Call me an snob and but I would probably never trust a drug that someone made in their basement while following a patent application.
Unless said friend also had a PhD in biochem, nanotech, phramacology, etc. And even then I would be cautious. At least if a pharma-drug is defective, you can sue the company that made it. You can't recover as much from Bob's basement drugs.
For better or for worse, I am a large fan of most of those NPR cultural references and touchstones. Much of the culture I consume is baseline NPR to the more avant-garde. If anything, Matt Y is possibly more culturally populist than me.
The second point is well taken though especially the white paper part.
My brother takes a lot of dancing classes. There is no regulating body for this but there is a private association whose name I can't recall. From what my brother tells me, dance studios that do not have the private associations badge of approval fold quickly because potential and actual students look for association approval as somewhat of a short-hand for at quality.
I imagine the same would be true in many other industries. So in the end it becomes the same thing.
Perhaps barber was too low an example. How about esthecians who do things like waxing and chemical peels? This stuff can cause physical injury if done incorrectly. I would say that regulating physical safety is a traditional police power.
In the end consumer protection probably ranks a bit higher for me than opportunity if needing to make a judgment call though.
The problem is that there seems to be an unending fascination with being "wonky" and too clever by half instead of understanding the real wants and needs of people. Everyone is looking at graphs and charts because people are just too darn contradictory and messy
Ygesias seems to see deregulation as an axiomatic good. Like many neo-liberals, he would like to see it combined with a welfare state but this is not happening. I am also not sure whether deregulation is a natural good. Plus a private entity will just come in to fill the role previously done by government. I am not sure why private Barber licensing is better than government licensing.
I think that too many wealthy people on the left and the right live disconnected and in bubbles. The liberal variant are the Rhees and Yglesias' of the world. They grew up in a largely parallel universe of private school or super-good wealthy suburban public schools. They attend TED talks which amount to nothing more than a puppy pat on the head while avoiding really hard questions on income inequality.
What is wrong with it being too easy to divorce? Do conservatives think that some kind moral hazard is going to happen?
On the other hand, I think that there is much to lose by making it too hard to divorce. New York finally adopted No Fault Divorce in 2010 or 2011. Before then, couples would need to find fault and this was a long and difficult process even when there was fault. It tied up courts and families for years.
No Fault Divorce allows for speedy-resolutions (hopefully) especially now because there is a modern trend for many couples to use a mediator and psychologist instead of a social worker.
Sometimes couples just fall out of love and there is no fault. Perhaps this is the most common reason that people end relationship. How does it value society and the culture overall to make people live in loveless marriages and see other people on the side? Why should there be hoops into getting a divorce?
Possibly a bit of both but largely a habit that comes with familiarity.
I am fairly academically oriented but more in an arts, history, and humanities way. I love hitting the stacks but not for the ability to produce white papers with charts and graphs. But I am still a liberal.
Your argument for ACA is good but I prefer a more moral argument on a right to health care as a basic fact of human dignity and decency. To me universal healthcare is a moral and ethical issue, not a cost/economic one.
I agree that the increase in options leads to more niches in culture overall and now people can seek out various blogs, etc.
However I do think that one part of being a critic is exposing people to culture that they might have to seek out a bit. Yes critics need to review the mass culture stuff but they should also work as exposing agents and say "Hey, there is a Truffaut retrospective in Madison, Wisconsin and if you are in the area go see Jules and Jim and The Last Metro".
I also have the very unfashionable belief that it is good to nudge people into eating their "cultural spinach" and to try and watch something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or see a Richard Serra retrospective instead of sticking with comfort food culture. If there is value in work, there is also a value in wrestling with difficult art that encourages contemplation or different brain functions.
Fair enough and I largely agree that policy can be interesting and intellectually stimulating.
However we live in a representative democracy and the other (and possibly most important) half of the equation is going out and doing retail politics. You can't enact policy if you keep losing elections.
I will add that I have no desire to run for political office ever so this is a big fat hypocrisy on my point.
There is also the fact that I am not a neo-liberal which makes me a bit less than sympathetic to the Rhee's and Matt Y's of the world from time to time. Matt Y is not one of my bloggers and I don't understand how he became a rising star blogger or Andrew Sullivan's voice of braveness for speaking "truth to power."
That is a reasonable point. Liberals do not necessarily see divorce and recreational drug use as being immoral. At least in the sense that conservatives tend to use the phrase.
I wouldn't say we necessarily think divorce or drug use are good though. Just inevitable products of human history and things that have always been around. People have been trying to get intoxicated for pleasure since the dawn of civilization. There have also been couples who have fallen out of love since the dawn of civilization and split up? What good does it do to be draconian against either?
My fellow liberals often seem more comfortable about producing white papers and doing research than going out and talking to voters. There is a certain technocracy streak that I find disconcerting as if the Rhee and Ygelias types would like to just produce a peer-reviewed white paper that says "X is the best policy and we should enact it" and then have the voters say okay.
I think these people are honest and sincere in their desire to find good policy but they seem to find retail politics distasteful like an old law professor might find the study of law to be divine but the actual practice of law to be vulgar. Many of the more wonky liberals seem to not always understand that good policy is not necessarily good politics.
I would say that every American has some kind of basic imprinting that says it is bad to be elitist. We tend to react very strongly against the word. Plus there are all sorts of loaded images into American imagery.
Your last paragraph on social elitism seems to fit right into the heart of a GOP cartoon of liberals. I don't know anything about your politics and take it on face value that you are not making a judgment call. However, the last paragraph makes Democratic Party supporters look like Louis the XVI and the rest of the Bourbons. We are just decadent partiers while the plain folk work honestly.
Does the Democratic platform encourage drug use? Many liberals might support liberalizing the harsh and wasteful drug laws but that is a far cry from advocating for recreational narcotics as a political idea.
I suppose it is an interesting argument but I have a hard time thinking about what social elitism and social populism mean in this case?
It is true that there is a certain form of populism in some GOP redmeat politics. Notably Santorum calling Obama a snob and then falsely reporting that Obama wanted everyone to attend college. More recently, the line about how "smart" people will never be with the Republicans. By smart, I think he meant urban, somewhat to very "sophisticated", roughly members of the so-called Creative Class. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a dig at being Jewish in their as well. Or at least a dog-whistle.
However, I think that many young liberals and progressives are trying to avoid the old "high culture" criticism that used to plague the left or are possibly simply uninterested in high culture. My cultural tastes can probably be labeled as "snobby*" for the most part and one of my problems with many internet liberal sites is their dearth of good cultural coverage. Basically a failure to talk about anything above pop/geek culture that can be easily accessed by everyone. The only remaining bastions for good cultural reporting are: The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and more niche journals like N plus One. Here, you will find serious and in-depth essays about avant-garde (or at least "high brow") culture. On ThinkProgress, it will be a video games or comic con, or YA literature** for the umpteenth time. Basically nothing that requires being older than 12 to appreciate.
Julian Sanchez talked about this a bit over the summer while giving a half-defense of Joel Stein's remarks about not reading the Hunger Games. He noted that there was at least somewhat of a sense of obligation at having adult tastes a few decades ago with Leonard Bernstein being American's ambassador general for classical music. Who is exposing kids to classical music today? I saw an old video clip of John Cage doing a TV appearance in the 1950s or early 60s. It was on some game show but they let him perform one of his pieces (Water Music) and too him seriously as a composer. That would not happen today.
*A lot of people tell me that they prefer passive entertainment in art, reading, music, TV, and film. Stuff that "does not require them to think". I don't understand this desire. I am generally bored by stuff that does not make me think.
**I don't get the fad of adult readers going crazy over YA literature. People tell me that this is where the revolutionary stuff is happening but only offer me axiom and tautology as evidence when pressed. Joyce and Beckett are revolutionary, The Hunger Games not so much both in terms of plot and prose.
Though I probably just proved the point of social elitism with this response.
Harvard Law professor Roberto Unger launched a youtube video sometime in June about why Obama needed to lose. The reasons seem largely because of Obama's portrayl of the progressive agenda.
What would the result of Obama be? The election of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I have yet to see how this is going to help the progressive agenda except allowing some holier than thou leftists to feel good about themselves for not voting for Obama. What kind of judges and justices is Romney going to nominate for the bench? What economic policies will he enact? Nothing progressive.
To quote the article:
"The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals. Third parties are run by people who make the best the enemy of their own good and bring down that good. Theodore Roosevelt’s’ Bull Moose variant of his own Republican Party drained enough Republican votes to let the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, win. (His voters, believing he would not “send our boys to war,” saw the prince become a frog in World War I.) George H. W. Bush rightly believes he was sabotaged by the crypto-Republican Ross Perot, who helped Bill Clinton win. Ralph Nader siphoned crucial votes from Al Gore to give us George W. Bush."
I never liked Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas argument?" because it is generally highly offensive to tell someone what is in their self-interest. It is perfectly feasible for these voters to think that Republican economic policy is in their self-interest. On an application level, I think they are wrong though. But there are probably things that I think are in my self-interest but am wrong about on an application level as well.
That being said, I think that social conservatives are being played, at least on the national level. Let's say the movement launched roughly at the time of Roe v. Wade. This was 40 years ago and for the most part, we are more socially liberal. Abortion is still legal, all sorts of pornography are easily available, Gay Rights are now a mainstay of politics for at least half the country. Perhaps social conservatives have control on a state level (but are still constrained by the Federal Government, there is no working around Lawrence v. Texas).
What victories do you think social conservatives have won in the past 40 years?
I come from a very similar suburb of New York as Mr. Williams. Though mine was on Long Island but it was the absolutely typical upper-middle class suburb that people moved to for the schools. We had an excellent arts department though not as many famous alumni as Chappaqua.
I don't remember battles over the school budget though. Perhaps I was just not paying too much attention but I can't recall a school budget or bond proposal that did not pass swimmingly. Though a decent amount of my classmates did have one or two educator parents. My mom was a teacher and education administrator. My dad taught briefly while attending law school at night. Some teachers raised their children in the school district.
That biography aside, I think you both have points. Education does need to be reformed but I think a lot of people especially highly type-A, competitive Capitalist types have contempt for teachers and academia. It is seen as place where people go when they do not want to be in business or compete. Even when it is competitive, the competition is mocked. Hence, Kissinger's famous line about academic politics being so brutal "because the stakes are so low."
I am also skeptical of the reforms offered by the charter school/teach for America/hedge fund money set. The whole Teach for America program over all is rather suspect to me. I think most people enter it with a sincere desire to do good but in the end they are young and largely naive people thrown into really tough situations with minimal training (a 5-week summer course). These kids are given the worst or the worse in terms of classrooms. Most large cities have their own mini-Teach for Americas that do the same program. The NYC subway ads are notoriously misleading propaganda.
The reformers rely too much on standardized testing instead of much harder to quantify metrics like critical reading, writing, and thinking skills and developing a deep curiosity about the world. Perhaps too many people think that these skills are innate and not teachable. Or they just want more pragmatic goals.
Every reform instituted in the past decade seems to treat a majority of kids as hopeless and only capable of learning though testing. Life is not a multiple choice exam and neither should most education rest on those metrics.
I think I understand the psychological appeal of conspiracy theories.
But in the end, they don't stand up to any scrutiny and we people are largely too incompetent to carry them out. Plus they are all so complicated that they would easily and quickly spiral into chaos.
So they leave me mystified and sighing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “The Future of Gun Ownership”
Ugh....
"
I think that will be a long-time coming. Drugs are a lot more complicated to produce than firearms and a 3-D printer won't cut it.
Though I am surprised at what the 3-D printers can do.
"
Honestly, no one.
I've smoked in the past but not that often and it usually does not do anything for me.
My preferred intoxicants are beer and wine. Largely for taste reasons.
"
Call me an snob and but I would probably never trust a drug that someone made in their basement while following a patent application.
Unless said friend also had a PhD in biochem, nanotech, phramacology, etc. And even then I would be cautious. At least if a pharma-drug is defective, you can sue the company that made it. You can't recover as much from Bob's basement drugs.
On “What’s the Matter with New York?”
For better or for worse, I am a large fan of most of those NPR cultural references and touchstones. Much of the culture I consume is baseline NPR to the more avant-garde. If anything, Matt Y is possibly more culturally populist than me.
The second point is well taken though especially the white paper part.
"
My brother takes a lot of dancing classes. There is no regulating body for this but there is a private association whose name I can't recall. From what my brother tells me, dance studios that do not have the private associations badge of approval fold quickly because potential and actual students look for association approval as somewhat of a short-hand for at quality.
I imagine the same would be true in many other industries. So in the end it becomes the same thing.
Perhaps barber was too low an example. How about esthecians who do things like waxing and chemical peels? This stuff can cause physical injury if done incorrectly. I would say that regulating physical safety is a traditional police power.
In the end consumer protection probably ranks a bit higher for me than opportunity if needing to make a judgment call though.
"
Interestingly I do like NPR.
The problem is that there seems to be an unending fascination with being "wonky" and too clever by half instead of understanding the real wants and needs of people. Everyone is looking at graphs and charts because people are just too darn contradictory and messy
Ygesias seems to see deregulation as an axiomatic good. Like many neo-liberals, he would like to see it combined with a welfare state but this is not happening. I am also not sure whether deregulation is a natural good. Plus a private entity will just come in to fill the role previously done by government. I am not sure why private Barber licensing is better than government licensing.
I think that too many wealthy people on the left and the right live disconnected and in bubbles. The liberal variant are the Rhees and Yglesias' of the world. They grew up in a largely parallel universe of private school or super-good wealthy suburban public schools. They attend TED talks which amount to nothing more than a puppy pat on the head while avoiding really hard questions on income inequality.
"
How about liberals simply prefer social nontraditionalism?
"
At Will,
What is wrong with it being too easy to divorce? Do conservatives think that some kind moral hazard is going to happen?
On the other hand, I think that there is much to lose by making it too hard to divorce. New York finally adopted No Fault Divorce in 2010 or 2011. Before then, couples would need to find fault and this was a long and difficult process even when there was fault. It tied up courts and families for years.
No Fault Divorce allows for speedy-resolutions (hopefully) especially now because there is a modern trend for many couples to use a mediator and psychologist instead of a social worker.
Sometimes couples just fall out of love and there is no fault. Perhaps this is the most common reason that people end relationship. How does it value society and the culture overall to make people live in loveless marriages and see other people on the side? Why should there be hoops into getting a divorce?
"
Possibly a bit of both but largely a habit that comes with familiarity.
I am fairly academically oriented but more in an arts, history, and humanities way. I love hitting the stacks but not for the ability to produce white papers with charts and graphs. But I am still a liberal.
Your argument for ACA is good but I prefer a more moral argument on a right to health care as a basic fact of human dignity and decency. To me universal healthcare is a moral and ethical issue, not a cost/economic one.
"
I agree that the increase in options leads to more niches in culture overall and now people can seek out various blogs, etc.
However I do think that one part of being a critic is exposing people to culture that they might have to seek out a bit. Yes critics need to review the mass culture stuff but they should also work as exposing agents and say "Hey, there is a Truffaut retrospective in Madison, Wisconsin and if you are in the area go see Jules and Jim and The Last Metro".
I also have the very unfashionable belief that it is good to nudge people into eating their "cultural spinach" and to try and watch something like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or see a Richard Serra retrospective instead of sticking with comfort food culture. If there is value in work, there is also a value in wrestling with difficult art that encourages contemplation or different brain functions.
"
Fair enough and I largely agree that policy can be interesting and intellectually stimulating.
However we live in a representative democracy and the other (and possibly most important) half of the equation is going out and doing retail politics. You can't enact policy if you keep losing elections.
I will add that I have no desire to run for political office ever so this is a big fat hypocrisy on my point.
There is also the fact that I am not a neo-liberal which makes me a bit less than sympathetic to the Rhee's and Matt Y's of the world from time to time. Matt Y is not one of my bloggers and I don't understand how he became a rising star blogger or Andrew Sullivan's voice of braveness for speaking "truth to power."
"
I think almost everyone realizes that divorce is going to be around and we are not going back. Plus plenty of Republicans get divorced.
I just used it as an example because Pinky used it. Generally my thoughts are the same as yours and that they really don't care about marriage.
"
Okay. My apologies as well.
"
That is a reasonable point. Liberals do not necessarily see divorce and recreational drug use as being immoral. At least in the sense that conservatives tend to use the phrase.
I wouldn't say we necessarily think divorce or drug use are good though. Just inevitable products of human history and things that have always been around. People have been trying to get intoxicated for pleasure since the dawn of civilization. There have also been couples who have fallen out of love since the dawn of civilization and split up? What good does it do to be draconian against either?
"
My fellow liberals often seem more comfortable about producing white papers and doing research than going out and talking to voters. There is a certain technocracy streak that I find disconcerting as if the Rhee and Ygelias types would like to just produce a peer-reviewed white paper that says "X is the best policy and we should enact it" and then have the voters say okay.
I think these people are honest and sincere in their desire to find good policy but they seem to find retail politics distasteful like an old law professor might find the study of law to be divine but the actual practice of law to be vulgar. Many of the more wonky liberals seem to not always understand that good policy is not necessarily good politics.
"
How often do conservatives arrive at a non-private/business solution to any social or economic problem?
"
On your parenthesis:
I would say that every American has some kind of basic imprinting that says it is bad to be elitist. We tend to react very strongly against the word. Plus there are all sorts of loaded images into American imagery.
Your last paragraph on social elitism seems to fit right into the heart of a GOP cartoon of liberals. I don't know anything about your politics and take it on face value that you are not making a judgment call. However, the last paragraph makes Democratic Party supporters look like Louis the XVI and the rest of the Bourbons. We are just decadent partiers while the plain folk work honestly.
Does the Democratic platform encourage drug use? Many liberals might support liberalizing the harsh and wasteful drug laws but that is a far cry from advocating for recreational narcotics as a political idea.
"
I suppose it is an interesting argument but I have a hard time thinking about what social elitism and social populism mean in this case?
It is true that there is a certain form of populism in some GOP redmeat politics. Notably Santorum calling Obama a snob and then falsely reporting that Obama wanted everyone to attend college. More recently, the line about how "smart" people will never be with the Republicans. By smart, I think he meant urban, somewhat to very "sophisticated", roughly members of the so-called Creative Class. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a dig at being Jewish in their as well. Or at least a dog-whistle.
However, I think that many young liberals and progressives are trying to avoid the old "high culture" criticism that used to plague the left or are possibly simply uninterested in high culture. My cultural tastes can probably be labeled as "snobby*" for the most part and one of my problems with many internet liberal sites is their dearth of good cultural coverage. Basically a failure to talk about anything above pop/geek culture that can be easily accessed by everyone. The only remaining bastions for good cultural reporting are: The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and more niche journals like N plus One. Here, you will find serious and in-depth essays about avant-garde (or at least "high brow") culture. On ThinkProgress, it will be a video games or comic con, or YA literature** for the umpteenth time. Basically nothing that requires being older than 12 to appreciate.
Julian Sanchez talked about this a bit over the summer while giving a half-defense of Joel Stein's remarks about not reading the Hunger Games. He noted that there was at least somewhat of a sense of obligation at having adult tastes a few decades ago with Leonard Bernstein being American's ambassador general for classical music. Who is exposing kids to classical music today? I saw an old video clip of John Cage doing a TV appearance in the 1950s or early 60s. It was on some game show but they let him perform one of his pieces (Water Music) and too him seriously as a composer. That would not happen today.
*A lot of people tell me that they prefer passive entertainment in art, reading, music, TV, and film. Stuff that "does not require them to think". I don't understand this desire. I am generally bored by stuff that does not make me think.
**I don't get the fad of adult readers going crazy over YA literature. People tell me that this is where the revolutionary stuff is happening but only offer me axiom and tautology as evidence when pressed. Joyce and Beckett are revolutionary, The Hunger Games not so much both in terms of plot and prose.
Though I probably just proved the point of social elitism with this response.
On “Sit Down and Shut Up! (Because we are many and you are not)”
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/jun/18/curse-political-purity/
Harvard Law professor Roberto Unger launched a youtube video sometime in June about why Obama needed to lose. The reasons seem largely because of Obama's portrayl of the progressive agenda.
What would the result of Obama be? The election of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I have yet to see how this is going to help the progressive agenda except allowing some holier than thou leftists to feel good about themselves for not voting for Obama. What kind of judges and justices is Romney going to nominate for the bench? What economic policies will he enact? Nothing progressive.
To quote the article:
"The etherialists who are too good to stoop toward the “lesser evil” of politics—as if there were ever anything better than the lesser evil there—naively assume that if they just bring down the current system, or one part of it that has disappointed them, they can build a new and better thing of beauty out of the ruins. Of course they never get the tabula rasa on which to draw their ideal schemes. What they normally do is damage the party closest to their professed ideals. Third parties are run by people who make the best the enemy of their own good and bring down that good. Theodore Roosevelt’s’ Bull Moose variant of his own Republican Party drained enough Republican votes to let the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, win. (His voters, believing he would not “send our boys to war,” saw the prince become a frog in World War I.) George H. W. Bush rightly believes he was sabotaged by the crypto-Republican Ross Perot, who helped Bill Clinton win. Ralph Nader siphoned crucial votes from Al Gore to give us George W. Bush."
On “What’s the Matter with New York?”
I never liked Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas argument?" because it is generally highly offensive to tell someone what is in their self-interest. It is perfectly feasible for these voters to think that Republican economic policy is in their self-interest. On an application level, I think they are wrong though. But there are probably things that I think are in my self-interest but am wrong about on an application level as well.
That being said, I think that social conservatives are being played, at least on the national level. Let's say the movement launched roughly at the time of Roe v. Wade. This was 40 years ago and for the most part, we are more socially liberal. Abortion is still legal, all sorts of pornography are easily available, Gay Rights are now a mainstay of politics for at least half the country. Perhaps social conservatives have control on a state level (but are still constrained by the Federal Government, there is no working around Lawrence v. Texas).
What victories do you think social conservatives have won in the past 40 years?
On “Sit Down and Shut Up! (Because we are many and you are not)”
There is a certain kind of leftist that would rather be a noble loser to history than actually win and need to govern.
On “Tales from the Nightstand: When She Woke by Hillary Jordan”
Three out of Five stars seems high based on the last line in your skip it section.
On “Teacher Hatred and Class Warfare”
I come from a very similar suburb of New York as Mr. Williams. Though mine was on Long Island but it was the absolutely typical upper-middle class suburb that people moved to for the schools. We had an excellent arts department though not as many famous alumni as Chappaqua.
I don't remember battles over the school budget though. Perhaps I was just not paying too much attention but I can't recall a school budget or bond proposal that did not pass swimmingly. Though a decent amount of my classmates did have one or two educator parents. My mom was a teacher and education administrator. My dad taught briefly while attending law school at night. Some teachers raised their children in the school district.
That biography aside, I think you both have points. Education does need to be reformed but I think a lot of people especially highly type-A, competitive Capitalist types have contempt for teachers and academia. It is seen as place where people go when they do not want to be in business or compete. Even when it is competitive, the competition is mocked. Hence, Kissinger's famous line about academic politics being so brutal "because the stakes are so low."
I am also skeptical of the reforms offered by the charter school/teach for America/hedge fund money set. The whole Teach for America program over all is rather suspect to me. I think most people enter it with a sincere desire to do good but in the end they are young and largely naive people thrown into really tough situations with minimal training (a 5-week summer course). These kids are given the worst or the worse in terms of classrooms. Most large cities have their own mini-Teach for Americas that do the same program. The NYC subway ads are notoriously misleading propaganda.
The reformers rely too much on standardized testing instead of much harder to quantify metrics like critical reading, writing, and thinking skills and developing a deep curiosity about the world. Perhaps too many people think that these skills are innate and not teachable. Or they just want more pragmatic goals.
Every reform instituted in the past decade seems to treat a majority of kids as hopeless and only capable of learning though testing. Life is not a multiple choice exam and neither should most education rest on those metrics.
On “A Heretic’s Pilgrimage: My Journey to the 2012 Values Voter Summit”
I think I understand the psychological appeal of conspiracy theories.
But in the end, they don't stand up to any scrutiny and we people are largely too incompetent to carry them out. Plus they are all so complicated that they would easily and quickly spiral into chaos.
So they leave me mystified and sighing.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.