Culture

[Legacy]

Public Opinion, Criminal Justice, and Incipient Popular Liberalism in China

Indeed, few ideas are as persistent in China scholarship as the notion of ‘Chinese exceptionalism’. Inquiries into China’s failure (or at least delay) in meeting benchmarks of historical progress such as ‘science’ or ‘capitalism’ are two examples; debate over whether Chinese political or philosophical traditions are compatible with democracy, rule of law or human rights is another. The traction of tradition makes it appear to some that China’s political future may be inevitably authoritarian, and that the country will always be governed by paternalist leaders whose legitimacy is premised on the idea of the state as an intrinsically moral institution. Indeed, the idea of a strong one-party state as ensuring prosperity and stability and as capable of delivering justice in perfect harmony with more-or-less homogeneous collective interests is an integral part of the ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ argument.

But, as compelling as that ideal vision of the Chinese state might be, its inevitability is daily being cast into doubt by the realities of contemporary Chinese society. Rapid economic development has led to significant socioeconomic polarization and fragmentation, and China’s political and legal institutions are straining to manage the diversity of values and interests that has developed as a result. The re-emergence of an authentic public opinion in China, founded on an increasingly commercialized press, a growing journalistic professionalism and a vibrant Internet, has begun to loosen the Communist Party’s monopoly over the public agenda and opened up space for these diverse and often contentious views to be voiced. Since the 1980s, China’s leaders have put increasing stock in development and reform of the nation’s legal system to regulate the process of modernization, improve the state’s capacity for managing conflicts in a more complex society and ensure social harmony and political stability. One might even say that, in the absence of any other compelling unifying ethos, China’s leaders have resorted to making law the new moral centre of contemporary Chinese society, one to which all other values and interests must ultimately reconcile.

 

[wizards8507]

Public Opinion, Criminal Justice, and Incipient Popular Liberalism in China

This highlights why I consider myself a right-libertarian and not a paleoconservative a la Whiskeyjack. The State ought not be given powers to determine right and wrong because the State is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. I value societal traditions and institutions so long as they're not enforced by the entity that wields the force of law, police, and military.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Perhaps it's worth considering the changes in another culture which have an Asian concept of sex and arguably more rapid changes in urbanization, financial opportunities, increased individualism, generational differences, feminine role transformations, acceptance of alternative sexual roles - China.

China's Generational Cultural Change

China's Sexual Revolution Has Reached The Point Of No Return

Women's Roles in China: Changes Over Time

How would you frame the discussion on their cultural changes with respect to their religious and traditional cultural beliefs?

From your 2nd link:

Within different dynasties, China became very conservative with the influence of neo-Confucianists, especially during the Qing dynasty — the last dynasty — when prostitution and homosexuality was outlawed. A whole new consciousness came into China as it met the west via the Opium Wars and Western ideals for example.

So to the extent you're offering China as a non-Western example of a "natural" progression toward sexual liberalism, I don't think it holds up. Chinese attitudes towards sexuality during the late Qing dynasty, communism followed by the now prevalent state-controlled capitalism, the liberalizing powers of internet access, etc. are all western imports. And they're just as likely to import the bad with the good.

This highlights why I consider myself a right-libertarian and not a paleoconservative a la Whiskeyjack. The State ought not be given powers to determine right and wrong because the State is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. I value societal traditions and institutions so long as they're not enforced by the entity that wields the force of law, police, and military.

The state is an extension of the natural authority that exists within families. As a more distant authority, its claims on you are much weaker; but a just state has the same obligation to uphold the Natural Law as your father does, and for the same reason. Claiming otherwise: (1) necessitates a radical individualism that is obviously at odds with how humans really live; and (2) drives the social atomization you decry.

 

[zelezo vlk]

The hipsters are getting out of hand in this town.

 

[NorthDakota]

The hipsters are getting out of hand in this town.

That can't be sustainable...

 

[Legacy]

From your 2nd link:
So to the extent you're offering China as a non-Western example of a "natural" progression toward sexual liberalism, I don't think it holds up. Chinese attitudes towards sexuality during the late Qing dynasty, communism followed by the now prevalent state-controlled capitalism, the liberalizing powers of internet access, etc. are all western imports. And they're just as likely to import the bad with the good.

The state is an extension of the natural authority that exists within families. As a more distant authority, its claims on you are much weaker; but a just state has the same obligation to uphold the Natural Law as your father does, and for the same reason. Claiming otherwise: (1) necessitates a radical individualism that is obviously at odds with how humans really live; and (2) drives the social atomization you decry.

I wasn't necessarily thinking of such a 'natural' progression in China, but I was considerng China as a non-Christian culture, whose societal mores and religious beliefs did not generate the concepts of natural, moral and municipal law as foundations for government derived from a supreme being. I have to consider the limitation of a ruling authority whether a emperor, a communist head, a state-controlled semi-capitalism or a government guided by Christian principles provides the framework for a culture. China as an ancient, continous and relatively homogenous society has also been isolated through most of its history from the influences of other cultures and therefore worth examining for those reasons. Perhaps a culture - despite the state - is a product of the "natural authority' that exists within families. Also, maybe hedonism is natural part of a society whether homogenous or pluralistic and does not indicate societal decline. But I imagine China too has their traditionists who may well similarly voice concerns about social decline, attributed more due to "outside influences" rather than generated from within its society.

 

[wizards8507]

The state is an extension of the natural authority that exists within families.

Care to enumerate the premises behind that one?

As a more distant authority, its claims on you are much weaker; but a just state has the same obligation to uphold the Natural Law as your father does, and for the same reason.

Sure, the state has the obligation to uphold the Natural Law, but when has it ever done so and why should we trust it to do so in the future? Assuming you believe in the corrupting influence of power, the tendency of the state will always be away from the Natural Law because Natural Law comes from God, which the state is hostile to as a competing source of authority. You rightly point out that the state is a distant authority, which makes recourse extraordinarily difficult. As the proper and more immediate authority, the family is more readily able to exercise recourse against neighborhoods and municipalities than the federal leviathan.

Claiming otherwise: (1) necessitates a radical individualism that is obviously at odds with how humans really live...

You're conflating political individualism with individual isolationism. Paraphrasing Aristotle, a man who cannot live in society is a beast and a man who need not live in society is a god. The key is free and voluntary association, as opposed to the coerced association of the state. I don't object to communitarianism operating under an umbrella of libertarianism, the key distinction being the freedom of individuals to pick and choose which communities they'd like to participate in. Notice that this looks a heck of a lot like federalism as laid out in our Constitution.

and (2) drives the social atomization you decry.

That's awfully utilitarian of you. If I believe something is right on principle, I don't think it's appropriate to overturn my beliefs on the matter just because it may have some consequences that I find distasteful.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Damon Linker just published an article titled "Will the left turn on sexual freedom?":

Remember the libertarian moment?

That was the brief time two summers ago, before Rand Paul began officially running for president, when some journalists convinced themselves that we were about to see the political mainstreaming of a consistently libertarian agenda — not just drastic cuts to taxes and regulations, but also drug legalization, a laissez-faire attitude toward sex, and a foreign policy of restraint. Then Paul announced his bid for president, ran a dud of a campaign, and the libertarian moment seemed to end before it had even begun.

At least until the past week. With the Libertarian Party ticket of Gary Johnson and William Weld generating considerable media buzz and setting itself up to serve as a lifeboat for voters fleeing the listing major parties, there's a chance that 2016 could prove to be a libertarian moment after all.

Or maybe not.

While a ticket featuring two former Republican governors might do a little better in this bizarro general election than candidates for the Libertarian Party typically do, 2016 has actually proven to be a singularly bleak year for libertarian policies both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the Western world.

This was a year when passionate attacks on economic libertarianism that were once confined to the academy (where it tends to be denounced as "neoliberalism") spread out into the wider political world and gained a remarkable degree of traction. Bernie Sanders is an anti-libertarian candidate of the left, just as Trump (with his attacks on open borders and promises of protectionism in trade) is one from the right. From France and Denmark to Austria and Hungary, the same anti-libertarian dynamic is playing itself out across the globe.

But more interesting is the question of whether criticism of economic libertarianism will be broadened to encompass the moral libertarianism that both underlies it and inspires the parallel drive toward the liberation of sexuality from moral judgment.

Understood in this wider sense, we've been living through an extended libertarian moment since the early 1960s.

Moral libertarianism presumes that no authority — political, legal, or religious — is competent to pronounce judgment on an individual’s decisions, provided that they don’t negatively effect other people. Thanks to this assumption, a grand edifice of inherited moral and legal strictures on sexuality have crumbled over the past half century, leaving individuals free to live and love as they wish, as long as everyone involved gives their consent.

Religiously traditionalist conservatives have rejected moral libertarianism from the beginning, while losing just about every political and legal battle over its spread. But left-wing dissent has been selective and sporadic. In the 1980s, a subset of feminists (led by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin) made a tactical alliance with Jesse Helms and others on the religious right to fight the spread of pornography, which, in their view, contributed to the degradation and oppression of women. But the mainstream of the women's movement, cognizant of how much sexual liberation has benefited the feminist cause and skeptical about linking up with social conservatives, has resisted taking strong stands against porn and the sexualization of pop culture more generally.

That may be starting to change.

While in recent years there have been some moves toward mainstreaming and decriminalizing prostitution and other forms of "sex work," growing numbers of young women have been working to publicize the prevalence of rape on college campuses and the tendency of university administrators to go easy on the perpetrators. In terms of moral libertarianism, that sounds like a draw, with the former its latest advance and the latter a call to police its boundaries under Title IX.

But the discontent goes deeper. In Jessica Valenti's powerful and disturbing new memoir (excerpted here) and a recent Washington Post symposium on porn, one senses a broader dissatisfaction with the behavior of men in a world lacking norms of sexual restraint — and therefore an impatience with the social and interpersonal costs of unlimited moral libertarianism.

One distinctly un-libertarian response, favored by some participants in the symposium, would be to classify pornography (or at least some forms or uses of it) as a threat to public health. That would place the Department of Health and Human Services (or whichever government agency sought to oversee such regulations) on a collision course with established First Amendment law. The resulting debate would be well worth watching.

But I'm more intrigued by hints of an even more radical response.

In the excerpt of her memoir, Valenti doesn't so much fault law enforcement for failing to keep her safe as highlight the psychological consequences for women of growing up "in a culture that hates them." But of course it's not the "culture" that has repeatedly groped Valenti and exposed itself to her in public places, or masturbated and ejaculated on the back of her jeans while she stood, unaware, in a New York City subway car listening to music on headphones.

Men did those things. And the behavior is obviously already illegal.

If we hope to change that behavior — or break the fixation of tens of millions of American men on internet porn — the response will need to be extra-legal. It will need to be cultural, and moral, and perhaps even religious. It will need to involve notions of intrinsic right and wrong, and norms of propriety, and ideals of human flourishing and degradation, and fixed standards of acceptable and unacceptable male conduct. And all of this will need to be inculcated and reinforced from a very young age — by parents, but also by our culture and society.

Trying to advance that agenda while simultaneously affirming moral libertarianism makes about as much sense as trying to enact Bernie Sanders' economic program while upholding the highest principles and core tenets of neoliberal ideology.

Either we learn to limit our moral libertarianism — or we must resign ourselves to living with the consequences of refusing to do so.

Those are the options. There is no third alternative.

 

[wizards8507]

The Week's Damon Linker just published an article titled "Will the left turn on sexual freedom?":

See also Ian Tuttle in National Review. Big-L Libertarians are an embarrassing lot.

Libertarians Convention in Florida: Crazy, Fun, Unserious | National Review

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's a short essay published in Intercollegiate Review by Amelia Sims titled "What Does the Cult Have to Do with Culture?":

Today we hear a lot of talk about the “culture wars” and “redeeming the culture.” Most people unanimously agree that a strong culture corresponds with a thriving nation. The way the word is bandied about now, however, confuses the traditional meaning of culture with an ambiguous set of any group’s narrow ideals. But to understand culture we must first ask the question: where does culture come from?

Culture comes from the cult: people joining together for worship. From this primary association, the body of worshipers can cultivate community.

According the the great historian of Western Civilization, Christopher Dawson, "A social culture is an organized way of life which is based on a common tradition and conditioned by a common environment. . . . It is clear that a common way of life involves a common view of life, common standards of behavior and common standards of value, and consequently a culture is a spiritual community...Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion."

Taking the cult out of culture leaves a residual set of customs and ideas that no longer tie people together because they lack the unifying center. A culture that has lost the cult becomes a culture with many cults. Today the fragmentation of culture has lead to a narrow mass culture only united on the surface, but really fragmented.

Without this religious center, every aspect of culture has its own version of a cult, usually of personality. There is no longer unification between worship, art, sport, and beauty, but a great divide- celebrity vs. celebrity, cult vs. cult.

What used to be unifying cultural events: concerts, art shows, sporting events, political conferences, and even religious speakers have now devolved into pseudo religious experiences. There is now the cult of One Direction, the Cult of Rand Paul, and the cult of Laci Green. Unlike the worship of God in the liturgy, these cults do not unify truth, goodness, and beauty in submission to one Godhead. Instead we have fragmented body of worshippers, united in nothing but individual preference.

We can't expect to enjoy the entertainment of modern mass “culture” without succumbing to the ideas modern culture offers. To be ideologically on the side of truth is not enough because ideology only addresses the intellect. Culture seeks to transform whole person primarily in worship but also in music, books, painting, poetry, philosophy, theology, architecture, economics, and politics. Culture transcends the political struggle of ideas and shapes the way we see, touch, and hear the world. We can renew our imaginations participating in the liturgy, reading the great books, surrounding ourselves with beautiful art/music, or even just taking a walk outside instead of watching TV.

 

[dublinirish]

Don’t Blame Divorce on Money. Ask: Did the Husband Have a Job? - Bloomberg

 

[irishroo]

.

 

[Legacy]

New Texas Abortion Burial Restrictions

New Texas Abortion Burial Restrictions

This could go under a number of threads - Politics, Healthcare (?), Issues of Prinicple, Media Matters (since many newspapers have editorialized about it), possibly Supreme Court or with a stretch, Religious Liberty. Maybe posts belong here since they reflect a Culture epitomized by the Texas legislature. Anyway,

Texas Media Call Out Anti-Choice Logic Behind Proposed Fetal Tissue Disposal Rules (August 3, 2016)

After the Supreme Court struck down HB 2, Texas health officials “quietly proposed rules” mandating the “cremation or burial of fetal remains” following an abortion.

The cost of a burial in Texas is about $2600 plus the cost of a burial site for any fetal tissue even if it may be smaller than a pea. The Supreme Court struck down HB2 was unconstitutional because it was aimed at restricting abortion rights, unduly affected minority women and without any increase in a woman's safety.

Smith: Texas officials’ antics after abortion ruling are beyond belief (Austin American-Statesman)

Apparently, though, Texas isn’t taking that (Supreme Court) ruling sitting down. State officials signaled their determination to work around the court’s ruling with the new rule and other steps.
(Governor) Abbott loudly endorsed the rule and urged (Texas) HHSC to enforce it immediately. How it will be enforced, though, is anybody’s guess. With its broad definition of fetal tissue — “other tissue from a pregnancy” — the new rule raises many questions.

If “other tissue from pregnancy” is to be buried or cremated, who pays for it? Will funeral homes need to be involved? What of in vitro fertilization? What about miscarriages at home or in physicians’ offices? What about the legal and critically needed donation of fetal tissue for medical research?

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, it is unclear how soon some clinics might reopen. Many Texas women will still be denied access to quality health care while providers try to readjust after the ruling.
Even the Supreme Court cannot deter anti-abortion activists. Funerals for fetal tissue. Indecent, over-the-top intrusions into the relationships of women and their medical providers.

Hispanic women bear brunt of Texas abortion law, figures show (Midland Reporter - Telegram)
(This 2014 data's release by the Texas Health Services Department was delayed until after the Supreme Court ruling because it showed the unconstitutionality of the disproportionate affect on minority and poor women, especially Hispanics.

Women living in the Texas Panhandle, West Texas and the Valley -- which saw the largest increases in driving distances to the nearest abortion facility -- experienced some of the biggest drops in abortions.

Throughout the yearslong battle over the restrictions, abortion rights advocates pointed to the dearth of clinics in the Rio Grande Valley, where predominately poor and Hispanic women had to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion.
That travel, they argued, was out of reach for women who couldn’t afford the trip or take multiple days off to see a doctor.

“People in the Panhandle were having such a hard time getting together travel, time off, and money that they dropped off communications, and our best guess is that they were forced to carry to term,” said Nan Little Kirkpatrick, executive director of the Dallas-based Texas Equal Access Fund, which helps women in North Texas fund their abortions. “We’ve heard from some clients that they had considered self-aborting.”
Others sought care out of state, Kirkpatrick said.

It's been two years since Corpus Christi lost its sole abortion provider because of restrictions the U.S. Supreme Court has now struck down but the doctor who ran the clinic won't reopen it.

After House Bill 2 in 2013, Aquino and San Antonio-based Dr. Alan Braid invested $3 million in an ambulatory surgical center to adhere to the new requirements. Before leaving, Aquino searched for a partner in Corpus Christi to do the same, but to no avail. Together they operate Alamo Women's Reproductive Services.

In other news, Baby with Zika-linked birth defect dies in Texas The baby had microcephaly and died shortly after birth.

Zika-related brain damage in fetuses "is one of the saddest congenital birth outcomes imaginable," said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. "The case highlights that ZIka is not just producing babies with small heads. . . .We should expect many similar deaths, and also stillbirths."
Fifteen babies in the U.S. have been born with Zika-related birth defects, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Seven women have lost pregnancies due to Zika. Those numbers could grow. Nearly 1,000 pregnant women in the continental U.S. and territories have been infected with Zika.

Texas has the second largest number of diagnosed Zika-infected patients (89) in the U.S. If the babies are stillborn, the mothers in Texas will now be required to bury or cremate the baby, unless a court blocks the Health Department's regulations.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Michael Lind just published an article in The Smart Set titled "Intellectuals Are Freaks":

Intellectuals — a category that includes academics, opinion journalists, and think tank experts — are freaks. I do not mean that in a disrespectful way. I myself have spent most of my life in one of the three roles mentioned above. I have even been accused of being a “public intellectual,” which sounds too much like “public nuisance” or even “public enemy” for my taste.

My point is that people who specialize in the life of ideas tend to be extremely atypical of their societies. They — we — are freaks in a statistical sense. For generations, populists of various kinds have argued that intellectuals are unworldly individuals out of touch with the experiences and values of most of their fellow citizens. While anti-intellectual populists have often been wrong about the gold standard or the single tax or other issues, by and large they have been right about intellectuals.

The terms “intellectual” and “intelligentsia” arose around the same time in the 19th century. Before the industrial revolution, the few people in advanced civilizations paid to read, write, and debate were mostly either clerics like medieval Christian priests, monks, or secular scribes like Confucian mandarins who worked for kings or aristocrats, or, as in the city-states of ancient Greece, teachers whose students were mostly young men of the upper classes.

The replacement of agrarian civilization by industrial capitalism created two new homes for thinkers, both funded directly or indirectly by the newly enriched capitalist elite. One was the nonprofit sector — the university and the nonprofit think tank — founded chiefly by gifts from the tycoons who lent these institutions their names: Stanford University, the Ford Foundation. Then there was bohemia, populated largely by the downwardly-mobile sons and daughters of the rich, spending down inherited bourgeois family fortunes while dabbling in the arts and philosophy and politics and denouncing the evils of the bourgeoisie.
Whether they are institutionalized professors and policy wonks or free-spirited bohemians, the intellectuals of the industrial era are as different from the mass of people in contemporary industrial societies as the clerics, scribes, mandarins, and itinerant philosophers of old were from the peasant or slave majorities in their societies.

To begin with, there is the matter of higher education. Only about 30 percent of American adults have a four-year undergraduate degree. The number of those with advanced graduate or professional degrees is around one in ten. As a BA is a minimal requirement for employment in most intellectual occupations, the pool from which scholars, writers, and policy experts is drawn is already a small one. It is even more exclusive in practice, because the children of the rich and affluent are over-represented among those who go to college.

Then there is location. There have only been a few world capitals of bohemia, generally in big, expensive cities that appeal to bohemian rich kids, like the Left Bank of the Seine and Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury. In the U.S., the geographic options for think tank scholars also tend to be limited to a few expensive cities, like Washington, D.C. and New York. Of the different breeds of the American intellectual, professors have the most diverse habitat, given the number and geographic distribution of universities across the American continent.

Whether they are professors, journalists, or technocratic experts, contemporary intellectuals are unlikely to live and work in the places where they are born. In contrast, the average American lives about 18 miles from his or her mother. Like college education, geographic mobility in the service of personal career ambitions is common only within a highly atypical social and economic elite.

In their lifestyles, too, intellectuals tend to be unusually individualistic, by the standards of the larger society. I am aware of no studies of this sensitive topic, but to judge from my experience the number of single individuals and childless married couples among what might be called the American intelligentsia appears to be much higher than in the population at large. The postponement of marriage in order to accumulate credentials or job experience, the willingness to move to further career goals, and — in the case of bohemians — the willingness to accept incomes too low to support children in order to be an avant-garde writer or artist or revolutionary sets intellectuals and other elite professionals apart from the working-class majority whose education ends with high school and who rely on extended family networks for economic support and child care.

The fact that we members of the intellectual professions are quite atypical of the societies in which we live tends to distort our judgment, when we forget that we belong to a tiny and rather bizarre minority. This is not a problem with the hard sciences. But in the social sciences, intellectuals — be they professors, pundits, or policy wonks — tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias.

This can be seen in the cosmopolitanism of the average intellectual. I was the guest of honor at an Ivy League law school dinner some years ago, when, in response to my question, the academics present — U.S. citizens, except for one — unanimously said they did not consider themselves American patriots, but rather “citizens of the world.” The only patriot present, apart from yours truly, was an Israeli visiting professor.

Paranoid populists no doubt would see this as confirmation of their fear intellectuals are part of a global conspiracy directed by the UN or the Bilderbergers. I see it rather as a deformation professionelle. Scholarship, by its nature, is borderless. The mere phrases “Aryan science” and “Jewish science” or “socialist scholarship” and “bourgeois scholarship” should send chills down the spine. Furthermore, many successful academics study, teach, and live in different countries in the course of their careers.

So it is natural for academics to view a borderless world as the moral and political ideal — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Make-believe cosmopolitanism is particularly stupid and lazy in the case of academics who fancy themselves progressives. In the absence of a global government that could raise taxes to fund a global welfare state, the free movement of people among countries would overburden and destroy existing national welfare states, or else empower right-wing populists to defend welfare states for natives against immigrants, as is happening both in the U.S. and Europe.

The views of intellectuals about social reform tend to be warped by professional and personal biases, as well. In the U.S. the default prescription for inequality and other social problems among professors, pundits, and policy wonks alike tends to be: More education! Successful intellectuals get where they are by being good at taking tests and by going to good schools. It is only natural for them to generalize from their own highly atypical life experiences and propose that society would be better off if everyone went to college — natural, but still stupid and lazy. Most of the jobs in advanced economies — a majority of them in the service sector — do not require higher education beyond a little vocational training. Notwithstanding automation, for the foreseeable future janitors will vastly outnumber professors, and if the wages of janitors are too low then other methods — unionization, the restriction of low-wage immigration, a higher minimum wage — make much more sense than enabling janitors to acquire BAs, much less MAs and Ph.Ds.

The social isolation of intellectuals, I think, is worsened by their concentration in a few big metro areas close to individual and institutional donors like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. (where I live) or in equally atypical college towns. It was never possible for Chinese mandarins or medieval Christian monks in Europe to imagine that their lifestyles could be adopted by the highly visible peasantry that surrounded them. But it is possible for people to go from upper middle class suburbs to selective schools to big-city bohemias or campuses with only the vaguest idea of how the 70 percent of their fellow citizens whose education ends with high school actually live.

Universal national service would be a bad idea; the working class majority is hard-pressed enough without being required to perform unpaid labor. But it might not hurt if every professor, opinion journalist, and foundation expert, as a condition of career advancement, had to spend a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse. Our out-of-touch intelligentsia might learn some lessons that cannot be obtained from books and seminars alone.

 

[ACamp1900]

But in the social sciences, intellectuals — be they professors, pundits, or policy wonks — tend to be both biased and unaware of their own bias.

Has been a point I've beaten to death on this board for about a decade now...

 

[zelezo vlk]

I have no problem calling Whiskey a freak.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I have no problem calling Whiskey a freak.

 

[dshans]

Does this mean that I'm free to let my Freak Flag Fly without fear of fanciful, flakey or funky facetiousness?

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Does this mean that I'm free to let my Freak Flag Fly without fear of fanciful, flakey or funky facetiousness?

Only if you're intellectual about it. And epistemicly humble.

 

[gkIrish]

Does this mean that I'm free to let my Freak Flag Fly without fear of fanciful, flakey or funky facetiousness?

<iframe width="550" height="350" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HhG2lBLCtdA" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[dshans]

Only if you're intellectual about it. And epistemicly humble.

That's a ten-four, Rubber Ducky.

 

[Legacy]

John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy draws the distinctions between Productive and Unproductive Labour as far as the creation of wealth and the material benefits to society.

Many writers have been unwilling to class any labour as productive, unless its result is palpable in some material object, capable of being transferred from one person to another. There are others (among whom are Mr. M'Culloch and M. Say) who looking upon the word unproductive as a term of disparagement, remonstrate against imposing it upon any labour which is regarded as useful—which produces a benefit or a pleasure worth the cost. The labour of officers of government, of the army and navy, of physicians, lawyers, teachers, musicians, dancers, actors, domestic servants, &c., when they really accomplish what they are paid for, and are not more numerous than is required for its performance, ought not, say these writers, to be "stigmatized" as unproductive, an expression which they appear to regard as synonymous with wasteful or worthless. But this seems to be a misunderstanding of the matter in dispute. Production not being the sole end of human existence, the term unproductive does not necessarily imply any stigma; nor was ever intended to do so in the present case. The question is one of mere language and classification. Differences of language, however, are by no means unimportant, even when not grounded on differences of opinion; for though either of two expressions may be consistent with the whole truth, they generally tend to fix attention upon different parts of it. We must therefore enter a little into the consideration of the various meanings which may attach to the words productive and unproductive when applied to labour.

In distinguishing Productive Labour beyond physical labor that produces material wealth, Mills also says:

No limit can be set to the importance, even in a purely productive and material point of view, of mere thought. Inasmuch, however, as these material fruits, though the result, are seldom the direct purpose of the pursuits of savants, nor is their remuneration in general derived from the increased production which may be caused incidentally, and mostly after a long interval, by their discoveries; this ultimate influence does not, for most of the purposes of political economy, require to be taken into consideration; and speculative thinkers are generally classed as the producers only of the books, or other useable or saleable articles, which directly emanate from them. But when (as in political economy one should always be prepared to do) we shift our point of view, and consider not individual acts, and the motives by which they are determined, but national and universal results, intellectual speculation must be looked upon as a most influential part of the productive labour of society, and the portion of its resources employed in carrying on and in remunerating such labour, as a highly productive part of its expenditure.

Arguably, we can interpret his use the term "savants" for "intelligentsia".

Michael Lind may not agree with Mills and has a more restrictive definition of productivity that underlies his article on the intelligentsia. Would he define his article or any of his labor in writing articles as unproductive?

John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume II - The Principles of Political Economy with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy (Books I-II) [1848] (Chapters 2 & 3)

Also interesting is Mill's "Of the Functions of Government" section.

 

[Legacy]

The American Soul Is a Murderous Soul
Guns make America more lethal than other countries. But getting rid of the Second Amendment won’t make Americans any less violent. (Foreign Policy)

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The Week's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry just published an article titled "America's birth rate is now a national emergency":

The new birth rate numbers are out, and they're a disaster. There are now only 59.6 births per 1,000 women, the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States. Some of the decrease is due to good news, which is the continuing decline of teen pregnancies, but most of it is due to people getting married later and choosing to have fewer children. And the worst part is, everyone is treating this news with a shrug.

It wasn't always this way. It used to be taken for granted that the best indicator of a nation's health was its citizens' desire and capacity to reproduce. And it should still seem self-evident that people's willingness to have children is not only a sign of confidence in the future, but a sign of cultural health. It's a signal that people are willing to commit to the most enduring responsibility on Earth, which is raising a child.

But reproduction is also a sign of national health in a more dollars-and-cents way. The more productive people you have in your society, the healthier your country's economy. It's an idea that was obvious back in the 17th century, when economist Jean Bodin wrote "the only wealth is people."

Today we see the problems wrought by the decline in productive populations all over the industrialized world, where polities are ripping each other to shreds over how to pay for various forms of entitlements, especially for old people. The debates play out in different ways in different countries, but in other ways they are exactly the same. That's because they are ruled by the same ruthless math: The fewer young, productive people you have to pay for entitlements for old, unproductive people, the steeper the bill for the entire society becomes. This basic problem is strangling Europe's economies. And while the United States is among the least bad of the bunch, it is still headed in the wrong direction.

It doesn't have to be this way. While the evidence for government programs that encourage people to have more children is mixed, the fact of the matter is that in contemporary America, 40 percent of women have fewer children than they want to.

And there are plenty of policies that could help close that gap, whether from the left or from the right. Not just pro-maternity policies, but also policies that encourage healthy child-rearing, like child tax credits, family savings accounts, and tax-free children savings accounts. Or education reforms that would make fewer parents feel that they have to pony up for private school to give their kids a decent shot at life. Perhaps one of the biggest things we could do is to reduce the countless state and local regulations that make housing expensive.

But put policy aside for a second. The United States literally exports more oil than Saudi Arabia and has the world's top expertise in both renewable and traditional energy forms. It is the world's biggest food producer and a gargantuan country with very little density. There is no reason for the United States to have a weak birth rate — and it is a national emergency that it does.

Yet no one seems worried. And that might be the biggest worry of all.

Anyone interested in "making America great again" ought to consider marrying young, having a large family, and being a devoted spouse and parent.

 

[zelezo vlk]

The Week's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry just published an article titled "America's birth rate is now a national emergency":



Anyone interested in "making America great again" ought to consider marrying young, having a large family, and being a devoted spouse and parent.

I don't even know what to joke about. This is a serious issue. Semi-related: everyone who compares their pets to children should be slapped.

Sadly I see the contracepting mentality everywhere and too few couples who actually want to have more than 1 or 2 children.

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[wizards8507]

Anyone interested in "making America great again" ought to consider marrying young, having a large family, and being a devoted spouse and parent.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

This is sad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/07/opinion/sunday/fifty-states-of-anxiety.html
Fifty States of Anxiety

"Based on Internet searches, Americans' anxieties are up 150% since 2004."

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

I don't even know what to joke about. This is a serious issue. Semi-related: everyone who compares their pets to children should be slapped.

Sadly I see the contracepting mentality everywhere and too few couples who actually want to have more than 1 or 2 children.

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IMO, part of this is more millenials are self centered and don't want to do everything the way their parents did. The other part is the whole "get married and have 3-4 kids" plan is a helluva lot more daunting than it was 20 years ago financially.

Average cost of raising a child (before college) is $180k, we're coming off a nasty recession, and the middle class is struggling.

 

[zelezo vlk]

IMO, part of this is more millenials are self centered and don't want to do everything the way their parents did. The other part is the whole "get married and have 3-4 kids" plan is a helluva lot more daunting than it was 20 years ago financially.

Average cost of raising a child (before college) is $180k, we're coming off a nasty recession, and the middle class is struggling.

The millenials were taught by their parents and the culture. They aren't the outlier; the sexual revolution has poisoned America and the effects become worse with every generation. If a kid is a POS, most of the time they learned it from the parents.

I do agree about the economic reasons though. But I don't think that it's the prime cause of this crisis.

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[woolybug25]

IMO, part of this is more millenials are self centered and don't want to do everything the way their parents did. The other part is the whole "get married and have 3-4 kids" plan is a helluva lot more daunting than it was 20 years ago financially.

Average cost of raising a child (before college) is $180k, we're coming off a nasty recession, and the middle class is struggling.

When do we stop saying "we just came off a recession"? It's an historically inaccurate statement. The recession was 6 years ago. Since 1945, the average expansion cycle has been 57 months. We are actually overdue on our next decline.