Digest, 11/26/2022: Gobble Gobble Gobble
the seventy-second digest post
This Week’s Posts
Monday, November 21st - Pushing Everyone Into College was a Policy Response to Other Policy
The rhetoric about student loan debt often has a “they should have known better” attitude built into it. But pushing everyone into college has been an explicit policy goal for a generation, and that was a response to macroeconomic policy.
Wednesday, November 23rd - You Can Hate Your Country and Love Its Rituals
People really, really hated this one, and there were many theatrical declarations that they were going to unsubscribe. I will respond to that soon. As is typical with these things I think the headline drew about half the ire. But I have to stay true to my real feelings in this project.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Non-Garbage Online Reading
A great meditation on the wild turkey.
Book Recommendation
“You Can't Fire the Bad Ones!”: And 20 Other Myths about Teachers and Teaching, Bill Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers, 2016
A good, sharp look at common attacks on teachers and their unions, buttressed by research and argued in a feisty style. You know my thoughts on education, and while I can’t say that these authors share all of my ideas, they are very good at busting the myth that students are simply clay to be molded by talented and hardworking teachers, and that there are externalities the education system can’t control which contributes to our problems.
NFL Picks of the Week
This week I like the Tennessee Titans +2.5 over the Cincinnati Bengals. I fear Ja’marr Chase as much as the next man, but I can’t pass up a 7-3 home underdog, especially against a Bengals team that I see as due for a letdown game. I suspect Tennessee grinds it out and wins outright tomorrow.
Season record: 7-3-0
Comment of the Week
For my boomer parents, they grew up in a world where a degree was a golden ticket. This they conveyed to me: the expectation was simply that I would go to university. To study what? didn't matter. Just graduate.
Of course, by the time my generation were graduating, it was no longer a ticket because so many people now have degrees. There's the basic market economics of something dropping in value as it is produced in surplus.
There's also the fact that just as factory jobs are diminished, a lot of white collar jobs have been removed too. The admin support jobs that used to make up many offices (secretarial pool, mail rooms, etc) have vanished. Executives type their own emails.
And the middle management jobs that once existed - many of them at the factories - have also gone. - Katrina Gulliver
Bad taste in my mouth right now. But I’ll have another chance next week.
I didn't comment on the Thanksgiving one because it seemed like your basic thrust was too simple to really engage with; it wasn't an invitation to debate, but a declaration. The American Empire is a horrorshow of brutality on its fringes and in its maintenance, but a holiday specifically set aside for feasting with kin and friends in a spirit of gratitude for what life has thrown your way is still pretty cool. Just like, aight. Logging it now, but I've no real response.
But I will admit it HAS been bugging me since you posted. I expect mostly just residual outrage at people who bring "America BAD!" to every discussion. Just how I was raised, and I've mostly grown out of the outrage.
I just started a job at a middle school where they say the pledge of allegiance every morning. Kids are supposed to stop and place their right hand over their heart as it's being read, but of course they don't and I'm supposed to stop them and correct them. I don't have the heart for the task. These kids don't know jack shit about fuck. No conception of what citizenship means, no idea what America is or does, not framework to view the world. They just know the adults want them to do something so they don't wanna. I would love to explain to them that patriotism doesn't count if it's coerced, that I will never, ever stop them to make them stand still and mumble the pledge even if the admin try to make me. But I'd also like to give them a crash course in history about how America was founded at war with itself, with its high ideals of liberty at odds with its material realities. I'd like to walk them through its development over the centuries, show that as the friction increased and the boiling points were reached, material realities shattered on contact with ideals and gave way, allowing other contradictions and conflicts to step up and begin the pressure cooker anew.
We are still at war with ourselves. The contradictions between what we do and what we tell ourselves we do are still here. The pressure cooker continues building. And that I don't think the high ideals will win again unless the population- aka, the people, today's children and tomorrow's citizens- decides they will. And they won't, if they decide they hate their own country and that the ideals were bullshit since the start.
So I kinda see the "Hate your country, loves parts of its civic religion" rhetoric as counterproductive. I don't think citizens should hate their country except for a few things they pick and choose, like a kid picking the good candy out of a Halloween bowl and leaving the low-quality stuff behind. I think they should love it. I think they should be fiercely attached to it, and hate the current condition it's in.
Meh. I'm just a dumbass who got too much romanticism as a youngin', what do I know.
People who dramatically unsubscribe are the same people that share Facebook posts of throwing away Goya food cans. Just do it, and shut the fuck up about it. deBoer likes to brag about the cheese he's making, so he mentioned he makes about quarter mil from this gig. Your $5 don't really matter. Your threat is laughable.
I read deBoer because I like his writing, not because I think I'd like him as a person. He's a typical scumbag leftist and Marxist, with all that entails, including blinding self-righteousness. So what? Good writers and other artists are often assholes. James Joyce was notorious for being one.