Digest, 11/26/2022: Gobble Gobble Gobble
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.
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.
Can’t believe I’m ‘entering the fray’ already batting second, but let it be known that IMHO FdB is not a scumbag!
I do have further thoughts about the college-loan column though. As a Californian of a certain age who was able to take advantage of the inexpensive tuition rates that were part of the OG state master plan for higher ed. in the post-war era, the inflation of tuition truly has been astonishing. That it was accomplished and has been sustained by a bipartisan consensus, though, is undeniable. Money talks to both sides. Just how much wealthier is Nancy Pelosi now than when she first entered Congress?
The left has consistently invoked Reagan as the boogeyman behind de-regulation and a host of other negative developments since his days in office lo those many years ago, but, as time passes and his well-coiffed corpse grows colder, his services as an all-purpose villain grow less reliable. I’m not defending him, and am at least as put-off by right wingers’ worship of him. But all of that just underscores the need for viable alternatives to the Big 2 parties that dominate American politics. Burning effigies of dead men is just about as deranged as defending bronze equestrian statues of failed champions of slavery.
We have a lot to do. We know that the ongoing sumo match isn’t going to end anytime soon. But a 3rd party that could establish a grass-roots base and interpose people into the see-saw battles on various levels could tip the balance away from the political stasis we’re living with. How about that as a subject of future musings?