Double Bubble

The whimsical quiz I linked to on Wednesday has drawn complaints here and there. In a comment, Professor Hale pointed out that the lower and higher scores both indicate insulation and that the questions themselves indicate a bias. I agree to an extent, but I don’t find it that germane.

The questions were written with regard to this Charles Murray article contrasting the growing divergence of two hypothetical neighborhoods. As Murray’s focus is on the elites who influence the norms and mores, or in this case ignore bad ones, the questions in the quiz were designed to show how little the true elites, who would presumably score around zero, know about those they are purporting to help or save from themselves.

Commenter jz offered two concise summations:

One of Murray’s concerns is the elite class making decisions for others with absolutely no understanding of their values, behavior, incentives of the lower class.

and

One of Murray’s prescriptives was music to me; he states,
“The best thing that the new upper middle class can do is to drop its condescending ‘nonjudgmentalism’. Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

One step toward dropping that condescending nonjudgmentalism is understand those who need to be judged. The idea may be foreign to those of us reading this, but there are really people out there who are wholly ignorant about those living between the coasts. Those elite ignoramuses are powerful and increasingly dangerous.

How Thick is Your Bubble?

I’ve been meaning to write about Charles Murray’s excellent piece on the new class divide that everyone has been writing on, but I’m glad I haven’t yet. This quiz, which measures the thickness of your bubble, was illuminating.

I don’t have a bubble, but my kids will. I was born to a blue collar father, I’m not afraid of cans of beer, I enjoy fishing, and I don’t get holier than thou if a person smokes. At the same time, I am in management, I’ve attended Rotary lunches, and I don’t consume much mass entertainment.

This dividing line is new and it both feeds and is fed by atomization, atomization which arises from our hyper-individualistic solipism. Even die hard lefties can sound like Ayn Rand when discussing their space and their stuff and their rights. The hippie boomers and the cult of me has won. Me doesn’t want to be with you, especially if you aren’t a mirror of me.

My kids likely won’t live in a neighborhood like the one I grew up in where there was my blue collar family on this corner and a doctor on that corner. We kids played together, our parents carpooled us to school, and we weren’t too acutely aware of our differences because they were material. We all had parents who were married and our lives weren’t that dissimilar.

Things have gotten much uglier since then.

Mulder Smiled

[The] normalization of single motherhood, and the concomitant decline of marriage, led to both the marginalization of black men and–with an assist from welfare reform–the success of black women. . .

Feminism and sexual permissiveness are moving America toward matriarchy, a state in which men are increasingly superfluous and, as evidenced by the high black male incarceration rate, dangerous. Black women’s economic success is to be applauded, but the broader picture is cause for worry, not optimism.
-James Taranto

That’s not from a regular crank’s blog, that’s from Taranto’s Best of the Web Today which appears on the Wall Street Journal’s website. (The X Files was on Fox, Murdoch owns the WSJ, now the truth that is out there is being published. Coincidence? I think not.)

Many might quibble with his assertion that we’re moving to a matriarchal society and instead state it in the past tense, but to those Cassandras I say, “Be more like Pollyanna.”  It’s always darkest before the dawn and all that shit.

Musical Interlude – the Etta edition

Remember when singers could really just sing without ProTools and autotune? Etta James could sing. RIP.

Great jam:

And Then There Were Six, Five, Eleventy, Some Number

Bye, bye Rick Perry
. Or as Vodka Pundit said, “Rick Perry was running for president?”

Say what you will about Perry – corporatist, opportunist, status quo – his campaign highlighted just how ridiculous the nominating process has become. We don’t care about the resume, we only care how telegenic a person is. Spengler’s Law applies to much more than just gender relations. Perry isn’t a smooth debater, and it is an important predictor as super awesome president and strong talking points regurgitator Obama exemplifies, so he lost. Romney, who has won one, one!, election continues to hoist the electability petard over a soma-addled electorate, Newt Gingrich is not being ignored, the Libertarian wing continues to put all its eggs in the Ron Paul basket, Rick Santorum wears vests, and normally sane people are actually wishing Palin had run.

Obama is going to coast to reelection.

What Fresh Hell is This?

Hawaiian Libertarian is currently displaying a “this blog has been removed” message. Hopefully this is a temporary hiccup. Though there are others, Keoni is my go-to dynamic blogroll. I know I am not alone. I haven’t even had a chance to link to him with regard to Paula Deen’s diabetes or my anecdotal experiences with eating too many carbs over Thanksgiving/Christmas/January.

May this absence be a true aloha, replete with a final hello.

Save the Sugar and Honey, No Sopapipa for Me

First, I have to give a tip of the hat to Chuck ‘Sweet Potato’ Rudd for  coming up with the sopapilla/SOPAPIPA angle.

Second, Chris Dodd supports SOPA, ergo I do not.

Is Google, itself no great champion of free markets and competition, being totally on the up and up about its opposition? Very likely it is not. One thing I’ve read is that it will cost them ad revenue when access to sites is blocked. Sounds plausible.

I am not going dark for the day, but I do hope these bills die ugly deaths. We have enough regulations. The problem is not lack of regulation, the problem is regulatory capture and corporatism. Though SOPAPIPA seems to bother the corporatists, it’s just a few tweaks away from changing sides. Also, it’s supported by Chris Dodd.

Update: Chuck elaborates on an angle I chose not to explore. I won a round against the WordPress app. I didn’t want to press my luck with a long post.

I’m Designer

My generation’s for sale
Beats a steady job.
How much have you got?
-Josh Homme “I’m Designer“

Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

-William Deresiewicz The Entrepreneurial Generation

I cannot believe I’m quoting a self-described progressive who quotes David “Crease” Brooks in an article for the New York Times.

It simply does not jive with my image.

But the dude might have a point, despite the fact that his politics causes him to make some mistaken assumptions. He credits Clinton as the intellectual founder of the entrepreneurial generation, and specifically states that Reagan was not. Perhaps that is true, though Deresiewicz is too clever by half. Clinton is the poster child and patron saint of Baby Boomerism. Clinton is Boomer Jesus. The Boomers begat the Millenials. Narcissism and navel gazing are foundational when it comes to gold stars and self-promotion. Self-gratification pairs nicely with an inoffensive front.

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

But is it really a commercial personality? Is it not, rather, the guarded personality? Is it instead don’t come around, uh oh, der kommissar’s in town and he’s brought with him the guardians of correctness? Running afoul of the guardians can be damaging to the brand, to be sure, but the motivation is not an internal desire to sell. The motivation is a desire to avoid punitive nonsense.

Not that I expect Deresiewicz to broach such territory. To ask if PC and proper progressive shibboleths produce unintended consequences, like stifling artificial groupthink, is to question the concept of homogeneity that girds the diversity movement. Diversity is only acceptable if the differences are superficial. Real differences cannot be tolerated. They cannot even be acknowledged. To acknowledge the differences would be to acknowledge true diversity, bonus points!, and true diversity ain’t often neat and pretty. There’s a reason that unisex jumpsuits, despite heavy lobbying and marketing by the science fiction industrial complex, have never caught on. People inherently bristle at being atoms in a molecule, cf. the loud conforming nonconformity of hipsters.

This intersection is where I come in. We must, for the sake of the herd, become blander. We need trendsetters to lead us to a glorious milquetoast future. We need unisex jumpsuits and pioneers to model them. We need unisex jumpsuits decorated with ugly sweater designs to attract the pioneers. They will come and spread the word. I will become Millenial Jesus in a Gen X package. Bono and shoe Tom, but not toothpaste Tom, will fall before me and my mission. I’m designer, beats a steady job.

Programming Note

I often upload drafts and tidbits in the evening, polish them on my smartphone on break or lunch, and then hit publish. Alas, the newest WordPress app, updated this weekend, is the worst app ever. It reformats, it deletes large chunks of previously saved text, it freezes, it refuses to scroll, it does other annoying things and does not do other useful ones. After spending 40 minutes re-swyping a post twice today, I realize I need a new schedule since all I am accomplishing is frustration. So, stay tuned, I have a handful of whiskey reviews and a post on image and selling the self in the hopper. Loki contributed a doggeral that I need to add a few verses to. There is other news I may or may not reveal.

In any case, the radio silence is mostly &$#%#@$& technology problems.

And WordPress, you really need to give us back the old app. I tried to email, but the address listed in the Android Market is incorrect.

A Cinematic Masterpiece

The ploy was subtle, prompted perhaps by the length of time since my last offering. She looked younger than I remembered. Maybe it is that I am now older.

Hello, Love, original muse, keeper of the cleave.

I must give you credit. Your plan lacked elegance and finesse. Nonetheless, it worked–I watched I Know What You Did Last Summer. Now I am writing a paean to it, to you.

There will be pictures.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is not The Third Man. It is not Fight Club. It is not Logan’s Run. It is more perfect than any of those. It established a franchise, replete with technicolor gloried inconsistencies and you, though I must confess that I find the more growed-up version to be superior to the nubile yet unfinished younger edition.

There is the rich kid, the slutty girlfriend, a few characters who might be good or evil and who are pining for Love, poor victim of circumstance that she is, Anne Heche in her most convincing performance ever, and some creepy characters from left field, a staple of good horror. Though, in this case, it’s a perfectly scripted mockery of boilerplate horror, but it’s not ironic and there is a preponderance of cleavage, glorious, glorious cleavage.

Spoiler alert: There is also a cerebral angle. The kids are gathered around the campfire telling a ghost story, just before Love shares her as-yet-unadorned special lady and flower with the Freddie Prinze Jr. who was formerly known as an actor. One character discusses how urban legends must start with a kernel of truth. Then the kids run over the spokesman for Gorton’s fishsticks and history is made, a new urban legend born.

There is no pretense, there are no unnecessary arthouse nods, there is no pointless convolution, only purposeful convolution. Love and dude must not be murderers; we have to root for someone, after all. Gorton’s fury must be unhinged, not understandable revenge. Everything must sewn up, then the seams ripped, credits rolled, the sequel practically pre-written. Wes Craven isn’t legendary because he’s blind to cleavage and the entertainment value held therein, though audiences worldwide were spared when Freddie Kruger was taken out of his scripted halter and put into his now-signature sweater.

So pour a glass of something good, like the Balvenie 14 Caribbean Cask (review coming soon!), sit back, turn on Starz, and watch cinematic magic. And Love.