"So Shines a Good Deed in a Naughty World"
by Franklin P. Adams
There was a man in our town, and he
was wondrous rich;
He gave away his millions to the colleges
and sich;
And people cried: "The hypocrite! He ought
to understand
The ones who really need him are the children
of this land."
When Andrew Croesus built a home for children
who were sick,
The people said they rather thought he did it
as a trick,
And writers said: "He thinks about the drooping
girls and boys,
But what about conditions with the men whom
he employs?"
There was a man in our town who said that he
would share
His profits with his laborers, for that was
only fair,
And people said: "Oh, isn't he the shrewd and
foxy gent?
It cost him next to nothing for that free
advertisement."
There was a man in our town who had the perfect
plan
To do away with poverty and other ills of man,
But he feared the public jeering, and the folks
who would defame him,
So he never told the plan he had, and I can hardly
blame him.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
"So Shines a Good Deed in a Naughty World" by Franklin P. Adams
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Different Drum by Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Poneys
Different Drum by Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Ponys
Double click to enlarge.
Double click to enlarge.
Different Drum
by Linda Ronstadt and The Stone Poneys
You and I travel to the beat of a diff'rent drum.
Oh, can't you tell by the way I run
Ev'ry time you make eyes at me. Wo oh.
You cry and you moan and say it will work out.
But honey child I've got my doubts.
You can't see the forest for the trees.
Oh, don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm knockin'.
It's just that I'm not in the market
For a girl who wants to love only me.
Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty.
All I'm sayin's I'm not ready for any person,
Place or thing to try and pull the reins in on me.
So Goodbye, I'll be leavin'.
I see no sense in the cryin' and grievin'.
We'll both live a lot longer if you live without me.
Oh, don't get me wrong. It's not that I'm knockin'.
It's just that I'm not in the market
For a girl who wants to love only me.
Yes, and I ain't sayin' you ain't pretty.
All I'm sayin's I'm not ready for any person,
Place or thing to try and pull the reins in on me.
So Goodbye, I'll be leavin'.
I see no sense in the cryin' and grievin'.
We'll both live a lot longer if you live without me.
The most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act like a victim
I have speculated at various times about the tipping point in upper education when we tilted from old style Age of Enlightenment Classical Liberalism to the modern Postmodernist Social Justice mindset which has been so undermining of the Classical Liberal view of the world.
The three pillars, it seems to me, of the Postmodernist Social Justice experiment have been Group Identity (prioritizing Groups over individuals and forcing allocation to Groups); Relativism (there is no objective reality, just opinions and social constructs); and Victimhood (seeking support from the state/others to circumvent law, custom and natural rights in order to enjoy benefits not extended to others.) All three pillars are anathema to the Classical Liberal worldview anchored on the individual, natural rights, freedom, consent of the governed, rule of law, etc.
The pursuit of postmodernist social justice via Group Identity, Relativism, and Victimhood has driven three dangerous trends. Centralization of power in order to rectify outcomes not achievable through free choice. Authoritarianism in order to force solutions not achievable owing to the withholding of consent by the governed. Totalitarianism (all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state) to drive out nonconformity which is a key attribute of free systems.
We are so accustomed to the postmodernist social justice assumptions that it is difficult to realize that at one time very recently they were not common. There were voices singing those social justice tunes when I was in university and grad school in the eighties but they were solo performances. At some point they became a choir. A centralized, authoritarian, totalitarian choir which we see with greatest clarity in university campuses these days.
When was the tipping point? I had assumed that it was sometime between 1985 and 1995.
Lending support for that is this prescient essay by academic, author, essayist, Joseph Epstein from 1989, The Joys of Victimhood.
I have long enjoyed Epstein's essays (in small doses) but had never come across this one before.
All our public intellectuals of the first order, are frequently charged as conservatives by postmodernists, and yet derive their values and worldview primarily from the Classical Liberal school of inquiry.
Epstein's essay centers the tipping point from classical liberalism to postmodernist social justice as perhaps closer to 1990.
The sooner we see the back of postmodernist social justice as a mainstay of public discourse, the better.
The three pillars, it seems to me, of the Postmodernist Social Justice experiment have been Group Identity (prioritizing Groups over individuals and forcing allocation to Groups); Relativism (there is no objective reality, just opinions and social constructs); and Victimhood (seeking support from the state/others to circumvent law, custom and natural rights in order to enjoy benefits not extended to others.) All three pillars are anathema to the Classical Liberal worldview anchored on the individual, natural rights, freedom, consent of the governed, rule of law, etc.
The pursuit of postmodernist social justice via Group Identity, Relativism, and Victimhood has driven three dangerous trends. Centralization of power in order to rectify outcomes not achievable through free choice. Authoritarianism in order to force solutions not achievable owing to the withholding of consent by the governed. Totalitarianism (all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state) to drive out nonconformity which is a key attribute of free systems.
We are so accustomed to the postmodernist social justice assumptions that it is difficult to realize that at one time very recently they were not common. There were voices singing those social justice tunes when I was in university and grad school in the eighties but they were solo performances. At some point they became a choir. A centralized, authoritarian, totalitarian choir which we see with greatest clarity in university campuses these days.
When was the tipping point? I had assumed that it was sometime between 1985 and 1995.
Lending support for that is this prescient essay by academic, author, essayist, Joseph Epstein from 1989, The Joys of Victimhood.
I have long enjoyed Epstein's essays (in small doses) but had never come across this one before.
A shame there isn't a machine, the sociological equivalent of a seismograph, that registers fundamental shifts in social attitudes and concerns. In the absence of such a machine, we all have to operate with our own often rather primitive social radar, taking our signals where we find them. When one's dentist, for example, begins to say ''pasta'' instead of spaghetti or noodles, one knows that the interest in cookery has fully swept the middle classes. When one sees Mafia men jogging and worrying about their cholesterol, one knows that anxiety about health really is endemic. What began as a fad becomes a trend, which becomes a shift, which finally becomes a serious change in the way we live and think about ourselves.Epstein can sound like a recalcitrant conservative curmudgeon but he comes from a wonderful tradition of classical liberalism in an American intellectual history of libertarians and classical liberals who object to the centralization, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism of postmodern social justice, without losing their commitment to the wonderful vision of classical liberalism. Public intellectuals such as Allan Bloom, E.O. Wilson, Neil Postman, E.D. Hirsch, Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Jordan Peterson, Camille Paglia, etc.
My own fairly low-voltage radar has been pinging away for some while on another such shift, and last summer, while I was watching the Democratic National Convention on television, it began to bleep furiously in my mind. The noise could no longer be avoided when, at the moment that Ann Richards, the Texas State Treasurer, completed her strong keynote speech, the commentator on the television network I was watching remarked (as near as I can recall), ''Ann Richards is a divorced mother of four who has undergone rehabilitation for an alcohol problem.'' Earlier in the campaign, Kitty Dukakis had announced that she had undergone treatment for an addiction she had to diet pills. During his speech at the convention, Jesse Jackson, in speaking of his own origins, declared that he was an illegitimate child, and then he wove a speech around the metaphor of the Democratic Party being a quilt both made by and supplying warmth to all those elements in American life - minority groups, homosexuals, American Indians (or Native Americans, as they're now known), welfare families, and many others - who, in Mr. Jackson's reading, were America's victims. Eight and even four years earlier, the Democratic Party had advertised itself as the party of concern. Last summer, though, the Democratic Party seemed to have cut out the middleman and gone from ''caring persons'' straight to victims. The logic of the convention seemed to call for Michael Dukakis, on the night of his nomination, to arrive in an iron lung and announce that he was a lesbian mother.
Victims have never been in short supply in the world, but the rush to identify oneself as a victim is rather a new feature of modern life.
[snip]
Yet it was the civil rights movement, by my reckoning, that changed the tenor, the quality, the very nature of victimhood in the United States. I happened to be living in the South in the early 1960's, working as a director of the antipoverty program in Little Rock, Ark., while the civil rights movement was under way in full earnest. What I saw was a number of bad laws called into question and ultimately removed by acts of courage and wise restraint on the part of the victims of those laws. One really had to have nailed shut the shutters to one's heart not to have been moved by the spectacle of men and women risking everything to gain only what in fairness was coming to them. It was immensely impressive, on every level. Why? Because the early civil rights movement's appeal was unmistakably not to the guilt but to the conscience of the nation.
An appeal to conscience is an appeal to one's ethical nature, to one's sense of fair play; it is fundamentally an appeal to act upon the best that is in one. An appeal to guilt is almost entirely negative; rather than awaken the best in one, it reminds one what a dog one is. Conscience seeks its outlet in action, or right conduct; guilt seeks assuagement, or to find a way to be let off the hook.
The civil rights movement, like a spiritual oil spill, left a vast residue of guilt in its wake.
[snip]
Sometimes it must be difficult for the spokesmen for victims to keep up the anger - Jesse Jackson in an expensive suit, Gloria Steinem at a socialite party at the New York Public Library - but, whether simulated or real, the note of outrage always seems to be there when they need it. A victim, especially a professional victim, must at all times be angry, suspicious, above all progress-denying. He or she is ever on the lookout for that touch of racism, sexism, or homophobia that might show up in a stray opinion, an odd locution, an uninformed misnomer. With victims everywhere, life becomes a minefield in a cow pasture - no matter where you step, you are in trouble.
As if all this isn't nervous-making enough, there has come into being a large number of people, many of them in universities, who, if not victims themselves, wish to speak for victims or rouse other people to a sense of their injury as victims. They are the intellectual equivalent of ambulance chasers.
Perhaps the best place to see the traffic of victims and ambulance chasers in full flow is in the contemporary university.
[snip]
People who count and call themselves victims never blame themselves for their condition. They therefore have to find enemies. Forces high and low block their progress: society is organized against them; history is not on their side; the malevolent, who are always in ample supply, conspire to keep them down. Asked by an interviewer in Time magazine about violence in schools that are all-black - that is, violence by blacks against blacks - the novelist Toni Morrison replies, ''None of those things can take place, you know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.''
For victimhood to be taken seriously, there has to be a core of substance to the victim's complaints.
[snip]
They also remind the rest of us that the most efficient way to become truly a victim is to think and act like a victim.
All our public intellectuals of the first order, are frequently charged as conservatives by postmodernists, and yet derive their values and worldview primarily from the Classical Liberal school of inquiry.
Epstein's essay centers the tipping point from classical liberalism to postmodernist social justice as perhaps closer to 1990.
The sooner we see the back of postmodernist social justice as a mainstay of public discourse, the better.
O Ship of State by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
O Ship of State
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
THOU, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What Workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge and what a heat
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope!
Fear not each sudden sound and shock,
'Tis of the wave and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale!
In spite of rock and tempest's roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea!
Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.
Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears,
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,
Are all with thee, -are all with thee!
Presidential birth year cohort clustering
Looking at a list of where each of our presidents was born, I noticed an oddity. It has no significance, I don't think, but there is an anomalous pattern.
Given that presidents are elected every four years, you would expect that, on average, there would be about four years between birthdates of presidents. In fact, given the frequency of two term presidents, you would expect the average difference in birth years to be something more like six years.
It is in fact a lot lumpier than that, and that lumpiness changes over time. This only has significance, and I am not sure that it has significance, depends on the weight you assign to generational cohort shaping. For example, we think of the Great Generation as having been forged first by the Great Depression and then by their shared experience of World War II. I think there is some assignable cohort attributes arising from shared experiences but I am not confident how determinative those shared experiences might be.
Of the thirteen presidents born in the 18th century, the average difference in birth years is 5.25 years. The maximum difference was nine years (between William Harrison, 1773 and Martin Van Buren, 1782). The minimum gap was zero. We had two presidents in the nineteenth century who were born in the same year, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were both born in 1767 and one followed the other in sequence of presidents.
Of the twenty presidents born in the nineteenth century, the average age gap shrank by half a year to 4.75 years. The maximum age gap was 13 years which occurred on two occasions. The first time was between William Mckinley and Woodrow Wilson (two presidents apart from one another in sequence of presidents). The second time was between Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant (one president apart from one another in sequence.) On the other hand, again, there was only one occasion in that century when two presidents were born in the same year as one another. Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes were both born in 1822 and followed one another in sequence as presidents.
Of the eleven presidents born in the 20th century, the average age gap shrank again, down to 4.3 years apart. The maximum age gap among all presidents was in this century, with an eighteen birth year gap between Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower (one president apart in sequence.) However, there have been three occasions when presidents shared the same birth year. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were both born in 1913, one following the other in the sequence of their presidencies. Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were both born in 1924 (one president apart in sequence.) Finally, Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were all born in the same year, 1946. Bush following Clinton in sequence and Trump and Bush separated by one president in sequence.
The lowering of the average in birth year difference from 5.25 to 4.3 implies that there is a generational cohort smoothing going on. On the other hand, the number of occasions where presidents are born in the same year implies greater cohort clustering.
I don't think it has great significance because I don't think shared cohort experiences are all that determinative. Bush, Clinton and Trump shared the same cohort experiences from all being born in the same year but the difference in familial circumstances (traditional patrician, wrong-side-of-the-tracks familial dysfunction, and driven immigrant mogul family) far outweigh the shaping influence of cohort. But it is still striking how much more birth year clustering there is among our recent presidents.
Given that presidents are elected every four years, you would expect that, on average, there would be about four years between birthdates of presidents. In fact, given the frequency of two term presidents, you would expect the average difference in birth years to be something more like six years.
It is in fact a lot lumpier than that, and that lumpiness changes over time. This only has significance, and I am not sure that it has significance, depends on the weight you assign to generational cohort shaping. For example, we think of the Great Generation as having been forged first by the Great Depression and then by their shared experience of World War II. I think there is some assignable cohort attributes arising from shared experiences but I am not confident how determinative those shared experiences might be.
Of the thirteen presidents born in the 18th century, the average difference in birth years is 5.25 years. The maximum difference was nine years (between William Harrison, 1773 and Martin Van Buren, 1782). The minimum gap was zero. We had two presidents in the nineteenth century who were born in the same year, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams were both born in 1767 and one followed the other in sequence of presidents.
Of the twenty presidents born in the nineteenth century, the average age gap shrank by half a year to 4.75 years. The maximum age gap was 13 years which occurred on two occasions. The first time was between William Mckinley and Woodrow Wilson (two presidents apart from one another in sequence of presidents). The second time was between Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant (one president apart from one another in sequence.) On the other hand, again, there was only one occasion in that century when two presidents were born in the same year as one another. Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes were both born in 1822 and followed one another in sequence as presidents.
Of the eleven presidents born in the 20th century, the average age gap shrank again, down to 4.3 years apart. The maximum age gap among all presidents was in this century, with an eighteen birth year gap between Lyndon B. Johnson and Dwight D. Eisenhower (one president apart in sequence.) However, there have been three occasions when presidents shared the same birth year. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford were both born in 1913, one following the other in the sequence of their presidencies. Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush were both born in 1924 (one president apart in sequence.) Finally, Donald Trump, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were all born in the same year, 1946. Bush following Clinton in sequence and Trump and Bush separated by one president in sequence.
The lowering of the average in birth year difference from 5.25 to 4.3 implies that there is a generational cohort smoothing going on. On the other hand, the number of occasions where presidents are born in the same year implies greater cohort clustering.
I don't think it has great significance because I don't think shared cohort experiences are all that determinative. Bush, Clinton and Trump shared the same cohort experiences from all being born in the same year but the difference in familial circumstances (traditional patrician, wrong-side-of-the-tracks familial dysfunction, and driven immigrant mogul family) far outweigh the shaping influence of cohort. But it is still striking how much more birth year clustering there is among our recent presidents.
Tuesday, January 23, 2018
Screen time is associated with decreased psychological well-being.
Very interesting and by no means nearly even approaching the last word. From Decreases in Psychological Well-Being Among American Adolescents After 2012 and Links to Screen Time During the Rise of Smartphone Technology. by Jean Twenge, M. Martin, Gabrielle N. Campbell, and W. Keith Emotion.
This is an indicative tidbit suggesting that there are perhaps more unintended consequences than we anticipated. There is a lot of ground yet to cover. They believe they have ruled out economic cycles as a causal element. But perhaps it is not screen-time versus non-screen time but instead active versus sedentary? Lots of variables to control, (perhaps it is loss of institutional trust, or decline in religious convictions?) but this is an interesting data point supporting a long present concern about the cognitive and emotional disruption arising from always connected, always on.
In nationally representative yearly surveys of United States 8th, 10th, and 12th graders 1991–2016 (N = 1.1 million), psychological well-being (measured by self-esteem, life satisfaction, and happiness) suddenly decreased after 2012. Adolescents who spent more time on electronic communication and screens (e.g., social media, the Internet, texting, gaming) and less time on nonscreen activities (e.g., in-person social interaction, sports/exercise, homework, attending religious services) had lower psychological well-being. Adolescents spending a small amount of time on electronic communication were the happiest. Psychological well-being was lower in years when adolescents spent more time on screens and higher in years when they spent more time on nonscreen activities, with changes in activities generally preceding declines in well-being. Cyclical economic indicators such as unemployment were not significantly correlated with well-being, suggesting that the Great Recession was not the cause of the decrease in psychological well-being, which may instead be at least partially due to the rapid adoption of smartphones and the subsequent shift in adolescents’ time use.Post-2007 (introduction of smart-phones in combination with the maturing of the internet, browsers, social media, etc.) has been a real-life experimentation of human/social/technology interaction with plenty of moving and evolving parts. We can recognize many of the tactical benefits and pitfalls but the strategic accounting is much more complex and the data is still rudimentary.
This is an indicative tidbit suggesting that there are perhaps more unintended consequences than we anticipated. There is a lot of ground yet to cover. They believe they have ruled out economic cycles as a causal element. But perhaps it is not screen-time versus non-screen time but instead active versus sedentary? Lots of variables to control, (perhaps it is loss of institutional trust, or decline in religious convictions?) but this is an interesting data point supporting a long present concern about the cognitive and emotional disruption arising from always connected, always on.
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