The Harper's Letters

[charliebrown]

Re: The Harper's Letters

You guys/gals are too smart for me.

All I can say is be kind to one another. Everyone has been hurt and has their cross to bear.

Perhaps this upevil is a generational issue, as outlined in the imperfect but interesting.
"The Fourth Turning by Strauss/Howe"
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turnin.../dp/0767900464

[jpatter666]

Re: The Harper's Letters

You guys/gals are too smart for me.

All I can say is be kind to one another. Everyone has been hurt and has their cross to bear.

Perhaps this upevil is a generational issue, as outlined in the imperfect but interesting.
"The Fourth Turning by Strauss/Howe"
https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Turnin.../dp/0767900464

Unfortunately agree. I've been getting more and more disturbed on how things are mapping up.

[Techdread]

Re: The Harper's Letters

I've found the older I get the more open-minded and tolerant I've become because I've experienced more, traveled more and met other people more. But if you've done nothing but live in your own local bubble your entire life, I could see that happening.

[edit] I will note that perhaps I have become more cold-blooded and cynical on fantasy social engineering dreams, having seen how much of the rest of the world lives. My wife works in international development and we've been to far too many of the hellholes of the world. Very few of these young Jacobins would survive a week.

On the other hand, we're currently seeing the cold-blooded certainty of youth in its current intolerance of anything outside their own set of beliefs.

Yawn, yawn I bet your elders said the same about your generation.

[shiny!]

Re: The Harper's Letters

Yawn, yawn I bet your elders said the same about your generation.

They did. And they were right.

[llanlad2]

Re: The Harper's Letters

Yawn, yawn I bet your elders said the same about your generation.

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”


― Socrates

They did. And they were right.

"On the other hand, we're currently seeing the cold-blooded certainty of OVER SIXTIES in their current intolerance of anything outside their own set of beliefs."


If I was under 30 I'd certainly be intolerant of the apparent selfishness and sneering superiority of the most privileged generation in the history of mankind. But...I think the message is getting through. Slowly the sense that being in a gated community will not be enough protection......and that some of that wealth may need redistributing downwards.
Just an impartial observation from between the generations.....

[shiny!]

Re: The Harper's Letters

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

-Mark Twain

[seobook]

Re: The Harper's Letters

This is J.K. Rowling's blog post that she wrote to clarify her position on transgenderism. Seems like a logical, lucid, well-crafted position to me, but apparently this is hate speech that should be censored and she should be punished.

Almost nobody cares what other people do to themselves out of personal choice provided they are paying for it themselves & it does not harm others.

A big part of the snowflake credo is taking personal / internal / mental problems & foisting them onto the rest of society by asking them to pay for it and/or requesting preferential treatment. Sort of like the failing bottom third male athlete who does the whole transgender conversion and then wins running contests against girls.

Anyone who has had a child knows many things in life do not go as planned & while horrible parenting is easy good parenting is hard. This is a big part of what makes the BLM goal of further undermining the family unit so idiotic. Broken children carry the wounds with them & often become broken parents perpetuating the cycle of dysfunction.

If you want lives to matter you want people to have stable homes through childhood and solid roll models from within their family unit. That makes it easier for them to feel confident, loved, and emotionally balanced enough to put up with all the turbulence they will face at some point later in life.

Children who grow up without a dad in the home are more inclined to be coddled and lack discipline.
Children who grow up without a mom in the home are perhaps more likely to be highly disciplined but not feel as loved.

Either parent can of course be terrible or have terrible moments, but by having 2 you get 2 chances to have a good parent versus a single parent who is stretched thin, stressed out and has to cut corners to try to get by.

The idea that we just need to keep spending more on social safety nets that directly undermine the family unit with little to no expense to the perpetrators is idiotic.

Across the economy we hear markets, markets, markets. Tons of ways to fix the issue if the goal is actually improving quality of life.

If a parent wants the rest of society to pay for their child they should either be married to the person who helped create the child or they should have as a condition of those payments a vasectomy & tubal ligation so that they are not creating a whole fleet of violent little criminal monsters in a broken home when they were unfit to be a parent in the first place (based on requiring others to pay for the child).

The snowflakes don't want safety; they want a social bubble that serves as an echo chamber. If they get the governmental and societal change that they're rioting over, their problems will most certainly be solved when they are executed in concentration camps. I've seen this story many times and I know useful idiots when I see them. Afterwards, a new generation of useful idiots will say, "We didn't do it right the last time!" just as this generation's useful idiots are saying about the last generations' failures.

The big issues here is there is no limit to grievance culture & those who view themselves primarily as oppressed victims give themselves justification to live as shitbags.

One of the easiest ways to improve quality of life is to view it through a lens of luck & appreciation. Do that and you will push yourself to be the best (or at least a better) version of yourself. Here is a great podcast on that from many years ago
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/504...t-into-college
"These stories we tell about ourselves, they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them. So maybe the point here is that you should be careful about how you tell your story, or at least conscious of it. Because once you've told it, once you've built the highway, it's just very hard to move it. Even if your story is about an angel who came out of nowhere and saved your life, even then, not even the angel herself can change it."

Has cancel culture and shutting down people's voices been a Trumpian or Republican thing? I'd like to see one real example of such a thing yet it is utterly trivial to find examples of where the roles are reversed. It is the insane left's Red Guard going after "degenerates" and they have started turning on themselves that really prompted the Harper's letter. Hilariously, some signatories retracted their endorsement of the letter after they saw other signatories they didn't like. Evidently, even if something is objectively good--say, a pollution-free environment--it becomes something that cannot be endorsed or maybe even something that must be rejected if it is endorsed by someone whom one does not like.

Worth noting the contrast between the rural decay and the urban decay.

When I visit the small town my mom lives in I am always happy to get to visit her again & bring her the delicious Mexican food from the restaurant up the street, but if you drive through the town you'd see that the main line of business in the community other than the Walmart is a string of payday loan shops and variants of them (title loans, bails bond stores, etc.)

With all the rural decay from the gutting of manufacturing and outsourcing to China (easily predictable outcome long ago) a lot of the hate that came out of that was directed inwardly. Hence the massive waves of suicide by fentanyl. The media narrative on that issue was largely oh this is sad but there are other more important stories.

Withe the urban decay the hate is focused outward. More arbitrary violence and other crimes. Get yours. Defund the police. Police publishing lists of crimes they will outright ignore even if promptly reported. More victim culture. More I need moar free stuff. And the media response to this stuff is fomenting more violence & racism. On Twitter some are sharing police violence videos from other countries and implying they are examples of bad cops in the US.

As China is anti-Trump, the media will occasionally mention their slave labor camps, but there is little effort to connect the supply chains, offshoring & stagnant wages with the loss of hope expressed through victim mentality culture & violence.

At some point the outcome from the above is talented people end up leaving to rural areas or other countries. As long as the economic system & politics are unstable & getting worse one may as well live where they are not exposed to the violence as well.

When my wife was pregnant with my only child I nearly died from a sepsis infection tied to getting sucker punched by a black punk who called me nigger. That incident happened about a decade earlier, but after about a decade a small crack in root of tooth which went unnoticed became a whole lot of rotted jaw & a bodywide infection I nearly died from. I needed multiple antibiotics via IV to not die. If I would have died my daughter almost certainly would have been a miscarriage then wife likely would have committed suicide. All so we can pay to create more broken fatherless families, tell the kids they are victims, and then give them only slap on the wrist sentences for various violent crime to ensure they commit more.

I now live on the other side of the world and pay many multiples of median household income into a system that let that repeated violent felon roam the streets, will pay him to breed, and lecture me about my racism after I almost died & my entire family was nearly wiped out from the time he called me nigger. Quite charming really.

While I moved away long ago I still have some friends who are black, but most were the guys I played a lot of basketball with who were largely great family people who would run positive community events and fundraisers & would do things like coach the kids teams and bring their own kids to the gym. Total opposite mindset of the "give me free" in limitless quantities & we need to rip down the nuclear family concept as an explicit goal & excuse my personal violence because I am a victim and words are violence crew.

I don't see how in a world as varied as the one we live in people can't find some other aspect of life to hang a huge piece of identity on other than like sexual orientation, race, etc. ... the web makes everything accessible everywhere. How is it nothing else is interesting enough to have passion for outside of the most basic aspects of life or identity politics?

This video is brutally accurate.

Any ideology pushed to its extreme ends up wrapping around and emulating its polar opposite.

Are there widespread riots, looting, threats of physical harm, or threats of destroying one's career from conservative-leaning people demanding more corporate welfare, more wars, incurring more government debt, religion in schools, or increasing the federal government budget deficit?
...
I don't see people losing their jobs, threatened with losing their jobs, or having their lives threatened if they speak out against any of what you say. What do you say about JK Rowling's situation where saying that a woman is not just a person who just declares himself a woman is threatened with physical violence and potentially losing one's career (at least Rowling is ultra wealthy so she will not be financially harmed)? What about the situation where people are forced to use imaginary pronouns when referencing someone when talking about them? How about the insanity in the comic book industry and Hollywood; and American colleges where tenured professors are threatened with violence and calls for their firing are made if they merely state an unpopular (at the school) opinion?

Isn't the concept of self-reliance & self-improvement counter to the culture of victim mentality seeking to boost arbitrary extrajudicial violence & use its threat to steal labor, freedom & opportunity from others?

[shiny!]

Re: The Harper's Letters

seobook, I really appreciate you taking the time to craft such a thoughtful and thought-provoking post.

And though it's long after the fact, I'm so sorry to hear about your terrible ordeal with the sepsis. That must have been excruciating. I hope you made a full recovery.

[seobook]

Re: The Harper's Letters

seobook, I really appreciate you taking the time to craft such a thoughtful and thought-provoking post.

And though it's long after the fact, I'm so sorry to hear about your terrible ordeal with the sepsis. That must have been excruciating. I hope you made a full recovery.

Thanks. I am totally fine on the health front (or so I believe!) though I did have to have a bunch of teeth ripped out from that.

Things have been far tougher on my wife.

It is MUCH harder to see the person you love almost die than it is to be told you are about to die. When I was told I was about to die I was like "oh well, that's that" and there were not really a lot of emotions for me there. But then I saw my pregnant wife balling and felt horrible and ensured her I was fine and it was no big deal.

But she went through that & that day was far harder for her than me. Probably at least 50x or 100x harder for her.

Then our dog died a couple months later. Then when the baby was born they told us she might have a rare genetic issue where she wouldn't live to a year. Then our daughter had colic for like a half year (uncontrolled crying for hours at a time - poor sleep quality for my wife). I got the flu a few days after our daughter was born so for the first week I had to be sort of isolated from them so I didn't get either of them sick. Some women have blood pressure go up a good bit after pregnancy & the string of horrible events and near tragedies & then poor sleep quality from the chronic crying actually ended up having my wife hospitalized with high blood pressure twice.

That infection came back another couple times. Whenever it did I quickly got antibiotics before full on sepsis set in & my biggest concern on each time it returned was hiding it from my wife and getting it treated right away so she would not go through a panic over it again.

The glass half empty view is if we wouldn't have moved maybe our dog likely does not die from the error the vet made.

The glass half full view is if we wouldn't have moved maybe the IVF would not have worked & if we were in the US healthcare system my wife likely would not have got all those extra check ups her super amazing OBGYN did that ended up detecting the blood pressure issue and saving her life.

But really in the middle of the story any conclusion one draws can be wrong. It won't be until our daughter is doing well off on her own that conclusions will have much meaning.

I regret putting my wife through so much volatility and wish her health fully restores. I mean so much of that volatility was certainly not intentional...but that is sort of how life goes for everyone...everyone is at times a victim or a hero or really lucky or unfortunate and so on.

If one starts life from the victim mentality and holds onto it while shaping their identity around it the rest of their lives they are almost certainly going to channel that negative energy toward self-destruction and/or making more victims.

That's why that one podcast I quoted above is so good. It reminds us that each of us are lucky in some ways at some points in time. And it costs nothing to be appreciative & that simple act can make us be far better versions of ourselves even if we are all highly flawed humans.

[jk]

Re: The Harper's Letters

problem: gov't policy dating to 1935 encouraged single parent mothers to a. not have a man living with them and b. to have more children.

some excerpts from the wikipedia article on the program:


The program was created under the name Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) by the Social Security Actof 1935 as part of the New Deal. It was created as a means tested entitlement which subsidized the income of families where fathers were "deceased, absent, or unable to work".^[

The federal government required contributions from individual states, and authorized state discretion to determine who received aid and in what amount.^[2]:30ADC was primarily created [1935] for white single mothers, who were expected not to work. Black mothers, who had always been in the labor force, were not considered eligible to receive benefits.^[4] In 1961 a change in the law permitted states to extend benefits to families where the father was unemployed, a measure which 25 states eventually adopted.^[5]:164 The words "families with" were added to the name in 1962, partly due to concern that the program's rules discouraged marriage.^[2]:31

A number of states enacted so called "man-in-the-house" rules, which disqualified families if there was any adult male present in the household whatsoever. As Williams and Hardisty phrased it:

The "man-in-the-house" rule was struck down in 1968 by the US Supreme Court in King v. Smith.^[8] Thereafter, families with males in the household were eligible for benefits if they were not deemed to be actual or substitute parents, although any financial contribution on the part of the male to the family was still considered a part of the family's total income.^[3]:77 By 1981, the Supreme Court went further and required that states take into consideration the income earned by step-fathers.<sup>[3]:77

----------
so for some number of years you had federal policy encouraging the breakdown of low income families. what a recipe for success!</sup>

[shiny!]

Re: The Harper's Letters

Thanks. I am totally fine on the health front (or so I believe!) though I did have to have a bunch of teeth ripped out from that.

Things have been far tougher on my wife.

It is MUCH harder to see the person you love almost die than it is to be told you are about to die. When I was told I was about to die I was like "oh well, that's that" and there were not really a lot of emotions for me there. But then I saw my pregnant wife balling and felt horrible and ensured her I was fine and it was no big deal.

But she went through that & that day was far harder for her than me. Probably at least 50x or 100x harder for her.

Then our dog died a couple months later. Then when the baby was born they told us she might have a rare genetic issue where she wouldn't live to a year. Then our daughter had colic for like a half year (uncontrolled crying for hours at a time - poor sleep quality for my wife). I got the flu a few days after our daughter was born so for the first week I had to be sort of isolated from them so I didn't get either of them sick. Some women have blood pressure go up a good bit after pregnancy & the string of horrible events and near tragedies & then poor sleep quality from the chronic crying actually ended up having my wife hospitalized with high blood pressure twice.

That infection came back another couple times. Whenever it did I quickly got antibiotics before full on sepsis set in & my biggest concern on each time it returned was hiding it from my wife and getting it treated right away so she would not go through a panic over it again.

The glass half empty view is if we wouldn't have moved maybe our dog likely does not die from the error the vet made.

The glass half full view is if we wouldn't have moved maybe the IVF would not have worked & if we were in the US healthcare system my wife likely would not have got all those extra check ups her super amazing OBGYN did that ended up detecting the blood pressure issue and saving her life.

But really in the middle of the story any conclusion one draws can be wrong. It won't be until our daughter is doing well off on her own that conclusions will have much meaning.

I regret putting my wife through so much volatility and wish her health fully restores. I mean so much of that volatility was certainly not intentional...but that is sort of how life goes for everyone...everyone is at times a victim or a hero or really lucky or unfortunate and so on.

If one starts life from the victim mentality and holds onto it while shaping their identity around it the rest of their lives they are almost certainly going to channel that negative energy toward self-destruction and/or making more victims.

That's why that one podcast I quoted above is so good. It reminds us that each of us are lucky in some ways at some points in time. And it costs nothing to be appreciative & that simple act can make us be far better versions of ourselves even if we are all highly flawed humans.

Sincere best wishes for you and your family, especially your little girl. Sending good thoughts your way!

[shiny!]

Re: The Harper's Letters

JK Rowling receives apology from children’s site after threatening legal action over claims she 'harmed trans people'

Adam White
Independent
Fri, 24 Jul 2020 10:55 UTC

Site aimed at schoolchildren implied Harry Potter author was ‘deeply unpleasant’

JK Rowling has received an apology from a children’s news site after she threatened legal action over its claim that she had harmed transgender people.

On 10 June, The Day, a site aimed at schoolchildren, published an article under the headline “Potterheads cancel Rowling after trans tweet”.

It referenced the controversy stoked after Rowling took issue with the expression “people who menstruate” in a series of tweets, and then suggested that allowing individuals to self-identify their gender could pose a potential threat to cisgender women in an essay published to her personal site.

The Day article discussed the controversy, before asking readers to ponder whether it is still possible to enjoy works of art created by “deeply unpleasant people”, comparing Rowling to historic figures including Richard Wagner and Pablo Picasso.

It also referenced Rowling in relation to individuals who have participated in “harming minorities”.

In a statement, The Day has now apologised to Rowling after she hired libel lawyers.

“We accept that our article implied that what JK Rowling had tweeted was objectionable and that she had attacked and harmed trans people,” the statement reads. “The article was critical of JK Rowling personally and suggested that our readers should boycott her work and shame her into changing her behaviour. Our intention was to provoke debate on a complex topic.

“We did not intend to suggest that JK Rowling was transphobic or that she should be boycotted. We accept that our comparisons of JK Rowling to people such as Picasso, who celebrated sexual violence, and Wagner, who was praised by the Nazis for his antisemitic and racist views, were clumsy, offensive and wrong.

“Debate about a complex issue where there is a range of legitimate views should have been handled with much more sensitivity and more obvious recognition of the difference between fact and opinion. We unreservedly apologise to JK Rowling for the offence caused, are happy to retract these false allegations and to set the record straight. We shall be making a financial contribution to a charity of JK Rowling’s choice.”

Earlier this month, Rowling was among 150 public figures to sign an open letter condemning “cancel culture” and calling for “the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences”.