Category Archives: Social Commentary

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Home Schooling Is Not For Everyone

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…and neither is public schooling:

…unlike those who wish to suppress homeschooling, homeschool parents are rarely if ever heard demanding that the government pass a law demanding that every other family in the country do things the way they do. Unlike our German friends, homeschool parents do not wish to seize custody of other people’s children simply because they prefer a different model of education. The irony here is that more than a few of our public schools are so dangerous and dysfunctional that sending one’s children there really ought to be considered an act of neglect, if not for the fact that those poor parents have practically no choice in the matter.

It’s not about education. It’s about control.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

A Mayor Against Illegal Guns

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…is arrested for a gun crime:

Schiliro had had police bring 20-year-old Nicholas Dorsam to his home to drink wine, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. When Dorman attempted to leave, Schiliro prevented him from doing so, shooting the gun into a stack of papers and threatened to kill himself. Schiliro later credited Dorsam with helping save his life.

It’s almost as though these anti-gun nuts who want to take away our guns are projecting on us their own lack of control and irresponsibility.

Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Sneering Anti-Technologists

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Lileks is unimpressed:

Honestly: would you rather they hadn’t invented clothes-washing machines? Radio? Would you rather that one member of a household spend their entire day over a washtub with nothing but the sound from the street through the screen window for company?

It’s comforting for some, apparently, to think that people in the past just stared slack-jawed at flickering images and rose like zombies when the Consumption Instructions were finished, and spent their life in agitated dissatisfaction until the useless, needless object was acquired and installed. I’d like to know if these people have microwave ovens.

I’m thinking they write their ignorant snark on computers that they don’t really need.

Economics, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Millennials

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Is this the year they finally get fed up with big government?

These ads depict millennials as emotional, instinctive animals acting on appetites, impulses, and desires rather than moral and intellectual beings capable of acting according to reason and prudence. The liberal poster child is a product of the state, dependent on cradle-to-grave government support, to which free birth control is a higher end than a well-paying job or — heaven forbid — starting a family.

For many millennials, the scales have fallen. They realize that the future of Obamacare depends on their signing up to pay higher insurance premiums and deductibles. In the era of iPhones and PS4s, they realize that a government that can’t design a website can’t be expected to manage the intricacies of the entire health-care industry. In the wake of the news that the NSA collects mountains of metadata, they also fret that the government that wants you to talk about health care could (with a warrant) listen in on that very conversation.

Given the bleak reality for many millennials today, it’s obvious that the Democratic party can’t talk straight to them. Instead, it manufactures witty, tongue-in-cheek social-media campaigns and faux controversies like the “war on women.” (As with most faux liberal controversies, the data seem to suggest the opposite — in 2009 women became a majority of the work force for the first time ever, while 2013 saw women under 30 earn a higher median income than their male counterparts did.)

These tricks worked in 2008; they worked again, albeit to a far lesser degree, in 2012; but in 2014, it appears the magic has finally worn off. Many millennials see through the catchy rhetoric to the empty promises.

Let’s hope. As I’ve said in the past, I’d like to see a poll that asks if people would be more, or less likely to vote Republican if they promised to repeal and replace Barack Obama next year.

[Update a while later]

ObamaCare flops with the young.

Well, big surprise. What’s in it for them?