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?

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

Our Prussian School System

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More thoughts from Glenn Reynolds on the public-school disaster, over at the Daily Caller.

[Update a few minutes later]

Related: Meanwhile, back in the Fatherland:

Got that? Let me repeat it just in case. A German judge took children away from their parents because “he family might move to another country and homeschool, posing a ‘concrete endangerment’ to the children.”

In August, 20 armed police, equipped with a battering ram just in case, arrived at the door of this Darmstadt family and forcibly took four children, ages 7 to 14.

Was there anything wrong with the children? Nope. The judge — whose name, by the way, is Marcus Malkmus, in case you have a voodoo doll handy or wish to burn him in effigy — the judge admitted that the children were 1) academically proficient and 2) well adjusted socially.

He just didn’t like homeschooling.

Why? Pay attention now: this takes us deep into the heart of a leftist: because he feared that “the children would grow up in a parallel society without having learned to be integrated or to have a dialogue with those who think differently and facing them in the sense of practicing tolerance.”

The invocation of “tolerance” is especially cute, don’t you think?

As Glenn writes: “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. Gleichschaltung!”

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Going Galt

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America’s already done it:

The implications of this are actually terrifying. What are those nearly 92 million people doing with their time, other than sitting around depressed?. Many, of course, are on some version of welfare. Some are panhandling. We see the homeless on the streets of all our big cities. Others are moving into a shadow economy, much of it illegal (drugs, prostitution), not paying taxes on whatever they earn. It’s truly a sad situation. No wonder so many states are moving toward legalizing grass. Everyone wants to zone out.

This is rapidly approaching a a pre-revolutionary condition, but not for a revolution many of us would want to undergo. To avoid it, a massive change must occur at the federal level. But Barack Obama, mired in a dead ideology, doesn’t seem prepared to do anything but prolong the situation with highly conventional liberal solutions that have failed for decades, maybe even centuries.

And yet there is so much he could do. The most obvious, many of us know, is to unshackle the energy industry. He should dismantle much of the bureaucracy as well. There’s a lot more, of course. But the point now is to realize that when you have nearly 92 million people deserting the labor force in a country of 317 million (many of who are children too young to work), you have a catastrophic problem on your hands.

Even if he’s capable of realizing that, he’s ideologically incapable of changing.

[Update a few minutes later]

Non-Recovery

This is a recovery only in the narrow, technical sense of growth in GDP. But it’s not growing anywhere near fast enough to provide jobs for those who want and need them. It’s the worst economy since the Great Depression, brought on by similar foolish policies.

[Late-morning update]

December probably wasn’t a one-off:

The smiley-face crowd’s next line of defense is that December was a one-off — some are even blaming inclement weather, which is pretty pathetic, given that those who predicted seasonally adjusted job additions of almost 200,000 already knew what the month’s weather was like — and that the generally upward trajectory seen during most of 2013 will resume. There are many reasons to question that optimism.

I think a lot of wishful thinkers are underestimating the destructive effects of uncertainty in health insurance on hiring.