Thursday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Thursday, July 25, 2024
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92 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a retired Professor of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The headline of the day- 9 injured, hundreds evacuated in JFK airport escalator fire
The Florida headline of the day- Kamala Harris won’t save Democrats, DeSantis says, predicting Trump victory for president
I had a long series of semi-lucid dreams. One involved imagining the presidential primaries were held all in one day, complete with early voting and mail in voting, with all results announced within a day or two; like the general election.
The person I was talking to, said then there may not be a single candidate with the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination.
I agreed enthusiastically, adding people would be more likely to vote for their preferred candidate. And the conventions would then be about consensus.
I can see lots of reasons why this would never be possible. And also it’s so simple, it must have been suggested before.
Another dream yesterday was about how parallel universes form, and how the Olympian gods I led* were using this knowledge to reverse entropy once all life in the universe ended.
Yet another dealt with training the kids from Prodigy to undertake a dangerous and vital rescue mission.
I had something against Dal.
At one point the simulated results of the mission were that 99.2% of prisoners would be rescued, but the whole Prodigy team would perish. Gwynn argued this would be an acceptable outcome.
*Yeah, right. I was also immortal in that dream, not to mention impossibly smart.
Corker of a find: shipwreck in Baltic brims with crates of champagne
Some (most?) champagnes age well but this is a bit extreme.
Discovery of poliovirus in Gaza ‘incredibly alarming’, Unicef executive director says
As if they didn’t have enough problems right now.
Another insight into the freak show that is the GOP:
Probably not the sort of calculations that the Framers hoped the occupants of those two offices would be making.
Also, the Heritage Foundation thinks you’re having too much fun with sex.
@Kathy:
I once dreamt I was talking to someone on the phone, and the person began taunting me about my supposed lack of awareness that I was dreaming (they asked me something along the lines of “How did you get here?”, mimicking a scene from Inception). Indignantly I told the person, “Look, I know I’m dreaming….”
You know what the funny thing is? This was not a lucid dream AT ALL. Despite the fact that I said I knew I was dreaming, I did not, in fact, know I was dreaming.
This is for Mimai: Recently you posted that you were getting real benefits from using generative AI and I was hoping you could share more detail. I’ve seen real benefits from machine learning over the years (better heart arrythmia detection, combining readings from multiple sensors to yield analysis you can’t get by reading each sensor individually, and of course things like google search results) but every interaction I’ve had with something that springs from this latest burst of generative AI has ranged from poor to abysmal to actively harmful. So I’m really curious how you are using it that is yielding positive results.
@Kylopod:
With me, I know I’m dreaming, but can’t direct what happens in the dream. I can think what to say, suggest topics of discussion.
If I think I say something clever or come up with an interesting idea, I will remind myself to remember it when I wake up. I usually will remember, but if I don’t write some of it down or think more about it, details become fuzzy.
@Kingdaddy: Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like a winning campaign strategy – particularly with young people.
@Kingdaddy:
That mortality waiting was the one thing that bothered me about that piece. Vance does not need Trump to die, he just needs him to become prohibitively cognitively impaired – at the rate Trump is declining pretty much a certainty well before 2028.
BTW, I linked to that piece early on in Wednesday’s forum.
@Kingdaddy: @Tony W: How are the old folks in The Villages going to react?
@Kingdaddy:
The Heritage’s premise is bullshit by the way. Even our closest ape relatives, bonobos, spend an enormous amount of time on non-procreative sex, for example to form friendships or alliances, smooth things over after fights etc. Scientists who study them say they are pretty much all bisexual, every last one.
@Tony W: Of the things that gets me about such approaches is that even fairly traditional married couples want to determine (dare I say control) when they conceive or not.
Also: this is not my idea of “limited government” nor of “freedom.”
@Kingdaddy: Does somebody know if the anti-birth-control stuff is actually in the project 2025 doc? I only know of the ban on porn. I’m not even sure who that is quoting or what their standing is.
(Also, people have been having sex for something other than procreation for a really long time now. Animals, too. Roughly since the time sex first evolved as something that felt good, I imagine.)
@Steven L. Taylor: You’re just not getting it, Dr Taylor. If the traditional married couple doesn’t want a child, then they should not be touching each other’s fiddly bits, duh.
/s
@Kathy:
I have some level of control. I can walk through walls and fly. I haven’t had much success changing my environment at will, though. I usually like to just stand back and observe the environment, with the knowledge that it’s all in my head. But it starts to feel like a VR simulation without much plot. Indeed, if there was some kind of a plot to the dream, it typically just evaporates right there, and the rest of the dream is simply me walking around the dream environment.
I also can pretty much wake myself up at will. This was something I figured out how to do as a kid. I developed a technique where, if I realized I was dreaming, I would create a mental picture of myself lying in bed, and attempt to move that. It took me years to perfect; now I can do it almost instantaneously (or at least it feels that way).
A lot of the time though, I’m only partially aware I’m dreaming. In a lot of my dreams, I have at least some vague sense that it’s not real. Sometimes I think I’m watching a movie, or that I’m daydreaming, and only gradually does it occur to me that I’m asleep and dreaming.
And even if I “know” I’m dreaming, that doesn’t mean I’m in a rational state of mind; I can still continue to have absurd perceptions such as the idea that I’m communicating with actual people despite “knowing” I’m in a dream. And even when I have a vague sense that it’s a dream, I have a hard time escaping the belief that the plot I’m ensconced in matters; only after I wake up do I realize it was pretty nonsensical.
That’s why I’ve long felt the term “lucid dreaming” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s like saying “sober drunkenness.” Knowing you’re drunk doesn’t mean you aren’t about to crash the car you’re driving into a tree.
I’m curious what you meant when you described the dream above as “semi-lucid.”
The Heritage premise is, basically, what the legal people call “assumed fact not in evidence.”
@charontwo:
The 25th amendment has been invoked by the sitting president a few times. As I recall Bush the younger used it to leave Chenney in charge when he had surgery. It was more of a heads up to Congress, and saying he’d be back in charge soon.
When the cabinet or Congress attempts to use it to remove a president, in particular the Convicted Felon, it will wind up in court, and fare about as well as the 14th amendment did.
@Kingdaddy: Conservatives are welcome to lead the way by banning non-procreative sex as a condition of participating in the movement. That will end up being a very small movement.
@Franklin: Starting on page 483, there are a lot of policies (“ Restore Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate (also a CMS rule),” “ Expand inclusion of fertility awareness–based methods and supplies to family planning in the women’s preventive services mandate,” and more) that take aim at both the availability and desirability of contraception.
@Kingdaddy:..Conservatives have to lead the way in restoring sex to it’s true purpose & ending recreational sex…
That Heritage Foundation “directive” is dated May 27, 2023. So I guess conservative pud wacker Lauren Boebert had not read it several months later when she went to see a children’s production of Beetlejuice in a Colorado theatre.
Just for review here is an account of the mature behavior of Republican United States Representative Lauren Boebert.
Attention all avid readers: Melania Trump will be releasing her memoir, imaginatively titled Melania, this fall from Skyhorse Press.
Special collectors editions will be available for the low, low price of $150. I can’t wait.
@Kylopod:
All I’ve read on lucid dreams say one can direct how the dream goes. Since I can’t, but am aware and remember things rather well later, I call it semi-lucid.
BTW, parallel universes don’t form when one makes a choice. Rather, at moments of indecision, all quantum possibility paths related to the possible outcomes come into virtual existence. The longer the indecision lasts, the more likely one of these virtual paths will coalesce unto itself and become actual rather than virtual, but this is still very rare.
When a choice is finally made, the virtual paths collapse unto the actual path where the indecision existed.
This is technobabble, but self consistent.
Now, it turns Olympian gods can enter the virtual paths using very advanced technology. So could mortals, but the downside is the transfer is fatal. The gods can resurrect while the mortals can’t. So only the Olympians move from universe to the universe.
Reversing entropy involved finding a primordial atom, a big bang unexploded, that can arise in parallel universes whose different natural laws allow this. Then they stash them in stasis in a parallel universe that’s largely empty. When our universe dies by heat death, big rip, or whatever, the Olympians intend to detonate a new universe in its place.
It made more sense when I was sleep, but it was entertaining.
I did wonder how this plan would be kept going for trillions of years.
@Kathy:
You are assuming he craters less than I expect. I think it will get pretty obviously ridiculous for him to continue. You also are predicting Scotus – never safe to do. Maybe they have no problem with Vance.
@Steven L. Taylor:
George Lakoff addressed this by observing that for conservatives, freedom means being able to do their duty as they see it. And part of their duty, as they see it, is making you do your duty, as they see it.
Very often words don’t mean the same thing to conservatives as they do to liberals and Webster, starting with “conservative”. Of current interest is “law and order”. For conservatives it has never meant the rule of law, it has always meant what Wilhoit said. And that is what SCOTUS ruled in the immunity case. When Republicans say “law and order” they mean keeping them DEI’s in line.
Open letter to the Heritage Foundation:
I lived with a woman for 16 years. We never did get married. We never wanted children. I got a vasectomy.
ALL of our sex was recreational!
SEE YOU IN HELL!
GLB
@charontwo:
I think as long as he can stitch two words together, he won’t go quietly. BTW, we’ve been expecting him to crater for going on nine years now.
Also, perhaps the cabinet won’t want to remove the Convicted Felon, even if h can’t stitch two words together. They may not like Vance, or fear he might not like them.
Hopefully, Harris wins the election and we leave this whole thing in the realm of speculation.
@CSK:
I’m reminded of an old joke when Nancy Reagan published her memoir, entitled “My Turn.”
The joke was Ronnie would publish his, and call it “Her Turn.”
@Kathy:
I feel like I’ve read that book.
It seems like the agenda of Project 2025 goes beyond the dismantling of “the sexual revolution.” The authors also want to actively promote a particular model of sexuality and relationships. See the section on the Administration For Children And Families (ACF), where it talks about programs like Healthy Marriage And Relationship Education (HMRE) and Healthy Marriage And Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF). For example, the document proposes to “[p]rotect faith-based grant recipients from religious liberty violations and maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of family and marriage. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriages are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability (the average length of same-sex marriages is half that of heterosexual marriages); financial stress or poverty; and poor behavioral, psychological, or educational outcomes.”
Of course, that’s not what the research says. Nor has the existence of same-sex unions had any impact on heterosexual marriages. But I think we all know what they mean by “social science” (maybe a fringe study here or there, combined with disdain for LGBTQ+ people in general).
More news from Texas:
No, it doesn’t have anything to do with non-reproductive sex. I think.
Fredericksburg’s Texas Testicle Festival adds 2 August dates
The US economy is pulling off something historic (CNN Business)
Let’s go Brandon!
Aviation bits.
Video on why new aircraft design take longer now than in the past. This is something I’ve wondered about. TL;DR, safety regulations and certification requirements, new materials, more complex systems, and the development pace of new engines.
Horrible airline crash in Nepal. (contains disturbing video). Right after takeoff, the plane banked and hit the ground. There were two cockpit crew, and airline personnel apparently involved in maintenance. It was a ferry flight. It was also reported to be Saurya Airlines’ only plane (though Wikipedia says they had two). The captain survived somehow.
@Kathy:
From what I understand, lucid dreaming and dream control are two separate things. So if you know you’re dreaming, then it’s a lucid dream, period; even if you feel you have no control over what’s happening in the dream.
The converse also applies: it’s possible to seem to be controlling the dream without knowing it’s a dream. I’ve had dreams where I was flying, walking through walls, etc., even though I did not know I was dreaming. I’ve just had so many lucid dreams throughout my life that the types of things I do in them became habitual so that I started having non-lucid dreams where I was doing the same stuff.
There’s a classic Dick Van Dyke episode where Rob dreams his life turns into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style sci-fi movie in which everyone around him has had their bodies taken over by aliens. He suspects it’s a dream almost from the get-go but has no ability to control what happens or wake himself up. At one point, to determine whether he’s dreaming or not, he calls his wife and asks her to check his bed to see if he’s there.
FWIW, I suspect Buttigieg isn’t seeking the VP slot so much as he’s angling towards getting bought off with another cabinet position or equally significant role. After all, he’s in Biden’s cabinet, which goes away in January. If it’s Harris, she will pick her own cabinet.
@DK: Fake news. Right now the US is in the middle of a depression. Those are actually economists predictions for the new trump revitalization of the US economy which will be the bestest ever.
@MarkedMan: If I were Buttigieg, I’d be seeking a little time off so I could get to know the baby. Maybe get a regular 9-5 job at most.
@Kylopod:
Oony-oops. (sp?)
@Jon:
I’m sure I haven’t.
@Kylopod:
I must have my definitions wrong. I’ve never been able to direct a dream. I’m not usually aware I’m dreaming. Quite the opposite actually, especially in dreams about work that stress me out.
On other things, did anyone notice the finale for season 2 of Prodigy hit the fastest Trek reset button ever?
Minor spoilers: in one scene, Janeway retires. Two scenes later she’s back in Starfleet.
BTW, there were a great many references to season 1 of Picard, too. The Mars tragedy, the Romulan evacuation, the uniforms shown at the end.
@MarkedMan:
RE LLM practical uses: computer programming. They’re getting really good at writing boring, boilerplate code. It saves a lot of time.
@Kingdaddy:
Every country that has tried to boost fertility rates has failed. And every wealthy (and some not so wealthy) country has falling fertility rates – rates which (this will not shock you) began to fall before the first gay got married or a trans person invaded the sanctity of an airport bathroom.
The correlation is unmistakable: in successful countries, fertility drops. Every single time. Fertility rates remain high in sub-Saharan Africa and the Islamic world. Make America Libya!
Force millions of women out of the work force, which would crater GDP and per capita income. Genius!
Men who can’t get laid making policy. Here’s a thought: men who make women go, ‘eeewww, yuck,’ should not be allowed to vote.
@Kingdaddy:
The funny thing about the sex thing:
There is a reason prostitution is called the world’s oldest profession. It’s probably not strictly true, but it does show that recreational sex is as old as humans. And given the autoerotic activities of our closest genetic cousins, so is masturbation. But religious conservatives don’t like that either.
Moreover, sex was a common means of politics throughout the history of the ‘Western Civilization’ they claim to be saving from other ideas born in . . . Wait for it . . . Western Civilization.
I suppose that second paragraph is snark. But it doesn’t require squinting to be true. It’s certainly more accurate than the lazy, revisionist, and bawlderized versions of Biblical ethics and history they espouse.
The law regarding Harris taking Biden’s campaign funds is not clear. So she could face election fraud charges in the years to come
Fun times.
A bit of a thought problem, could Kamala Harris taken a portion of the Biden”/Harris” campaign funds for herself if she had chosen to leave the ticket and make an run on her own?
Of course, the law isn’t that unclear. Campaigns can be in one name only. In this case, Biden. The exception is for the NOMINATED candidates for a party’s president and vice president ticket. Ooops.
But take heart, it won’t be resolved until after the election. Harris best make sure she doesn’t make a claim on an accounting record somewhere.
@JKB:
Wrong. Both Biden’s and Harris’ names are on the campaign.
Do you never tire of spreading utter nonsense? You’re like the Energizer Bunny of bullshit.
Netanyahu’s recent speech seems to have generated very little interest from the websites I look at. Maybe no one cares.
@CSK: The delay was attributed to Melania waiting for her ghostwriter to finish reading Michelle Obama’s memoir.
@Michael Reynolds:
The evidence is overwhelming that it is (just) slightly more complicated: educating women causes a decline in the birth rate. It often precedes a country becoming more successful economical, sometimes by a significant amount.
@Tony W:
Or maybe Mel was searching for a ghostwriter who knew how to say “leave the money on the dresser” in seven different languages.
@Kathy: I think the confusion comes from the fact that people who pursue lucid dreaming as a hobby see it as a first step to learning how to control their dreams. Still, they are distinct concepts. And you don’t have to be a hobbyist to have a lucid dream. A lot of people just naturally have them on occasion, even if they’ve never heard the term. And since you’re still in REM sleep with significant parts of your brain shut down, it’s still perfectly possible for your mind to acknowledge the fact that you’re dreaming, while simultaneously thinking thoughts that make no goddamn sense.
@Michael Reynolds:
I’m currently reading Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century (I’m fond of reading splashy, popular books years afterwards). He goes on some length in part one about population growth, and notes the falling fertility rates worldwide, but especially in Europe and Asia.
He also claims there are a lot of factors involved, and that family friendly policies (ie paid parental leave and free or subsidized daycare), do not necessarily affect the fertility rates much.
He does not go, yet, into much detail about immigration. But notes the population increase in the Americas in the 17th through 19yh centuries was driven more by immigration than by births.
@JKB:
Why are you so allergic to links? It’s especially annoying when you directly quote something.
I thought you started to understand my complaints when you put a timestamp on a YT link the other day.
I guess not.
@Kathy:
Wheels up and flaps??? And anyone survived? Wa!
@Mikey:
@JKB appears to be claiming that the only way to have two names is if the entire ticket has already been nominated, and because currently the Dem nominee is presumptive, then they couldn’t legally have two names registered. Of course, we don’t have a link to the interview with Derek Muller, so what’s the context of this? Hell, the one name/two name question isn’t even in the selected quote from the interview.
Is this what you are saying, @JKB?
Also, there is this weird reference to election fraud charge. Not sure how this would qualify as “election fraud”. Yes some campaign finance violations can incur prison time, but no section of the law has been cited as to what the penalties would be in this case.
And another note is that we have a law professor who disingenuously equates falsifying business records (the state criminal
chargesconviction he references) with campaign finance law. So, I would be super-skeptical of the impartiality of a Notre Dame law professor and Federalist Society member who engages in such a false equivalence that a non-lawyer can spot.@Flat Earth Luddite:
There’s a small number of catastrophic crashes with one lone survivor. Some oddity and pure chance.
@JKB:
So. I googled your quote.
I found it here.
Given that the quote misspells Notre Dame Law Professor’s name, and that the transcript linked by Althouse doesn’t format the transcript that way*, and that Althouse includes the part of the quote about [Muller not thinking] there’ll be criminal charges”, it appears that you clipped the quote.
Why? I’ll take “I made a mistake.” That’s fine. We all do. But if you want to admit to laziness or dishonesty, it may be better for your personal growth.
I am charitable toward you. I exhibit that far more than most of the regulars here, and quite frankly far more than you exhibit toward anyone here. So, I will assume it was an innocent oversight.
Do you deserve it? There are fair reasons that others here could use to say you do not. But I’m giving you the chance to show some integrity and honesty.
ETA: One other reason you could give is that another blog cited Althouse and clipped the quote. Fine. But that is yet another reason you should provide links. So you don’t get stuck having to answer for the appearance of dishonesty.
@MarkedMan: Urbanization of society also contributes to declining birth rates. Subsistence agriculture is at least a little better at supporting larger families (of the sort that permit landowners to hire less outside help) than wage labor. And I’m sure that there are other factors (including masturbation, since it’s a topic on the thread).
@Kathy: I think that if economists studied the issue in detail (and maybe they have), they’d find that family-friendly policies don’t shift the economic burden of raising additional children to tip the balance to increased birth rate. If the oligarchs want larger national populations, they’re simply going to have to raise wages significantly, but I don’t think the oligarchs care enough about birthrate to make such a sacrifice.
I have had it up to here with these activist courts.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Once the velour couch was invented, we were doomed as a species…
Michael Reynolds:
@MarkedMan:
Stats indicate there is a basic correlation of wealth, education, and female emancipation with fertility decline.
If you aren’t dirt poor peasants in a society with massive infant mortality, you don’t need to rear massive families to ensure you can work the farm in late middle age, and not starve in old age (assuming you’re lucky enough to get old in the first place).
And an educated, fairly well-off, woman is unlikely to want to endure all the downsides of many births.
OTOH, a lot of wealthy societies recently are showing signs of birth-rates below what polling preferences indicate, because of the problems around young couples obtaining secure, well-paid employment, and a place to live that does not impose crippling costs.
So, memo to natalists:
If you are actually SERIOUS, instead of dreaming silly dreams about reversing female emancipation etc, what about sensible, practical, policies like
– a living wage
– employment rights
– house building
– higher education minus crippling debt
– child care provision
– economic stability
etc
@Kathy:
On immigration, its been noted (though damme if I can recall the source) that immigrants from “poor peasant” societies tended to have a very high birth rate in the immediate migrants, quite high in first generation, usually falling to “local normal” by second generation.
A pattern seen again and again, in various countries and various ethnic groups: US, UK, Germany, Austria, Australia, Argentina, Israel.
@Jen:
“Supreme Court rules that judges called “spineless” may in fact still have residual fragments of spines in their carcass.”
@JohnSF: You make good points. And though the link to women’s education has been known for decades, no one really understands the causal mechanisms
@JohnSF:
You sound like Stalin. Don’t you know communists/socialists killed hundreds of millions of people?
Keep your red commie hands off our income inequality. We like freedom over here.
/s
@JohnSF: It’s one of the reasons that it can be legitimately said that the small positive birth rate in the US is entirely due to immigration. Not just by the immigrants but also that they have significantly larger families, and their children have somewhat larger families.
@Kathy: Speaking of splashy, popular books, in Slouching Towards Utopia Brad DeLong notes that,
@Kurtz:
“The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party”
So there. 😉
It’s always been a puzzle to European democratic socialists that some American right types are unable to figure out why said socialists, social-democrats, Christian-socials etc loathe both fascists and bolsheviks.
Whereas democratic conservatives or liberals (in the European sense) may be opponents, but not enemies.
@Kurtz:
I guess communism is still a threat if you define “communism” broadly enough. After all, they claim CRT is being taught in grade schools by calling any implication of race “CRT”.
@gVOR10:
They consider all Critical Theory Marxist. For them Marxism=Marxism-Leninism=Stalinism. Many consider Socialism Communism. And many consider Nazism as Leftist because it has the word Socialist in it.
They never answer why that logic also must mean that North Korea is a Democratic Republic, because it has “Democratic” and “Republic” in the official name.
Russia seems to be getting careless, and probably “accidentally on purpose”:
Romanian/NATO air defence engaging Russian drones.
Russia is doing a lot of “pushing the envelope” in Europe lately.
See eg assassination plot re Armin Papperger, etc etc etc.
Poking the Germans may be seen as safe in Moscow; but trying that sort of thing against the Poles or the French, and causing serious harms, is liable to evoke a response.
@JohnSF:
Oh, many on the American Right love to quote Orwell when they attack socialism. When one quotes Orwell’s famous essay from In These Times, they either run away or think somehow Orwell was mistaken or think that post-Cold War Socialism is different in some way, I guess.
I doubt any of them stop quoting it anyway.
@JKB:
@Kurtz:
This is an actual area of risk, and one that I flagged last week as a potential reason that Biden had not yet stepped down. I noted that they might be waiting until the *ticket* is nominated.
The assertion that funds are raised “in one name only” is incorrect in this situation, as the ticket is incumbent.
The issue is how the FEC delineates funding cycles. There are two cycles, the primary and the general. The question is, when you send Joe Biden and Kamala Harris a check for $2,000, are you contributing to their primary, or their general election fund?
It’s easier to grasp the distinction in fundraising if you take as an example a challenger. The primary funds are those raised before the nominating convention, and the general funds are those raised after–when the full ticket is on the ballot. So, in 2020: a check to Joe Biden in May went to Joe Biden, and post-convention, the check went to Biden-Harris.
My guess/hunch is that because Biden-Harris are the incumbent ticket, Biden’s stepping down functions just like a death/25th amendment would: the VP assumes the head of ticket and the money flows appropriately. I further assume that they had really, really smart election law attorneys looking at this and came to a similar conclusion.
@Kurtz:
They really need to read some political history of Europe 1845-1945.
Family anecdotage time:
One grandfather was a Labour/Union activist back in the 1920’s/30’s
Recounted the tale of a senior officials private response to Lenin’s statement that British communists should support (Labour General Secretary) Arthur Henderson “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”.
And guess what?
They did. 🙂
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
It does seem a bit like offering free street parking so more people will buy cars.
@JohnSF:
Historically, agricultural societies featured large families, because that was the farmer’s labor force. IF the pattern holds to modern farmers in low income countries, then the first arrivals might carry on having large families out of nothing more mysterious than custom.
@JohnSF:
Surely, that must just be a Lefty Left uni Bobo lie. Why just in this very thread, someone was noting that GDP growth is at a high not seen for decades. There can’t possibly be people having difficulty obtaining secure, well-paid employment in an economy growing that strongly. 🙁
@Kurtz: Particularly those of us who are at the top of the “freedom” ladder.
@Tony W: Touche’
You have to ask?
😉 😉 😉
@Kurtz: Crritical theories tend to be deconstructive, in the broad sense of the term. Conservatives tend to see deconstruction as focused on deconstructing “our” way of life. No surprises there.
@JohnSF:
Sure, they should. Full disclosure: I also have not read enough. Unfortunately, over here across the pond, we have a bunch of small publishers and imprints of the Big 5 that churn out a lot of shitty history as a corrective to the Lefty academics who distort history because they are all commies.
Hell, the Rush Limbaugh wrote a bunch of American myth as history books for kids. Couched as fiction, because a substitute teacher named Rush Revere (yeah, nothing weird and narcissistic about that) takes two students back in time to teach them about Colonial America and the Revolution.
Now that I think about you all produced one too, Niall Ferguson. I’m sure there are others, but ya know. Some of his popular work is probably better than what a lot of his American counterparts produce, but still.
On the subject of immigrants and children, I suspect my own families are somewhat typical.
My paternal GF came over from Slovenia in 1900, GM in 1904. Both Catholic, 10 children. Twins died age 5. Julia the eldest had 2 children, Gus had 2, Joe never came back from WW II, Walt made it back, had 1, Tony (and his wife Betty) adopted 1, Dorothy and Bernie had none, and my old man made it back and had 7 (1 died soon after birth) I grew up with the repeated question of, “Your Catholic, aren’t you?”
On Ma’s side, good well bred Protestant Scots/English family going back I don’t know how many US generations. 2 kids: Uncle Alec (my WW II hero frogman in the Pacific*) made it back and had 4 sons in 3 marriages (got it right with my S Baptist Aunt Jeane, a Texas Belle with a heart of gold) and my mother (who Grams threatened to disown if she married my Papist father. Wrong move Grams.)
* I say this every time because I know it would embarrass him to no end, but he did get written up in a book for his exploits at Saipan. (all of 1 short paragraph, maybe 5 or 6 sentences)
@Jen: Thanks for that. It wouldn’t be a niggle in JKB’s ear if there wasn’t some little kernel of something in there, most likely blown out of proportion, but it seems like the “before” and “after” nomination at the actual convention was the questionable part. Incumbency might solve that.
@Kurtz:
Actually, some of Ferguson’s earlier work (before he got delusions of political grandeur) is quite interesting (though you need to watch for the non sequiturs)
But I disagree with his basic argument (which is where all his spiral of silliness stems from, imuho):
That Britain could have lived with an ascendant Second Reich, and that said Reich was in the long run compatible with “liberal” (in a very broad sense) European values.
It doesn’t take much examination of post-1870’s German ideology to sniff the rot (see eg Wagner, for all his genius in some respects)
Which is why many British conservatives in the 1900’s looked at Imperial Germany and concluded : “Fuck that shit.”
Not that British conservatism of that period was overly pleasant (the UK was closer than many have subsequently liked to acknowledge to civil war in 1900 -14) but German imperialism was a long way down the road to national socialist ideology re ethnic hierarchies and militaristic, absolutist, statism.
Which perspective Ferguson is entirely unable to figure out.
There’s a shortcut to doing so: visit almost any of the country houses of the English aristocracy, and look at the family trees.
In almost every case you will see a very large number of dead for the years 1914-18.
Often whole lines wiped out.
They did NOT sacrifice on that scale for shits and giggles.
@JohnSF:
Can you expand on this? And/or recommend a decent source. I find this fascinating.
About Ferguson: that is what I have read about his work. Well, among a few other things. But he is less interesting than the subject of my question.
Getting late here, and bedtime.
Gonna have to get back to you.
But its a really interesting thing in UK history, relating to both Irish crisis and the Lloyd George Liberal welfare and land tax budgets.
Tomorrow?
How do you say
“Chicken Shit”“Bull Crap”Salami, Pastrami, Baloney!(I’m trying to avoid being gigged by the OTB monitors.)
@JohnSF:
Hey, man. You would be doing me a favor.
Whenever is convenient for you.
I don’t sleep much. Hoping that Presidential dementia is still in vogue when it hits me.
@DK:
This would be much better news if US voters were affected by, like, facts.
@Kurtz:
If you’re still interested, I’m going to post my (rather long winded) reply in the Friday forum.