Watching America’s Crack-Up - "When you have lived long enough in a foreign country, you eventually begin to realize that the one you left behind, once accepted as utterly unique since it was all you knew, is not particularly different from anywhere else. One can call this perspective, but it is more a recognition of the essential contingency of any nation. This is especially true when observing a country like the United States, which raises its children to believe that it is exceptional and, being exceptional, also immortal. Indeed, living in a country like Israel, which must be ever-vigilant about existential danger, I am struck by America’s extraordinary sense of invulnerability... American history moves in cycles, and every few decades it is gripped by some kind of moral panic, during which rationality goes out the window. As the philosopher John Gray has written, our current moment owes as much to Salem as it does to Marx. It’s a Burned-Over District out there. This is, in other words, an indigenous problem: America is a democracy and, as such, must often submit to the whims of the crowd. But crowds are often either stupid or mad, and so we have a new McCarthyism in the form of cancel culture and a new Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the form of QAnon. In America’s past, reason and reality have eventually reasserted themselves against the madness of crowds, be they the Weathermen or the Satanic abuse panic. At the moment, however, with both sides hermetically sealed in their cultural, ideological, and political bubbles, this seems all but impossible... The desire to destroy the Deep State, on the other hand, has a certain irony and even humor to it, because for most of the last half-century, it has been the Left that entertained fantasies about overthrowing what they preferred to call the “military-industrial complex.”"
As if Qanon is as powerful or widespread as Blueanon
Life as a White Student in a 99% Black School in Segregated America - YouTube - "Mykenzie is one of the few white students at Orangeburg-Wilkinson. Her mum Linda recently sent her to the school to try to combat ethnic segregation in the town, and Linda launches an initiative to try to help racial integration in Orangeburg."
GUNTER, MYKENZIE JADE - Domestic Violence 3rd Degree - Assault On A PO While Resisting
GUNTER MYKENZIE JADE 01/29/2021 - Horry County Mugshots Zone - "Ordinance / Public Intoxication / Impairment (M)
Drugs/traf Meth. Or Coc Base -28g Or More, 1st (F)"
iamyesyouareno on X - "Her parents should be in jail for sending her to that school. She’s literally missing a part of her head now."
The Paris Review - Evliya Çelebi’ Is One of History’s Great Storytellers - "Affecting though his honesty could be, arguably the most compelling parts of his account of European Christendom are those he made up. He claims, for instance, to have accompanied a horde of forty thousand Tatar warriors on a raid of Germany and the Low Countries: a three-week whirlwind of looting, pillaging, enslaving, and razing. It’s written as a scene of Biblical destruction, but it clearly never happened. Not only was the scale of and speed of the Tatar advance implausible, but Evliya’s geography was wildly inaccurate, and he claimed to have encountered things as fantastical as those Lemuel Gulliver found in Lilliput: freakish avian creatures newly imported from America; giant multi-colored wax plants growing out of the ground; a strange yellow tree whose leaves miraculously cure syphilis. In the Seyahatname, pages can whistle by without an honest word in sight, though Evliya emphasizes that he is upholding the will of Allah. Typically, “Evliya the unhypocritical” reminds us of his pious commitment to scrupulousness just before he launches into an obvious lie about, say, an encounter with a woman from the Black Sea who gave birth to an elephant, the rhinoceros-riding tribes of the Sudan, or the man-eating Buddhists of Kalmyia. “God is my witness that this took place,” he says before one such tale—cast-iron evidence that it didn’t. Historians debate whether these fairy-tale inventions are intended as satirical barbs at the hyperbolic travel writers or an homage to the fantastical stories of Arabian Nights on which Evliya had grown up. Likely, it was both. But it’s also pretty clear that every now and then he simply got bored with faithfully recording reality and decided to amuse himself by splicing the mundane with the phantasmagorical. The fun for the reader comes in trying to spot the moment when empirical truth ends and one of Evliya’s campfire yarns begins."
Alexander Jabbari on X - "The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi's story about eating honey in a Circassian village is the most insane thing you'll read today"
Meme - "From the writings of Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi. Note that Circassia is in the region of modern Sakartvelo and Caucasian Russia.
God is my witness that this took place. One day we were guests in a certain village and the Circassian who was our host wished to do a good deed. He went outside where he tarried a while. When he returned he brought a dinner-spread made of elk skin, also a wooden trough - like a small vault or portico (latif ravak gibi) - of honey and other troughs with cheese and pasta. "Eat, O guests, may it be permitted, for health of my father soul," he said. We were starving, as though we had just been released from Ma'noglu's prison, and we laid into the honey so fast that our eyes could not keep up with our hands. But the honey was full of strange hairs which we kept pulling out of our mouths and placing on the spread. "Eat," said the Cireassian, "this my father honey." Our hunger having abated, we continued to eat the honey at a slower pace, separating out the hairs. Meanwhile Ali Can Bey, a native of Taman in the Crimea, came in. "What are you eating, Evliya Efendi?" he said. "Join us," I replied. "It's a kind of hairy honey. I wonder if it was stored in goatskin or a sheepskin." Ali Can, who knew Circassian, asked our host where the honey came from. The Circassian broke out weeping. "I took it from my father grave," he said. I understood the words, but didn't quite grasp the import. Ali Can explained: "Last month his father died and he placed the corpse in a box on a branch of the big tree in the courtyard outside. Honeybees colonized the area around the groin and penis. Now, as a special favor, he has offered you honey with his father's pubic hairs. These are the hairs you have been separating out while eating the honey." Ali Can said this and went out. I followed him, with my gorge rising and my liver fairly bursting. "What kind of trick has this pimp of an infidel played on us?" I cried. Then what should see? Our Circassian host also came out, climbed up the tree where his father was and refastened the lid of the coffin box, all the while weeping and eating the horrible honey. When he descended from the tree, he said: "Hadji! When want honey bring you much strange and disturbing much father soul honey lust say prayer." This was certainly a strange and disturbing event"
Thread by @Culture_Crit on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Why did America destroy its own cities? A thread... 🧵 When you think of American cities you think of places built for maximum efficiency and commerce - not necessarily for beauty and harmony. This photo often does the rounds... But in the early days, Americans prioritized great architecture for the very purpose of inspiring citizens. As Sir Christopher Wren once said, great public buildings are "the ornament of a country" - a way to establish a nation. It wasn't only public buildings. Take the Erie County Savings Bank in Buffalo (since demolished in an attempt at "urban renewal"): But then, something happened. The postwar years saw a brutalist style emerge - architectural elitists scoffed at traditional designs and replaced them with the avant-garde. The public pushed back. The “Design Excellence Program” was established in 1994 to ensure higher quality public buildings. But the results weren't great: San Francisco's Federal Building is so bizarre that it almost defies analysis... As modernism became postmodernism, buildings became the manifestations of selfish artistic vision - monuments to individual egos instead of monuments to America. But something eroded American beauty more than this misguided artistry: efficiency. The US once had dense, more European-style cities, and workers commuted via public streetcars. These were soon to be sacrificed for the great highways... This was how the 1939 New York World's Fair envisioned cities of the near future, in an exhibit sponsored by the General Motors Corporation... Amidst a frenzy of industrialization in the 1940s, the US launched a decades-long project of freeway construction. Huge swathes of existing cities were demolished in the process, like in Kansas City: Entire communities were displaced and once-thriving districts wiped out: so much so that this became known as the "Kansas City blitz." Ironically, this breakneck pursuit of efficiency sacrificed what would today be some of the city's most profitable real estate. Those downtown buildings would be worth around $655 million today. This happened all across America. This is Cincinnati, where 25,000 people were displaced to build an interstate and surrounding parking lots. And this was the site of the new I-35W which gutted Minneapolis. It was decided in the 1950s that new highways must "go right through cities and not around them." 521,000 people lived in Minneapolis in 1950. The interstate hastened a major shift out to the suburbs, cratering the population - and it never caught back up again (425,000 today). The dream of European-style cities in America was all but eradicated. Suburban sprawl meant cities lost significant chunks of their tax bases, and inner cities fell into spirals of decline. One more: Hastings Street in Detroit, before and after: There are some modern-day efforts to reprioritize how inner cities are built in America. Boston pushed its highway underground in 2003, albeit at very significant cost. But some places are retaliating in cheaper ways: Lancaster, CA transformed its main street into a tree-lined boulevard. It took 8 months and cost $11.5m - generating around $273m in economic output since 2010. Perhaps that old vision of the American city is still possible. If we design streets around people, and demand more beauty of the public realm, we might be surprised at the result - economic and otherwise..."
This was a brilliant thread. Now supporting walkable cities will be white supremacy
Meme - LiorLefineder @lefineder: "Tax revenue in Roman provinces minus defense spending on the legions. The Western Roman Empire is a net fiscal negative while the East is a positive, Egypt is the most profitable province in the empire."
"Surplus and deficit regions based on population estimates, revenue calculations (10 million sesterces per million people) and military costs (Bullion production has not been included)"
AD 14 (sesterces). Late First Century (sesterces). Mid-Second Century (sesterces)
Danube. Gaul/Germany (Rhine). Britain. North Africa. Asia Minor. Egypt"
Meme - "The Computer Doctors. We make computers work for you. *u in computer as computer mouse with wire/penis dripping liquid*"
Meme - "CITY PARKING LIMITED TO
EVEN # SIDE ON EVEN # MONTHS
ODD # SIDE ON ODD # MONTHS
APR. THRU SEPT.
EVEN # SIDE ON EVEN # DAYS
ODD # SIDE ON ODD # DAYS
OCT. THRU MAR...
ALTERNATE 10AM"
Meme - "IN THIS HOUSE,WE BELIEVE. STAR WARS IS REAL.
DENTISTRY IS PSEUDOSCIENCE
PINEAPPLE ON PIZZA SHOULD BE ILLEGAL
HAND TO HAND coM BAT SHOULD BE TAUGHT IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
TAYLOR SWIFT IS A CIA ASSET
BING ISA SUPERIOR SEARCH ENGINE
BIRDS AREN'T REAL"
Meme - ">year is 1992, Italian military goes to Somalia for some peacekeeping work under the UN
>Same area they used to be active in the African theater of
>When they set up camp, they're approached by an 80 year old Somali, in full Italian kit with a tricolor sash and perfectly maintained rifle
>Soldiers wtf hard and ask him what he's doing
>He's a veteran of an Ascari group that fought for the Italians in
>Insists that he's back to fight for them like in the old days" won't be turned away because he's taken an oath to serve them for life, and intends to keep it
>After consulting the general, they keep him around as sort of a mascot, give him an honorary position as a camp guard and let him raise the flag
>He's very loyal and they all love him except for one awkward problem
>In ceremonies and formal events, no matter how much they always tell him to stop, he always screams, "Viva re, viva duce, viva Italia!""
“viva re, viva duce, viva italia” “Long live the King! Long live the Duce! (Mussolini) Long live Italy!” – @mav-it on Tumblr - "Equipped with an anti-riot helmet of the Carabinieri, with his perfectly oiled and still functioning Moschetto 91, he remained in the Embassy to guard the entire duration of the mission, living in a shack in the embassy yard. Immediately “adopted” by the Italians every morning he showed up for inspection to General Loi, rotating his rifle. In official ceremonies, in the presence of authority, he always chanted perfectly “Long live the Duce, long live the King, long live Italy” despite having been explained that the situation in Italy had changed. For Scirè, however, Italy Fascist and Monarchy still meant order, wellbeing and stability, while in the years after the war he had learned to be wary of terms such as independence, democracy and republic that were synonymous for him because they had brought only anarchy, poverty and war. who was living. After the mission to Somalia ended, with the return of the Italian contingent, he was given the rank of marshal. “Great Italian soldiers, doing the Abyssinians’ asses” used to repeat the most faithful of the ascari."
How Many Children Should You Have? - The Atlantic - "A handful of studies have tried to pinpoint a number of children that maximizes parents’ happiness. One study from the mid-2000s indicated that a second child or a third didn’t make parents happier. “If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child,” the study’s author told Psychology Today. A more recent study, from Europe, found that two was the magic number; having more children didn’t bring parents more joy... Ashley Larsen Gibby, a Ph.D. student in sociology and demography at Penn State, notes that these numbers come with some disclaimers. “While a lot of [the] evidence points to two children being optimal, I would be hesitant to make that claim or generalize it past Western populations,” she wrote to me in an email. “Having the ‘normative’ number of children is likely met with more support both socially and institutionally. Therefore, perhaps two is optimal in places where two is considered the norm. However, if the norm changed, I think the answer to your question would change as well.” The two-child ideal is a major departure from half a century ago: In 1957, only 20 percent of Americans said the ideal family meant two or fewer children, while 71 percent said it meant three or more. The economy seems to have played some role in this shift... “That number plummeted as the cost of rearing children rose and as more women entered the workforce and felt a growing sense of frustration about being reduced to childbearing machines,” he said. The costs of raising children are not just financial. “As a parent who prizes his own mental and physical health,” says Robert Crosnoe, a sociology professor who is also at the University of Texas at Austin, “I had to stop at two, because this new style of intensive parenting that people feel they have to follow these days really wears one out.” (He added: “I am glad, however, that my parents did not think this way, as I am the third of three.”) At the same time, having only one kid means parents miss out on the opportunity to have at least one boy and one girl—an arrangement they have tended to prefer for half a century, if not longer. (Couples are generally more likely to stop having children once they have one of each.) Maybe this is another reason two is such a popular number—though in the long run, one researcher found that having all girls or all boys doesn’t meaningfully affect the happiness of mothers who wanted at least one of each. (This researcher didn’t look at dads’ preferences.)... What happens when there’s a gap between parents’ desires and reality? Per the General Social Survey, in 2018, 40 percent of American women ages 43 to 52 had had fewer children than what they considered ideal. “Part of the story here is that women are having children later in life, compared to much of human history, and they’re getting married later in life as well,” Wilcox says. “So those two things mean that at the end of the day, a fair number of women end up having fewer kids than they would like to, or they end up having no kids when they hoped to have children.” Though the root causes can differ, this mismatch between hope and actuality is seen worldwide, and appears to make women measurably less happy... Perhaps the most meaningful difference isn’t a matter of going from one to two children, or two to three, but from zero to one—from nonparent to parent. “Having just one child [makes] various aspects of adults’ lives—how time, money, emotion, and mind are used and how new social networks are formed—child-centered,” says Kei Nomaguchi, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University. “If you want to enjoy adult-centered life, love expensive leisure activities, cherish intimate relationships with your partner, and both you and your partner want to devote your time to your careers, zero kids would be the ultimate.”... Being a parent tends to be a less positive experience for mothers and people who are young, single, or have young children. And it tends to be more positive for fathers and people who are married or who became parents later in life... ryan Caplan believes that when people think about having children, they tend to dwell on the early years of parenting—the stress and the sleep deprivation—but undervalue what family life will be like when their children are, say, 25 or 50... Parents may decide that a certain number of children is going to maximize their happiness, but what about the happiness of the children themselves? Is there an optimal number of siblings to have? Generally speaking, as much as brothers and sisters bicker, relationships between siblings tend to be positive ones. In fact, there’s evidence that having siblings improves young children’s social skills, and that good relationships between adult siblings in older age are tied to better health. (One study even found a correlation between having siblings and a reduced risk of getting a divorce—the idea being that growing up with siblings might give people social toolkits that they can use later in life.) There is, however, at least one less salutary outcome: The more siblings one has, the less education one is likely to get... In many countries in central and West Africa—such as Senegal, Mali, and Cameroon—the desired family size for many young women is four to six children, says John Casterline, a demographer at Ohio State who has conducted research in the region. This number has stayed relatively high even as people have attained higher average levels of education—a shift that, in Asia and Latin America, for instance, is usually accompanied by a shrinking of the hoped-for size of families."
The effects of physical education on student fitness, achievement, and behavior - "Despite the mounting evidence that physical education (PE) has health and education benefits for elementary-aged children, much less is known on the effectiveness of such programs for older children. To study the effects of PE on adolescents, we analyze the impact of Texas Fitness Now (TFN), a four-year $37 million grant program that mandated daily PE for middle-school students in low-income schools. Using a regression discontinuity approach to exploit the cutoff in school eligibility, we find that daily PE mandates do not lead to overall improvements in student fitness, including cardiovascular endurance, strength, and flexibility. Although we show that the program was ineffective at changing average student body composition, estimates indicate a reduction in the proportion of obese students. Using individual-level school records data, we find that PE does not lead to positive spillover effects in the classroom, including improvements in standardized test scores, or increases in attendance for 6th, 7th and 8th graders. Instead, we provide some evidence to suggest that PE reduces attendance rates and increases disciplinary incidents for middle-school students."
Why P.E. Fails at Solving Problems Such as Obesity - The Atlantic - "“By making kids sit and be quiet and learn rather than allowing them to be physically active, we may actually be holding their test scores down,” Kohl continues. “We may be kidding ourselves by making kids sit in classrooms all the time.” For Kohl, the ideal P.E. program would still be five days a week—but unlike the Texas requirement, it would be more focused on building active recess periods into the day and include opportunities before and after school to, say, ride one’s bicycle or walk to and from school and participate in sports."
The effects of school physical education grants on obesity, fitness, and academic achievement - "Most Texas Fitness Now funds were spent on sports and fitness equipment. Smaller amounts were spent on anti-obesity curricula. Texas Fitness Now improved strength and flexibility, especially among girls, but it did not improve BMI or academic achievement, and it had mixed effects on aerobic capacity. The fitness benefits were not lost in the year after the program ended, perhaps because schools kept the equipment that they had bought during their years of eligibility."
Are Physical Education‐Related State Policies and Schools' Physical Education Requirement Related to Children's Physical Activity and Obesity? - "States' PE requirement was not associated with any outcome. In cycle 1, overall, a 10% increase in the percentage of schools requiring PE was associated with a 28% increase in the number of days having vigorous PA per week. In cycle 2, the association was not significant. However, significant variation in the association by gender in cycle 2 suggests an influence of schools' PE requirement on girls' PA only. No association was found between schools' PE requirement and obesity."
Clutter Can Be Useful - The Atlantic - "A few weeks into coronavirus quarantine, a reader who had cleaned out his home according to the decluttering guru Marie Kondo’s ultra-popular KonMari method emailed me to ask if I had heard from anyone else who was regretting that move. He’d been happy with the results until the country’s circumstances had abruptly changed, and his family ended up reordering some of the same board games and casual diversions they had parted with back when their lives were busier and the boxes were taking up space in a closet. Packing light for a lifetime has its perks, but it’s not a strategy that’s highly adaptable to sudden unemployment or overburdened supply chains... Tossing everything that isn’t just right in the moment is its own kind of privilege, which is why Kim Kardashian’s house looks like a mausoleum, and why the set for the anti-capitalist film Parasite is all sharp edges and sleek wood. The pursuit of domestic perfection should be done only by those who don’t have to worry about what unforeseen wants or needs might lie ahead. Among consumer culture’s most impressive sleights of hand is convincing far too many people that they’re in that group."
Can Conservatism Be Conserved? - "calling the new alliance “conservative” at all is at once intuitive and bizarre. It describes a group who really do want to “conserve” something: all are united in the effort to defend certain liberties which are essential to truly civilized Western life. What could be more conservative than defending and repairing the historically foundational elements of our societal structure? On the other hand, many in this group might strenuously resist, or even reject, the label. Andrew Doyle, Peter Boghossian, Douglas Murray, Candace Owens, Jordan Peterson, Christopher Flannery, Brandon Straka, Julie Bindel, James Damore, Bret Weinstein, Julie Birchill, Blaire White: only some of these people would call themselves conservative—including some on the Right! An inescapably important reason for this is that many members of the new conservative coalition (especially those who don’t identify as conservative) reject the label because they hold views, and practice ways of life, which the historic conservatism of only a generation ago deemed deeply distasteful, even unconscionable... If the new conservative alliance is merely a marriage of convenience, then very well. “At all times the sincere friends of freedom have been rare,” wrote Lord Acton in his 1877 History of Freedom in Antiquity: perhaps what we are seeing now is merely a temporary strike force scraped together out of every willing and remotely able-bodied soldier, assembled only to answer the needs of this one urgent moment. But if so then we must accept that when our present war is over we will have precious little in common. If today’s Great Realignment bespeaks only desperation and not a newfound brotherhood, then ultimately we do not share nearly as much as we think we share—and we will not continue to get along once woke politics is defeated... Some important recent books—notably Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed in 2018 and Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement this year—have argued that the West’s present social trauma is not a perversion of liberal reform but, in one way or another, an unavoidable consequence of it. Is this so? The power of the question lies in our sneaking suspicion that we are avoiding trying to answer it... Back when we were debating whether to decriminalize homosexuality (for example) or when women were demanding the vote, there were those who said that doing so would open the door to a whole host of woes. It will not do to dismiss such people as hysterical alarmists: through their eyes, the present mania for things like transgender children and partial-birth abortion are proof that their fears were exactly correct... More traditionalist conservatives, for their part, might consider what their actual aims are. It has become increasingly clear that the social justice movements of the ’60s and ’70s have spun wildly out of control. But is anyone really willing or able to reverse them entirely?"
crab eating while being cooked - YouTube
Commentary: My career race is in the home stretch, here’s what I know - "The big choice many people face at the outset is whether or not to pursue their vocation. Doing so is a class marker. Few people from poorer families can afford to spend years trying to become, say, a furniture restorer or a novelist. When I canvassed opinions, one woman wrote that career guidance at her state school had “pushed us to pursue what we were ‘passionate’ about, without giving the full picture of the precarity involved with certain careers”. She and others had unwittingly taken high-risk paths: “I signed up for a film degree, genuinely believing that I could viably become a full-time director or producer.” Still, if you do have a vocation (many people don’t) and you can take the financial risk, I’d say pursue it. Otherwise, a career lasts a long time. Many of my peers are now well-off, bored and disappointed. When I covered the City for the FT, I saw young bankers sidestep the vocation-or-security choice by embracing the fiction of “hitting my number”. They told themselves (and everyone else) that once they’d made their pre-assigned sum, before age 40, they would quit and become painters, winemakers et cetera. Eventually, an older banker explained to me that this was a fantasy. He said that with age, marriage and children, people become used to their income, draw identity from it and cannot give it up. They also come to realise that they’d be unlikely to become decent painters or winemakers if they start without any training aged 37. Anyone genuinely serious about those jobs would have a 20-year lead on them. There’s a reassuring simplicity in shaping your life around income maximisation. “Looking after the family” absolves you from worrying about meaning. But I’ve noticed that there is a way around the mortgage trap. The key variable in most people’s financial standard of living isn’t their salary. It’s where they live, along with whether they ever got seriously ill or divorced. Given regional differences in house prices and the rise of remote work, young people today might be smart to take a job with a working-from-home future, then move to a cheap region when possible. A caveat: This strategy could backfire if you ever need to change careers, because the best place to do that is the big city. Something else I’ve seen along the way: So much of career success is knowing how to behave at work. The usual advice is, “Just be yourself.” But this only applies if you’re a member of the dominant demographic in your workplace: A working-class man on a building site, a middle-class woman in a teachers’ staff room, a young white man in a tech start-up. Anyone else needs to learn the dominant group’s codes of dress, humour or eating and put them on like a costume every morning. One day the career will end, probably either sooner or later than you wanted. Don’t kid yourself that your institution cares about individuals. The point of an institution is that it can function without any particular individuals. The end is harshest for people who draw their identity from their job."
