Friday Hodgepodge

The Miss Parade

Or: Four things I encountered that I decided not to turn into their own blog posts for one reason or another. As an exercise, I am going to offer some thoughts and briefly state why for each one.

1. Headline: "Democrats' Crisis: White, Woke Elites Have Alienated Everyone." Sample:

Just ahead of posting, I realized my image selection was an indirect and unintentioanl pun. (Parade of ... misses. Cue the groans.) Really, I just liked it...(Image by Brett Jordan, via Unsplash, license.)

First, Democrats are fighting a widespread feeling of exhaustion among Americans. Not merely with COVID, but with the political and cultural warfare of the past decade. Those conflicts predated Donald Trump. From the left, there has been a concerted effort to make everything political, from media and education to workplaces, sports, and even language.

Backlash against this effort helped elect Donald Trump in 2016, just as desire for a break from this conflict hurt Donald Trump in 2020. Some voters thought if they just took away the target of the left's aggression, the fighting would end. [Hint: Trump isn't and never was the real target. -- ed] But the culture wars didn't end. They got worse.

And here lies the true "feeling" Democrats are fighting against -- the second big problem for the Democrats. Americans of all stripes increasingly blame a specific demographic for the divisions in American society: college-educated, liberal "woke" whites. This is the cultural clique of elite liberal arts college graduates that takes pride in showing how little they care about the practical challenges facing everyday Americans. And unfortunately for Democrats, Americans correctly associate this group with the Democratic Party.

The headline is true. The piece makes some good points and some bad points -- and opens many cans of worms along the way. I would guess that the author has a good intuitive sense of the political moods of Americans in general, but is not philosophically inclined.

This is very thought-provoking, and I may come back to it later, even if only to think about it. But it's too much for the kind of short blog post I had been aiming for that day.

2. Headline. "Update: My Coworker Keeps Joking That I'm Having Sex With My Husband in the Office." Sample:

I know that a lot of commenters were concerned that she wasn't really my friend and that I couldn't see that she was trying to bully me or bring me down professionally, I hope that this update has put that fear to rest! She really is a nice person, I think she was falling back on the one thing she knew about me (my marriage) to try to bond and she just missed the mark.

It was interesting to see two of the strands of advice. The first, which might have been labeled common sense a decade or so ago, is what the letter-writer ended up doing, with excellent results. The other strand was to go straight to someone over the person's head. The former strikes me as more benevolent and the latter as being too quick to assume the worst of other people.

The latter could reflect youthful inexperience, leftish cultural trends or both. It smacks to me of being a sign of the times, but I don't have enough to go on and didn't have the time or inclination to go into it when I saw the post at Ask a Manager.

3. Headline: "Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?" Sample (from a commenter answering):

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous.

This discussion topic from a tech forum was too niche, the views on humanity on display in the back-and-forth too all-over-the-place, and the misconceptions about business and capitalism too many to cram into my mind all at once, let alone turn into a blog post.

For what it's worth, the question at hand boils down to Do you ever come up with a cool hack that you decide not to share with people who might appreciate it? My answer is sometimes and my obvious and unsatisfying reason is, it depends on what doing so would accomplish. There can be good and bad reasons to do something or not. Who is John Galt?

4. Headline: "Florida Gov. DeSantis Proposes Plan to Fight Rising Seas Without Any 'Left-Wing Stuff'." Sample:

As his news conference, the governor avoided terms like sea-level rise or climate change. Despite a strong scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that it's due largely to emissions from industry, power plants, agriculture and vehicles, many Republicans consider it to be either a hoax or a minor problem that's been exaggerated for political purposes.

The excerpt should show that what interested me about the piece wasn't so much DeSantis -- who looks more and more like an organized Trump who won't piss too many people off and so could really set back the cause of liberty every day.

What interested me was seeing in mainstream media a concession that some people who don't swallow climate hysteria hook, line, and sinker might not be Evil! Climate! Deniers! after all.

Are the likes of Michael Shellenberger, Bjorn Lomborg, and Alex Epstein finally making cultural inroads?

One speculative datum from one story is too little to go on, but one can hope...

-- CAV