Elsewhere (122)
Franklin Einspruch on government intervention and unintended consequences:
[Tuition fees] go up faster than inflation every year because we have generous Federal loan programmes with low interest rates and low selectivity. Easy loans stimulate demand, and higher demand drives up prices. You may think that the colleges should steel their wills and ignore the fundamental dynamic of the market, but as James Howard Kunstler put it, capitalism is not a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, it’s more like gravity. Let that process continue for decades and you’ll put tuitions through the roof, with wildly different consequences for the rich and the poor. In other words, the state worsens inequality by mitigating the risks of lending. This isn’t academic at all. It is a consequence that will keep repeating itself until we quit causing it.
And Kristian Niemietz on the needy dynamic of political correctness:
A positional good is a good that people acquire to signal where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them… PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
None of which will be news, I think, to regular readers. And hence the theatrical agonies about patriarchal cupcakes, insufficiently considerate spellcheck software, the serving of meals, racist hair, racist grammar, and the unspeakable crushing horror of the heteronormative barbecue. Also, Ace coins the term “the Cognitive One Percent.” I wonder, can neurotic, competitive signalling be redistributed?
And should you need to display your own moral elevation, feel free to tickle the tip jar.
None of which will be news, I think, to regular readers.
But wait a minute, David. The wider availability of this knowledge is threatening my social status. Oh no!
Heh. It’s for the greater good.
“[As] James Howard Kunstler put it, capitalism is not a belief system that you can subscribe to or drop out of, it’s more like gravity.”
So true. Capitalism isn’t an ideology at all; it’s an activity.
You don’t “believe” in capitalism in the way you “believe” in, say, a free market, socialism, climate change, Islam or even atheism.
You do capitalism.
jjm…… good analysis, simple and accurate.
and the unspeakable crushing horror of the heteronormative barbecue.
That’s still one of my favorites. Consider your tip jar tickled.
That’s still one of my favourites.
It’s not every day someone tells you that men discussing how to light a barbecue is not only “oppressively penetrating,” but about as “oppressively penetrating” as a thing can be.
More campus ‘diversity’…
http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/05/college-campuses-essentially-operate-on-mob-rule-at-this-point/
If you can stomach it, here’s Junot Diaz on the trauma of attending a writing course that’s ‘too white’.
Quote: ‘She was tough and she was smart and she’d read loads but in the end, the whiteness of the workshop just wore her out. These people are killing me, she told me repeatedly.’
Here’s the heart-breaking rest of it: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/mfa-vs-poc.html
(via: Arts and Letters)
Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
Nicely put. I might add to the left this is an automatic response like breathing air.
They don’t even see what they are doing hunting for what they see as a higher elevation on the human curve to feed ego’s gorged on the idea they are above other for any reason.
This used to be the preserve of self Righteous Christians with ignorance, who didn’t know their own faith. It is now the normal acceptable behaviour to secular Socialists. They are the elite entitled darlings of the Universe. So they think.
This used to be the preserve of self Righteous Christians with ignorance, who didn’t know their own faith. It is now the normal acceptable behaviour to secular Socialists
I attended a fundamentalist Presbyterian school for my middle school years. I now listen to some of my friends who are leftists rant about how evil religion is yet their politics, and increasingly every other aspect if their lives, ring of the same fundamentalist BS that I was taught in middle school. The moral preening, the Puritanism, the self satisfaction, and the unquestioning appeal to authority. The irony.
Just read that New Yorker link from witwoud and found this in the comments. “The problem is the failure of white people to recognize that their perspective is undoubtedly colored by their experiences as a white person[.] OJM [a previous commenter] never thought of saying “kiss my white ass” because for him a “white ass” is just an “ass.” This is whiteness as default at work.”
I think I’m coming round. It’s ass-color that’s the problem.
Competitive Outrage Illustrated.
This used to be the preserve of self Righteous Christians with ignorance, who didn’t know their own faith.
It’s not a matter of ignorance so much as Whatever Is Considered Virtuous By Society.
In the West it has been Christianity, but it doesn’t really matter the source of the Virtue du Jour, the same types of people will always contrive a way to appear to possess that virtue without the hard work of actually developing it.
There are two types of people who engage in Competitive Moral Outrage: cynical sociopaths (and approximations) who wield the appearance of morality as a weapon and those weaker souls who are merely terrified of being thought Awful.
This dynamic shows up in both micro and macrocosms: having grown up Mormon in Utah, I have seen plenty Moral Outrage Olympics, mostly among teens and college-age kids, but occasionally in adults. The adults tend to be the cynical ones and the youth are more likely to be frightened.
Sanctimony feels good, unfortunately, which is why it will never go away entirely.
I wonder, can neurotic, competitive signalling be redistributed?
I’m happy for them to keep all of it.
Morning all. Thanks to all who’ve hit the tip jar recently. It makes a big difference to how much of my time can be spent on this thing, whether writing or finding content or just banging on in the comments.
More campus ‘diversity’…
There’s a thing that professional news producers do where they use shots close into a crowd of protestors that, together with the fact of the story being reported at all, give the impression of a huge swell of people. Only when there really are thousands of protestors do they use dramatic aerial shots.
The amateur who took this video of the ‘Hey-hey-ho-ho-ing’ students helpfully takes a proud panoramic of them all, making it possible to see that at the absolute most there were some 60 protestors there, quite possibly even fewer.
Rutgers apparently has a student population of about 59,000.
That suggests only about 0.1% of the student population actively protested, at least as shown by that video.
Good to see democratic principles in action, then.
“Democrats have locked up the black vote for generations not because they’ve solved any problems in the black community – those they’ve attempted to address have done nothing but get worse – but because they’ve cynically and diabolically injected race into every issue and labeled with ‘otherness’ anyone who strays from the orthodoxy they’ve deemed ‘acceptable thought’ for black Americans.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2014/05/04/liberal-racism-n1833093/page/full
labelled with ‘otherness’ anyone who strays from the orthodoxy they’ve deemed ‘acceptable thought’ for black Americans.
The reactions to Dr Ben Carson come to mind. Specifically, such pious left-of-centre terms as “Uncle Ruckus,” “Uncle Tom” and, get this, “political Mandingo.” “He can shine my shoes,” quipped one ‘progressive’ comedian.
Apparently UKIP have been forced to cancel their freepost address after receiving blood and faeces through the mail. Because, y’know, social justice or something:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ukip-cancels-freepost-address-after-the-party-is-sent-blood-and-faeces-9323590.html
I am printing and framing the Kristian Niemietz article. Spot on. It’s the “Grievance Industry” and like any other industry, you have to continually stimulate new demand by rolling out new “products.”