Culture

Millennials

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There is a 2015 article by Jeff Selingo just linked by David Foster below. Selingo is worried because college graduates don’t know how to shoe a horse tolerate an ambiguous situation anymore.  Maybe so, but Selingo is drawing largely from personal anecdotes plus a Stanford psychologist who hasn’t figured out the difference between correlation and causation (which means neither can Selingo), so I’m suspicious.  Also, Steven Johnson’s 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good For You says the opposite, that the computer teaches kids to try all sorts of things to get where they want to go, epitomised by the videogames that just drop you off in an environment with no clue what your objective is or what the rules are.

Most likely, many Millennials are able to tolerate ambiguous situations, many are not, and many are in between. Is the trait more common now than it was? I don’t know of evidence either way, but everyone has an opinion about Millennials.

I have a bias that generations are not that different from each other.  They each have their cabbages and kings. When we say “I have been teaching/coaching/hiring/supervising young people for forty years, and I think that Kids Today aren’t as ______ as they used to be,” there is a lot left out of that estimation. 

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Introduction

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I have been invited to post at Chicago Boyz, and have accepted. I have had my own blog, Assistant Village Idiot, for over a decade, with over 5,000 posts there. I will crosspost here a selection of my current posts there. Come over and hit the search box if you want to know what I think about something. I have been interested in too many topics in my life, forever finding new enthusiasms. I changed majors at William and Mary from math to medieval literature to theater, and had a minor in anthropology after the one in psychology blew up. I have started and bailed quickly at grad school in three fields. Lack of focus and discipline, clearly. My adult life has shown the same pattern. I posted heavily over the decade on Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton; colonial history; words and historical linguistics; statistics, bias, and reasoning; Judaism; Bible and theology from a POV that holds the conventional wisdom of the last two centuries as suspect. (Which you had already guessed after seeing Lewis and Chesterton listed.) I am an evangelical who dislikes a lot of evangelical culture.

My overriding topic has been cultural commentary from as objective and non-immediate perspective as I can manage. Current events are a swamp of emotions, and nearly everyone gets them wrong at first. I see Americans as belonging to various tribes: Arts & Humanities, Science and Technology, Military, Government and Union, plus regional, ethnic, and religious groups. 90% of us used to belong to the God & Country tribe, but this is no longer so. Most of us are allied with more than one. I was very much raised in the Arts & Humanities tribe, which used to be politically mixed, but is now almost entirely liberal. I harshly dissected that tribe for years. I still read in the arts and humanities, but have largely rejected the tribe’s attitude, which means most of my extended family considers me a bit dangerous.

I follow sports – commentary, history, and statistics – yet seldom watch a game or post on these. I am similarly fascinated by maps and geography, psychology and neurology, parenting and development, and HBD, and don’t post on those either. Why? Dunno, but I think it is because I don’t have anything new to add about, say, the Negro Leagues or new psychotropics that you can’t find elsewhere. I have a few older series I will link to here.

Personal Information: Semi-retired psychiatric social worker at the state hospital of NH, mostly in acute care. 40 years there. I am husband of one, a retired children’s librarian, and father of five sons, age 22-39. The first two came in the usual way, were excellent students, and went to Asbury College. We were fanatic parents – no TV, hours of reading aloud, constant discussion with friends about best practices. One is married with two daughters and lives nearby, the second is the creative director at First Methodist in Houston. The second two came from Romania as teenagers, one now living in Nome with two daughters, currently visiting wife’s family in the Philippines; the other moved to Tromso, Norway after getting out of the USMC. The youngest is a nephew we took in at 13 when his parents…well, never mind. They eventually repaired relationships with him. He lives nearby, works for USPS, and is in the Army Reserve. From my overall experience, I now counsel young couples to have more children and pay less attention to them. They are going to be what they are going to be without you moving the dial much, and they are enormous fun when they are adults.

I will put up a few too many posts over the next week, then back off.

How intellectually rigorous is Vox Day?

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Vox Day is an alt-right figure who is a perfect illustration of why the alt-right needs to be engaged and not just thrown into the outer darkness. He’s accomplished, influential, smart, and cruel. He claims to be interested in the truth. No matter where it leads, he wants to follow and his position is that at the end of any journey committed to the truth, you’ll end up alt-right.

He is more correct about mainstream western society than mainstream society (left or right) is comfortable admitting. There are sacred cows aplenty in both conventional camps and people do notice them and treat those conventional pieties with the cynicism they deserve. These positions leave an opening for alternative political camps with a greater fidelity to truth. Vox Day is attempting to position the alt-right as a better-enough successor to conventional conservatism in order to reorient international politics.

But when encountering something he is unfamiliar with, does he have the guts to actually chase it down and educate himself?

De-russification is largely about Russia’s peripheral states attempting to get people to switch allegiances to the local nation from Russia. It’s very close to classic American melting pot politics. It also appears to be working, something that Vox Day has made claims cannot sustainably happen when talking about the future of the USA.

So what will Vox Day do when he reads up on the subject? Will he condemn the Baltic states’ efforts and be consistent across societies? Will he reassess the chances for melting pot politics in the USA and attempt to move the alt-right to a different destination? Stay tuned. The man is unlikely to leave the subject permanently unaddressed. It’s too obvious a weak spot for his camp.

I’m assuming, without any evidence whatsoever, that Vox Day actually is not aware of what de-russification entails. It’s the charitable thing to do. But doing so without following up is not charitable. It is merely foolish.

An American Version of the Habsburg Empire?

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Based on a recommendation from Sgt Mom, I recently read A Sailor of Austria, a novel about an Austrian submarine commander in WWI.  I thought it was excellent, but this post isn’t a book review.

Both this novel and the memoirs of a real-life Austrian sub commander, Captain Georg von Trapp, portray the intergroup tensions that plagued the multinational/multiethnic/multilanguage/multireligious entity that was the Austro-Hungarian empire.  These tensions only got worse, of course, as the war situation turned darker.  For example, Captain von Trapp, while having some shipyard work done in his submarine, observed that “the work is actually delayed. It is quite similar to Penelope’s tapestry: mysterious forces impede the construction. The crew is suspicious.”  He thought it likely that Czechs working in the shipyard were deliberately slowing the work, noting that  “At the American declaration of war, they supposedly really celebrated, but you can’t pin anything on them.”

Reading A Sailor of Austria reminded me of my 2011 post Government Overreach and Ethnic Conflict, in which I quoted AJP Taylor:

The Austrian state suffered from its strength: it had never had its range of activity cut down during a successful period of laissez-faire, and therefore the openings for a national conflict were far greater. There were no private schools or hospitals, no independent universities; and the state, in its infinite paternalism, performed a variety of services from veterinary surgery to the inspecting of buildings. The appointment of every school teacher, of every railway porter, of every hospital doctor, of every tax-collector, was a signal for national struggle. Besides, private industry looked to the state for aid from tariffs and subsidies; these, in every country, produce ‘log-rolling,’ and nationalism offered an added lever with which to shift the logs. German industries demanded state aid to preserve their privileged position; Czech industries demanded state aid to redress the inequalities of the past. The first generation of national rivals had been the products of universities and fought for appointment at the highest professional level: their disputes concerned only a few hundred state jobs. The generation which followed them was the result of universal elementary education and fought for the trivial state employment which existed in every village; hence the more popular national conflicts at the turn of the century.

The present-day US doesn’t have the level of government dominance that existed in the Austro-Hungarian empire, certainly, but the degree to which many nominally-private activities are now government-funded (universities, healthcare)–combined with the extreme politicization of everything from coffee to football–is helping to drive those same behaviors of intergroup squabbling.

It does seem that the US is in danger of ceasing to be a nation-state at all and transitioning into a   multinational, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious, gender-divided empire comprised of groups that are primarily interested in gaining power over their internal rivals.

Discuss

THE DEEP STATE CIVIL WAR AND THE COUP D’ETAT AGAINST PRESIDENT TRUMP

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In case you all had not noticed, a -LOT- of what is going on in the news between the Deep State and Pres. Trump here in the USA is a intra-Deep State factional Civil War over Iran.

In short — It’s Iran, STUPID!

This can be shown via the fact that the Obama “Iran Nuclear Deal” faction used the full powers of the FISA counter-intelligence to ram the Iran deal through Congress in 2015. (See the text immediately below and the Tablet on-line magazine link  to their April 2017 article on the subject)

In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting  “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

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The reason the prior abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus is clear only now is because the Russia campaign has illuminated it.  As The New York Times reported last month, the administration distributed the intelligence gathered on the Trump transition team widely throughout government agencies, after it had changed the rules on distributing intercepted communications. The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained”preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.”  The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.

Now you know why General Flynn was under counter-intelligence surveillance by the Asst. AG Sally Yates at the DoJ and Andrew McCabe at FBI Counter-Intelligence in 2015.

The Obama Administration was afraid ex-Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen Flynn would be called to testify before Congress about how CIA Chief Brennen and DNI Clapper were cooking the intelligence books on Iran and ISIS.

It turned out the illegal FISA surveillance by the Obama Administration got enough dirt on Congressional leaders to prevent that from happening.

The Deep State’s Iran Deal factional plans might have worked if Trump had lost…but he didn’t.

Everything regards the spying on the Trump campaign and attempted coup d’etat by special council/lawfare/impeachment against President Trump is about hiding the facts of that Iran Nuclear Deal from the American people and law enforcement.

But while the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal faction was the largest and strongest Deep State faction…it wasn’t the only one.

Pres. Trump has the anti-Iran Deep State faction on his side as well — which is mainly uniformed US military intelligence, see Gen Flynn and Adm Mike Rogers formally head at NSA — with a foreign intervention in the form of Saudi Arabia, the Israeli Mossad and Israeli PM Bibi Netanyahu on Trump’s side of the ledger.

Some in the the ‘coup supporting media’ would argue that this gets into fine shades of “what is treason” regards President Trump.

This sort of argument   ignores the fact that the Obama/Iran Nuclear Deal Deep State faction — the DoJ, FBI, CIA, the State Department and a small faction in the senior civil service at the Defense Department — had the support of the EU political and IC elites as well as Iran’s Mullah’s & the Moslem Brotherhood in ramming home the Iran deal.   And that they

  1. Launched FBI  Operation Crossfire Hurricane  which;
  2. Illegally used Stefan Halper as a ‘Agent Provocateur’ to tag Trump campaign officials with the FISA tag of ‘Foreign intelligence asset’ to;
  3. Use the full powers of the Federal government to spy on the Trump for President campaign,    and government, plus
  4. Has had Asst. A.G. Rosenstein appoint Special Council Mueller and delegate to him — quite illegally mind you — full authority to conduct on-going FISA surveillance in a criminal investigation against US citizens.

IMO, the bottom line up front here is that the Trump faction was and remains “constitutional” in its actions — his faction won an election and is following legal procedure.

The legal terms of art for   “Iran Nuclear Deal” Deep State faction efforts engaged in to date are an on–going  seditious conspiracy to violate both the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s civil rights “Under color of Law” in order to overturn the results of the 2016 election.

The short form for that is the Iran Nuclear Deal faction the Deep State are attempting a Coup d’etat.

It gets worse.

Whether or not President Trump finally wins over the Obama faction and takes down the Iranian Mullah’s.   The Obama’s Deep State Faction has done deep, lasting and permanent “Gramscian damage” (See link:  http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260    for an explanation of the term) to the American Republic, because they attempted a Coup De Etat against the tradition of peaceful succession of executive political power.

We can no longer take for granted peaceful opposing political party transitions of power in the American political system.