Society

Differences Between Left and Right Political Viewpoints

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A friend of mine writes with the following thoughts, which I’ve edited for readability:

This election is highlighting a lot of the distinction between the way people on the Left and people on the Right think and feel. For the people on the Right, this election is about whether there will be a world war, whether the economy will be ruined, whether the southern border will be secured, what material steps need to be taken so that bad things will be prevented and some positive things happen. It’s about policy being implemented and government power being used in positive ways and not being used in damaging ways.
 
The Left is much more about personality and feelings. Identifying with Harris because she’s black and a woman, and feeling that she in some ambiguous but nonetheless important way represents some vague ideal that people care about. I have a friend whose daughter is voting for Harris, and he asked her why, and she said: Because she’s black and a woman and she’s not Trump; I don’t need to know what her policy views are.
 
It’s a completely different way of looking at the world. Frankly, it’s female, and I don’t like it, and it’s destructive if it’s given political power. The idea of this type of female mindset operating a system where people are arrested or people with guns show up at the door is terrifying. Such a system would be based on arbitrary female sentiments, and gestures of submission, rather than some agreed-on set of rules.

Dancing the Minnesota Walz

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I think the most purely risible, ‘laugh out loud and roll on the floor’ headline of the current presidential campaign must be this one: Tim Walz’s Masculinity Is Terrifying to Republicans

This unintentionally hilarious take has been committed by one Frances Wilkinson, in an opinion piece for the entity known as Bloomberg.com. I do not know anything about Frances Wilkinson, but will venture a couple of guesses here: one, that she doesn’t really know any Republicans personally; two, that she is as acute a judge of what constitutes masculinity-fearing-Republicans as Rachael Gunn (the notorious Raygun of the Australian Olympic breakdancing team) is of break-dancing technique; and three, who the heck is terrified by the masculinity of a guy who looks like a live-action movie version of Elmer Fudd anyway?

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The Coming Deluge?

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“The official version of events in the UK media is that the murders are an isolated incident and the public must stop talking about it, let the police handle it, but the protests are a nationally coordinated far right extremist conspiracy, which must be met with aggressive force and further destruction of what few civil liberties remain.”

A comment from a guest post at Postcards from Barsoom, which can be read here: Who Speaks for the Children?

Violent protests, and even riots are happening in Manchester and other English cities, following a bloody knife attack on a children’s dance workshop by the teenaged son of Rwandan refugees. Three little girls were murdered and several more girls and their teachers badly injured – and such protests might indicate to distant observers such as myself that the native British are finally fed to the teeth with a flood-tide of migrants, and violent criminal depredations by recent immigrants that are basically excused when they aren’t outright ignored by politicians, the press, academics and activists. Popular historians often make note of social snobbery in the Victorian era – where the upper classes looked down on anyone “in trade” and sneered at the working class … but I don’t see that the Victorians thoroughly despised their fellow countrymen to the degree that the modern British ruling class despises everything about the ordinary native British working folks.

Cursive and Other Archaic Skills

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My daughter recently reviewed the various academic programs available at the Hill Country elementary school which Wee Jamie will eventually attend, when she makes her pile in real estate and moves up to that community. Among the skills on offer is training in writing cursive which we were both pretty thrilled to hear about. (Although I do hold out for home-schooling Wee Jamie.) Apparently, teaching cursive handwriting has been pretty much phased out in elementary school curriculums of late in favor of either printing or keyboarding… apparently, very few people now hand-write documents. Scrawling a signature is about as far as most people go, these days of computers, cellphones, email and being able to fill out forms on-line.
For myself, I have perfectly awful handwriting; not all the cursive practice in third and fourth grade could remedy this quality a single iota. Frankly, I envy anyone who has excellent flowing Palmer-style handwriting, or the gentleman I met at an art show who could do perfect gothic script lettering freehand. I have usually resorted to printing, if legibility to another person was a requirement, and there wasn’t a typewriter or computer handy. But I fully support Wee Jamie being taught to write cursive, for the very excellent reason that even if you can’t handwrite legibly you can still read handwritten documents. Otherwise, whole libraries and archives are closed to someone who simply can’t read such documents.

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Yon Tanpèt Pafè

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In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.

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