The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.

[…]

Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.

| Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, cited by Conor Friedersdorf in Where the Left Went Wrong—and How It Can Win Again

Rorty was anticipating, I think, the political shift from left-versus-right to up-versus-down.

(via stoweboyd)

This is an important read, but I am not hopeful anyone will heed its suggestions, so I’m pretty sure we’re stuck with trump for at least 7.5 more years.

I don’t know why I care, but the fact that I can’t seem to be able to connect with anyone here at work puts my entire long term future here in question.

Of my entire day, I spend:
8 hours at work
3 hours commuting
3 hours with R, much of which involves making and eating food and planning the day and week while avoiding topics like politics
1 hour reading, which includes this site
6 hours sleeping
3 hours with L, which is one part delightful beyond comparison, one part exhausting beyond comparison

That’s it. I don’t have the time to talk to friends anymore (anyway everyone seems stuck in their own rut), I don’t even know I have friends anymore, and the twice-monthly coop shifts are the peak of my social life.

Work is the biggest part of the day, and it’s the most soul deadening. It is not stressful, which was the whole reason I walked away from the Old Company, but neither was the time I was with the Pathetic Company, but at least I had a semblance of friends there. And expectations there were lower. Here, I literally don’t talk to anyone all day.

Among the contrasts I am surprised to discover between our playground and the rich kids’ one 15 min walk away (besides the latter having nicer equipment) is how many languages you hear at the wealthy one: French, and German, and Spanish, and Italian, and Russian, Turkish, Portuguese, Polish, Japanese, what I’m guessing is Hungarian, Mandarin, Hebrew, probably-Serbo-Croatian… and a little bit of English.

Ours is just Spanish and English. I add Russian when I’m there. Curiously enough, there are never any muslim kids or their parents to be seen, even though there are so many in the street.

stoweboyd:

Sean Trainor | Losing Control

Viewed from a distance of more than a century, the nineteenth-century beard fashion looks like a basic historical fact. For many observers, the succession of bearded and otherwise unremarkable U.S. presidents during the decades preceding 1900 is no more surprising than the fact that there are mountains in Switzerland. And yet the arrival of this fashion came as a great shock for those who lived through it. Sweeping much of Europe, North America, and Latin America after roughly two centuries of clean-shavenness, the beard movement was almost certainly the most dramatic development in nineteenth-century men’s fashion – every bit as shocking as if knee breeches and ruffled shirts were to once more become the dominant mode of men’s dress throughout the so-called ‘Western’ world.

Fascinating analysis, but my biggest takeaway is the succinct definition of modern american masculinity as being “about mastery and control: control over one’s destiny and that of ‘lesser’ men and women. ”

This makes me wonder how much of my subconscious rejection of this approach has to do with a principled position, and how much simply came from growing up outside of American culture that made it so utterly foreign.