Changing Attitudes 1

The other day Larry Kudlow claimed that

“[t]he human toll [in Japan] looks to be much worse than the economic toll, and we can be grateful for that.”

He later claimed he had mangled the line he intended to give, although it's difficult to imagine whatall he meant to say. The underlying principle, however, seems clear: our central concern must always be on the economic impact of any act of god or humanity. This really not a new set of ideas and it is one we have been trying to overcome for most of the 20th century. 

In Bellamy's Looking Backwards the key to the transformation from the wretchedness of the 19th century to the wonderfulness of the 20th was exactly to stop thinking that way and to start thinking about putting human needs first.

No doubt, Bellamy's prescription for what ails us is overly optimistic; however, in this post by Ed over to GinandTacos, he shows what can happen

[i]f government takes its responsibilities seriously (which requires the preliminary step of recognizing that responding to an unthinkably large natural disaster is a government responsibility) it is possible to see that the animal-level needs of its people are met. Japan does have the advantage of being a small, dense country, but nonetheless its public sector has managed to shelter, feed, and rescue itself admirably. Why? Because its government is not devoted to the idea that government should be abolished.


Beyond that, Japan hasn't build its entire society on the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Their idea of disaster preparedness is not hoarding enough bullets to shoot their neighbors who run out of food. When America has a natural disaster, the private sector immediately focuses on profiteering and jacking up prices. In Japan the prices are lowered and in some cases basic necessities are even given away gratis. Japanese are more willing to look out for and help one another because unlike the U.S., their social dynamics focus on group harmony (critics say "conformity") rather than constant reminders that You are responsible for yourself and no one else. If your neighbor needs help, the American response is to lecture him about failing to better prepare himself for the crisis.

 Americans' attitudes, or some very loud and annoying Americans' attitudes, toward the state and their fellows do drive policies that make life less sweet and, it follows, if we change our attitudes we might find ourselves living in a kind of margaritaville.

Socialism

Bernie Sanders is on CSPAN right now complaining intelligently about the tax deal, and he has promised to continue until his boy ranger legs can no longer support him.  He is a great American.

UPDATE:
If nothing else Sanders is making in public from a position of some importance the best available arguments against the dominate neo-Liberal consensus that holds that the best way to protect the country and improve the economy requires screwing the vast majority of Americans by following a neo-Liberal path already shown to lead off a cliff.

Violence

I was going to post something on rhetorical violence versus calls to be violent, which is to say something on McArdle's most recent silliness, but instead would suggest for those of you, who want honest debate between and among Conservatives, Liberals, and Progressives to go read this discussion of McArdle's two by four to the head promotion versus her depiction of it. 

Crises in Education

Via comes this interview that explains the crisis in higher education in partly thusly:

The issue, of course, is money. Since the financial crunch of the late 1960s and 1970s, American colleges and universities have worried about their bottom lines. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.

And she argues that

[t]here is a difference between education and vocational training. And, what we are seeing today is the vocationalization of higher education. As they struggle to attract warm, tuition-bearing bodies, many schools have begun to offer ever more career-oriented courses of study. That’s what students and their parents supposedly want, especially at a time when they view college as an investment that should lead to an immediate economic pay-off. But that kind of short-term thinking is damaging -- to students, to higher education, and to society as a whole. To begin with, most students graduating today will change their careers at least six times before they leave the workforce. Courses that are narrowly tailored to particular jobs may not serve these students well if the machinery they have been trained to operate becomes technologically obsolete or the occupational niche they were planning to fill ends up in Asia. They need broader skills and an educational background that will allow them to adapt themselves to a wide variety of work environments.

To which I say, you betcha.

Not So Much Crazy as a Fantasist

Fred Clark:

O'Donnell says:

I was dabbling in witchcraft, I've dabbled in Buddhism. I would have become a Hare Krishna but I didn't want to become a vegetarian. And that is honestly the reason why -- because I'm Italian, I love meatballs!

To understand this bizarre, and untrue, statement, you have to understand the peculiar place that Hare Krishnas hold in the rhetoric of America's evangelical Christian subculture. "Hare Krishna" doesn't refer, specifically or literally, to the belief system that bears this name. It's a shorthand signifier representing something like "every other possible alternative that anyone could imagine."
As with her claim to have "dabbled into" a Warnke-esque form of Satanism, O'Donnell is here embellishing her "personal testimony" in an attempt to make it seem more compelling, more exciting and more authoritative. This kind of runaway exaggeration is encouraged in the evangelical subculture by giving such dramatic testimonies a more enthusiastic response than is generally provided to the more honest and accurate, but blander, sort of testimony that begins, "I've been attending this church my whole life ..."

There is much more at the link and well worth reading.  These last couple of his posts make clear the extent to which O'Donnell is unfit for office.  What is shocking is the extent to which Delaware agrees.

He's Right, You Know That.

Ed, from Ginandtacos, makes the point that

Arguments are incoherent, childish, and bilious. In short, it isn't a bunch of people devoting their non-negligible intellectual skills to a topic of little relevance. It's just a bunch of retards screaming, fueled by anger and entirely uninterested in making sense

He's not, as you might think, castigating Yglesias, Goldberg, et alia, rather he refutes Chomsky, which takes some work. And as by the way, I have been trying to take the Pew survey on religion but the site is overwhelmed with folks determined to be better informed than the great unwashed.