Month: August 2010

“Everybody Else Is Crazy”

by Conor Friedersdorf

Jim's pet peeve:

Cursive!

I have three kids in elementary school wasting countless hours learning cursive. Why? I can't remember the last time I wrote anything longer than a grocery list by hand. With technological development, they'll do that even less frequently than I do.  Sure, everyone needs a signature, but why not teach a signature alone?  Kids in countries that are our largest competitors worldwide are learning advanced math while America's kids have to struggle to make a proper freaking Q.  Moronic.

Circa 1986 I began taking cursive at Our Lady Queen of Angeles, the K through 8 Catholic school where I earned straight As almost every semester, except for my perennial C minus in handwriting. I hated that damned subject, and it's been useless to me ever since. It actually surprises me that they're still teaching it. The capital "S" and "G" were what got me. 

Nathan writes:

A couple of examples, before I get to the item:

1)  On a friend's Facebook page, I, reminiscing about old football days, drop a "shit" and a "fuck", and am gently chided for my use of the words.

2)  The other day, at the grocery store with my 1 1/2 year old, I misplace the grocery list.  I look around for it for a minute, and am mildly annoyed.  My son, tuned in and empathetic as he is, looks at me and says:  "Daddy, fuck it."

Now in both of these cases, I felt as though I was supposed to feel bad, or ashamed, or like I need to correct my behavior (my son definitely picked that word up from yours truly).

But here's the thing: I don't give a fuck!  Really, what the fuck is this taboo with certain words? It fucking bothers the shit out of me.  Now, I understand the importance of certain taboo words, and mind them without resentment, but really, who the fuck is really bothered by fuck?  Someone who needs to chill the fuck out, that's who.

Gabriel's complaint:

The taboo on female toplessness.

While guys sporting giant hairy man-boobs go around shirtless without remark, women and even little girls cannot bare their chests in any public context.  This taboo alone has supported what may be a preponderance of "adult entertainment" (topless bars, "girlie" magazines), at least prior to web-porn.

The bikini top is the Western version of the hajib. It is an irrational, sexist clothing disparity with nothing to support it save the dubious pedigree of "tradition."  It has led to the persecution and embarrassment of countless nursing mothers.  It should be tossed in the same ashcan as male-restricted jury duty and suffrage.

Unwinding our female-breast taboo might reduce the pathological fixations in this society that have led to dangerous and harmful augmentation surgeries.

The chance to join this year's protest just passed.

An Era Of Immaturity? Ctd

by Patrick Appel

Jamelle Bouie's two cents:

[The NYT] delves into the "extended adolescence" of relatively sheltered graduates from major universities, but what about the mass of 20-somethings who either didn't go to college or pursued degrees at community colleges and local universities? I graduated from a high school of roughly 2,400 people in 2005, and judging from the Facebook profiles of those I graduated with, many of my former classmates have built fairly adult lives for themselves. Most have jobs and live independently of their parents. Some have spouses or long-term partners, a few have children. For those who do live with their parents, it has less to do with maturity and more to do with the terrible job market. Obviously, anecdotes can't substitute for statistical data, but I'd wager that the above is true for many 20-somethings of modest means.

A reader makes some related points:

Conor seems to have missed the gigantic elephant in the room: the economy.  Particularly since unemployment has so far fallen hardest on teens and 20 somethings in this recession.  I'm currently 25 and living with my parents while attending graduate school.  It is not what I was hoping for at this point in my life, however it is the circumstance that I find myself in thanks to being unable to get stable gainful employment right out of college. (Architecture has been hit pretty bad along with all the other construction related fields; worst billings period on record)  This is hardly some horrific circumstance, and in fact I'm grateful to my parents for being there to help me get through it with a hopefully stronger resume than I had before the recession started, but it's still not the ideal 20's that I had dreamt of when I was a kid lying awake at night.

At this point I was hoping to have accomplished some of those NYT milestones.  Reality is indifferent to my hopes and dreams, though, and so I'm stuck looking for work in a lousy economy while hiding away in the ivory tower hoping things get better. I can only imagine what life is like for those who were unable to go to college or join a trade or some other vocation that provides some degree of bargaining power with employers. 

Periods of economic uncertainty quite simply are not conducive to taking risks.  At the personal level this typically means buying a house or starting a family.  Certainly nobody should put their life on hold completely for macro-economic policy reasons, but ignoring the reality of this recession seems just as foolhardy.  Yet somehow when a company does this it's called prudence or responsibility , but when a generation does it it's called immaturity.  If today's circumstances were different I probably would have my own place and financial independence at the very least. The assumptions being made by the gainfully employed author reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, actually:

"Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

What would that writer be doing if he was suddenly out of work right now? I seriously doubt it would be signing up for a mortgage and working towards having another baby.

I guess we 'kids today' just can't win when it comes to generational summaries.  But then that's always been the case and probably why I quit reading stories about generational 'trends' or what have you long ago.

Housing Tanks, Ctd

by Patrick Appel

A reader writes:

I think a big part of the equation that is being missed is those owners that cannot sell. For them it’s not that they “are convinced that their homes are worth lots of money, or will rise in price…”, but that they are so far upside down on their mortgage that they cannot afford to sell. We are one of those owners. Trust me, I would love to get out from under the condo we own in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, we are 25% upside down on the mortgage we bought in 2006 and we are too responsible to have received any assistance either from the government or from the bailed out bank that holds our mortgage. We have no option other than to hold on and hold out for as long as it takes for us to be able to save up and pay our way out or have the value of our home increase back to the mortgage value (and this could be 20 years). I don’t know how prevalent this situation is, but I’m guessing a lot more than people think and until it is addressed I don’t think our economy can fully recover.

Felix Salmon thinks housing prices will fall farther.

Brands Of Crazy

by Patrick Appel

Weigel compares slurs:

There is almost no downside if you want to make an extreme claim about Barack Obama. You generate outrage from the left but you get attaboys from the conservative base. Is this much different than the rewards that liberals could get for making extreme claims about George W. Bush? I think it is, because the conservative media — Fox, talk radio, all the way down to forward e-mails — is a fantastic transmission device whose consumers are ready to believe that the rest of the media is lying to them. There is really no downside for Frank Gaffney when he says that Obama or his nominees are bringing radical Islamic law to America. It gets to the conservative base, which makes it a "controversy," which means that the rest of the media has to cover this Very Important Issue Americans Are Concerned About.

Email Of The Day

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

I love the View From Your Window contest. But not because I have a snowball's chance in Hades of guessing the location. But because I don't. One thing the contest gives me is a complete awareness of  A) Just how smart your readers are (myself excluded) and B) They've been places I've never been to, and are in places where I am not. The world comes to the Dish and suddenly I'm painfully aware of how untraveled I am.

I sit looking at a bunch of rooftops and I have no idea where it is. Three hundred of your readers could not only narrow it down, but actually talk about it with some degree of expertise. They say things that sound like, "Well, clearly from the brick structure it in is in the eastern section of this eastern country in that eastern part of Europe. And judging from the angle of the light, it can't be that one eastern country because due to the Basque influence, as adapted from some Moorish influence at the end of the reign of (some king I never heard of), they don't make window sills with that brick anywhere but this country because they use their sills to grow pomegranates. Oh how I did enjoy the pomegranate preserves as we ate in a little bistro on what I believe is the far side of the square in (a town I've never heard of). I also spot a church tower that I remember standing under and proposing to my wife. So, going by all that, this clearly is the town of Tallinn."

I've never been anywhere. I go places on the Daily Dish.

Should the US Military Work with Wikileaks?

by Conor Friedersdorf

A Bloggingheads.tv episode I recorded with Conn Carroll of The Heritage Foundation is now posted. Above we discuss Wikileaks, its decision to publish classified information about the war in Afghanistan, and whether the US military should've worked with the stateless group to request the redaction of sensitive names.

Interestingly, I think neither one of us is remotely persuaded by the other's argument. (One factual matter I remain unclear on is whether Julian Assange broke US law.)

The rest of my conversation with Mr. Carroll can be found here.

Is the World Running Out of Helium?

by Conor Friedersdorf

Supplies are running low because the gas is under-priced.

Or so says a Nobel Prize-winning scientist:

Helium, a non-renewable resource, is used in MRI scanners (which are cooled by the gas), airships and also by anti-terrorist authorities who used it for their radiation monitors.

Professor Richardson also believes that party balloons filled with helium are too cheap, and they should really cost about £64 to reflect the precious nature of the gas they contain. He told The Independent: "Once helium is released into the atmosphere in the form of party balloons or boiling helium, it is lost to the Earth for ever, lost to the Earth for ever."

Our grandchildren may grow up in a world where there is no appropriate way to end an artistic French film.

The Annals of Long Form Journalism

by Conor Friedersdorf

In 1906, The Atlantic published a piece that compared New York and Paris to one another. If you're passingly familiar with NYC it's a very enjoyable read, and as good an opportunity as any to note that subscribing to the magazine is an excellent way to support ambitious journalism of this sort, as well as everything here at The Atlantic Online.

Those unfamiliar with New York will require a substitute item today. It is about hummingbirds, and has a description of the coolest coat ever. Upon finishing the piece, go here.