Aggrandizement by association

I have preferred to promote gilt by association to encapsulate the habit of employing either adulation or antagonism towards significant people to enhance the ego. My mother did that and it was a matter of pride that she chose friends for their superior qualities. And she resented that her mother made friends in the lower class. (Though, perhaps that assertion was meant as a critique of my associations I was too dense to get).
Continue reading →

Critical Race Theory in the New Yorker

Since humans are social organisms, the arbitrary exclusion of any group is immoral. Also, exclusive behavior, aka segregation, is abusive and the expectation that the victims of abuse are capable of stopping the perp is unrealistic. All abuse requires a third party intervention to be stopped. Indeed, that is likely the main purpose behind organizing what we call government. And if that is the case, then legislative support for exclusive behavior is not just immoral, but counterproductive. Segregationists undermine the very purpose of social organization and so those who oppose them are providing an indispensible public service.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/the-man-behind-critical-race-theory

Redundancy

That is what economic theory fixated on monetary profit removed from society. Planned obsolescence (failure by design) and “just in time delivery combined to set the stage for an ill-prepared health care industry when a new virus arrived. The initial whining about stressed hospitals resonated badly with people who had heard for decades that emergency rooms and hospitals needed to be closed.

If nasty surprises are to be avoided, redundancy is a sine qua non.

Puddy’s Nose

For a couple of years now (decades) we have been dealing with periodic sinus problens which manifest as post-nasal drip and from time to time affect respiration and sleeping. That is, sleep apnea causes disturbed sleep. A regimen put together by the doc in Durham managed to provide some relief, but then Puddy moved to Georgia and the doc died. Continue reading →

Dissembling in Georgia

For quite a while, candidates for public office in Georgia were pressured to run under the Republican banner by the Republican establishment with the argument that Democrats could not get elected, despite the numerical plurality of voters identifying as Democrats. Though all newcomers were likely to be rejected in the primary anyway, the argument did serve to reveal basic Republican duplicity.
Continue reading →

Instead of disutility, social utility

Education is, like health care, a social utility and so society should pay for the delivery. Costs should be born by those who benefit. However when cost/benefit analysis was first introduced by economists, they were quite content to pretend that it did not matter who bore the cost and who got the benefit as long as the numbers for the latter were larger. So, we had an “objective” analysis of present value to project future benefit which almost automatically transferred public assets into private wealth. So, the impoverishment of the nation was systemic, but it was not designed to be racist. In most cases it was a matter of working people being too busy to object to the machinations of the exploiters.