i’m sure @yllevid just means math phds should teach womens studies, and women studies phds should teach math. i mean that’d make much more sense. right?!
she’s driven enough to put herself through grad school, all while dealing with the daily horror of customer service? i’ve got to wonder, who broke up with whom here?
( personal disclosure, my mother broke up with my father because he thought she should stay home and raise the kids, and not finish her masters. of course, she wound up doing both, on her own, just fine. )
He probably just believes that women’s studies are an illegitimate area of intellectual inquiry and shouldn’t be available at a serious university, especially the publicly funded ones. Many people seem to be of the mind that universities should only reflect the economy, and function more as a trade school than public institutions dedicated to research into all areas of life.
Not sure I want to wade into that mine field! I will say that getting through grad school is a financial and often emotional hardship for many, especially when the individual seeking a post-secondary degree is funding it out of pocket (even with TAs and such). Not too few people went through grad school and came out changed enough as a person (for better or worse) to end up leaving a long term relationship. and those tensions go both ways (both the student and their spouse, who can often feel neglected and angry at the student). I will say it’s easier to sit on the sidelines of another’s relationship and judge when you have no idea what’s happening between the parties involved and @yllevid might know better than us, but he might also have a very slanted view of what happened, given his relationship to the individuals in question.
That reads like you’ve only read right-wing analyses of Piketty that seek to damn him with faint praise.
His writing consistently understates his case (rather deliberately, I imagine), but the facts he repeats over and over again from various angles amount to a searing indictment of trickle-down bullshit.
There’s no two ways about it - given that the return on capital consistently outstrips growth, the lack of any overarching policy to direct wealth back downwards amounts to a policy of directing wealth upwards.
IMO the old folks have an easier time voting because that’s how the scumbags prefer it - old folks don’t seem to have nearly as much of a problem with regressive agendas that favour incinerating the birthrights of the unborn for the sake of a brief flicker of warmth for the nearly dead.
'Tis possible. When people gripe about taxes, I see old patterns. Especially those who gripe about social security payments, since it pays for their parents. Everyone seems to feel so clever about figuring out that they aren’t saving for their own retirement, but paying to keep their parent’s generation from suffering the old curse of poverty in their old age. Or that high risk jobs get to retire early as a sort of reward for performing such a risky job.
I’m just pissed off at the selfish dolts and their dupes.
No I said plainly I favor wealth redistribution. I was blaming old folks for giving us neo liberalism. I also implied they support these policies because old folks tend to overestimate their own social value, and feel negative about taxation.The baby boom generation is especially annoying because they want to kill the benefits after they get them.
I argue that if poor single moms received half the benefits of a senior citizen we’d be in much better shape in the future.
The older I get, the more my observations of the world reinforce my strong suspicion that the outcome of human economics - not the toy theories like Free-Market Capitalism, Mercantilism, Marxism, ect…, but the actual nauseating reality of an animal that expands by consuming everything in its path as quickly as it can with no serious regard for its future generations - is as inevitable as the tides. For while humans can and often do check their avarice individually and in small groups, the law of mass action seems to prevail over individual choice.
I don’t advocate giving up, on the contrary, but I have determined that my own efforts and investment in sustainability should be structured to best benefit damage control to the global economy, the human animal and it’s fragile habitat, to assume we will deplete the environment and to therefore put effort into mitigating the damage to civilization and the planet. This is what passes for optimism in my worldview these days.
Remember that the accusation above was about major parties, not about all parties. Your actual leftists would have no place in your major parties were it not for your form of government.
And the main reason why the Dems are center right today is that the GOP has gone full-blanket lunatic right wing and will brook no compromise. To get anything we have to push things like ObamaCare instead of socialized medicine. However, Hillary Clinton tried for single payer in the 90s, and it’s been in the Dems’ platform since 1948.
Were there a reasonable opposition party on the right like we had from the 40s through 70s the Dems would be center-left, but real politics mean any success is impossible. It sucks, but the only place for a leftist to get anything done in the current environment and with our winner take all form of government is with the Dems.
There are efforts to change our voting processes and local government structures to make third and small party wins more likely, but they are stymied by the big parties.
There’s going back to the old days and then there’s going back to the old days. As I’ve been saying for a while, for modern American conservatives the ideal year – politically, economically, socially – isn’t 1956 but 1896. Now we also have the neoreactionaries of the alt-right, who in those regards would take us back to 1766.
The problem with my fellow liberals and progressives is that we don’t yet have our own coherent response to dealing the end of the postwar economic anomaly, the rise of automation, and climate change. There’s some warmed-over Marxism and half-baked Anarkiddie anti-globalism and ineffective protest innovations like OWS’s general assembly, but otherwise it’s a lot of dancing around “unthinkable” ideas like a Universal Basic Income and more granular environmental taxes.
Because of apocryphal stories about ancient American civilizations, I once imagined what it would be like if a person from a civilization that has invented the wheel met a person from a civilization that had domesticated animals. You can imagine the explosion of productivity that would follow. Those are two technologies that multiply your work and that multiply together. I think it’s hard to not see how free trade has the potential to greatly improve life for people.
But what we call “free trade” today is when those two people, upon meeting, make an agreement that says, “Okay, your society can have wheels, but I get $X per kilometer travelled.” and “Your society can have domesticated animals, but they must be exclusively purchased from my family of animal trainers.”
Sometimes I think I do just this, maybe I wasn’t raised right.
You’re forgetting that we have had more fillibusters in the last ten years than we had in the previous century and a half. When that’s the tactic of choice, it doesn’t matter who “controls both houses of Congress”–the minority party can still run out the clock on the session.
Yes, but having a majority in the House and Senate doesn’t mean that you can just ram anything through you want. The House has procedural rules that can bog down anything, and the Senate has the filibuster where as long as you have 41 votes against something you can hold it up forever. Obama and the Dems tried to get ObamaCare passed with a Meidcare for All (single payer) option, but were unable to bypass a filibuster due to a former Democrat from CT named Lieberman who chose to back the insurance companies of his state over the health of his constituents.
