Terminal Stage Cuba, End of Merit in Med School Will Be Disastrous, British Charlatan and California Education Reform, How to Destroy Russia's Economy, Stuck Culture
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Beckles combines black with British. For some reason, PMC Americans have a hard-on for British accents, assuming competence, sophistication and intelligence when they otherwise should not.
This allows the PMC audience to virtue-signal and scrape before Brits, at the same time.
That Culture article was interesting. One thing I noticed was that family-focus entertainment was moved back in the American tv industry and more individual orientend content was produced in 1996-98.
Also, any Cuban leader that squirrels his assets away in the US is a fool. American vengefulness towards surrendered enemies is legendary, as shown by Libya and Syria, to name two.
In the aftermath of the plandemic, I have more faith in garage mechanics than doctors. Medicine has bigger problems than DEI. Be responsible for your own health.
Black and hispanic doctors will most likely serve black and hispanic patients. If DEI supported doctors suck, medical outcomes will vary between ethnic groups thereby requiring more DEI.
As a writer, I disagree that culture is stuck. Even within my own niche of indie SF, there's great stuff coming out, and being read with delight by aficionados. Perhaps SF is something of a special case. We have to move at the speed of technology. But what really makes me happy is to see how many newer authors care about their craft as well as the tropes. Beautiful prose is timeless, and as indies, we're free to ignore the social justice rot.
Something similar is happening in music. Freed from the big labels, newer artists are quietly honing their craft in genres that would never have sold enough in the old days for them to even get picked up.
Writers moan about Amazon, and musicians moan about Spotify, with good reason, but cutting out the middleman has enabled real cultural flourishing--thanks to the technologies that make digital distribution possible.
Is anything similar happening in the visual arts? I don't know enough about that to say either way.
Funny spying the article you shared on medicine while in the midst of reading Ivan Illich's article, "Disabling Professions." I have a hypothesis for the com box: despite the advances in medicine, the underlying method of professionalism has actually never been based upon meritocracy, but the gaining of a distinct honor/rank among a society at large. I think that this honor/rank was once bestowed roughly meritocratically, but there were still flaws in the system. I think shifting our thinking from "bring me back my meritocracy" to "Oh! I guess merit was never the fundamental ground of the technical professions in the first place" would help us make sense of all the changes so rapidly happening. As a hint to why I have this opinion, note that when the reformer Flexner gained credence at roughly the same time as John Dewey was promoting his "scientific" vision of progress in education. Dewey didn't have science as his basis, but rather he had the of the arc of history at his disposal. In a similar vein, we can say that, despite the fact that Flexner was a good doctor and scientist (i.e., he did win on the scale of merit), the true source of his reforming power was not his knowledge, but his honor.
Again, hypothesis and food for thought. But I sure want it to be true, so that way I don't have to rethink my paradigm.
I was born in Cuba 68 years ago and came at age 9 to the US with grandparents. My parents were given permission to leave about 4 years later and my father was in forced labor camps because that's how the Cuban government met its productivity quota....but in the name of the revolution.
A relative had come over in 1960. He had little assistance and lived for a few years doing this and that jobs and also begging in the streets of NYC. He settled himself eventually. His brother in Cuba rose super high in the Communist party, enough so that he could travel outside Cuba AND take his family with him.
Anyway, the Communist brother in the 1970s came to visit his brother in the US. At one point they went grocery shopping and his Communist brother became enraged and recriminatory. Why? He thought that the American brother had taken him to some sort of showplace American government installation. The Communist brother was simply in disbelief with the material abundance and refused offers to go to another grocery store etc. That anger broke their relationship for many years.
You see, it's one thing, Cuban government style, to have taken visiting journalists and politicians to a Potemkin showplace, and very much another to have done, what the Communist brother thought was being done to him, to your own flesh and blood. Hard lessons in my life at an early age....but great ones.
Russian macroeconomic management has been extremely impressive for some time now. They may have the soundest state finances of any major, developed economy.
It’s one of the things that should have made Western leaders skeptical that Putin had anything but a very firm grip on power: he has throughout his reign resisted the temptation to buy stability today by mortgaging tomorrow. Meanwhile, the US is running a 7% deficit during a period of full employment…
“Math Equity Story of Change” is easily the most unintelligible iteration of Wokism I’ve yet heard. Why do empires destroy themselves so lustfully at the end?
One thing you might want to look into is to is the coming demographic crisis - it is way worse than people realise More Births on twitter has covered this extensively.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
Beckles combines black with British. For some reason, PMC Americans have a hard-on for British accents, assuming competence, sophistication and intelligence when they otherwise should not.
This allows the PMC audience to virtue-signal and scrape before Brits, at the same time.
On time and cheerful as usual.
Never understood how US sanctions could be blamed for Cuba's terrible economy. There are numerous countries that don't sanction Cuba.
That Culture article was interesting. One thing I noticed was that family-focus entertainment was moved back in the American tv industry and more individual orientend content was produced in 1996-98.
Also, any Cuban leader that squirrels his assets away in the US is a fool. American vengefulness towards surrendered enemies is legendary, as shown by Libya and Syria, to name two.
In the aftermath of the plandemic, I have more faith in garage mechanics than doctors. Medicine has bigger problems than DEI. Be responsible for your own health.
An oil rich country needed to 'save money'. Ridiculous.
Black and hispanic doctors will most likely serve black and hispanic patients. If DEI supported doctors suck, medical outcomes will vary between ethnic groups thereby requiring more DEI.
As a writer, I disagree that culture is stuck. Even within my own niche of indie SF, there's great stuff coming out, and being read with delight by aficionados. Perhaps SF is something of a special case. We have to move at the speed of technology. But what really makes me happy is to see how many newer authors care about their craft as well as the tropes. Beautiful prose is timeless, and as indies, we're free to ignore the social justice rot.
Something similar is happening in music. Freed from the big labels, newer artists are quietly honing their craft in genres that would never have sold enough in the old days for them to even get picked up.
Writers moan about Amazon, and musicians moan about Spotify, with good reason, but cutting out the middleman has enabled real cultural flourishing--thanks to the technologies that make digital distribution possible.
Is anything similar happening in the visual arts? I don't know enough about that to say either way.
Funny spying the article you shared on medicine while in the midst of reading Ivan Illich's article, "Disabling Professions." I have a hypothesis for the com box: despite the advances in medicine, the underlying method of professionalism has actually never been based upon meritocracy, but the gaining of a distinct honor/rank among a society at large. I think that this honor/rank was once bestowed roughly meritocratically, but there were still flaws in the system. I think shifting our thinking from "bring me back my meritocracy" to "Oh! I guess merit was never the fundamental ground of the technical professions in the first place" would help us make sense of all the changes so rapidly happening. As a hint to why I have this opinion, note that when the reformer Flexner gained credence at roughly the same time as John Dewey was promoting his "scientific" vision of progress in education. Dewey didn't have science as his basis, but rather he had the of the arc of history at his disposal. In a similar vein, we can say that, despite the fact that Flexner was a good doctor and scientist (i.e., he did win on the scale of merit), the true source of his reforming power was not his knowledge, but his honor.
Again, hypothesis and food for thought. But I sure want it to be true, so that way I don't have to rethink my paradigm.
I was born in Cuba 68 years ago and came at age 9 to the US with grandparents. My parents were given permission to leave about 4 years later and my father was in forced labor camps because that's how the Cuban government met its productivity quota....but in the name of the revolution.
A relative had come over in 1960. He had little assistance and lived for a few years doing this and that jobs and also begging in the streets of NYC. He settled himself eventually. His brother in Cuba rose super high in the Communist party, enough so that he could travel outside Cuba AND take his family with him.
Anyway, the Communist brother in the 1970s came to visit his brother in the US. At one point they went grocery shopping and his Communist brother became enraged and recriminatory. Why? He thought that the American brother had taken him to some sort of showplace American government installation. The Communist brother was simply in disbelief with the material abundance and refused offers to go to another grocery store etc. That anger broke their relationship for many years.
You see, it's one thing, Cuban government style, to have taken visiting journalists and politicians to a Potemkin showplace, and very much another to have done, what the Communist brother thought was being done to him, to your own flesh and blood. Hard lessons in my life at an early age....but great ones.
Russian macroeconomic management has been extremely impressive for some time now. They may have the soundest state finances of any major, developed economy.
It’s one of the things that should have made Western leaders skeptical that Putin had anything but a very firm grip on power: he has throughout his reign resisted the temptation to buy stability today by mortgaging tomorrow. Meanwhile, the US is running a 7% deficit during a period of full employment…
“Math Equity Story of Change” is easily the most unintelligible iteration of Wokism I’ve yet heard. Why do empires destroy themselves so lustfully at the end?
Something to mention about the economic blockade organized by the hegemon?
One thing you might want to look into is to is the coming demographic crisis - it is way worse than people realise More Births on twitter has covered this extensively.