"At a time when men are falling behind their female peers on a number of fronts, fostering healthy, all-male environments may be the first step toward lifting them back up."
Which men are falling behind? WORKING CLASS MEN. Does Richard Reeves know any working class men? If he did, he wouldn't infantilize them the way he does.
Working class men are not suffering from a lack of men's bowling leagues - they are suffering from a lack of BREADWINNER WAGES.
It costs money to go out with the guys. And it costs money to impress a pretty working class girl, who considers staying home to raise her kids a luxury beyond her grasp. But working class men don't have money anymore, because jobs requiring physical ruggedness and strength are no longer valued.
Stop treating working class men like whiny babies and start taking their need to earn a manly wage seriously. That would help to rebuild communities and heal male loneliness and lack of self respect. Blue Collar Lives Matter.
Public sector unions are a trap for the Democratic Party. They are unpopular and in the case of the teachers unions, visibly crazy. But how to decouple from such a big part of the base. You have some Democrats at the local level (school boards) trying to do that but their tenure in office is unstable because the base strikes back. School boards have become a sort of farm team for other government offices when, on the merits, they are rivaled only by sheriffs as the most important local officials.
To fix this several things must be done. First, move school board elections to the general election dates rather than low turnout dates that are dominated by the unions. Appointed boards don't seem to preform any better than elected ones (e.g. Chicago) so that is a non-starter. Second, get some philanthropist with impeccable liberal credentials to drop a couple of billion on a School Board Academy. There is (or was) such a thing for aspiring Superintendents but it was national and the SBA needs to be organized locally and focused on recruiting as well as training board members. If it is privately funded, it can't be defunded by the unions though they will try to infiltrate it. Consideration should be given to paying board members and exempting them from term limits. I tend to think that these latter two ideas would cause more problems than they would fix but people should think about them. Term limits can be dealt with by a robust recruiting process that creates a succession chain. Unpaid boards can be ameliorated by the discipline to stay focused on major policies and adequately supervise the staff.
The key thing those articles reinforce is what we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the Chinese are ten steps ahead of us. Not just in terms of technological innovation, but in terms of internal control of the flow of media and information in their society in a way that will allow them to have actual control over their AI systems, while those systems will likely come to control the governments of the U.S. and the West more broadly.
They see Trump and his push for ‘deglobalization’ as their coupe-de-grace. As he and his movement more broadly pulls the U.S. inward, they get to grow their influence— through expansions of the Belt-and-Road initiatives, by taking the U.S.’s place as the dominant voice in key global organizations like the WHO, by accelerating their medical research in response to Trump’s freezing of NIH funds.
The Chinese people find him funny and call him 建国同志 - the comrade who helps construct China and Make China Great Again.
They spent thousands of years as the most advanced and most powerful civilization on the planet. They have a history of bureaucratic discipline that far outstrips anything in the history of the West, and it’s finally showing. They see this all as a return to the natural global order, and the end of Western hegemony. And it’s becoming clear, as the Age of AI emerges and the U.S. refuses to defend its global Allie’s, that they may soon be right.
Well, the definition is best expressed as a story--and it is a long story. It goes like this:
'Powerful' in that it, from an early stage, it had vastly superior state formation and administration capabilities, and technological supremacy in pretty much all arenas...metallurgy, military organization, hydraulic engineering, and--most importantly--the invention, far before anyone else, of the most crucial technological innovation of all time: paper.
All the above came into existence during a 2000 year period from about 1600 BCE to 250-ish CE, while the Greeks and the Romans lagged way behind, with dysfunctional tribal organizations and democracies that turned into a comparatively undeveloped imperial state in Rome and quickly broke apart, as well as a late coming to advanced writing and paper-making--all throughout, China maintaining a far more advanced and stable imperial system that became the hegemon of East Asia and the chief exporter of tech to the West (via the Silk Road) long before and long after the Romans, with the most complex writing system in the world.
Then, after a brief period of instability from 200-600 CE where Europe caught up a little bit, the latter quickly entered the dark ages, with warring states and slow technological development, as the Tang and Song dynasty maintained a vast superiority in that arena once again for the next 600 years--being the first to develop advanced movable type printing, magnetic compasses, complex handheld gunpowder weaponry...one could go on.
After that, the story becomes one of convergence, with Europe taking the edge by the 20th century. But that still amounts to millennia spent as the superior technological and military power. And that is why the Chinese view the hegemony of the West as a historical aberration, and the hegemony of the East as the norm. And they see the 21st century as the period when, because of the West's arrogance and ineptitude in dealing with the challenges of globalization, they get to reclaim the crown, through the AI arms race.
One ought not place their faith in Trump and MAGA to stop them.
"At a time when men are falling behind their female peers on a number of fronts, fostering healthy, all-male environments may be the first step toward lifting them back up."
Which men are falling behind? WORKING CLASS MEN. Does Richard Reeves know any working class men? If he did, he wouldn't infantilize them the way he does.
Working class men are not suffering from a lack of men's bowling leagues - they are suffering from a lack of BREADWINNER WAGES.
It costs money to go out with the guys. And it costs money to impress a pretty working class girl, who considers staying home to raise her kids a luxury beyond her grasp. But working class men don't have money anymore, because jobs requiring physical ruggedness and strength are no longer valued.
Stop treating working class men like whiny babies and start taking their need to earn a manly wage seriously. That would help to rebuild communities and heal male loneliness and lack of self respect. Blue Collar Lives Matter.
Public sector unions are a trap for the Democratic Party. They are unpopular and in the case of the teachers unions, visibly crazy. But how to decouple from such a big part of the base. You have some Democrats at the local level (school boards) trying to do that but their tenure in office is unstable because the base strikes back. School boards have become a sort of farm team for other government offices when, on the merits, they are rivaled only by sheriffs as the most important local officials.
To fix this several things must be done. First, move school board elections to the general election dates rather than low turnout dates that are dominated by the unions. Appointed boards don't seem to preform any better than elected ones (e.g. Chicago) so that is a non-starter. Second, get some philanthropist with impeccable liberal credentials to drop a couple of billion on a School Board Academy. There is (or was) such a thing for aspiring Superintendents but it was national and the SBA needs to be organized locally and focused on recruiting as well as training board members. If it is privately funded, it can't be defunded by the unions though they will try to infiltrate it. Consideration should be given to paying board members and exempting them from term limits. I tend to think that these latter two ideas would cause more problems than they would fix but people should think about them. Term limits can be dealt with by a robust recruiting process that creates a succession chain. Unpaid boards can be ameliorated by the discipline to stay focused on major policies and adequately supervise the staff.
The key thing those articles reinforce is what we’re seeing everywhere, which is that the Chinese are ten steps ahead of us. Not just in terms of technological innovation, but in terms of internal control of the flow of media and information in their society in a way that will allow them to have actual control over their AI systems, while those systems will likely come to control the governments of the U.S. and the West more broadly.
They see Trump and his push for ‘deglobalization’ as their coupe-de-grace. As he and his movement more broadly pulls the U.S. inward, they get to grow their influence— through expansions of the Belt-and-Road initiatives, by taking the U.S.’s place as the dominant voice in key global organizations like the WHO, by accelerating their medical research in response to Trump’s freezing of NIH funds.
The Chinese people find him funny and call him 建国同志 - the comrade who helps construct China and Make China Great Again.
They spent thousands of years as the most advanced and most powerful civilization on the planet. They have a history of bureaucratic discipline that far outstrips anything in the history of the West, and it’s finally showing. They see this all as a return to the natural global order, and the end of Western hegemony. And it’s becoming clear, as the Age of AI emerges and the U.S. refuses to defend its global Allie’s, that they may soon be right.
"They spent thousands of years as the most advanced and most powerful civilization on the planet."
Define "powerful."
Well, the definition is best expressed as a story--and it is a long story. It goes like this:
'Powerful' in that it, from an early stage, it had vastly superior state formation and administration capabilities, and technological supremacy in pretty much all arenas...metallurgy, military organization, hydraulic engineering, and--most importantly--the invention, far before anyone else, of the most crucial technological innovation of all time: paper.
All the above came into existence during a 2000 year period from about 1600 BCE to 250-ish CE, while the Greeks and the Romans lagged way behind, with dysfunctional tribal organizations and democracies that turned into a comparatively undeveloped imperial state in Rome and quickly broke apart, as well as a late coming to advanced writing and paper-making--all throughout, China maintaining a far more advanced and stable imperial system that became the hegemon of East Asia and the chief exporter of tech to the West (via the Silk Road) long before and long after the Romans, with the most complex writing system in the world.
Then, after a brief period of instability from 200-600 CE where Europe caught up a little bit, the latter quickly entered the dark ages, with warring states and slow technological development, as the Tang and Song dynasty maintained a vast superiority in that arena once again for the next 600 years--being the first to develop advanced movable type printing, magnetic compasses, complex handheld gunpowder weaponry...one could go on.
After that, the story becomes one of convergence, with Europe taking the edge by the 20th century. But that still amounts to millennia spent as the superior technological and military power. And that is why the Chinese view the hegemony of the West as a historical aberration, and the hegemony of the East as the norm. And they see the 21st century as the period when, because of the West's arrogance and ineptitude in dealing with the challenges of globalization, they get to reclaim the crown, through the AI arms race.
One ought not place their faith in Trump and MAGA to stop them.
Inflation will increase not decrease
I wish Canadas Trudeau would list the exact Canadian products that would cost Americans 25% more due to Trump 2.0 tariffs.