Tuesday 19th of March 2024

the bourgeois decadence...

stonehenge

Here we study the way the bourgeoisie has shaped the Western world into a deliberate mess so that some people can make more money than you and me. 

 

First let's see some opposite views from Gilbert T. Sewall

 

The sciences are able to devalue moral judgment and empathy more easily than the humanities. That is not a good thing, as faculties drained of benevolence might be monsters, but there are right answers in science, at least most of the time. The sciences can protect their integrity through built-in empiricism, proofs, and replication. The humanities do not enjoy such innate protection. For students who want a baccalaureate credential, but who don’t want to work too hard, the humanities and social sciences offer fail-free courses of study that the hard sciences do not.

Not all able students think crafting a philosophy of life is an unaffordable luxury. As University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson’s popularity demonstrates, many youth remain starved for models of thought and action. These include those forcibly dispossessed of once hallowed traditions, possibly ridiculed if Christian, tainted by ancestry, cast as unduly privileged. But perennial wisdom that flows from Athens and Jerusalem is not where the action is, according to most humanities faculties, unless it’s there to be flogged and ridiculed, or re-purposed to serve contemporary polemics. The weaponized humanities offer students little except angst and ressentiment, which is what a few seek—but not many—and probably not the most discerning, well-adjusted, or personable among them.



The ars liberalis prevailed over theology in the 19th century and flourished at American colleges, designating the learning that free men required. This matrix of knowledge long informed the nation’s discourse, civic principles, and moral examples. Once, in better circles, and among U.S. statesmen, educators, and clergy, familiarity with classical and modern markers was simply expected. Whether minds so furnished will be sought in the future remains uncertain. The timeless might endure and the faddish fade away, but there are no guarantees. 

Gilbert T. Sewall is co-author of After Hiroshima: The United States Since 1945and editor of The Eighties: A Reader.


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/twilight-of-the-humanities/

 

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And now some redress from Claire Potter:

A second perspective does not argue against the fact of this democratization, but against the notion that these new university clients needed the humanities any less than the old ones did. While this is part of the language that liberals speak today — that the effect of the humanities is timeless, and not quantifiable, conservatives tend to view this sentiment as a loose commitment to classic knowledge.  Also in 2015, following the release of The Heart of the Matter, a report issued by the Academy of Arts and Sciences that year, Gilbert T. Sewall grumbled in the National Review (October 13, 2015) that the humanities had been stripped of their cultural authority. It was not the number of college enrollments that represented a crisis, it was that the humanities’ stature as knowledge had been badly reduced by “lofty” and “empty language” that was designed to reassure the public that the humanities were not elitist.

By not even meeting its conservative critics part way, Sewall argued, the liberal authors of the report had also ignored the reason that the humanities’ intellectual authority had diminished over time: humanities faculties had retreated from their special place as guardians of elite culture. “The looming cul-de-sacs of postmodernism, diversity, and revisionism identified by Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch, and Daniel Bell a generation ago? Not here,” Sewall noted.

No hint of the interior life or refinements of character, morality, and ethics that have bound humanistic thought since the Renaissance sullies these bright and glossy pages. Appreciation or even acknowledgment of classical antiquity, European philosophy, Christian theology, or Anglo-American law or literature is absent. Western civilization is not “the heart of the matter.” Plato and Aristotle, Ovid and the Old Testament, Copernicus and Newton? Gibbon, Johnson, or Austen? Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche? The Tao Te Ching? No, nothing.

Was Sewall’s point merely the advancement of cultural elitism? Only partially. A quarter century after the attacks on Great Books courses at places like Columbia and, most famously, Stanford University, liberals had simply declared victory in the culture wars without actually stating what had been won, why, or how that victory represented a preservation of humanities disciplines rather than their displacement as core university curricula.

In contrast, intellectual historian Tim Lacy has argued that the clearest relevance of the humanities is concrete and real: a humanities education, whether a student majors in a humanities discipline or not, infuses other forms of education with greater value. As Lacy notes in a 2016 blog post:

If corporations and businesses are primarily concerned with the exchange of value, and measuring commodities for the purpose of exchange, it is the humanists who help evaluate the values being exchanged. Businesses, smart ones that is, already recognize the value of humanistic and liberal arts thinking in what they do. They already hire liberal arts majors in various positions. Those businesses know creativity and acts of creation precede exchange and measurement.

Beyond creativity, humanists have the ability to invest certain existing commodities with value. The fields of sales and marketing know this. Do businesses know that humanists could, or should, be key team members in those endeavors? A liberal arts education inculcates the ability to discern value and explain it. That education provides the powers of persuasion needed to communicate areas of value to the uninformed, to the value-seekers.

An education the humanities provides the breadth of vision that also matters in leadership positions. The liberal arts provide one with a sense of the complexity, context, and contingency that are inherent in human relations. A good leader will think in those terms while managing a team. Those judgments negotiate the meaning of projects for a team, and add value to the institution.

This, I think, is an interesting counterpoint to Sewall’s argument, which implies that the value of the humanities is lodged the preservation of a set of cultural standards, priorities, and preservation agendas that stand outside of value systems altogether, and thus cannot be measured against the emergence of new knowledge product or collapsed into new forms of education sanctioned and commodified by the university for the benefit of an evolving professional middle class.

How can we have a crisis in the humanities if we all agree — foundations, federal agencies, liberals and conservatives — that the humanities are a core practice in which we are willing to invest? In which case — is the crisis in the humanities simply another way of avoiding a deeper look at the crisis of the university itself?

Claire Potter is professor of history at The New School, and executive editor of Public Seminar. You can follow her on Twitter.




read more:
http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/02/are-the-humanities-really-in-crisis/


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Gus the sage elder (old kook):

Being bourgeois/middle class….

Being bourgeois demands an effort/submission in conformism in regard to the Sunday roast, the value of work — strict sexual preferences and family practices — while enjoying the intellectual superiority of being white/male... Easy piece of shit as long as we accept the value of "sin"....

Rightfully, history has hailed the bourgeois as a creator of wealth. Behind this façade of course lies the artificial structure of hierarchy in which the rulers (kings, queens, despots, emperors, presidents) need the bourgeoisie to pay taxes and the bourgeoisie needs workers on low pay, to make a buck. The bourgeois lick the noblemen's arses, while the workers resent the lot — presently the "Yellow Vests"... As already mentioned on this site, The system became complexed by the invention of factory work versus toiling in the fields of potatoes — while mechanisation and computerisation of work elevated some bourgeois to super rich status while other middle class citizens have been struggling since, trying to sell obsolete and artisanal products on diminishing local markets, overtaken by cheaper options on Amazonian outlets. 

Meanwhile the “social arts” (humanities) struggled to make sense of new concept of knowledge such as sciences. “Social arts" had long been based on the idea of god and, progressively since the 18th century, this idea has been vanishing. This was the core belief of the bourgeoisie in Europe. This belief encapsulated the need for “colonialism” to teach “inferior" races the way life should be lived — especially as slave, to provide cheap labour to the enrichment of the bourgeoisie. Mind you, the bourgeoisie was competing against itself through the various countries of the West. The English bourgeoisie was competing against the French bourgeoisie, and so forth. 

A lot of cash was being made though and everyone was relatively happy — all under the umbrella of god, the only one, to give us our daily buck and our right to forgive those who tried to revolt and whom we crushed… So, this is what we believed. It was all based on “power is knowledge”… and god was power. 

Recently, some trodden minorities managed to get “equality”. Gays and Muslims entered the bourgeois context grudgingly accredited by the bourgeois, while women still struggle to break through their “inferiority” status. That humanities presently struggle or not in universities is a good thing. Humanities — having long been under the spell of ancient philosophers and powerful religious mobs — need to do a massive leap into quantum mechanics (non-mechanical discreet increments) in order to find a new pathway to inspire a better existence for most humans without destroying individuality nor imagination. A big call, I admit.

I sometimes despair that there won’t be the equivalent of a single rebellious Gus Leonisky in the young Millenniums who have been raised on fake milk and twitter-feed rather learn to swim in the sewers. But I hope they can’t find their own feet during this confused transition between the old and the new — and find a few interesting ideas from Gus. 

The unsustainable bourgeois comforts have been responsible for many problems such as dreadful wars and global warming. Full stop.... We are barely recovering from the wars… We still don't understand the warming planet. Meanwhile, the young Millenniums will have to fight their own way through our crap, to create their own peace and sustainability. In Gus’ glass-ball prediction, this can only be achieved by a powerful understanding of solid sciences (reality) and arts (illusions/imagination) in order to sustain the next, in a sea of multiplicity (which we're trying to "globalise") of social constructs in which individuals have to become more individual, better educated and less "negatively" aggressive. 

On this level, Claire Potter is closer to the point than Gilbert T. Sewall who seems to start well but soon back-pedals on his bourgeois bicycle, yet there is still a long way for them both to accept that sciences can create a sustainable and better “morality” for humans, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence — which the religious mobs fear. I believe AI will guide us to better things, in a really nihilistic universe while minimising pain for all and improving happiness. 

Suddenly through sciences, this senseless universe opens up its so far misunderstood constructs which are meaningless but can be understood... We already know, but we don't want to know... We prefer the old crap.

The bourgeoisie (the middle class) oscillates (is divided) between the capitalist-ish selfish position and the social-conscience-ish compasionate-ish, to a point. Both settings create different level of poverty in the lower echelons of society — and in other cultures. Charity thus is a hindrance to a really “equal” opportunity which is rarely equal considering that the middle class and its clarions (the media) control the mechanics of employment and of “doing things” — most of which are presently contrary to sustainability and contrary to caring about the planet. Dig baby burn...

And in between all these levels of social constructs, there are ages in development and understanding: kids who are learning the limits of caring and stuffing it up, young adults full of hang-ups and testosterone, adults with their prejudicial barbecues and oldies who have been relying on dead people (philosophers/artists) to tell them about how good or great they are/were doing. The whole thing is a mess and somewhat chaotic. 

Enters that Canadian filosofer, Jordan B. Peterson, who has the perfect answers with his 12 steps to avoid chaos… It’s nice capitalist neoconservative semi-religious bullshit, of course, but it works for some people, especially helping the depressed compassionate bourgeois to become happy selfish bastards.

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? A renowned psychologist answers hard questions with a unique combination of ancient wisdom and clinical experience. 

Jordan Peterson's work as a clinical psychologist has reshaped the modern understanding of personality, and now he has become one of the world's most popular public thinkers, with his lectures on topics ranging from the Bible to romantic relationships drawing tens of millions of viewers. In an era of polarizing politics, echo chambers and trigger warnings, his startling message about the value of personal responsibility and the dangers of ideology has resonated around the world.


In this book, he combines ancient wisdom with decades of experience to provide twelve profound and challenging principles for how to live a meaningful life, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today. Gripping, thought-provoking and deeply rewarding, 12 Rules for Life offers an antidote to the chaos in our lives - eternal truths applied to our modern problems.


As soon as someone mentions "eternal truths”, you have to apply the bullshitometer and see the needle go bezerko. Driving a bulldozer to bury Jordan Peterson's book would be a better way to feel better than reading it… But to anyone their medicine — old or new…

Even the Reader’s digest gets on the action with “The power of FAKE PILLS”. 

Yes we (all) know, the power of fake news, especially that which has been spread under the religious spell, and has kept us “happy”, until today when we have no idea what “happy” means. This is the major problem for "humanities".

This is where we need some reconstruction, using the power of sciences…

We cannot go wrong by fiddling scientifically with this — than accepting the rubbish we’ve been mucking about for the last 4,000 years… Actually with sciences we now can establish a better value for the next of who we are going to be than having been god's forsaken sinning children.

First we need to fix up the MAJOR fuck-ups such as global warming — but no-one wants to listen to the full problem — and the millennials are being coached silly-dumb with more tweeter-feed… Can someone turn the plug off their phones and let reality enter the room between their ears, please? Ha, it's okay... reality is already on the little screens of the matrix...
We're fucked...

Gus the Elder
your local drunk.

mucking about for the last 4,000 years...

Picture at top by Gus Leonisky:

"Forgotten Purpose"... (Stonehenge)

 

scratching the veneer of the bourgeois culture...

In 2017, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax stepped outside the shrinking perimeter of permissible thought when she wrote a short essay in defense of “bourgeois culture.” Wax drew campus-wide censure for “assertions of white cultural superiority” and remains a controversial figure at the Ivy League school.

What did Wax say that was so heinous? She praised traditional marriage with children in wedlock, hard work, patriotism, and good conduct as antidotes to social pathology. “If the bourgeois cultural script—which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach—cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all,” she warned.

While this might seem obvious, the social assumptions that have driven historical America are on the defensive in centers of power and authority. Even modest efforts to safeguard time-honored practices and values meet violent antagonism. The entertainment-media-tech complex pitches the post-bourgeois replacement script nonstop. After decades of aggravation, many purists have surrendered. They say live and let live. They don’t believe this for one second but are exhausted by assaults on their judgment and character.

Declaring that “all cultures are not equal,” Wax violated the first principle of the replacement script. Condemning babies born out of wedlock, trans-activism on aircraft carriers, or menacing crazies panhandling at the local 7-Eleven is very uncool—possibly actionable. Insisting on standards of speech, dress, or behavior in public spaces might lead to charges of harassment or employment trouble. All-purpose smears like racist or hater can ruin lives.

 

Read more of GILBERT T. SEWALL:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-diminishing-authori...

 

Read from top.

The only authority of the bourgeois culture is to applaud the Empire construction by whatever means as long as the wars are declared "moral"... The rest of being "bourgeois" is to be boringly suitably predictable while praying to a god that does not exist — while tourmenting minorities or giving them the charitable nudge that keeps them in their quiet and unseen stations...

We, in the West, are on the cusp of inventing a new social norm for ourselves, but we are unable to grasp the importance of the rebirth away from the old crap. 

see also:

 

The Ape That Understood the Universe, Steve Stewart-Williams, Cambridge University Press, 387 pages

Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, Robert Plomin, The MIT Press, 280 pages

It’s possible for humans to change. In recent centuries we’ve lived as hunter-gatherers, as farmers, as factory workers, and as screen-absorbed technology drones—among much else. Different cultures do things in radically different ways even with the same technology. Specific individuals, too, change over the course of their lives and act differently in different environments.

And yet there are limits. Radical efforts at social engineering have resulted in starvation and mass killings. While we don’t like to think about it, some people seem naturally capable of things that others simply are not. As a result, one of the biggest questions in politics is how greatly we can reorganize and equalize society without bashing our heads into the limits of nature.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/social-engineering-does...

A bit glib but getting some point across...

tax cut for the middle class? you're dreaming...


by Stephen Lendman

The Trump promoted GOP scam was all about benefitting corporate interests and high-net-worth households.

Wage hikes attributed to tax cuts have been mostly hype. Big business gained hundreds of billions of dollars from the law - used mostly for stock buybacks and generous handouts to executives, workers getting shortchanged. 

Thousands got pink slips. The federal deficit is ballooning by over a trillion dollars annually, social benefits slashed to help pay for the tax cuts, a transparent wealth transfer scheme.

Analyzing the tax cut scam a year later, Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) said the following:

Corporations were the big winners. So were high-net worth households. "(S)old as a boon to the (disappearing) middle-class,(cuts) primarily benefit(ted) the wealthy."

"By 2027 when the law is fully implemented, 83% of the tax cuts will go to the top 1%." Little was done to end profit shifting to offshore tax shelters.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, about $300 annually is moved abroad to avoid taxes.

Corporations with accumulated offshore earnings got "a tax cut of over $400 billion on those profits."

The GOP legislation encourages offshoring of US jobs and production by taxing foreign profits of American companies "at half the rate on domestic earnings."

The so-called "small-business" tax cut has gone mostly to "wealthy owners of big firms. Most owners of pass-through businesses-sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations-are now generally allowed to exclude 20% of their business income from taxation," ATF explained.

By 2024, 60% of the tax breaks will go to America's 1%. The weakened estate tax widens the wealth gap. David Stockman estimates the great GOP tax cut heist will increase the federal debt to around $35 trillion by 2028.

Today it's $22 trillion, rising exponentially. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin lied claiming the tax cuts would pay for themselves through through increased economic growth generating more tax revenues from lower rates.

"(I)nstead the deficit is increasing considerably due to the tax cuts," said ATF - mostly because corporate tax revenue dropped by about one-third, almost $100 billion year-over-year since the December 2017 law took effect.

The GOP plan for checking the spiraling debt is by cutting social services for ordinary Americans - notably Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Increased corporate profits went mostly to shareholders and corporate executives, not workers.

Trump lied saying corporate America would use the windfall tax breaks by giving the average US household a $4,000 pay raise, "shower(ing) workers with bonuses," along with generating "massive investments."

A year later, "corporations are mostly using their actual and anticipated tax cuts and their rising profits to buy back their own stock, which principally further enriches wealthy shareholders and top corporate executives," ATF explained.

According to its database, "$853 billion in share repurchases" were announced in 2018 - "120 times more" than workers got in pay increases last year, a slim "$7.1 billion" for the entire 128.5 million US workforce - about $55 per worker if my math is right.

Contrary to Trump's promise, "worker wages are getting no boost from the tax cuts," said ATF. "(O)nly 4.4%" of them received a monetary benefit ascribed to the measure.

Year-over-year-through December, inflation-adjusted "average real hourly wages for all workers rose just 0.8%, while average weekly wages actually fell, because employees were working fewer hours," ATF explained, adding:

"Special interests are the GOP tax law's big winners" - what was predicted before the law was enacted at yearend 2017. 

Polls show most Americans know they were scammed. Benefits gotten are too meager to matter, and it gets worse. Millions of US workers expecting tax refunds either aren't getting them or will receive much less than they anticipated. 

Last week, the IRS said around 30 million US taxpayers will owe the agency money, three million more than before the GOP tax cut.

Average refunds going out are down 8.4% year-over-year so far. The American Institute of CPAs vice president Edward Karl said "(t)here are going to be a lot of unhappy people over the next month. Taxpayers want a large refund." Millions will be sorely disappointed.

Last April, Trump falsely said not only will Americans "save a lot of money," but the filing process will be simplified on "one page, one card," adding:

"You'll have a nice, simple form next year. This will be the last year (under the old system). So take pictures of it and enjoy it. This is the last time you'll have to file a very complex and big tax form. It will be much easier starting next April."

Tax code changes made things more complicated, along with ordinary Americans benefitting little from the great GOP tax cut heist.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home - Stephen Lendman). Contact at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.


See more at http://www.pravdareport.com/world/142251-tax_cut_heist/

the bourgeois debt...

Congress has stared into the abyss of debt, and the abyss has stared back. The national debt just topped $22 trillion for the first time ever, yet barely a peep was heard in the halls of the Capitol. The debt-to-GDP ratio has more than doubled in less than 20 years, rising from 33 percent in 2000 to 78 percent today. Within 10 years, it will reach 93 percent, the highest level since just after World War II.

While currently the federal budget deficit is around $900 billion, beginning in 2022, it will exceed $1 trillion per year, every year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Over the next decade, deficits are projected to fluctuate between 4.1 percent and 4.7 percent of GDP, well above the average over the past 50 years.

Yet instead of discussing how we will afford what we are already slated to spend, Congress is debating how much more government should add to that. The national conversation is focused on Medicare for all, how many billions should be allocated for a wall, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal. Far from reforming our out-of-control spending, these policies would only cost more.

Based on the muted public response, you’d never know that a mere decade ago, the national debt was half of what it is today, or that the debt is projected to keep up its exponential rate of growth as the U.S. population ages. Even if Congress were to vote against every dollar of new spending, the debt held by the public will still be 150 percent of the total economy by 2047. And by the looks of this new spending bill, it will reach that ratio far sooner than that.

 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ignoring-americas-abyss...

 

Read from top.

as long as you think "like us"...

 

The changing face of the liberal creed from the ancient world to today

The Lost History of Liberalism challenges our most basic assumptions about a political creed that has become a rallying cry—and a term of derision—in today’s increasingly divided public square. Taking readers from ancient Rome to today, Helena Rosenblatt traces the evolution of the words “liberal” and “liberalism,” revealing the heated debates that have taken place over their meaning.

In this timely and provocative book, Rosenblatt debunks the popular myth of liberalism as a uniquely Anglo-American tradition centered on individual rights. She shows that it was the French Revolution that gave birth to liberalism and Germans who transformed it. Only in the mid-twentieth century did the concept become widely known in the United States—and then, as now, its meaning was hotly debated. Liberals were originally moralists at heart. They believed in the power of religion to reform society, emphasized the sanctity of the family, and never spoke of rights without speaking of duties. It was only during the Cold War and America’s growing world hegemony that liberalism was refashioned into an American ideology focused so strongly on individual freedoms.

Today, we still can’t seem to agree on liberalism’s meaning. In the United States, a “liberal” is someone who advocates big government, while in France, big government is contrary to “liberalism.” Political debates become befuddled because of semantic and conceptual confusion. The Lost History of Liberalism sets the record straight on a core tenet of today’s political conversation and lays the foundations for a more constructive discussion about the future of liberal democracy.

Helena Rosenblatt is professor of history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her many books include Liberal Values: Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion and Thinking with Rousseau: From Machiavelli to Schmitt. She lives in New York City.

 

Read more:

https://press.princeton.edu/titles/13258.html

 

 

Read from top.

 

 

In Australia, a "liberal" is often an ultra-CONservative with religious underpants... which defines the bourgeoisie. The "Liberal" Party was so name sarcastically by its founder, Mr Menzies, to fool the punters about its purposes...

 

Note that Rousseau was a sexist bastard...

words of combat...

Despite a recent uptick in physical and vocal attacks against members of the press, US President Donald Trump revved up his rhetoric and singled out the New York Times in a Wednesday tweet, dubbing the paper “a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” in response to its latest viral piece.

bourgeois NYT...

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/cartoons/201902211072608829-trump-calls-nyt-enem...

 

 

Read from top.

the bourgeois neatness...

Everybody, sorry I’ve been out of touch all day. I had to go out of town unexpectedly today, and have been away from the keys. One of the nice things about this blog is when I don’t post when people think I should, folks start writing to ask if I’m okay. Some good news: in February, this here blog received over one million unique visitors — the twelfth month in a row we’ve done this. Overall, TAC had another great month as well. Thank you!

Here’s a fascinating story from The Atlantic: a map of American political prejudice.Guess where researchers found that the most politically prejudiced people live, and who they are? Read on:

In general, the most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves. This finding aligns in some ways with previous research by the University of Pennsylvania professor Diana Mutz, who has found that white, highly educated people are relatively isolated from political diversity. They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives, as Mutz describes in her book Hearing the Other Side.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.

We see this dynamic in the heat map. In some parts of the country, including swaths of North Carolina and upstate New York, people still seem to give their fellow Americans the benefit of the doubt, even when they disagree. In other places, including much of Massachusetts and Florida, people appear to have far less tolerance for political difference. They may be quicker to assume the worst about their political counterparts, on average.

White, highly educated people are the most politically intolerant in the entire country. These are the people who congregate in Boston, New York, and Washington. I would love to see the demographic breakdown of who the decision-makers in major-media newsrooms are, as well as in other US institutions. We know from other demographic data that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to be liberal.

Look at this finding: “the most politically intolerant county in America appears to be Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes the city of Boston.” 

Read more:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/educated-white-liberals-i...

 

in the neatness loop forever...

 

I don’ t know why but I did not take my usual ration of reading material when I had to escort my friend Jo to the hospital. He needed someone to walk the few hundred metres from his place to the RPA. There, while waiting for him to have his appraisal about his diabetes, I took a couple of mags off the rack in the waiting room. One was MW and the other was WW, I think…

 

I had lost track of what these rubbish publications did publish and I got a full dose of what J-Lo had been up to which by the end of the article was not much apart from still being alive; about Bad Pitt and his divorced women fighting each others for his cash; about Maria’s new squeeze, a dancer she hired as a back-drop after having dropped the previous dancing one, while both dancers could be gay; massive ink splattering injections of all the Jenners and Kardashians who seemed to have been breeding like sneaky foxes while maintaining their extraordinary curves and doing stuff designed to make sure we don't forget who they are; a lot of middle-aged-middle-aged models all having had tits, bum, face and nose cosmetic surgery plus lipo; not to mention a hell of a lot of new kids on the blocks to stardom with acting careers still probable as long as they spread their legs over Brad in a D-grade movie; while the oldies, the Goldies, now grandmas shouting from behind the doctor and the midwife to their giving-birth progeny to spread their legs; and a multitude of dead stars who are already on their tenth uplifts in the cellulite department. Oh fuck… This really hurt my brains. Did we really fight WW2 for this shit to appear on the newsstands?


This was as if I had been hit with the bottom-half, and I mean the bottom, of the bible on how to be a rich decadent bourgeois with a neat loony pigeon loft for brains…

Then, poor old Jo had to go to a specialist for his varicose veins, across the road and I was hit by the neat essence of the bourgeoisie while reading more stuff from the Mag-rack…
Apparently, The Economist runs a side mag called 1843. (https://www.1843magazine.com). It’s about lifestyle. 
Lifestyle give me the shits... 
Suddenly I felt as if I got it all wrong and did things that never could maximise my lifestyle as it should be. This is the neat side of the bourgeoisie where everything is precise, tailored and impeccable. The issue I got my mittens on was semi-apologetic about having placed a neat portrait of Megan Markle on the cover, while the inside article with a fine neat typography and neat graphics told the neat bourgeois reading the neat stuff that the Royal Family was on the decline, but got saved by Megan. Very neatly written and boring as batshit — and if you know the bats in Sydney, you really know what batshit is when you see it the next morning on your outdoor furniture.
Even the art and the styled photography in various neat articles were so perfect that they were dead. May as well read the Mercedes Benz Magazine and feel part of the elite, than read about this neat middle class stuck in the neatness loop forever.

I must be getting too old for this neat blancmange, where ideas are cultivated under neat artificial bourgeois blue light...  
Next time I go with Jo, I will bring my own books on sciences and politics — and look like a learned idiot. This would be better though.


Read from top.

this beats basket weaving...

Kylie Jenner, the youngest member of the Kardashian-Jenner American reality TV family, has become the world’s youngest billionaire at the age of just 21.

Jenner, who grew up under the watch of TV cameras filming Keeping Up with the Kardashians, was on Tuesday admitted to the “nine-zero” fortune club by Forbes. The business magazine ranked Jenner as the world’s 2,057th richest person. She became a billionaire two years younger than the Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who took the title at the age of 23 in 2008.

“I didn’t expect anything. I did not foresee the future,” Jenner said in an interview with Forbes. “But [the recognition] feels really good. That’s a nice pat on the back.”

Jenner’s fortune comes from Kylie Cosmetics, the makeup company she runs largely from her iPhone, with the help of her mother Kris. Forbes estimated that the cosmetics company, which is 100%-owned by Jenner, made $360m (£274m) in sales last year.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2019/mar/05/kylie-jenner-makeup-make...

 

Read from top. Bourgeois and cash makes a great symbiosis... but the real point is that considering the free advertising these guys get in the awful popular women magazines for showing their butt cracks, this is not surprising.