Happy Birthday to Buck Showalter, 56.
A little good stuff:
1. Nathaniel Beck on youth unemployment and the NYT op-ed page. At the Monkey Cage.
2. The 1884 presidential election. By county. The not-quite-yet Solid South. Great stuff from Erik Loomis.
3. And Dan Larison on "expantionist" Russia, Iran, and others
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
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Second link is wrong.
ReplyDeleteThanks -- fixed.
ReplyDeleteIf you guys are still interested in the Kevin Williamson fiasco feel free to check out Ed Killgore's take down of Williamson's essay. I think enough has been said about the glaring errors that Williamson has made from a historical standpoint and from a political science standpoint as well as the massive inconsistencies his piece contained. It struck me as an example of the tendency of conservative public intellectuals to embrace "sideism" about big complex questions and issues. You see this in the extreme with the Trayvon Martin incident where almost overnight many conservative commentators on TV and the internet embraced those hacked pictures from Trayvon's facebook as some sort of partisan evidence of argumentative superiority, as in: "look he flicked off the camera, see Zimmerman was right, what a great victory for my side! Take that Democrat Party!" Thus proving that once there were racists in the Democratic Party becomes some great triumph even if one of the main goals of GOP state legislators all over the country six decades after the March on Washington is passing laws to make it harder for minorities to vote. That said, I think Richard Ben Kramer sums up what happened quite well in regards to this enormous change in American politics when describing how Strom Thurmond went from being a Democrat to a Republican when "he felt the great wind of racial change on his own ancient and wattled neck."
ReplyDeleteoops here's the linke: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_05/civil_rights_revisionism037520.php
Delete"... embraced those hacked pictures... "
DeleteI know the liberal memory hole has already been wedged open on this issue, but it's TOO EARLY. We all still remember ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and HuffPo lies and how liberals responded to them. Wait a few months before you go off on one or two pictures that were posted and then rescinded by Malkin, et al within a day or two.
Threadjacking for a great reason:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/22/report-robots-stack-human-professors-teaching-intro-stats
If this can be repeated and scales, then GOODBYE COLLEGE DEBT and a million other problems. And liberal professors can learn to do real work!
Backyard, many universities are moving in the direction you advocate by putting more of their classes online. That may not be quite the same as taught by a robot, though many students may not know the difference. (Some, such as the University of Phoenix, are almost entirely online). As you suggest, this helps with cost, but it probably isn't the panacea you imagine. These are terrible times for brick-and-mortar grads to get jobs; the online schools are apparently far worse at job placement. I suspect the explanation is as follows:
ReplyDeleteSuppose you are a bright-eyed young student in Professor XRT3000-R's Intro Stats class. You think you've got a penchant for math, so you approach the professor about possible careers. Specifically, you wonder if the professor has any connections at the big insurance companies in town, where you wish to start a career as an actuary.
Professor XRT3000-R's lights flash on, it makes a whirring sound, and soon it spits out a sheet with the CareerBuilder sites for the six biggest insurance companies in town. You say thank you, but add that you could have done that; what you're looking for is names with whom to network!
Professor XRT3000-R's lights flash again, more whirring, and this time it spits at you the list of C-level executives from a reference site like manta.com. You thank the machine again, but emphasize you were looking for someone to contact, like a phone number. The machine whirs once more, and resubmits the manta printout, only this time with the main corporate switchboard number highlighted.
You take your leave then, and knowing that your mission is hopeless, you sigh and realize that you are fated to return to the summer job you hated, the one you swore you'd never return to once you had a degree; you know, stamping widgets on the shop floor of the family's backyard foundry.
Your story is implausible; only the communists were nutty enough to put foundries in backyards.
DeleteI'm actually a fan of the backyard foundry; it has a certain appealing Kiva Microfinance vibe to it. Sure, the big soulless corporate foundries would kill you on scale, but as little guy entrepreneurship goes, you could probably do a lot worse.
DeleteAs an exercise in government-induced cargo-culting, running a backyard foundry is at least funnier than most liberal programs that confuse correlation and causation. I guess. But don't be lumping Kiva in with the commies; they're the only charity designed to STRENGTHEN capitalism.
Delete