The Evil Plan That Backfired: China Fears Baby Bust

Disastrous. So now Beijing is begging women to have babies. Who could have guessed that its cruel one-child policy of social engineering would have resulted in chaos, misery, human rights abuses, and now a feared "demographic time bomb"?  Who indeed, except anybody with any sense at all.

2 Perspectives on American Working Class Voters

Take a look at these posts by a lay observer blogging and a law professor writing in the Harvard Business Review. Quite a bit of overlap.

The Professor and the Waitress: Thoughts on Life

Worth a read.

China to End One-Child Policy

Well, good, because it was a stupid, evil, destructive policy in both the short and long term that has caused untold amounts of human misery and social damage.

Quote of the Day: "Our Stock Arguments Are Lazy Stacks of Cliches"

A thoughtful liberal takes his fellows to task (as well he should, because he's totally correct).  Read the whole thing, but here's a piece of it:

Criticism of today’s progressives tends to use words like toxic, aggressive, sanctimonious, and hypocritical. I would not choose any of those. I would choose lazy. We are lazy as political thinkers and we are lazy as culture writers and we are lazy as movement builders. We ward off criticism of our own bad work by acting like that criticism is inherently anti-feminist or anti-progressive. We seem spoiled, which seems insane because everything is messed up and so many things are getting worse. I guess having a Democratic president just makes people feel complacent. Well, look: as a political movement we are in pathetic shape right now. We not only have no capacity to move people who don’t already share our worldview, we seem to have no interest in doing so. Our stock arguments are lazy stacks of cliches. We seem to want to confirm everything conservatives say about our inability to argue without calling other people racist. We can’t articulate why our vision of the future is better than the other side’s, and in fact many of us will tell you that it’s offensive to think that we have an obligation to educate others on that vision at all. We celebrate grassroots activist movements like Black Lives Matter, but we insult them by treating them as the same thing as hashtag campaigns, and we don’t build a broader left-wing political movement that could increase their likelihood of success. We spend all day, every day, luxuriating in how much better we are than other people, having convinced ourselves that the work of politics is always external, never internal. We have made politics synonymous with social competition. We’re a mess.

... One-liners don’t build a movement. Being clever doesn’t fix the world. Scoring points on Twitter doesn’t create justice. Jokes make nothing happen. We’re speeding for a brutal backlash and inevitable political destruction, if not in 2016 then 2018 or 2020. If you want to help avoid that, I suggest you invest less effort in trying to be the most clever person on the internet and more on being the hardest working person in real life. And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.

Via Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, who also notes: "The Democratic party's complete ideological breakdown in favor of party leaders fragging each other would be an amusing spectacle if so many of America's imminent problems didn't depend on working together."

Quote of the Day on Ferguson

Benjamin Watson of the New Orleans Saints has what is likely the best commentary yet.  You can also read it directly on his Facebook page.  For once in this unrest somebody has used social media constructively ... and done so with grace and wisdom.  (Take note, reprehensible sensationalist media outlets.)

The Great Chinese Exodus

"Should I stay or should I go?"

Blood Is Thicker Than Politics

A timely reminder that humanity should > politics.

Cheerios and Interracial Families

I totally didn't understand the controversy.  It's an adorable ad.  The family in it had a black dad and a white mom.  SO WHAT?  But apparently some jerks got their undies in a bunch about it online.  So here's the backlash to the backlash: the reminder that hey, interracial families exist.  Thank you: this has been your public service announcement.  In fact, a whole bunch of my friends have married someone of another race and are raising gorgeous interracial families.  Love should be color-blind.  Shall we also bring up the related topic of interracial adoptions?  Don't be a hater, man.

The Great British Class Calculator

Take this with a grain of salt, but I found it really amusing.  It said I was a member of the "emergent service workers":

This class group is financially insecure, scoring low for savings and house value, but high for social and cultural factors. According to the Great British Class Survey results, lots of people in this group: 

Are young
Enjoy a cultured social life
Rent their home - almost 90%

Princeton's MRS Degree

Oh, dear.  Then again, what do I know?  I'm a childless unmarried monster.

"Ghost Marriages" in China

Um ... ewwwwww.  When the term "grave robbing" appears in any article, the "ick" factor instantly multiplies by a factor of at least 10.  Imagine the response from feminists when they discover that women are being trafficked as objects and commodities even after they're dead!

China's "Little Emperors" Turning Out to Be Jerks

What a surprise ... NOT.  Hey, how's that one-child policy workin' out for ya?  Pffft!

The Children of China's Communist Elite

Of course, the entire fact that there is such a thing as a "Communist elite" is fodder for jokes.  Now the bigwigs are worrying that their pampered little plutocrat princelings will "devour the revolution."  Yummy, yummy revolution.  Pass the soy sauce.

Tiger Nation: Thoughts on Asian-American Success

Take a look.  Personally, I don't get why so many Asian-Americans vote left.  You'd think the age-old inculcated emphasis on education and hard work and personal responsibility would lead to more voting on the right or libertarian.  I can't believe that's just me, yeah?  I'll add too that race-based school admissions and affirmative action tends to harm Asian-Americans.  (You'll remember the latest go-round here.)

Et Tu, "Weekly Standard"?

As a childless unmarried monster, I was not amused by this.   

Neither "economics" nor "culture" are the driving reasons behind my (apparently offensive and civilization-imperilling) personal lack of mini-Minervas. You know, some people don't have kids because - for just two examples - health issues are in play or they hold the quaint old-fashioned conviction that they want to get married first.  It's not, in that unfortunate wording in the piece, that we simply don't "bother to have children at all."  That kind of makes us childless monsters sound like self-absorbed dirtbags, and I jolly well do not appreciate that.

This whole thing might depress some people, but it frankly just ticks me off.  Hey, people, how about you walk a mile in my shoes  awesome high heels before you presume to judge me?   It's another round of modern socio-politics' favorite song: "You Played Nicely and Tried to Be Responsible?  You're A SUCKER."  The coda here: "Oh, and You're Evil Now Too."  Thanks, people, thanks a lot.  That really helps.  Pfffft.  Meanwhile, Feminist Ryan Gosling continues to amuse:

Call Me Maybe.

China's "Leftover Women"

Well, I had said before that China's social engineering was going to blow up in its own face, so who's surprised that it is?  I've posted before about the "Sheng Nu," and the New York Times has a new piece about the phenomenon: "China's Leftover Women."  Wow, if that isn't a shot in the self-esteem, girls, I don't know what is.  Whoohoo, Childless Unmarried Monsters R Us!  Pfffffft.  Bonus: Did you know that according to China's Women's Federation, our expiration date is age 27?  Not, of course, that I ever give any credence to any of the social agitprop that comes out of there.

Newsflash: China's One-Child Policy Is Wreaking Social Havoc

To which headline I say ... WELL, DUH!  What the hell did you think was going to happen?  While we're at this, let me once more bang my drum about the horrifying human cost of this entire enterprise, including forced abortions on unwilling women, the selling of babies ...

Well, I'm Offended That You're Offended. Get Back to Work!

Hmmm.  Well, I do tell my students flat out that at one point or another in my class, they are going to be offended, so they should just get over it and get over themselves.  People are always offended when I say this - which is exactly my point.  They're always stunned by the idea that they could be exposed to things they personally don't happen to like and that I don't care.  This related bit has a fabulous anecdote about those annoying, sanctimonious, brittle, humorless people who presume to speak for a group of which they happen to be part:

About thirty years ago one of my cousins, a novice within a religious order, brought some of his confreres to a family summer party. One of the friars chose to take offense at some trivial chatter, and presumed to stand there and do it “as a Religious of the Roman Catholic church!” 

To which my cousin, walking by, responded, “oh, lah-di-fecking-dah, so am I” and shoved him into the pool.

PERFECT.

Thoughts on North Carolina: "How to win a culture war and lose a generation"

Here is a pretty darn sensible blog post about the recent uproar about North Carolina's voting to amend its state constitution.  Here's a piece of it:

Despite the fact that the North Carolina law already holds that marriage in the eyes of state is only between a man and a woman, an amendment was put on the ballot to permanently ban same-sex marriage in the state constitution. The initiative doesn’t appear to change anything on a practical level, (though some are saying it may have unintended negative consequences on heterosexual relationships), but seems to serve primarily as an ideological statement. 

... an expensive, destructive, and impractical ideological statement.  

... it should be clear that amendments like these needlessly offend gays and lesbians, damage the reputation of Christians, and further alienate young adults—both Christians and non-Christian—from the Church.  

So my question for those evangelicals leading the charge in the culture wars is this: Is it worth it? 

Besides, I don't like the idea of tampering with constitutions, period.  Also a side effect of culture wars: everybody comes out looking and feeling worse, and everybody comes out more radicalized in one direction or the other - and this makes everything even worse than they were in the beginning.