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| Economy |
| The Human Condition |
| 2017-11-03 |
| [AccordingToHoyt] ...Yesterday just before going to bed, I read an article linked from Instapundit about poverty in the Appalachia. Of course, this meant I spent most of an unquiet night (yesterday was one of those days where real life and interruptions intervened to keep me from going for a walk or even using the treadmill ‐ by the time I had time to, I was dead on my feet. For some reason just walking around most of the day, but not an uninterrupted, full out, fast walk of three miles, doesn’t allow me to sleep well at night.) dreaming of buying land in that region. It was the line about violent crime being below national average and also the line about how cheap cost-of-living was. ...I have reasons to add some salt to it. First the characterization as a "White Ghetto" brings with it a whole lot of freight which the journalist should have been wary of and clearly wasn’t. Because of the title and leaving the correction about how low crime (other than welfare fraud) actually is, I imagined the images that "Ghetto" conjures: shootouts in the glades, women murdered in their houses... that sort of thing. Turns out no. While it is inhabited by a bunch of welfare recipients, has almost no stores (this possibly to the lack of population density) and lacks opportunities for local employment, this region is not a hell hole of gang shootings and violent theft. Which immediately makes it completely different, and far more desirable as an address, than any urban ghetto. ...Which brings us to what is wrong with the rest of the local population, and how to help them. The first is obvious and is going to make me sound horribly heartless. The second... Ah the second is far more difficult. The answer to the first is "There is nothing wrong. They are normal, sane humans." And now you’re going to gibber at me about drug use and child neglect. And ‐ not here, but elsewhere ‐ someone is going to call for more federal money dumped into the place. They’ll call for more Head Start, more jobs programs. The left who ‐ with more than a bit of self flattery ‐ will flap gums about how our technological society is leaving people behind, how all these poor people simply aren’t SMART enough to make money and thrive in the new new technological world. DIGRESSION This flatters the left insanely because they clearly are "smart" enough to thrive in the new technological world. Lately in reading their stuff it’s all about power couples and marrying intelligent people and ‐ bah. They wouldn’t know intelligent people if one bit them in the arse. They are what in our school system were A students. These were never ‐ at least when I was going through school ‐ the actual SMART people (unless the smart people made a great deal of effort.) True geniuses tended to be odd. They dressed funny, sometimes had er... hygiene issues, and they had the confounded habit of correcting teacher. As such, they were heartily despised by all right thinking people, and usually managed Bs, unless they were really really smart, in which case they trolled the D/F region. In adulthood the geniuses I’ve known ‐ those functional enough to hold a job ‐ tend to hold jobs in convenience stores, fertilizer plants, or other menial positions where the fact they don’t dress fashionably and haven’t attended Harvard doesn’t matter. This is why the beautiful people hold on to CREDENTIALS over accomplishments as signs of their specialness. Which is why the "economy" the left is thriving on is a combination of glitz, glamour and valueless money printed at speed and of crony capitalism which devours the real substance of prosperity accumulated by our ancestors. HERE ENDETH DIGRESSION Part of the reason that even as the welfare model is collapsing all over the world, the left is hysterically seeking to bolster it is that they really think they are in a "With Folded Hands" future, where everything that "the little people" could do has been mechanized and therefore we should give the little people the means to survive and let them get stoned out of their minds, because, what else is there to do? Kill them? Oh, please, the left aren’t monsters. They just hold on to monstrous ideas. (Note I said "part of the reason" ‐ some of the left is doing this for the power, of course, and to create a neo-feudal society. But the rank and file of the evil party are not actually evil. They’re just human and know a lot of things that just ain’t so.) (Is there a lack of work for uneducated/not particularly intellectual people? What, in the last 20 years? Show me where the advances in manufacturing/computing/etc put these people out of work. What is really happening is that our personal do-gooders have priced the US worker out of competition ‐ and it’s not even the minimum wage, an effort as sane as legislating air humidity, as the crazed and increasingly futile environmental and other regulations ‐ so the jobs have moved overseas. This will correct itself either when the other lands create a middle class that demands better treatment ‐ though they’re unlikely to demand crazy enviro regulations ‐ or when we hang the komissars with their own guts. Because as has been pointed out on this blog, there will always be need for the kind of mind that thrives on detailed, repetitive work, and which really really really doesn’t want to speculate about the causes of the Spanish-American war or read about Elizabethan England. Whether these minds are less able, I refuse to even consider, because look... I couldn’t do what my plumber ‐ or my hairdresser! ‐ does. I certainly couldn’t do what factory workers do. It would drive me as batty as for them to do what I do. Yeah, they test lower on IQ, a test designed to measure achievements of a certain kind. We’ll just say they have different types of mind and that, without interference, there would be work they could do.) |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 It is true that many geniuses do not do well in the work world -- but there are certainly exceptions. OldSpook mentioned once that he has an IQ of 160, which puts him solidly in that category. He was a Special Forces master sergeant, comfortable talking to generals; the equivalent in the civilian world, it seems to me, is a technical track team leader in a large company. I also know two who are a stay-at-home husband and a housewife. Both perfectly clean, sweet-smelling, and well adjusted to the fact that they were not suited to the work world, supporting spouses who are very well suited, and happy to be freed from household concerns while they get on with their careers. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2017-11-03 12:02 |