I kept looking for cute, funny links to share, and not finding any, all weekend. None of these news links is exactly good news. Though one is at least ridiculous.
Charity
Valid warnings.
Government as Theft
There's a reason why the Bible taught that land should be owned by families, not individuals--so that it couldn't be permanently "nationalized." There's a valid biblical case for a constitutional amendment preventing government from "owning" any land.
Marketing
Cracker Barrel restaurants built their image on the idea of the old-time, mostly but by no means exclusively Southern, general store (every neighborhood had to have one) where old people did not lean on, but spread out board games on, the tops of the barrels from which bulk food was sold, when nobody in the store was buying any bulk food. Crackers used to be sold in bulk. So did many other food items: salt, sugar, flour. By the 1940s shoppers had spoken: All but the very most "conservative" and the most fanatically frugal preferred to buy individually wrapped, pre-measured packages of food that stayed fresh longer and hadn't been breathed on by other shoppers. By the 1960s bulk food was an innovation brought back at health food stores, and by the 1980s it was brought back as an innovation, again, in supermarkets in neighborhoods that supported health food stores--but basically food stores no longer feature barrels of bulk food. So that barrel, with the geezer waiting to resume his game as soon as you've dipped out your crackers, was a nostalgia trigger identified with "comfort food" for people who remembered the Roosevelt Administration. If they'd stopped with removing the barrel from the logo, the management of the Cracker Barrel chain might not be catching so much hate now.
But they didn't stop. A restaurant that deliberately kept people waiting in store rooms with old farm tools displayed as decor on the walls, and replicas of 1920s- and 1930s-style toys and decorative items as merchandise, before serving them big white-flour biscuits and greasy gravy and mashed potatoes and fried steaks and fried okra and suchlike, was appealing to people who loved Ronald Reagan's repeating theme of reviving 1940s styles--in clothes, and also in federal budgeting. Those people, to the extent that they're still alive, like Trump's "Make America Great Again" rhetoric. It's all part of the same cultural package.
The Cracker Barrel's young, innovative managers put their finger on what some of us already disliked about the chain: It's so phoney it could change its name to Bell. The cracked ploughshares and rusty scythes hanging on the walls might once have been real, but the big-chain restaurant, owned by Blackrock, is in many ways the opposite of what its menus and merchandise try to suggest to a generation that's not going out for dinner much any more anyway. Unless we happen to feel nostalgic about a local Cracker Barrel restaurant, baby-boomers' and millennials' nostalgia trips are triggered by completely different things, too.
Unfortunately, instead of just admitting that they were trying to appeal to a demographic group more of whom are still alive, Cracker Barrel management had to crack wise about the audience their predecessors had only spent fifty years honing an appeal to. "MAGA types don't have to eat here," do they? Ooohhh, nice going, Idiot Girls. Do they, or does anyone else, want to eat there?
Restaurants that want to stay in business should consider displaying support, if not for MAGA, at least for MAHA. It's good business sense not to diss the majority of the nation...and to commit to serving food that's not contaminated with "pesticide" residues and plastic waste. Or, for that matter, with spliced genes. Or, for that matter, with ties to Blackrock.
Me Too
Much as some guilty men, and the women who want to believe their alibis, would like to believe that discrediting one woman as the lying daughter of a lying father means that "#MeToo is dead"...Twitter is dead. Twitter hashtags are dead. The idea that women should act on the presupposition that what women say is valid is not dead. Men who want to dispute what women are saying may produce evidence. Men who don't understand what women are saying may say "I don't understand." Men who say any variation of "Don't believe her because she's...[any derogatory term; whatever the word chosen implies about her competence, the meaning is "female" or, more accurately, "not me"] need to know that all of those things are now heard as admissions of guilt.
We can see how badly the #MeToo movement is still needed from the recent flap about Noel Martin, reportedly a school administrative office worker, getting into a loud, ugly quarrel with some man who's not publishing his own name in a public park. According to the man, Martin accosted him in the park and began yelling at him. According to the video recording he presents as evidence, a quarrel is well under way when he begins recording and, though seeming to back away slowly, continues to call out very offensive remarks that keep the quarrel going. The man wants to claim that Martin is "mentally ill"--normally an indication of male sexual misconduct, though Martin hasn't reported it, so what men need to know about this is that when you guys say a woman is mentally ill, we understand you to mean you've exploited or abused her. Just don't go there if you want to have any credibility. Martin's yelling back at him, though ugly, shows that she's aware of the reality that he's keeping the quarrel going--it's evidence of sanity, if not of diplomacy or tact or verbal competence. It's up to this man to document, if he can, that Martin routinely vents stress on neighbors by starting quarrels in the park; otherwise, from the video he released on X, the default assumption should be that he's her ex-boyfriend who either is or wants to be married to someone who has more money.
It doesn't take a great deal of standing together to reverse patterns of societal abuse of women. We just need to let the abusers see it happen, once, to break the pattern. We all need the experience of acting on the presupposition, when we witness a male/female disagreement, that the woman is right.
Try it with a man you know. The next time he says any variation on "She's incompetent to say...", take a step back, give him a cold-eyed sharky grin, and say "Really? What did you do to her?" He's stepped out of the circle of your trust. He can't get back in without either producing hard evidence that what she's saying is untrue, or else saying the words, "She has every right to say..., and I have no right to disbelieve her. I was emotional. I was afraid of what she was saying. I was in denial. I need help to deal with my own emotions without trying to discredit her." Could be transformative.
Does this mean that legal cases should be judged on the way people present their cases? It does not. If a case is worth taking to court, it's worth subpoenas and presentations of hard evidence. If it's just a petty personal altercation...my guess would be that men and women are equally capable of making mistakes, but men need to know they do not automatically have more credibility than women, that we're on to their game and know that they are, if anything, more irrational and emotional than women are, that if they try to blame women they automatically zip themselves down to zero credibility. They can learn to state their cases without emotional abuse...if the social consequences of emotional abuse motivate them to learn.
Does abortion cause long-term depression? Probably. But the reason why women are more likely to seek psychological help is that men aren't having their emotional problems called out enough. We as a society could benefit from much more awareness that the excessive anger that becomes a pleasure and even an addiction, in males, is a far more serious problem than "depression." Instead of worrying when young women look as if their love lives weren't as blissful as envy wants to make them seem, we'd do better to think about what's going on when young men can hardly utter a sentence without using words that express excessive anger.
When half of humankind have to arrange their work and travel plans around avoiding the violence of the other half of humankind, the half who are living in fear are NOT the sicker half.
Politics, Philosophy of
Daniel J. Mitchell offers valid corrective advice for the current presidential administration.
More from Thomas Massie.
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