Not a Potted Plant

I’ll be leaving a day early since I am making the 12-hour drive rather than flying.

There was an article in the Redstone Gazette the other day about Ryersen Gas Stations donating $1,000,000 to St Matthews. Redstone is the blue collar town where I substitute teach. Ryersen is a very large chain of gas stations in the region that has its corporate HQ in Redstone. St Matthews is the local catholic school.

The whole thing left a rather bad taste in my mouth. Some of it is pure partisanship. I substitute at Redstone High School, St Matthew’s public alternative. And my thought on reading the headline was that St Matthews doesn’t need that money, and Redstone schools can use it! St Matthews is where the rich kids go (and select others) while most of the town is struggling to get by. Even setting aside my biases (I don’t substitute at the high school all that much anyway and wouldn’t expect the money to go towards my getting a raise), this raises some class-hackles.

But, no doubt, Ken Ryersen went to St Matthews. Because most people of note in Redstone went to St Matthews. The city’s leaders (most of whom aren’t ethnically from Catholic countries, despite most of the town itself being so) tend to have gone there. So of course that’s where a lot of the emphasis is going to be. Notably, St Matthews’s football team gets to play at a district stadium, free of charge (this has been a point of contention with some).

Anyhow, it’s natural that Ryersen would want to support the school that he went to. It does create a genuine problem, however, when this school soaks up a lot of the kids that could otherwise be lifting Redstone’s district up. And it does seem to create a wall of sorts.

I have various friends through whom I follow on Facebook closely due in part to politics. The most obvious reason to do so is that they have something insightful to say, and sometimes that’s why, but there’s another subset I watch for another reason: The man and woman on the street.

I have a longstanding friend named Tony and, by my reckoning, Tony should be a Republican. He has a Republican mentality, to the extent that there is such a thing. Most people, when they talk to him, will assume that he is one, unless politics comes up. He’s an independent. Up until recently, he was a right-leaning one. The thing about Tony is that he’s not a swipple and has no aspirations of swippledom. He is very independent-minded and believed that he could do a better job of educating himself than some fancy-schmancy college good. He works hard and makes a good living. When he has lost his job, he has never so much as applied for unemployment. He has a disdain for those who do. He’s not a big fan of OWS and should have been a big fan of the Tea Party.

I’m relatively sure he voted for Bush twice and think that he voted for McCain. Now, Tony is just a guy and he’s not even a guy in a swing state, but I feel that the GOP needs Tony’s vote to thrive. Unfortunately, they’ve lost it at least for the time being. His Facebook feed has gone from about 50/50 making fun of everybody to 75/25 making fun of conservatives and Republicans. The GOP has lost him on gay rights (they never had him, but they did have his ambivalence) and really lost him on contraception. If I were to psychoanalyze, it’s driven home the ways in which he is not a Republican. He’s an atheist. He’s married and divorced twice, to the same woman, and was “living in sin” with my ex-girlfriend Julianne in between the marriages. His parents divorced when he was young and he is glad that they did. He has a child (conceived in wedlock, born during separation) and pays child support on a couple of former step-kids. His is a complicated situation. In the GOP’s narrow version of the way that families work, he’s on the outside. I don’t think he cares to do the mental gymnastics that would keep him in the fold of a party that might like him personally but doesn’t like where he comes from.

Now, Tony is just a guy, and he’s a guy that doesn’t live in a swing state. But I think that there are a lot of guys like him. I can think of a number that I know that I believe the GOP has failed by not picking up. I do this a lot, asking myself not just how the parties are doing with Tony, but with the Tonies of the world. To be fair, sometimes things work the other way. At some point, the GOP apparently picked up our ex-girlfriend Julianne. Julie was always apolitical, and I doubt that she still has much in the way of beliefs, but I think a lot of the Obama-bashing has, for some reason (and not racism), taken with her as she really doesn’t like the guy. And she’s a little dour on liberals more generally. If I were to psychoanalyze, it might be related to her very conservative vision for herself (marriage, picket fence, kids) that never worked out (thanks to me & Tony, in large part) but that was always a part of her vision of the way that things should be. Or it might just be that she got a whole lot of Republican friends.

One of the reasons I keep an eye on the Tonys and Julies are that I can’t rely on what most of my other closest friends think. We all went to college and largely fit a swippley profile. My peer group is moving left (including my wife, and to a lesser extent myself), but we’re a relatively narrow demographic. One of the advantages to having known people like Tony and Julie are that they represent people quite different from myself. One never went to college and the other dropped out. Neither spend a whole lot of time thinking about grand philosophy. They’re more what I would call intuitive voters. I’ve named a couple here, but there are others (I don’t want to get too tedious).

I believe there to be more of them than more of us. Not among the voting population (since most voters are in one bag or the other), but among the potential voting population as well as among potential swing voters.

I thought about writing a (more significant) post, but there’s not much I can touch upon that James Joyner didn’t here. There’s no single snippit that I want to excerpt, so I would recommend going over and reading the whole thing.

I am not anti-corporation or anti-profit, though I have to confess some skepticism of for-profit universities. I’ve been contemplating going back to college in an online capacity and have been sticking to state colleges (and WGU). There are so many bad incentives involved that make me skeptical. Bad incentives from the government. Bad incentives from society. Bad incentives for and from the potential customers.

Some of this is related to my very strong belief in the State University. I am not as skeptical of the non-profit privates as the for-profits, but I am still not a huge fan. This does qualify as a bias. When I see a list of state universities that are struggling, I am more likely to come up with alternative explanations as to why this doesn’t mean that the model is necessarily bad. Of course, sometimes I think the model is bad. I think it’s problematic to send ill-prepared kids to college. I question whether open enrollment universities should even exist (I’m more sympathetic to community colleges). But even here, I don’t think the universities themselves are the problem. Even though, if I were running things, at least some of them would cease to exist. But I’ll still take them over their for-profit alternative, so I guess as long as we have the University of Phoenix, we should have a lower-cost alternative.

Morat20 makes the following observation:

Are whites being discriminated against? Are they likely to be in the future?

It wasn’t skin color that led to affirmative action — it was a legacy of racism and flat-out denied oppurtunity.

Offhand, should income inequality not be settled, I suspect race might give way to class based considerations.

For all the supposed sins of affirmative action, the actual sins of privilege are far worse. Legacy admissions at colleges, for starters.

A friend of mine works for a company she jokingly refers to as “Nepotism, Incorporated”. Her horror stories about management there (mostly dead weight in the form of various relatives of the board) that make me cringe. Nothing I’ve ever experienced, not even the most clueless of Dilbert-style bosses in the tech industry, have come close to the legacy of idiocy her company is weighted with.

This is an oft-made point. One that is instructive in one sense: preferential admissions based on one’s heritage are not new and is beneficial to some whites. But the “some” in that statement is crucial. Therein lies a pretty significant distinction. Affirmative Action, where it is utilized, is designed to benefit minorities as a whole. Some may benefit and some may not benefit, but it looks specifically at race and as a program does not differentiate between this kind of African-American and that kind of African-American or this kind of Hispanic and that kind of Hispanic. The wealthy child of Cuban lineage from the suburb gets a boost just as the child of poor Mexican-American migrants.

Most whites are not going to receive any sort of legacy-based consideration. Or, if they do, it’s exceedingly likely to be very limited to only an institution or two. As it happens, I was offered a legacy benefit, in-state tuition to an out-of-state school. My wife, on the other hand, was not offered anything from her parents’ out-of-state alma mater (and, therefore, was not offered anything from anywhere on account of her heritage, excluding the benefits of her economic class). My friend Aron whose parents never went to college? Wasn’t offered squat. Meanwhile, my well-to-do 1/4 Cherokee classmate and my Cuban-American best friend were getting letters from out-of-state schools from across the country for grades that were similar to or worse than my own.

This isn’t a whine for me. I came from a substantive enough background that within the normal parameters (excluding the Ivy League or Podunk Highway State) I’m not sure how much it mattered where I went to college (I didn’t go to the “best” school that accepted me anyway). We can go ahead and say “That Will Truman guy was privileged.” Not as privileged as the next guy, but far more privileged than a lot of other white kids. Which gets to the greater point, which is that many (though not all) of the privileges we often associate with being white, such as legacy admits and nepotism, are not evenly distributed. Assigning privilege to one white due to privileges given to another is… problematic.

This is not, in and of itself, a reason why we shouldn’t have affirmative action. We can admit all of the above and say that affirmative action is still better than the alternatives. As I have said elsewhere, I ultimately come down against affirmative action (not solely, or even primarily, for the above reason), but only softly and with a level of indifference. And I think the whining about affirmative action – often though not always coming from those who definitely do count as privileged – can be rather unseemly. I do remember back in college that a lot of the vocal opposition to affirmative action was coming from… the wrong places. And it’s also the case that not all affirmative action programs are created equal and that there are definitely some cases (police departments come to mind as a most obvious example) where there is a collective benefit. But, at best, I think such programs should be pursued warily.

While we’re on the subject of flawed (or incomplete) arguments and affirmative action, in an otherwise insightful piece, League alum Jamelle Bouie recently wrote:

(Another note: just because the white student didn’t get in doesn’t mean that someone took “their” spot. Colleges don’t owe spots to students, and if you don’t get in to the school of your choice, the college took nothing away from you. With or without affirmative action, the odds of getting into a selective college are low).

I don’t think this is a road supporters of affirmative action want to go around. This is, in fact, why I am largely indifferent on the subject of affirmative action to begin with. I was softly for it until a few years ago, then became softly against it. My view is that the specific institution one attends doesn’t matter a great deal and therefore whites or minorities complaining that they were left out due to affirmative action or the absence thereof needed to just make the best of their situation. But as an issue of fairness, it’s not entirely for me to say whether it does or does not matter. And if it matters over here, it matters over there, too.

{Original Post modified to include Morat20’s entire comment.}

Apparently, we have *a lot* of Isabellas on the way. Quite a few Sophias, Avas, and Olivias.

What’s really interesting about this list is how much naming is apparently a national phenomenon. I would not at all have been surprised to see different names in different regions. One name popping up over here and expanding. Another popping up over there. Instead, Isabella is #1 in California to New York, Oklahoma to Rhode Island. I actually know one baby named Isabella and another named Sophia. Truth be told, I consider both of these names (almost all of the ones listed, actually) to be vast improvements over the names I am seeing in classrooms. My concern is that there is less here than meets the eye and the main reason that Isabella shows up and Brianne doesn’t is because the latter is broken down into fifteen spellings. Here is hoping not!

I actually know a little Isabella and a little Sophia. I didn’t realize that they were on the cusp of a tidal wive (if it’s that). Interestingly enough, in an alternate version of my life, my old flame and I (who got married in this timeline) named our daughter Sophia. I actually chose the name solely due to its gnostic significance and not because I’d heard anybody else that had it.

I am curious where the names came from, if anywhere. I mean, other than the fact that they have been around a while. Why the resurgence now? That’s one of the great mysteries of names, though.

The boys names are almost all straight from the Bible. And William. Clancy actually wanted to name our son (if we have one) William/Will (and I actually have a fondness for Truman and it was my brother’s pick!) (I mean William as in William and Truman as in Truman, not William and Truman as in my actual first and last name – both William and Truman are family names). We’d actually sort of had a girl’s name picked out, but recently Clancy discovered there is a family name very similar to what we chose (in the same way that Caroline is similar to Carolyn) and so we might be changing course.

And for your enjoyment, music!

A certain kind of religious activist takes it as a given, and as an imperative, that the Decalogue must be displayed prominently on and in public buildings. Gratefully, these folks are rare; sadly, they have influence because few people want to be seen as opposing them. Which is why there are groups like the ACLU and the FFRF, willing to (among other things) absorb the unpopularity of “opposing the Ten Commandments” so as to stand against the melding of church and state — something done, as I hope this post will demonstrate, for the benefit of both the religious and the secular among us.

Quite possibly the strangest set of cases in the modern era of the Supreme Court comes from efforts to display the Ten C’s on the grounds of the Texas Capitol in monumental statuary, and in a small display case in the entryway of a rural Kentucky county courthouse. Turns out, the big, prominent, expensive display was okay, and the small, nearly obscure display was not — because the big prominent display was found to be, artistically speaking, part of a larger piece of art and display celebrating the role of law in society generally, while the small display had as its primary purpose the endorsement and proselytizing of Christianity.

So one judge, who apparently shares my disquiet with this rule, decided to put that notion to the test.

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The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is deeply addictive and enjoyable, and hands-down the most beautiful game I’ve ever played. The dragons are awesome and the new permutation of the Elder Scrolls’ lore and rich background is delicious.

But I don’t like it nearly as much when it turns in to Skyrim: The Game Of Inventory Management!

Sarah Palin would approve of my home town. Though I wasn’t here in 2008, I would be surprised if she weren’t at least somewhat popular here.

Since moving here, I have been contacted by Arbitron once, and Nielson twice now. Prior to moving here, I had never been a part of either survey. Given that I don’t live in Peoria or Galveston or Missouri or any other place often considered demographically representative of the whole – even in Middle America or what-have-you, my county is a red outlier – I find the interest interesting. I mentioned this to the latest Nielson rep, who assured me that it was all random. But they seem inordinately interested in what we outliers watch and listen to. Okay, not so much for Arbitron since that’s all about local competition and not national networks, but still. (The Arbitron thing is particularly laughable because we have three radio stations: Pop, Christian, and Country. I listened to no radio that week. But they paid me the $2 anyway for my participation.)

ABC is the grand beneficiary. Completely by luck, I’ve been catching up on my ABC shows this week. If Awake gets renewed (and you like it): You’re welcome.