Yep. And the more justified the anger, the easier it is to indulge it. You have to want the freedom of forgiveness more than you want to be right, and that ain’t easy.
Sorry, I cannot make any sense of that sentence. Valence is a word I know only from Chemistry denoting the number of electrons of an element available for chemical bonding to other elements thus to make up molecules. My goto online dictionary only adds something about the number of words in a sentence that another word can be paired with. Neither of those definitions gives me a clue how to decipher that sentence.
I think it means truth is not just factual accuracy; it is a moral compass. From the A.I. Cosmarch: The sentence "Truth has moral valence" asserts that truth is not merely a neutral or amoral concept but carries inherent moral weight and significance. It implies that truth is intrinsically tied to goodness, virtue, and ethical responsibility, and that its pursuit or neglect has moral consequences. Here’s a deeper breakdown:
Moral Valence Defined: "Valence" in this context refers to the intrinsic positive or negative value of something. To say truth has moral valence is to claim that truth is inherently aligned with the good, while falsehood is aligned with evil or corruption.
Classical and Theological Roots:
Aristotle: In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle links truthfulness (aletheia) to the virtue of honesty, positioning it as a mean between deceit and boastfulness.
Christian Tradition: The Bible declares, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32), framing truth as liberating and divine. Conversely, Satan is called "the father of lies" (John 8:44), associating falsehood with moral corruption.
Natural Law: Truth is a fundamental precept of natural law, as it aligns with the rational and moral order of creation.
Modern Implications:
Personal Integrity: Truthfulness fosters trust, which is the bedrock of relationships, business, and society. Deception, by contrast, erodes these foundations.
Social Order: A society that prioritizes truth (e.g., in law, media, or science) is more just and stable. Lies, propaganda, or "post-truth" relativism lead to chaos and injustice.
Spiritual Dimension: In many traditions, truth is a path to transcendence or enlightenment, while falsehood binds one to ignorance or sin.
Counterarguments Rebutted:
Some postmodernists argue that truth is constructed or subjective, devoid of moral weight. This view is rejected here as it undermines the very possibility of moral judgment and shared reality.
Pragmatists might claim truth is merely "what works," but this reduces it to utility, ignoring its intrinsic moral dimension.
I appreciate both your and Holly's reply and explanations, but I guess I prefer the biblical injunction, "You shall not lie", which I do consider a moral good. Of course the biblical commandment leaves open the option of saying nothing if you think the truth will result in harm to an innocent.
My wife, the genius and the saint, was very good at speaking the truth without harm. She once had a girlfriend who, while shopping, was enamored with a dress that made her look terrible. She said, "I've seen you wear things that look better on you," and then tried to help her find a more suitable dress.
OK, I am clearly failing miserably. If the comment sections are this far off the rails this early, I am at a loss. I’ve long known that this Substack required writing skills that are beyond mine but I have no idea how to fix this.
By “the truth has moral valence” I mean: if Fox News reports a thing, it doesn’t matter how true it is, it’s bad/evil because Fox News said it.
You can’t just live in reality. You have to be a morally acceptable person by Woke standards, or else reality itself is bad.
You probably still don’t understand what I meant and I should probably delete this. Jesus Christ.
I won't. I'm being dramatic because I'm overly tired, lonely, and published this well before I'd worked through my anxiety about it well enough to do so -- trying to push myself on that axis. Which I should not do when I'm overly tired.
I can relate as I get insecure about the patterns I see when overtired. However, I found this post quite compelling. It moved me and gave me food for thought.
This post made me feel so seen that I subscribed. Thank you for this clear, incisive look at and unpacking of the psychosocial dynamics driving our current cultural moment. It is so spot on.
I have intuited this dynamic for a long time. Thomas Sowell expounds on it thoroughly in his book Intellectuals and Society. I recommend it if you feel like you need corroboration or want to explore further. Rob Henderson also touches on it with his concept of luxury beliefs.
I’ll be sharing this outside of Substack. People need to read this. Well done! 🌼
As to your major point about reality and testing your ideas and practices against reality, here's the way I put it in my book. "Feedback is life. Kick a rock, and the rock doesn’t care because it’s not alive. Put an amoeba in a petri dish with a drop of acid on the left, and it will squirm over to the right, not because it’s intelligent, but because it’s alive, and the acid means death."
My wife once had a long discussion with one of her better students who took a libertarian view towards drug usage. His attitude was people should be able to make up their own minds and have the freedom to do what they want. Her attitude was that, philosophically she agreed that should be the case, but she'd seen too many friends with lives ruined by drug abuse and felt the need to protect them and the lives of those they touched in harmful ways. Neither changed the other's mind, but I hope the student moved to a more nuanced view as he gained more experience.
I loved this article and hope you will write pt 2 when you are feeling (mentally) better. A thank you to Josh because I also didn't know about the baking soda for grease fires!
Many years ago, I was looking up an obscure composer whose name I had come across: Zacharia Paliashvili. His stuff is quite good, but his reputation suffered from poor planning: His masterwork, a setting of the Orthodox liturgy of John Chrysostom, was published the year of the Soviet Revolution, which radically changed his home country of Georgia.
I was looking him up in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center, and I complained to a librarian that the only reference I could find to him was in a Croatian encyclopedia of classical musicians – and I, through some mischance, had not studied Croatian.
He replied “Never let your ignorance of a language prevent you from reading it.”
Stupid, right?
But that was actually incredibly helpful advice. So long as one knows the writing system, one can glean some meaning from any written language. Alas, I’m limited to the Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets: Hebrew, Arabic, and the profusion of Asian alphabets (and non-alphabets) make my eyes and brain hurt.
“When a nurse makes a mistake, there’s an investigation and a write-up. When a gender studies professor invents nonsense, it becomes a conference theme.”
Talking with the kids today about this. There are real world consequences if you get a dose wrong. People die. The woke trying to turn medical/nursing/pharmacy school into a struggle session never have had to front up to an angry family after something like this has happened and work through the consequences. They don't work clinically: they have no skin in the game.
It's really, really nice to be able to teach someone *anything* and I'm glad you let me. So many today-and most of the young-are hostile and flippant at the very idea that older people might know anything useful. It's been a huge disappointment in middle age because I'm a teacher and I want to teach. Wasn't expecting the "stupid old lol analog boomer" regime I've found myself in.
Pedantry: The reason you don't throw water on a grease fire is not that it "feeds" it, but that it splashes the burning oil instead of smothering it. Smothering is the actual thing that water is doing; that's how it puts fire out. We don't think of that because it's a liquid. We think of solids and powders smothering, but that's how water does it too.
Water and oil repel each other; oil is hydrophobic (and thus a huge fucking bigot). So instead of covering the pool of oil on fire, the way water would cover and soak into burning wood, it slides off the oil and pushes the oil like a bumper car. Take a pan of hot grease and throw water on it, and dozens of pieces of flaming grease will fly out and stick to the walls, putting the whole house ablaze in seconds.
For grease fires in a pan PUT A LID ON IT. PUT A LID ON IT. That is STEP ONE and almost always contains it. If not, baking soda, if you don't have that, for God's sake NO flour or sugar. They burn easily. Get a blanket and smother it.
/safety lecture
Sorry to go on about it, but kitchen/grease fires are one of the most common causes of house fires and fatalities. I saw a lot of people die this way when I was a crime reporter the newspaper.
People often gasp when I tell them that I run 4-6 kerosene lamps at once in winter. They ask, "aren't you afraid of fire?" It's reasonable, but also unreasonable because it shows that we've framed the problem of fire in our minds incorrectly. I mean this:
1. The key to fire safety is care and practical knowledge, not getting rid of all fire. It's the same thing as handling guns. We act like guns are unsafe and refuse to acknowledge that it's a) criminals and b)uneducated users who are most dangerous.
2. A kerosene lamp is much, much safer than the candles (ladies-your scented candles that you're oddly not afraid of) that the "aren't you worried about fire?" people are probably burning themselves. Candles are naked flames, unprotected. They're one of the biggest causes of housefires. Kerosene lamps protect the flame with a glass chimney, and they are heavy and weighted not to be easy to knock over.
3. I know to get the fire extinguisher, or, in a pinch, heavy blankets to smother any fire if a lamp tipped over and spilled kerosene-unlikely but certainly possible and has happened many times in the world.
4. I respect fire and fear it appropriately, but I'm not "scared of it" the way modern people are.
TLDR; the average American is far more likely to set his house on fire with a "nice little candle" or by not knowing how to put out a grease fire in a skillet than most other scenarios. This is what I mean when I say I fear for these young people who have so little actual physical contact with the world where they have to manipulate matter and do work manually, thinking about it. They don't know what the fuck to do when ANYTHING out of the ordinary happens.
I edited it down a lot, lest I embarrass you with too much praise, LOL.
Thank you again -- after the freshman year fire in which I lost almost everything (the drawing you picked up for me from the framer being one of the few things that went undamaged!) I will never *not* want information on how to prevent fires.
On a related topic -- you and I should collaborate at some point on a piece of writing about being niche "influencers" (gag) who are also Cluster B kids. People who have enough of a following to require awareness and navigation of parasocial realities but also have neurological wiring that our parents fucked up around recognition of reality and gaslighting. I'll handle the touchy-feely apart, like how it feels to read one of the count-on-one-hand human males who's ever made me feel safe called a dangerous misogynist. You can write the explanatory part, LOL.
Am I going to "well ackshually" the baking soda? Yes! Consider getting a fire blanket (Prepared Hero or some china knock-off) for your kitchen. Now back to the deep thoughts from everyone else. :)
George Orwell said that, even when you're a totalitarian 2 + 2 has to equal 4 if you want your guns to fire, even if you claim it equals 5 in other contexts.
That said I think there's something a little more complex going on, which I've explored in my own writing. Not that you're wrong, but it goes deeper. Pure science might be uncontaminated, but researchers need funding and that allows woke in, because money talks.
Also, *institutionalised* science is very open to political corruption. That was why COVID was so damaging to the reputation of science. The scientific method of free inquiry was disrupted for political reasons. It's the same with healthcare providers, including the NHS here in the UK, promoting anti-scientific trans ideology.
In terms of forgiveness, I agree. I've noticed what I call "90s liberals". People who think the Democratic Party belongs to Bill Clinton, not AOC and Mandani or, in a UK context, that Tony Blair is the face of progressive politics, not a Labour Party run by radical Islam. I don't know how to convince people of a reality where politicians, legacy media, NGOs and international bodies like the UN are thoroughly corrupt, but 90s Liberals are often kind people and we can't afford to go to war with them.
Josh and I have talked about this a lot. People who aren’t Very Online who truly do NOT understand how insane it is. My landlord’s wife is the closest example; people who really have no idea that kids are actually, in material reality, in time and space, being given irreversible medical interventions, and that “Transwomen are women” is declared as an expression of what the declaring parties believe to be reality.
And I think the chart shows my point -- the people who are in the scientific fields where funding might be corrupting in the ways you describe are still much more likely to have politics that recognize reality is real.
Essays like this one are why the first thing I do after firing up my browser is to check your substack to see what gem of wisdom you have published today!
My wife and I have had this discussion for the better part of fifty years, adding the woke part in the last ten or so years. For those who still don't understand, actions have consequences and they don't give a damn about your feelings!
From the toddler allowed to have a public tantrum without spanking to the teenager caught shoplifting but not prosecuted, we have enabled the very bad behavior we claim to abhor. By not dealing early with this behavior, we make it increasingly more difficult to mitigate later. This is why businesses leave. Rather than deal with the bad behavior by prosecution, they cut their losses and close, punishing their loyal customers.
Consequences fall on society at large rather than those who are the problem.
This is the best assessment of our current state that anyone has made. Please do consider making a part two. In particular, you have helped me understand why, as a Boomer septuagenarian, I have radically different opinions from nearly everyone under the age of 30. And yes, the mantra in my day was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” We’ve had to deal with a lot of reality, in making a living, raising children, and trying to prepare for our remaining years. Having the scars makes it easier to see the mistakes being made by others.
Late to the party, with more to say later, but at this point, 6:10 am central time, I find it interesting that there are 25 comments before mine, and only one with a name easily identifiable as a woman’s name. Other than the author’s comments…
Most of my women readers are mothers. They were putting the kids to bed when I published and are getting the kids breakfast and ready for the day, or will be soon. Mothers read on their phones while standing in line in between other responsibilities.
I thought you might have noticed the unbalanced stats and would have a good reason for it. Sounds like my older daughter with four children…even now when the youngest will be a junior in high school later this month.
“the price tag for not knowing it gets rung up at the register of consequences”
“literally never been punished for being wrong”
When I was in college in the late 90s, there was one guy in our friend group about whom we said (behind his back) “He really needs to have his ass kicked one time.” Too sheltered, too sure of himself, never been on the receiving end of reality.
When 9/11 happened I remember my husband saying something like, “Maybe this is America’s ass-kicking,” referring of course to that college friend. Maybe now, he wondered, we’d get our heads out of our collective navels.
I wonder if that’s the same impulse that some people nowadays have for seeming to want (Gd forbid) a civil war. They realize that some folks just need to have their asses kicked one time.
It's so much easier to hate than to give grace. Remind me to tell you about Dr Christian Conte and his couch metaphor.
Yep. And the more justified the anger, the easier it is to indulge it. You have to want the freedom of forgiveness more than you want to be right, and that ain’t easy.
"Truth has moral valence."
Sorry, I cannot make any sense of that sentence. Valence is a word I know only from Chemistry denoting the number of electrons of an element available for chemical bonding to other elements thus to make up molecules. My goto online dictionary only adds something about the number of words in a sentence that another word can be paired with. Neither of those definitions gives me a clue how to decipher that sentence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valence_(psychology)
I think it means truth is not just factual accuracy; it is a moral compass. From the A.I. Cosmarch: The sentence "Truth has moral valence" asserts that truth is not merely a neutral or amoral concept but carries inherent moral weight and significance. It implies that truth is intrinsically tied to goodness, virtue, and ethical responsibility, and that its pursuit or neglect has moral consequences. Here’s a deeper breakdown:
Moral Valence Defined: "Valence" in this context refers to the intrinsic positive or negative value of something. To say truth has moral valence is to claim that truth is inherently aligned with the good, while falsehood is aligned with evil or corruption.
Classical and Theological Roots:
Aristotle: In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle links truthfulness (aletheia) to the virtue of honesty, positioning it as a mean between deceit and boastfulness.
Christian Tradition: The Bible declares, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32), framing truth as liberating and divine. Conversely, Satan is called "the father of lies" (John 8:44), associating falsehood with moral corruption.
Natural Law: Truth is a fundamental precept of natural law, as it aligns with the rational and moral order of creation.
Modern Implications:
Personal Integrity: Truthfulness fosters trust, which is the bedrock of relationships, business, and society. Deception, by contrast, erodes these foundations.
Social Order: A society that prioritizes truth (e.g., in law, media, or science) is more just and stable. Lies, propaganda, or "post-truth" relativism lead to chaos and injustice.
Spiritual Dimension: In many traditions, truth is a path to transcendence or enlightenment, while falsehood binds one to ignorance or sin.
Counterarguments Rebutted:
Some postmodernists argue that truth is constructed or subjective, devoid of moral weight. This view is rejected here as it undermines the very possibility of moral judgment and shared reality.
Pragmatists might claim truth is merely "what works," but this reduces it to utility, ignoring its intrinsic moral dimension.
I appreciate both your and Holly's reply and explanations, but I guess I prefer the biblical injunction, "You shall not lie", which I do consider a moral good. Of course the biblical commandment leaves open the option of saying nothing if you think the truth will result in harm to an innocent.
My wife, the genius and the saint, was very good at speaking the truth without harm. She once had a girlfriend who, while shopping, was enamored with a dress that made her look terrible. She said, "I've seen you wear things that look better on you," and then tried to help her find a more suitable dress.
OK, I am clearly failing miserably. If the comment sections are this far off the rails this early, I am at a loss. I’ve long known that this Substack required writing skills that are beyond mine but I have no idea how to fix this.
By “the truth has moral valence” I mean: if Fox News reports a thing, it doesn’t matter how true it is, it’s bad/evil because Fox News said it.
You can’t just live in reality. You have to be a morally acceptable person by Woke standards, or else reality itself is bad.
You probably still don’t understand what I meant and I should probably delete this. Jesus Christ.
Actually that explanation makes perfect sense to me. Please don't delete your post over my single quibble about a line I didn't understand.
I won't. I'm being dramatic because I'm overly tired, lonely, and published this well before I'd worked through my anxiety about it well enough to do so -- trying to push myself on that axis. Which I should not do when I'm overly tired.
;)
I can relate as I get insecure about the patterns I see when overtired. However, I found this post quite compelling. It moved me and gave me food for thought.
Don’t Panic. 🌼
This post made me feel so seen that I subscribed. Thank you for this clear, incisive look at and unpacking of the psychosocial dynamics driving our current cultural moment. It is so spot on.
I have intuited this dynamic for a long time. Thomas Sowell expounds on it thoroughly in his book Intellectuals and Society. I recommend it if you feel like you need corroboration or want to explore further. Rob Henderson also touches on it with his concept of luxury beliefs.
I’ll be sharing this outside of Substack. People need to read this. Well done! 🌼
I think you would likely ace an advanced Philosophy course. I'd like to read Part 2.
As to your major point about reality and testing your ideas and practices against reality, here's the way I put it in my book. "Feedback is life. Kick a rock, and the rock doesn’t care because it’s not alive. Put an amoeba in a petri dish with a drop of acid on the left, and it will squirm over to the right, not because it’s intelligent, but because it’s alive, and the acid means death."
When you cut off feedback for a business, that business eventually develops gangrene and dies. I discuss that in my essay The Bottom Line is Wrong. https://frank-hood.com/2025/02/03/the-bottom-line-is-wrong/
My wife once had a long discussion with one of her better students who took a libertarian view towards drug usage. His attitude was people should be able to make up their own minds and have the freedom to do what they want. Her attitude was that, philosophically she agreed that should be the case, but she'd seen too many friends with lives ruined by drug abuse and felt the need to protect them and the lives of those they touched in harmful ways. Neither changed the other's mind, but I hope the student moved to a more nuanced view as he gained more experience.
I loved this article and hope you will write pt 2 when you are feeling (mentally) better. A thank you to Josh because I also didn't know about the baking soda for grease fires!
On learning what you don’t know.
Many years ago, I was looking up an obscure composer whose name I had come across: Zacharia Paliashvili. His stuff is quite good, but his reputation suffered from poor planning: His masterwork, a setting of the Orthodox liturgy of John Chrysostom, was published the year of the Soviet Revolution, which radically changed his home country of Georgia.
I was looking him up in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in Lincoln Center, and I complained to a librarian that the only reference I could find to him was in a Croatian encyclopedia of classical musicians – and I, through some mischance, had not studied Croatian.
He replied “Never let your ignorance of a language prevent you from reading it.”
Stupid, right?
But that was actually incredibly helpful advice. So long as one knows the writing system, one can glean some meaning from any written language. Alas, I’m limited to the Roman, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets: Hebrew, Arabic, and the profusion of Asian alphabets (and non-alphabets) make my eyes and brain hurt.
Oh my gosh. Please continue this line of thinking. ❤️🌻
“When a nurse makes a mistake, there’s an investigation and a write-up. When a gender studies professor invents nonsense, it becomes a conference theme.”
Perfection!!!
Talking with the kids today about this. There are real world consequences if you get a dose wrong. People die. The woke trying to turn medical/nursing/pharmacy school into a struggle session never have had to front up to an angry family after something like this has happened and work through the consequences. They don't work clinically: they have no skin in the game.
You flatter me too much:)
It's really, really nice to be able to teach someone *anything* and I'm glad you let me. So many today-and most of the young-are hostile and flippant at the very idea that older people might know anything useful. It's been a huge disappointment in middle age because I'm a teacher and I want to teach. Wasn't expecting the "stupid old lol analog boomer" regime I've found myself in.
Pedantry: The reason you don't throw water on a grease fire is not that it "feeds" it, but that it splashes the burning oil instead of smothering it. Smothering is the actual thing that water is doing; that's how it puts fire out. We don't think of that because it's a liquid. We think of solids and powders smothering, but that's how water does it too.
Water and oil repel each other; oil is hydrophobic (and thus a huge fucking bigot). So instead of covering the pool of oil on fire, the way water would cover and soak into burning wood, it slides off the oil and pushes the oil like a bumper car. Take a pan of hot grease and throw water on it, and dozens of pieces of flaming grease will fly out and stick to the walls, putting the whole house ablaze in seconds.
For grease fires in a pan PUT A LID ON IT. PUT A LID ON IT. That is STEP ONE and almost always contains it. If not, baking soda, if you don't have that, for God's sake NO flour or sugar. They burn easily. Get a blanket and smother it.
/safety lecture
Sorry to go on about it, but kitchen/grease fires are one of the most common causes of house fires and fatalities. I saw a lot of people die this way when I was a crime reporter the newspaper.
People often gasp when I tell them that I run 4-6 kerosene lamps at once in winter. They ask, "aren't you afraid of fire?" It's reasonable, but also unreasonable because it shows that we've framed the problem of fire in our minds incorrectly. I mean this:
1. The key to fire safety is care and practical knowledge, not getting rid of all fire. It's the same thing as handling guns. We act like guns are unsafe and refuse to acknowledge that it's a) criminals and b)uneducated users who are most dangerous.
2. A kerosene lamp is much, much safer than the candles (ladies-your scented candles that you're oddly not afraid of) that the "aren't you worried about fire?" people are probably burning themselves. Candles are naked flames, unprotected. They're one of the biggest causes of housefires. Kerosene lamps protect the flame with a glass chimney, and they are heavy and weighted not to be easy to knock over.
3. I know to get the fire extinguisher, or, in a pinch, heavy blankets to smother any fire if a lamp tipped over and spilled kerosene-unlikely but certainly possible and has happened many times in the world.
4. I respect fire and fear it appropriately, but I'm not "scared of it" the way modern people are.
TLDR; the average American is far more likely to set his house on fire with a "nice little candle" or by not knowing how to put out a grease fire in a skillet than most other scenarios. This is what I mean when I say I fear for these young people who have so little actual physical contact with the world where they have to manipulate matter and do work manually, thinking about it. They don't know what the fuck to do when ANYTHING out of the ordinary happens.
I'm sorry I wrote this book!
I edited it down a lot, lest I embarrass you with too much praise, LOL.
Thank you again -- after the freshman year fire in which I lost almost everything (the drawing you picked up for me from the framer being one of the few things that went undamaged!) I will never *not* want information on how to prevent fires.
On a related topic -- you and I should collaborate at some point on a piece of writing about being niche "influencers" (gag) who are also Cluster B kids. People who have enough of a following to require awareness and navigation of parasocial realities but also have neurological wiring that our parents fucked up around recognition of reality and gaslighting. I'll handle the touchy-feely apart, like how it feels to read one of the count-on-one-hand human males who's ever made me feel safe called a dangerous misogynist. You can write the explanatory part, LOL.
Am I going to "well ackshually" the baking soda? Yes! Consider getting a fire blanket (Prepared Hero or some china knock-off) for your kitchen. Now back to the deep thoughts from everyone else. :)
George Orwell said that, even when you're a totalitarian 2 + 2 has to equal 4 if you want your guns to fire, even if you claim it equals 5 in other contexts.
That said I think there's something a little more complex going on, which I've explored in my own writing. Not that you're wrong, but it goes deeper. Pure science might be uncontaminated, but researchers need funding and that allows woke in, because money talks.
Also, *institutionalised* science is very open to political corruption. That was why COVID was so damaging to the reputation of science. The scientific method of free inquiry was disrupted for political reasons. It's the same with healthcare providers, including the NHS here in the UK, promoting anti-scientific trans ideology.
In terms of forgiveness, I agree. I've noticed what I call "90s liberals". People who think the Democratic Party belongs to Bill Clinton, not AOC and Mandani or, in a UK context, that Tony Blair is the face of progressive politics, not a Labour Party run by radical Islam. I don't know how to convince people of a reality where politicians, legacy media, NGOs and international bodies like the UN are thoroughly corrupt, but 90s Liberals are often kind people and we can't afford to go to war with them.
Josh and I have talked about this a lot. People who aren’t Very Online who truly do NOT understand how insane it is. My landlord’s wife is the closest example; people who really have no idea that kids are actually, in material reality, in time and space, being given irreversible medical interventions, and that “Transwomen are women” is declared as an expression of what the declaring parties believe to be reality.
And I think the chart shows my point -- the people who are in the scientific fields where funding might be corrupting in the ways you describe are still much more likely to have politics that recognize reality is real.
Great for making non-fry crispy wings, too!
https://www.recipetineats.com/crispy-oven-baked-chicken-wings-honey-garlic-sauce/
Essays like this one are why the first thing I do after firing up my browser is to check your substack to see what gem of wisdom you have published today!
My wife and I have had this discussion for the better part of fifty years, adding the woke part in the last ten or so years. For those who still don't understand, actions have consequences and they don't give a damn about your feelings!
From the toddler allowed to have a public tantrum without spanking to the teenager caught shoplifting but not prosecuted, we have enabled the very bad behavior we claim to abhor. By not dealing early with this behavior, we make it increasingly more difficult to mitigate later. This is why businesses leave. Rather than deal with the bad behavior by prosecution, they cut their losses and close, punishing their loyal customers.
Consequences fall on society at large rather than those who are the problem.
This is the best assessment of our current state that anyone has made. Please do consider making a part two. In particular, you have helped me understand why, as a Boomer septuagenarian, I have radically different opinions from nearly everyone under the age of 30. And yes, the mantra in my day was “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” We’ve had to deal with a lot of reality, in making a living, raising children, and trying to prepare for our remaining years. Having the scars makes it easier to see the mistakes being made by others.
Late to the party, with more to say later, but at this point, 6:10 am central time, I find it interesting that there are 25 comments before mine, and only one with a name easily identifiable as a woman’s name. Other than the author’s comments…
Most of my women readers are mothers. They were putting the kids to bed when I published and are getting the kids breakfast and ready for the day, or will be soon. Mothers read on their phones while standing in line in between other responsibilities.
I thought you might have noticed the unbalanced stats and would have a good reason for it. Sounds like my older daughter with four children…even now when the youngest will be a junior in high school later this month.
Excellent essay. These points stuck out for me:
“cosplay with benefits”
“the price tag for not knowing it gets rung up at the register of consequences”
“literally never been punished for being wrong”
When I was in college in the late 90s, there was one guy in our friend group about whom we said (behind his back) “He really needs to have his ass kicked one time.” Too sheltered, too sure of himself, never been on the receiving end of reality.
When 9/11 happened I remember my husband saying something like, “Maybe this is America’s ass-kicking,” referring of course to that college friend. Maybe now, he wondered, we’d get our heads out of our collective navels.
I wonder if that’s the same impulse that some people nowadays have for seeming to want (Gd forbid) a civil war. They realize that some folks just need to have their asses kicked one time.