abendlander

Metro Squad seeks suspects who gunned down Raytown jogger

Detectives say Stone was just out for a morning jog, on his normal route, when a dark-colored, four-door sedan pulled by, slowed down, fired several shots at him, then pulled off, without ever stopping.

Which is more ridiculous: the image of a "four-door sedan" itself firing shots at an innocent passerby, or the inadvertent "racism" of describing it as "dark-colored"?

And in not entirely unrelated news:

Trayvon Martin documents reveal new details in shooting

Neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin from a very close range, according to documents a Florida prosecutor released Thursday that indicate a hand-to-hand struggle occurred before the teenager was killed. [This is news? We already knew the thug was on top of Zimmerman, beating him bloody. Then, a few paragraphs down:] The information includes laboratory reports that show Martin’s blood had traces of THC, a chemical that is found in marijuana.

Why am I not surprised?

(From the famous 911 call)

Zimmerman: We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood and there’s a real suspicious guy....This guy looks like he’s up to no good or he’s on drugs or something.

Obama campaign: New York Times poll is 'biased'

Obama campaign deputy manager Stephanie Cutter dismissed today's CBS/New York Times poll showing that 67 percent of people believed Obama made his decision on gay marriage for political reasons. Only 24 percent said that Obama did it “mostly because he thinks it is right.”

Implicit premise: supporting something as crazy as "gay marriage" is somehow more respectable if it's sincere, instead of for rational, pragmatic reasons (viz., more money from the Sodomy Lobby).

A Campaign in Trouble

Three thoughts come to my mind on this:

1.When was the last time you saw a Democrat — any Democrat — claim that The New York Times(!!!) was biased against them?
2.What will be the NYTimes response to Team Obama’s attempt to throw them under the bus like that? They can’t be very pleased.
3.Team Romney has been faced with bad polling news many times since Mitt officially announced his candidacy. (Think of all those flavors-of-the-month that momentarily soared ahead of him, for starters. There were others.) Did they ever once attempt to blame the pollster for less-than-stellar poll numbers? I can’t remember that ever happening. Can you?
I have mentioned a number of times on these pages the number one rule of organizations. They tend to take on the characteristics of their leader. You can see this play out here.

When Team Romney is faced with a problem, their first instinct is to do like their boss and identify the problem and fix it. When Team Obama is faced with a problem, their first instinct is to do like their boss and figure out how they can avoid the blame for it.

OWS RIP

Remember when Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the nation? The media branded it the left’s answer to the Tea Party, the start of a grand national mobilization ... but compared to the Tea Party, except for the media hype, OWS was a political flop ... like it or loathe it the Tea Party did — and does — make a difference. Politicians seek its support; its leaders have taken over local party organizations and made waves in race after race across the country....But as a populist left wing fight back against the biggest economic disaster since the 1930s, [OWS] was dismally lame....

To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization [and who are motivated by sheer ethnic self-aggrandizement, anyway]. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive [and they are dominated not by private-sector workers struggling against exploitative capitalists, but by overpaid and underworked government employees].

....The level of confusion and dysfunction apparent in the OWS universe during its brief run is a sign that the American left has yet to find a vocabulary and a political stance that works in the 21st century....Organizing an effective left has always been exceptionally difficult in America because these groups were (and remain) much less cohesive than, say, the traditional blue collar factory proletariat of a conventional European ethnic nation-state [who are now being betrayed by their xenocentric, ethnophobic Socialist leaders masters].

It's hard to have a genuine, populist Left when the Left itself is the entrenched and privileged establishment. Blacks dominate Democratic urban party-machines, and sporadically riot with impunity; the two parties fall all over each other, offering benefits to illegal aliens; paper-credentialed, arugula-nibbling snobs dominate the education-news-entertainment complex; after over 100 years of "progressive" government, 60+% (and rising) of the federal budget (which is also ever-rising) is social(ist) spending.

I've considered myself a man of the Right for the last 25 years, simply by default, because what passes for the Left these days is so demented and destructive, and the Right is the only alternative. If there were a rational and patriotic Left anywhere out there, though, I'd sign up in a heartbeat.

Paradise Lost in Sweden

To many on the American Left, Sweden sets a gold standard for public policy....Despite a strong tradition of welfare-based economics that the FT calls “a major pillar of Swedish identity,” Sweden is doing a poor job of providing for its newest and neediest residents....It’s one thing to offer generous benefits for “people like us”, but when more of the beneficiaries are different—a different religion, different language, different customs—then voters worldwide often want to cut back. The Scandinavian social democratic utopias were once among the most homogenous populations on earth; when that was the case, they built protective social welfare states. Now, as immigrants come on the scene, some Scandinavians are taking another look at their social programs.

The question is, why did Sweden decide to import the world's needy? (Or rather, why the Swedish political oligarchy decided: I suspect the policy was never put to a popular vote.) Once having built their socialist Utopia, why mess with it? Why impose this moral and material burden on their compatriots? Of course, instead of questioning the policy that's wrecking the pink paradise, the liberal finds fault with the oppressed and exploited native people for recoiling from the impositions of their masters and the invaders.

wikipedia:

In philosophy, an aporia is a philosophical puzzle or a seemingly insoluble impasse in an inquiry, often arising as a result of equally plausible yet inconsistent premises. It can also denote the state of being perplexed, or at a loss, at such a puzzle or impasse. The notion of an aporia is principally found in Greek philosophy, but it also plays a role in post-structuralist philosophy, as in the writings of Derrida and Irigaray, and it has also served as an instrument of investigation in analytic philosophy.

Plato's early dialogues are often called his 'aporetic' (Greek: ἀπορητικός) dialogues because they typically end in aporia. In such a dialogue, Socrates questions his interlocutor about the nature or definition of a concept, for example virtue or courage. Socrates then, through elenctic testing, shows his interlocutor that his answer is unsatisfactory. After a number of such failed attempts, the interlocutor admits he is in aporia about the examined concept, concluding that he does not know what it is. In Plato's Meno (84a-c), Socrates describes the purgative effect of reducing someone to aporia: it shows someone who merely thought he knew something that he does not in fact know it and instills in him a desire to investigate it.

In Aristotle's Metaphysics aporia plays a role in his method of inquiry. In contrast to a rationalist inquiry that begins from a priori principles, or an empiricist inquiry that begins from a tabula rasa, he begins the Metaphysics by surveying the various aporiai that exist, drawing in particular on what puzzled his predecessors: "with a view to the science we are seeking [i.e., metaphysics], it is necessary that we should first review the things about which we need, from the outset, to be puzzled" (995a24). Book Beta of the Metaphysics is a list of the aporiai that preoccupy the rest of the work.


.....Elenchus (Greek: ἔλεγχος elengkhos "argument of disproof or refutation; cross-examining, testing, scrutiny esp. for purposes of refutation") is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin form elenchus (plural elenchi) is used in English as the technical philosophical term. In Plato's early dialogues, the elenchus is the technique Socrates uses to investigate, for example, the nature or definition of ethical concepts such as justice or virtue. According to one general characterization, it has the following steps:
1.Socrates' interlocutor asserts a thesis, for example "Courage is endurance of the soul", which Socrates considers false and targets for refutation.
2.Socrates secures his interlocutor's agreement to further premises, for example "Courage is a fine thing" and "Ignorant endurance is not a fine thing".
3.Socrates then argues, and the interlocutor agrees, that these further premises imply the contrary of the original thesis, in this case it leads to: "courage is not endurance of the soul".
4.Socrates then claims that he has shown that his interlocutor's thesis is false and that its negation is true.
One elenctic examination can lead to a new, more refined, examination of the concept being considered, in this case it invites an examination of the claim: "Courage is wise endurance of the soul". Most Socratic inquiries consist of a series of elenchi and typically end in aporia.

For me, human existence as a whole is an aporia, and my own life is an elenchus.

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor's degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

....Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life - level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it - are having long-lasting financial impact...many people with a bachelor's degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes.

....Any job gains are going mostly to workers at the top and bottom of the wage scale, at the expense of middle-income jobs commonly held by bachelor's degree holders. By some studies, up to 95 percent of positions lost during the economic recovery occurred in middle-income occupations such as bank tellers, the type of job not expected to return in a more high-tech age.

....In addition, U.S. workers increasingly may need to consider their position in a global economy, where they must compete with educated foreign-born residents for jobs. Longer-term government projections also may fail to consider "degree inflation," a growing ubiquity of bachelor's degrees that could make them more commonplace in lower-wage jobs but inadequate for higher-wage ones.

A bit of generational-historic perspective: The college class of 2012 is the Millenial cohort of 1990. I was in the college class of 1990.