We men are under threat. White men make up only 30% of the US population. There was a time when it was over 40%, only about 100 years ago. In the interim, we have been under attack by feminism and homosexuals, losing our traditional roles as providers and even our manliness.
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Note: I am not an economist. This is not about why inflation happens but what I have written here is going to anger the “fiat currency is a conspiracy of the international bankers” sect and will be challenged by them and others because of certain assumptions I have made. See the bottom of this article for those assumptions.
Inflation is a constant reality of living in a human society which uses paper currency. So why does it bother so many people?
I admin the YouTube channel of a Canadian immigration company. Every few weeks, we get a comment or two about how the immigration company (or immigration in general) is destroying Canada’s economy or society or both, and the term “cultural genocide” is often thrown in there.
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There is a war raging on the internet. That war centres around a rather stupid question: are millennials to blame for everything or are boomers? Typical of every internet debate, it is a debate which often lacks nuance; while there are informed pieces on both sides, most of the content amounts to blaming millennials for all the problems in the economy or blaming boomers for the problematic economy as a whole. Generation gaps are a natural part of human life, but why does this one seem so large?
Is the world a meritocracy? If you work hard will you be rewarded? If you are lazy, will you be poor?
Supply-side economics, popularly known as ‘trickle-down’ economics, has been the most dominant approach to economic policy in North America (and some other countries) since the 1980s. Despite all economic evidence to the contrary, it is a policy that is still pursued today, to some extent or other, by both conservative and centrist parties in liberal democracies. The primary real-world consequence of these policies is a drastic increase in the economic differences between the rich and poor. The record is not good. Why is the policy so popular?
Why does everything have to be so complicated?
Danielle: I heard they found evidence on Vic.
Dutch: Yeah. Maybe a little too much.
Danielle: What do you mean?
Dutch: You ever hear of Occam’s razor? The simplest answer is usually the right one? Good. Now apply that to the Lemansky case. Now all this evidence is pointing to Vic. Occam’s razor would suggest he’s guilty. Walter Chatton a contemporary of Occam’s. Disputed the razor. Coined his own anti-razor.
Danielle: What’s that?
Dutch: Chatton believed that the world was too complex. Too many variables to assume that the simplest answer was always the correct one.
From “Baptism by Fire,” the second episode of season 6 of The Shield.
I haven’t watched The Shield in years, but this exchange has haunted my dreams ever since. The world is indeed a complicated place, and most complex phenomena have complicated explanations, but, more often than not, the simplest hypothesis is the best. Why are so many of us tempted to believe otherwise, like Dutch here?
We all hate change. I think it’s safe to say that unwanted change in our lives is one of the primary sources of stress for pretty much all of us. Even for those people who appear to thrive on change and chaos, underlying their lives are secret routines they have that we can’t see. If our routines and habits are disrupted by someone or something, this makes us angry, confused and stressed out.
The most obvious reason why we don’t like change is that human beings prefer what’s familiar. That’s a constant throughout human history; we humans have always preferred the familiar to what’s not. We could have a long conversation about why that is, but I want to focus on a second reason why human beings fear change and, more specifically, dislike reform, e.g. socio-political changes. This reason compliments and reinforces our innate fear of the new and different. This reason is The Just World Fallacy.
Why do so many Americans deny global warming/climate change? Is it because they’re idiots who don’t understand science? Is it because they believe in faith over reason? Or is there something else going on, a little more nuanced?
It has long been a cliche of our internet age that the comments section of an article will feature the worst of what humanity has to offer – every kind of discrimination and slander you can imagine, all supposedly enabled by the anonymity of the internet. But the same kinds of behaviour can be found on twitter where many people use their real names or aliases that can be readily linked to them. This bad behaviour, whether it’s trolling or something else, targets various “minorities” more often than not, but often seems to focus on a “minority” that’s actually a majority: the female half of the species. Why is it that women are a persecuted “minority” on the internet?
