- Why are Gen Z men going back to church, and women leaving? It’s always about the search for meaning;
- About friends and family who’ve been lost to MAGA madness;
- Hurricanes are caused by being left-handed — er, by porn in schools;
- How Republicans *want* to be able to spread misinformation;
- Faking a former Walz student;
- How Trump’s win would return the US to the world of the 1930s.
So hard to keep up. I think for today I’ll pass over Trump’s stunt at a McDonald’s, and his obsession with Arnold Palmer’s anatomy. You can Google them.
Why would this be?
Slate, 11 Oct 2024, Jill Filipovic: Gen Z Men Are Going Back to Church. Why?, subtitled “Young men are increasingly more religious. Young women are leaving the church in droves. Their motivations might not be so different.”
The not so different motive is “a search for some kind of structure or purpose.”
That pursuit looks very different for both of these cohorts because of real changes in each group’s circumstances, social position, and life prospects. In the U.S., women are simultaneously doing better than ever before and enjoying historic opportunities for education and work while also seeing their most basic rights—chief among them the right to determine the number and spacing of their children—not only contested but broadly constrained.
Young men, on the other hand, seem comparatively more out to sea. They still enjoy vast social and economic benefits compared to women, but a nation in which there is less discrimination against women is also a nation in which there are fewer unearned advantages for men. They’re also lonely: Social isolation and feelings of alienation are increasingly common. And compared to young women, young men are less likely to rely on friends or romantic partners for support, leaning instead on their parents, who they are also more likely to live with.
Yes, it all comes back to the “search for meaning.” (Which I’ve suggested elsewhere is an extension of the narrative bias.)
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Or family.
Salon, 20 Oct 2024, Mike Lofgren: Invasion of the MAGA body snatchers: How many friends have you lost to madness?, subtitled “What can we do when intelligent, well-meaning people we’ve known for years start to ‘do their own research’?”
The people who “do their own research” are typically the people who’ve never been to college and have no idea how to do actual research, except to Google a topic and pick the links that confirm their suspicions. The articles concludes,
Americans have traditionally been famous for being open and friendly, although this quality, often enough, is a superficial gloss. Now we approach our fellow Americans with a certain wariness, and steer clear of a growing list of subjects, lest we inadvertently trigger an embarrassing scene. Perhaps later historians will conclude that the single most significant development in the United States in the new millennium was not AI, but the rise of the paranoid mind and the resultant loss of social trust.
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I saw a cartoon on Facebook depicting a medieval cleric, who tells his assistant something like, “Surely the reason for these plagues is our tolerance for the left-handed.”
JMG, 21 Oct 2024: Hate Pastor: Hurricanes Are Caused By Porn In Schools
This is basic delusional thinking: the primitive assigning of cause and effect without any understanding of actual causes.
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CNN, 21 Oct 2024: How Republicans pushed social media companies to stop fighting election misinformation
Republicans *want* to be able to spread disinformation.
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Not just lying, but going out of their way to lie.
Washington Post, 21 Oct 2024: Viral attack on Walz features fake former student making false claim
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Everything was *not* better in the past.
Washington Post, Max Boot, 21 Oct 2024: Opinion | If Trump wins, we could return to the world of the 1930s, subtitled “The post-World War II international order is hanging in the balance.”
The United States remains by far by the most powerful country in the world: It spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined, and its economic output accounts for roughly one-quarter of the global total. What America does matters. A lot.
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After 1945 in the United States, the greatest generation sought to rectify that mistake by constructing a new world order based on free-trade pacts and security alliances. That approach was staggeringly successful: Democracy and prosperity spread around the world. Great power conflict has been averted. The United States has been the biggest beneficiary among major nations of the international system that it created along with its allies: U.S. gross domestic product per capita in 2023 was $73,600, compared with just $39,800 for Russia and $22,100 for China.
Now those historic achievements are imperiled by the possibility that Trump could return to office and implement “America First” policies reminiscent of the 1930s. Only if Harris wins is the United States likely to continue pursuing the policies that have undergirded its prosperity and security since 1945.
As with “supply-side” economics and so many other things, it seems that while conservatives venerate history, they don’t actually study history much, or learn its lessons.
