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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Spengler: The triumph of inequality |
| 2017-08-15 |
| [PJMedia] We spent a great deal of time talking about inequality of opportunity and outcomes. The tech industry is fanatically progressive in its opinions, as the unfortunate James Damore, formerly of Google, recently learned. The tech industry's drivel about diversity and equality masks a guilty conscience: Digital technology creates inequality of a kind we have never seen before in human history. Instead of talking about inequality of outcomes, suppose we talked about inequality of knowledge? Three hundred years ago, pretty much everyone knew how their technology work. Europe had lived for a millennium on the innovations of the Carolingian Renaissance: the water wheel, the horse collar and three-field crop rotation. Everyone knew how a water wheel worked. Water pushed the paddles and gears turned the millstones. Not everyone knew how a steam engine worked, but a lot of people did. The same applied to internal combustion engines. ...The great divide is not between black and white, male and female,We are turning into two races: Eloi who play video games and Morlocks who program them. The July 3 New York Times reported, "By 2015, American men 31 to 55 were working about 163 fewer hours a year than that same age group did in 2000. Men 21 to 30 were working 203 fewer hours a year...video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year. Between 2004 and 2015, young men’s leisure time grew by 2.3 hours a week. A majority of that increase -- 60 percent -- was spent playing video games." |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #5 ...video games have been responsible for reducing the amount of work that young men do by 15 to 30 hours over the course of a year. The Arrow of Causation is as backwards as saying that 'pigeons are caused by droppings on windshields'. At the same time: tell people that low-skilled jobs are "beneath them", raise minimum wages so there are fewer jobs, and provide financial incentives to support non-workers. First Cloward-Pliven and then the Gulags where people are forced to work at whatever the State requires. |
| Posted by: magpie 2017-08-15 12:02 |
| #4 P2k, I tried to do that a couple of years ago when I was a substitute middle school teacher. End of the year doldrums meant that I had 3 days of time to "monitor" the classes while the year ended. I suggested that I show the kids DTUC since I own a copy and figured it would be better than the cartoon (literally) show that was scheduled. Was told " no way I should show such controversial material !!" I stopped subbing when Common Core was mandated and learning abandoned. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2017-08-15 10:10 |
| #3 Just rewatched The Day the Universe Changed last week or so. Both should be mandatory in our education system. Along with a little factoid, that if you make 18,000 (US) dollars a year, you are in the top 4 percent of the worlds population. Then ask would you like to join those 96 percent by 'killing the goose that laid the golden egg'? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-08-15 09:18 |
| #2 I've gotten to meet Mr. Goldman and found him to be quite erudite, intense and broadly knowledgeable. I can guarantee that he is using video games metaphorically not literally. Many years ago James Burke did a couple of series on this phenomenon. Look up "Connections" and "The day the Universe Changed". They are very interesting and informative. (Extra points if you can find the topless scene) This is pretty much nailed by the commercial "That's not how this works; that's not how any of this works." I also suggest that you reread "The Time Machine" to remember exactly what Eloi and Morlochs are. |
| Posted by: AlanC 2017-08-15 07:49 |
| #1 Video Games? The new '50s devil of the comic book straw man? Since Obamacare, working more than 28 hours a week becomes a economical disincentive to employers. More like government mandated time off. The boys are playing more and watching TV less. Interactive vs passive entertainment. Gamergate showed which audience won't put up with SJW encroachment and where the consumer immediately effects the bottom line the seller. Those companies generally are not protected by large corporations which can shift monies around to cover bad products and bad decisions by their management. [Insert here whining from the SJW about the unequal outcome of that] |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2017-08-15 06:38 |