Recently in Culture Category
On Millennial Snot - by Dudley Newright - The Upheaval
Smarm, snark, and snot: Why millennial political discourse is so juvenile. "The obsession with data is a pretext for the reality of the liberal position, which is that any grievance expressed in terms that lie outside the current window of acceptable liberal discourse is simply not valid - it's false consciousness, it's mis/disinformation, it's problematic, it's stochastic terror. Political difference is a matter of some people being incorrect - If you only possessed the right knowledge, saw the right charts, the right facts, you'd change your mind. Political conflict, to the modern liberal, is not about struggle for finite resources, insoluble moral differences, or fundamental divergences in our conception of what America ought to be. It's only a failure of half the country - a bunch of dumb hicks - to know what's good for them. The grand liberal challenge has been recast as an effort not to improve the material conditions of the unwashed masses "clinging to their guns and religion," but to enlighten them so hard that they rewire their minds. Compromise is now impossible, because only one position is correct. And when reality does not comport with the liberal worldview, when data fails to tell the story liberals want to tell, when the chuds stubbornly refuse to get with the program, the only tactic that remains is policing group boundaries via shame and ridicule of the outgroup. If I can't persuade you to agree, I'll publically humiliate you until you learn your lesson."
The U.S. Dialect Quiz: How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk - The New York Times
My dialect map pinpointed Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Wichita as the cities to which my dialect is closest (because of my use of the terms "crawdad," "service road," and "pop," respectively. I'm furthest from Worcester, Springfield, Mass., and Providence because I pronounce "aunt" as "ant."
Phones Are Destroying Kids' Ability To Read Books
Jeremy S. Adams writes: "And yet we somehow expect these same kids who can't enjoy a simple bike or horse ride to sit down in a corner and spend hours reading a book. Keep in mind one of the most shocking yet revealing statistics in modern educational research: teens are more likely to read a novel at thirteen than they are at seventeen. As one of my best friends recently observed, 'My son used to be a voracious reader -- a couple books a week. And then we gave him a phone and the reading stopped.'... Which brings me to another demoralizing data point in the quickly degenerating mental state of American students. Two weeks ago, Pew Research released disturbing findings about American educators which found that 58 percent of high school instructors noted their students had "little to no interest" in learning. A whopping, though completely unsurprising, 72 percent say cellphone distraction is a major problem."
The Queering of the SBC - Center for Baptist Leadership
Jared Moore writes: "In a 2019 interview with Apologia Radio, Butterfield said that if she were still living a lesbian lifestyle today and were trying to repent, theologians and pastors who teach that same-sex attraction is not sin would have prevented her from doing so: 'I don't know how it would have gone for me today, because ... in working out what it means to have the indwelling sin of homosexuality, I would be told that it wasn't a sin at all; or I would be told it's only a sin if you act on it.'...
Moore discusses a long list of SBC leaders and influencers who have departed from Biblical truth on this question: Preston Sprinkle, Nate Collins, Karen Swallow Prior, David Prince, Patrick Schreiner, Sam Allberry. He points to analysis by New Testament Professor Robert A. Gagnon, showing that "a child's social environment greatly increases or decreases his or her chances of developing same-sex desires."
"The queering of the SBC--and all of conservative American Christianity--is a major problem. It appears that in a misguided effort to be winsome to the world, we have allowed leaders and ministries to advance unbiblical teaching that undermines God's good plan for human sexuality and even celebrates the embrace of sexual immorality in the lives of professing Christians and the church. In our sexually confused and sinful day and age, what the lost need most is courage and clarity, not compromise."
From the article: "Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like "build ninja" (cultural appropriation), "nuke the old cache" (military metaphor), "sanity check" (disparages mental illness), or "dummy variable" (disparages disabilities). One engineer was "strongly encouraged" to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including "zie/hir," "ey/em," "xe/xem," and "ve/vir"), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of "inclusivity" (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group)."
From the comments: "It is fascinating how so many successful organizations end up accidentally setting up incentives that reward and increase the influence of the dumbest people in the room. There are undoubtedly thousands of genius level engineers at Google, and yet they get their marching orders from people who couldn't pass a freshman calculus class."
The Problem With Human Resources - Mockingbird
"My friend knew it was harassment, but didn't trust HR to handle the matter. Nobody did -- in her working class department, everyone had been through the same training, and had written off HR as an enemy. Desperate for freedom, my friend found a position in another department, and hoping to make a change as she left, she filed an HR grievance on the way out the door. Her grievance uncovered a trail of harassment that included testimonies of nearly a dozen other women, all of whom could have reported the man, but none of them trusted HR to do anything about it. The man in question was fired, but he might have been fired sooner if the general consensus among the campus working class was that HR only cared if race or sexual orientation were involved. Every institution has trouble garnering trust from its employees, but commitments to ineffective moral frameworks make the problem worse.
"Say what you will about Christianity, but it's been a historic catalyst of achieving the goals that HR programs aim for. Its initial spread came through the underclass of slaves, women, and the poor throughout the Roman Empire, developing one of the world's first truly extranational communities. Its adherents established the first hospitals to take care of the sick and elderly. It became a champion of literacy so that normal people could have direct access to its sacred texts (and reform its own corrupt religious hierarchy). Whether it's the end of chattel slavery, the American civil rights movement, the decolonization of the British empire, or the end of South African apartheid, the moral logic of Christianity has historically been a tool of the dispossessed to challenge their oppressors. Why has Christianity been successful in this way? One imagines that its success is, in no small part, due to the fact it allows for all sins, including oppression, to be expiated as water under a bridge."
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest
Jonathan Haidt, co-author with Greg Lukianoff of "The Coddling of the American Mind" writes:
"Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen "cognitive distortions," such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causes depression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression.
"What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.
"I thought the idea was brilliant because I had just begun to see these new ways of thinking among some students at NYU. I volunteered to help Greg write it up, and in August 2015 our essay appeared in The Atlantic with the title: The Coddling of the American Mind. Greg did not like that title; his original suggestion was "Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach Cognitive Distortions." He wanted to put the reverse CBT hypothesis in the title."
"Hayley said she was riding high on a 'dopamine rush' and told her partner she could plan the whole thing in just two weeks. And she very nearly did.
"'But once that high had disappeared it was like falling off a cliff and everything stopped,' she said.
"Hayley has ADHD, and during the most exhilarating time of her life, it hit her extremely hard.
'I was lucky that in those two weeks, I had managed to go through my excel spreadsheets send out a lot of inquiries and got most things sorted and underway before I crashed,' she said.
"Decision fatigue was one of the biggest challenges she encountered.
"Decision fatigue is where the more decisions a person makes over the course of a day, the more physically, mentally, and emotionally depleted they become."
Eternity 1950-1989 : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has borrowable grayscale scans of the full 1950-1989 run of Eternity, a monthly Christian magazine founded by Donald Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis writes: "I am taken by the earnestness of the topics addressed and the quality of the writers, such as John Stott, Bernard Ramm, Billy Graham, G. Elton Ladd, and others. It was a magazine of serious evangelical commentary. I found articles on the God is dead theory, race relations, various political issues, LSD, youth culture, television (note the cover I posted from 1976), and other issues of moment.... I wrote a few articles for them [in the mid '80s], one rather long piece on New Age politics. By combing through these old issues, I see that Eternity gave us solid evangelical commentary and Bible study back in the day and for many years. For this, I am grateful and look forward to working my way through the years of their magazine." Because the magazines are still under copyright, you must have an Internet Archive account to check out a copy for viewing one hour at a time. The final issue dated January 1989 has cover stories by Brian Frickle regarding the moral content of architecture and by Thomas L. Kerns on architecture and creating a place of worship.
A Simple Age Verification Law Is Blowing Up the Online Porn Industry - POLITICO
"An important consensus seems to have emerged that childhood exposure to pornography is one of many things negatively affecting the minds of Gen Z. Anxiety is mounting around the country over the devastating and humiliating mental health crisis afflicting my generation. Some blame social media; others chime in to add oversensitivity, overdiagnosis and a therapeutic culture. It hardly seems like a leap to throw limitless internet porn into the blame basket.
"As the Louisiana law posits, 'Pornography may also impact brain development and functioning, contribute to emotional and medical illnesses, shape deviant sexual arousal, and lead to difficulty in forming or maintaining positive, intimate relationships, as well as promoting problematic or harmful sexual behaviors and addiction.'"
