tingilinde

liz warns

tipping in america

It varies - it's too bad these establishments don't pay living wages.  Just raise the prices a bit and forgo tips.  A few restaurants in the US follow the practice that's common elsewhere.

 

accents

london accents through the ages

the value of state (foreign) exports

How much and where does it go?

 

birthrates and antiabortion laws

In Poland the government's desire to turn the nation's population bust around appear to have failed.

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An array of factors — including job insecurity, housing shortages, scarcity of child care and, more recently, the war in Ukraine — is driving the slide in birthrates. Populations in Eastern Europe have also been sapped by people seeking work elsewhere, especially in wealthier Western European countries.

Yet the decline in Poland has accelerated, and more than half of Poles blame the new law. Many Polish women say the obstacles they would face to terminating their pregnancy, even if a fatal birth defect is diagnosed, are a daunting deterrent.

Now, the only way to end a pregnancy is when it results from rape or incest, or if the woman’s health is endangered. And some doctors, who face years in prison if they perform an abortion that doesn’t conform to the law’s stringent exceptions, have been reluctant to help women end their pregnancies in a timely way. That chilling effect appears to have led to unnecessary maternal deaths.

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women in china

China has a serious population problem on its hands - and young woman aren't going along with the the state solution.

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Now many young Chinese women are doing exactly that, delaying or shunning marriage and childbirth altogether, mirroring the journey of women in other, wealthier patriarchal East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As individuals, these Chinese women are generally unwilling to challenge official policy. But through their reproductive choices, they collectively pose a radical and complicated problem for the Chinese Communist Party.

Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.

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trump's mental health

It's getting worse

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For example, Dr. Justin Frank, author of "Trump on the Couch", recently warned that Trump has a “a classic God complex driven by a persecutory delusion. His sense of omniscience is compensatory and more disturbing than ever” and “In my opinion, Trump's incessant, word-salad repetition reflects chronic substance abuse or impending dementia, which is consistent with the blank eyes. His blotchy red and puffy face (and constant sniffling) are not new but underscore a clinician's natural suspicion that he is not cognitively healthy. His cartoon character menacing and bellicose posture is second nature to him.”

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thomas zimmer on americans and democracy

A historian looks for signals 

part 1 - do Americans value it?

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And yet, the American Values Survey (AVS) deserves a lot of attention. We already discussed it two weeks ago on Is This Democracy. But the results have stuck with me, and I have found myself talking about the survey a lot. I’d like to reflect more extensively on what the AVS unearthed, on what to make of these findings, and how to situate them in the broader context of America’s long-standing struggle over democracy. Almost exactly one year before the 2024 presidential election, this is as good an indication as any of the current state of American politics and society.

The American Values Survey stands out precisely because it is not concerned with the horse race, not all about favorability ratings and making far-fetched predictions about future election results. The AVS aims at something deeper – that which underlies the day-to-day squabbles. As the introduction to the AVS puts it: “The survey illuminates Americans’ concerns about the overall direction of the country, the state of the economy and inflation, public education, social connectedness, and the broader health of our democracy.” That last dimension is key: “the broader health of our democracy.” Because in order to get there, the AVS asks questions that, as my co-host Liliana Mason explained on Is This Democracy, not many other surveys tackle – it asks about where people stand on democracy vs authoritarianism, attitudes towards political violence, ideas about national identity, culture, and religious values that determine what vision for America’s future people support or fear.

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part 2 - how can it work?

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The challenge is to properly unpack what “American culture and the American way of life” actually means. In the survey, the people who defined this as their priority were also much more likely to be worried about immigration, support Christian nationalism, and agree that the country had become “too feminine.” In this interpretation, what needs to be protected is a white, Christian, patriarchal way of life in accordance with traditional and/or divinely ordained hierarchies of race, gender, and religion. There is nothing ephemeral or aloof about this “culture”: In this context, the term indicates a preference for a very specific, all-encompassing societal order. What we often refer to as the “culture wars” is a struggle over what “America” should be, who should get to define it, who should get to delineate the boundaries of who or what counts as “American,” who should have the right to shape society in their own image and have their own image reflected back at them in the public square. This isn’t just political theater. It’s about power and status in all spheres of life, very much including politics and the economy. Think of the “culture wars” as equality and national identity wars – a struggle over nothing less than the question of who has a right to be at the top, because they embody the essence of “real America,” and who doesn’t really belong and is, at best, tolerated, their status always conditional on them shutting up and accepting their “rightful” place further down the latter. So, yes, Republicans are fixated on culture rather than specific economic policy issues. But the “real American” way of life they envision comes with a pretty clear understanding of how power and resources should be distributed. It’s not so much that they aren’t anxious about the economy – but their economic concern is downstream from the “cultural” anxiety.

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the auteur theory of design

John Gruber illustrated with the film industry..  it probably applies to many other areas.

a tip of the hat to Dwayne