What have you learned so far in life?

[mplsdunk]

don't start smoking, when you quit it sucks.

 

[rexanglorum]

JayzOnMyToes wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

Being clever can only do so much, hard work is essential for any venture to succeed, at least any worth while venture. This is true for your education, sports, business, politics, warfare, the arts and all manner of human enterprise. Being able to speak and write and think at a high level is great but there are others who are as smart r smarter than you and in almost every situation the those who do well work and they not only work but they follow up with more work and it is over time, through steady and consistent and diligent work that you can over come someone who puts in blasts of Herculean effort for a short time.

I learned this in school where I struggled at math because I was used to not only passing but getting A's and B's from attending lectures and/or reading the assigned readings and then writing beautifully on my exams. In math, I had to practice a few time per week and it was that pattern of learning that was frustrating for me and I had to get some bad grades until I accepted the reality that I had to put in steady and diligent work just to pass. This is true for more advanced students as well. One of my very best Economics professors was also the department chairwoman and she said that she surpassed many of her colleagues because she is willing and able to get up and get into her office and do 40 hours of research per week, 50 weeks per year, i naddition to her teaching, which usually entails three or four classes. She is very smart, like almost all university professors but she is correct that there are many academics who do not have the disposition to be so business like, so bourgeois in their unwillingness to take long summer vacations, teach more than one class and to be at work early. 

I also learned this by playing basketball, you cannot get conditioned in a day or a week, no matter how many suicides you run. You also will lose your jump shot without consistent work and your overall decision making will become dull without frequent games and scrimmages. To be good at basketball, I had to make it a part of my lifestyle.

Finally, I have seen this pattern of diligent and consist work at its most stark now that I work in finance. As we saw in 2007 and 2008, mathematical models can not work out very well. They tended to have too little data (seriously some models would have investment patterns or real estate prices that covered about four or five years), they caused management to be over confident, they also caused management to be arrogant and to be blindsided by the fact that rapid home price increases were not the norm and based on an assumption of a 10% to 25% annual increase in home values, for an infinite amount of years, and the conclusions derived therefrom where the foundation upon which they staked hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions more than they did not have. Also, anyone who thinks that you can make a killing by investing based on broad demographic trends is delusional ( e.g when someone says that you should invest long term in health care because there is an aging population or that you should gold now in 2011, after several years of financial sector turmoil and mounting government debts).

The way I make money for my firm is by going to municipalities in order to see if their bond rating corresponds with the reality on the ground. If a county or town is floating a bond and it is not AAA, the interest rate is higher because there is presumption that default could occur. If I can look at the local economy, its social out look, the voters' views on debt and default and find that the bond ratings agencies were slightly off, we can make money off of that little bit of asymmetry of information. That extra bit of information about a town in the central Valley of California is what gives us an edge over someone on Wall Street, who is 3,000 miles from California, thinks that every West of the Hudson is the Wild West who could not name a single county in the San Joaquin Valley. I did not out think them I put my boot, or rather my wingtips or boat shoes on the ground, where a putative investment may or may not take place.

I am sorry if I sounded too preachy or too didactic even but I really think that people, especially people who are clever, want to avoid the tragic reality that you cannot reason your way to excellence, the path to victory is made shorter if you have mastery of languages and mathematics but you cannot finish that journey without steady, diligent and unrelenting labor of what sort or another. I hope that some of you who, are still in college or who are still in k-12 will, get some utility from what I have stated.

how long it took you to type that

It maybe took me seven or eight minutes. If you watch a clock's second hand or count "one one thousand, two one thousand..." sixty seconds is lot of time and if you know your subject matter very well, you can churn out a paragraph in one to two minutes.

Ten years ago, it took me a long time to produce a research paper. Our 20 page paper in English class took so much time and energy and it was so hard to meet the page requirement. However, through repetition and well, more repetition, you can research efficiently and within hours have more than enough material. If I had a class that required that I write a term paper and it did not require a great deal of of traditional research (going to the library and gathering information from a wide variety of sources) but rather was an assignment that entailed summarizing or arguing a position that was based on our required reading (most history and most upper division economics courses did not have a single/central text book and instead there would be two to ten different books and/or article from academic journals), could write a page every five to ten minutes and then I would actually spend twice as much time, if not more, to revise, refine and reinforce my arguments and to make the paper better.

On NT, you guys get the rough draft (I will use the spell check to cut down on misspellings and typos but I am not going to spend 15 minutes for every paragraph) unless if my reply is on a very emotional and/or controversial issue, where every single word can and will be dissected and in that case, I will give key passages a second or third look and thus, a good deal of time.

Keep working at writing, read a great deal, learn formal technique for argumentation and reasoning, learn formal techniques for writing (and after mastering the standard five paragraph essay, with its intro, with its thesis statement and other attention grabbing statements of opinion; three body body paragraphs, with their intros, and a their sentences containing concrete details with two sentences of supporting commentary and their ending sentence of transition and of course your final paragraph that restates your position and summarizes the arguments) and after mastering those techniques you can deviate from the formula while retaining the same general notion of organizing your facts and commentary, learn how to do research and just keep at it and you will be able to write well and write quickly. You may get so good at it that you will have too much to say and/or you will become so good at shaking people's foundational beliefs; finding their logical and moral failings; deconstructing prevailing narratives or the mythos, upon which belief system are built, and ethics and you will become all the more unpopular for doing so.

Know your subject and know how to write and become hyper proficient in writing in and of itself and as you learn new things. One of the joys of life is that as we get into our 30, 40's and into old age, we can keep growing i nwisdom and in our body of factual knowledge for decades even as our bodies do the fall apart. However, amny people know a lot but cannot articulate it and the World is, intellectually a bit poorer as a result. So once against know your stuff, know how to say it and you can produce a quality paragraph in as little as a minute or two.

 

[rexanglorum]

JayzOnMyToes wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

Being clever can only do so much, hard work is essential for any venture to succeed, at least any worth while venture. This is true for your education, sports, business, politics, warfare, the arts and all manner of human enterprise. Being able to speak and write and think at a high level is great but there are others who are as smart r smarter than you and in almost every situation the those who do well work and they not only work but they follow up with more work and it is over time, through steady and consistent and diligent work that you can over come someone who puts in blasts of Herculean effort for a short time.

I learned this in school where I struggled at math because I was used to not only passing but getting A's and B's from attending lectures and/or reading the assigned readings and then writing beautifully on my exams. In math, I had to practice a few time per week and it was that pattern of learning that was frustrating for me and I had to get some bad grades until I accepted the reality that I had to put in steady and diligent work just to pass. This is true for more advanced students as well. One of my very best Economics professors was also the department chairwoman and she said that she surpassed many of her colleagues because she is willing and able to get up and get into her office and do 40 hours of research per week, 50 weeks per year, i naddition to her teaching, which usually entails three or four classes. She is very smart, like almost all university professors but she is correct that there are many academics who do not have the disposition to be so business like, so bourgeois in their unwillingness to take long summer vacations, teach more than one class and to be at work early. 

I also learned this by playing basketball, you cannot get conditioned in a day or a week, no matter how many suicides you run. You also will lose your jump shot without consistent work and your overall decision making will become dull without frequent games and scrimmages. To be good at basketball, I had to make it a part of my lifestyle.

Finally, I have seen this pattern of diligent and consist work at its most stark now that I work in finance. As we saw in 2007 and 2008, mathematical models can not work out very well. They tended to have too little data (seriously some models would have investment patterns or real estate prices that covered about four or five years), they caused management to be over confident, they also caused management to be arrogant and to be blindsided by the fact that rapid home price increases were not the norm and based on an assumption of a 10% to 25% annual increase in home values, for an infinite amount of years, and the conclusions derived therefrom where the foundation upon which they staked hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions more than they did not have. Also, anyone who thinks that you can make a killing by investing based on broad demographic trends is delusional ( e.g when someone says that you should invest long term in health care because there is an aging population or that you should gold now in 2011, after several years of financial sector turmoil and mounting government debts).

The way I make money for my firm is by going to municipalities in order to see if their bond rating corresponds with the reality on the ground. If a county or town is floating a bond and it is not AAA, the interest rate is higher because there is presumption that default could occur. If I can look at the local economy, its social out look, the voters' views on debt and default and find that the bond ratings agencies were slightly off, we can make money off of that little bit of asymmetry of information. That extra bit of information about a town in the central Valley of California is what gives us an edge over someone on Wall Street, who is 3,000 miles from California, thinks that every West of the Hudson is the Wild West who could not name a single county in the San Joaquin Valley. I did not out think them I put my boot, or rather my wingtips or boat shoes on the ground, where a putative investment may or may not take place.

I am sorry if I sounded too preachy or too didactic even but I really think that people, especially people who are clever, want to avoid the tragic reality that you cannot reason your way to excellence, the path to victory is made shorter if you have mastery of languages and mathematics but you cannot finish that journey without steady, diligent and unrelenting labor of what sort or another. I hope that some of you who, are still in college or who are still in k-12 will, get some utility from what I have stated.

how long it took you to type that

It maybe took me seven or eight minutes. If you watch a clock's second hand or count "one one thousand, two one thousand..." sixty seconds is lot of time and if you know your subject matter very well, you can churn out a paragraph in one to two minutes.

Ten years ago, it took me a long time to produce a research paper. Our 20 page paper in English class took so much time and energy and it was so hard to meet the page requirement. However, through repetition and well, more repetition, you can research efficiently and within hours have more than enough material. If I had a class that required that I write a term paper and it did not require a great deal of of traditional research (going to the library and gathering information from a wide variety of sources) but rather was an assignment that entailed summarizing or arguing a position that was based on our required reading (most history and most upper division economics courses did not have a single/central text book and instead there would be two to ten different books and/or article from academic journals), could write a page every five to ten minutes and then I would actually spend twice as much time, if not more, to revise, refine and reinforce my arguments and to make the paper better.

On NT, you guys get the rough draft (I will use the spell check to cut down on misspellings and typos but I am not going to spend 15 minutes for every paragraph) unless if my reply is on a very emotional and/or controversial issue, where every single word can and will be dissected and in that case, I will give key passages a second or third look and thus, a good deal of time.

Keep working at writing, read a great deal, learn formal technique for argumentation and reasoning, learn formal techniques for writing (and after mastering the standard five paragraph essay, with its intro, with its thesis statement and other attention grabbing statements of opinion; three body body paragraphs, with their intros, and a their sentences containing concrete details with two sentences of supporting commentary and their ending sentence of transition and of course your final paragraph that restates your position and summarizes the arguments) and after mastering those techniques you can deviate from the formula while retaining the same general notion of organizing your facts and commentary, learn how to do research and just keep at it and you will be able to write well and write quickly. You may get so good at it that you will have too much to say and/or you will become so good at shaking people's foundational beliefs; finding their logical and moral failings; deconstructing prevailing narratives or the mythos, upon which belief system are built, and ethics and you will become all the more unpopular for doing so.

Know your subject and know how to write and become hyper proficient in writing in and of itself and as you learn new things. One of the joys of life is that as we get into our 30, 40's and into old age, we can keep growing i nwisdom and in our body of factual knowledge for decades even as our bodies do the fall apart. However, amny people know a lot but cannot articulate it and the World is, intellectually a bit poorer as a result. So once against know your stuff, know how to say it and you can produce a quality paragraph in as little as a minute or two.

 

[User 37837]

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

JayzOnMyToes wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

Being clever can only do so much, hard work is essential for any venture to succeed, at least any worth while venture. This is true for your education, sports, business, politics, warfare, the arts and all manner of human enterprise. Being able to speak and write and think at a high level is great but there are others who are as smart r smarter than you and in almost every situation the those who do well work and they not only work but they follow up with more work and it is over time, through steady and consistent and diligent work that you can over come someone who puts in blasts of Herculean effort for a short time.

I learned this in school where I struggled at math because I was used to not only passing but getting A's and B's from attending lectures and/or reading the assigned readings and then writing beautifully on my exams. In math, I had to practice a few time per week and it was that pattern of learning that was frustrating for me and I had to get some bad grades until I accepted the reality that I had to put in steady and diligent work just to pass. This is true for more advanced students as well. One of my very best Economics professors was also the department chairwoman and she said that she surpassed many of her colleagues because she is willing and able to get up and get into her office and do 40 hours of research per week, 50 weeks per year, i naddition to her teaching, which usually entails three or four classes. She is very smart, like almost all university professors but she is correct that there are many academics who do not have the disposition to be so business like, so bourgeois in their unwillingness to take long summer vacations, teach more than one class and to be at work early. 

I also learned this by playing basketball, you cannot get conditioned in a day or a week, no matter how many suicides you run. You also will lose your jump shot without consistent work and your overall decision making will become dull without frequent games and scrimmages. To be good at basketball, I had to make it a part of my lifestyle.

Finally, I have seen this pattern of diligent and consist work at its most stark now that I work in finance. As we saw in 2007 and 2008, mathematical models can not work out very well. They tended to have too little data (seriously some models would have investment patterns or real estate prices that covered about four or five years), they caused management to be over confident, they also caused management to be arrogant and to be blindsided by the fact that rapid home price increases were not the norm and based on an assumption of a 10% to 25% annual increase in home values, for an infinite amount of years, and the conclusions derived therefrom where the foundation upon which they staked hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions more than they did not have. Also, anyone who thinks that you can make a killing by investing based on broad demographic trends is delusional ( e.g when someone says that you should invest long term in health care because there is an aging population or that you should gold now in 2011, after several years of financial sector turmoil and mounting government debts).

The way I make money for my firm is by going to municipalities in order to see if their bond rating corresponds with the reality on the ground. If a county or town is floating a bond and it is not AAA, the interest rate is higher because there is presumption that default could occur. If I can look at the local economy, its social out look, the voters' views on debt and default and find that the bond ratings agencies were slightly off, we can make money off of that little bit of asymmetry of information. That extra bit of information about a town in the central Valley of California is what gives us an edge over someone on Wall Street, who is 3,000 miles from California, thinks that every West of the Hudson is the Wild West who could not name a single county in the San Joaquin Valley. I did not out think them I put my boot, or rather my wingtips or boat shoes on the ground, where a putative investment may or may not take place.

I am sorry if I sounded too preachy or too didactic even but I really think that people, especially people who are clever, want to avoid the tragic reality that you cannot reason your way to excellence, the path to victory is made shorter if you have mastery of languages and mathematics but you cannot finish that journey without steady, diligent and unrelenting labor of what sort or another. I hope that some of you who, are still in college or who are still in k-12 will, get some utility from what I have stated.

how long it took you to type that

It maybe took me seven or eight minutes. If you watch a clock's second hand or count "one one thousand, two one thousand..." sixty seconds is lot of time and if you know your subject matter very well, you can churn out a paragraph in one to two minutes.

Ten years ago, it took me a long time to produce a research paper. Our 20 page paper in English class took so much time and energy and it was so hard to meet the page requirement. However, through repetition and well, more repetition, you can research efficiently and within hours have more than enough material. If I had a class that required that I write a term paper and it did not require a great deal of of traditional research (going to the library and gathering information from a wide variety of sources) but rather was an assignment that entailed summarizing or arguing a position that was based on our required reading (most history and most upper division economics courses did not have a single/central text book and instead there would be two to ten different books and/or article from academic journals), could write a page every five to ten minutes and then I would actually spend twice as much time, if not more, to revise, refine and reinforce my arguments and to make the paper better.

On NT, you guys get the rough draft (I will use the spell check to cut down on misspellings and typos but I am not going to spend 15 minutes for every paragraph) unless if my reply is on a very emotional and/or controversial issue, where every single word can and will be dissected and in that case, I will give key passages a second or third look and thus, a good deal of time.

Keep working at writing, read a great deal, learn formal technique for argumentation and reasoning, learn formal techniques for writing (and after mastering the standard five paragraph essay, with its intro, with its thesis statement and other attention grabbing statements of opinion; three body body paragraphs, with their intros, and a their sentences containing concrete details with two sentences of supporting commentary and their ending sentence of transition and of course your final paragraph that restates your position and summarizes the arguments) and after mastering those techniques you can deviate from the formula while retaining the same general notion of organizing your facts and commentary, learn how to do research and just keep at it and you will be able to write well and write quickly. You may get so good at it that you will have too much to say and/or you will become so good at shaking people's foundational beliefs; finding their logical and moral failings; deconstructing prevailing narratives or the mythos, upon which belief system are built, and ethics and you will become all the more unpopular for doing so.

Know your subject and know how to write and become hyper proficient in writing in and of itself and as you learn new things. One of the joys of life is that as we get into our 30, 40's and into old age, we can keep growing i nwisdom and in our body of factual knowledge for decades even as our bodies do the fall apart. However, amny people know a lot but cannot articulate it and the World is, intellectually a bit poorer as a result. So once against know your stuff, know how to say it and you can produce a quality paragraph in as little as a minute or two.




What are you currently reading right now?

 

[User 37837]

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

JayzOnMyToes wrote:

---

Originally Posted by Rexanglorum

Being clever can only do so much, hard work is essential for any venture to succeed, at least any worth while venture. This is true for your education, sports, business, politics, warfare, the arts and all manner of human enterprise. Being able to speak and write and think at a high level is great but there are others who are as smart r smarter than you and in almost every situation the those who do well work and they not only work but they follow up with more work and it is over time, through steady and consistent and diligent work that you can over come someone who puts in blasts of Herculean effort for a short time.

I learned this in school where I struggled at math because I was used to not only passing but getting A's and B's from attending lectures and/or reading the assigned readings and then writing beautifully on my exams. In math, I had to practice a few time per week and it was that pattern of learning that was frustrating for me and I had to get some bad grades until I accepted the reality that I had to put in steady and diligent work just to pass. This is true for more advanced students as well. One of my very best Economics professors was also the department chairwoman and she said that she surpassed many of her colleagues because she is willing and able to get up and get into her office and do 40 hours of research per week, 50 weeks per year, i naddition to her teaching, which usually entails three or four classes. She is very smart, like almost all university professors but she is correct that there are many academics who do not have the disposition to be so business like, so bourgeois in their unwillingness to take long summer vacations, teach more than one class and to be at work early. 

I also learned this by playing basketball, you cannot get conditioned in a day or a week, no matter how many suicides you run. You also will lose your jump shot without consistent work and your overall decision making will become dull without frequent games and scrimmages. To be good at basketball, I had to make it a part of my lifestyle.

Finally, I have seen this pattern of diligent and consist work at its most stark now that I work in finance. As we saw in 2007 and 2008, mathematical models can not work out very well. They tended to have too little data (seriously some models would have investment patterns or real estate prices that covered about four or five years), they caused management to be over confident, they also caused management to be arrogant and to be blindsided by the fact that rapid home price increases were not the norm and based on an assumption of a 10% to 25% annual increase in home values, for an infinite amount of years, and the conclusions derived therefrom where the foundation upon which they staked hundreds of billions of dollars and trillions more than they did not have. Also, anyone who thinks that you can make a killing by investing based on broad demographic trends is delusional ( e.g when someone says that you should invest long term in health care because there is an aging population or that you should gold now in 2011, after several years of financial sector turmoil and mounting government debts).

The way I make money for my firm is by going to municipalities in order to see if their bond rating corresponds with the reality on the ground. If a county or town is floating a bond and it is not AAA, the interest rate is higher because there is presumption that default could occur. If I can look at the local economy, its social out look, the voters' views on debt and default and find that the bond ratings agencies were slightly off, we can make money off of that little bit of asymmetry of information. That extra bit of information about a town in the central Valley of California is what gives us an edge over someone on Wall Street, who is 3,000 miles from California, thinks that every West of the Hudson is the Wild West who could not name a single county in the San Joaquin Valley. I did not out think them I put my boot, or rather my wingtips or boat shoes on the ground, where a putative investment may or may not take place.

I am sorry if I sounded too preachy or too didactic even but I really think that people, especially people who are clever, want to avoid the tragic reality that you cannot reason your way to excellence, the path to victory is made shorter if you have mastery of languages and mathematics but you cannot finish that journey without steady, diligent and unrelenting labor of what sort or another. I hope that some of you who, are still in college or who are still in k-12 will, get some utility from what I have stated.

how long it took you to type that

It maybe took me seven or eight minutes. If you watch a clock's second hand or count "one one thousand, two one thousand..." sixty seconds is lot of time and if you know your subject matter very well, you can churn out a paragraph in one to two minutes.

Ten years ago, it took me a long time to produce a research paper. Our 20 page paper in English class took so much time and energy and it was so hard to meet the page requirement. However, through repetition and well, more repetition, you can research efficiently and within hours have more than enough material. If I had a class that required that I write a term paper and it did not require a great deal of of traditional research (going to the library and gathering information from a wide variety of sources) but rather was an assignment that entailed summarizing or arguing a position that was based on our required reading (most history and most upper division economics courses did not have a single/central text book and instead there would be two to ten different books and/or article from academic journals), could write a page every five to ten minutes and then I would actually spend twice as much time, if not more, to revise, refine and reinforce my arguments and to make the paper better.

On NT, you guys get the rough draft (I will use the spell check to cut down on misspellings and typos but I am not going to spend 15 minutes for every paragraph) unless if my reply is on a very emotional and/or controversial issue, where every single word can and will be dissected and in that case, I will give key passages a second or third look and thus, a good deal of time.

Keep working at writing, read a great deal, learn formal technique for argumentation and reasoning, learn formal techniques for writing (and after mastering the standard five paragraph essay, with its intro, with its thesis statement and other attention grabbing statements of opinion; three body body paragraphs, with their intros, and a their sentences containing concrete details with two sentences of supporting commentary and their ending sentence of transition and of course your final paragraph that restates your position and summarizes the arguments) and after mastering those techniques you can deviate from the formula while retaining the same general notion of organizing your facts and commentary, learn how to do research and just keep at it and you will be able to write well and write quickly. You may get so good at it that you will have too much to say and/or you will become so good at shaking people's foundational beliefs; finding their logical and moral failings; deconstructing prevailing narratives or the mythos, upon which belief system are built, and ethics and you will become all the more unpopular for doing so.

Know your subject and know how to write and become hyper proficient in writing in and of itself and as you learn new things. One of the joys of life is that as we get into our 30, 40's and into old age, we can keep growing i nwisdom and in our body of factual knowledge for decades even as our bodies do the fall apart. However, amny people know a lot but cannot articulate it and the World is, intellectually a bit poorer as a result. So once against know your stuff, know how to say it and you can produce a quality paragraph in as little as a minute or two.




What are you currently reading right now?

 

[hendrix watermelon]

That I have to wipe my own butt. Like, why can't my bathroom have a some sort of technology installed (japan prolly has this lol) that wipes my butt for me? Feels badman.

That philosophy is confusion after confusion. Aiming aimlessly to a thought, a belief, that their own "epiphanys" are the right ones. Thats ******ed. If you come up with a philosphical thought, you'll start believing it, but guess what? Someone else will read your philosphy and instead of believing it, he will counter with a reverse thought. Like?!

Life's a paradox, it seems.

That its hard (pause).

That people fall into so many categories. People who come up with pholosiphacal thoughts, looking for a way to justify their emptyness, people who challenge the norm, people with confusing thoughts.

 

[hendrix watermelon]

That I have to wipe my own butt. Like, why can't my bathroom have a some sort of technology installed (japan prolly has this lol) that wipes my butt for me? Feels badman.

That philosophy is confusion after confusion. Aiming aimlessly to a thought, a belief, that their own "epiphanys" are the right ones. Thats ******ed. If you come up with a philosphical thought, you'll start believing it, but guess what? Someone else will read your philosphy and instead of believing it, he will counter with a reverse thought. Like?!

Life's a paradox, it seems.

That its hard (pause).

That people fall into so many categories. People who come up with pholosiphacal thoughts, looking for a way to justify their emptyness, people who challenge the norm, people with confusing thoughts.

 

[rexanglorum]

jm2000 wrote:

---

 

What are you currently reading right now?


I am currently reading Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror. The book is about ethnicity in America and about how certain "master narratives" exist, that make people, even many self described "liberals" and "progressives," unwittingly say things that are part of these "master narratives" or lies that are repeated by the vanquished and in order to help bolster the position of those who are in control. One of his examples is the old yarn that the Irish came to America because of a potato plight. While it is true that Irish emigration peaked during the years of the famine, there were brisk levels of outward migration for decades in the 19th century and the biggest factor was British colonial dominance, which saught to subjugate the Western Irish and ethnically cleanse Eastern Ireland and make it into cattle grazing land.

More specific to America he brings up the idea that while American education is no longer afraid to talk about the human misery caused by racism or the forceable displacement of native Americans, it does not "name names." It does not blame anyone in particular, it makes slavery seems like an Earthquake or a Drough tand not the result of people, who had been exposed to the enlightenment and people who champoned liberty, buying human beings. He says that even the most progressive history books, do not mention that slavery was a choice and that many whites opted out by manumiting their slaves or by doing so in there wills. He said that after the Americans revolution, some whites took it very seriously and ended their own practice of slavery and other whites vigorously opposed it and became fervent abolitionists. He also says that white people in America, lost liberty of their own because slavery was like fever that sucked the body politic of its energy that was created by a war for liberty. The Electroral College and the House of Representatives existed as result of the Three Fifths compromise, which let the Southern elite turn their slaves into voting power.

I like that he puts to rest the notion that the constitution said that blacks are morally or inetllectually or where "three Fifths of a human being" in any capacity accept that for the purposes of gaining seats in the house. On the bigger questions about the humanity of slaves and of the potental for blacks to be citizens, most white Americans said eithe all or nothing. Anti-Slavery, anti-racist whites said that blacks were human and deserving of freedo mand citizenship and pro slavery whites said they were nothing besides property. It was the pro slavery forces that wanted blacks to be counted as full citizens in the census and i twas the anti slavery delegates who (in my opinion) made the wise political calculation to not have "property" be counted, they settled on Three Fifths.

If blacks were not counted in any census, the South would have had much less political muscle and it would have been forced to limit the Westward growth of slavery and it would have been phased out by a growing and increasingly abolitionist North. He also says that the Civil War created extra resentment by ordinary whites against freed slaves, he says that the Southern elite would obviously be unhappy but it was the white, non slave holdin gmasses that had lost loved ones in the War that they directed their anger as freed blacks and therefore, because the Civil War was fought, the North should have either excluded former confederates from voting or at least barred them from positions of political power and/or maintained the occupation for alonger period in order to protect freed blacks. There would have been no need for the a very large and iconic civil rights movement in the mid 20th Century if those issues had been settled in the 19th and that would have meant an end of slavery without a civil war being fought and since the war was fought, a prolonged occupation and or more vigilence from the Federal government in the numerous cases where state and local law enforcement did nothing and even assisted the lynch mobs and other racist vigilantism.

He also deconstructs other narratives. He says that for a long time, the US history of immigration never mentioned Asians and will focus on the Irish or Italian experience but have nothing to say about Chinese or other East Asian immigrant besides the old yarn that "the Chinese built the Railroad." There is a tragic but very inetresting history of Chinese people in the US and it is more relevant to today's American History student than is the old yarn about the Potato Famine and the Irish Catholic experience in the 19th Century. He also says that the view towards Native Americans although sympathetic, still is narrative that gilds the ugly truth, a nation or rather several hundred nations that had been in North America were defeated in several wars over the course of centuries and they are dispossessed of their land. He blames progressives, who changed the narrative that Indians were uncivilized into the native Americans as simple and noble people who were defeated by the unstoppable machine that was progress. He delves into the Trail of tears and how it was a tragedy and great injustice, as judged from the white man's point of view. Lands that was formally held by people who farmed, printed a news paper (and less endearingly, owned slaves on their Georgia plantations) was still taken illegally, with the justification that they were not white and that their property rights did not count. The Supreme Court sided with the Native Americans but the anti-racism of one group of whites was overruled by one of our most racist presidents ever, Andrew Jackson, the great Democrat and populist. He also debunks the notion that the civil war was purely regional, Democrats in New York city supported slavery and so did many coastal cities that thrived off of the cotton trade in New England and meanwhile the various pockets of German Americans in the South, opposed slavery and opposed succession.

Dr Takaki is very left wing but he, unlike many of his fellow ethnic studies professors did not use his class for political advocacy nor to bash white people. He said that "white privilege" should be rephrased as white leverage and that while white people since the founding of the country to present day have enjoyed certain privileges, many whites use their position to oppose racism and that many whites are not serious about combating racism but rather want to use it for short term political gain and they weaken the profundity and morality of true anti-racist speech and action.

The man really changed my perceptio nof the academic discipline. He passed away in 2009 but my best frined, his nephew, introduced me to him when we were up in the Bay Area. We talked about alot of things and he was the first ethnic studies pro that I meet who did not have a blanket dislike for white people. He did make me aware of the very subtle forms of racism that exist all around us and told me how I and others can recognize it and avoid it and how we can explain it to others. He also appealed to me intellectually because I am mixed and his children and my best friend, who introducted him to be is mixed so we all had that in common. He also had the experience of teaching the first black studies class at UCLA in 1967, he had just received his PhD and being neither black nor old, was a surprising selection to teach that class. One big black student, who was proudly militant challenged him by saying "Well Dr. Takaki, What revolutionary methods will be teaching us" to which Dr. Takaki said "I will teach you how to read and write and analyze and to think very critically about the various master narratives which keep people like you in a state of bondage, that is, in my humble opinion very revolutionary."


Overall, I do not read many books. In college I read all of the assigned reading and would work through big parts of all the entirety of whole books as part research for my term papers but after graduation I have tended towards shorter works, I read a lot of the blogs by Economists, I read through the weekly or semiweekly columns by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Geroge Will, Victor Davis Hanson, Paul Krugman and others who comment on the events of the day. I also read academic journals on history and economics and political science and sometimes sociology and ethnic studies and anthropology. I also read my issues of The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Nation, Mother Jones and my Cato Institute Journal. I also enjoy checking out what is happenin gat MEMRI.org or rather the website that should be called ("what reformers, kings, dictators, imams, businessmen, ordinary people, terrprosts, militants and everyone else in the greater Middle East and Muslim world says when we think non one from the West is watch or listning.org").

Post College, I just not have the time to tear through books like did during both the semester and during the breaks but I can read articles, lots of article from the media and academia and I can switch up my choices of academic disciplines and idelogical viewpoints. In my line of work you do not write 40 or 50 page rsearch papers, in most cases you are trying to fit a lot of stuff into apage or two, sometimes you write five to ten pages but that is not especially frequent. Since I write short pieces, I like to read articles from great minds who manage to fit grand ideas onto petite 250 or 500 word articles. The Economy of lngauge employeed by somelike George Will or Thomas Sowell astounds be so I have been trying to copy that as of late.

 

[rexanglorum]

jm2000 wrote:

---

 

What are you currently reading right now?


I am currently reading Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror. The book is about ethnicity in America and about how certain "master narratives" exist, that make people, even many self described "liberals" and "progressives," unwittingly say things that are part of these "master narratives" or lies that are repeated by the vanquished and in order to help bolster the position of those who are in control. One of his examples is the old yarn that the Irish came to America because of a potato plight. While it is true that Irish emigration peaked during the years of the famine, there were brisk levels of outward migration for decades in the 19th century and the biggest factor was British colonial dominance, which saught to subjugate the Western Irish and ethnically cleanse Eastern Ireland and make it into cattle grazing land.

More specific to America he brings up the idea that while American education is no longer afraid to talk about the human misery caused by racism or the forceable displacement of native Americans, it does not "name names." It does not blame anyone in particular, it makes slavery seems like an Earthquake or a Drough tand not the result of people, who had been exposed to the enlightenment and people who champoned liberty, buying human beings. He says that even the most progressive history books, do not mention that slavery was a choice and that many whites opted out by manumiting their slaves or by doing so in there wills. He said that after the Americans revolution, some whites took it very seriously and ended their own practice of slavery and other whites vigorously opposed it and became fervent abolitionists. He also says that white people in America, lost liberty of their own because slavery was like fever that sucked the body politic of its energy that was created by a war for liberty. The Electroral College and the House of Representatives existed as result of the Three Fifths compromise, which let the Southern elite turn their slaves into voting power.

I like that he puts to rest the notion that the constitution said that blacks are morally or inetllectually or where "three Fifths of a human being" in any capacity accept that for the purposes of gaining seats in the house. On the bigger questions about the humanity of slaves and of the potental for blacks to be citizens, most white Americans said eithe all or nothing. Anti-Slavery, anti-racist whites said that blacks were human and deserving of freedo mand citizenship and pro slavery whites said they were nothing besides property. It was the pro slavery forces that wanted blacks to be counted as full citizens in the census and i twas the anti slavery delegates who (in my opinion) made the wise political calculation to not have "property" be counted, they settled on Three Fifths.

If blacks were not counted in any census, the South would have had much less political muscle and it would have been forced to limit the Westward growth of slavery and it would have been phased out by a growing and increasingly abolitionist North. He also says that the Civil War created extra resentment by ordinary whites against freed slaves, he says that the Southern elite would obviously be unhappy but it was the white, non slave holdin gmasses that had lost loved ones in the War that they directed their anger as freed blacks and therefore, because the Civil War was fought, the North should have either excluded former confederates from voting or at least barred them from positions of political power and/or maintained the occupation for alonger period in order to protect freed blacks. There would have been no need for the a very large and iconic civil rights movement in the mid 20th Century if those issues had been settled in the 19th and that would have meant an end of slavery without a civil war being fought and since the war was fought, a prolonged occupation and or more vigilence from the Federal government in the numerous cases where state and local law enforcement did nothing and even assisted the lynch mobs and other racist vigilantism.

He also deconstructs other narratives. He says that for a long time, the US history of immigration never mentioned Asians and will focus on the Irish or Italian experience but have nothing to say about Chinese or other East Asian immigrant besides the old yarn that "the Chinese built the Railroad." There is a tragic but very inetresting history of Chinese people in the US and it is more relevant to today's American History student than is the old yarn about the Potato Famine and the Irish Catholic experience in the 19th Century. He also says that the view towards Native Americans although sympathetic, still is narrative that gilds the ugly truth, a nation or rather several hundred nations that had been in North America were defeated in several wars over the course of centuries and they are dispossessed of their land. He blames progressives, who changed the narrative that Indians were uncivilized into the native Americans as simple and noble people who were defeated by the unstoppable machine that was progress. He delves into the Trail of tears and how it was a tragedy and great injustice, as judged from the white man's point of view. Lands that was formally held by people who farmed, printed a news paper (and less endearingly, owned slaves on their Georgia plantations) was still taken illegally, with the justification that they were not white and that their property rights did not count. The Supreme Court sided with the Native Americans but the anti-racism of one group of whites was overruled by one of our most racist presidents ever, Andrew Jackson, the great Democrat and populist. He also debunks the notion that the civil war was purely regional, Democrats in New York city supported slavery and so did many coastal cities that thrived off of the cotton trade in New England and meanwhile the various pockets of German Americans in the South, opposed slavery and opposed succession.

Dr Takaki is very left wing but he, unlike many of his fellow ethnic studies professors did not use his class for political advocacy nor to bash white people. He said that "white privilege" should be rephrased as white leverage and that while white people since the founding of the country to present day have enjoyed certain privileges, many whites use their position to oppose racism and that many whites are not serious about combating racism but rather want to use it for short term political gain and they weaken the profundity and morality of true anti-racist speech and action.

The man really changed my perceptio nof the academic discipline. He passed away in 2009 but my best frined, his nephew, introduced me to him when we were up in the Bay Area. We talked about alot of things and he was the first ethnic studies pro that I meet who did not have a blanket dislike for white people. He did make me aware of the very subtle forms of racism that exist all around us and told me how I and others can recognize it and avoid it and how we can explain it to others. He also appealed to me intellectually because I am mixed and his children and my best friend, who introducted him to be is mixed so we all had that in common. He also had the experience of teaching the first black studies class at UCLA in 1967, he had just received his PhD and being neither black nor old, was a surprising selection to teach that class. One big black student, who was proudly militant challenged him by saying "Well Dr. Takaki, What revolutionary methods will be teaching us" to which Dr. Takaki said "I will teach you how to read and write and analyze and to think very critically about the various master narratives which keep people like you in a state of bondage, that is, in my humble opinion very revolutionary."


Overall, I do not read many books. In college I read all of the assigned reading and would work through big parts of all the entirety of whole books as part research for my term papers but after graduation I have tended towards shorter works, I read a lot of the blogs by Economists, I read through the weekly or semiweekly columns by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Geroge Will, Victor Davis Hanson, Paul Krugman and others who comment on the events of the day. I also read academic journals on history and economics and political science and sometimes sociology and ethnic studies and anthropology. I also read my issues of The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Weekly Standard, The Nation, Mother Jones and my Cato Institute Journal. I also enjoy checking out what is happenin gat MEMRI.org or rather the website that should be called ("what reformers, kings, dictators, imams, businessmen, ordinary people, terrprosts, militants and everyone else in the greater Middle East and Muslim world says when we think non one from the West is watch or listning.org").

Post College, I just not have the time to tear through books like did during both the semester and during the breaks but I can read articles, lots of article from the media and academia and I can switch up my choices of academic disciplines and idelogical viewpoints. In my line of work you do not write 40 or 50 page rsearch papers, in most cases you are trying to fit a lot of stuff into apage or two, sometimes you write five to ten pages but that is not especially frequent. Since I write short pieces, I like to read articles from great minds who manage to fit grand ideas onto petite 250 or 500 word articles. The Economy of lngauge employeed by somelike George Will or Thomas Sowell astounds be so I have been trying to copy that as of late.

 

[3900stabler]

Originally Posted by Dmvbatman


all women can become irritating at some point, so you best as well stop trying to chase the perfect one and deal with the one you think that is close to it

Another way of saying that is it is better to be with the one you need instead of being with the one you want. That's some of the most profound dating advice I have heard.

 

[3900stabler]

Originally Posted by Dmvbatman


all women can become irritating at some point, so you best as well stop trying to chase the perfect one and deal with the one you think that is close to it

Another way of saying that is it is better to be with the one you need instead of being with the one you want. That's some of the most profound dating advice I have heard.

 

[mrbrown]

Rex killing his keyboard like always

 

[mrbrown]

Rex killing his keyboard like always

 

[weekz]

learned to use all your resources, the only opinion that matters are those that are above you and/or can help you, respect your elders, be yourself with girls, that is all

 

[weekz]

learned to use all your resources, the only opinion that matters are those that are above you and/or can help you, respect your elders, be yourself with girls, that is all

 

[dmvbatman]

some good gems in this thread

 

[dmvbatman]

some good gems in this thread

 

[dmvbatman]

some good gems in this thread

 

[dmvbatman]

some good gems in this thread