Re: It's Early, But Will You Have for Dinner Tonight, Thursday, 11/14/2024?

D wrote:

  On Fri, 15 Nov 2024, Coogan's Bluff wrote:
 

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Good stuff! I had a tonkatsu poke bowl and it was good. The only drawback is too much sallad and mushroom which they use to camouflage the inflation here. There just was an election here and the socialists won, so now we are looking forward to tax increases. In fact, the woke government that just left are doing their share as well by doubling the VAT on food, so a lot of small restaurants are currently closing.
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Classics waiting us later next year are a new progressive income tax and increase corporation tax.
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Europe seldom fails to disappoint the greedy socialists of the world! ;)

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That's a succinct and sad summary of socialism's solipsism.
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And I call it that because as the collectivists go, it's always about their group-think, not the impact it will have on their nation.

 Amen!
 Today I heard a story about a businessman in lithuania who told the new
government "f*ck you, I'm leaving" because apparently he had been trying
to build a factory that would bring 6000 jobs, and the government, both
the previous and the new, have been fighting him on every single level,
since he is not a party member. So when the new government only spoke
about increasing taxes, he said, "I'm done".
 I think if more business men would be equally principled, taxes would
come down rather quickly. As it is, they remain sycophants in the hope
of receiving benefits from the party in power.

Really good trickle-not analysis there.
Here's a timely piece by a disgraced NYT columinist pondering why "they" lost the people this election:
https://archive.is/2V2Cw
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/opinion/identity-groups-politics.html
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist
Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.
Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.
Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. This worldview emerged from the wonderful liberation movements that highlighted American life over the past seven decades: the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the gay rights movement, the trans rights movement.
The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.
In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020 and his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he told us he was going to pick a Black woman before he decided who it was going to be. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.
In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.
In this model, individual cognition is de-emphasized while collective consciousness is emphasized. Groups are assumed to be relatively homogeneous. People are seen as representatives of their community. Standpoint epistemology reigns. This is the idea that a person’s ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …” because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience.
This identity politics mind-set is psychologically and morally compelling. In an individualistic age, it gives people a sense of membership in a group. It helps them organize their lives around a noble cause, fighting oppression.
But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.
It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.
It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed: How do you fix inflation? How can we bring down crime? What should our policy on Ukraine be?
...
This is a time when we all should be updating our mental models and making our view of society more complex. And I’m seeing a lot of that around me as people try to learn from what just happened.
But I’m also seeing many people who are still victims of conceptual blindness. They are so imprisoned by their mental models, they can interpret these results only in identity politics terms: Harris lost because America is racist (even though she did virtually the same as Biden did among white voters). Harris lost because America is sexist (even though she underperformed among women). Some people blamed white women for abandoning their Black sisters, as if lack of gender solidarity were the main thing going on here.
Identitarian takes are strewn across the media. The New Yorker ran an analysis piece headlined “How America Embraced Gender War.” Slate ran a piece called “Men Got Exactly What They Wanted.” The Guardian ran a piece called “Our Mistake Was to Think We Lived in a Better Country Than We Do.” If the election didn’t come out the way we wanted, it must be because of their groups’ bigotry against our groups.
As I try to update my own models, a few stray thoughts enter my mind. First, you don’t reduce racial, ethnic and gender bigotry by raising the salience of these categories and by exaggerating the differences between groups. Second, integration is better than separatism. Diverse societies prosper when people in different categories cooperate in respectful ways on a day-to-day basis, not when we divide people into supposedly homogeneous enclaves. Third, assimilation is not a dirty word, as long as it’s voluntary; it’s not a sin to feel that your love for America transcends your love for your ethnic group, and you don’t really love America if you despise half its people. Fourth, most of the world’s problems are caused by stupidity and human limitation, not because there’s some malevolently brilliant group of oppressors keeping everybody else down.
Fifth, seeing groups in all their complexity requires seeing individuals in all their complexity. To see people well, you have to see what makes them unique. You also have to see which groups they belong to. You also have to see their social location — where they fit in the economic, social and status hierarchies. When you’re able to see people at all three levels of reality, you’re beginning to see them holistically.
Finally, we need a social vision that doesn’t rely on zero-sum us/them thinking. During his first term, Trump unleashed a cultural assault based on his version of identity politics. The left responded by doubling down on its identitarian mind-set. We have to do better this time.
In 1959 the British jurist Patrick Devlin made a point that should haunt us: “Without shared ideas on politics, morals and ethics, no society can exist.” He added, “If men and women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental agreement about good and evil, they will fail; if having based it on common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disintegrate.”
We need a social vision that is as morally compelling as identity politics but does a better job of describing reality. We need a national narrative that points us to some ideal and gives each of us a noble role in pursuing it. That’s the gigantic cultural task that lies ahead.

 

"The $5 chicken was over $9.
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As it currently is, I have a hard time seeing Costco survive in Sweden. That breaks my heart, as I would love to have the Costco I've always heard about. Their current offer is for us to pay a membership fee that allows us to drive to a remote location and pay between 80-300% of normal prices for things. This feels like a scam to me."
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I can believe it must!
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Ya'll deserve a lot LESS giverment than you're again voting for...
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:-/
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https://imgur.com/a/dxJA7Bo/

 Amen! We must pray and pray hard, that sweden will some tiem get its own
Trump! Only a man with Trumps powers and characteristics will ever be
able to uproot the ingrained socialism from swedish society!

Do you think that will be harder or easier for Sweden?
I ask that in the consideration that you've a royal family that now seem mere figureheads at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Sweden
Eriksgata was the name of the traditional journey of newly elected medieval Swedish kings through important provinces to have their election confirmed by local Things. The actual election took place at the Stone of Mora in Uppland and participation was originally restricted to the people of that area; hence, the need of having the election confirmed by the other parts of the realm. The Eriksgata gradually lost its importance when, as of the 14th century, representatives of other parts of Sweden began to participate in the election. After 1544, when hereditary monarchy was instituted, that meant that the Eriksgata had little practical importance. The last king to travel the Eriksgata according to the old tradition was Charles IX, whose reign began in 1604. Later, kings, up until present times, have made visits to all the Swedish provinces and called them an Eriksgata, while those visits bear little resemblance to the medieval tradition.