Romney 47% reading list
Of course there’s always Andrew Sullivan at The Dish. But here’s a Ta-Nehisi Coates piece (“We are all welfare queens now”), David Frum piece (“The sinister message behind Romney’s ‘gaffe’”), and a David Brooks piece (“Thurston Howell Romney”).
Money quotes:
More to the point, as tactics aimed at suppressing black citizenship become more abstract, they also have the side-effect of enveloping non-blacks. […]
The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.
[…]
The only radical mass movement in this country is the Tea Party, a movement to defend the interests of elderly incumbent beneficiaries of the existing welfare state. Against that movement is a government of liberal technocrats dependent on campaign donations from a different faction of the American super-rich than that which backs Mitt Romney himself.
And Brooks:
But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.
People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.
A collection of stumble-upons that connect school topics to real life.I have every intention of being productive. And then I turn on the internet.
