“Formulaic responses breed zero confusion. Instagram is not a place for tone or irony. […] Awkward is a ubiquitous teen word to denote socially unsanctioned behavior. It usually implies first- or secondhand embarrassment when you or a friend step outside the rules. […] Showing too much interest in anyone is mortifying. It lacks chill. […] When you have tools with which to stalk everyone all the time, the most seemingly aloof person wins. […] Teens aren’t money machines, oracles, or bellwethers of an uncertain future. They’re mercurial because they’re evolving, figuring things out for themselves.” — Mary HK Choi
I don’t usually post links that I tweeted verbatim, and I also usually try to link to longer pieces rather than shorter ones, but I love this passage (from a Johanna Drott essayette) so much:
“Rational thinking takes the situation as it is and uses it as a basis for further action, and the situation is that human beings think in terms of contexts and relations rather than singular statements presented in isolation.”
Photo by Shawn Perez, depicting dummies of several characters from The Beverly Hillbillies. Context unknown.
Vance’s answers to Dreher’s questions prompted me to buy the book. Here are some choice quotes from their conversation:
“By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.”
“[W]hen you grow up in a dying steel town with very few middle class job prospects, making a better life for yourself is often a binary proposition: if you don’t get a good job, you may be stuck on welfare for the rest of your life.”
Photo by Don O’Brien — “Seen during a visit to a small town along the Ohio R[i]ver.”
“The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand. At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way. […] But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.”
“The long view, inherited from my grandparents’ 1930s upbringing in coal country, is that all of us can still control some part of our fate. Even if we are doomed, there’s reason to pretend otherwise.”
I want Scott Alexander to review this book (after I’ve read it, that is). Also, isn’t Hillbilly Elegy an evocative title, regardless of anything else?
“Loosely speaking, there are two main kinds of income: income from labor, like salaries, and income from capital, like dividends and capital gains. In the U.S., the former is taxed more heavily than the latter, with a top marginal rate of 39.6 percent on ordinary income, versus 20 percent on capital gains and dividends. There are a number of efficiency and fairness arguments in favor of a lower tax rate on capital gains, but there are also those who suspect that an important reason for the difference is that (1) rich people tend to get more of their income from capital than poor people do, (2) rich people tend to prefer to pay lower taxes, and (3) rich people tend to get their preferred policies enacted.”
“If you look at my body as a tool of the company, I am not receiving the same level of maintenance as this inanimate object [the brick saw]. From the $164.08/mo I pay in health insurance, to the gas and vehicle wear I expend driving around to jobs, to the thousand extra calories I have to eat every day to maintain at such high levels of activity, all the way down to the sunscreen I have to wear every day and the ibuprofen I take to ameliorate the pain caused by the job — all of it is paid for personally by me, from my wages.” — user TRASH_UPLOADER on Reddit
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![Photo by Don O'Brien — a collapsing house "[s]een during a visit to a small town along the Ohio Rver."](../../../wp-content/uploads/2016/08/3083926847_dd42dcf45e_b-1024x896.jpg)
