Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers in the United States. Although this year has been difficult in some ways, I genuinely have much to be thankful for this year. One of my practices for nearly a decade has been to keep a “thanks log” of things that happen to me that I should remember to be thankful for. I’ve never been into journaling. So I just make this a simple dated bullet point list in a Word document. It’s good to review at Thanksgiving, at the end of the year, or whenever I need to remind myself of all the things that have gone right in my life. By nature we tend to focus on what’s going wrong, but it’s also important to remind ourselves of all the things that have gone well.
I really like the fashion family style article. It Would be great if creatives could start creating with that goal in mind and while also promoting some sort of identity rather than this blank white and black no identity thing
I wouldn't expect Aaron to know this because it's a super feminine kind of thing, but mom vloggers who have a pile of kids (6 or more) are a highly popular niche on YouTube. Many of them are Mormon, but also many are Christians. I always think of that as a representation of how hungry people are for family life even though families of that size, a historic norm, are vilified by every major Western institution now.
I will try to adopt your “thanks log” for next year. I have always been not just a “glass half empty” person but a “glass is broken and leaking on the table” person. This is in spite of what anyone would describe as a reasonably fulfilling and blessed life. As I enter my senior years and retirement, it will be more important to acknowledge moments of grace since they will come less frequently - if at all - through professional or personal achievement. My wishes for a happy Thanksgiving to you, your readers, and your and their families. God bless.
The sports gambling people were very smart in how they approached their push. Sports gambling itself (betting outright on event outcomes) would have been harder to pass given the general skepticism about it in the US as recently as 10 years or so ago, so the industry turned to fantasy sports, which was very popular already and was arguably a combination of "skill" (in choosing the right players for one's fantasy team(s)) and "luck" (in terms of the performance of the players) -- and given the existing popularity of this activity already, when it became monetized by DraftKings and FanDuel, it was like the gateway drug for wider sports betting. A few years of that and the appetites of millions were well and truly whetted for straight-up betting on events, no fantasy league required, and so the sentiment publicly changed significantly in a way that would not have been the case had people not been "softened" or "warmed up" by means of gambling-ized fantasy sports.
It was a clever tactic, and undoubtedly one that was taken with an eye on similar tactics that have been used by social movements in the US more broadly -- take an easier case, get it established, and then build on that once you have people accustomed to the easier case. So you start with civil unions, proceed to gay marriage and then you eventually get to transgender issues and puberty blockers and women's prisons and so on. But the point is you don't *start* with those issues -- if you do, you're dead in the water. So you start with something palatable and you build from there. You start with civil unions, you start with fantasy league betting. And then you end up with puberty blockers and prop bets on how many sacks in the third quarter and so on. Sequencing is everything, and we now know very well that public opinion can be easily moved in a specific direction if you pick the right issue and sequence that issue first, and proceed at a pace that allows that to be assimilated before you get to the hardcore stuff on the wish-list. It's how "things are done" today.
And on the shopping list ... boy, people love to hate Jonathan Franzen, don't they? I guess it goes to show that if you have the audacity to deviate even a smidge from the party line on something, you get hated for it, despite the fact that Franzen can't be described as anything but an orthodox leftie really. It's an odd kind of in-group puritanism the left has going on these days it would seem.
Whiskey stones are small, solid stones about half the size of an ice cube. Usually made of marble or granite, or fakes of these. You freeze them, then use them in whiskey or other cocktails as substitutes for ice. Whiskey stones don't melt and dilute the alcohol, but they keep the drink cold.
Surely that's a little too simple. We had a decade of prohibition, for example, and state lotteries are a fairly recent phenomenon though the states could've run them a century ago. I think Renn is right that the complete abandonment of any idea of the state attempting to buttress the virtue of its citizens, rather than exploit their vices, is to some degree a new development.
IIRC, government sponsored lotteries are nothing new. In fact, state lotteries were one of the principal means of financing the American Revolutionary War.
Governments also have supported themselves with a variety of monopolies (including necessities, such as matches and salt, and vices, such as vodka), tax farming, etc..
That's not an argument as to what governments *should* do, but rather, what they have historically done, even in The Good Old Days.
I had to go and check the lottery thing. You're right about their use in the colonial era, but nearly all states prohibited lotteries by the 1860s (apparently after a number of scandals in the preceding decades) and the modern state lottery system, as I had thought, is almost entirely an 80s-on creation, justified by the same revenue pleas that have been given for sports gambling and drug legalization. So I don't think it has always been so. And I think there's a difference between collecting sin taxes on commonly available vices like alcohol and establishing entire new avenues of vice to draw in far more people than previously took part, which is the case with the expansion of gambling.
I really like the fashion family style article. It Would be great if creatives could start creating with that goal in mind and while also promoting some sort of identity rather than this blank white and black no identity thing
I wouldn't expect Aaron to know this because it's a super feminine kind of thing, but mom vloggers who have a pile of kids (6 or more) are a highly popular niche on YouTube. Many of them are Mormon, but also many are Christians. I always think of that as a representation of how hungry people are for family life even though families of that size, a historic norm, are vilified by every major Western institution now.
I will try to adopt your “thanks log” for next year. I have always been not just a “glass half empty” person but a “glass is broken and leaking on the table” person. This is in spite of what anyone would describe as a reasonably fulfilling and blessed life. As I enter my senior years and retirement, it will be more important to acknowledge moments of grace since they will come less frequently - if at all - through professional or personal achievement. My wishes for a happy Thanksgiving to you, your readers, and your and their families. God bless.
The sports gambling people were very smart in how they approached their push. Sports gambling itself (betting outright on event outcomes) would have been harder to pass given the general skepticism about it in the US as recently as 10 years or so ago, so the industry turned to fantasy sports, which was very popular already and was arguably a combination of "skill" (in choosing the right players for one's fantasy team(s)) and "luck" (in terms of the performance of the players) -- and given the existing popularity of this activity already, when it became monetized by DraftKings and FanDuel, it was like the gateway drug for wider sports betting. A few years of that and the appetites of millions were well and truly whetted for straight-up betting on events, no fantasy league required, and so the sentiment publicly changed significantly in a way that would not have been the case had people not been "softened" or "warmed up" by means of gambling-ized fantasy sports.
It was a clever tactic, and undoubtedly one that was taken with an eye on similar tactics that have been used by social movements in the US more broadly -- take an easier case, get it established, and then build on that once you have people accustomed to the easier case. So you start with civil unions, proceed to gay marriage and then you eventually get to transgender issues and puberty blockers and women's prisons and so on. But the point is you don't *start* with those issues -- if you do, you're dead in the water. So you start with something palatable and you build from there. You start with civil unions, you start with fantasy league betting. And then you end up with puberty blockers and prop bets on how many sacks in the third quarter and so on. Sequencing is everything, and we now know very well that public opinion can be easily moved in a specific direction if you pick the right issue and sequence that issue first, and proceed at a pace that allows that to be assimilated before you get to the hardcore stuff on the wish-list. It's how "things are done" today.
And on the shopping list ... boy, people love to hate Jonathan Franzen, don't they? I guess it goes to show that if you have the audacity to deviate even a smidge from the party line on something, you get hated for it, despite the fact that Franzen can't be described as anything but an orthodox leftie really. It's an odd kind of in-group puritanism the left has going on these days it would seem.
What's a whiskey stone?
Anyway, governments have promoted vice for as long as they have been able to tax it, license it, or enjoy a monopoly on it.
Whiskey stones are small, solid stones about half the size of an ice cube. Usually made of marble or granite, or fakes of these. You freeze them, then use them in whiskey or other cocktails as substitutes for ice. Whiskey stones don't melt and dilute the alcohol, but they keep the drink cold.
Surely that's a little too simple. We had a decade of prohibition, for example, and state lotteries are a fairly recent phenomenon though the states could've run them a century ago. I think Renn is right that the complete abandonment of any idea of the state attempting to buttress the virtue of its citizens, rather than exploit their vices, is to some degree a new development.
IIRC, government sponsored lotteries are nothing new. In fact, state lotteries were one of the principal means of financing the American Revolutionary War.
https://www.history.com/news/13-colonies-funding-lottery#:~:text=That's%20because%20lotteries%20were%20one,to%20fund%20the%20American%20Revolution.
Governments also have supported themselves with a variety of monopolies (including necessities, such as matches and salt, and vices, such as vodka), tax farming, etc..
That's not an argument as to what governments *should* do, but rather, what they have historically done, even in The Good Old Days.
I had to go and check the lottery thing. You're right about their use in the colonial era, but nearly all states prohibited lotteries by the 1860s (apparently after a number of scandals in the preceding decades) and the modern state lottery system, as I had thought, is almost entirely an 80s-on creation, justified by the same revenue pleas that have been given for sports gambling and drug legalization. So I don't think it has always been so. And I think there's a difference between collecting sin taxes on commonly available vices like alcohol and establishing entire new avenues of vice to draw in far more people than previously took part, which is the case with the expansion of gambling.