A brief rant on names and pronunciations

Last updated on: July 30, 2020 at 1:59 pm By Jane the Actuary

Featured on NBC News on Tuesday: “Rep. Jayapal asks that her name be properly pronounced after colleague gets it wrong; ‘Jayapal. If you’re going to say my name, please say it right. It’s Jayapal.'” You have to listen to the twitter clip, of course, to hear it: https://twitter.com/ErickFernandez/status/1288176610114441218?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1288176610114441218%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Fnews%2Fasian-america%2Frep-jayapal-asks-her-name-be-properly-pronounced-after-colleague-n1235147 Rep. Lesko pronounced the name, well, as you’d expect according to English pronunciation rules: JAY (like bluejay) – uh – pal. Apparently it is actually pronounced JYE (like bye) – uh –... Read more

“Whiteness” — and the insolvability of multiculturalism

Last updated on: July 29, 2020 at 8:16 am By Jane the Actuary

My husband is German. Well, as of two years ago, he is also American, but he spent his childhood in Germany, came to the U.S. for grad school, and stayed. Which meant that he had to accustom himself to American culture — and at the same time, I had to learn that some of his quirks were really more a matter of his German culture not being entirely the same as American culture: it pains him to be late, for... Read more

How Would Biden Govern? Looking at the “Unity Tast Force Recommendations”

Last updated on: July 19, 2020 at 11:12 am By Jane the Actuary

Will Joe Biden govern as the moderate that he presented himself as? Or will he succumb to the temptation to try to be the “next FDR” to be remembered by posterity? Or is he, in fact, so frail that he has no control over anything at all, and it’s all a matter of who, behind the scenes, is controlling him? There’s a new document out, the Unity Task Force Recommendations, which is an extended policy platform and which should provide... Read more

Revisiting the Great Depression – part one: was it truly global?

Last updated on: July 19, 2020 at 10:17 am By Jane the Actuary

So I’m working my way through Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which is admittedly over a decade old now (published in 2007). A bit of a summary as well as its reception at the time is available at Wikipedia: her key argument is that not only was Hoover inept in how he reacted to the emerging depression (especially in implementing the Smoot-Hawley Tariff) but that FDR also, by his actions prolonged the Depression. ... Read more

Yes, 2 + 2 still equals 4

Last updated on: July 26, 2020 at 6:26 pm By Jane the Actuary

“Freedom,” Winston writes in George Orwell’s 1984, “is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Is there an objective truth? Postmodern intellectuals have been insisting that’s not the case for long enough now, though, of course, once-upon-a-time that was in the sense that there is no objective “right” or “wrong” morally speaking, or that what defines great literature or art is not objectively discernable (nor is it possible to discern... Read more

Actually, The Bostock Supreme Court Ruling Reaffirmed A Biological Definition of “Sex”

Last updated on: July 10, 2020 at 8:16 am By Jane the Actuary

Hey, everyone — the article below might seem outdated, but I had been shopping it around for publication, got quizzical looks, and I finally concluded I don’t have the time or motivation to try to wordsmith it to make it more persuasive, if, indeed, that is possible. So please be patient with the length of it and share your reaction in the comments. Everyone has made their pronouncements about the Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia Supreme Court decision in which... Read more

Diversity, inclusion, and Olympia Fields

Last updated on: July 5, 2020 at 4:01 pm By Jane the Actuary

Chicago is, its civic leaders worry, a place of deep income divides — from deeply impoverished Grand Crossing (median income $21,135) to wealthy West De Paul (median income $148,113), as a browse of Statistical Atlas reveals. It’s a city where those leaders fret that the middle class is leaving, leaving a sharp divide between the rich and poor, and it shows up as one of the “most segregated cities” in the United States (for example, #4 in USA Today, assessing metro... Read more

Can we — should we — pray for Trump?

Last updated on: June 26, 2020 at 11:36 am By Jane the Actuary

Sometimes I write about politics. Sometimes I have things I want to say that I want to communicate, that I want others to hear, that I want to persuade people of. Other times I know that I offer no particular expertise on a subject but just want to get something off my chest. But I am aware that I haven’t said much about Trump lately. The words I’d use to describe the situation, well, require a lot of finger-stretching to... Read more

Should Oskar Schindler be cancelled?

Last updated on: June 23, 2020 at 4:57 pm By Jane the Actuary

Should a man who: was a member of the Nazi party, pressured ghetto-confined Jews to sign over title to their factory, used ghetto-confined Jews as labor without paying them a wage, and sold wares to the German military, be honored as a “righteous man,” not merely by means of a statue but a movie celebrating him, a movie used to teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren? We all know the rest of the story — that Oskar Schindler came to see... Read more

Fact check: “systemic racism” is not racism

Last updated on: June 22, 2020 at 8:56 am By Jane the Actuary

Remember when Pluto was demoted from planetary status and given the name “dwarf planet,” confusing everyone for whom the name implies that it is indeed a planet, albeit a small one? OK, maybe I betray my age. But it was a peculiar sort of label: “yes, it’s a dwarf planet. No, it’s not a real planet.” Or on my Forbes site, I write about social insurance, and I say that it may have the word “insurance” in its name, but... Read more