New Yorker Cartoon: Lifting The Curtain On Internet Bamboozle

“LinkedIn has finally paid off—it got me two new followers on Twitter.”

"The Danish Do Not Have The Secret Of Happiness." Or... Do They?

Alan: What if "the secret of happiness" is - as the Danish experience indicates - not having high expectations?

And what if, on the far shore of happiness, "the secret of Divine Bliss" is having no expectations at all so that "anything" is constantly conceived as infinitely more than nothing? 

Buddhism, probably the sanest of all the Great Religions, posits "desire" as the universal source of human unhappiness.

Taṇhā

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81

American-style Cowboy Capitalism shackles "consumer units" in frozen poses of shrill exigency, imposing a patriotic duty that citizens shriek "More!" - an  ugly posture that, even on the face of it, is recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction.

What if Americans only "think" they're happy because they believe it's their inalienable right to squat at the trough, inhaling ever more "stuff," ever more "slop?"

In recent decades, I have watched - slackjawed - while American conservatives become increasingly unhappy, accusatory and incandescently angry, as if someone "stole their happiness."

Behind this extraordinary and largely unremarked dissatisfaction -- still disguised by patriotic displays of exceptionalism and fingers wagging "We're #1!" -- I see coddled, insular people whose "privilege" has disappeared as a result of the world's ongoing economic re-calibration - a re-calibration brought about by the spread of economic justice with many more nation's eating at the same table where, until recently, the only diners were white Europeans and their American offspring.

The Danish Don't Have the Secret to Happiness

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

MICHAEL BOOTHJAN 30 2015

Danish author Askel Sandemose’s works are little read in his home country these days—except, that is, for a small fragment of one novel, A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks, published in 1933. The fragment of A Fugitive that has come both to define and to torment the Danes is a list of rules by which the residents of the fictional town of Jante were said to abide. These rules set out the Law of Jante, a kind of Danish Ten Commandments, the social norms one should be aware of if one is planning a move to the north:

1. You shall not believe that you are someone.
2. You shall not believe that you are as good as we are.
3. You shall not believe that you are any wiser than we are.
4. You shall never indulge in the conceit of imagining that you are better than we are.
5. You shall not believe that you know more than we do.
6. You shall not believe that you are more important than we are.
7. You shall not believe that you are going to amount to anything.
8. You shall not laugh at us.
9. You shall not believe that anyone cares about you.
10. You shall not believe that you can teach us anything.

The truth is, Sandemose really nailed the Danes. My experience has been that Jante Law, which has become a national social manifesto of sorts, operates everywhere in Denmark on some level or another.

* * *

On the face of it, the Danes have considerably less to be happy about than most of us. Yet, when asked, they still insist that they are the happiest of us all.

What is one to make of this?

The obvious response is, “Define happiness.” If we are talking heel-kicking, cocktail-umbrella joie de vivre, then the Danes do not score highly, and I suspect not even they would take their claims that far. But if we are talking about being contented with one’s lot, then the Danes do have a more convincing case to present.

They tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover the perpetrator.

Over the years I have asked many Danes about these happiness surveys—whether they really believe that they are the global happiness champions—and I have yet to meet a single one of them who seriously believes it’s true. They appreciate the safety net of their welfare state, the way most things function well in their country, and all the free time they have, but they tend to approach the subject of their much-vaunted happiness like the victims of a practical joke waiting to discover who the perpetrator is.

On the other hand, these same Danes are often just as quick to counter any criticism of their country—of their schools, hospitals, transport, weather, taxes, politicians, uneventful landscape, and so on—with the simple and, in a sense-argument-proof riposte: “Well, if that’s true, how come we are the happiest people in the world?” (This usually accompanied by upturned palms and a tight, smug smile.) The happiness argument does come in handy sometimes, I guess.

Newspaper editor Anne Knudsen had an interesting theory relating to why the Danes continue to respond positively to happiness surveys: “In Denmark it is shameful to be unhappy,” she told me. “If you ask me how I am and I start telling you how bad I feel, then it might force you to do something about it. It might put a burden on you to help me. So, that’s one of the main reasons people say things are all right, or even ‘super.’”

Here’s another convincing theory, posited by a Danish friend of mine: “We always come top of those surveys because they ask us at the beginning of the year what our expectations are,” he said. “Then they ask us at the end of the year whether those expectations were met. And because our expectations are so extremely low at the beginning of the year, they tend to get met more easily.”

Could that be the secret of the Danes’ contentedness? Low expectations? It is true that, when asked how they expect the next year to pan out, the Danes do typically expect less than the rest of us, and when their low expectations are fulfilled, so are they. Happiness has never been an “inalienable right” in Denmark, so it could be that the Danes appreciate it all the more when it manifests itself. Perhaps Danish happiness is not really happiness at all, but something much more valuable and durable: contentedness, being satisfied with your lot, low-level needs being met, higher expectations being kept in check.

"Because our expectations are so extremely low at the beginning of the year, they tend to get met more easily."

A few years ago, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Southern Denmark, Kaare Christensen, published a slightly tongue-in-cheek overview of what he saw as the possible reason for the Danes’ happiness, entitled “Why Danes Are Smug: A Comparative Study of Life Satisfaction in the European Union.” His explanations ranged from the fact that the Danes might have been drunk when responding to questionnaires to their surprise 1992 European Championship in soccer victory (not only did they beat Germany in the final, but it took place in Sweden: a joyous confluence of multiple revenge fantasies). But Christensen and his team also concluded that low expectations were key: “If expectations are unrealistically high they could also be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,” Christensen writes. “Year after year they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark.”

It is a thin line indeed between relaxed and smug. The Danes do have a remarkably relaxed approach to life, which, I admit, I have sometimes interpreted as immense self-satisfaction, but they do have a great deal to teach us about not taking life too seriously. The Danish language is rich with phrases to encourage the elimination of stress: Slap af (“Relax”), they will say, rolig nu(“Easy now”), det er lige meget (“It doesn’t matter”), glem det (“Forget about it”). It’s not a bad way to approach life, I think.

* * *

According to much of the prevailing anthropological, political, social, and economic thought, the Gini Coefficient—a statistical method for analyzing the distribution of wealth in a nation—is the silver bullet that goes directly to the heart of not just how equal a society is, but how happy and healthy its people are likely to be. It is, if you like, the very sum of human happiness.

I asked epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, the author of The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, if he thought there might perhaps be any downsides to the low Gini countries. Didn’t the most equal societies also tend to be, you know, a little boring? All those lists of the best cities to live in are always made up of places with clean streets, cycle paths, and touring productions ofPhantom of the Opera, like Bern or Toronto; it is never the really scintillating, stimulating places like New York or Barcelona. As soon as I asked the question, though, I realized that, compared with the social ills examined in The Spirit Level— crime, teenage pregnancy, obesity, cancer, and suicide—a lack of decent street food and interesting graffiti were hardly serious complaints.

Didn’t the most equal societies also tend to be, you know, a little boring?

“People do say that,” the professor replied. “But the costs of inequality are very high indeed: the stress, the depression, the drug and drink problems, the tendency for narcissism.”

A surprising number of Danes agree with me, though: They also think their homeland is stultifyingly dull. Newspaper columnist Anne Sophia Hermansen, of the broadsheet Berlingske, caused a small kerfuffle recently when she expressed her feelings about what she saw as Denmark’s suffocating monoculture: “It is so boring in Denmark. We wear the same clothes, shop in the same places, see the same TV, and struggle to know who to vote for because the parties are so alike. We are so alike it makes me weep.”

Another prominent newspaper commentator, Jyllands-Posten’s Niels Lillelund, pinpointed a more serious side effect of the Danes’ Jante Law mentality: “In Denmark we do not raise the inventive, the hardworking, the ones with initiative, the successful or the outstanding; we create hopelessness, helplessness, and the sacred, ordinary mediocrity.”

Even the usually ebullient Ove Kaj Perdsen, an economist at the Copenhagen Business School, was open to this line of criticism: “I like Denmark, but I like to work abroad. I pay my taxes with great honor because I know for a fact that whenever I need something it will be there … Every day I conclude the best place to live is Denmark, but for me this kind of social cohesion, these middle-class-oriented societies, do not present the kind of challenges I am looking for. I want to be in the best places, and you don’t find the best places in Denmark when it comes to elite research and education. And why the hell can’t you go down to the bookstore in the morning and buy The New York Times for five dollars? Or get a good cup of coffee for a cheap price?”

Most of us would probably conclude that expensive coffee and having to put up with another touring production of Mamma Mia are reasonably prices to pay for a fair, functioning society. Denmark—and the rest of Scandinavia, for that matter—might not get your pulse racing like the Lower East Side or Copacabana, but in the long run a solid pension fund and reliable broadband will always win the day—as long as those plates keep spinning, and as long as the Danish miracle is sustained.

"What is the long-term sustainable version of the welfare state, version 2.0?"

With that in mind, I had a standard question that I asked most of my interviewees: “What are your fears for the future of Denmark?” One word cropped up more than any other in their responses: complacency. Many of my interviewees were worried that the Danes had it too good for too long, that they were now content to sit back in their Arne Jacobsen San armchairs and watch the plates wobble and fall. Worryingly for the Danes, the latest OECD Better Life Index of life satisfaction saw them plummet to seventh place, behind Norway and Sweden, among others.

“We have a confusion in Denmark in terms of where we should go. What is the long-term sustainable version of the welfare state, version 2.0?” said Torben Tranaes, head of the Rockwool Research Foundation, a social-research organization. “All the graphs about trends in Danish society and the economy have either gone up and then plateaued, or gone down and plateaued—the only exception is our weight.”

Danish society appears to have reached maturity, some would argue to a state of perfection, others to a perilous halt. The fear is that the next stage will be stagnation and decline. What happens when you develop a genuinely almost nearly perfect society in which there is nothing left to achieve, nothing to kick against, or work for?

But I had one other question I always asked, which, in its way, was even more revealing. Whenever I asked my Danish interviewees whether they could think of a better country to live in, the answer was invariably a thoughtful silence.

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This article has been adapted from Michael Booth's The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia.

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David Frum: "Liberals And The Illiberal Left"

Jessica Hill/AP

Liberals and the Illiberal Left

When Democrats don't stand up to the policing of speech, they surrender control of their party to its most extreme elements.

DAVID FRUMJAN 29 2015

“A liberal,” Robert Frost once said, “is someone who can’t take his own side in an argument.” If conservatives are often caricatured by their detractors as unfeeling, liberals are painted as uncertain, weak, and easily bullied. Back in the 1980s, the centrist British politician David Owen joined the two accusations in a jibe against Britain’s Prime Minister Thatcher and her then Labor opponent: “She doesn’t care, and he doesn’t dare.”
These stereotypes exert real-world political effects. In the 1970s, a Yale sociologist went to live for two years among an exotic tribe: not in the South Seas or up the Amazon, but in the working-class neighborhood of Canarsie, next door to New York’s Kennedy Airport. For a political generation, the Jews and Italians of Canarsie had voted overwhelmingly for New Deal Democrats. Since 1970, their preference had shifted to Richard Nixon’s Republicans. The sociologist, Jonathan Rieder, wanted to understand why. Here’s what he found:

Since 1960 the Jews and Italians of Canarsie have embellished and modified the meaning of liberalism, associating it with profligacy, spinelessness, malevolence, masochism, elitism, fantasy, anarchy, idealism, softness, irresponsibility and sanctimoniousness. The term 'conservative' acquired connotations of pragmatism, character, reciprocity, truthfulness, stoicism, manliness, realism, hardness, vengeance, strictness, and responsibility.

All of this is background to understand yesterday’s Internet dust-up over Jonathan Chait’s powerful new article in New York magazine. Chait is a liberal’s liberal: a warm and consistent supporter of the Obama administration, and a fierce and relentless critic of conservative policies and personalities. This time, however, Chait directed his sharp wit against a leftward target:

Political correctness is a style of politics in which the more radical members of the left attempt to regulate political discourse by defining opposing views as bigoted and illegitimate … Today’s political correctness flourishes most consequentially on social media, where it enjoys a frisson of cool and vast new cultural reach.

Chait condemned the goals of this new political correctness as verging on the totalitarian:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to. The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones.

That set off a stinkbomb!
It’s difficult even to tally, much less read, all the ripostes and rebuttals, many of which confirmed Chait’s original point by reprising even more noisily exactly the category-think he warned against. “So, here is sad white man Jonathan Chait’s essay about the difficulty of being a white man in the second age of ‘political correctness,’” wrote Alex Pareene at Gawker. Variants of this theme have rocketed around the left wing of the Internet and Twittersphere over the past 24 hours.

Related Story

An Optimist’s Guide to Political Correctness

Yet even as Chait’s critics dismissed the reality of political correctness he decried, real world examples pile up—some absurd, others ominous. In the absurd column comes this from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York: Professors and other employees at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center have been forbidden from addressing students and prospective students with the title “Mr.” and “Ms.” because, campus leaders say, the terms may be offensive.
“Effective Spring 2015, the (graduate center’s) policy is to eliminate the use of gendered salutations and references in correspondence to students, prospective students, and third parties,” Louise Lennihan, interim provost, states to employees in a recent memo. “Accordingly, Mr. and Ms. should be omitted from salutations.”
Lennihan instructs staffers to interpret the new policy “as broadly as possible,” that it applies to “all types of correspondence, such as: all parts of any letter including address and salutation, mailing labels, bills or invoices, and any other forms or reports,” states the memo.
In the ominous column, consider this chart from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education of attempts by students to ban speakers from campus, by means up through and including violent disruption:

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Disinvitation Incidents, 2000-2013

FIRE

As FIRE notes, not only are disinvitation incidents on campus rising, but so too is the “success rate” for such incidents. FIRE statistics indicate that disinvitation incidents are almost three times as likely to target speakers perceived as conservative (including those, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who would angrily disavow such a label for themselves) as those perceived as liberal or left. The campus left is reviving, and liberal university administrators are surrendering to them.
Jonathan Chait deplores the political correctness of the political left for contradicting its most fundamental values. Liberals are, well, liberal; political correctness is fundamentally and often radically illiberal. But there’s an important and fascinating pragmatic aspect to this story too, with large potential implications for national politics.
As Chait notes, political correctness is a weapon deployed by leftists against liberals. Its political effect in the larger political context is to make liberals look hesitant and weak. The inability to say “no” to transgender activists at a graduate school may not matter much in the scheme of things. But the Obama administration’s unwillingness to stand alongside the people of France at a march to condemn the Charlie Hebdo massacre does matter. The refusal to pronounce the phrase “Islamist terrorism” matters. Acquiescence to bureaucrats who order universities to suspend due process for male students accused of rape matters.
Politically correct leftism is more than a challenge to liberalism. It is a test of liberalism. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (himself a non-left liberal in the Chait style) anticipated that test years ago in an essay bluntly titled, “The Bitch Slap Theory of Politics.

One way—perhaps the best way—to demonstrate someone's lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves—thus the rough slang I used above. … Someone who can't or won't defend themselves certainly isn't someone you can depend upon to defend you.

Marshall anatomizes the effects of exhibiting weakness in the face of attacks from political opponents. Yet politicians and political movements can suffer the same damage when they quail before their nominal allies.
America’s most effective liberals—from Harry Truman to Rahm Emanuel—have known how and when to defy the illiberal left, whether that illiberal left was communist or Third Worldist or, as it is today, infatuated with the jargon of “intersectionality.” The liberals who couldn’t or wouldn’t or didn’t have been dragged toward the same marginality that has always befallen the hard left in America—and always will.
Republicans have suffered greatly over the past six years from their visible terror of their more extreme associates. The evolution toward a more responsible Republicanism remains incomplete, but is visibly under way. Now it seems to be the turn of liberals and Democrats to veer off into their own ideological fever-swamps. Exactly how and exactly why they are taking this novel turn is detailed in Jonathan Chait’s essay. There will be nothing novel about the result.

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DAVID FRUM is a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Pope Francis' Talk With Italian Farmers Emphasizes Distribution Of Earth's Goods

Pope Francis: cultivate and preserve Mother Earth

(Vatican Radio) Pope Francis on Saturday received members of  Italy’s National Federation of Farmers, who are this year celebrating the 70th anniversary of their foundation.

Listen to Lydia O'Kane's report: 

http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/01/31/pope_francis_cultivate_and_preserve_mother_earth/1120880

Pope Francis told the farmers present in the Clementine Hall  that there is no humanity without the cultivation of the earth, as there is also no life without good food that is produced for men and women of every continent.

This shows, underlined the Holy Father, that agriculture has a pivotal role.

In his prepared remarks to the farmers, the Pope reflected on as he put it, two critical points. He said, “the Second Vatican Council recalled the universal destination of the goods of the earth,” but, Pope Francis added, “in fact the dominant economic system excludes many from their correct use.”  The Holy Father went on to say that, “absolutizing market rules, a culture of waste and waste that in the case of food has unacceptable proportions, together with other factors, cause misery and suffering for many families.” Therefore, the Pope continued, the system of production and distribution of food must be radically rethought.

In his second point, the Holy Father said it was important  to remember that man is called not only to cultivate the land, but also to preserve it. In a time of climate change the Pope noted, this is difficult, that is why, he said, it is so vital that nations are able to work together to protect creation.

Finally, Pope Francis invited the farmers, in the spirit of St Francis, to love the land as Mother earth, and proposed that they make an alliance with it, so that it can continue to be, the source of life for the entire human family.

New Yorker Cartoon: Capitalism's Latest Exercise In Psychological Colonization

“Wow, this new version is a way more immersive waste of our youth.”

New Yorker Cartoon: "Maybe It Means Something Different In Dolphin?”

"Maybe it means something different in Dolphin?”

New Yorker Cartoon: Global Privatization And Meta-Level Mirage