Why I deplore Scottish nationalism
And other nationalisms like it. I was once instinctively for it but I was biased.
About my bias:
I do have some Scots ancestry; I was brought up to be pro-Scots; I have on occasions worn Highland Dress and very much enjoy that; I have been to Scotland more than once -- from Sauchiehall st to the Western Isles; I once married a bonnie Scottish lass and put on Scottish songs exclusively at our wedding reception; I have done extensive academic survey research in Scotland about Scottish attitudes. See:
http://jonjayray.com/scotland.html
From all that it should be clear that speaking ill of Scotland and the Scots pains me deeply. But it appears that I have to do so. The crux of the matter can be seen in this videoIt's a prelude to a Scottish Rugby match at Murrayfiend stadium. The song is "Flower of Scotland", now accepted as Scotland's national anthem. The words are as follows:
Flower of Scotland
O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
Your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
The Hills are bare now,
And Autumn leaves
lie thick and still,
O'er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
Those days are past now,
And in the past
they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
And be the nation again,
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
Flower of Scotland,
When will we see
your like again,
That fought and died for,
Your wee bit Hill and Glen,
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's Army,
And sent him homeward,
Tae think again.
What they are singing about is the Battle of Bannockburn which took place in 1324. It is one of the few battles with the English that Scotland won. The song is however much later than the battle. It was composed in the mid-1960s by Roy Williamson of the folk group the Corries.
The thing that disturbs me about it is that it is hate-based. It is a song of hatred of the English. And you have to note above how devotedly it is sung by a whole stadium of apparently ordinary people. It is heartfelt among them. That they should be enthusiastic about antything that took place in 1324 is absurd. It is not that event which moves the singers in the video. It is hatred and contempt for their Southern neighbours that the event inspires.
The Left sometimes conflate nationalism and patriotism. It is part of their theory of "ethnocentrism". But that is typical of their slipperiness. All nationalists are patriots but not all patriots are nationaists. Nationalists dislike other nations. Patriots just like their own nation.
Americans are highly likely to be patriotic but nationalism among them is virtually unknown -- except for a regrettable period in the "progressive" era associated mostly with Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. See
I have actually done some published survey research on patriotism and consistently found that liking for your own group did NOT imply dislike of "outgroups"
http://jonjayray.com/genrace.html
http://jonjayray.com/disutil.html
http://jonjayray.com/racethno.html
And Scottish hatred of the English has been disastrous for them. They lost many bloody battles. And hatred begrets hatred regardless of who "started" it. The Bhagavad Gita tells us that it is sometimes better to let our opponent win but the Gita has never had much of a following in Scotland. Matthew 5:38-40 has simlar advice but that too appears to have had no influenceI have personally experienced Scottish hatred of the English, as have many Australians. Scots cannot usually tell the difference between an educated Australian accent and RP, so when Australians go to Scotland, the Scots initially assume that we are English. They think we "sound like the TV", as one of my survey interviewees put it.
Wise Australians, however, hasten to undo that impression: "We are Australians, not English", we say. And the effect of that can be a wonder to behold. Scots see Australians as fellow "victims" of the English so the initial "dour" attitude towards us can immediately be replaced by a very warm one. We are suddenly friends and are treated accordingly. How sad that an accent can make such a diffrence.
So, as always, I can only deplore hatred. The current outpouring of hatred of Jews and Israel coming from the Left over Gaza shows how it can subvert all reason
JR
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Are blacks stressed by living among whites?
There is no scientific evidence for it but it suits the Left to believe it. For a REAL stressful environment try any city in Nigeria. If blacks can survive there, an American environment should be a doddle
In 1986, an upstart public health researcher named Arline Geronimus challenged the conventional wisdom that condemned the alarming rise of inner-city teen pregnancies. While activist minister Jesse Jackson and health care leaders were decrying the crisis of “babies having babies” as a ghetto pathology, Geronimus contended that teenage pregnancy was a rational response to urban poverty where low-income black people have fewer healthy years before the onset of heart problems, diabetes, and other chronic conditions.
Although Geronimus’ claims gained little traction at the time, the concept she pioneered – “weathering” – eventually became a foundation for the social justice ideology that is now upending medicine and social policy. She has stated in interviews and in her writings that the term “weathering” was intended to evoke the idea of erosion and resilience.
A white professor at the University of Michigan whom The New York Times hailed last year as an “icon,” Geronimus has combined race theory with data and statistics to argue that the chronic stress of living in an oppressive, white-majority society causes damage at the cellular level and leads to obesity and other health conditions, resulting in shorter life expectancies for African Americans. In more than 130 published studies, she has expanded the weathering hypothesis from an explanation of poverty harming one’s health into a dystopian sociological worldview that identifies middle-class assimilation and professional striving within the “American Creed” of hard work as the silent killers of people of color.
“Living life according to the dominant social norms of personal responsibility and virtue is not universally health‑promoting,” Geronimus wrote in a Harvard Public Health essay last year. “On the contrary: if you’re Black, working hard and playing by the rules can be part of what kills you.”
The subject of hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and thousands of citations, the weathering hypothesis is now widely taught in public health schools and accepted as perhaps the most plausible scientific explanation of how American society grinds down black and brown bodies. And the weathering paradox – that “relatively young people can be biologically old” – is now influencing policy decisions at all levels of governance.
Geronimus’ hypothesis was the foundation of many of the policy decisions of the White House COVID-19 health equity task force. In New Hampshire, the governor’s COVID-19 Equity Response Team issued a report and recommendations in 2020, citing weathering (and “racial battle fatigue”) as documented and established realities of American life. Weathering was recently extended beyond American people of color and accepted as evidence in federal courts to win early release of non-white detainees, some as young as their 30s, who were deemed to be prematurely aged and therefore at higher risk for COVID complications.
Some critics are beginning to push back against what they see as the heavy-handed, COVID-era politicization of healthcare. Ian Kingsbury, research director at Do No Harm, a nonprofit that seeks to keep identity politics out of medicine, said the uncritical acceptance of the weathering hypothesis as factual science has created an aura of invincibility.
“Unfortunately, judges and other policymakers look to academic journals to be authoritative and trustworthy voices on what is evidence and what is science,” said Kingsbury. “And so you sneak this stuff in there and, unfortunately, as far as a lot of people are concerned, you’ve created knowledge.”
More broadly, Boston University public health dean Sandro Galea warned in a new book, “Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” that his profession has veered into overcorrection and revolutionary excess. Galea doesn’t name names in his book, but he rebukes public health advocates for favoring political narratives over empirical data, denying the reality of social progress, and fixating on a utopian quest “to create a world free of risk.”
Geronimus' research on weathering's damage to blacks in a white world: "It’s the physiological consequence of being vigilant all the time or what we also call ‘managing your social identity’ or code-switching: various ways you try to put on your A-game and do what you need for the people around you to respect you and not to fear you."
The rise and reach of Geronimus’ weathering hypothesis – a once obscure and idiosyncratic idea that is becoming conventional wisdom in medicine – provides a window into how activist rhetoric and social justice ideology pioneered by feminist, queer, and critical race theorists are recasting healthcare as a Machiavellian power struggle between the privileged and the oppressed.
The public health field has long focused on “social determinants of health,” such as one’s environment and socioeconomic status, as contributors to health outcomes. The weathering hypothesis takes political empowerment to the next level, by medicalizing social relations and politicizing medicine. Weathering prefigured the recent flood of medical research that centers race in public policy and supplies the rationale for such moves as 265 public authorities declaring racism as a public health crisis; health officials jettisoning colorblindness and prioritizing people of color for COVID vaccinations and heart treatment; and medical schools training future doctors in social justice activism.
In her 2023 book, “Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society,” Geronimus sweeps across time and space, omnisciently diagnosing celebrities and public figures with weathering. She claims it explains why Martin Luther King Jr. had the damaged heart of a 60-year-old when he was assassinated at age 39 and why Fannie Lou Hamer died of breast cancer and complications of hypertension at age 59. She asserts that the trauma of being black in America is one reason why tennis greats Serena Williams had life-threatening blood clots at age 36, and why Arthur Ashe had a heart attack at age 36.
“Success comes at a spectacularly high health cost for those who have to fight the hardest to achieve it in the context of a society that doesn’t value them,” Geronimus stated in her book. “Structural violence is insidious, pervasive, and fateful. It is the fundamental cause of weathering, and it is entirely ignored in the age-washing narrative.”
It is amply documented that African Americans of all social classes have worse health outcomes, earlier onset of chronic diseases, and average life expectancies reported as five to six years less than whites. Weathering science, as Geronimus calls it, measures various biomarkers of what is presumed to be psychosocial stress – such as cortisol levels, telomere lengths, cytokine storms, and allostatic loads – to make the case that on average black adults are as much as 10 years older biologically than white people of a comparable chronological age.
But the data is complicated, requires interpretation, and doesn’t always add up. For example, in a 2021 study, a gerontology scholar at the University of Southern California assessed 13 measures of epigenetic aging. It found that some of the measures indicate accelerated aging among African Americans, while others indicate slower aging for African Americans. Epigenetics refers to the way genes function or malfunction under environmental stress and cultural conditions; most of these “epigenetic clocks” associate accelerated aging with obesity and lifetime smoking. This research, noting “the lack of expected effects of race and ethnicity,” suggests that there is no gold standard for measuring premature aging, and that weathering research is highly sensitive to the variables and measures that researchers select.
Nevertheless, Geronimus compares the African American experience of living and working among white people to the fight-or-flight adrenaline rush of a prehistoric human fleeing a cheetah – except, she says, that a 21st-century black person in a majority white society is trapped in that high-stress mode all day, every day, without reprieve, resulting in a flood of stress hormones that dysregulate the body.
Fluent in the language of social justice activism, Geronimus describes American society as a relentless onslaught of “microaggressions,” “othering,” “existential insults,” “daily indignities,” “voice erasure,” “identity threat” and other forms of “cultural oppression” that lead to early death. In response to those ever-present dangers in “the privileged space known as whiteness,” black people are constantly forced to adopt “high effort coping strategies” that Geronimus describes as “identity management” and “identity safety.” In a 2015 study titled “Black Lives Matter,” Geronimus and her co-authors estimated that racism and weathering caused 2.7 million “excess black deaths” in the United States between 1970 and 2004, a death toll of genocidal proportions.
This one-dimensional way of analyzing social relations has the effect of privileging the stress of those presumed to be oppressed, said Stanley Goldfarb, a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school and founder and chairman of the Do No Harm nonprofit.
“The problem with the theory is that these hormones and these stress responses don’t know what skin color you have,” Goldfarb said. “The point is: What’s unique about their stress? The point isn’t that stress is bad. The point is you decided that your stress is unique and different from everybody else’s stress.”
Still, weathering is an attractive explanation to researchers because the link between psychosocial stress and physical wear and tear is consistent with lower life expectancy for African Americans and lower-income people.
Moreover, the hypothesis is “very intuitive” to economists because of its similarity to modeling health depreciation, and to social scientists who seek explanations of differential outcomes, said economist Robert Kaestner, a University of Chicago public policy professor who co-authored a weathering study with Geronimus in 2009.
However, weathering studies do not actually measure stress or racism, but only correlate biological metrics back to the weathering hypothesis. The scientific conundrum is that the same biological evidence that supports weathering could also be “consistent with a lot of other things,” Kaestner said in a phone interview. “It’s always a measurement problem.”
“Weathering is a hypothesis, still in search of definitive evidence,” Kaestner said. “I’ve never seen one [study] – including my own – where it’s a definitive study that this really is a smoking gun that racism or prolonged psychosocial stress causes adverse health outcomes.”
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Teachers Sue Gavin Newsom Over Policy Forcing Them to Lie About Student’s Transgender Status to Parents
Elizabeth Mirabelli and Lori Ann West, two teachers at Rincon Middle School in Escondido, sued the Escondido Union School District in April, alleging violations of their First Amendment rights. They allege that the school district’s “Parental Exclusion Policy” prevents teachers from disclosing “the fact that a student identifies as a new gender, or wants to be addressed by a new name or new pronouns during the school day.”
The teachers added Gov. Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta to the lawsuit last month.
“The governor is the boss,” Paul Jonna, the lawyer representing Mirabelli and West, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. Newsom “has ultimate responsibility for setting education policy for those under his supervision,” Jonna, special counsel at the Thomas More Society and partner at the firm LiMandri and Jonna LLP, added.
“Rincon Middle School and the Escondido Union School District do not operate in a vacuum,” he noted. “The California Constitution provides that education is ultimately a matter of state responsibility.”
The lawsuit alleges a school district procedure titled the “Parental Exclusion Policy” prevents teachers from disclosing “the fact that a student identifies as a new gender, or wants to be addressed by a new name or new pronouns during the school day.”
The legal nonprofit Thomas More Society, which is representing Mirabelli and West, claims that “the district outright refused to exempt the teachers from the Parental Exclusion Policy—compelling them to systematically deceive the parents of their students.”
In August 2022, the teachers received an email with a list of students, including their preferred names and pronouns. The list included directions on whether teachers could disclose the names and pronouns to the students’ parents or guardians. Mirabelli reportedly received an email with a list of students like this: “[student name]: Preferred name is [redacted] (pronouns are he/him). Dad and stepmom are NOT aware, please use [redacted] and she/her when calling home.”
Mirabelli and West claim the policy violates their First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of religion.
In September, a U.S. district court judge granted a preliminary injunction preventing the school district from enforcing the Parental Exclusion Policy on Mirabelli and West.
Judge Rodger T. Benitez called the policy a “trifecta of harm:”
It [the policy] harms the child who needs parental guidance and possibly mental health intervention to determine if the incongruence is organic or whether it is the result of bullying, peer pressure, or a fleeting impulse. It harms the parents by depriving them of the long recognized Fourteenth Amendment right to care, guide, and make health care decisions for their children. And finally, it harms plaintiffs who are compelled to violate the parent’s rights by forcing plaintiffs to conceal information they feel is critical for the welfare of their students—violating plaintiffs’ religious beliefs.
In January, the educators added Newsom and Bonta to the lawsuit, claiming that the school district is acting under their direction in attempting to enforce “state and federal anti-discrimination law.”
The California Department of Education has interpreted the law to require school districts to hide students’ transgender identity from certain parents on pain of state education funds.
The amended legal complaint also says that “according to the attorney general, the State of California will sue any school district who fails to adopt these policies.”
Bonta “has been threatening school districts to adopt policies to conceal student gender incongruity from parents and legal guardians, pitting students, parents, and schools against each other,” Jonna, the teachers’ lawyer, said.
He said Benitez’s order deemed those policies unconstitutional, and the attorney general has shown no willingness to follow it.
“Bonta’s actions have demonstrated the state of California is not taking any actions to comply with Judge Benitez’s orders, so he will now be made to,” Jonna said.
Jonna says his clients are also desiring “a declaration that the parental exclusion policies violate parental rights because they cannot be forced to break the law.”
When asked to respond to Newsom’s arguments about such policies, Jonna said, “The policies are not needed to protect students—they harm students.”
“When teachers are forced to lie to the parents who have entrusted a child into their care – that is unconscionable,” he added.
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Scranton Joe and the Temple of Doom Spending
Millions of young Americans seem to have given up on their economic future, turning instead to “doom spending.” Rather than save up for a house, to start a family or for retirement—which they view as fruitless—they’re spending more than they earn without a plan to get ahead.
That’s the upshot of a recent study by Intuit, the company that makes TurboTax. It shows Americans, especially the young, are spending beyond their means to alleviate stress. But like the dieter who thinks progress is impossible and gives up trying to lose weight, these doom-spenders are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and digging the very financial abyss they fear.
The problem is becoming systemic. The study found that 96% of Americans are concerned about the economy today. (The remaining 4% are presumably politicians and their donors.) In response, 27% of Americans, about 90 million, have simply given up and turned to doom spending.
Even among those who haven’t thrown in the towel, things look bleak: Almost 60% of respondents are living paycheck to paycheck and lack sufficient savings to pay for an unexpected expense, like a major appliance breaking down. About a quarter of Americans—roughly 80 million—have zero savings.
And things aren’t improving, with half of respondents saying economic conditions have deteriorated further in the last six months. Pessimism is concentrated among the young, with more than 70% of Millennials and Zoomers reporting financial anxiety. A full quarter of Zoomers, those just entering the workforce, cannot even find decent-paying jobs.
That explains why more than one-third of these young Americans are doom spending, as are more than 40% of Millennials. Consequently, adults under 30 are moving back in with their parents at rates not seen since the Great Depression, giving up on the American dream of homeownership.
What used to be the most common age to start a family—mid to late 20s—is now the exact point Americans instead give up and resign to living for today.
Like many problems, this one started in Washington, D.C.
To finance perpetual government deficit spending, the Federal Reserve kept interest rates artificially low for almost two decades, creating money for the politicians to spend. That devalued the dollar and imposed a hidden tax of inflation, which sapped the value of savings and gutted the real return on investment, while simultaneously incentivizing spendthrift behavior.
It also grossly distorted prices and created misallocations of capital. Take the construction of densely packed apartments instead of homes. This drove up home prices, helping make homeownership the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Meanwhile, those same interest rates that drove inflation suckered people to go into debt for worthless college degrees while racking up more than $1 trillion in new credit-card debt that now has an average interest rate of over 21%.
At this point, horrendous fiscal and monetary policy have created two whole generations of Americans who have largely given up. They don’t believe it’s possible to ever afford their own homes and to afford the lifestyle in which they themselves were raised. They live only for today.
The tree of big government has born its noxious fruit of inflation, and those who have tasted it have contracted hedonism.
After all, why scrimp and save for something in the future when the real value of those savings is taxed away through inflation? If with each passing year as home prices climb faster than incomes, an adequate down payment will be forever out of reach, leaving the young to rent with roommates for life or move back in with their parents.
Instead of running to exhaustion on this treadmill, young Americans have thrown up their hands. The end result is a broader cultural decline where family formation, community stability and the perpetuation of American ideals have lost value in the minds of our youth. They become abstract, unattainable, old-fashioned luxuries for a previous generation.
This assault on the young continues with Bidenomics, which has added another $6.5 trillion to the national debt, created 40-year-high inflation, and produced record costs of home ownership. So long as the uniparty in D.C. keeps spending like there’s no tomorrow, America’s youth will believe there’s no tomorrow for them.
https://www.heritage.org/markets-and-finance/commentary/scranton-joe-and-the-temple-doom-spending
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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