Friday, May 5, 2017

Good old days in France and elsewhere

Managed to enjoy Peggy Steinfels' Commonweal article comparing the LePen-induced nostalgia about the good old days in France to the actual good old days in France.  Certainly applies to us as well.  Forget the slavery, racism and genocide. The constant cycles of boom and bust that have plagued our republic's economy.  As a white boomer, I certainly remember better days. But they are gone.  Essentially, that civilization, even if you reduced our population back to 1960's levels and banned computers, was unsustainable.  It depended on fossil fuel and that is a problem that won't go away.  Even the French towns described in the article depended on fossil fuels, though not as much.  So, we are NOT going back.  If we do, thanks to collapse of the environment, it'll be WAY back.

BTW, I noticed that the Commonweal website now has a monthly limit of 5 free articles.  However, when I click to sign in, there's no place to sign in.  Is there a glitch in the website or am I stupidly missing something?

15 comments:

  1. By "managed to enjoy", I was referring to the difficulty in getting to read the whole article. I still did not reach the limit on my laptop but my phone access is finished.

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  2. actually, it looks like I'm signed in, but I'm still blocked. I think some debugging is in order.

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  3. I am a subscriber to both America and Commonweal. The changes in both websites have made access for me easier.

    However the design of the websites has made surfing less easy. So I go to the sites less often and stay there for shorter periods of time. For example I completely missed this article.

    As for articles behind paywall limits, they simply discourage me from using those websites, e.g. I mostly read the NYTimes because someone has linked to their site. I don't even have it marked in my browser. I have enough computers that I could probably get around their monthly limits, but I still don't book mark them.

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    1. I always read Commonweal on paper, so I never went to the Web page to read the articles that appeared or were about to appear there. The site impresses me now as a mess in which all things large and small are treated equally and illustrated by a photo of either Trump or Pope Francis. You have to open and start reading to know what you have, and even then you can't be sure. So I rarely go there since the "improvements."

      America lost me --literally -- with its earlier Web site makeover. I lost access, and they never answered my emails nor two snail mails. Then I remembered that in the last days of Colliers they "fired" a bunch of readers to improve the demographic, so I decided I no longer was a desirable demo for the editors of America. Sic transit Tom.

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  4. I read the Commonweal article. It was good. Of course, nostalgia is always selective. Marine le Pen, if she were elected, could not bring back the cute little stores. Any more than Trump could bring back the Norman Rockwell-esque family owned grocery stores like the one my in-laws used to run. One likes to remember the good parts. But a bit of honest reflection brings back the not-so-good. The river that passed under the bridge will never be the same as the one passing under now, for better or worse.

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  5. Agree, Katherine. Trump can't bring back the old days of manufacturing jobs either, as most were lost to technology rather than to outsourcing overseas. If he had the least bit of imagination, he would come up with a real-world re-training program, along with incentives for people to be willing to move to areas with job growth, if necessary. He could promote new technologies and industries in the areas of the rust-belt that will not see a rebirth in the old industries, no matter how many lies he tells them.

    I too find navigating America's site to be a lot harder than it used to be. The last time I looked for an article that had popped up in passing on the home page, but had disappeared by the time I went back to read it, the "search" function didn't even find it. I then searched for a few other articles that I remembered, or whose authors I remembered, and could not find them. For one thing, the sort does not use "date" as the primary sort order, so the found articles might be from three years ago, while yesterday's article is buried or not found at all.

    I don't find Commonweal nearly as interesting now that there are no comments permitted online. I often read on an ipad, and the homepage banners on both the America and Commonweal websites take up so much of the screen that I often don't even bother to scroll down to find what else might be there.

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  6. I hardly ever visit the Commonweal site anymore since there's no way to interact now. I still visit America but it has become very conservative and pro-life. There are other places o visit for the Catholic news, like NCR or US Catholic or The Tablet. But I find myself just reading the news at Google now instead ... NYT, LA Times, CNN, Daily Beast, New Yorker, the Atlantic.

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  7. I'm having trouble accessing the Commonweal articles, now, too. I'm a subscriber, and I'm signed in. I followed the link in my e-mail notification of new content. But it said I had maxed out my five articles for the month.

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  8. They've even cut me off--a columnist!!!

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  9. Sounds like the new Commonweal site didn't spend enough time in beta testing mode before going live.

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  10. Everyone seems to be having some nostalgia for the good old days of America and Commonweal.

    The problem (magazines or nations) is not nostalgia, it is that we are not making much progress; lots of change, but not much progess.

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  11. lots of change, but not much progess

    I don't know if that replaces "e pluribus unum" or "In God we trust," but it has to replace at least one of them.

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  12. Thanks, Tom & Jack. I needed the laugh. And the beer helped too.

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  13. Regarding retraining, I remember a comversation I had with a U. of R. professor, one time president of the Optical Society of America, back when guys in their 50s were losing manufacturing jobs not to machines but cheap labor. We were both 50 at the time. He said he'd sure hate to have to be retrained at this point in his life.

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    1. Your prof had a good point. We talk glibly of retraining older blue collar workers for tech or EMT jobs. But let's imagine another scenario.

      Let's say that middle-aged profs are losing their jobs, so we're going to retrain them all as cooks, insurance billers, or massage therapists. Sure, many of them could learn these skills. But does it make sense? No. We'd say that doesn't use their talents wisely, and that they could not adjust to the new organizational culture.

      So why do we expect older blue collar workers to embrace the retooling idea enthusiastically? Probably because we don't understand their skills and talents.

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