detachment, or abdication of responsibility?

I don't think you remember the new math.  It came out after you had left academia, caused a bit of a stir, and then faded away.  What it was about was sets, which is what the big time mathematicians were interested in at the time.  I think the idea was to get kids in tune with the glory of math rather than tedious and pedestrian arithmetic, but the parents couldn't understand their kids' homework, and rithmetic was the third hour wasn't it?

Anyway the new math was about sets, and I guess that's kind of like societies.  One society is the set of all the people in the world, another society is the set of nobody, another would be the set of all white people, and another would be the set of all people whose social security numbers end in 7.  That last wouldn't be much of a society in the sense that the people wouldn't have much in common.  The set of white people would have a lot in common compared to the set of all black people.

Thinking back, and I am too lazy to go through the posts to find it, when I spoke of my society as being all the people in the world, I meant something like I feel for all the people of the world.  I didn't mean that that was Society, I meant it was the particular society (set of people) I was talking about at the time.

I think we can agree that the white society was running almost everything when we were growing up.  And one of the things that the white society was trying to do was keep it that way, trying to keep the blacks from 'taking over,' by denying them good housing and jobs.  Not that we, Beagles and Uncle Ken, were running things.  Within that society (set) of all white people only a subset were the ones actually running things.  Were we better off because we could live in Gage Park, and that we did not have to compete with blacks for jobs?  Probably.  These benefits were provided to us by the white guys who were running things because we were also white guys.  Some of us white guys, the liberals, felt guilty about that.

I don't think I care for this concept of detachment.  If you are having beers with a bunch of your friends and for some reason they start beating up some guy, can you just detach yourself from them instead of trying to stop them?  Whenever you are in a group, set, society, and they make a wrong turn, isn't it your responsibility to try to fight that turn rather than turning away? 

I guess it depends.  I am thinking of church dissidents.  You can fight to change the church, or you can start your own church.  I guess what you do depends on the situation.  You probably fight to change it at first, and then if that doesn't work you start your own church. 

Now that I think about it.  In That Book, did you think those guys marching in Marquette Park had a legitimate grievance that should have been settled or do you think they were just making a spectacle of themselves and trying to take over?

The racist jokes that I remember were pretty mean, they were based on the idea that blacks were stupid and inferior.  I did like the Polack jokes however, which were mostly about how stupid Polacks were.  The difference was that most people didn't believe that Polacks were really stupid, but they did believe that blacks were.

The interest in your accounts is not the interest that will be effected by the fake shut down.  The interest that will be increased is the interest foreigners charge us when we borrow money from them.  Your overall gains from stocks will be decreased, they would be higher if we were paying foreigners a lower interest rate.  Nobody has been coming after your guns in eight years.  They will, of course, keep raising the taxes on your cigs, but they will never take them away because then they would lose those taxes.

Maybe, if you really believed in something, it might make sense to hold the budget hostage if there was a chance you might get your way.  But if there is no chance, and Cruz and his ilk know there is no chance, then you are just fucking with the economy for no good reason.  And voters can see this, so everytime they do this Republicans take a hit, so I'm kind of on your side on this one Beagles, I love to see the Republicans take a hit.

How is the Donald looking to you these days?