Social class, manosphere maps, Reformed doesn't necessarily mean Calvinist, and more

• Bob Wallace on Class and class. One of my favorite books. The American dream died in 1973; the Sixties were among its killers: ...this is a class I'm not sure exists anymore. They're the working class/blue collar class who worked themselves up to middle class. Those were my parents, who dropped out of high school. My father was a general contractor and my mother worked nights at the local ER. I never lacked anything. The reason I don't think this class exists anymore is because the economy is so bad, has been for a long time, and will be for a long time. See my comment under his post. He's a smart manosphere critic who changed my thinking by introducing me to Rob Fedders' better social-hierarchy chart. (Real alphas, not bullies or "player" parasites.) Roissy's for example is still useful, but you can think of the manosphere maps Wallace criticizes as alchemy is to chemistry, or like chiropractic: manipulating your back helps your back even though the reason chiropractors do it is hooey. ("Mixers" in chiropractic are OK: basically physical therapists who don't buy the hooey.) "Bad game's better than no game"; an inaccurate map's better than none. The British cartoon infographic is from here.
• Ex-Army: Man as fallen angel vs. man as rising beast. This is way too simple, of course, because for one thing I don't fit neatly into it anywhere. But it's a good jumping-off point for discussion. The terms seem metaphorical. Of course we're not angels; they're pure spirits. We're unique in creation for having spirits like God and the angels but also bodies like animals. Also, nobody has proved that one species has evolved into another.
• Anglicanism: I stand corrected. I misremembered Bill Tighe telling me that continental Protestants considered Anglicans eccentric Calvinists who happen to have kept bishops. Actually he said they're eccentric Reformed with bishops. Easy to confuse the two as Calvin's continental denominations, such as the Dutch, call themselves "Reformed." Here he explains how and why that came to be. The only correction which I might be tempted to make to your blog posting is to deplore the promiscuous (and inaccurate) use of the term "Calvinist." (It reaches its reductio ad absurdum in one of your correspondents' statement that the Episcopalian 1928 BCP is "thoroughly Genevan:" there is nothing "Genevan" whatsoever about that BCP, or really any other one, in form or even content [except insofar as it reflects a basic "mere Protestantism" shared among all Protestants, or, in this case, all non-Lutheran Protestants].) Calvin, as you know, attempted to find a via media position between the Lutherans and the Swiss Reformed of Zurich and elsewhere, following in this his mentor, Martin Bucer of Strasbourg. But whereas Bucer "crossed his fingers" and came to an agreement (an agreement with "loopholes") with the Lutherans in 1536 (the eventual result of which was that the "Bucerian" churches of SW Germany, forced by the Emperor in 1548 to choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism, chose the latter, while Bucer himself fled to England, where he died in 1551), Calvin came to an agreement with Bullinger/Zurich in 1548, in which Calvin did most, if not all, of the conceding on issues of disagreement (such as the Eucharist) — and so Geneva formally became part of the "Reformed" world and Calvin had to abandon his attempt to mediate between the Lutherans and the Reformed. Calvin had almost no influence on the English scene before the 1560s: as the enclosed article shows, it was Zurich that was the beau ideal of those who ran the Elizabethan Church of England for decades after 1559. Calvin's influence grew (especially at Oxford and Cambridge, and so among theologically educated clergy) throughout Elizabeth's reign, and beyond, but it never became dominant (and what the English took from Calvin was what he taught on predestination and soteriology generally — mostly they neglected his sacramental teachings, on which English Calvinists tended to be more Zurich than Geneva, and also followed the Zurich "erastian" pattern of subordination of Church to State). Scotland, of course, was different: their Reformation was, among its devotees and leaders, full-bloodedly "Calvinist" in the strict sense of the term.
• An old idea that always flops in America. I've been hearing about getting rid of the $1 bill for 40 years. We already have coins. People don't use them. The British and Canadians use pound or dollar coins; I wonder why Americans don't. I like the big Ike dollars, even if they're too big to be practical, not the little Susan B. Anthony ones that look like quarters. The Sacagawea one was pretty because it was fake gold. The British make using pound coins easy by using relatively small but thick coins, which are a distinctive color much like the Sacagawea dollar. But all are glorified subway tokens. Bring back real money: gold and silver.