Jul 30 2022
An Interesting Explanation of Cultural Changes
Jul 29 2022
Aspects Of Aging
One of the inevitabilities of life is life itself: if you don’t die, you’ll get older. Of course some persons do, ah, elude that development, though whether their course is the better one I must leave to individual judgement. I’m on one side, Deborah Harry’s on the other. Choose according to your tastes.
Western culture today is powerfully youth-oriented. Our media promote youth and its concomitants relentlessly. Many of us inspect ourselves daily for signs that we’re getting old. And many have recourse to all manner of treatments, from cosmetics to surgery, to main a youthful appearance. Some of them do a fair job, though seldom one that will last very long.
However, for the moment at least there is one sign of advancing age that no one knows how to erase…at least, while leaving the rest of one’s body and mind intact and functional. That’s the accumulation of a past, including one’s memories.
I don’t have the book to hand, but in one of her collections of short stories, the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, better known to her readership by her nom de plume of “James Tiptree, Jr,” mused over the dark ocean of memory and how it can affect the conduct of the aged. She noted that an older person is often slow to respond to a question, not because he’s deaf or senile, but because the stimulus can trigger a cascade of memories so great as to be temporarily overwhelming.
But of course, some memories are more pleasant than others.
One obligation of character that’s taxed me to the limit, and occasionally beyond, is that of forgiving. Christians are supposed to love their enemies, forgive them their transgressions, and pray for their well-being both in this world and in the next. (Cf. The Lord’s Prayer.) But forgiving can be a monumental challenge. The memory of a hurt can linger for decades, especially if it touches upon some aspect of oneself about which one is unduly sensitive.
At seventy years of age, my memory remains excellent, near to perfect for personal experiences. That’s a mixed blessing, to be sure. While I can quote you accurately from books I haven’t touched in fifty years, my memory of injuries and slights is just as deep. I’m still struggling to forgive some of them. I’ve often thought I’d be better off if I’d managed to forget them all.
Forgetting is a discipline few study and fewer master. “They teach us to remember; why do they not teach us to forget? There is not a man living who has not, some time in his life, admitted that memory was as much of a curse as a blessing.” (Francis Durivage) I haven’t learned how to do it, which has made a number of memories seem the curse of which Durivage speaks.
Yet it is not so. A memory of pain or insult inflicted by another person is a challenge to him who remembers: to understand, and to forgive. Many of us never surmount that obstacle to growth. But to wish it forgotten is still worse.
Some memories, of course, are pleasant ones. Indeed, some of those grow even rosier as one ages away from them. That’s why many elderly folks tend to “live in the past,” recalling, recounting, and re-enjoying those distant events perhaps more than their reality would have merited. It’s an especially strong temptation for those whose present is painful, solitary, or otherwise unenviable.
I was indulging in a bit of deliberate recollection just a little while ago: straining to remember all the cars I’ve owned. It was an impressive panoply of autodom. I greatly enjoyed owning and driving each of those vehicles when I owned it. In some cases, the acquaintance ended too soon: for instance, one car, a Saab 900S, was stolen from me and only recovered after it had been stripped to its chassis. But on the whole those are memories of happy times that I was pleased to revisit.
It was also an exercise in service to a contemporary development. One of the techniques some financial institutions use today, when a customer triggers a large transaction over the phone or the Internet, is to ask him whether he’s “ever been associated with any of the following cars.” It’s been inflicted upon me twice in recent years. On both occasions the list of vehicles included cars that I only owned in the formal sense: i.e., the owner de facto was one of my stepdaughters. I did remember those cars and those occasions. However, there was one, a car whose financing I only co-signed, that I didn’t remember…and that was enough to cause my bank to hold up a transaction involving many thousands of dollars.
Watch out for this, Gentle Reader.
Finally, a few words about an event that probably doesn’t happen to many. Indeed, it might be something only someone who writes voluminously – some would say excessively – would or could suffer. It involves a temporary lapse of memory I experienced a while ago.
I was conversing with a friend over the phone when he expressed a sentiment many would call controversial, but with which I agreed strongly. He phrased it with striking elegance. He spoke in a way that suggested that the statement ought to be particularly relevant to me. When I failed to respond at once, he said worriedly “Fran? Are you still there?”
“Uh, yes,” I replied. “I was just distracted.” My friend’s statement teased me long after we’d rung off. He seemed to think it would be a stimulus to memory…but as much as I agreed with the opinion it expressed and admired the elegance of its expression, I could not remember anything relevant to it. After tormenting myself with it for quite a long time, I resolved to think about it no further and turned to other things, albeit somewhat grimly.
It took several weeks before the statement resurfaced. I happened upon it entirely by chance, through a Google search for something else.
It was from one of my own essays.
Beware, Gentle Reader. The Internet’s memory is better than yours. Better than mine, at least. But do have a nice day.
Jul 29 2022
The enemies of normality.
Love him or hate him, during Trump’s presidency, the economy was strong, markets were up, inflation was under control, gas prices were low, illegal border crossings were down, crime was lower, trade deals were renegotiated, ISIS was defeated, NATO allies were stepping up, and China was stepping back (a little). Deny all that if you want to. The point here is that something like 100 million Americans believe it, strongly, and are bewildered and angered by elite hatred for the man they think delivered it.
Nor was Trump’s record all that radical—much less so than that of Joe Biden, who is using school-lunch funding to push gender ideology on poor kids, to cite but one example. Trump’s core agenda—border protection, trade balance, foreign restraint—was quite moderate, both intrinsically and in comparison to past Republican and Democratic precedent. And that’s before we even get to the fact that Trump neglected much of his own agenda in favor of the old Chamber of Commerce, fusionist, Reaganite, Conservatism, Inc., agenda. Corporate tax cuts, deregulation, and bombing Syria: These are all things Trump’s base doesn’t want, but the oligarchs desperately do, which Trump gave them. And still they try to destroy him.[1]
Think about that. Trump was obviously a man who asked what are the best interests of the nation and its people. ALL its people. The nation was demonstrably better off under his leadership and the MAGA faction damn well knew that and knew why. At last the country was being led by someone who wasn’t a crackhead ideologue who hated the people and everything about their history, culture, and laws. Yet, the vast political class that had been so inconvenienced by the operation of the American electoral system in 2016 went ballistic over the fact that their lunatic, malicious agenda of mass transformation had been rejected.
As someone who writes Contemplations on the Tree of Woe observes:
. . . Our contemporary consensus is not just wrong here and there, not just mildly out of step on reality. It is wrong on the fundamentals. The very building blocks of our entire society are misshapen and fractured, and they do not fit together. They are, in fact, so broken that they are leading us to ruin.[2]
Trump’s action were so wildly out of kilter with the wishes of the political class — the holders of those misshapen and fractured opinions — that the very highest officials engaged in open sedition with their concocted cries of Russian influence with Trump or/and interference in U.S. elections (Washington Post, New Yorker/James Clapper, Foreign Affairs, BBC/James Comey, Brookings Institute, and Daily Beast). With impunity, let it be said. A massive where-there’s-smoke exercise in distortion ensued.
Trump’s ballpark normalcy was a threat to the proponents of the abnormal. Think about the implications of that. The celebration of that abnormality today is the summum bonum of the political class with their zealous embrace of what is perverted and stupid.
Notes
[1] “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” By Michael Anton, Compact, 7/28/22.
[2] “Why Has Our World Gone so Crazy?” By Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, 7/29/22.
Jul 28 2022
Voting Integrity
UPDATE: I found this essay on The Left’s plan to keep Trump out of office. It has multiple scenarios for that effort, depending on the situation on the ground (Funny how these military phrases seem to keep cropping up when discussing Trump, isn’t it? And, by that, I DON’T mean that Trump or his allies are planning an “insurrection” – The Left is the one that is set on militarizing their cause).
It has a lot of provisions – mandatory use of ID, keeping Zuckerbucks from skewing the registrations, and ending practices such as ballot harvesting (which makes it legal for activists to take MANY ballots to the outside boxes, stuffing them with votes), same-day registration (if the Left thinks they might be losing, they just send activists to the polls to “sign up” – generally with no ID needed), and automatically mailed ballots, which flood the system with authentically printed ballots, which can be filled out by someone claiming another’s name.
Now, most of those provisions would be dandy ideas to be enacted. But, they need to be enacted at the STATE level, not the national level. States need to take charge of cleaning up their own systems, and, if necessary, bring in STATE observers to monitor the process that a relatively few voting areas – mostly urban centers – are deliberately screwing up.
It’s the practice called Federalism, which really doesn’t mean what it sounds like. Federalism is the system that divides authority for governance between states and the federal government. In the beginning, when the Constitution was ratified, the balance of power was solidly in favor of the rights of state governments to handle their own affairs. Only a few powers were explicitly allocated to the federal government. That was the intent of the Framers, and was the status quo for many years.
The purpose of establishing some areas of undisputed authority for the federal government was to allow a central government to have the powers it needed to wage war, interact with foreign powers, and raise sufficient money to allow it to function independent of the states. Much of that ability to raise money came from tariffs imposed on goods imported into the United States (a practice that had the support of American industry). Taxes, at that time, were resented, and nearly overthrew the early government (see the Whiskey Rebellion).
And, it did work – for a time – reasonably well. The various Representatives and Senators had their say, the Executive Branch had their say on matters (damn few) that they controlled, and, until Marbury vs Madison, the Judiciary had little to do.
But, then came the Abolition Movement, one led initially by churches and civic organizations. When women prominent in their state level organizations were refused participation at a national conference, a few of them formed the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Eventually, women were able to participate in abolition activities without restriction.
In America, even without suffrage, women were active in local organizations. Women married to men of means were able to use their household help to free them for voluntary work in organizations. Single women were generally supported by relatives, and freed of the need to earn their living. Many were active in their church, in volunteer activities. Almost all of those women were, by the standards of their time, well educated, generally in sectarian schools and colleges. Which means that they graduated with an education that didn’t prepare them for any useful type of work, and some experience in campus leadership. Many of them joined the aboltion movement, or other organizations.
But, advocates for abolition of slavery became frustrated by the failure of their efforts. They identified the retained powers of the states (10th Amendment) as a major cause of their inability to persuade either the public in general, or the legislators in the Congress, to strike down the practice.
In short, they didn’t have the votes.
It wasn’t until the Civil War, when the federal government was no longer held in check by proponents of the Retained Rights of the States, that the center of power began to shift to the national government.
Taking that power was, during the war, a military necessity. If the North was going to win, they had to pretty much jettison the Constitution. And, by assuming federal powers he had no right to take, Lincoln changed the USA. After that point, the federal government encroached on state’s powers in ever-increasing power grabs.
And, the courts mostly let it happen.
After Reconstruction ended, the balance of power between those that favored the power of the national government to act unilaterally, and those that insisted that the states’ powers were supreme, started shifting. The so-called state’s rights proponents lose ground, little by little. In many of the fights, the state’s rights side couldn’t win, they could only delay (which is why the filibuster was so often used to slow down the process).
The pro-federal side used various means to win – they imported immigrants, and enabled them to vote as soon as they docked. They pushed for female suffrage. They used almost-bribery, lavishly expending money on building railroads and establishing the state college system (the Morrill Act took federally controlled land – often from Indian tribes – and offered it to state and local government for educational purposes).
At every crisis point, those fighting to increase federal power used that situation to ram permanent changes through that increased their control, installed their people, and funnelled money to their side.
It wasn’t solely the work of the GOP – the Dems got their greedy little hands on the largess when they held office. At every crisis point, those favoring stronger national government pushed the boundaries – heck, they trampled them to the ground in their rush for power (and money – there was a LOT of money spent that just HAPPENED to end up in the hands of those who were not the intended recipients).
The Left used the Civil Rights Acts to increase their power (it certainly wasn’t their deep love of non-White people). It was because it was a lot easier to buy a few people at the national level, than to do the same at the state level. It allowed bureaucrats to make decisions, overturn state laws, and keep the Left in power for all time. The first attempt to impose that agenda, in Reconstruction times, was only partly successful. Until the shift to an urban dominated nation, the states could not be pushed around. That Civil Rights Act is STILL being used to gain control of enough of the states, through their urban populations, for the Left to run things.
So, here we are. The federal government – the more or less permanent part that is sometimes called The Deep State – is in charge of just about every facet of your lives. And, a lot of that ability to keep power is based on federal control of the election process.
So, while I’m not completely against using the ACE Act to shore up elections, the fight needs to be at the state level. It’s there that those elected can be influenced most directly. They are largely part-time legislators, and, therefore, less easily corrupted. In elections, just a relatively few votes can change the composition of the government.
Jul 28 2022
What Cannot Be Reported As Fact
…can sometimes be depicted to good effect in fiction:
Then there was the matter of process. How the election was run. How it was administered. The frenzied push to ramp up absentee and mail-in ballots and ramp down verification, especially in battleground states. How many states changed election laws? Hint: a lot. How many swing states? Hint: also a lot.
For the Ruling Class, COVID was a handy cover. Safety first, they said smugly, then went to town on unsupervised drop boxes. Objections were met with hostility. If COVID wore thin, the Race Card was always available. What’s the matter, don’t you want Blacks to vote?
They were covering their bases this time, folks. They didn’t want another four lost years. Should’ve been a cakewalk for the Dems, right? Haha, nope. They can’t even do fraud properly. Just like 2016, their schemes weren’t enough. Their candidate was so terrible and Trump was such a mega-juggernaut, they were gonna lose anyway. They realized at the eleventh hour and then things got messy.
They commenced win-at-all-costs mode, optics be damned. They closed polling stations and kicked out observers. Third-world stuff. Throughout the night, they chipped away at the numbers. They found uncounted mail-in ballots by the boxload. Most in Biden’s favor – and when I say most, I mean all.
By early morning, the landscape had shifted. Seismically. A 9.5 on the Richter Scale. Trump’s lead was gone. I’m still shocked at their gall. They basically said, fuck you America, we’re doing this. What were the odds of such a turnaround? Someone actually calculated them. Zero.
They didn’t call the election ’til November 8th. Fraud takes time, don’t ya know. Biden ended up with more votes than any candidate in history. What madness. They didn’t even have the decency to make their fraud believable.
Then the system closed in on itself. Forget irregularities, inexplicable anomalies, the plethora of smoking guns. Every agency and department colluded to shut down investigation (or even discussion) of fraud. Nothing to see here, folks. Biden won. Any talk to the contrary was anti-American. The appearance of impropriety? Not at all, they said with a straight face. The media piled on: “No evidence of voter fraud,” they declared. Lather, rinse, repeat. And thus, a bumbling imbecile who couldn’t draw a dozen supporters in his hometown beat an incumbent that filled stadiums faster than any rockstar in history.
And that is what was done and how, indeed.
The novel I cited above isn’t a deathless classic for the ages. Professors decades hence are unlikely to present it to their students as a triumph of English-language literature. It’s more important than that. It’s a battle cry, just as its title says.
There is a crying need for fiction writers who love freedom to get producing. We don’t have enough such fiction. With the media doing their damnedest to suppress any reportage that contradicts the Left’s narratives, the route of storytelling is the next best thing. The electronic publishing revolution even means that you can’t be silenced. Yes, you might be ignored…but the probability that you’ll be read and heeded is better today than ever before in history.
Get to work, storyteller-patriots. America wants you.
Jul 27 2022
Individuality And Sex
Is this or is this not a strange combination?
Recently, Carl Trueman, a professor of Biblical and Religious Studies at Grove City College, released Strange New World, a study of contemporary notions of identity, with emphasis on the Sexual Revolution. The book is a condensation of his earlier book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, which was a volume of the sort reviewers in the Legacy Media often call a “surprise best-seller.” Strange New World is trending in the ”surprise best-seller” direction as well. I’ve just ordered a copy, so I can’t yet comment on the book. However, the subject matter is inherently worthy of pondering.
Why, considering how absolutely uniform the sexual capacities of our bodies have remained these past half-million years, should notions of individuality bear on sex in any way or to any degree? Is there anything sexual – indeed, anything physical — that any one person’s body can do that no one else can do? My expertises don’t include human anatomy or physiology, so perhaps my Gentle Readers should discount my opinion. That having been said, it doesn’t strike me as likely.
Perhaps my conception of individuality is too far off-axis to see the connection. In my view, one has individuated when one accepts full responsibility for himself, his choices, and whatever might proceed from them. Yet the most radical sexual “innovators” – we’ll get back to that notion – are often prominent in the mobs screaming for other people, including governments, to save them from the consequences of their actions. That doesn’t scream individuality to me.
Yet there’s no separating the sexual radicals from the contemporary phenomenon of identity politics. How did this come to be? Why have so many thousands of people, mostly assumed competent to cross the street without a minder, chosen to define themselves according to their sexual proclivities – and to allow that self-definition to circumscribe the rest of their existences, including their political choices?
I’ve known a few from every category…in some cases, without being aware that I did. The majority of those acquaintances were disturbing. Some were extremely so. Yet my belated discovery of their sexual choices has usually explained what it was about them that had twisted them.
Self-definition is a powerful thing. Most of us do it consciously to some extent. Consider the prevalent practice of telling a new acquaintance that “I’m a [insert occupation here].” As our occupations do consume a great part of our adult lives, the tendency to self-define in that manner is fairly easy to understand. What we seldom pause to contemplate is the persistence of that self-definition.
For example: For the past seven years I’ve been a writer of fiction, non-fiction, and opinion: nothing else. I’ve said so in my most recent encounters with new acquaintances. More than half the time my interlocutor will ask “Do you actually make your living that way?” I usually chuckle and demur…which immediately evokes the follow-up question “So what did you do before this?”
(It says something elusive about our cultural matrix that no one has yet accepted that I once destabilized the governments of Third World countries on contract. Clearly, the general level of credulity is not what it could be.)
I’m sure many other retired persons, happy and adequately occupied by their retirement vocations, could tell a similar story. When so many people self-define according to how they earn their daily bread, the tendency to assess others in the same fashion must be strong. We do tend to map our own mental models onto others. But my main point is the power of self-definition, not merely in how we see ourselves, but in how others are likely to see us.
What follows are purely my opinions. Don’t be afraid to differ with them. However, they seem a good fit to the trends. Why else would I be slathering you with them?
Given the immense power of self-definition, it strikes me as extraordinarily limiting, even belittling, to define oneself according to one’s sexual preferences. Yet there are substantial numbers of persons – the majority of whom are presumed sane and competent – who do exactly that. It makes no more sense to me than defining oneself according to one’s dietary preferences…though there are numerous persons who do that, too. (Q: How can you tell if your new acquaintance is a vegan? A: Don’t worry; he’ll tell you.) As icing on the cake, it’s as irrelevant to one’s value to others.
The only worthwhile measure of a man is how he deals with events. Is he calm and confident? Is he anxious, or nervous? How much forethought does he give to his decisions? Does he respond to the unexpected smoothly and without undue disturbance, or does he “run in circles, scream and shout?” Are his responses usually adequate? In the aftermath, is he given to critiquing and learning from his own behavior? Does he routinely seek help…or demand it? If he subscribes to a standard of any sort, what kind of event, if any, would make him depart from it?
Time was, among the highest compliments one man could pay another was to call him “a good man in a storm.” It was a favorite of my Navy veteran father’s. I maintain that one’s individuality, however conceived, ultimately matters less than how one “weathers the storms.” He who self-defines according to how he employs his genitals is unlikely to do well in a storm. His obsession will expose him to storms the rest of us won’t face and will leave him unready for them. That having been said, he might be the man to ask about which nearby clinics give out free Preparation H or penicillin.
Jul 27 2022
A Quick Thought
I’ve written many times about political dynamics and the swelling of blatant demagoguery in response to the incentives built into our system of government. Recent developments, especially the increasing degree of cooperation between Democrats and Republicans at destroying our rights and seizing our property, persuade me that the time has come to declare the politician an invasive, destructive human subspecies: an evolutionary development that threatens the rest of Mankind.
This development was foreseen more than a century ago:
The day will come when a multitude of people will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of a legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and usury and asking why anyone should be permitted to drink champagne and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be preferred by a workman? When Society has entered on this downward progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the fifth, with this difference, that the Huns and Vandals who ravaged Rome came from without, and that your Huns and Vandals will have been engendered within your country, by your own institutions. [Thomas Babington Macaulay]
What shall we do about these predators? How can we forestall their further multiplication? Well, what do we do with other verminous species that threaten the rest of us, Gentle Reader?
Are there any Liberty’s Torch readers with experience in the development of pesticides?
Jul 26 2022
International Cooperation and Competition
It’s not all – or even mostly – about love and peace and being a beacon to the world.
It’s about which nations WIN.
Now, that’s a hard idea for Modern Women – and their sorta-Male Allies – to wrap their heads around. Faced with a harsh reality – that, generally, nations will try to get the most resources, best defense, and greatest ability to influence world policy in THEIR favor – women’s eyes will spin around like pinballs, and they will be unable to function except to sputter “American Hegemony!” and “Climate Crisis” and “Racist, Homophobic, Transphobic” et al.
Addressing the issue – that, either we make all efforts to see that American interests are protected, our resources not plundered by corporations eager to make a better (cheaper) deal with OTHER countries, and our borders secure – or we die as an independent nation.
There is no “But, the Higher Good!” or “We need to set a Higher Moral Example” or “How can you let the CHILDREN suffer?”.
It’s US, or THEM.
That’s why is was such a surprise to read an essay in The Federalist by a woman to GETS it.
It underlines the idea that we need to begin promoting the idea that, for most women, their contributions to improving the human race is best effectuated by working relatively locally – in their communities, homes, churches, and city, and country level government. That’s the level most women can manage, compatible with their responsibilities in their family, and any paid work that they may be performing. Too many women aspire to national/international fame, rather than handle the tasks that they are well suited for.
Yes, I did end that sentence with a preposition – I’m from Cleveland, and that’s the way we roll – deal with it.
It’s not the scope of work that leads to interviews on morning talk shows. Women following this pathway may be little known outside of their area of influence. But, within that circle, they will be the go-to person, trusted to handle life’s pointy edges, and ease other’s lives.
That’s the kind of life that ends with a full funeral, and tears all around from all those who were lucky enough to know that person. That’s not a bad way to go. It’s not a paragraph in the history books, but it’s a lot of lives influenced by a life of service, strong moral foundation, and the goal to make better lives for those within their sphere of influence.
Many men would find that sort of life a worthy one for themselves.
So, my advice for most of us – start local, focus your efforts close to home.
Leave the cut-throat international and national fights to those who relish the battle.
Jul 26 2022
The Rulers
To learn who rules over you, simply look to those you are not allowed to criticize. [Multiply attributed, most often to Voltaire.]
The above seems sound. Certainly many aristocracies treated the criticism of the rulers — lese majeste — as a serious offense. In some such lands it was treated more harshly than murder. However, if we Twenty-First Century Americans steer our attention by that counsel, we find ourselves trying to look in many directions at once. It’s enough to cause neck strain.
Here are a few of the groups the criticism of whom is treated savagely:
- Negroes,
- Amerinds,
- Homosexuals,
- Transgenders,
- Illegal immigrants,
- Pro-abortion activists,
- Mouthy leftist women,
- Members of the Biden clan.
The backblast for criticizing any of the above categories can be murderous. Persons who are members of more than one of the protected categories get special shielding. (Why else would Elizabeth Warren have pretended to have Amerind ancestry all this time?) He who can claim membership in three or more of them automatically gets immunity from everything. He could rape a nun at high noon in the middle of Times Square and receive a police escort back to his house. (Don’t ask me to cite particular instances. I need to clean and oil the guns and put out fresh claymores before I have to fend off another mob.)
Indeed, even associating a protected group with some disapproved behavior is enough to bring the howlers to your doorstep. Consider homosexuals and pederasty. It’s never been in doubt that the sexual molestation of young boys is a homosexual behavior. Attempting to argue otherwise only makes you look like a fool. So those determined to “protect” homosexuals immediately leap to spittle-flecked invective. “The haters must be silenced!” they shriek in chorus. (It gives them a wee bit of pain to note that among the reasons Catholic clergy have been found guilty of pederasty is the seminaries’ recent “open door” policy toward homosexuals. This might be one of the reasons for the recent attempts to normalize pedophilia, though research continues.)
It doesn’t take a Certified Galactic Intellect to detect the connecting thread: all the enumerated groups are Leftist mascots. Once an organization or institution has been suborned by the Left, it will resolutely refrain from any emission that might be seen as criticism of a Leftist mascot group. And the rulers will protect their mascots. Got to keep the coalition together, don’t y’know. So the Left’s tenderness toward homosexuals over the spread of monkeypox should come as no surprise:
California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) released a statement on Wednesday warning local health officials report they would run out of monkeypox vaccine later in the week.
“Today, the San Francisco Department of Public Health announced that the Department is about to run out of monkeypox vaccine,” Senator Wiener said in a written statement. “Its San Francisco General Hospital monkeypox vaccine clinic will be temporarily suspended after today (Wednesday).”
The senator said the exhaustion of the vaccine supply comes as San Francisco and other communities see increases in monkeypox infections and exposures.
“We need to be very clear where the responsibility lies for this completely avoidable situation: the federal government,” Wiener stated. “Failure to control this outbreak will result in intense — and completely unnecessary — misery for many people, particularly gay and bisexual men.”
At the other end of the country, New York City officials report the monkeypox virus is spreading at a rapid pace, Breitbart News reported. Cases in New York City account for a full 30 percent of all cases in the United States — 170 cases during the first two weeks of July.
Wiener might reap some reproof for daring to mention that “gay and bisexual men” are particularly at risk from this disease that’s been exceedingly rare in the West until now. But perhaps he’ll get away with it this once. Homosexuals are indeed the persons most at risk for monkeypox. The spread of the disease has been closely associated with a practice prevalent among homosexuals: the open-door orgy, in which many men who are nearly all strangers to one another indulge in multi-partner anal sex.
Yes, that’s still going on, particularly on the coasts. Even in the age of AIDS.
You might think that our nation’s “health authorities” would issue some cautionary words about such doings. Well, that hasn’t happened yet, and I’d advise you not to hold your breath while you wait. Hearken to the mighty Ace:
Note that monkeypox is not technically a sexually transmitted disease, but it is transmitted by close skin-to-skin contact, and that can only occur in a handful of human interactions. Sex, of course. Brazilian jiu-jitsu and wrestling. Other kinds of contact sports.
And that’s about it.
And you can only spread it if you’re touching many people in this way. A man and wife can’t spread it to each other; they’d have to have been infected by skin-to-skin contact from an outside party.
That’s why this is mostly being spread by gay men at orgies and raves and through anonymous sex. Sex is a main way to spread it, and you need to be in physical contact with multiple people to both catch it and then retransmit it.
And yet: There are no advisories from the CDC telling gay men to cool it with the orgies and anonymous sex. No stern warnings to… not even go celibate, but just pick one sexual partner for the duration of the pandemic and be monogamous temporarily.
No, that’s too much of an imposition on the gay community.
That underscores the Left’s protectiveness toward this important mascot group. But wait: there’s more! The Usurper Regime is ramping up an effort to use monkeypox as a successor to COVID-19. Keeping people terrified of another ominous disease – one that they probably won’t catch, those monogamous non-assfucking prudes! – would be a perfect way to reinstitute the conditions that allowed the Democrats to steal the 2020 elections. And just in time for the disastrously looming midterms, at that:
But when this spreads out to the general population, they’ll have no problem telling us our kids will have to remain locked in their homes for a year, will they?… the left’s constituent groups are never told not to do the things they like doing. If there’s a forbiddance needed, then all of society is told to lock down.
Indeed. But that having been said, I’d give odds that in the midst of such a lockdown, open-door homosexual orgies would go on as usual. There would be little or no change to the behavior and practices of coastal homosexuals…and the rulers would turn a blind eye.
What follows might strike my Gentle Readers as a complete change of subject. I maintain that it is immensely relevant to the matters already addressed in this screed. Judge for yourself:
What if twenty, or thirty, or fifty cities in America each had some sort of religious procession or pilgrimage yearly? And could draw thousands – or more?
I don’t mean a march. There’s still a place for a March for Life, since the fight to protect the unborn is far from over. And there’s certainly plenty of reason to hold marches for other issues as well. But these are directed to political goals. I’d like to see the Church in America develop public events that have a solely religious or spiritual character. Other effects, I’m convinced, would follow.
They would not be easy to organize. And need not be overly ambitious. At first. It’s hard enough to get people outside for emotional issues like protecting innocent human life. But even if they started small, the eventual results might just surprise us.
The above comes from Robert Royal’s “A (Possibly) Immodest Proposal,” which he published yesterday, for the feast day of Saint James the Apostle. He opened his brief essay by describing the Camino, The Way of Saint James in Spain, a pilgrimage which attracts thousands of participants every year. Does Mr. Royal’s suggestion seem likely to be reified here in America? Approximately one quarter of all Americans are self-described Catholics, so why not?
One reason is that the Left’s mascot groups hate the Catholic Church and everything it stands for. They’d make their opposition public, noisy, and slanderous. Americans have become so averse to confrontation that even were the Left not in control of our political and cultural institutions today, the great majority of us would refrain from anything that might attract a Leftist mascot group’s ire. Given current conditions, violent assaults on an openly organized Catholic pilgrimage would be more likely than not. As with the open-door homosexual orgies, the rulers would probably look away — if they dared to authorize such an event in the first place. I can easily imagine our Legacy Media treating such a pilgrimage as an offense against “tolerance,” violence in itself.
You cannot tell a homosexual that what he’s doing is wrong without expecting a violent backblast. These are people whose sexual proclivity is their whole self-concept. He who tells them that the eternal consequences of their behavior will be terrible, is simply not to be borne. And the rulers will be on their side from first to last.
Recently, Congressman Matt Gaetz earned my admiration for something he said, and for his rebuff to an attempt to make him retract it, or at least publicly regret it:
On Saturday, Gaetz spoke to college students at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit in Tampa, saying women protesting abortion access are less likely to get pregnant because they aren’t attractive.
“Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions?” Gaetz said. “Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”…
Channel 3 then asked Gaetz two follow-up questions:
- Channel 3: Is it safe to say that, based off your comments, you’re suggesting that these women at these abortion rallies are ugly and overweight?
- Gaetz: “Yes”
- Channel 3: What do you say to people who think those comments are offensive?
- Gaetz: “Be offended.”
Gaetz’s kind of lese majeste is exactly what we need. Doing lots more of the same could very well be the key to mobilizing what Kurt Schlichter called “the Normals:” we who believe in freedom, individual responsibility and accountability, and the Christian norms upon which America was founded. To openly criticize, even condemn those who strive to anathematize those things is to tell them that we do not fear you. The rulers’ cringing behavior toward their own mascots suggests that that would get them to fear us — and it’s high time for exactly that.
Jul 25 2022
Unsolvings
The world of “problems” and “solutions” makes for a fascinating exploration of human conceptual space. The tendency to view some unsatisfactory condition as a “problem” to be “solved” is intriguing all by itself. Some such conditions are so persistent and so deeply embedded in the history of Man that it would be more reasonable to call them aspects of our nature. That, of course, doesn’t impede the do-gooders. Neither does it deter the social engineers determined to demonstrate that no “problem” can defeat their unsurpassed ingenuity.
Constitutional lawyer Alan Dershowitz once cited a bit of Hebraic folk wisdom that has relevance here: “If your idea is so good, then the old rabbis, who were much smarter than you, must have thought of it first. But if the old rabbis, who were so much smarter than you, didn’t think of it first, then it can’t be such a good idea.” (Yes, when he cited it he was expounding on the power of precedent in legal contests, but what of that?) Never mind the specious logic; it’s the sort of rejoinder innovators particularly hate to confront.
To return to the main point, not only do we separate some conditions out and call them “problems;” we also partition the space of “problems” into “solved” and “unsolved.” The partition allows for a gray zone: “problems” we have “kinda-sorta solved.” Those are cases where the problem is considered ameliorated but not completely dealt with. Maybe we’ve made some advances, but we intuit that we could do better. Social engineers meet such an observation by grinning, rolling up their conceptual sleeves, and proclaiming “And by God we will!”
That’s usually when the trouble starts.
This morning, in one of his typically fine essays at American Greatness, Anthony Esolen quotes from an old Taylor Caldwell novel:
The scene is from Taylor Caldwell’s 1980 novel Answer as a Man, about the suffering we bring on ourselves and our fellows. It is 1912, and a young Irishman, the manager of a new hotel in northeastern Pennsylvania, recalls a conversation with his grandfather long before. “When a politician,” said the grandfather, ever angry with God but even angrier with selfish, foolish, ungrateful, cruel, and treacherous man, “anxious for office, talks of ‘reforms,’ it’s time for citizens to inspect their guns. Something dirty is afoot, and dangerous.”
When the grandson asks whether there’s any politician to trust, the old man says no, there isn’t, though he adds that he’d be less suspicious of someone “who talked of the ‘ancient verities,’ such as patriotism, honor, sobriety, hard work, respect for authority, constituted law, decency, manhood—if there’s any of that left in this country.”
What about tender care for the less fortunate? The old man won’t have any of that, either. “Beware of the rich man who cries for the poor! He is a cannibal. Like the tearful walrus who ate all the trusting oysters in that book Alice in Wonderland.”
Taylor Caldwell was both a fine writer and clearsighted about the nature of politicians and their rhetoric. Another fine and clearsighted writer, Isabel Paterson, mirrored the sentiments expressed above, with an extra helping of insight into the “philanthropist” mindset:
If the primary objective of the philanthropist, his justification for living, is to help others, his ultimate good requires that others shall be in want. His happiness is the obverse of their misery. If he wishes to help “humanity,” the whole of humanity must be in need. The humanitarian wishes to be a prime mover in the lives of others. He cannot admit either the divine or the natural order, by which men have the power to help themselves. The humanitarian puts himself in the place of God. [From The God of the Machine]
Casts a rather peculiar light on the social engineers of our species, doesn’t it? But is it arguable, or have we enough experience with their efforts to regard the matter as settled?
We’d like for “problems” to move smoothly from “unsolved” to “solved.” Sometimes they do, albeit after spending a term in the “kinda-sorta solved” part of the Venn diagram. Consider the heating of a residential building. Time was, we knew of only one way to do it: a fire burning in an open hearth. That did constitute a valid approach, though it did involve a significant amount of labor on the part of the homeowner. Still, for a long while we could do no better. Then came the enclosed boiler, and a succession of fuels from barely better than wood all the way to natural gas and heat pumps. These more recent approaches have reduced the homeowner’s labor to near zero and have elevated his comfort considerably.
Might there be improvements yet to be made? It’s possible. If someone were to figure out how to use the radiation from spent nuclear fuels to heat a house, we’d really have something. But at this time, the natural-gas boiler / heat-pump combination is considered the best solution available. Nor does any rational man expect that going back to wood and coal would be preferable, barring the surprise unavailability of natural gas.
But some problems do come “unsolved,” at least to the extent of returning to the “kinda-sorta” category. In nearly every case, the reason is government: interference by officious types determined to have their way with us, if only to demonstrate how much cleverer and more important they are than us poor peons.
One of the “problems” with which the do-gooders have bludgeoned us for centuries is that of the “poor.” (Yes, yes, today they prattle about “income inequality,” but very few decent persons take them seriously. Decent persons, I said. That excludes just about everyone who draws a government salary.) He whose continued existence is endangered by current circumstances, whether or not they’re at all within his control, is regarded as a “problem” that can only be “solved” by government action. Never mind that under the official definition of poverty, millions of people who are already adequately fed, clothed, sheltered, schooled, and otherwise cushioned against the slings and arrows of temporal existence are deemed “poor” and therefore in need of “assistance.” Once a “problem” has been politicized, Charles Murray’s Three Laws kick in with irresistible force:
- The Law of Imperfect Selection: Any objective rule that defines eligibility for a social transfer program will irrationally exclude some persons. [And will irrationally include some others – FWP]
- The Law of Unintended Rewards: Any social transfer program increases the net value of being in the condition that prompted the transfer.
- The Law of Net Harm: The less likely it is that unwanted behavior will change voluntarily, the more likely it is that a program to induce the change will cause net harm.
Under political supervision, the “problem” of poverty has grown steadily worse. That is: More persons, both absolutely and as a percentage of the population, have been deemed “poor,” more bureaucracy has been added, and more money has been expended. It’s a perfect example of the perverse incentives that apply not merely to social transfer programs but to all government-arrogated “problems.” The political dynamics are irresistible.
Yet the problem was once regarded as solved:
In 1841, seven years after the enactment of the new Poor Law, when a whole series of amendments was being proposed to it by various members of Parliament, Nassau Senior, in an anonymous pamphlet signed merely “A Guardian,” came to the defense of the original act, and explained its rationale perhaps in some ways better than did the original report.
“In the first place,” he wrote, “it was necessary to get rid of the allowance system—the system under which relief and wages were blended into one sum, the laborer was left without motive to industry, frugality, or good conduct, and the employer was forced, by the competition of those around him, to reduce the wages which came exclusively from his own pocket, and increase the allowance to which his neighbors contributed.
“Supposing this deep and widely extended evil to be extirpated, and the poorer classes to be divided into two marked portions—independent laborers supported by wages and paupers supported by relief—there appeared to be only three modes by which the situation of the pauper could be rendered the less attractive.
“First, by giving to the pauper an inferior supply of the necessaries of life, by giving him worse food, worse clothing, and worse lodging than he could have obtained from the average wages of his labor. . . .
“A second mode is to require from the applicant for relief, toil more severe or more irksome than that endured by the independent laborer. . . .
“The third mode is, to a certain degree, a combination of the two others, avoiding their defects. It is to require the man who demands to be supported by the industry and frugality of others to enter an abode provided for him by the public, where all the necessaries of life are amply provided, but excitement and mere amusement are excluded—an abode where he is better lodged, better clothed, and more healthily fed than he would be in his own cottage, but is deprived of beer, tobacco, and spirits—is forced to submit to habits of order and cleanliness—is separated from his usual associates and his usual pastimes, and is subject to labor, monotonous and uninteresting. This is the workhouse system.”
The Royal Commission, in defending that system, had argued that even if “relief in a well-regulated workhouse” might be, “in some rare cases, a hardship, it appears from the evidence that it is a hardship to which the good of society requires the applicant to submit. The express or implied ground of his application is, that he is in danger of perishing from want. Requesting to be rescued from that danger out of the property of others, he must accept assistance on the terms, whatever they may be, which the common welfare requires. The bane of all pauper legislation has been the legislation for extreme cases. Every exception, every violation of the general rule to meet a real case of unusual hardship, lets in a whole class of fraudulent cases, by which that rule must in time be destroyed. Where cases of real hardship occur, the remedy must be applied by individual charity, a virtue for which no system of compulsory relief can be or ought to be a substitute.”[Quoted in Henry Hazlitt’s The Conquest of Poverty.]
The Victorian workhouses were not without their own problems. Yet far worse has come from their abolition than the meliorists who shouted them down could have dreamed.
One of the routes to the “unsolving” of a problem is the broadening of its definition. For example, if “poverty” is defined in terms of survival, then the solution requires only the provision of survival goods in adequate quantities. But when the do-gooders set to work on the thing, they added to “poverty” the relief of many non-survival conditions, including the availability of many comforts and diversions. They didn’t do that by arguing explicitly that the “poor” have a “right” to cars, air conditioning, Xboxes, and so forth. Rather, they compared the overall environments of “poor” communities with those of the self-sufficient and made their goal achieving “equality” between them. Raising those communities to equality with working-class and middle-class districts became a matter of “compassion”…and, of course, more money. Little discussion went to why such communities exist, or why conditions within them rarely improve.
The relief of material need is only one example of this process. In the case of the Victorian workhouses, the do-gooders harped upon observable abuses of the system. In truth there were some, usually on account of lax supervision of certain workhouses by the public officials responsible for them. The replacement of the workhouses by “outdoor relief” – i.e., funds disbursed directly to the needy person or family – created more poor, and more suffering overall, than the abuses it extirpated.
In other cases, such as public education, the broadening of the definition was more explicit. Who could possibly forget about the push to include “health” education in the public curriculum? Or the drive for bilingual and “gifted and talented” programs? The broadenings made it impossible de facto for the public schools to do everything they’d been charged with. Tragically but naturally, the attention of education officials focused on those subjects to which the largest amounts of new funding were flowing, with catastrophic results for students’ literacy and numeracy.
Thomas Sowell and others have commented on the perverse incentives that pertain to government attention to conditions deemed “problems.” The evidence for the insanity of ever permitting a government to take charge of a “problem” should be overwhelming by now. But it is not so. The do-gooders, like the philanthropists in Isabel Paterson’s citation, cannot stop; their self-image would dissolve like a dream. The bureaucracies find the creation of “problems” a reliable engine for growth, and so they encourage the do-gooders whenever they can. And while governments expand without limit as they “unsolve” our “problems,” the functions legitimately delegated to them – the defense of the realm; the suppression of violent crime and crimes against property; the operation of an impartial justice system – grow worse daily, in accordance with the laws of anarcho-tyranny.
Where is the endpoint?
Jul 25 2022
Disposable Women
The whole Surrogate ‘Mother’, Artificial Womb, and Tech-Driven Push to Eliminate Natural Pregnancy movement has always struck most of us as – Off. Just Not Right, in a way many of us felt, but couldn’t explain. For many, the only way they could bring a child into their family (adoption is not a possibility for many, because they were same-sex, or were considered not a good candidate for adoption, and didn’t have the Big Buck$ to bypass the Adoption Fortress).
I was enjoying my coffee, while browsing the web (my favorite way to leisurely wake up), and noted this post on Powerline Blog.
In Enima Melonic’s post, she cites the Spectator essay that initiated her thoughts – I urge you to read both. From the Spectator:
“At first, only the rich might be able to afford it. Insurance companies might begin by prioritizing the needs of women who, through no choice of their own, are incapable of carrying a fetus to term. Yet insurance companies that celebrate Pride Month are hardly going to deny gay men the right to rent a womb, too.
Before long, it won’t seem so weird, and millions of women busy pursuing careers will see the advantage in having something else bear their children. Hippies and religious people will want to keep their childbearing natural. Will most women, when they can enjoy motherhood without the pains and risks of childbirth or the inconvenience of a nine-month burden?”
I would expect that, at some point, women will only be able to carry a pregnancy to term if they have been approved by their insurance provider – once they had passed their genetic screening. Of course, women COULD continue their pregnancies without such permissions – but, the insurance would not be responsible for the costs – both for the pre-delivery expenses, the actual delivery and aftercare, and any costs associated with delivery of a sub-standard child. At today’s rates, that would virtually wipe out rogue pregnancies.
Those anxious to hurry the technology and culture to make what Daniel McCarthy calls “Brave New Wombs” are, in many cases, those who have never experienced the leisurely gestation of another generation of souls, nor the extended time of dependency that raising a child/children necesitates. It is precisely that committment of time and energy that allows for proper, necessary bonding with the infant. A set of ‘drive-by’ parents will not have the same feelings.
Why are ‘feelings’ so important?
Well, they aren’t all that important to the increasing numbers of people “on the spectrum”, or those who are by nature more Spockian. For such people, only the extended time period with their new family members will coax the more emotional responses into being.
My own father was such a person. A true introvert, with a nature that had been influenced by his upbringing in Appalachia, home of America’s Original Loners, and reinforced by his father’s early death and subsequent change in residence to other family members. He found it hard to express himself, unless he had been drinking (which led to other problems). My poor elder brother got the brunt of his inept parenting, and suffered from feelings of not being adequate long after reaching manhood.
I, on the other hand, benefited both from being female, and comparatively much less sensitive than my brother was. I was able to shrug off my father’s often harsh temper without taking it personally. I also found his hobbies fascinating – electronics, cars, and reading.
I have a hard time believing that so many people who struggle to connect with those not in their social class will be good parents to a human who, at birth, is broke, ignorant, stinky, and demanding. Let’s face it – for the first few months, kids are hard to find endearing – who likes to be spit up on, needing to be changed – a WHOLE lot of changes, and screams for hours, despite trying desparately to meet all their possible wants?
MANY so-called professional women have reported that they engaged child care providers as soon as they were cleared to return to work, and left home that first day with some regret, but also a LOT of relief. That hands-off behavior continues into the rest of childhood:
- Child having problems navigating interactions at school? Call in the psych professional. With luck, he will find the right combination of meds to mask the problems.
- School problems? Engage a tutor.
- Can’t spare the time or energy to teach your child sports skills? Send them to sports camp, enroll them in a league, or pay a neighborhood kid to toss the ball back and forth. Or, buy a pitching machine, a rebounder for perfecting that pitch without the effort of scooting after the mistakes.
- Kid is eager to pursue a hobby? You COULD learn along with him/her, or you could pay an expert to show them the ropes. You won’t understand their excitement over their first mangled attempts, and, instead, critique the mistakes. I’m sure that will properly motivate them to continue.
- /sarc
It’s no surprise to me that so many kids have deep emotional issues. I’d be surprised if they did not.
And, as we are in the second/third generation of ‘one and done’ families, many adults have little experience with child care. Until my granddaughter’s birth, my own youngest daughter had never held an infant (OK, that was dumb on my part. I hadn’t realized that, although she had babysat, it was with older children.) Fortunately, her husband had been a hands-on father to his first child, and was able to assist. It also helped that she breastfed that child. The extended time nursing mothers spend with their children is a big boost to getting to know them.
Jul 24 2022
The Ever-Trendy Faith
Gerard van der Leun has a typically excellent essay up today. It’s so good that I almost feel as if I’m committing an offense against the proprieties by pull-quoting it, but…well…maybe the authorities will look the other way:
Back in 2006 National Geographic and other media echo chambers thought enough of this “discovery” to headline it, Jesus May Have Walked on Ice, Not Water, Scientists Say. I’m not nearly so objective. After I read the story, I thought it could more reasonably be headlined, Scientist Confirms Popular Theory That Most Scientists Are Atheistic Asses with Too Much Time and Money on their Hands, Sensible People Say.
The New Testament says that Jesus walked on water, but a Florida university professor believes there could be a less miraculous explanation — he walked on a floating piece of ice….
Nof, a professor of oceanography at Florida State University, said on Tuesday that his study found an unusual combination of water and atmospheric conditions in what is now northern Israel could have led to ice formation on the Sea of Galilee…..
“If you ask me if I believe someone walked on water, no, I don’t,” Nof said. “Maybe somebody walked on the ice, I don’t know. I believe that something natural was there that explains it.”
“We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account.”We leave to others the question of whether or not this research is worth diddly-squat. What is of broader interest is the present state of the secular mindset to all things religious.
Please read the whole thing. It illustrates the evangelical secularist’s typical tactic for seeking to induce doubt and / or silence among believers. If my Jewish cousins will grant me a lexical loan, Oy vey!
Unfortunately, the trap such secularists set is seductive to far too many persons.
Lurking behind all of science, and every bit of “scientific knowledge,” is a truth that cannot be proved. Yet it has survived disproof throughout human history. However, few persons, regardless of their rationality and intellectual power, have reflected on it:
For any given event
There are an infinite number
Of potential explanations.
One of those explanations is correct. The others are distractions. But when the event is past, and is irreproducible by human power, which explanation is the correct one can be argued endlessly.
That’s why scientists insist upon reproducibility before they grant the investigability of the event in question. If you can’t make it happen again and again, the event is outside the realm of the sciences.
The events of the Gospels are two millennia in the past. Moreover, among the events they describe are several dozen miracles: departures from what we think of as the laws of nature. Today, those events cannot be reproduced. Ergo…?
But evangelical secularists insist upon proposing alternate explanations for the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, all the way up to His Resurrection. They then claim that now that there’s an alternative explanation for some miraculous event, it’s perfectly rational to wave aside the possibility that it really, truly was a miracle made possible by Divine power. The assertion is usually couched in intimidating language, designed to make anyone who might differ feel intellectually inferior. The article Gerard cites is a perfect example.
This is merely snobbery in pseudo-scientific guise. The subtextual message is unmistakable: “All the bright people, the people with PhDs, accept this explanation. Don’t you feel foolish for disagreeing with them?”
Such supercilious appeals, married to the regular denigration of believers as unsophisticated dullards, can have a great deal of impact, especially upon the young. What young person doesn’t feel the urge to emulate those he admires for their achievements, including their academic and intellectual achievements? What young person doesn’t want to feel that he’s worthy of inclusion in such an elite?
The seductive power of this Tactic must not be underestimated.
Have a pair of brief videos. Please watch them in order:
In the first video, atheist philosophy Professor Radisson, played by Kevin Sorbo, wields the Tactic against believer Josh Wheaton, ably played by Shane Harper. At first Wheaton has no reply. Perhaps the other students in the class are impressed by the Tactic, for who could fail to be impressed by the intellect of Stephen Hawking, to say nothing of the sarcastic delivery of Radisson? But in the second video, Wheaton presents a devastating riposte from an intellect of equal magnitude: mathematics / philosophy Professor John Lennox.
Among the conceits of the evangelical secularists is that they’re the only genuinely bright people around. Indeed, some years ago a group of atheists and humanists tried to make bright a colloquial synonym for atheist. Demonstrating to such persons that they’re not the only players in the intellectual arena upsets them rather badly, as it did in the second video above.
But as I’ve already observed, not everyone is capable of rising to the challenge presented by the Tactic.
Porretto’s Anatomical Axiom states that:
Everybody’s gotta have one.
And it is so. (At least, I’ve encountered no exceptions.) But the evangelical secularist seeks to make opinions other than his socially unacceptable. He does it, in the main, by sneering at those who differ with him, hoping to bludgeon them into silence by the force of his disdain. Once again the subtext is plain as a fart: If you can’t respect the decrees of your betters, at least have the humility to shut up.
But their preference has no binding force. It’s merely an opinion that’s trendy in certain circles and is immune to proof or disproof under the veil of Time. It’s no more “scientific” or “intellectual” than the belief in God, the acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as His Son, and the hope of an afterlife of eternal bliss in His nearness. It’s delivery merely expresses conceit.
Be not intimidated…nor afraid.
Jul 23 2022
Ruins
The saddest things on Earth, for my money, are the ruins of things that could have been great. That excludes archaeological ruins, of course; at one time they were legitimately impressive structures, or so we’re told by the “authorities.” What I have in mind here is a bit different: art, or music, or fiction that was spoiled by unnecessary meddling…even if the meddler was also its originator.
Potentially great fiction has suffered that sort of ruination on occasion. Rather than cite specific works, I’ll say this: Have you ever read a book that had the power to excite and exalt you, elevate your thoughts to a higher plane…but which was polluted by excessive sex, or violence, or the injection of political irrelevancies? I’d bet a pretty penny that you have, because I have.
Potentially great music is occasionally spoiled by the intrusion of a badly conceived passage, or a diversion into a poorly chosen key or meter, or sometimes just by noise. A number of progressive-rock artists – this is one of the few innocent uses of the term progressive I’ve encountered – have fallen victim to this hazard. The injection of noise into a piece is common. It’s a particularly heinous sin.
That’s the sort of thing that can make even a strong man weep.
I have a biography of Maxwell Perkins in my library. Perkins is still considered the most accomplished editor the world of fiction has ever known. The list of great writers he mentored and brought to a mass audience is staggering. It includes F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolff, Taylor Caldwell, Erskine Caldwell, and Sherwood Anderson. Several of those might not have become famous except for Perkins’s tutelage. Yet Perkins was remarkably modest about his role:
“An editor does not add to a book. At best he serves as a handmaiden to an author. Don’t ever get to feeling important about yourself, because an editor at most releases energy. He creates nothing….The process is so simple. If you have a Mark Twain, don’t try to make him into a Shakespeare, or make a Shakespeare into a Mark Twain. Because in the end an editor can only get as much out of an author as the author has in him.”
But in contrast to Max Perkins, today’s editors are more akin to today’s art critics, constantly striving to inject themselves into the works they edit. (Robert A. Heinlein: “You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”) Exceptions are few. It might have more to do with the proliferation of “woke” fiction from the conventional publishers than readers are generally aware.
In my wanderings through YouTube earlier today, I stumbled over a pair of songs I remembered loving ‘way back in the darkest Sixties, when I and their issuing artists were young. And of course, I played them, and realized that I love them still. But as I luxuriated in the memories, I remembered the rest of the album from which they came, and the ruination that had been wreaked upon them.
They were the product of a tiny, almost purely acoustic group that called itself Appaloosa. Guitar, bass, violin, and cello…and nothing else. The guitarist was a composer and lyricist of considerable originality and ability. Unfortunately for Appaloosa, at that time the major record labels weren’t interested in John Parker Compton’s kind of music. In consequence, the group fell under the sway of a producer who was himself a musician – and an egotist.
Al Kooper, for all his talents – and they were considerable – was the sort of man who had to be, in Heinlein’s memorable phrase, “the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.” It’s probably why, after a phenomenally successful debut album, the other members of Blood, Sweat, and Tears asked him to depart the group. When he heard Appaloosa audition, he decided that what it needed – apart from a recording contract, of course – was lots and lots of him. And he made sure they got it.
Of the eleven tracks on Appaloosa’s eponymous album, only two escaped Kooper’s gorilla touch. They were unique and refreshing then, and they remain so today. The other nine…well, you’re already aware of the subject of this screed. Appaloosa never issued another record, though Compton and violinist Robin Batteau did go on to modest success in other ventures.
Forgive an old man for a bittersweet remembrance. Here are the songs.
And have a nice day.
Jul 23 2022
OK, I’m a Dork
I’m on of those people who actually enjoy reading Congressional bills, and looking for the ‘Easter eggs’ – the sly little provisions that are the REAL goal of the bill.
Jul 23 2022
Who For President?
The wizened old librarian-curator who lives in the back of my head said that he was prompted to dredge this up by the talk that Gavin Newsom would make an excellent Democrat presidential nominee:
March 3, 2004
“Everybody’s always giving me guns.” — Humphrey Bogart playing Philip Marlowe, in The Big Sleep
In the preceding essay on this subject, your Curmudgeon mapped some of the ground over which an honest man engaged in political debate must travel. That journey was stimulated by an important Mark Alger piece, which gave an example of a scurrilous rhetorical tactic used by leftists, and counseled disengagement from dishonest persons in debate.
But the Left has more than one arrow in its quiver. Regard the following reportage by Michelle Malkin, concerning an exchange between San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave on the Larry King Show last week:
When Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, the Colorado Republican sponsoring a federal marriage amendment, bluntly confronted Newsom with his criminal behavior (“I’m going through the deliberative legislative process, Mr. Mayor. You’re defying the law.”), he pursed his lips and snorted: “I’m hardly defying the law.” Hardly? Fact: In 2000, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 22, the state’s Defense of Marriage Act. Despite Newsom’s issuance of 3,500 marriage licenses to homosexual couples, Prop. 22 remains the law today.
Musgrave didn’t back down: “You’re making a mockery of the law.” Newsom wheedled in response: “I think you’re making a mockery of this country and our values of diversity, and bringing people together and uniting people.”
Ann Coulter nailed this one in her book Slander: Liberal Lies About The American Right. The mouthpieces of the Left will always advance as if under the threat of attack.
Musgrave simply called Newsom on his defiance of the law. When Newsom tried to ward the thrust by denying it, and found that Musgrave would not relent, he changed the subject and went on the attack against Musgrave’s motives, and by implication, the motives of all those who consider him a lawless and culpable man.
Chess players call this a zwischenzug: a move which interrupts the opponent’s developing combination by forcing him to attend to a threat or possibility he hadn’t included in his thinking. In this case, Newsom was trying to compel a change of subject to avert the need to defend his actions, while simultaneously seizing the rhetorical initiative and throwing his opponent on the defensive.
It’s legitimate in chess. It’s not legitimate in political discourse.
An honest man who’s been called to account for his actions stands his ground. Newsom couldn’t do that; California state law is plainly against him, and he has cheerfully defied it. He didn’t want to defend a position that was so obviously indefensible, so he had to derail Musgrave’s train of attack. The best way to do that was to invoke the Left’s rhetorical standby: its claim of good intentions, which implies the bad intentions of its opponents.
The Good Intentions Gambit is usually effective against the Right, because we of the Right:
- Almost all have good intentions ourselves, and therefore extend that presumption to others;
- Are too gentlemanly to call a lying scoundrel a lying scoundrel in public, where it might hurt his feelings.
Your Curmudgeon will pause here until you’ve stopped laughing.
If we compare the underpinnings of the Newsom maneuver to the explicit pronouncements in the Benjamin Hellie rant cited in yesterday’s Curmudgeonly emission, we can glean important intelligence from it, both tactical and strategic. Hellie explicitly articulated the fallback premise of the Left: “We’re the good guys and they’re the bad guys.” To review, Hellie’s actual words were:
The goal of the right wing is to perpetuate and worsen a system in which a small number of people control obscene quantities of wealth and power at the expense of the vast majority, whereas the goal of the left wing is to distribute wealth and power more broadly. For short, the goal of the right wing is perpetuating and increasing injustice, whereas the goal of the left wing is increasing justice.
The veracity of the claim to one side, this amounts to an appeal to emotions based on the elevation of intentions above all other things.
The amazing part of this is how effective it can be. Psychologist and author Peter Breggin has repeatedly lectured pro-freedom groups on the perceived importance of good intentions in political outreach. Broadly speaking, the target of a political pitch will judge the speaker on his perceived intentions more predictably than on anything else about him. If the target judges the speaker to be callous or cruel, the pitch will fail; indeed, it might rebound to disastrous effect.
Scant wonder that the Left, which has a uniform record of failure in all things this century past, should recur to the Good Intentions Gambit so regularly.
The most effective tactical counterstroke has much in common with the one suggested in the preceding essay: call the violator on his violation, where everyone can hear. It would go something like this:
[Hearty chuckle] Mayor Newsom, it’s clear that you can’t defend your conduct on legal grounds, and equally clear that you dislike being put on the defensive about it. But those are the facts, and in time you will be called to account for them. Your protestations of superior virtue on the basis of your supposed good intentions are just a cover for your unwillingness to conform your conduct to the law as a good citizen should.
The Good Intentions Gambit is the Left’s innermost line of defense. Should it fail, leftist generals have nowhere to retreat. Strategically, this implies that freedom advocates may choose between battlegrounds:
- We can lay siege to Fort Good Intentions, by pointing out at every opportunity that the Left’s vanguard’s response to its policy failures is always to evade them, usually by defining them out of existence or attacking the motives of its critics. Thus, it preserves its ego and its power at the expense of the persons it claims to want to help. This is not the behavior of a movement animated by good intentions. Pursued consistently, this strategy will separate the Left’s followers from its vanguard.
- We can bypass the fortress and bring the facts about leftist failures, leftist deceits, leftist arrogance, and leftist power-lust to the largest possible “lay” audience, simply and clearly. Pursued consistently, this will remove the Left’s support among the general populace.
In both sites, the correlation of forces is favorable to us. There are enough of us to try both. Choose — and strike!
The exchange quoted above took place when Gavin Newsom was the Mayor of San Francisco. Show it to any left-liberals you might know. Ask them “Do you think he’d make a good president?” Gauge their honesty and trustworthiness from their reactions. (And I know: most of the links no longer work. Don’t bother berating me about it.)
Jul 23 2022
A Timeless Observation
As I’ve recently been re-enjoying the writings of the great Henry Louis Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore – yes, there was a time when Baltimore not only had a Sage but actually produced its own! – I thought it might be appropriate, in this time of troubles, to share a slice from one of the more pungent ones with my Gentle Readers. It comes from a period during which Mencken was traveling with a campaigning presidential candidate, whom he does not name:
One night out in the Bible country, after the hullabaloo of the day was over, I went into his private car along with another newspaper reporter, and we sat down to gabble with him. This other reporter, a faithful member of the candidate’s own party, began to upbraid him, at first very gently, for letting off so much hokum. What did he mean by making promises that no human being on this earth, and not many of the angels in Heaven, could ever hope to carry out? In particular, what was his idea in trying to work off all those preposterous bile-beans and snake-oils on the poor farmers, a class of men who had been fooled and rooked by every fresh wave of politicians since Apostolic times? Did he really believe that the Utopia he had begun so fervently to preach would ever come to pass? Did he honestly think that farmers, as a body, would ever see all their rosy dreams come true, or that the sharecroppers in their lower ranks would ever be more than a hop, skip, and jump from starvation?
The candidate thought awhile, took a long swallow of the coffin-varnish he carried with him, and then replied that the answer in every case was no. He was well aware, he said, that the plight of the farmers was intrinsically hopeless, and would probably continue so, despite doles from the treasury, for centuries to come. He had no notion that anything could be done about it by merely human means, and certainly not by political means: it would take a new Moses, and a whole series of miracles. “But you forget, Mr. Blank,” he concluded sadly, “That our agreement in the premises must remain purely personal. You are not a candidate for President of the United States. I am.”
As we left him, his interlocutor, a gentleman grown gray in Washington and long ago lost to every decency, pointed the moral of the episode. “In politics,” he said, “man must learn to rise above principle.” Then he drove it in with another: “When the water reaches the upper deck,” he said, “follow the rats.”
[Found in A Mencken Chrestomathy. Originally delivered as a lecture to the Institute of Arts and Sciences of Columbia University, January 4, 1940.]
H. L. Mencken remains the gold standard for penetration and probity in American journalism. I fear that we will not see his like again.
Jul 22 2022
What Matters
When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But, when I became a man, I put away childish things. [First Epistle to the Corinthians 13:11]
A fiction writer must know what matters to the reader. But this is far easier if he already knows what matters to him personally.
Pour yourself another cup of coffee. This is likely to be a ramble.
He who is knowledge-oriented is likely to take his greatest pleasure from extending, exercising, and exhibiting his knowledge. That’s normal. We tend to emphasize that at which we’re best, including in our interactions with others. However, there’s a downside. More than one, actually.
First, there’s the tendency toward narrowness. A sharp focus that persists overlong can come to dominate a man, render him less capable of functioning outside his chosen domain. Most of us have known someone whose thoughts are so monothematic that conversations with him invariably return to a single subject. They’re not easy to have as friends.
Second, there’s the tendency toward pomposity. “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best,” said Robert Conquest, and it is so. So when someone introduces an idea within the bounds of Smith’s monomania, Smith is likely to butt in with an assertion of authority. It can result in quite a lot of embarrassment for all concerned – Smith included.
Third, should Smith come into contact with Jones who shares Smith’s monomania, the probability of an unpleasant clash is high. Every authority yearns to be The Authority. The desire is found at its maximum in the self-nominated authority whose attention others strive to avoid. This requires that others see them as the pinnacle of their subject. The emergence of a competitor is the last thing they would wish.
Fourth and last for this Friday morning disquisition, Smith is overwhelmingly likely to forget what really matters…if he ever knew it.
Monomanias are common among children. A child’s mental landscape expands irregularly, in fits and starts, and often in response to an unexpected stimulus. Fascination with a particular subject or activity is natural for a child. The broadening of his scope to include a wide perspective is an essential part of his maturation. Indeed, one of the signs of what we call arrested development is the perpetuation of a monomania into adulthood.
I recently had the great pleasure of seeing The Queen’s Gambit, Netflix’s 2020 series about a young woman who rises to the top of the chess world. There haven’t been many worthwhile fictions that involved chess as an important element. This one was praised so highly that even if I had no great interest in chess, I would have wanted to see it. (I was fairly sure that not all the praise came from chess fanatics.)
The Queen’s Gambit, to my great satisfaction, isn’t “about chess.” It’s about maturation, dealing with loss and betrayal, and what Abraham Maslow called self-actualization. In the Maslovian hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is the pinnacle, which cannot be attained without first satisfying the four more fundamental needs below it:
- Physiological needs,
- Safety and security needs,
- Love and acceptance needs,
- Self-esteem needs.
Protagonist Beth Harmon uses chess, a game of great complexity that yields its secrets to her prodigious intelligence, to ascend that hierarchy. The ascent isn’t without setbacks. In particular, she must defeat two of the prime threats to a chess monomaniac: better players and drugs.
Of course, a very young player must expect to encounter older, more mature players. She does succeed in defeating the first ones she encounters; such is the magnitude of her gift. But there comes a time when she must rise to new heights. At first, against American champion Benny Watts, she falters. After she defeats him, world champion Vasily Borgov, a player of enormous ability and many achievements, looms in her sights. She loses to him as well. In each case the defeats send her careening into drug and alcohol excess. Three bright lights help her to climb out of her pit: her orphanage chum Jolene, her old Kentucky rival Harry Beltik, and her half-platonic love D. L. Townes.
The game is always there, of course, but it’s less of a driving force for Beth than her need to defeat the obstacles to maturity. She must cease to measure herself by her tournament results and the players she hasn’t yet defeated. She must learn to accept help, affirmation, and love when those things are offered to her. Townes’s surprise appearance in Moscow, as Beth is about to face the greatest players in the world, provides the climax. When he says “Consider me your second” – an important post a great player must fill, and which Beth had allowed to remain empty – she achieves a critically important release from the fetters that have kept her from achieving true adulthood: her deliberate orphaning by her suicidally depressed mother; her isolation in the orphanage environment to which she was consigned; the never-quite-dissipated disdain of male players for this female upstart, and enveloping them all, the unexamined conviction that she will never be good enough to be accepted and valued by others.
The series is a fine exposition about what really matters. And yes, there are a couple of really neat chess games for aficionadi to drool over.
A monomaniac’s monomania can doom him. It doomed two great chess players with whom all chess lovers must be familiar: Alexander Alekhine and Bobby Fischer. It’s doomed others in other fields, as well; indeed, the examples are endless. The sufferers never looked past their blinders to find what really matters.
As a writer of fiction, I struggle continuously to “keep my eye on the ball.” Yes, I write in the genres: science fiction, fantasy, romance. Those genres are “defined” by the special elements the writer uses to distinguish his story-universe from the one we live through in real life. It tends to make those genres popular with particular audiences. Many readers refuse to read outside the genre of their preference. This is par for the course, but there’s a danger involved.
And in the worst cases displace,
What really matters.
And what is that? Why, it’s people. People changing and growing. People overcoming their weaknesses. Most important of all, people learning to love and to accept love: love of self, love of others, and the love of God.
Ultimately, love is everything. – M. Scott Peck
May God bless and keep you all!
Jul 22 2022
One Incident, Two Observations
Just yesterday evening, Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was attacked during a campaign rally:
Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for New York governor, was attacked during a campaign stop near Rochester in upstate Monroe County on Thursday night….
The suspect approached Zeldin wielding an unknown weapon and Chenelly tackled him.
“Once the man was on stage, he reached into his right pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a knife or a razor blade, maybe a box cutter and lunged at the Congressman,” [bystander Joe] Chenelly said.
First, take note that this attack is on a Republican, as was the James Hodgkinson attack on Congressman Steve Scalise and other Republicans who were playing softball at the time. Watch how the Legacy Media handles it. Will they downplay it, force it out of the news cycle as swiftly as possible, as they did with the Hodgkinson attack that nearly killed Steve Scalise? Or will they recast it as the fault of Republicans, Trump supporters, or Zeldin himself?
Second – and in the fullness of time this might prove to be the more important aspect of the event – observe this screen grab:
Zeldin never lets go of the microphone. (Feel free to watch the whole video. You’ll see.) He’s grappling with an armed attacker, but drop the microphone? Release that irrelevance so he can use both hands to defend himself? Possibly to preserve his life? Never! The microphone is more precious to him.
That’s politician behavior. Politicians never, ever let go of a chance to parade themselves before the public, or an instrument by which to do so. Cameras are great, but a mike will do in a pinch.
Remember this. Vote for Zeldin in November, by all means – Hochul must go – but don’t trust him. Never trust any politician. And remember this incident.
Jul 22 2022
Pearls of expression.
It is one of the great mysteries—or perhaps I should say it is one of the reliable reminders of human imperfection—that higher education often fosters a particular form of political stupidity [“the repudiation of inheritance and home”].[1]
There is abroad in the land the poisonous notion that government at all levels should naturally have “partners” or that there should be “public-private partnerships.” Centralization, supranationalism, multiculturalism, diversity, and critical race theory are the vertical iteration of that horizontal splay of sovereignty into dilution and remoteness from public actions taken by public servants accountable to the voters.
Everything’s peachy so long as important decisions are taken by effing strangers such as Bill and Melinda, Mark, Georgie, Jeff, and your garden-variety federal judge. It’s bad enough when political decisions ARE made by officials putatively answerable to the voters even if at second hand. Some kind of a problem with THAT as it turned out to my way of thinking but no need to stray too far afield. Look up “unaccountable administrative state” and “out-of-control, contemptuous, contemptible U.S. Congress” if you’ve got time on your hands.
And anybody have an email address or phone number for the asinine freak dressed as a Klingon battle cruiser commander whose mind is populated by sugarplum fairies and big rock candy mountains? Own nothing and be happy, my ass. Who elected that one?
Notes
[1] “On Popular Reason and Self-Rule.” By Roger Kimball, The American Mind, 7/19/22.
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