Once again science advances social progress!
“New DNA evidence uncovered by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University shows that there were in fact female Viking warriors. The remains of an iconic Swedish Viking Age grave now reveal that war was not an activity exclusive to males – women could be found in the higher ranks at the battlefield.”
Too, the fact that he is accompanied by two herbivores is convincing evidence of his having been vegetarian. So advanced, these enlightened Nordics.
: )
But What’s Upstream from Culture?
Andrew Breitbart noted – with urgency – that politics was downstream from culture. John Adams, aware of this from his own reflection on history, wrote that Liberty can only be enjoyed by a virtuous and moral people.
Today Glenn Reynolds notes unhappy developments in the culture of the academy – serious grade inflation.
Grade inflation bears a striking resemblance to theft: Redistributing the honor of those who deserve and diluting their ranks with the unworthy. Alas, theft is never a victimless crime. If the swelling ranks of A-graders causes no resentment amongst the true earners and no shame amongst those who grade and those who “benefit” unfairly, then the culture is decaying. So too is the absolute value of having earned A’s.
Let’s note here that Culture is an aggregate effect. It is the aggregate of individuals’ values and behaviors that create the culture. Our schools have long abandoned Wisdom and her consorts Honor and Justice. We should note too that these always and everywhere pertain to the individual. Without them, and individual’s values and behaviors default to surrounding tribal, collective norms.
Shabbat shalom,
Yos
FWIW: Fox Butterfield, is that you?
Chris Fountain chimes in on Pinky Sulzberger’s Daily Rag: Fox Butterfield, is that you?
Quoth Chris: “President Obama will be remembered as a thoughtful and dignified president who led a scrupulously honest administration [sic] that achieved major changes.” [Sic indeed!]
“People argue over whether his impatience with politicians and Republican intransigence denied him bigger accomplishments, but that argument is beside the point: He rescued an economy in crisis and passed the recovery program, pulled America back from its military overreach, passed the Affordable Care Act and committed the nation to addressing climate change. To be truly transformative in the way he wanted, however, his success had to translate into electoral gains for those who shared his vision and wanted to reform government. On that count, Mr. Obama failed.
“His legacy regrettably includes the more than 1,000 Democrats who lost their elections during his two terms. Republicans now have total control in half of America’s states.”
Alas. The Won didn’t rescue an economy in crisis but rather added more to the debt, saw half of households on “assistance” and 95 million citizens off the work rolls. If President Obama pulled us back from military over-reach, it came at the cost of destabilizing the entire planet and at a shockingly high toll in American lives. The ACA, passed via parliamentary trickery has proven to not be, in fact, “affordable” and neither are Mr. Obama’s fatuous, crony missteps at addressing AGW. As one wag put it, Jack Kennedy put a man on the moon, Barack Obama put men in girls’ bathrooms. (There is a joke in there somewhere about golfing and putts.)
“Thoughtful and dignified”? As in, “My Administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks!”? Such noblesse! Such gravitas!
“Scrupulously honest”? President Obama’s entire Presidency was a farce a la Cage aux Folles, and the Grey Lady has paid heavily for it’s part in his dishonesty and his failures with lost revenues, tanking subscriptions and a completely vanquished reputation.
Neither will be missed.
… servers.
One wonders whether anything can ever be private from the very moment of pressing a keyboard. When even the NSA can be compromised, “security” is less a fact than a wish.
Now Time magazine has the question “Why we’re losing the internet to the culture of hate” on its cover. (“Culture” of “hate”? Losing the internet? We won’t bother to link Time, one of the original trolls of print). “Hate” is Time’s epithet for “free speech”. They never did appreciate (never mind survive) robust competition, so this is no great surprise.
Danger Will Robinson! Irony alert!
On top of this, the US will hand over the keys to the intertubes in a few month’s time, and along with them, the new controllers’ access to censorship of badthink.
Taken as dots or as a pattern, what is the outlook for freedom of speech via the digital ether?
“Code” is just “dog whistle” for…
(D) with a by-line.
Sorry Cokie, try again. – Ed.
Wherein Fox’ Owners Do-In the Brand
This from Ace. Et tu, Megyn? Really?
Apparently the Murdochs would off Roger Ailes “for cause.” Have they considered the damage to the brand?
There are no major Libertarian or Conservative media channels to compete with Fox, who’s editorial viewpoint is rather a mix of Libertarian, Conservative, Squishy and Liberal perspectives. This, one may assume, is the intent of Ailes – who at the very least had the foresight to understand that libertarians and conservatives watch commercials too.
One wonders whether the vacuum of his departure will be filled by yet another squish or liberal at the helm in the mold of CNNABCCBSNBCMSDNC? Should that sad fate arise, Fox will be competing with CNN in the race to red ink.
Yours truly doesn’t watch television at home, and for the record, there is precious little on Fox’ channels to watch while on the road. (No, not Megyn. Ever.) Still, it had been the only channel worth the bother.
I suppose all things must pass. I will miss Roger Ailes’ Fox.
– Yos.
UPDATE: Roger has loyal friends at Fox. Who knew?
The sad news comes via Ed Driscoll.
Sad, because the only real ground breaking she’d ever accomplish will be for her casket, her litany of finished projects notwithstanding. In our school there were a handful of famous brand-name architects that were highly influential amongst the “intellectual” students and professors. Hadid of course; Koolhaas and Tschumi had status as design gods.
A few of us that felt strongly that Architecture had gone off into the twilight zone. We had Sterling and the PoMo crowd making cartoons and visual puns, we had Hadid and her ilk rabidly avoiding aesthetic merit and any sense of scalar dialogue, and we had brutal mediocrities like Philip Johnson desperately trying to play catch-up whilst hogging the magazines. (Don’t get me started on Moshe Safdie.) This crowd could talk a great design, but in the end they were like the clowns writing an “artist’s statement” or the chef waxing elegant about his anchovy swirl parfait.
The better design students (we knew who they were) were rather more attuned to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Alvar Aalto, Eero Saarinen, and to marvelous contemporary artists such as Frank Gehry. Yours truly’s heroes?… Saarinen, Peter Behrens and Christopher Wren. (And you, Gus Da Roza!)
Beauty is where one finds it.
Yos
Mr. Levin,
Over the years you have repeatedly shamed the Conservative movement and your listeners with your ugly behavior towards call-in guests. On Friday March 25th, you treated a perfectly polite and intelligent caller – #3, Dennis (~32:25) – with contempt and utter rudeness. You continually talked over him, put words into his mouth and then referred to him as “stupid” after having hung-up on him.
Sir, I’ve had it with your attitude and with your show. You could learn a great deal about professionalism from the gentlemanly attitude of many of the “backbenchers” to whom you regularly condescend.
A talk show is not a free-for-all blog comment section. When you shame and embarrass a good man on your show, you do so in public before millions.
You have competition. I shall tune in there. It is particularly sad, because as an observer of the political scene, you are one of the very sharpest. Unfortunately as a man, you fail the grade.
With sincere regret,
Yos
“Oh the fun we’re all going to have when Brooks discovers Fast & Furious, the IRS Scandal, “Richard Windsor,” and the ramifications of the deal with Iran sometime in February of 2017.”
Brooks’ reputation isn’t helped by his “cordless bungie-jumping into the abyss of self parody.” [Is that Dan Riehl’s phrase?] Neither is the Old Grey Lady’s, who abjectly failed to vet and then report over the last decade that which was staring them in the face.
Our point being, we’re observing historical revisionism occur in real-time. Look forward to the gulag archipelago, comrade.
Evangelizing Left: The Missionary Troll
Ace of Spades: “The media [the Left in general, IMHO] has two wings: The Pious Concern Troll wing, and the Nasty Attack Dog wing. Why no, they’re never asked to reconcile these wings.”
There is also the phenomenon of The Missionary Troll to the Prols: He of the Left who dresses in pious Conservative garb whilst holding a Bible (or candies) in one hand and a cattle prod in the other. His role is a combination of The Pious Concern Troll and The Nasty Attack Dog.
Always his purpose is to nudge us sheep (those of us in Conservative and Libertarian camps) to the Left in small steps, administering candy or shock as necessary.
That every tyranny of central planning and control is antithetical to the Bible – and outright heresy – doesn’t matter to him. The more souls this man “saves”, the greater his share of “collective redemption.”
His style is marked by condescension, running auto-hagiography, sympathy at this moment and at the next flame, and a string of really cr@ppy arguments. Fine, we get the role of comic relief in debate – but how enjoyable is it really, when the Missionary Troll doesn’t realize that the joke is on him?
Chimes in Right Guy:
“But that’s the mark of a progressive, left or right. One, that the government has to be used to promote their beliefs and execute their agenda. On one side it’s social justice on the other is to make the world safe for their twisted version of crony capitalistic democracy. Two, that man is flawed and needs to be saved from himself. Only through the government and control can this happen. Both are basically religion and it’s just a softer version of what the caliphatists want. Robert Heinlein understood all this and broke it down quite simply:
“Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.“
– Robert A. Heinlein
Or another favorite:
“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know, the end result is tyranny and oppression no matter how holy the motives.“
– Robert A. Heinlein
“And yet we still have seeming smart people championing white hat over black hat. For a couple reasons. Some people have greater affinity to groups and the power they perceive and possibly get from them. They want to be on the winning team. It’s people like this that usually want people controlled. This is why the liberty movement fails. People that champion individuality don’t like to be in groups. This makes it difficult to move things in that direction.”
Thank-you! Full agreement here. “People that champion individuality” – or just want to be left alone – “don’t like to be in groups.” Perhaps this is why ‘liberty movements’ are rare events.
If we may take a swipe at William F! Buckley, jr… Buckley’s “Conservatism” was rather as Gore Vidal believed – merely an elegant tolerance of fascistic principles. That neither of them came to argue from first principles is to their shame. While Gore was apologizing for the Soviets, Buckley was eschewing – and destroying – principled Libertarians and Conservatives such as Rand and Welch.
Even Thomas Paine didn’t see the full extent of the motives behind the French Revolution: That turned out to be the Officiate overturning the Monarchy, the inverse of what Joseph had done to the Priests when he’d handed vast powers to Pharaoh. In the final result, Liberté is antithetical to Égalité and Fraternité.
“[Thomas Paine] was freed in 1794 (narrowly escaping execution) thanks to the efforts of James Monroe, then U.S. Minister to France. Paine remained in France until 1802 when he returned to America on an invitation from Thomas Jefferson. Paine discovered that his contributions to the American Revolution had been all but eradicated due to his religious views. Derided by the public and abandoned by his friends, he died on June 8, 1809 at the age of 72 in New York City.”
Happy Christmas everyone!
Yos
Si Vis Pacem 