… is a cheerful song or two about pigs.
Category: Decline and fall
If I had a hammer
Update: Lydia McGrew comments on France and related matters.
What must be recognized is that the West does no good to the world at large by committing suicide through an excess of generosity and sentiment. Where will the refugees of thirty years from now, any of them, even a small number, turn to if Europe has become part of a Caliphate? How much can the U.S. help others or act as a beacon of freedom if its already weakened economy and infrastructure are further strained by bringing in numbers of people with problems we do not have the resources to handle? And as we turn into more of a police state in response to the terrorist threats we have fecklessly welcomed in, how much do we remain an exemplar of freedom to the nations and a place of safety for others to come to? And, finally, face this: The government of Germany, or the U.S., or France, has more of a duty to protect its own citizens from terrorist attacks than it has to welcome the destitute and oppressed from other countries. That’s just a fact. There are concentric circles of duty, though it is politically incorrect to say so.
See also What’s Wrong with the World.
Update II: Anthony Sacramone presents some notes on that magical era when Christians, Jews and Muslims lived in harmony in medieval Spain.
Love and compassion
Insulting the right people signals compassion, and modern people buy it because hating the nasty backward traditional oppressor is what unites modern people. Despising the right people means love.
The microwave of doom
The dangers of dihydrogen monoxide are well-known, but there are other hazards that you might have been unknowingly exposed to. For instance, studies have demonstrated that over 93% of all cancer patients have at some time inhaled O2, a powerful oxidizer. More than 87% of people with bipolar personality have looked at a full moon without adequate eye protection. Anecdotal evidence suggests that individuals exhibiting egregious political activism ingested acetylsalicylic acid during childhood. It has been hypothesized that the majority of people who during early adulthood order a steak rather than a salad will not live to see their 100th year.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have important culinary matters to attend to.
Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies
Various odds and ends:
Fillyjonk linked to an old but not outdated story by Ray Bradbury, “The Murderer.” I found a couple of other favorites, “The Veldt” and “The Pedestrian.”
*****
Perhaps not entirely unrelated to the Bradbury stories:
Having time each day merely to amuse oneself, or just to sit and think, greatly improves one’s life. Yet we’re practically taught to avoid such periods – to stay as busy as possible virtually all the time. The emphasis on work, on “multitasking” (which, as a former expert in the architecture of multitasking operating systems for embedded devices, I can assure you is always an illusion) and on achieving ever more per unit time is using us up in ways we don’t always perceive and even less often appreciate. You’d almost suspect that time spent in introspection had been deemed an offense against the social norms.
(Via Dustbury.)
*****
While Sakurajima is ominously quiet, in the South Indian Ocean Piton de la Fournaise is putting on a modest, colorful show.
Continue reading “Notes from the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies”
Yep
(Via the Bayou Renaissance Man.)
Spot the squirrel
Reality becomes unintelligible
Is it possible to reason with the Islamic State? Perhaps not.
Two theological schools emerged within Sunni Islam in the ninth century. The first, the Mu’tazalites, said that God is reason and justice. The Mu’tazalites held that man’s first duty is to reason because the existence of God is not self-evident. Once man arrives at the existence of God through his reason, he examines the claims of revelation that God has spoken. If anything in revelation appears to go against his reason, he must either bring the revelation into accord with reason or discard it. Through reason, too, man comes to know the difference between what is right and what is wrong, and he must choose what is right through his free will. God is just insofar as He will reward those who do what is right and punish those who do what is wrong.
The second theological school, the Ash’arite school, opposed all of this. God is not reason and justice, the Ash’arites said. Rather, He is pure will and power—unbound by anything, including His own word. Man must abandon reason and submit to the text of revelation, no matter what it says or how unreasonable it may appear. Man’s reason is incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Nothing is right or wrong in and of itself; it is right or wrong only according to what God says.
Does God forbid murder because it is wrong? Or is it wrong because He forbids it? The Mu’tazilite answer was that God forbids it because it is wrong. The Ash’arite answer was that it is wrong only because God forbids it, and God could change his mind and require ritual murder, if He so chose. Also, according to the Ash’arites, God is not required to reward those who obey Him and punish those who disobey. He may reward those who disobey Him and punish those who obey, and no one can gainsay Him. Whatever God does is just—because right is the rule of the stronger, and God is the strongest.
The Mu’tazalites and the Ash’arites also fought over the nature of the Qur’an. The Mu’tazalites said that the Qur’an was created in history and therefore needs to be understood in terms of the linguistic and cultural circumstances in which it was revealed. The Ash’arites claimed that the Qur’an was not created but has existed coeternally with God in heaven. Therefore, the Qur’an is not contingent on the circumstances in which it was revealed, and Arabic is the language of God (which is why all Muslims have Arabic names and must pray in Arabic, though the majority of Muslims in the world do not understand this language). Obviously, the Mu’tazilite understanding of the Qur’an allows for greater breadth of interpretation, while the Ash’arite understanding tends toward literalism (which finds its harshest expression today in Saudi Wahhabism).
The Mu’tazalites had a conception of natural law that allowed man to come to know the difference between right and wrong through his reason’s apprehension of the essences of things. Since the Ash’arites asserted that man could not obtain moral knowledge through his reason, they constructed a bizarre atomistic metaphysics to defend their position and to destroy the possibility of natural law. Basically, man cannot know the nature or essence of things because they have no natures or essences. Everything is constituted by time-space atoms that momentarily come into existence directly through the will of God. Whatever exists is an agglomeration of these atoms specifically configured for a brief moment by an act of God. These same atoms are then annihilated almost simultaneously by another direct act of God’s will. God then reconstitutes reality with an entirely new set of atoms that may be similar to the previous ones or completely different—that depends only upon Him.
Therefore, a Mu’tazilite could know that a horse would remain a horse because it has the nature of the horse. But the Ash’arite could possess no such knowledge, because God might wish to turn the horse into a giraffe, and there is no reason why He could not. In fact, to say that the horse must remain a horse because it has the nature of the horse would be an act of blasphemy for an Ash’arite. It would place a limit on God’s omnipotence.
The atomistic metaphysics of the Ash’arites created a fatal breach between cause and effect in the natural world. Fire does not burn cotton; God does. Gravity does not make the rock fall; God does. To say that a rock falls because of gravity is an act of shirk, blasphemy—assigning a cause to something other than God. In other words, there is no continuous narrative of cause and effect tying these moments together in a comprehensible way. Each thing stands separately as an individual act of God, unrelated to what preceded it or to what follows it.
Anything can come of anything, and nothing necessarily follows. Reality becomes unintelligible….The Mu’tazilite rational theological school was suppressed by force in the second half of the ninth century, and the Ash’arite school became the majority in Sunni Islam. To this day, everything that happens is assigned to the first and only cause, Allah; secondary causes simply do not exist.
Understanding that this teaching became entrenched in the Sunni Muslim world is the key to unlocking such puzzles as why scientific inquiry is nearly dead there; why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years; why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon.
Among the fruits of this strain of Islam: the preservation of antiquities; respect for friends of mankind.
I won’t settle for the lesser of two evils …
… but I won’t vote for Cthulhu, either. Instead, here’s my choice for 2016:
• But they’re fictional characters! you say. And Donald Trump is real?
• But it’s against the Constitution! That might have been true in the past, but no longer. Nowadays, the meaning of the Constitution depends on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy gets up on in the morning. It’s just a matter of picking the right day to present the question.
• But they’re not even from our world, let alone our country! Big deal. The same is true of the lousy golfer currently in the white house.
Do I expect Lelei and Rory to win? Probably not; I have a poor record with political endorsements. But there’s no question that an intelligent, responsible mage and a semi-divine warrior would do a better job leading the country than the present administration or the clown who wants to run the circus.
Continue reading “I won’t settle for the lesser of two evils …”
Today’s quote
John C. Wright on the Hugo Awards:
I am humbled by the laud shown my work: it is not everyone who can point to the smoking wreckage of a great city whose fanes and temple, colonnades and palaces, baths and coliseums and alabaster towers the burghers burnt with their own hands to prevent falling into his.
Update: See also Peregrinations.
Here, let me oppress you
The Bayou Renaissance Man discovered the tweet of the year:
Princess Content @ContentPrincess
intelligence and reason are just code words for white male privilege.
Today’s quote
Those kinds of things are illogical policies and they need to be responded to with illogic.
By the way, I hereby declare my office a donut sanctuary.
Yep
(Via Fillyjonk.)
A few quotes
Maybe pitchforks just aren’t enough.
*****
Thank God they didn’t know about Queen’s Blade…
*****
Gentlemen
Whilst marching from Portugal to a position which commands the approach to Madrid and the French forces, my officers have been complying diligently with your requests which have been sent by H.M ship from London to Lisbon and thence by dispatch to our headquarters. We have enumerated our saddles, bridles, tents and tent poles, and all manner of sundry items for which His Majesty’s Government holds me accountable. I have dispatched reports on the character, wit and spleen of every officer. Each item and every farthing has been accounted for , with two regrettable exceptions for which I beg your indulgence.
Unfortunately the sum of one shilling and ninepence remains unaccounted for in one infantry battalion’s petty cash and there has been a hideous confusion as to the number of jars of raspberry jam issued to one cavalry regiment during a sandstorm in western Spain. This reprehensible carelessness may be related to the pressure of circumstance, since we are at war with France, a fact which may come as a bit of a surprise to you gentlemen in Whitehall.
This brings me to my present purpose, which is to request elucidation of my instructions from His Majesty’s Government so that I may better understand why I am dragging an Army across these barren plains. I construe that perforce it must be one of two alternative duties, as given below. I shall pursue either one to the best of my ability, but I cannot do both:
1. To train an army of uniformed British clerks in Spain for the benefit of the accountants and copy-boys in London, or, perchance,
2. To see to it that the forces of Napoleon are driven from Spain.
Your most obedient servant
Wellington.
*****
As with most political analysis pieces, the Czar will follow convention and ask what are your thoughts? Whom did you like? Whom did you dislike? Although, don’t write in because the Czar doesn’t care what you think.
A few quotes
Next year, instead of buying TurboTax, I’ll just let the Chinese government file my taxes for me.
—J. Greely, in the comments here.
What is slavery? Well let us suppose Jewish rules applied … It is saying, “You can manage my life better than I can.”
What does government tell us these days? “We can manage your life better than you can.”
It’s time to stop privileging sanity.
The real Nightmare
Just when you thought you were safe from the St. Louis Jesuits:
Missa Meus Parum Equus. ((Or something like that; my Latin’s very rusty.))
(Via the comments at Josh’s place.)