Category: Decline and fall

Today’s quote

Lionel Shriver, via Amy Welborn:

… I was born in the wrong body. I am 5ft 2in. But inside? I feel tall. My soul is tall. I experience myself as 6ft 5in. And because a terrible mistake was made when I was born and ‘assigned’ as this short person, I’m going to force everyone to look me in the eyes by staring 15 inches over my head.

Thoughts for the day

Joseph Moore:

The Great Books are more damaging than helpful when taught outside the traditions that produced most of them. I hate to admit this, as I love the classics, but if they are read as just a bunch of interesting books whose ideas are merely a smorgasbord from which everybody gets to pick what they want and interpret it as they see fit, the Great Books become little more than an excuse for unearned elitism, a closed mind, and the false belief that one is educated simply by having skimmed a bunch of old books.

In context, which is Christendom and the ancient civilizations it saved, the books have something worthy to tell us. This knowledge leads to humility rather than elitism, and destroys the canard that people nowadays are just so much more enlightened and intelligent than those old dead guys. Out of this context, the Great Books are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

(See also “The Sign of the Broken Sword.”)

The Z Man:

Every day a Western leader publicly frets about civil unrest over food and energy shortages, despite the fact that the people have shown no signs of revolt. The reason the politicians keep talking about potential revolts is the same reason Washington is obsessing over fictional insurrections. These are people who think they deserve a revolution.

Housekeeping

Stuff salvaged from posts I never published.

Maus:

In the 21st century, we have reached the point where Pius X’s observation that modernism is the synthesis of all heresies is beyond dispute. We’ve got Arian’s denial of Christ’s divine nature (I’m spiritual, not religious); Pelegian’s salvation by human effort (CRT, taking the vaxx jab); gnosticism (trust the experts because they F*cking Love Science™); and a soupçon of Donatism (evil white cis-het men are evil just like those icky pedo priests). It’s not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.

Continue reading “Housekeeping”

Poetry corner: in memoriam

Joyce Kilmer, updated by John Leo:

Versified and rhythmic non-prose verbal arrangements are fashioned by people of alternative intelligence such as myself, but only the divine entity, should he or she actually exist, can create a solar-shielding park structure from low-rise indigenous vegetative material.

John Leo, a very funny, very serious writer whose columns were among the few things worth reading in the newspaper2 before the turn of the century, died earlier this month. His collection Two Steps Ahead of the Thought Police3 is fun to browse through.

(Via Kim Du Toit.)

Timely question

Robbo:

It’s been a long time now since Uncle paid any attention to the notion that you only buy what you can pay for and that there should at least be some rational relationship between federal outlays and federal revenues. He simply prints the stuff now. (Inflation? Never heard of it!) That being the case, why am I still paying any income tax at all?

(… and Revolver is indeed the best of The Beatles.)

***

Yesterday the high was 89°F. I just looked out the window and saw fat snowflakes blowing in the wind. Yep, it’s springtime in Kansas.

Hmm

Perhaps I shouldn’t have formally disaffiliated myself from all political parties. Dutch:

I don’t really vote any more, but I keep my Repub voter registration. The reason is this—the single strongest factor in vote results is the party breakdown of voter registrations. When a precinct has 65% Repub voters registered, but the Dem wins the precinct with 55%, the game is obvious, for someone who is actually paying attention and knows how things work.

The relationship between voter registration percentages, at the precinct level, and actual vote tally percentages was tight, very tight, until 2008. That’s when precincts tallying 65% or 70% Republican registrations started going for the Dem candidate 50% or more. There’s your break, and that is where Dominion entered the picture, 2008.

This seems all too plausible, but I would like to see the documentation.

What is a conservative?

The Z Man:

From time to time a debate breaks out in outsider politics between those who prefer meta politics and those who prefer activism. The former takes the view that it is ideas that drive history so getting the ideas right is the priority. The latter notes that we live in the real world not the world of ideas. Keeping the groomers out of the schools, for example, is what matters now. You are not going to talk them out of it so you have to get involved in order to solve the immediate problem

This is a debate that has haunted conservative politics and it was something that haunted radical politics until the 20th century. Conservatives never solved the problem and it eventually ruined them. The reason is they committed to participating in a political system that leaves no room for conservative ideas. Once you sign onto the long list of left-wing taboos and mob rule, there is nothing worth defending. Conservatives became the tax collectors of liberal democracy.

William M. Briggs:

Another non-surprising discovery is that [Bätzing] describes himself as a “conservative.” This is so if we take the word in its modern connotation as one who surrenders, gracefully, to the left. Surrender is precisely what he wants, saying he wants the Church to “change.”

Just wondering

Does this distress you?

From the Daily Mail:

A University has slapped a trigger warning on some of Britain’s greatest Romantic poets because their work contains ‘representations of sexism and misogyny’.

Bath Spa University has told students that poems by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Alexander Pope have the potential to ‘disturb’ or ‘distress’.

Is there any writer worth reading, anyone at all, who will not “trigger” some ideologue?

(Via Kim Du Toit.)

Quote of the day

methylethyl, in the comments at Joseph Moore’s place:

Whenever I see study titles, or headlines, that involve “models”– I mentally add “In Legend of Zelda” or something equivalent to every conclusion. It helps put it in perspective. So, you know “model estimates covid spread by vaccination rate in Legend of Zelda” or “Climate model predicts 3-foot sea level rise by 2050 in Kingdom of Hyrule” or “Model predicts 10% rise in heart attack deaths with 5% increase in calorie consumption in The SIMS” Because any time you’re working with a model, you’re in video-game land, not the real world: video-game land is simplified, has far fewer variables, by definition cannot have unexpected events or outcomes, etc.