Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2021

L. Neil Smith, 12 May 1946 – 27 August 2021

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From what might be the penultimate issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, Neil’s daughter Rylla Smith says farewell to her father:

Lester Neil Smith III, novelist and political commentator, gunsmith and musician, visionary and futurist, passed away on Friday, August 27th at Poudre Valley Hospital after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease. He was 75 years old.

A long-time resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, Neil was born on May 12th, 1946 at Mercy Hospital in Denver, Colorado to Maj. Lester N. Smith II and Marie L. Coveleskie Smith.

Neil, known in the world of science fiction as L. Neil Smith or, affectionately, “El Neil”, is survived by his beloved wife, Cathy L.Z. Smith, his daughter, Rylla C. Smith, his brother Roger L. Smith, his nephews Nolan and Travis, and his aunt, Barbara Ohlwiler, as well as countless friends and brothers-in-arms. He was preceded in death by his mother and father.

Neil’s life was one spent perpetually looking forward — toward the future of freedom, of technology, of the continuation of the evolution of the human body, mind, and spirit, and toward the endless sea of stars. As a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist, to discover the unknown in the depths of the seas; this translated naturally in his young adulthood to a thirst for knowledge of the far greater unknown beyond the shores of this world.

Neil had an avid interest in the politics of personal liberty and always stood for what he believed to be right. He had a passion for friendly debate and never shied away from speaking his mind.

In the late 1970s, he wrote the first of his many novels, The Probability Broach, which began a long and prolific career in the burgeoning world of liberty-oriented science fiction, and was the creator of the Prometheus Award, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Memorial services will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado on a date yet to be determined; for more information, please follow Neil’s memorial page on EverLoved.com or contact Rylla Smith at ryllacat@gmail.com.

“And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.” — L. Neil Smith

August 18, 2021

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Wednesday [May 5th] marks the 200th anniversary of the death of the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who was, depending on who you’re listening to, either a wily Corsican bandit who rose to dominate Europe through force and terror, or a messiah of liberalism who de-medievalized the continent. Whichever view you buy, Napoleon’s unique vis viva is still felt strongly in the world today. Any strong history undergrad ought to be able to chart a path from Napoleon through his nephew and successor Napoleon III, to what A.J.P. Taylor called “the period of the German wars” (ending in 1945), to the present moment.

The French Republic still uses Napoleonic touches in its mythmaking, as do its politicians. Sweden’s crown is still worn by descendants of Bernadotte, a general who was of humble birth but proved the ultimate champion of the emperor’s bizarre game of thrones. Napoleon said of his army that every man in it carried a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. By the same token, every ambitious colonel who ever plotted to pull together a squadron of tanks and overthrow a president carries a little portrait of Napoleon I next to his bosom. It may not be fair to say that Napoleon bears part of the responsibility for Hitler, but if there had been no Napoleon there could not possibly have been a Hitler. It is probably one of those “necessary cause” vs. “sufficient cause” things that give people so much trouble.

The bicentenary of Napoleon’s lonely death in custody on a windblown South Atlantic island has given the English an excuse to refresh some of their most precious and whimsical tokens of victory. At Apsley House, the home of the 1st Duke of Wellington, art restorers have been giving special attention to a bronze copy of Napoleon’s death mask, which was taken in plaster after the emperor expired. It’s a mesmerizing totem: to our eyes, the face emphasizes the Italian character that the ci-devant Buonaparte struggled to elude and conceal on the way to becoming master of France. Death masks seem creepy to us today, but they speak in ways a portrait cannot.

Colby Cosh, “Will There Be Cake?”, NP Platformed, 2021-05-05.

July 20, 2021

Kurt Westergaard, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Mark Steyn on the life and work of cartoonist Kurt Westergaard:

Kurt Westergaard and I were successive winners of the Danish Free Press Society’s Sappho Award. I was very flattered to find myself in his company, but couldn’t honestly say I deserved to be. Kurt was one of the bravest men of our time – not because he was inclined to bravery, but simply because, when it was required, he met the challenge and never backed down.

Sixteen years ago Flemming Rose of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten decided to conduct a thought experiment in public after an author casually revealed that he couldn’t find any Danish artist willing to illustrate his book about “the Prophet Mohammed” (as the BBC now routinely styles him). So Flemming called twelve cartoonists and invited them to depict the late Prophet. Kurt Westergaard’s cartoon was the memorable one, and the one you recall as the years roll by. It was a pithy visual jest: Mohammed’s turban as a bomb with a lit fuse. See picture at top right.

“I attempted to show that terrorists get their spiritual ammunition from parts of Islam, and with this spiritual ammunition, and with dynamite and other explosives, they kill people,” Kurt told my old newspaper The National Post a few years back. “I showed this in a cartoon and what happened? They want to kill me, so I think I was right.”

An otherwise courtly, cultured Dane, Kurt Westergaard had a somewhat arresting dress code, preferring le rouge et le noir, the colors of anarchists, although, as a practical matter, it’s hard for a man of advanced years to carry off red trousers, whatever his motivation. He would qualify his pantaloons by explaining that he was not a political anarchist but a cultural one. Still, one can gather from the garb alone that Westergaard was no “right-winger”. Like most of the men and women I have shared a stage with in Europe this century, he was an old Sixties radical sufficiently principled to think the same kind of jokes he’d applied to church, monarchy, parliament and every other societal institution should also be applied to Islam. He never wanted to be a “free speech hero”, but gamely bore the burthen once it had been dropped on him. He certainly never wanted to be world-famous, albeit more so in Mogadishu than Manhattan and Lahore than Los Angeles. It cost him a comfortable retirement, weakened his health, and an ever more craven culture denied him the consolations of monetary exploitation. When I expressed sympathy, he laughed and said he’d do the same cartoon all over again even knowing what he was in for.

The blood lust began with a trio of imams on the make shopping the twelve cartoons (plus three cruder fakes) round the Muslim world, and leaving it to the usual Islamonutters to take it from there: In nothing flat, over two hundred people were dead – which meant that CNN & Co were obliged to cover the story. They did so by modifying Westergaard’s cartoon, with Mohammed’s face pixilated, as if he’d entered the witness protection programme. If only. In reality, it was that dwindling band of people who believe in free speech – and, indeed, free speech itself – that found itself in the witness protection programme.

April 9, 2021

HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, 1921-2021

Filed under: Britain, Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:05

Sad, but not unexpected news this morning as His Royal Highness Prince Philip has died. Along with all of his many earthly titles and awards, he was considered divine by villagers in Vanuatu. Janet Davison reports for the CBC:

HRH Prince Philip was the Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Regiment. In April 2013, he presented the Regimental Colours to the 3rd Battalion.
Photo by Jamie McCaffrey via Wikimedia Commons.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth, died today at 99. He was the longest-serving royal consort in British history.

His death, announced by Buckingham Palace, came more than three-and-a-half years after Philip formally stepped back from public life, a retreat that had been happening gradually for several years.

In an interview in June 2011 with the BBC, the no-nonsense Philip spoke about “winding down” and reducing his workload as a member of the Royal Family.

“I reckon I’ve done my bit so I want to enjoy myself a bit now, with less responsibility, less frantic rushing about, less preparation, less trying to think of something to say,” he said.

His final official public engagement came on Aug, 2, 2017, when he attended a parade of Royal Marines at Buckingham Palace and met servicemen who had taken part in a charity race.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a statement Friday calling Philip “a man of great service to others” who maintained a special relationship with the Canadian Armed Forces and was a patron to more than 40 Canadian organizations.

“Prince Philip was a man of great purpose and conviction, who was motivated by a sense of duty to others,” he said. “He will be fondly remembered as a constant in the life of our Queen – a lifelong companion who was always at her side offering unfailing support as she carried out her duties.”

Through the Queen’s 69 years on the throne, the man whom she had called her “strength and stay” carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements and made nearly 5,500 speeches. He attended events periodically with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family after stepping back from official duties.

Update: Colby Cosh recounts a story about Prince Philip’s WW2 naval career that I’d never heard before:

Socially he was entitled to the style of “royal highness” in his own right, yet he was looked down on by mere aristocrats, and even commoners, who had superior public-school credentials and polish. Marriage to a princess might have been impossible if Philip hadn’t impressed George VI personally. As a junior officer he was well-liked, but strict about shipboard order and neatness. He was said to have a natural intuition for command. If he wanted something done, his word put everything in motion at once.

The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Wallace in December, 1942.
Imperial War Museum photo FL 10546 of collection 8308-29 via Wikimedia Commons.

He performed well throughout the war, but his finest moment as an officer was not common knowledge until Harry Hargreaves, a Royal Navy yeoman who ended up in Westport, Ont., published a memoir of his own service in 1999. Hargreaves served with Philip aboard HMS Wallace, an old “flotilla leader” ship that had been finished in 1919 and modified for speed. Its original shore-bombardment hardware was pulled in favour of anti-aircraft guns and submarine-killing equipment.

Wallace’s and the prince’s great moment came in July 1943 when the ship was assigned to escort Convoy KMF18 from the Algerian harbour of Bône to the beaches of Sicily. As it happens, this convoy carried the First Canadian Division, which Mackenzie King had lobbied to put in action for the first large-scale amphibious invasion of occupied Europe. Wallace was to ward off U-boats on the trans-Mediterranean journey and then protect the landing party from German air attacks.

On the evening of July 8, Wallace was spotted on a clear, bright night and attacked by flights of Stuka dive-bombers. One damaging near-miss, Hargreaves wrote, had everybody prepared to die when the Stukas came back. Philip, the ship’s first lieutenant, quickly cooked up a plan to build a raft and set it afloat with smoke floats attached, hoping it would look enough like the wreckage of a destroyed ship to distract the returning planes.

“It had been marvellously quick thinking,” Hargreaves said, “conveyed to a willing team and put into action as if rehearsed.” But it required Wallace to steam away from the decoy and await its fate in silence and darkness. When the Stukas came back into earshot, the yeoman “screwed up (his) shoulders in anticipation of the bombs.”

The Germans took the bait and attacked the decoy. “Prince Philip,” Hargreaves concluded, “saved our lives that night.” He also saved the ship, which went on to cover the British-Canadian landing near Pachino.

Having survived the scrape, the prince was alive and intact to attend the Royal Family’s Christmas pantomime at Windsor Castle. Princess Elizabeth’s governess, Marion Crawford, found that combat had turned a “bumptious boy” into a “grave and charming man.” But the princess’s already longstanding crush on her distant cousin had not flagged, and never would.

March 16, 2021

“… because who doesn’t like to see both wine snobs and the French taken down a peg or two?”

Filed under: Books, France, History, USA, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys sadly notes the passing of Steven Spurrier, perhaps best known for organizing the “Judgement of Paris” in 1976:

The wine world lost one of its giants this week in Steven Spurrier. He’s one of the very few people who managed to put the subject on the front pages of the world’s newspapers when he organised the so-called Judgement of Paris competition in 1976.

This was a blind tasting judged by the great and good of the French wine world pitting the might of Bordeaux and Burgundy, against California, a place whose wines most Europeans had never even tasted. Surely France could not lose. But thrillingly, and deliciously, it did, with Californian wines coming top in both the white and red categories. It inspired a book and a feature film Bottle Shock starring Alan Rickman as Spurrier. In fact, the media, particularly over here and in the US, has never lost interest. Perhaps because who doesn’t like to see both wine snobs and the French taken down a peg or two?

More significantly, it marked the arrival of American and later Australian, Chilean and other New World wines. Fittingly, I first met Spurrier at a round table tasting for an upmarket Chilean wine. These tastings could be nerve-wracking affairs for new writers. They still fill me with anxiety. I never know what to say as the big beasts of the wine world opine. Sometimes, the cellar rooms where such tastings are often held seem much too small for all those jostling egos.

I was sat next to Spurrier and, much to my surprise, he asked me my opinion on the wines, something I don’t think any other writer had done up to that point. He then engaged with what I said, and said something like, “yes, I think you’ve got it there.” Or words to that effect. It’s quite hard to express how startling this experience was to someone outside the wine world. It’s like Martin Scorsese asking your opinion on film making.

March 3, 2021

QotD: Big game hunting

Filed under: Africa, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.

P.G. Wodehouse, Ring for Jeeves.

January 17, 2021

Las Vegas marks a significant loss

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Saturday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh notes the death of Siegfried Fischbacher, better known as half of the stage magic team Siegfried & Roy:

… Las Vegas, as we all know, is a special place in which ordinary moral writ and aesthetic judgment have greatly diminished force. Vegas is honouring Siegfried & Roy this week, and will recognize them forever, as city fathers. Even Penn Jillette, a fellow magician whose career has been a crusade against old-school schmaltz and glitz and other Teutonic concepts that Siegfried & Roy embraced, inscribed a small tribute to his colleague.

Siegfried & Roy were true pioneers in transforming Vegas into a full-spectrum entertainment capital. Their basic function was not to parade oppressed animals, or to do conjuring tricks. Considered as “magicians,” did they have a signature effect? Or is the truth that prop-heavy, mechanistic stage magic is just relatively easy to combine with a wildlife act that also travels poorly?

No, their mission was to extract money from the family members of degenerate gamblers and, gosh, were they good at it. When they started out at the New Frontier hotel in 1981, Las Vegas was still its postwar self — an anarchic watering hole and sybaritic paradise mostly for adult men, associated with a boozy, jocular style of entertainment that was rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror of the culture. (Siegfried & Roy were never trendy, exactly, but being unique was enough.)

Almost no one can have consciously envisioned a world in which gambling in various forms regained wide, post-Protestant social acceptance. That gambling would one day become legal everywhere at an astonishing pace would have been seen as a nuclear-grade threat to the literal existence of the city. The nightmare has arrived, but Vegas is bigger and more economically sound than ever. Siegfried & Roy helped reshape the industrial nucleus of a city you don’t even have to like gambling — or showgirls — to enjoy.

QotD: Hunter S. Thompson

Filed under: Books, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

HST killed himself. He never would have “turned his life around” — that’s a hard thing to try when the room’s been spinning for 40 years. Depression? Wouldn’t be surprising. A bad verdict from the doc? Wouldn’t be surprising. A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period. I feel sorry for him, but I’ve felt sorry for him for years. File under Capote, Truman — meaning, whatever you thought of the latter-day persona, don’t forget that there was a reason he had a reputation. Read Hell’s Angels. That was a man who could hit the keys right.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-02-21

November 25, 2020

Jan Morris, RIP

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

By an odd co-incidence, I began reading the third volume of Morris’s British Empire trilogy just last night and today I discovered that she recently died at age 94. The particular edition I have has Morris’s original male name on the cover, but her female name in the “note about the author”:

Jan Morris, who died last week at the age of 94, may have lived one of the more various and accomplished lives on record. She was, in turn, a soldier, a newspaper correspondent with a number of scoops to her name, a fine memoirist, and a writer of books whose scope encompassed the world.

Any dutiful obituarist must also note something else which happened fifty years ago. It is likely for ever to feature in the first paragraph, if not the first line, of everything written about Morris. She was born a man, named James by her parents, and underwent what her publishers and profilers term “a change of sexual role” in 1972 – back when such a thing was a rarity and rather dangerous to accomplish.

I hope to leave that subject aside for a moment while contemplating her place in letters. By the end of her long life, Morris had become something of a national treasure and an institution. Her quixotic obsessions – a personal, mythical interpretation of the Welsh side of her family and her home in that country, and the late First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher – became the subject of stories shared by friends, editors and admirers.

She gave wise and funny interviews to the papers about savouring mussels without dignity and why whether what one is doing is kind ought, in a good world, to be the modest test applied to action.

Other profilers note her long companionship with Elizabeth (née Tuckniss) – first through marriage, then a legally-divorced close friendship, and finally a civil partnership, with the ceremony witnessed by a local couple who afterwards invited the two for tea. Elizabeth survives Jan, but a visiting journalist or two was shown the headstone which is planned for both of them. They will lie on a Welsh island they owned in the Dwyfor, a river that runs by their home. The stone reads: “Here lie two friends, at the end of one life”.

These are beautiful stories, but they should not retroactively colour in fully our impressions of Morris. Nor should a sense – repeated in some otherwise careful obituaries – that as “James”, Morris’s “written voice always sounded certain”. Whereas as Jan, her writing grew more introspective and aware of the ways that time and tide conspire to decay the facades of men as much as they do institutions and places. This was exhibited notably in her Pax Britannica trilogy, which chronicled Britain’s imperial decline.

September 21, 2020

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RIP

Filed under: Law, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren notes the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at a particularly fraught moment in US political history:

US Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia.
Screencap from a report by CBS News.

The death of the prominent American jurisprude, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will be this morning’s example. I noticed that a favoured rightwing blog said, “Breaking news. Try to show some respect for the dead.” This comes more easily to a human being, if he is at least superficially decent. Self-discipline may make it possible for others.

Mrs Ginsburg was toward the left side of the Supreme Court in Washington, in her rulings and often articulate dissents, but I loved her anyway. So did the late Antonin Scalia, who when he died inspired real grief to exponents of the other side. They were notorious buddies, Ginsburg and Scalia. They were more than willing to hear each other out; neither was a hothead. Both were deeply informed about Yankee law, and human law generally, unlike most judges. They could discuss its principles at a high level; and at a low, with a sense of humour. Their mutual respect set an example in their vicinity, claquers who included other Court members. They were both utterly worth having at their stations.

One wonders if those days are gone, for the foreseeable future, when some degree of civilization was possible in legal and political debate. When I look instead at electoral campaigns, in which knowing, malicious lies are repeated by both sides, and both are trying to raise the temperature (I won’t say “equally”), I see something larger than the current political issues. We cannot have public order if this continues; only tyranny can be imposed by one side. Mistakes are being made by “my side,” when we forget that daily life requires negotiation. Or rather it doesn’t, if one prefers civil war.

April 17, 2020

“Diary Of An Unknown Soldier” – Lost in the Great War – Sabaton History 063 [Official]

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Media, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Sabaton History
Published 16 Apr 2020

The bells rang on Armistice Day 1920 in the 11th hour, and two minutes of silence followed. One minute for the soldiers that had fought in the Great War and had come back. The second for those who did not. Those unfortunate souls that had been left behind. They had died like so many others, but had been denied a final resting place due to the violence of war. They had vanished, without a trace, without an identity. Those men where the Unknown Soldiers.

Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory

Listen to “Diary of an Unknown Soldier” on the album The Last Stand:
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Watch the official lyric video of “Diary Of An Unknown Soldier” here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jhkz5…

Check out the trailer for Sabaton’s new album The Great War right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCZP1…

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Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Broden, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound Editing by: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory

Archive by: Reuters/Screenocean https://www.screenocean.com
Music by Sabaton.

Sources:
– National Library of Scotland
– National Library of France
– Imperial War Museum: Q 10378, Q 100373, Q 57227, Q 100624, Q 53727, Q 29155, ART 3991 a, Q 109517, Q 100928, Q 100699, Q 100913, Q 45814, Q 23706, Q 14963, Q 31518, Q 31494, RAF-T 3129, Q 31514, Q 909, Q 87441, Documents.5323, Q 100486, Q 48929A, Q 78614

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From the comments:

Sabaton History
2 days ago
Something different this time. Since we already have two episodes about the fighting in the Argonne, we thought this time we’d talk about the sacrifice and the legacy of the “Unknown Soldier”. Of those who fought and died but were not fortunate enough to have a last known resting place. We hope you still enjoy the episode!

April 3, 2020

QotD: Canadian senators

Filed under: Cancon, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I heard that Sen. Tommy Banks had died of leukemia at age 81, I thought maybe the newspaper notices ought to be left to the people who knew him better — and in Edmonton that number comes to thousands upon thousands of people. I interviewed Banks a few times as a young political reporter. I think every such person has learned the procrastinator’s trade secret that if you’re doing an issues story, senators are easier to get hold of on a short deadline than elected MPs, and a lot easier than cabinet ministers, especially if you’re an unknown lightweight.

This, at least, used to be the case. I am not sure whether it applies to the Brave New Senate that now exists after the somewhat cynical appointments of Stephen Harper and the experimental renovations of Justin Trudeau. But if you have ever wondered why political beat writers and old codger columnists often have surprisingly positive sentiments about the Senate, which nine-tenths of the people reading these words despise, this is probably one reason: a senator might call you back soon enough to be of some use.

And there’s another, related reason. In phoning a senator to chat about issues because you can’t get a “real” politician to return your inquiry, you would (or, anyway, I would) sometimes find surprisingly strong evidence that the Senate quietly lives up to its original constitutional promise. Spared the effort of endless electioneering and toilsome constituent service, senators do have time for deep study of projects and problems, and some freedom to develop independent opinions. I do not say that most of them use the time and the freedom, but it was, and I’m sure it still is, fairly easy to avoid the duds.

Colby Cosh, “R.I.P. Senator Tommy Banks, a figure from Edmonton’s pantheon”, National Post, 2018-01-26.

January 16, 2020

“… he returned to settle in a 250-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire which he named ‘Scrutopia'”

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Barbara Kay remembers Sir Roger Scruton:

Scruton’s breadth of knowledge was astonishing. None of his enemies could dispute that. He wrote whole books with complete authority on religion, architecture, opera, the environment, Islam, philosophy. But running through them all was a guilt-free love for, and fidelity to his — our — cultural inheritance. He loved his own home, England, and he would not repudiate it for its disfiguring historical warts, which seemed to preoccupy almost everyone else. It was Scruton who gave us the word “oikophobia” — hatred of one’s home — which is the hallmark of progressivism. He was out of sync with the hey-hey-ho-ho-western-civ-has-got-to-go zeitgeist. It didn’t help that he was the son of a lowly schoolmaster and had gone to the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe, a selective public high school.

Sir Roger Scruton
Photo by Pete Helme via Wikimedia Commons.

Feeling isolated, like Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens before him, Scruton drifted “across the pond” to breathe the friendlier air of the last western redoubt where conservative thought finds a welcoming hearth. From 1992 to 1995, he taught a philosophy course at Boston University, and he spent a second stint in America from 2004 to 2009. But the pull of his beloved England proved too great, and he returned to settle in a 250-year-old farmhouse in Wiltshire which he named “Scrutopia.”

[…]

Among those who expressed their gratitude to Scruton in his final year were the governments of Poland and Hungary, who garlanded him with honors for the role he’d played in overthrowing the Communist regimes that had blighted their countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This recognition followed his receipt of the Czech Medal of Merit (First Class), presented to him by Vaclav Havel in 1998. At great risk to himself, Scruton had smuggled banned books across the Iron Curtain and helped dissidents organize an underground university, even arranging for degrees to be awarded by the Cambridge theology department. Among his other achievements, he was on the right side of history.

I cherish the memory of a brief conversation I had with Scruton after his Ottawa talk, in which he had expanded on the idea of decency, a concept of great interest and importance for me, especially in retrospect, for Scruton was himself a supremely decent man, although that did not save him from the postmodern jackals. I remember he said decency was easy to regulate in small towns, because you can’t be happy in a small town without a willingness to conform to standards. But these standards aren’t written down. There is no need. Everyone knows what they are. You know you’ve transgressed them when you receive disapproving glances or are cold-shouldered.

Compelled conformity — not legislated, God forbid, but enforced by social pressure — looks stifling to progressives, but in its own way it can be a great comfort, knowing the rules of what is and isn’t decent, and, through them, belonging. We all want to belong, but healthy belonging is sensitive to scale. We’re not made for globalization. We’re made for homes and homelands. If people don’t have homes to keep them rooted, feeling they belong in a good way, they will find fake homes that are tethered to ideas and theories, and then they often belong in a bad way. These are Scrutonesque musings.

Conformity and its effects, good and bad, absorbed Scruton. He once described the entire trajectory of his life as a constant movement toward “that impossible thing: an original path to conformity.” Like so many other of his gnomic utterances, it forces one to stop and think, really think, about what it means. And you know it means something worth thinking about because Roger Scruton never thought or spoke or wrote bullshit. He left that to his critics.

January 14, 2020

Sir Roger Scruton, RIP

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Douglas Murray on the life and work of the British philosopher:

Doubtless there will be some talk in the coming days of “controversy”. Some score settling may even go on. So it is worth stressing that on the big questions of his time Roger Scruton was right. During the Cold War he faced an academic and cultural establishment that was either neutral or actively anti-Western on the big question of the day. Roger not only thought right, but acted right. Not many philosophers become men of action. But with the “underground university” that he and others set up, he did just that. During the ’70s and ’80s at considerable risk to himself he would go behind the Iron Curtain and teach philosophy to groups of knowledge-starved students. If Roger and his colleagues had been largely leftist thinkers infiltrating far-right regimes to teach Plato and Aristotle there have been multiple Hollywood movies about them by now. But none of that mattered. Public notice didn’t matter. All that mattered was to do the right thing and to keep the flame of philosophical truth burning in societies where officialdom was busily trying to snuff it out.

Sir Roger Scruton
Photo by Pete Helme via Wikimedia Commons.

Having received numerous awards and accolades abroad, in 2016 he was finally given the recognition he deserved at home with the award of a Knighthood. Yet still there remained a sense that he was under-valued in his own country. It was a sense that you couldn’t help but get when you travelled abroad. I lost count of the number of countries where I might in passing mention the dire state of thought and politics in my country only to hear the response “But you have Roger Scruton”. As though that alone ought to be enough to right the tiller of any society. And in a way they were right of course. But the point did always highlight the strange disconnect between his reputation at home and abroad. Britain has never been very good with philosophers of course, a fact that Roger thought partly correct, but his own country’s treatment of him was often outrageous. As events of the last year reiterated, he might be invited onto a television or radio programme or invited to a print interview only for the interviewer to play the game of “expose the right-wing monster”. The last interview he did on the Today Programme was exactly such a moment. The BBC might have asked him about anything. They might have asked him about Immanuel Kant, or Hegel, or the correct attitude in which to approach questions of our day like the environment. But they didn’t. They wanted cheap gotchas. That is the shame of this country’s media and intellectual culture, not his.

But if there was a reason why such attempts at “gotchas” consistently failed it was because nobody could reveal a person that did not exist. course Roger could on occasion flash his ideological teeth, but he was also one of the kindest, most encouraging, thoughtful, and generous people you could ever have known. From the moment that we first met – as I was just starting out in my career – he was a constant guide as well as friend. And not just in the big things, but in the small things that often matter more when you’re setting out. Over the years I lost count of the number of people who I discovered that he had helped in a similar way without wanting anyone to notice and expecting no reward for himself.

Theodore Dalrymple describes him as “swimming always against the tide”:

He showed great moral courage throughout his career, swimming against the intellectual tide of his time regardless of the deprecation, insult, denunciation, and even hatred directed at him. For a long time, his very name among much of the British intelligentsia was a byword for political atavism or evil, as if he had been a radical advocate of tyranny and pogroms rather than a defender of freedom and civilized values. At the time of his coming to public notice, much of the intelligentsia refused to believe that a highly gifted and knowledgeable man could also be a conservative. Their own rejection of all that was traditional seemed so self-evidently right to them that they thought that the only possible explanation for someone who valued tradition was obtuseness, moral turpitude — or both.

Scruton’s work was so broad-ranging that the term Renaissance Man seems hardly inappropriate. He published books on Kant and Spinoza, on Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, on the aesthetics of music and architecture, on animal rights, on wine, on hunting, on the importance of culture, on the nature of God, on man’s relations with animals, and on many other subjects. He wrote novels and short stories of distinction, and two operas. The words of Dr. Johnson’s epitaph for Oliver Goldsmith come to mind: he left scarcely any style of writing untouched, and touched nothing that he did not adorn.

This is not to say that many people, or indeed anyone, would agree with all that he wrote, scarcely to be expected in view of his immense output. He accepted disagreement with equanimity, as the natural and laudable condition and consequence of freedom. Unlike many of his detractors, who affixed labels to him and then believed in their veracity, he was fair-minded to those with whom he disagreed and whose ideas he believed had had a disastrous effect on Western society. In the two editions of his book about thinkers of the New Left, for example, he praised them generously for whatever he considered praiseworthy in them. He paid them the honor of reading their work with attention, trying hard to decipher what it meant (by no means easy, given their frequent resort to high-sounding, multisyllabic verbiage), and refuting what was sufficiently intelligible to be refutable.

January 12, 2020

Neil Peart, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was very saddened to see the news, but it explains why the band retired:

Rush in concert, Milan 2004.
Photo by Enrico Frangi, via Wikimedia Commons

Neil Peart, the virtuoso drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January 7th, in Santa Monica, California, at age 67, according to Elliot Mintz, a family spokesperson. The cause was brain cancer, which Peart had been quietly battling for three-and-a-half years. A representative for the band confirmed the news to Rolling Stone.

Peart was one of rock’s greatest drummers, with a flamboyant yet precise style that paid homage to his hero, the Who’s Keith Moon, while expanding the technical and imaginative possibilities of his instrument. He joined singer-bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Rush in 1974, and his musicianship and literate, philosophical lyrics — which initially drew on Ayn Rand and science fiction, and later became more personal and emotive — helped make the trio one of the classic-rock era’s essential bands. His drum fills on songs like “Tom Sawyer” were pop hooks in their own right, each one an indelible mini-composition; his lengthy drum solos, carefully constructed and packed with drama, were highlights of every Rush concert.

In a statement released Friday afternoon, Lee and Lifeson called Peart their “friend, soul brother and bandmate over 45 years,” and said he had been “incredibly brave” in his battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. “We ask that friends, fans, and media alike understandably respect the family’s need for privacy and peace at this extremely painful and difficult time,” Lee and Lifeson wrote. “Those wishing to express their condolences can choose a cancer research group or charity of their choice and make a donation in Neil Peart’s name. Rest in peace, brother.”

A rigorous autodidact, Peart was also the author of numerous books, beginning with 1996’s The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa, which chronicled a 1988 bicycle tour in Cameroon — in that memoir, he recalled an impromptu hand-drum performance that drew an entire village to watch.

Peart never stopped believing in the possibilities of rock (“a gift beyond price,” he called it in Rush’s 1980 track “The Spirit of Radio”) and despised what he saw as over-commercialization of the music industry and dumbed-down artists he saw as “panderers.” “It’s about being your own hero,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. A compromise is what I can never accept.”

Update: At AIER Peter C. Earle pays tribute to Peart’s life and work.

The announcement of the death of Rush drummer Neil Peart came as a tremendous shock. Having only retired about four years ago, so many fans of Rush (myself included) had convinced ourselves that this was a temporary hiatus, and that in a year or two – eventually, at any rate – there would be an announcement of a new album, a short tour, or some other project. Surely musicians of their virtuosity and passion couldn’t stay away from the studio or stage for long. But now we know we were wrong, and we know why.

It was revealed that Neil had been battling a brain tumor for over three years. Characteristically, he, his family, and friends (among the closest of whom, Rush vocalist/bass player Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson) upheld his desire for privacy. I haven’t done the math as to whether Neil’s illness was likely a causative factor in the decision to retire, or whether it seems to have come along not long after the decision to retire.

[…]

In his role as the lyricist of Rush, Peart took on such topics as pernicious nationalism (“Territories”), mass hysteria (“Witch Hunt”), the division between constructive and destructive belief (“Faithless”), the fall of Communism (“Heresy”), conflict and power (“The Trees”), the horrors of totalitarian rule (“2112,” “Red Sector A”) and many allusions to individual liberty (“Tom Sawyer,” “Anthem,” “The Analog Kid,” “Finding My Way,” “Caravan”). He did so via lyrics which artfully and passionately evinced those sentiments; sentiments which early on suggested Objectivist perspectives, but over time developed into what he called “Bleeding Heart” libertarianism:

    I call myself a bleeding heart libertarian. Because I do believe in the principles of Libertarianism as an ideal – because I’m an idealist. Paul Theroux’s definition of a cynic is a disappointed idealist. So as you go through past your twenties, your idealism is going to be disappointed many many times. And so, I’ve brought my view and also – I’ve just realized this – Libertarianism as I understood it was very good and pure and we’re all going to be successful and generous to the less fortunate and it was, to me, not dark or cynical. But then I soon saw, of course, the way that it gets twisted by the flaws of humanity. And that’s when I evolve now into … a bleeding heart Libertarian. That’ll do.

Neil, through his lyrics, managed to do what so many lyricists and writers – even, perhaps especially, so many libertarian intellectuals – fail to do: make liberty neither an alien fixture, a flat slogan, or a utopian slog. It is a way of thinking and living, and one which not only doesn’t ignore, but embraces the flaws and frailty of humanity, tempering realism with hope and optimism.

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