Paul Sellers
Published 15 Jun 2023I see more and more options for sharpening a chisel and yet, with no mechanical means at all, I go from a chisel I have dulled to surgically sharp in about a minute or less.
The fact is I never need to use a grinding wheel, and I was taught to sharpen by the masters of sharpening in my apprenticeship days 58 years ago which I have never strayed from because I found every other option too slow and, dare I say it, DULL and time consuming no matter which method or which machine!
Watch the video and see what you feel.
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October 18, 2023
Sharpening a Chisel in under a Minute | Paul Sellers
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QotD: The role of violence in historical societies
Reading almost any social history of actual historical societies reveal complex webs of authority, some of which rely on violence and most of which don’t. Trying to reduce all forms of authority in a society to violence or the threat of violence is a “boy’s sociology”, unfit for serious adults.
This is true even in historical societies that glorified war! Taking, for instance, medieval mounted warrior-aristocrats (read: knights), we find a far more complex set of values and social bonds. Military excellence was a key value among the medieval knightly aristocracy, but so was Christian religious belief and observance, so were expectations about courtly conduct, and so were bonds between family and oath-bound aristocrats. In short there were many forms of authority beyond violence even among military aristocrats. Consequently individuals could be – and often were! – lionized for exceptional success in these other domains, often even when their military performance was at best lackluster.
Roman political speech, meanwhile, is full of words to express authority without violence. Most obviously is the word auctoritas, from which we get authority. J.E. Lendon (in Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997)), expresses the complex interaction whereby the past performance of virtus (“strength, worth, bravery, excellence, skill, capacity”, which might be military, but it might also be virtus demonstrated in civilian fields like speaking, writing, court-room excellence, etc) produced honor which in turn invested an individual with dignitas (“worth, merit”), a legitimate claim to certain forms of deferential behavior from others (including peers; two individuals both with dignitas might owe mutual deference to each other). Such an individual, when acting or especially speaking was said to have gravitas (“weight”), an effort by the Romans to describe the feeling of emotional pressure that the dignitas of such a person demanded; a person speaking who had dignitas must be listened to seriously and respected, even if disagreed with in the end. An individual with tremendous honor might be described as having a super-charged dignitas such that not merely was some polite but serious deference, but active compliance, such was the force of their considerable honor; this was called auctoritas. As documented by Carlin Barton (in Roman Honor: Fire in the Bones (2001)), the Romans felt these weights keenly and have a robust language describing the emotional impact such feelings had.
Note that there is no necessary violence here. These things cannot be enforced through violence, they are emotional responses that the Romans report having (because their culture has conditioned them to have them) in the presence of individuals with dignitas. And such dignitas might also not be connected to violence. Cicero clearly at points in his career commanded such deference and he was at best an indifferent soldier. Instead, it was his excellence in speaking and his clear service to the Republic that commanded such respect. Other individuals might command particular auctoritas because of their role as priests, their reputation for piety or wisdom, or their history of service to the community. And of course beyond that were bonds of family, religion, social group, and so on.
And these are, to be clear, two societies run by military aristocrats as described by those same military aristocrats. If anyone was likely to represent these societies as being entirely about the commission of violence, it would be these fellows. And they simply don’t.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part III: The Cult of the Badass”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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October 17, 2023
Those problematic “AI girlfriends” – men suck and women suffer because of it
Janice Fiamengo discusses a recent CNN program that woman-splained why young men paying for “AI girlfriends” are yet another way that misogynistic men are harming women:
Last week, CNN aired a must-watch episode with the somber headline, “AI girlfriends are here and they’re posing a threat to a generation of men”. If that sounds as if the show might possibly express some compassion for young men and for the “epidemic of loneliness” referred to in the show, it was not to be. Even an expert, Scott Galloway, profiled briefly on how society is “failing men”, felt the need to express contempt for their alleged conspiracy theories, online misogyny, and even (gasp!) climate change denial. With friends like these …
The segment is fascinating, however, for its revelation of some pundits’ uneasy awareness of male discontent.
[…] The expert is Liberty Vittert, a statistician and professor of data science at Washington University’s Olin Business School. But she might as well be an AI feminist, so predictable was her analysis of the male entitlement allegedly driving the turn to AI girlfriends. Though a statistician, Vittert gave no data about the numbers of men who are paying to access AI content. While the CNN host, Michael Smerconish, seemed open to the possibility of exploring men’s points of view, the expert could only emphasize male failure.
She condemned young men for “choosing AI girlfriends over real women”. The choice means, according to Vittert, that “they don’t have relationships with real women, don’t marry them and then don’t have and raise babies with them”.
But wait, aren’t marrying and raising babies a patriarchal imposition on women — part of the “comfortable concentration camp” that Betty Friedan so memorably indicted?
Professor Vittert says nothing about the decreasing number of young women willing to marry and procreate. Her (botoxed) mouth turns down in disapproval as she explains that the increasing realism of AI is “enabling this entire generation of young men to continue in this loneliness epidemic”. It seems that men prefer sterile self-pleasuring and facile scopophilia to the “hard work” of relationships with real women. Like Joaquin Phoenix’s hapless character, these men, she says, are so fixated on perfection that they “are not able to deal with ups and downs, not only in a relationship, but in life in general”. The glibness of the condemnation is remarkable, though far from unusual.
It’s not clear if Professor Vittert has ever talked to actual men about why some of them (not “an entire generation”) might choose an AI relationship. Does she know any young men who have tried for years without success to find a marriageable girlfriend? Many discover that such prizes are remarkably thin on the ground, many of them unsuitable to be considered as future mothers. Even worse, perhaps, does Vittert know anything about what can happen to an inexperienced young man who pursues the wrong woman or women (there are a couple of heartbreaking examples in Sons of Feminism)? How many times does a young man who has failed repeatedly need to hear that no woman owes him love or sex before he starts thinking that giving up on them might not be a bad idea? Meanwhile, women laugh at his loneliness and drink “I bathe in male tears” mugs.
To give him credit, CNN’s Smerconish asks a few questions about the male point of view: “What’s going on with the women?” Has the power dynamic shifted in their favor? Are they less approachable than formerly? These only scratch the surface, but he’s chosen the wrong expert for such a conversation.
Vittert freely admits that there are now many more women than men at university (thanks, affirmative action!) and that far more women than formerly are choosing career over homemaking (thanks, feminist propaganda!). But those are good things, and young men simply need to adapt. Calling any of this debacle women’s fault, she declares, would not be “the right way to go”.
Why WW1 Cavalry Was Essential On The Battlefield
The Great War
Published 13 Oct 2023The First World War was a catalyst for modern warfare with tanks, poison gas, flamethrowers and more. Cavalry didn’t have a place anymore on the modern battlefield – or so the common misconception goes. In this video we show how useful cavalry still was in WW1.
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An appropriate task for AI – reading the Herculaneum scrolls
Colby Cosh discusses the possibility of finally being able to read the carbonized scolls found in the buried remains of a wealthy Roman’s country villa in 1750:
Unrolled papyrus scroll recovered from the Villa of the Papyri.
Picture published in a pamphlet called “Herculaneum and the Villa of the Papyri” by Amedeo Maiuri in 1974. (Wikimedia Commons)
From the standpoint of fragile human life, a volcanic eruption is the worst possible thing that can happen anywhere in your general vicinity, up to and probably including the detonation of a nuclear weapon.
It goes without saying that pyroclastic flows are also bad for animals or buildings or vegetation … or documents. And yet: as a consequence of the eruption of Vesuvius, there exists a near-complete library of papyrus scrolls retrieved from the buried ruins of a splendid Roman villa.
The “Villa of the Papyri” in Herculaneum was found in 1750 by farmers and was quickly subjected to archeological excavation, an art then in its infancy.
These scrolls, which today number about 1,800 in all, are often described as the only known library to have physically survived from antiquity. The problem, of course, is that they have all been burned literally to a crisp, with only a few easily readable fragments here and there.
The incinerated scrolls are so sensitive that they tend to explode into a cloud of ash at the slightest touch. Occasional attempts to unravel the scrolls — which were rolled very tightly for storage in the first place — have been made over the past 300 years; the chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829), for example, gave it a shot using newfangled stuff called chlorine. But none of these projects ever came especially close to success, and they typically involved destruction of some of the “books” in the library.
In recent years 3D imaging techniques for “reading” documents like this in a non-invasive way have been making great headway. The leader in the field is a University of Kentucky computer scientist named Brent Seales, who in 2015 led efforts to read a fragile, desiccated Hebrew Bible parchment scroll dating to the third or fourth century AD.
The text was from the book of Leviticus, and proved to be a letter-for-letter match with the Torah of today — which is a disappointment to scholars from one point of view, and a finding of awesome significance from another. (It goes without saying that this scroll came from the territory of Israel, near a kibbutz: this is a fact that would, in any other political context, be regarded as a supreme affirmation of indigeneity.)
Seales has been able to “unroll” some Herculaneum scrolls and detect the presence of inks using CT scanning, but reading the pages is a profound challenge. Roman ink was carbon-based, meaning researchers are trying to “read” traces of carbon on carbonized pages rolled up into three dimensions.
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Sherry Wine of Andalucía
The Culinary Institute of America
Published 13 Nov 2012Andalucía is well known for its sherry, a fortified wine made near the town of Jerez. Sherry is a protected designation of origin; and in Spanish law, all wine labeled as “Sherry” must come from the Sherry Triangle, an area between Jerez de la Frontera, Sanlúcar de Barrameda, and El Puerto de Santa María.
For recipes, please visit http://www.ciaprochef.com/andalucia.
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QotD: Representations of sex work in SF
Maybe it’s a relic from when SF was just another facet of Men’s Adventure magazines, or maybe it’s capitalizing on the stereotypical basement-dwelling Geek’s desire to have high quality women to command at the wave of a few credits or gold pieces. Or, more cynically, it’s the desire of Hollywood producers who actually DO have high quality women at their mercy, career-wise, to further normalize the idea that “Sex work is real work” to help smooth away the resistance to their hamfisted efforts on the casting couch.
TV Tropes has a number of entries about this, from “Unproblematic Prostitution” to “High Class Call Girl”. Writers like to call up the imagery of the Geisha, and make their Space Hookers come across as brilliant sexual artists, with additional talents that help the protagonists, such as advanced degrees or connections to corporate executives and high ranking government officials. (Funny how they are not corporate movers and shakers or government officials themselves …). They forget, of course, that Geisha were not actually prostitutes, and only rarely took lovers. There were still actual brothels in Japan for that sort of thing.
Science Fiction has gotten a lot more difficult to write as the frontiers of reality have pushed back against the flights of fantasy. We have had to accept that you can’t get to the moon inside a Victorian upholstered artillery shell, or set foot on the Jungles of Venus. And maybe that’s why a lot of SF in recent decades has turned towards the softer sciences where theories are more prominent than scientific facts, making it simpler to speculate.
However, even in our understanding of society, there are some realities that can’t be ignored. A few of them are listed in the aforementioned “Unproblematic Prostitution” entry. The primary social reality that undermines all of the tropes is that when you commodify sex, you are putting women on sale. Maybe it’s just fractionally, for a few hours out of her lifetime, but when your fantasy/SF hero comes along and waves a few C-notes to get a woman to do what he wants, it’s not the “Combination of Sex and Capitalism” (“… which are you against?” the excuse goes) but the sublimation of Sex TO Capitalism.
“Sex work is real work,” they like to say, but when you turn sex INTO work, it strips it of all of its better qualities. “Do what you love and you’ll never work another day in your life,” is another lie. I’ve known too many artists who go from having a fun hobby to chasing unsatisfying commissions, eventually burning out from endless requests by cretins for illustrations of their vilest fantasies. So the idea that our happy Space Hookers are having fun and getting paid, and what’s wrong with that, turns into burnout in pretty short order, because the kind of guys who go out looking for “That kind of girl” are not interested in the parts of sex that make it as enjoyable as it is for a compatible couple. They don’t have girlfriends for a reason. So the trope that Prostitution is just Sexy Fun Time falls by the wayside in the face of human nature.
SF also likes to postulate that science will make sex consequence free with perfect contraception and cures for all diseases. Writers and Producers fail to see the actual social costs and secondary effects, some of which we are finally running afoul of today, as women are aging out of their “Hookup culture” days and finding themselves alone and with few prospects for a lasting relationship, while at the same time human reproduction is falling below the replacement rate worldwide. And of course, nature being what it is, there will always be new diseases from new planets or new alien races or who knows WHAT our horny young space cadets have been sticking their dicks into. Human biology has less security in its OS than a Commodore 64.
Dr. Mauser, “Space Hookers Must Die!”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2023-07-16.
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October 16, 2023
In ?praise? of the “spoils system”
Glenn Reynolds on the way the US government’s structure changed from the “spoils system” of the early republic to the modern “professional” civil service of today:
Andrew Jackson sitting on a hog on top of a tomb with the inscription “To the victors belong the spoils”.
Political cartoon by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 28 April, 1877.
America’s institutions need structural reform. We need it in academia, we need it in the corporate world, and we need it in government. In all of these fields, the structures, incentives, and institutions that have grown up over time have been destructive, and need to be fundamentally transformed.
I’ll be writing about all of these things down the line, but for now let’s start with government. Though you don’t hear a lot about it on the right, the left is all bent out of shape over the prospect that a Republican administration elected in 2024 might partially deconstruct the existing protected civil service. I, on the other hand, am excited about that prospect, and only wish they’d go farther.
Prior to the adoption of the Pendleton Act in 1883, government employment operated according to the “spoils system”, which meant that hiring in the executive branch was controlled by the Executive. When a new administration came in, everyone’s job was up for grabs, at least potentially. This “rotation in office” had several advantages, which were widely appreciated at the time, and propounded by presidents from Jefferson to Jackson to Lincoln.
Jackson argued that one serving in government for too long would inevitably lose sight of the public interest and come to use office for personal gain. He also maintained that government was or could be made simple enough for men of ordinary ability and experience, so ‘more is lost by the long continuance of men in office than is generally to be gained by their experience’.1
Contrary to popular belief, though, the arrival of a new president didn’t mean that everyone left. Even Andrew Jackson, upon taking office, replaced only about 10% of the federal work force with his own people. Every president understood the value of continuity, and hiring new people is hard work.
But under the spoils system, the fact that the president could replace anyone mean that everyone worked for him. And that meant both that everyone was responsible to the president, and that the president was responsible for everyone in the government, and everything the government did. This is consistent with the Constitution’s vesting clause, which provides that “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” If the executive branch does it, it’s an executive power, and if it’s an executive power it should be controlled by the president.
Contrast this to a “professional” civil service, in which the president does neither the hiring nor the firing, except with regard to a comparatively small number of senior officials. The civil service doesn’t think of itself as working for the president, really, and will happily drag its feet when it doesn’t like the president’s priorities. And when the bureaucracy misbehaves, or fails to perform, the president can, at least to a degree, blame its recalcitrance for the trouble or lack of results that occurs.
Congress is also let off the hook, yet simultaneously weirdly empowered. Congress can blame “the bureaucracy” for bad things, even when those things result from laws that Congress has passed. Then it can turn around and “help” constituents by intervening with the bureaucracy it has rendered dysfunctional, earning gratitude that may be deserved in a narrow sense, but not in terms of the big picture.
Under a spoils system, on the other hand, nobody gets off the hook. If the bureaucracy misbehaves, the president can fire the misbehavers. If Congress is unhappy with what bureaucrats do, they can demand that the president fire them, and make an election issue out of it if they want.
So why did we wind up with a civil service? As is typical, the fantasy of a neutral, efficient, expert civil service was laid next to the reality of a messy functioning government. But, as is also typical, the fantasy in practice turned out to be considerably less appealing than as proposed.
1. Robert Maranto, Thinking the Unthinkable in Public Administration: A Case for Spoils in the Federal Bureaucracy, Administration & Society, January 1998, 623,625.
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The Allied Rape Wave of 1944 – War Against Humanity 116
World War Two
Published 12 Oct 2023Since the earliest days of humanity, where there has been war, there has been rape. This war is no different. As vast armies battle across Europe, the chaos in their wake breeds an epidemic of rape. In its action and its punishment the European rape wave is also highly racialised. It adds up to a storm of suffering.
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After the attacks, Hamas proudly shared photos and videos of the victims
In UnHerd, David Patrikarakos describes what he calls “the week Hamas reinvented horror”:
Israel and Gaza are a Pathé newsreel of violence. Atrocity mounts upon atrocity. Blood smeared on gristle. Festivals mottled with corpses. Women dragged off to be raped and killed. And, now, perhaps the ultimate taboo. “This is the most difficult image we’ve posted”, ran the Daily Telegraph’s front page, reprinting a tweet from the State of Israel’s official account. “As we are writing this we are shaking. We went back and forth about posting this. But we need each and everyone of you to know. This happened.”
The images were of the charred and blackened corpses of babies. Dead bodies are a fixture of my professional life, and I have never seen anything like it. I have never felt that level of nausea. Nothing is beyond the sadism of Hamas. Nothing, now, might be beyond the response — comes the reply from Israel.
Clearly, nothing now is beyond being live-streamed, uploaded, posted, tweeted or shared. Amid the horror and disgust, one thing has struck me above all: the footage has overwhelmingly come from the perpetrators. Yes, there is video shot by terrified and fleeing victims, but scroll through Twitter, Telegram and Instagram and what do you see? Hamas filming themselves barking at cowering Israeli families on the ground; parents covering their children’s eyes, desperate to banish reality; Hamas yanking soldiers off tanks and throwing them into the dirt; Hamas grinning as they parade an elderly woman around in a golf cart.
This conflict has lasted for almost a century, yet what we have seen this week has never been seen before. It is a nasty and brutal war fought over land where ideology and the interminable cycle of reprisals has made its resolution impossible. But it is something else, too. It is perhaps the world’s longest running geopolitical media spectacle. Nothing, not Kashmir nor the Balkans nor any of the other enduring conflicts largely created by empire, has received anywhere near this level of coverage. The depths plumbed by Hamas are unprecedentedly low.
Several factors explain the brutality. First is a perennial of human nature: old-fashioned rage and bloodlust. No one, least of all it seems Hamas, expected the attacks to be so successful. Coming upon hundreds of unarmed Israelis was obviously too much of a temptation for many of these incontinent fanatics.
Then there is the desire to provoke. To get Israel to overreact, but also its neighbours. Broadcast images of dead Palestinian babies onto those feeds and then maybe your Arab allies will start to wonder about the wisdom of their various normalisation agreements with Israel. History is turning away from Hamas. The warming of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia threatens to destroy them forever. If the “Custodian of the Two Holy Places” decides the “Zionist Entity” is actually ok, then it’s only the politically impotent and half-witted Bashar al-Assad beside you, and the Iranians, who are formidable but largely alone.
It’s a basic strategy but a generally successful one. Don’t forget that one of the reasons bin Laden struck the World Trade Center was to get the Leviathan to lash out, which it did. Hamas has limited options. This is perhaps the one card it can play with any real efficacy.
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Remington Model 8 (in .25 Remington)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Feb 2014The Remington Model 8 (and the 81, which is mechanically identical) was an early self-loading rifle design by John Browning, and was produced from 1906 into the 1950s. It was available in 4 calibers initially, all of them being rimless, bottlenecked proprietary jobs — the .25, .30, .32, and .35 Remington. The .35 was the most effective on game and was the most popular seller, with the .25 being the least popular. When the Model 81 was introduced (with a heavier forestock and semi pistol grip), it was also made available in .300 Savage. At that time, the Remington factory also offered to rebarrel existing Model 8s for the .300 Savage cartridge.
The Model 8 was a long-recoil design, something that saw little further development and remains one of the least-common types of action. It is interesting to compare the Remington 8 to the Winchester 1905/07/10 series of rifles that came on the market at almost the same time. Both were well-made and effective self-loaders, but with much different target markets and mechanical systems. Winchester opted to make a replacement for the pistol-caliber lever action saddle rifle, and did so using a simple and somewhat brute-force operating system: direct blowback with a heavy bolt and recoil spring. Remington, on the other hand, wanted to make a big-game rifle with very fast follow-up shot capability, and used the far more complex long recoil locked breech system. Both guns are largely forgotten by the gun-owning public today, although they both were widely used and appreciated by hunters for decades.
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QotD: Differentials of “information velocity” in a feudal society
a) competence is a criterion of legitimacy, and
b) someone other than the king is qualified to judge a king’s competence.Because admitting either, of course, opens the door to deposing the new guy on the same grounds, so unless you want civil war every time a king annoys one of his powerful magnates, you’d best find a way to square that circle …
… which they did, but not completely successfully, because within two generations they were back to deposing kings for incompetence. Turns out that’s a hard habit to break, especially when said kings are as incompetent as Henry VI always was, and Edward IV became. Only the fact that the eventual winner of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VII, was as competent as he was as ruthless kept the whole cycle from repeating.
Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.
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October 15, 2023
“… officials gesture and perform with a constant focus on the optics. The act of governing becomes the act of calculated sloganeering”
Chris Bray explains how politicians and government officials have so damaged their own credibility that significant portions of the population greet each and every news story as pre-calculated propaganda to advance this or that cause. Thanks to their breathtaking cynicism, the swivel-eyed conspiracy theorist of old has more credibility than a high-ranking government official:
The moral and intellectual sickness of the global governing class is infecting us all. They’ve poisoned the public sphere.
In the society of the spectacle, authority has become a display; officials gesture and perform with a constant focus on the optics. The act of governing becomes the act of calculated sloganeering: This vaccine is safe and effective. The use of evidence is a conspiracy theory; disagreement is disinformation. What we learned from the discovery process in Missouri v. Biden is that, yes, the government has manipulated what you’ve been allowed to read and to know. Everyone who gets vaccinated against COVID-19 becomes a dead end for the virus, and don’t you dare say otherwise.
The British journalist Laura Dodsworth told us, with considerable evidence, that governments were using nudge units of social scientists to deliberately crank up public terror over the pandemic, embracing mask mandates as a way of planting a symbol of fear on our faces. We wake up every morning knowing that governments lied for the purpose of manipulating our behavior.
And now we see the devastating cost. I wrote on Substack this week about video of the Hamas attacks on Israel and quickly began seeing the themes of a low-trust society in the comment thread, comments that were echoed all over social media: Why do the authorities want us to see this footage? What’s their game? How did they pull off this psyop? What’s causing them to launch this false flag attack at this exact moment?
The repeated message was about the importance of being skeptical: The war machine is trying to propagandize us into another stupid war!
But what I began seeing — what we all began seeing — wasn’t skepticism, the diligent search for clear evidence, but a wholesale refusal at the political margins to believe anything at all.
The certainty that all images are lies is the psychological mirror of the reflex to believe the news, identically displaying the refusal to parse evidence and make choices. It’s all one thing or the other: Oh, right, Hamas attacked Israel, moron! I GUESS THE SHEEPLE JUST BELIEVE WHATEVER THEY’RE TOLD!
It’s scorched-earth nihilism, the blanket rejection of inconvenient reality. And I understand it. People who’ve been lied to assume that they’re being lied to.
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The Isolation of Army Group North – WW2 – Week 268 – October 14, 1944
World War Two
Published 14 Oct 2023Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt meet at the Moscow Conference and talk about future “spheres of influence” in the Balkans. They also make plans for the future of Poland. In the field the Soviet Red Army completes the isolation of Army Group North and also advances in Hungary and Yugoslavia. The Allies enter Aachen in the west and cross the Rubicon in Italy. The Americans are still fighting the Japanese on Peleliu, and this week also make raids against Japanese airfields ahead of next week’s invasion of the Philippines.
01:00 Recap
01:22 The Moscow Conference begins
03:43 Isolating Army Group North
06:29 Soviet advances toward Belgrade
08:14 The Debrecen Operation
13:20 Horthy and Hungary
14:30 Chiang Kai-shek accuses Joe Stilwell
16:19 American raids on Formosa
19:29 The fight for Peleliu continues
20:01 Antwerp and Aachen
22:01 The Allies cross the Rubicon
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Training and educating for unseriousness
Theophilus Chilton on the many ways our education and entertainment industries inculcate trivial and easily distracted habits in both children and young adults:
Any thinking American has surely observed that our culture and society are growing more and more immature, childish, and unthinking with each passing year. In previous articles, I’ve noted this immaturity, as well as the tendency (neither coincidental, nor accidental) to make Americans more and more dependent upon the Regime for even the most basic needs of life. There are several interrelated cultural and political agendas at work which have systematically worked to create this state of affairs among the American people – and these are largely the work of social and political “progressivism”, the handiwork of the Left. Let’s face it – it is to the benefit of left-wingers to cause as many people as they possibly can to be dumb, distracted, and therefore destitute of the ability to think for themselves or to successfully reason their way into informed opinions about complex social and economic issues.
One of the major ways in which the Left dumbs down the American population is through the public education system. What people need to understand is that progressives are not genuinely interested in our children receiving a thorough and useful education, no matter how much they may squawk about “funding” and whatnot. For the Left, publik skoolz are merely a means by which to propagandize children to a progressive worldview while simultaneously rendering them unable to question the unreality they have been taught. At the same time, additional funding “for schools” is basically just a way for personnel in the managerial superstructure to divide the spoils. The Left has absolutely no desire for children to grow up into college students, and then into full-fledged adults, who can think for themselves, using logic and reason to assess what they see and hear and to come to their own conclusions.
Along these lines, I was reminded of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s article from 2014 in Forbes magazine about the need to put the liberal arts back into the centre of American educational curricula. By this, he means the restoration of the great books of Western civilization, the accumulated wisdom in the sciences and humanities that our culture has built, and the ideological underpinnings upon which Western notions of citizenship, responsibility, and the rule of law are based. In other words, all of the things that the cultural Marxists have spent the last five decades systematically expunging from the American educational system, from top to bottom. Things like Cicero, Plato, the Church Fathers, Shakespeare, Herodotus, Montesquieu, the Founding Fathers, and so much more that I could not possibly list in full. No – these have been purged, replaced by Heather Has Two Mommies and Why Are the Ice Caps Melting?: The Dangers of Global Warming. Progressives want young people (who will then grow up to be old people) who are in the dark about the whats, hows, and whys of our cultural underpinnings and what they all mean for our heritage and traditions. They want your kids to be more interested in emasculating themselves with hormones than they are in reading dusty old books about their own history and heritage. This explains why progressives are so irate about the proposals such as those which remove diversity and LGBT propaganda from classrooms, just to give a couple of examples.
However, I don’t believe we can place the blame solely on the educational system. It surely has not escaped the attention of intelligent Americans that most of what constitutes our entertainment and media establishment is, shall we say, less than cerebral. In fact, much of what is on television, in the movies, and on the radio waves is downright stupid and distracting. It is literally distracting. The content of these media, as well as the advertising regimen by which television viewers are presented with five minutes of show, then three minutes of ads, then another five minutes of show, then another three minutes of ads … it is all designed to train people toward short attention spans that are easily distracted by shiny baubles and other mindlessness. A person who has their brain trained by modern television programming is going to be someone who will not have the patience to sit down with a book and read it. They’ll literally be uneducable beyond simple repetition and mindless obedience.
The state of American journalism is no better. This is illustrated by Gobry’s article above, in which he addressed the attacks upon Republican congressman (nominee at the time it was written) Dave Brat of Virginia, an economics professor who overturned Eric Cantor in the 2014 GOP primary, and who is a genuine constitutionally-minded intellectual who stands on the fundamental principles of our society and constitutional system (meaning, of course, that he’s still a turbonormie but at least his heart’s in the right place). In the course of some statements he made, Brat remarked that government has “a monopoly on the use of force”. For this, he was attacked by nimrods in the news media as some kind of crazy, wacko extremist. There’s just one problem, as Gobry points out,
What’s wrong with this picture, America, is that the concept of the state having “a monopoly on the [legitimate] use of force” is a quotation from the highly reputed and important German sociologist Max Weber, and is a concept that is absolutely basic to our modern understanding of the State. Anyone who has taken polisci 101 or sociology 101 or political philosophy 101 or history of ideas 101 ought to have encountered the phrase. It is about as offensive as saying that donuts have holes …
In other words, journalists – who are supposed to be educated, and who, if they are dealing with the political circuit, should have at least some sort of basic education in political science to go with their typewriting skills – had no clue what Brat was talking about. They didn’t recognize Weber’s (very commonly quoted) dictum; most of them probably don’t even know who Max Weber was. All they saw was what they thought was an opportunity to play the “Tea Party wacko extremist” card because somebody used the words “force” and “government” in the same sentence.
The sad part is that it probably worked with a lot of the low-information voters out there.
A paper in the Journal of Pediatrics by Peter Gray, David F. Lancy, and David F. Bjorklund points to the ever-declining ability of children and teens to engage in independent activity away from direct adult supervision from a very early age:
It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the US are at an alltime high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, a joint statement to the Biden administration that child and adolescent mental health be declared a “national emergency.”
Although most current discussions of the decline in youth mental health emphasize that which has occurred over the past 10-15 years, research indicates that the decline has been continuous over at least the last 5 or 6 decades. Although a variety of causes of this decline have been proposed by researchers and practitioners (some discussed near the end of this Commentary), our focus herein is on a possible cause that we believe has been insufficiently researched, discussed, and taken into account by health practitioners and policy makers.
Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.
With few, if any, opportunities to explore and engage with the world away from parental supervision, it isn’t a surprise that young adults today suffer much higher rates of mental illness, especially anxiety-related afflictions.
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