Facing death — and life — with courage, awareness, and honesty can bring out the best in us and focus our minds on what matters most: gratitude and love. Gratitude for a chance at life, given the biological reality that those hundred billion people who lived before us were, in fact, only a tiny fraction of the many trillions of people who could have been born but were not. The chance encounter of sperm and egg that led to each of us could just as well have produced someone else, and you would never know it because there would be no you to know. Once born, we are each unique, a concatenation of genes and brains with thoughts, feelings, memories, histories, and points of view that can never be duplicated, here or in the hereafter. Our sentience — yours, mine, everyone’s — is ours alone and like no other anywhere in the cosmos. We are given this one chance to live, some four score trips around the sun, a brief but glorious moment in the cosmic drama unfolding on this provisional proscenium. Given all we know about the universe and the laws of nature, that is the most any of us can reasonably hope for. Fortunately, it is enough. It is the soul of life. It is heaven on earth.
Michael Shermer, Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia, 2018.
June 8, 2020
QotD: Death and life
June 7, 2020
QotD: The American education system
Bryan Caplan, “Is Education Worth It? My Opening Statement for the Caplan-Hanushek Debate”, The Library of Economics and Liberty, 2018-02-19.
June 6, 2020
QotD: The Fountainhead
Nora Ephron, The New York Times Book Review (1968), quoted in Reason Online
June 5, 2020
QotD: Recognizing the work of famous painters
#2 If Everyone Looks Like Hobos Illuminated Only By A Dim Streetlamp, It’s Rembrandt
#3 If It’s Something You Saw On Your Acid Trip Last Night, It’s Dali
#4 If The Paintings Have Lots Of Little People In Them But Also Have A Ton Of Crazy Bulls#%t, It’s Bosch
#5 If Everybody Has Some Sort Of Body Malfunction, Then It’s Picasso
#6 Lord Of The Rings Landscapes With Weird Blue Mist And The Same Wavy-Haired Aristocratic-Nose Madonna, It’s Da Vinci
#7 Dappled Light And Unhappy Party-Time People, Then It’s Manet
#8 If You See A Ballerina, It’s Degas
#9 Dappled Light But No Figures, It’s Monet
#10 If Everyone Is Beautiful, Naked, And Stacked, It’s Michelangelo
#11 Dappled Light And Happy Party-Time People, It’s Renoir
#12 If The Images Have A Dark Background And Everyone Has Tortured Expressions On Their Faces, It’s Titian
#13 Excel Sheet With Coloured Squares, It’s Mondrian
#14 If All The Men Look Like Cow-Eyed Curly-Haired Women, It’s Caravaggio
#15 If The Paintings Have Tons Of Little People In Them But Otherwise Seem Normal, It’s Bruegel
#16 If Everyone In The Paintings Has Enormous Asses, Then It’s Rubens
#17 If Every Painting Is The Face Of A Uni-Browed Woman, It’s Frida
#18 If Everything Is Highly-Contrasted And Sharp, Sort Of Bluish, And Everyone Has Gaunt Bearded Faces, It’s El Greco
#19 If The Painting Could Easily Have A Few Chubby Cupids Or Sheep Added (Or Already Has Them), It’s Boucher
Aušrys Uptas, “Someone Created A Funny Guide On How To Recognize Famous Painters And It’s Surprisingly Accurate (19 Pics)”, deMilked, 2019.
June 4, 2020
QotD: Islamofascism
Dislike of George Bush’s foreign policy has led to an automatic support of those perceived to be his enemies. Paradoxically, this leaves the left defending people who hold beliefs that condone what the left has long fought against: misogyny, homophobia, capital punishment, suppression of freedom of speech. The recent reaffirmation by Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie has been met by virtual silence; as has the torture and murder in Iraq of a man who would be presumed to be one of the left’s own — Hadi Salih, the international officer of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. The hard left these days is soft on fascism, or at least Islamofascism.
The religious right in America would, if it could, wind back access to abortion and some other women’s rights. But as far as I am aware, no Christian fundamentalist in the US has suggested banning women from driving cars, or travelling without their husbands’ permission, or forcing them to cover their faces. Contrary to popular opinion, one is not the same as the other.
Pamela Bone, “The silence of the feminists”, The Age, 2005-02-04
June 3, 2020
QotD: From “the media’s” point of view
Bias. Everyone leans a certain way politically. Ideally, that wouldn’t affect the way a reporter covered a city council meeting or a police news conference. But to tell the truth, I’ve probably worked with 10 times more liberal-leaning journalists than conservative-leaning journalists over the past three decades. The profession attracts people with an affinity for underdogs. That has to have some impact on the stories we choose to do and the ones we don’t.
Sensationalism. It depends how you define it. If we talk to the relatives of a murder victim, are we doing it to make money? I hope we’re there because we’re trying help the community grieve together. But let’s face it, that story is going to be well-read so maybe it will make more money in some click-based, page-view algorithm that I’ll never understand.
Negativity. We don’t make cars crash. We don’t bomb civilians. The world can be an ugly place and these things won’t stop if we ignore them. On the other hand, I haven’t met many reporters who would rather cover a parade than a murder trial. Darker stories seem, by their nature, more important. So maybe we are negative.
But I’ve already fallen into the trap of thinking in terms of “us” and “them.” There should be no distinction. It’s here where the media are their own worst enemies. We tend to think we’re infallible because we’re doing God’s work. But if we want more people on our side, we could do a much better job of showing the public what we do, why we do it and how we do it. We like to crow about open courts, but what about open newsrooms?
Maybe we should trust people enough to let them in on the process. To boil it down to one example, if the police shoot an Indigenous man and we decide to mention his race in coverage, we should tell people why we thought it was relevant and maybe admit that we agonize over such decisions. It might not stop the haters but it would at least give “them” a chance to understand “us.”
Cam Fuller, “Do people really hate us and if so, why?”, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, 2018-03-03.
June 2, 2020
QotD: Economic inequality
Steven Pinker, “Twenty Questions with Steven Pinker”, Times Literary Supplement, 2018-02-18.
June 1, 2020
QotD: The right to keep and bear arms
The bureaucrat in question is New York Police Department Commissioner James O’Neill, an individual who clearly believes that his thirty-five years spent plodding unspectacularly up the NYPD chain of command equips him better to tell you what your rights are, and what they are not, than the Founding Fathers of this country and the Framers of its unique social contract.
Well I’ve got news for you, Jimmy, there is no “allow”.
“Every man, woman, and responsible child has an unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any weapon — rifle, shotgun, handgun, machine-gun, anything — any time, any place, without asking anyone’s permission.”* That’s the essential freight of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, the highest law of the land, which you and yours have been illegally suppressing since passage of the 1911 Sullivan Act, named for Tammany Hall’s Timothy Sullivan, perhaps the most corrupt, bigoted politician ever to occupy office in New York.
Since the ability to own and carry weapons unmolested by the State is a fundamental right, there can be no thought of any unit of that state “allowing” it or not “allowing” it. Any government employee who attempts to interfere with that right deserves a long stay in prison among those whose rights he’s violated. Note that I am not saying that peace and civil order are a bad thing, just that it has to be achieved within Constitutional parameters. The Founders put them there for a reason; they had seen the rule of law abused too often by arrogant and brutish British authorities.
* “The Atlanta Declaration”, L. Neil Smith, 1987
L Neil Smith, “There Is No ‘Allow’, Jimmy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-02-18.
May 31, 2020
QotD: Measuring what can be measured
Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics, 2018.
May 30, 2020
QotD: The “Americanization” of German philosophy
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 1987.
May 29, 2020
QotD: Historical ways to deal with your “rage heads”
Set the Wayback Machine to the turn of the 20th century. Lenin’s great insight is that “the masses” will never achieve the proper revolutionary consciousness without a dedicated cadre of hardcore, professional revolutionaries to lead the way. Lenin recognized the prevalence of incipient rage heads in his society — how could he not? — but realized that, absent some guiding hand, they’d flounder around incoherently. At best (from the “furthering the Revolution” point of view), they’d do what his, Lenin’s, idiot brother did: Try to knock off the tsar, and get himself hung for it. Thus, the Bolsheviks.
The problem, though, is that rage heads by definition suffer from poor impulse control. The tiny subset of them that are pure sociopaths (like Lenin), and thus have the icy-veined self-control to hold their fire, have to maintain the very tightest discipline over the Party, or all hell breaks loose. See, for example, the massive street battles in Weimar Germany between the KPD (German Commies) and the SD. Hitler, like Lenin, had to get his rage heads on a tight leash, so he channeled the disciplined sociopaths from the SD into the SS, cooled out the coolable in the SD by buying them off, and shanked the incorrigible remainder. See also the almost-exactly-contemporary Moscow Show Trials.
Note please that this is your best-case scenario for a purely ideological revolution. From Robespierre to Kim Il Sung, the first step in consolidating the Revolution is killing off a large fraction of the original revolutionaries.
The worst-case scenario (again, from the “furthering the Revolution” standpoint) is what the American wannabe-bolshies did / are currently doing. Knowing that you can’t shank or show-trial the dreadlocked poetry majors that make up your goon squad, you try to channel them into academia, the Media, the “arts.” Which fails egregiously, because whatever tenuous contact with reality they once had gets completely severed by those institutions’ social bubbles. They never were very good at holding fire, and now they can’t, literally can’t, see any reason to — life is great here on campus, so why can’t it be that way everywhere?
Severian, “Living in End Times”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-02-28.
May 28, 2020
QotD: The decline and fall of the British aristocracy
The historical way-markers to this implosion are well-documented. The First World War delivered a demographic and psychological blow of unprecedented proportion. Yet the next generation laughed into the void. The Roaring Twenties were a whirl of parties and bankruptcies. Only with the aid of married American fortunes did a carapace of their old values remain intact. The ’60s dissolved what remained of those values in a fug of dope and good tail. Those who didn’t succumb to the new addictions succumbed to old ones they could no longer afford. Titans of the British military like Sir David Stirling — cofounder of the SAS and a descendant of Charles II — gambled away their estates at the hands of unscrupulous Mayfair casino-owners who pretended to be their friends. The aristos were co-opted for their charm — read: money — by a new milieu that promoted the glamour of sexual and social transgression. Blinded by their inherited feelings of self-worth, they never realized they were being used by people who despised them. As a result, nowhere was Britain’s postwar political direction — dubbed “The Management of Decline” — internalized as effectively as among the people who had once driven its ascent.
[…]
How could a species that once steered Britain to greatness now claim the Darwin Award in every passing decade? The simple reason is that British aristocrats are the only people on earth among whom stupidity is not only accepted but prized. As the ultimate proof against meritocracy, it is the ultimate badge of honor. As Stendhal wrote in Le Rouge et Le Noir, “It is not doing something well or badly that is the crime: but doing it at all.”
“Bunky Mortimer III”, “Class Rejects: A Guide to the British Aristocracy”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-03-02.
May 27, 2020
QotD: “Hate speech” is the new secular heresy
Brendan O’Neill, “Why we must win the fight for free speech”, Spiked, 2020-02-26.
May 26, 2020
QotD: Our sister Dominions on the other side of the world
But, of course, the real joke here is on New Zealand. It’s the Dominion too easily forgotten for someone like me to remember to point out how forgotten it is.
What’s interesting about this is that, over the past 40 years or so, New Zealand has probably exercised a more significant political influence on Canada than Australia ever did. New Zealand’s 1980s neoliberal revolution, led by Finance Minister Roger Douglas, helped teach politicians everywhere (and especially in Alberta) tactics for deregulating, privatizing, lowering marginal tax rates, and generally blowing the dust off of planned economies.
Colby Cosh, “An ounce of Canadianity for a less-radical junior Dominion”, National Post, 2018-02-27.
May 25, 2020
QotD: Sociopaths and politicians
The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.
Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy. It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.
“The Z Man”, “Rule by Sociopath”, The Z Blog, 2018-02-21.
