What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.
No, It merely makes of them mollycoddles, weaklings, and in some important ways barely or not even human. That’s the effect of a safe space, to render those who hide in them weak and ignorant.
There are things worse than the safe space, though. That only weakens your brain by making sure you never have to reason about or argue in defense of your beliefs. And, at least, this moral weakening and brain-deadening thing is voluntary. Much worse is the movement to restrict free speech and to manipulate speech for political ends. This does what the safe space does, of course, but a simple saunter down memory lane shows it does so much more. Want to starve ten or twenty or fifty million of your own people to death? Want to gas a few million members of a despised minority? Want to hack to death half a million countrymen? Job one is attack speech.
Don’t you find it odd that your teachers have led you away from any history that would tend to show you that destruction and perversion of free speech is generally followed by massive murder? Don’t you find it a little odd that they place offending someone as worse somehow than starving, gassing, or shooting them to death?
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
January 21, 2020
QotD: “Safe spaces” do not produce strong people
January 20, 2020
QotD: Maturity and wisdom
Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.
January 19, 2020
QotD: Bad fiction writers often know little or no economic theory
It is clear that she comes from an academic background, since she thinks that shelves are allotted by order of “importance.”
This is a problem for me as a reader often because I run into a lot of writers like her. It’s less important in things like romance, though even there it can get weird, like when some authors assume that the best thing possible in the Regency would be being a duke AND a doctor. (Head>desk, repeat.) This is because they misunderstand the relative wealth and importance of earning a living in the professions.
But there are a ton of books in mystery that hit the wall. Those that require understanding of how the world worked. So the economics these writers write are what you expect from exquisitely maleducated people. They learned sociology and various grievance studies. So you know, factories are bad places where people are forced to work in terrible conditions — for the 21st century. None of these darlings has the slightest idea what actual conditions were like at farms in the Regency, say — and do not even get health care or counseling, and are probably totally deprived of free ice cream.
I have now walled mysteries, some romances and a few fantasies, because they assume people who build and run factories are “evil exploiters” and villains. (As opposed to you know not building anything and letting the peasants starve.)
I’ve walled even more of them when the villain becomes “reformed” and just gives his whole fortune away to people who probably drink it away within a week and, presumably, dies in a gutter shortly thereafter.
In science fiction and fantasy this is even more painful. You’ll have entire worlds getting paid for things, without it making any sense, since there is no galactic agreement on money, no universally agreed upon standard, nothing that makes whatever they hand you worth anything. We have entire worlds paid for things that make no sense to transport inter-world with the money existent at that time. You have “exploited” groups, that you can’t figure out why anyone would exploit or what sense it makes.
Then there is the soc jus in these worlds, which often consists of upending historic injustices by creating worse injustices and, oh, yeah, incidentally making it impossible for the economics to function and starving everyone in the world. If you’re going to do that call it Planet Venezuela already, okay?
And don’t get me started on the economics of worlds with magic, where monetizing magic is somehow either wrong or no one ever thought of doing it (because everyone in that world is born mentally impaired.)
Sarah Hoyt, “A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Supply and Demand”, According to Hoyt, 2019-11-06.
January 18, 2020
QotD: Men and talking
Also, because many women tend to over-analyze, they assign all sorts of deep meaning to trivial gestures and then demand explanations. Sometimes a rose is just a rose and five minutes of silence is just a man thinking about what he has to do at work tomorrow. You want to get a man to talk? It’s not hard. Ask him to explain what’s going on in a UFC fight or what his favorite sexual fantasy is and you’ll have trouble getting him to shut up.
John Hawkins, “5 Things Women Do That Secretly Annoy Men”, PJ Media, 2012-08-23.
January 17, 2020
QotD: The Bible
In my former life, when I entertained grand schemes, I dreamt of publishing a multi-volume revision of that Variorum, with the latest scholarship, but attached to the same old, resonant King James text. (This project could as well have been mounted on the explicitly Roman, and similarly magnificent, Douay-Rheims.)
There are now, in print, more than one hundred alternative English translations of the Bible, and the reader who buys, say, the top twenty, to compare them, is wasting time. He could actually save time by mastering the original languages. I rather think it was the Devil’s idea, to undermine the simple Christian’s confidence in Scripture by means of multiple translations, and innumerable petty and irrelevant distractions.
The New English Bible‘s first volume, a translation into “modern idiom” of the New Testament, was published in 1961. It is dated now in a way the KJV will never be, and has in fact been succeeded by the many other “improved” — and desperately flawed — ever more “modern” editions, including those which intentionally misrepresent the original texts to keep up with the latest “gender” abominations. Yet even when it first appeared, T. S. Eliot could say that the new translation “astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial, and the pedantic.”
That criticism holds, so far as I can see, for every modern-language “update” of scripture and liturgy. The hard truth is that the medium of contemporary language is incapable of conveying the substance we require.
Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set.
David Warren, “A rant”, Essays in Idleness, 2017-12-13.
January 16, 2020
QotD: Progressive hatred
One reason for this, obviously, is that many people attracted to the Left are mentally unstable, so their politics are just a vehicle for their pathology. Many of the Antifa people, for example, have no coherent political thoughts. They just like being crazy on the streets and causing mayhem. This is the type of person who was attracted to the riots that used to follow the big economic summits. There was never any purpose to their rampages, other than the thrill of smashing things and causing mayhem.
Another more important reason for the rage is the nature of leftist politics in our post-national age. Being on the Left no longer means joining a group that has a tangible enemy, against whom the group throws themselves. The days of unionist, socialists and communists operating as collectives are gone. Even the post-modern movements like climate change and sexual politics is atomized. Much of it is backed by the sorts of people the Left used to oppose like rich people and business.
The Z Man, “It’s Personal”, The Z Blog, 2019-11-12.
January 15, 2020
QotD: Louis XIV and the first accurate maps of France
Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.
January 14, 2020
QotD: Drinking in Upper Canada
Nor was the early Canadian drinker certain of what was in his drink. McBurney and Byers offer a few recipes of the day. Wisely they note: “These old recipes are presented for interest only; they should not be used.” I’ll say. Their recipe for port calls for 28 gallons of cider, 9 gallons of whiskey, 15 pounds of white sugar, as well as cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, ground cochineal, carbonate of potash, and — if necessary — two ounces of ground alum. I don’t think that’s the way they make it in Portugal. There are no grapes, for starters. I’m trying to imagine how I’d feel the next day. Now I’m trying to stop imagining how I’d feel the next day.
Nicholas Pashley, Notes on a Beermat: Drinking and Why It’s Necessary, 2001.
January 13, 2020
QotD: Early civilizations and the barbarians
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
January 12, 2020
QotD: Progressive snobbery is part of the kink
Yes, they do. For liberals, the distinction between the “dumb masses” and their enlightened selves renders life meaningful. Disdain for ordinary folks is not just an ancillary trait of liberalism. It is fundamental to the its nature.
At its heart, liberalism is a gnostic religion, and the essence of that religion is the believer’s faith that he possesses the means of changing the world for the better. The belief that the world must be changed requires there to be a mass of individuals whose lives are in need of change. Following this logic, it is the liberal, not those deplorables in need of change, who knows what must be changed. For liberals, there must be a mass of people in need of this knowledge for life to make sense.
Above all, liberalism is a hubristic faith. Its followers share the fatal flaw of pride in their own intellectual capacity. This is why liberalism appeals so strongly to those in the knowledge trades: teachers, journalists, writers, psychologists, and social workers. The sense of “knowing more than others” is its strongest attraction – particularly to the young, who otherwise know so little. Liberalism confers, or seems to confer, almost immediate power and authority to those who embrace it.
The left’s obsession with superior knowledge runs through its entire history. As Woodrow Wilson remarked, the “instrument” of political science “is insight. A nice understanding of subtle, unformulated conditions.” Lyndon B. Johnson thought “a president’s hardest task” is “to know what is right.” And the most hubristic of all is Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Yes, we are wonderfully bright, and we’ve been waiting eons for ourselves to appear.
Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.
January 11, 2020
QotD: “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
That’s not remotely what happened. Rather, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, as enacted by Congress, has long deemed Sodomy, which covered more than just homosexual conduct, as a criminal offense potentially carrying severe penalties. Moreover, the procedure for entering into service demanded that prospective recruits deny or admit to homosexual leanings, in writing, which admissions would usually bar the man or woman from service. Of course, back when the shame of being publicly homosexual was very great, people who wanted to join the armed forces simply lied about it and then, as a general rule, hid it while in service.
Liberal Democratic President Bill Clinton, acting in his capacity as Commander in Chief of the armed forces, simply ordered that prospective recruits were not to be asked if they were gay or had homosexual leanings, and were not to volunteer the information. That, young Millennial, is where DADT came from; it came from a liberal, liberally motivated, and pandering to his liberal base.
Did you know that? No? Well, then; ask yourself, WHY didn’t you know?
What the loss of history does to you, dear Millennial, is that it robs you of the ability to reason your way to cause and effect. Never mind the crappy to the point of idiotic decisions and programs this might lead you to support, consider what it does to you as a person. What, after all, is the effect of shielding people from contrary opinions by designating and maintaining, under color of law or regulation, “safe spaces” for this or that minority? Does it make them stronger? Better able to deal with a harsh world? Does it change that objective world to something less harsh? No and no and no; it does none of that. Do you gain grit in a safe space? Ha. Do you learn endurance in a safe space? Oh, please.
Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.
January 10, 2020
QotD: Deciding what is “newsworthy”
The idiosyncracies of historical remembrance of battle do not hinge alone on the presence of a Socrates or Teddy Roosevelt in the ranks. Sometimes there are wild cards of culture and politics as well. In this case and at this time, the fact that Israelis fit the stereotype of affluent and proud Westerners abroad while the Palestinians were constructed as impoverished and oppressed colonial subjects brought to the equation the sympathies of influential Americans and Europeans in the media, universities, and government — the prominent and sometimes worrisome elites who determined to send their reporters, scholars, and diplomats to Jenin rather than to Islamabad or Grozny.
Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 2004.
January 9, 2020
QotD: National music
James Lileks, Screedblog, 2005-07-08.
January 8, 2020
QotD: Diversity in academia
“America’s one-party state”, The Economist, 2004-12-02.
January 7, 2020
QotD: The cult of Le Corbusier
A dangerous cult may be defined as a kind of false religion, adoption of a system of belief based on mere assertions with no factual foundations, or as excessive, almost idolatrous, admiration for a person, persons, an idea, or even a fad. The adulation accorded to Le Corbusier, accorded almost the status of a deity in architectural circles, is just one example. It has certain characteristics which may be summarized as follows: it is destructive; it isolates its believers; it claims superior knowledge and morality; it demands subservience, conformity, and obedience; it is adept at brainwashing; it imposes its own assertions as dogma, and will not countenance any dissent; it is self-referential; and it invents its own arcane language, incomprehensible to outsiders.
Anyone who thinks this is an exaggeration has not read much Le Corbusier. (His writing is as bad as his architecture, and bears out precisely what Curl says.) Nor is it difficult to find in the architectural press examples of cultish writing that is impenetrable and arcane, devoid of denotation but with plenty of connotation. Here, for example, is Owen Hatherley, writing about an exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work at London’s Barbican Centre (itself a fine example of architectural barbarism). According to Hatherley, Le Corbusier was:
the architect who transformed buildings for communal life from mere filing cabinets into structures of raw, practically sexual physicality, then forced these bulging, anthropomorphic forms into rigid, disciplined grids. This might be the work of the “Swiss psychotic” at his fiercest, but the exhibition’s setting, the Barbican — with its bristly concrete columns and bullhorn profiles, its walkways and units — proves that even its derivatives can become places rich with perversity and intrigue, without a pissed-in lift [elevator] or a loitering youth in sight. … [T]hese collisions of collectivity and carnality have no obvious successors today.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.
