A day in the life of a male Christmas shopper is one of trepidation and resignation.
Let’s be honest, the expectations on a guy at Christmas time to come up with the perfect gift are tremendous. Are we equal to the task? No.
Not to paint everyone with the same brush, and there are exceptions which prove the rule, but guys are out of their element when it comes to Christmas shopping … or shopping for that matter.
Christmas shopping for women is like deer hunting season for guys. They prepare for the season, they’ve spent hours scouting, they’re dressed for it, they read all the magazines, purses and budgets are finalized, and when they hit the woods, er, I mean the stores … they are ready to make the kill.
Men on the other hand, are like the deer caught in the proverbial headlights.
Todd Hamilton, “Gift-hunting season opens”, Interior News, 2004-12-23.
December 22, 2018
QotD: Christmas shopping
December 21, 2018
QotD: “Baby, it’s cold outside”
Speaking of immorality, MGM’s censors cut the wrong song. A few decades back, a young middle-class Egyptian spending some time in the US had the misfortune to be invited to a dance one weekend and was horrified at what he witnessed:
The room convulsed with the feverish music from the gramophone. Dancing naked legs filled the hall, arms draped around the waists, chests met chests, lips met lips …
Where was this den of debauchery? Studio 54 in the 1970s? Haight-Ashbury in the summer of love? No, the throbbing pulsating sewer of sin was Greeley, Colorado, in 1949. As it happens, Greeley, Colorado, in 1949 was a dry town. The dance was a church social. And the feverish music was “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” as introduced by Esther Williams in Neptune’s Daughter. Revolted by the experience, Sayyid Qutb decided that America (and modernity in general) was an abomination, returned to Egypt, became the leading intellectual muscle in the Muslim Brotherhood, and set off a chain that led from Qutb to Zawahiri to bin Laden to the Hindu Kush to the Balkans to 9/11 to the brief Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt to the Islamic State marching across Syria and Iraq. Indeed, Qutb’s view of the West is the merest extension of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — America as the ultimate seducer, the Great Satan.
I’m a reasonable chap, and I’d be willing to meet the Muslim Brotherhood chaps halfway on a lot of the peripheral stuff like beheadings, stonings, clitoridectomies and whatnot. But you’ll have to pry “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” from my cold dead hands and my dancing naked legs. A world without “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would be very cold indeed.
Mark Steyn, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”, Steyn Online, 2014-12-01.
December 20, 2018
QotD: An “authentic” peasant diet
The fact is that you wouldn’t want to eat like a European peasant of yesteryear, or a Chinese peasant, either. Sure, peasants ate well when the garden was producing and the harvest was ripe. A lot of the year, they ate pretty meager, dull fare. Many of the spices we now take as ordinary — salt and pepper, for example — were pretty pricey. So were meat and cheese, which, like everything else, tended to get pretty scarce in winter. When you read about what people were actually eating most of the year, you realize that diets were dull, repetitive, and heavy on grains and legumes, lightly complimented by salted and dried things (home canning, like many of the other things we think of as traditional, was another Industrial Revolution contribution, and before modern farming practices, cows tended to be “dried off” in the winter to save the expense of the extra feed a milking cow needed). And this stayed true throughout the 19th century for large swaths of the population in both America and abroad.
The farther north you went, the more this was true — it’s probably no accident that Ireland and Scandinavia are not, let us say, renowned for their fantastic contributions to world cuisine. When your growing season is a short cloudy period between miserable winters, you don’t have the raw materials to construct amazing dining experiences. (Sure, every country has at least one or two really good fairly traditional foods. But the shorter the time fresh ingredients are available, the fewer culinary marvels you’ll be able to produce.)
Too, we must remember that not everyone was a good cook. Cooking was a job, not an absorbing hobby, and as with any other job, many people did it badly. Every farm wife could produce enough calories to feed her family (at least, if the raw materials were available). Not all of them could produce anything you’d want to eat. Modern food-processing technology has relieved us of that most “authentic” culinary experience: boring ingredients processed by an indifferent cook into something that you’d only voluntarily consume if you were pretty hungry. Even the memory of these cooks has fallen away, though you’ll encounter a lot of them if you read old novels.
Megan McArdle, “‘Authentic’ Food Is Not What You Think It Is”, Bloomberg View, 2017-02-24.
December 19, 2018
QotD: Maple-flavoured corporate welfare
There’s that word: “investments.” That’s what Canadians — Ontarians and Quebecers, certainly — have been trained to expect in these situations: An elaborate mating dance culminating in a greasy press conference where corporate leaders hail bold new provincial and federal “investments” in the company and its workers and its world-beating widgets. Critics are assailed as uncaring and testily reminded that every jurisdiction subsidizes the widget industry.
Traditionally, this is later followed by outrage when it emerges the company has used taxpayers’ bold investment to pay out lavish bonuses or dividends. In the fullest version of the performance, the company just pulls up stakes and leaves town anyway — sometimes having fulfilled its stated obligations, sometimes not, but always leaving behind a bad taste and a per-employee subsidy rate that makes no sense in hindsight.
If the company is Bombardier, it might extract lavish subsidies from government for an airplane project on the theory the Canada needs an aerospace industry, then turn around and sell the project to a foreign competitor for basically nothing.
Chris Selley, “A reminder that governments don’t ‘invest’ in businesses. It’s just corporate welfare”, National Post, 2018-11-28.
December 18, 2018
QotD: Addiction
The chief difficulty with the word “addiction” is the idea that it describes a power greater than the will. If it exists in the way we use it and in the way our legal and medical systems assume it exists, then free will has been abolished. I know there are people who think and argue this is so. But this is not one of those things that can be demonstrated by falsifiable experiment. In the end, the idea that humans do not really have free will is a contentious opinion, not an objective fact.
So to use the word “addiction” is to embrace one side in one of those ancient unresolved debates that cannot be settled this side of the grave. To decline to use it, by contrast, is to accept that all kinds of influences, inheritances, and misfortunes may well operate on us, and propel us towards mistaken, foolish, wrong, and dangerous actions or habits. It is to leave open the question whether we can resist these forces. I am convinced that declining the word “addiction” is both the only honest thing to do, and the only kind and wise thing to do, when we are faced with fellow creatures struggling with harmful habits and desires. It is all very well to relieve someone of the responsibility for such actions, by telling him his body is to blame. But what is that solace worth if he takes it as permission to carry on as before? Once or twice I have managed to explain to a few of my critics that this is what I am saying. But generally they are too furious, or astonished by my sheer nerve, to listen.
Peter Hitchens, “The Fantasy of Addiction”, First Things, 2017-02.
December 17, 2018
QotD: Woodrow Wilson’s repressive regime
Not surprisingly, such intellectual kindling was easy to ignite when World War I broke out. The philosopher John Dewey, New Republic founder Herbert Croly, and countless other progressive intellectuals welcomed what Mr. Dewey dubbed “the social possibilities of war.” The war provided an opportunity to force Americans to, as journalist Frederick Lewis Allen put it, “lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step.” Or as another progressive put it, “Laissez faire is dead. Long live social control.”
With the intellectuals on their side, Wilson recruited journalist George Creel to become a propaganda minister as head of the newly formed Committee on Public Information (CPI).
Mr. Creel declared that it was his mission to inflame the American public into “one white-hot mass” under the banner of “100 percent Americanism.” Fear was a vital tool, he argued, “an important element to be bred in the civilian population.”
The CPI printed millions of posters, buttons, pamphlets, that did just that. A typical poster for Liberty Bonds cautioned, “I am Public Opinion. All men fear me!… [I]f you have the money to buy and do not buy, I will make this No Man’s Land for you!” One of Creel’s greatest ideas – an instance of “viral marketing” before its time – was the creation of an army of about 75,000 “Four Minute Men.” Each was equipped and trained by the CPI to deliver a four-minute speech at town meetings, in restaurants, in theaters – anyplace they could get an audience – to spread the word that the “very future of democracy” was at stake. In 1917-18 alone, some 7,555,190 speeches were delivered in 5,200 communities. These speeches celebrated Wilson as a larger-than-life leader and the Germans as less-than-human Huns.
Meanwhile, the CPI released a string of propaganda films with such titles as The Kaiser, The Beast of Berlin, and The Prussian Cur. Remember when French fries became “freedom fries” in the run-up to the Iraq war? Thanks in part to the CPI, sauerkraut become “victory cabbage.”
Under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, Wilson’s administration shut down newspapers and magazines at an astounding pace. Indeed, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn’t want to buy Liberty Bonds.
The Wilson administration sanctioned what could be called an American fascisti, the American Protective League. The APL – a quarter million strong at its height, with offices in 600 cities – carried government-issued badges while beating up dissidents and protesters and conducting warrantless searches and interrogations. Even after the war, Wilson refused to release the last of America’s political prisoners, leaving it to subsequent Republican administrations to free the anti-war Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others.
Jonah Goldberg, “You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for: Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson”, Christian Science Monitor, 2008-02-05.
December 16, 2018
QotD: Transferring nationalist passions
The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, […] they can be and often are fastened up on some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincare, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re-transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.
But for an intellectual, transference has an important function […]. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
December 15, 2018
QotD: New Country music
The Eagles, more than any actual country acts, are responsible for the current denatured state of “Country” music. “In the nineties,” says Considine, “a whole generation of Stetson-topped singers and pickers insisted that the Eagles were as much an inspiration as Hank Williams (if not more).” That jibes with my experience: It takes me ten minutes to figure out whether I’m listening to a country station or some reanimated corpse of KlassiK RocK.
Tim Cavanaugh, “Why Don’t You Come to Your Senses?”, Reason Hit and Run, 2005-03-30.
December 14, 2018
QotD: Burgundy
If it’s red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that’s left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it’s probably Burgundy.
Jay McInerney, Bacchus & Me: Adventures in the Wine Cellar, 2002.
December 13, 2018
QotD: The Cabinet
[T]here is a clear similarity between the Prime Minister’s cabinet and the wardrobe/closet from the Narnia Chronicles: neither has any back to it and people who spend an excessive amount of time in either find themselves in a fantasy land.
Eric Kirkland, 2005-03-24.
December 12, 2018
QotD: G.K. Chesterton’s political Catholicism
Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
December 11, 2018
QotD: Academia
Academia has an infantilizing effect. I understand that. Many professors dress and act like adolescents right up to the time they are ready to hand in their tenure and live off their generous pensions. The Peter-Pan aspect of academia is not entirely the professors’ fault. After all, the points at which the real world intrudes upon academia are so few and so tenuous that academics may be forgiven for some of their hyperbole and inadvertently comic displays of self-importance. They exist, like kept women of yore, entirely at the pleasure of an affluent society they despise. So in a way it is not surprising that they endeavor to transform their entire campus into a sort of existential boudoir, which is French for “room for pouting in.”
Roger Kimball, “A Modest Disposal”, PJ Media, 2017-01-15.
December 10, 2018
QotD: No one “owns” a culture
To own something is to have the rights (1) to determine exclusively how it is used, (2) to appropriate exclusively any income or other benefits it yields, and (3) to transfer the foregoing rights to others by sale, gift, or bequest. In this light, it is clear that no one owns a culture, and hence no one may legitimately seek state violence for the defense of such asserted property rights.
One may have preferences about culture. One may have affections for or aversions to a culture or particular elements of a culture. But such preferences do not entail any rights of ownership. Moreover, all cultures are constantly changing to a greater or lesser degree by spontaneous, decentralized processes, including interaction with other cultures. Such interaction has always been the case except for the cultures of people completely isolated from the rest of the world.
To treat the arrival of new members of society who live to some degree in accordance with different cultures as if these persons were “invaders” who threaten to destroy one’s culture is simultaneously to evince little faith in the attractiveness and strength of one’s culture and to seek its defense as the enforcement of property rights where no such rights exist.
Robert Higgs, “No One Owns a Culture”, The Beacon, 2018-11-19.
December 9, 2018
QotD: The western way of war
Free capital is the key to war making on any large scale, what Cicero called “the sinews of war,” without which an army cannot muster, be fed, or fight. Capital is the wellspring of technological innovation, which is inextricably tied to freedom, often the expression of individualism, and thus critical to military success throughout the ages. That capitalism was born in the West, expanded through Europe, survived the alternate Western-inspired paradigms of socialism and communism, and found itself inextricably tied with personal freedom and democracy in its latest global manifestation explains in no small part Western military dominance from the age of Salamis to the Gulf War.
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 2001.
December 8, 2018
QotD: The nationalist obsession
As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can relieve only by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of the which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler forms as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe-Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalists motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic — a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
