Look around you – if we in the West and we humans, in general, had been invaded by aliens, what would be different?
- Our schools in America teach that the system under which America lives, from constitutional protections to (relatively … very relatively) free markets are evil and the cause of all evils in the world.
- Our schools further teach that all the problems in the world at large are the fault of “Imperialists” to include not just America, but the West which is America’s mother culture. They ignore the sins of other nations, many of which, still today, commit female mutilation and slavery, to concentrate ONLY on the West and the sins of the West, thereby obviating any possible pride the students might have in their own culture.
- Further, the schools, under the guise of environmentalism, promote the view that humanity is the worst plague on the planet. Without pointing out that any species can drive others to extinction, or that humans are the only species capable of self-regulating their impact on the environment, they concentrate on those extinctions humans have caused and fantasize that without humans the world would be a paradise.
- Without pointing out the difficulty of global censuses or that in fact we don’t and can’t know how large the world population is, our learning institutions, our cultural institutions, even our entertainment continually scare us with the idea of overpopulation. Without taking into account that there are more trees now in North America than when the colonists arrived, they picture humanity as creating deserts. Schools push middle schoolers to sign agreements never to reproduce.
- As if this weren’t enough, feminists picture women – in Western, well off, more or less equalitarian (at least before the law as it existed before feminist tampering made it take sides with women most of the time) systems – as perpetual victims, stoke a sense of outrage and anger at any and all males, and encourage women to consider normal intercourse “rape” and marriage a prison.
- As if this weren’t enough, the insanity has descended to preaching that there is no such thing as biological sex, and that one’s gender is a sort of “mood” which can be determined before a child is even fully developed. Parents giving hormones to children, to change their sex before the age of reason (let alone physical or emotional maturity) and effectively encouraging castration/neutering and precluding future generations aren’t considered deranged abusers. In fact, educational and medical establishments will encourage parents to thus destroy their progeny and will take the children away if the parents don’t do it, on the flimsiest of pretexts based on stereotypes, such as a boy who disdains male toys, or a girl who doesn’t like dolls. The rich panoply of human expression is ignored in a – dare we say it – alien attempt to make individual people fit stereotypes.
- Three generations into this, our leading lights in intellectual life, be it fiction, non-fiction, academia or even research, get plaudits and advancement ONLY from conclusions and policies that objectively hurt humans and prevent humans from reproducing. A subset of this is hate of the West, the most successful culture in the world, ever, in terms of extending life, preventing early death, preventing or curing disease and preventing and curing famine. Another and even more vociferous subset is the hatred of America, which took all of Western virtues and made them more so.
If aliens, hostile to the very idea of humanity and wanting to prevent us from prospering, let alone going into space (another cause that all so called “progressives” hate with a burning passion and try to prevent by all means possible, from telling us that there is still need on Earth so we shouldn’t spend money on going to space, to telling us that we must first learn to “take care of this planet” to just sustained screaming that the human plague shouldn’t propagate) had managed to take control of our culture, what would they do differently?
Sarah Hoyt, “What if We Have Been Invaded by Aliens?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-21.
September 16, 2019
QotD: If we’d been taken over by aliens, how would we know?
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September 12, 2019
QotD: Canadians and Europeans
“The typical British family,” he writes, “looks much more like the typical German family than the typical American family. We eat Italian food. We watch Spanish soccer. We drive German cars. We work Belgian hours. And we buy second homes in France. Above all, we bow before central government as only true Europeans can.”
He has a point, though cultural similarities are not always determinative: Canadians eat American food, watch American sports, drive American cars, work American hours (more or less), and buy second homes in Florida. But they still bow down before central government as only true Europeans can.
Mark Steyn, Telegraph, originally posted to the old blog (no longer online), 2004-09-30.
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September 9, 2019
The Inca Empire – Life of a Dead Emperor – Extra History – #3
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To understand daily life in the Inca Empire, we travel from Cusco to Quito (located in modern-day Ecuador), where Thupa Inca wanted to establish a second capital city. From efficiently designed work assignments, to elaborate death rituals, life was neatly organized, masking rising tensions.
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QotD: War
Pushbotton war has its place. There is another kind of conflict — crusade, jihad, holy war, call it what you choose. It has been loosed before, with attendant horror but indecisive results. In the past, there were never means enough to exterminate all the unholy, whether Christian, Moslem, Protestant, Papist, or Communist. If jihad is preached again, undoubtedly the modern age will do much better.
Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war — against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red.
Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.
For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions — as its prophets have long proclaimed.
Except that in this world are tigers.
T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.
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September 6, 2019
QotD: The horrors of war
An aside: I’ve long thought that prettifying World War II for domestic consumption contributed to both the media shock of Vietnam and the generation gap. WWII and Korea vets, who knew war first-hand, didn’t understand just how shocked their doted-on boomer kids were. “The Good War” wasn’t any more pleasant when you were experiencing it.
Virginia Postrel, “Horrors of War”, Dynamist.com, 2004-04-27.
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September 5, 2019
QotD: Fashion
[… image from Marshall Fields catalogue …]
Ponchos. Good God. Ponchos. And what’s with this blonde’s hair? How many My Little Ponys did they kill to make this wig?
[…]
God forbid our children should ever be happy. Not when they can have ATTITUDE, which is what we all really want from our kids.
[… image of sneering, posturing child models …]
Charming. Remember: Fashion means never having to say you’re happy. From Dutch supermodels to haughty tykes, the watchword from Dame Fashion is “pissed.” Now put on your poncho and radiate sullen blankness.
James Lileks, “The Bleat”, 2004-08-17 (Reposted from the old blog).
Note: Jon mentioned that he looked at the images in Lileks’ article and at first thought they were actual 1970s catalogue photos, but in that dreckful decade, the models would have been smiling. A valid point, I think, and one of the issues Lileks has with the current fashion industry. Nowadays, you can’t be a fashion model without the kind of surly attitude best expressed by thugs and angry bar patrons after last call.
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September 4, 2019
QotD: Goth problems
Dan Savage, The Onion A/V Club, 2004-08-04.
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August 21, 2019
QotD: The cult of Japanese cultural superiority
That was a major blow to the Japan cult. Katanas are supposed to cut concrete blocks! At least that’s what they say in the Tokyo airport gift shop.
Why does aikido attract troubled people with unrealistic expectations? A high school friend of mine took up aikido. The Internet says he runs a dojo now. He gave his life to aikido. Unfortunately, aikido has a serious problem: it doesn’t work at all. Sure, you can twist people’s wrists and immobilize them if they are stupid enough to give you their hands, but everyone who has tried aikido in the ring has had his behind handed to him in individually wrapped slices. I can’t understand devoting your life to a martial art which can be defeated easily by 95% of angry untrained drunks. Would you open a store that only sold appliances that didn’t work?
Here are the words that start every single aikido demonstration: “Give me your hand.”
People are enchanted by Japan. They think the Japanese have deep wisdom we lack. They do, and here it is: do your job well and treat your elders and your boss with respect. That’s about it; the rest is hocus pocus. There are no Japanese superpowers. There is no chi. Steven Seagal has never once used magical Japanese aikido to fight a real fight because he knows he would experience humiliating losses.
Forged in Fire has its funny moments, but Knife or Die is a little too ridiculous to lampoon. It’s almost sad. It’s probably dangerous, too. Untrained eccentrics swinging razor-sharp knives of unknown quality in a timed test are a recipe for deep wounds and severe blood loss. I would hate to be in the studio when half of a knife goes flying off at 60 miles per hour.
Steve, “Knives for Knaves”, Tools of Renewal, 2018-05-31.
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August 19, 2019
QotD: Hitler’s “wonder weapons”
Marcus Jones, “Innovation For Its Own Sake: The Type XXI U-boat”, Naval War College Review, 2014-04.
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August 15, 2019
QotD: Strong female characters in fiction
Today, when I telling the kids about it, I realized why. It was because the character was a strong woman. Born with the ultimate disadvantage, the ultimate lack of support, she doesn’t – like fairytale princesses – either get rescued by a strong knight nor even by fate that reveals her to be a hidden princess. Also, she never complains; she never repines – she takes the situation she finds herself in and makes the best out of it, all the while looking out for those who are weaker or in more need than her. This last characteristic nets her the all-important recipe book (supposedly created by a medieval convent, which rings true for Portugal, and lost for centuries.) When her romance doesn’t work because her very conventional suitor wants a girl of suitable family, she doesn’t go into a decline, she just goes on with life.
She is, in fact, what editors so often say they want “a strong woman heroine, self sufficient, a good role model for growing girls.” Only, from my observation and reading, by this they usually mean mouthy, aggressive, foolhardy and complains a lot about men till one wonders if said character has an issue with being born female. There are exceptions, of course, but complaining about fate and men and being bitter seems to be obligatory.
And yet, it is true that this type of character is not only a great role model for young women, she is the type of role model we do need. Earth needs women (yes, and men, but we’re talking women here) who take care of the weak and helpless. Earth needs women who don’t whine. Earth needs women who cheerfully shoulder the burden of what needs to be done.
Earth does not need women who complain about men all the while neurotically obsessing on clothes and jewelry to attract said men and pursuing the highest-status males they can possibly get. There is nothing wrong with these activities, in moderation, but when they become the focus of existence they create a generation of infantile harpies. Now, I don’t think any women in real life are as bad as that, but almost all women characters in books and movies are just like that.
Young women who read/watch these characters end up feeling they must APPEAR like them or they’ll be thought weak. And this is wrong. Strength in women – and men – can be defined not as throwing weight around but in doing what must be done for oneself and those who depend on one.
Earth needs grown up women.
I very much hate to tell people what to do, much less what to be, but I wish we could set about writing – and living – role models for the women Earth needs.
Sarah Hoyt, “Earth Needs Women a blast from the past of November 2010”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-13.
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August 13, 2019
QotD: Karl Popper on the paradox of tolerance
In note 4 of volume 1, chapter 7, of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, he clarifies his position on how best to deal with intolerant philosophies:
… I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
It is clear from Popper’s writing that it would be unwise to resort to violence against an intolerant group that is willing to discuss and debate their ideas. So long as the intolerant group is tolerant enough to agree to debate and discuss their intolerant ideas rather than resort to violence, it is better to handle them with words.
The problem is, some groups, like Antifa, respond to arguments with violence. And it is these sorts of groups that Popper claims must not be tolerated. If a group is so intolerant that they are unwilling to discuss ideas and instead rely entirely on violence, then they must be met with violence. In other words, Popper is simply saying that a nonviolent society must, at the very least, believe in a right to use violence as a form of self-defense.
Nathan Kreider, “Misconceptions of the Paradox of Tolerance”, Being Libertarian, 2019-05-31.
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August 11, 2019
QotD: Deconstructing “Minoan Crete”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
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August 6, 2019
English has become what Esperanto was designed to be
As a teen, I was quite curious about Esperanto … enough that I ended up buying several books in the language and making a few semi-serious attempts to develop fluency. I still have those books in my library, but I never actually achieved any firm grasp of Esperanto. It was the most successful of a number of attempts to create a universal second language, intended to allow people to communicate with others who did not speak their primary tongue. When I was young, I also believed that this was a way to reduce inter-cultural frictions and in at least a small way to lower the risks of war between nations. As I got older and more cynical, I realized that Douglas Adams probably had the truth of it in describing the Babel Fish from his novels:
Anatomy of the Babel Fish as explained in the BBC TV series.
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
[…]
Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
All that aside, Douglas Todd points out that despite all of its manifold complexities, the English language is actually taking on the role that Esperanto and other artificial languages were intended to do:
I recently travelled to the home of Ludwik Zamenhof, the Russian-Polish Jew who in 1873 invented Esperanto. It was intended to become the world’s first universal language.
Hoping it would end wars, Warsaw-based Zamenhof dreamed Esperanto would encourage people to come together under a common language. He thought that kind of connection would help overcome the distrust that can be exacerbated by the globe’s multi-language Tower of Babel.
Zamenhof’s vision of a common language caught on for hundreds of thousands. I have met people in Poland, South America and elsewhere who learned Esperanto as children. But, needless to say, the cause of Esperanto is now virtually lost.
Whether we like it or not, English is on the road to become the world’s lingua franca.
It is not the world’s most spoken language — that’s Mandarin. But English is arguably the language most commonly adopted as the medium of communication between speakers whose native languages are different.
I know I’m not the only Canadian who has travelled — in my case to Indonesia, Argentina, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Brazil, Turkey, Germany and elsewhere — and witnessed a collection of multilingual speakers suddenly revert to English, even if awkwardly, as they seek a shared way to talk.
It is a thing to behold. It is humbling.
As a native English speaker, I am not proud to say I only know about 1,500 words of French that I have trouble putting together in a meaningful way. I’m intimidated by new languages, whereas many friends and family are polyglots. So, for that matter, are most Europeans, where 97 per cent of 13-year-olds now study English.
It rarely ceases to amaze me when disparate multilingual people around the world show me and others their respect (and perhaps their pity) by speaking in English. Of course, most of them also like the chance to practise the language, since they know it is a key to new vistas.
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August 2, 2019
QotD: What we mean by “civilization”
Which is when the dime dropped and I realized you guys immediately translated civilization to “as good as we have or better.” Which, of course, made me giggle. Because I’d have liked you to tell a Roman, with their world-bestriding empire that they weren’t civilized. Or, before that a classical Greek.
Understand I am not imagining others before us had the internal combustion engine, or steam, or trains, or … Sure, they might have, but that’s a heck of a coincidence, since those things usually come about by an individual stroke of genius, and even when they do they often aren’t used the way we did (Romans and their mechanical toys.)
To imagine other civilizations of which we’ve forgotten every trace followed exactly the same route we did to the same place we’re at requires believing that inventing steam and the internal combustion engine and harnessing electricity is as natural to humans as dams to beavers.
Now, maybe that’s true. It would certainly make for a very good science fiction story. (Short story, I think. Too much of a punchline thing for a novel.) BUT the odds defy rationality.
I was imagining, you know “builds houses of wood or stone. Domesticated SOME animals. Has villages and cities. Might have trade over long routes. MIGHT have had wheeled vehicles.” (The last, as we know, one can have quite sophisticated civilizations without.)
Look, it’s not your fault. Since the seventies, we’ve been bombarded by crazy BS about superior aliens or superior lost civilizations. (And before that, there was a trickle of it, too, going back I think to the eighteenth century, just couched in different terms.) You’ll get stuff about how the pyramids were built of stones that floated at the sound of a certain note. (A C note, or the equivalent, I bet. “Listen, Mac, you take this stone to the top of the pyramid, I give you a C Note. A hundred Amontheps in your pocket, bucko. Buys a lot of fish and falafel.”)
Part of this, and part of the reason it intensified since the seventies were the “unilateral disarmament people.” You know, those jokers who wanted us to get rid of our own nukes and stand disarmed in front of the USSR, who would then realize we were peaceful, and not attack, and everyone would live in peace and harmony with rainbows and farting unicorns. Yes, it was a stupid and crazy idea since the continued survival of the USSR depended on plunder and conquest. But I’ll remind you our last president still believes that bag of moonshine. All of it, including the unicorn farts.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
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July 21, 2019
History-Makers: Marco Polo
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OVERLYSARCASTICto get 75% off a 3 year plan and an extra month for free. Protect yourself online today!On this episode of History-Makers, Blue takes a trip alongside the legendary explorer Marco Polo to figure out how the intrepid Venetian merchant made his way to the Mongol Empire and back, and what that means for his written account of those Travels.
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