[High school Moral Philosophy teacher and retired Mobile Infantry Colonel Jean DuBois lecturing his class on juvenile delinquents and the permissive society that helped create them:]
“[These] unfortunate juvenile criminals were born with none, even as you and I, and they had no chance to acquire any; their experiences did not permit it. What is ‘moral sense’? It is an elaboration of the human instinct to survive. The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations.
“But the instinct to survive can be cultivated into motivations more subtle and much more complex than the blind, brute urge of the individual to stay alive. [What one] miscalled ‘moral instinct’ was the instilling in you by your elders of the truth that survival can have stronger imperatives than that of your own personal survival. Survival of your family, for example. Of your children … of your nation. And so on up.
“[These] juvenile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the do-gooders attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures’, to ‘reach them’, to ‘spark their moral sense’. They had no ‘better natures’; experience taught them that what they were doing was the way to survive. The puppy never got his spanking; therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral’.
“The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual. Nobody preached duty to these kids in a way they could understand — that is, with a spanking. But the society they were in told them endlessly about their ‘rights.'”
Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers, 1959, quoted by Dave Huber in “Libertarian sci-fi author predicted current progressive-induced cultural failures over 60 years ago”, The College Fix, 2021-04-03.
August 3, 2021
QotD: Robert Heinlein predicted the 2020s amazingly well in 1959
July 10, 2021
QotD: The western military tradition versus wealth and decadence
Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 2002.
June 3, 2021
John McWhorter on Affirmative Action
In the latest post at It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter outlines the history of Affirmative Action in American schooling and explains why it’s no longer doing anything useful and should be re-oriented to actually help disadvantaged students of all races:
John McWhorter’s Twitter thumbnail image
I do not oppose Affirmative Action. I simply think it should be based on disadvantage, not melanin. It made sense – logical as well as moral – to adjust standards in the wake of the implacable oppression of black people until the mid-1960s.
When Affirmative Action began in the 1960s, largely with black people in mind, the overlap between blackness and disadvantage was so large that the racialized intent of the policy made sense. Most black people lived at or below the poverty line. Being black and middle class was, as one used to term it, “fortunate”. Plus, black people suffered open discrimination regardless of socioeconomic status, in ways for more concrete than microaggressions and things only identifiable via Implicit Association Testing and the like. In a sense, black people were all in the same boat.
Luckily, Affirmative Action worked. By the 1980s, it was no longer unusual or “fortunate” to be black and middle class. I would argue that by that time, it was time to reevaluate the idea that anyone black should be admitted to schools with lowered standards. I think Affirmative Action today should be robustly practiced — but on the basis of socioeconomics.
A common objection is that this would help too many poor whites (as if that’s a bad thing?). But actually, brilliant and non-partisan persons have argued that basing preferences on socioeconomics would actually bring numbers of black people into the net that almost anyone would be satisfied with.
I’m no odd duck on my sense that Affirmative Action being about race had passed its sell-by date after about a generation. At this very time, it had become clear, to anyone really looking, that the black people benefitting from Affirmative Action were no longer mostly poor – as well as that simply plopping truly poor black people into college who had gone to awful schools had tended not to work out anyway. It was no accident that in 1978 came the Bakke decision, where Justice Lewis Powell inaugurated the new idea that Affirmative Action would serve to foster “diversity”, the idea being that diversity in the classroom made for better learning.
I highly suspect that most people have always had to make a slight mental adjustment to get comfortable with this idea, as standard as it now is in enlightened discussion. Do students in classes with a certain mixture of races learn better? Really? Not that there might not be benefits to students of different races being together for other reasons. But does diversity make for better learning? Has that been proven?
As you might expect, it has not – and in fact the idea has been disproven, again and again. No one will tell you this when the next round of opining on racial preferences comes about. But this doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
April 24, 2021
QotD: Marxism and the teenage mind
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault …
A big part of growing up, then, is: realizing that not everything is someone’s fault. Every effect has a cause, that’s a simple truth of logic, but not every event has a cause. The real world, grownups know, is what Buddha said it is, a nexus of causes and conditions. Even the simplest event has innumerable proximate causes, necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions, and so on. If you want to argue, in terms of pure logic, that every event is an intersection of a long series of causal chains that are all, in theory, perfectly discoverable, go nuts, but for all practical purposes, shit just happens. Accepting that is one of the foundation stones of adulthood.
From that perspective, one’s youthful Marxism seems silly, and nothing seems sillier than Marx’s endless ranting against the perfidy of “the capitalists.” Just as your parents aren’t really the capricious tyrants you thought they were when they wouldn’t let you use the car on Friday night, so even the biggest of businessmen are just people. Marx paints them as cartoonishly evil, but though a guy like Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard in his youth, no doubt about that, he too grew up, becoming a staunch philanthropist and anti-imperialist. So, too, with the labor theory of value, which is the closest thing to the quintessence of the teenage mind ever put to paper — those Air Jordans are “overpriced,” no one denies that, but it’s simply not true that selling $5 shoes for $200 is “exploitation.” There’s this thing called “demand,” and … well, you get it.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
April 16, 2021
“Students will find in Shakespeare absolutely no moral compass”
Sky Gilbert responds more than adequately to a demand to “Cancel Shakespeare” that also appeared in The Line recently:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
Allan thinks that Shakespeare’s language is difficult and old fashioned, and that students today find analyzing the complexities of his old-fashioned rhetoric boring and irrelevant. Yes, Shakespeare essentially writes in another language (early modern English). And reading or even viewing his work can be a tough slog. Not only did he invent at least 1,700 words (some of which are now forgotten today), he favoured a befuddling periodic syntax in which the subject does not appear until the end of a sentence.
But a study of Shakespeare’s rhetoric is important in 2021. There is one — and only one — exceedingly relevant idea that can be lifted from Shakespeare’s congested imagery, his complex, sometimes confusing metaphors — one jewel that can be dragged out of his ubiquitous references to OVID and Greek myth (references which were obviously effortless for him, but for most of us, only confound). And this idea is very relevant today. Especially in the era of “alternate facts” and “fake news.”
This idea is the only one Shakespeare undoubtedly believed. I say this because he returns to it over and over. Trevor McNeely articulated this notion clearly and succinctly when he said that Shakespeare was constantly warning us the human mind “can build a perfectly satisfactory reality on thin air, and never think to question it.” Shakespeare is always speaking — in one way or another — about his suspicion that the bewitching power of rhetoric — indeed the very beauty of poetry itself — is both enchanting and dangerous.
Shakespeare lived at the nexus of a culture war. The Western world was gradually rejecting the ancient rhetorical notion that “truth is anything I can persuade you to believe in poetry” for “truth is whatever can be proved best by logic and science.” Shakespeare was fully capable of persuading us of anything (he often does). But his habit is to subsequently go back and undo what he has just said. He does this so that we might learn to fundamentally question the manipulations of philosophy and rhetoric — to question what were his very own manipulations. Shakespeare loved the beautiful hypnotizing language of poetry, but was also painfully aware that it could be dangerous as hell.
In fact, Shakespeare’s work is very dangerous for all of us. That’s why students should — and must — read it. Undergraduates today hotly debate whether The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic, or whether Prospero’s Caliban is a victim of colonial oppression. Education Week reported that “in 2016, students at Yale University petitioned the school to ‘decolonize’ its reading lists, including by removing its Shakespeare requirement.”
It’s true that Shakespeare is perhaps one of the oldest and whitest writers we know. (And sometimes he’s pretty sexist too — Taming of the Shrew, anyone?). But after digging systematically into Shakespeare’s work even the dullest student will discover that for every Kate bowing in obedience to her husband, there is a fierce Lucrece — not only standing up to a man, but permanently and eloquently dressing him down. (And too, the “colonialist” Prospero will prove to be just as flawed as the “indigenous” Caliban.) William Hazlitt said: Shakespeare’s mind “has no particular bias about anything” and Harold Bloom said: “his politics, like his religion, evades me, but I think he was too wary to have any.”
April 7, 2021
Hitler and Stalin’s Child Soldiers: The Hitler Youth and KOMSOMOL – WW2 – On the Homefront 008
World War Two
Published 6 Apr 2021Patriotism and war enthusiasm sweeps through the totalitarian countries in the run-up to the Second World War. This doesn’t leave out children either, who are supposed to become the prime soldiers of the future.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Anna Deinhard
Written by: Fiona Rachel & Spartacus Olsson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Fiona Rachel
Edited by: Karolina Dołega
Sound design: Marek KamińskiColorizations by:
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Daniel WeissSources:
– Bundesarchiv
– Library of Congress
– RIAN NOVOSTI: 25358
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe NAC
– Yad Vashem: 6884/13, 6884/14, 6884/5
– National Archives NARA
– Picture of Boy Scouts at a Campsite courtesy of Springfield College, Archives and Special Collections
– English children at school in 1920s courtesy of pellethepoet from Flickr – https://tinyurl.com/yerg47hn
– Fortepan: 5660, 1371, 32045, 55755,
– Picture of the League of German Girls with children courtesy of Facing History and Ourselves & Hoover Institution Archives – https://tinyurl.com/yzrfozasSoundtracks from Epidemic Sounds:
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf|
– “Weapon of Choice” – Fabien Tell
– “Remembrance” – Fabien Tell
– “Moving to Disturbia” – Experia
– “Break Free” – Fabien TellArchive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
From the comments:
World War Two
3 hours ago (edited)
When thinking of people who have been affected by the horrors of war, children are not usually the first group to pop into one’s mind. Of course, fathers away at the front and wartime propaganda bring the war closer to children’s homes, but with state-controlled youth organizations in totalitarian countries, we have yet another topic at our hands, how the war crept into children’s lives. Even though with the end of the war this dark chapter of youth movements in Europe mostly got to an end, clubs and associations are still an important part of youth culture to network and emancipate oneself. Have you been part of a club or other youth organizations in your childhood? Please let us know in the comments.Cheers, Fiona
March 4, 2021
Teenagers vs the British Empire: Smith Bateman’s Hall Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Nov 2020http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
On May 20, 1826 the United States Congress formally presented Model 1819 Hall rifles with personalized silver plaques to the 20 members of Aikin’s Volunteers, for their “Gallantry at the Siege of Plattsburg”. The Volunteers were a group of 20 boys, aged 14-17, from the Plattsburg Academy who joined up under 21-year-old Martin Aikin to help in the Defense of Platssburg during the British Invasion in 1814. The boys acted as valuable scouts in the days leading up to the battle, and on the main day of fighting they manned positions at a mill on the Saranac River, preventing British troops from crossing under rifle fire. The American General Macomb commended the boys’ contribution to the battle, and promised each a rifle as a token. Of thanks. It would take Congress 14 years to fulfill that promise, but they finally did in 1826, with the only rifles ever presented to civilians by Congress before or since.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
December 3, 2020
Modern narcissism
In Quillette, Marilyn Simon discusses a song her daughters learned in school and what it reveals about modern thought:
There is a pop song by Canadian artist Alessia Cara that my daughters have learned to sing in their school choir. The song is “Scars to Your Beautiful.” It is a catchy, simple song. Many readers probably know it. The message it promotes is, by all accounts, a positive one, which is presumably why it’s being taught to children at school. The chorus goes like this:
There’s a hope that’s waiting for you in the dark,
You should know you’re beautiful just the way you are,
And you don’t have to change a thing,
The world could change its heart,
No scars to your beautiful,
We’re stars and we’re beautiful.In spite of my girls’ sweet singing voices, and the intention of the lyrics, I think it is one of the most disturbing songs my kids have ever learned in school (right up there with Lennon’s insipid and juvenile “Imagine”). It is a narcissistic anthem painfully unaware of its hypocrisy. It reinforces the notion that beauty is rightfully a girl’s desirable goal, and that her aspiration to be “a star” is not only attainable — without any corresponding effort or talent on her part, naturally — but also the world’s ethical responsibility to ensure. In other words, there are no standards, ideals, nor any objectivity; instead the world needs to change its heart in order to conform to an individual’s subjective self-desiring.
Narcissism isn’t merely an issue of having an inflated ego. It is the condition of being enamored with one’s idealized projection of oneself to the exclusion of reality and of one’s real self. This occurs not because one is vain, but because one is too fragile to admit failings or fault. It has nothing to do with self-love, but rather with being locked in a solipsistic gaze with a fantasy of one’s self. Contemporary culture has taken classic narcissism and turned it into a new moralism. What we deem goodness now is that everyone else affirms the delusions of one’s wishful thinking as objective truth. Cara’s song, for instance, first reinforces the fantasy that each one of us is equally beautiful, and then makes the claim that the world must “change its heart” and endorse the image of oneself that is, in the first place, a self-interested desire. In other words, the mythology of “Scars to Your Beautiful,” and of our self-positive, identity-affirming culture as a whole, would suggest that not only is Narcissus correct in falling in love with a projection, an unreal and unreachable image of himself in a pond — something the Greeks thought was quite bad enough — but also that the rest of world must affirm his reflection as the real thing and celebrate his dead-end obsession with it.
So, positive reinforcement of self delusion is now a social good. The individual and society reject what is objectively real and instead embrace infantile narcissism, where the self’s fantasy of its own perfection is reaffirmed by the uncritical and unconditional love of a universal parent. Cara’s song intends to be encouraging, and in some ways it is (I’m not entirely deaf to my pre-teens’ rebuttals of “Mommm! You’re so depressing. It’s just a song to make us feel good!” and I will assent to the wisdom of my 12-year-old that healthy self-esteem is a good thing). But at its core, the song is self-delusion dressed in the garb of pop psychology. This is an accurate picture of our contemporary moral code: Everyone’s ideal projection of her or himself must be coddled and adored by a soft and nurturing world. Only a bad person would suggest that not everyone is equally beautiful, that not everyone is the “star” she imagines herself to be. (And only a monster would suggest that some people don’t even have inner beauty, either.)
“Competitive individualism,” writes Christopher Lasch, has channeled “the pursuit of happiness to the dead end of a narcissistic preoccupation with the self. Strategies of narcissistic survival now present themselves as emancipation from the repressive conditions of the past, thus giving rise to a ‘cultural revolution’ that reproduces the worst features of the collapsing civilization it claims to criticize.” Lasch’s words, written in 1979, predict so much of our contemporary upheaval — in our efforts to overcome racism, we have fallen into the trap of making (almost) everything about race. In our efforts to end sexual harassment, we have traded natural, often playful, interactions between women and men for institutional policies, while simultaneously treating women as somehow less than fully human, incapable of deceit and of misreading situations, and incapable of deftly handling sexual innuendo and sexual tension. The same thing has occurred with our culture’s criticism of our esteem for idealized physical beauty, particularly female beauty, while we make the contradictory insistence that we are all ideally beautiful, and should be admired accordingly. Beauty, we say, shouldn’t be venerated. That’s shallow. But we should also all believe that “we’re stars, and we’re beautiful.” That’s virtue.
December 2, 2020
QotD: Old Sam Clemens, he understood
Shouting at my parents about how unfair it was that they insist I be home for tea, home again to go to bed, brush my teeth, turn my lights out and go to sleep, get up for school, do my homework and blah blah blah.
Their list of stupid pointless rules was bloody endless – it became perfectly obvious to me around the age of fourteen that no intelligent person should be forced to endure this draconian regime, and I let the intellectual homunculi know so in no uncertain terms.
And the lofty and pompous arrogance with which these dreary praetorians informed me, ME!, that “while I lived under their roof, I would have to live by their rules“!
I seemingly had no rights at all. I was not free.
The horror.
I resolved then and there to move out as soon as I could.
Which turned out to be about five years later, but still …
My word, how I despised them and their byzantine rules. I yearned to breathe free air and not remain beleaguered in their stale and oppressive Gulag of The Mind. I was an adult dammit, and not some little kid, to be told what I can and cannot do.
Ahem.
Funnily enough, when I returned home many years later, I was amazed to discover how much more reasonable they had become in my absence – I felt like they had really grown … spiritually (h/t Samuel Clemens)
Alex Noble, “Progressive Millennials. While We Live Under Their Roof, We Should Abide By Their Rules.”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-09-01.
September 17, 2020
QotD: Baden-Powell and the Scouting movement
In 1907, Baden-Powell took 20 boys to Brownsea Island on an experimental camp. Boys from different social backgrounds participated in camping, observation, woodcraft, chivalry, lifesaving and patriotism. This was the start of scouting. There was soon great interest and demand for scouting across the world. Today there are over 54 million scouts, operating in almost every nation on earth.
I know about this legacy not from my own experience – I was never much of a scout – but from my family. My father was a scout and scout leader. He played a part in widening the horizons of thousands of young people in Paisley and then Derby where he lived. He was proud of the legacy, and rightly so.
My own children have benefited greatly from being in the scouts. One of them, when aged 14, attended the 23rd World Scout Jamboree in Japan. He returned having made friends from many countries, rich and poor, black and white, and with an invaluable insight into the world and its cultures. Local scout leaders are community heroes, without whom the lives of many children would be poorer. At a time when children can feel their lives are overregulated, and parents that their offspring don’t get out enough, the scouts are especially important.
How many people have left a legacy of this magnitude and worth? The statue-toppling crusaders prefer to ignore Baden-Powell’s real legacy and focus on aspects of his life that were reactionary, yet commonplace at the time he was alive. On retirement in the 1930s, he warmed to some of Hitler’s visions, and in a 1939 diary entry he described Mein Kampf as “a wonderful book, with good ideas on education, health, propaganda, organisation etc”. A certain admiration for Hitler was, in fact, shared quite widely among sections of Britain’s elite in the 1930s. Besides, none of this has any bearing at all on his scouting legacy today.
Jim Butcher, “Baden-Powell’s legacy should be celebrated, not toppled”, Spiked, 2020-06-14.
September 8, 2020
QotD: Creative hand-work
But for the younger generation it is different. They were born into the state of affairs where entertainment, like everything else, was made easy. And some of our Youth Leaders are now finding it difficult to get boys really doing things — boys in their teens with no particular hobbies, no particular interests, who simply want to be entertained, and that at a time when a boy should be so full of interests that no day is long enough to cram them all in. “I do not complain of growing old,” says John Buchan, “but I like to keep my faith that at one stage in our mortal existence nothing is impossible.” We feel that that should be so in youth, and yet here is the problem in our midst. “It gives you absolutely nothing to work on,” said one of their Leaders to me recently, a man who numbers photography, book-binding, carpentry and music among his own hobbies, and does them all extremely well. “They’ve no conception of taking the initiative themselves or doing a spot of work for the pleasure of it.”
What are we going to do about it? The gospel of “work for the pleasure of it” isn’t an easy gospel to preach to the young. You have got somehow to kindle the spark of enthusiasm in their minds first, that enthusiasm which can make everything seem well worth doing, even the hard bits, for the sake of the end in view. And it is the enthusiasm of the Youth Leaders from which the boys have got to catch their own tiny spark which, once alight, may well kindle into a flame. And it will be worth it. For they can learn more from intelligently working at a hobby than from almost anything else. It develops patience, ingenuity, alertness, self-mastery, helps them to discover their own hidden powers, teaches them the satisfaction of a good job done, widens their knowledge in a thoroughly practical way.
But we have no business to leave it all to the Youth Leaders. There is no easy time ahead for the boys of this generation and it is every man’s job to lend a hand where he can. The best place is in the home. If you are a keen woodworker, then try to interest your boy as well. Don’t just hustle him out of the way because you are in the middle of a job and don’t want to be interrupted, or are afraid he will meddle with your tools. Teach him how to use them; help him with some little constructive job of his own, if it is only to make a “safe” — as a small boy of my acquaintance did recently — to keep his secrets in! Small boys are usually keen enough. It is the older ones who grow apathetic. And who knows if the blame can be put entirely on the pictures? Mayn’t it be that we have hustled them out of our way rather too often? Dared them to touch our tools when they were simply longing to try them? The impulse to do and to make things is there right enough. But these are days when it needs to be fostered.
Charles H. Hayward, “Work and Pleasure”, The Woodworker, 1942.
September 5, 2020
QotD: Teenage girls
R. Sherman commenting at DavidThompson.com, 2018-06-05.
August 6, 2020
QotD: Selling booze to the immature
I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed …” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension. Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.
I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better. Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days. Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].
Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze. In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels. That’s something they don’t teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.). And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.
Kim du Toit, “Gilding the Lily #268”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-05-24.
July 11, 2020
QotD: Pop culture
That is the funny thing about pop culture in our Progressive paradise. It is a lot like the pop music of totalitarian paradises of the past. The Soviets manufactured their version of Western pop, but it was never popular. Just as we see at the Super Bowl, comrades can be forced marched to an arena and made to cheer, but no one really liked it. There’s a lot of that today, as every pop star has the exact same Progressive politics and uses their act to proselytize on behalf of the faith. That’s not a coincidence. It is by design.
The West does not have a competitor that embraces freedom and liberty, so the past has become the competition. Look at YouTube and you will see that old songs and bands have enormous amounts of traffic. Given that the people who listened to Sinatra in their prime are mostly dead, it must be younger people discovering and enjoying the old stuff from when the West was still in love with itself. I’ve often been surprised to see young people, particularly young men, into music that pre-dates me, but it is not uncommon.
“The Z Man”, “The Soundtrack Of This Age”, The Z Blog, 2018-03-15.
July 6, 2020
QotD: The special moral insight of children
So when does the special moral insight of children manifest itself? When they are telling us that algebra is a stupid waste of time and the drinking age should be 14? No, funnily enough, children are only gifted with these special powers when they agree with the adults around them. Our long-standing cultural dichotomy lets adults use them strategically in political arguments, to push them forward as precious angels speaking words of prophecy to make a point, and then say, “hush, they’re just kids” when the children mar that point by acting like, well, children.
Adult organizations helped organize the walkouts, while casting them as a pure expression of youthful insight. Liberal communities proudly enabled the walkouts; liberal parents posted gushing accounts of their children’s protests on Facebook; liberal elite universities rushed to assure kids that walking out wouldn’t hurt them on college applications. Conservative communities, meanwhile, threatened to enforce the rules against disrupting class time. So the protests often ended up a better reflection of adult priorities than childish wisdom.
[…]
That is not to say that gun-control advocacy is stupid. But if you wouldn’t be swayed by a 17-year-old’s passionate advocacy for a lower drinking age — or for that matter, their ideas about Federal Reserve policy — then you should probably apply those same cautions to their other views, especially when they’re under so much pressure to conform. There’s nothing particularly wrong with Wednesday’s mass walkouts. But there’s nothing especially right about them either.
Megan McArdle, “The student walkout said more about adults than kids”, Washington Post, 2018-03-15.
