We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I am grateful to live in a Belmont where most people aspire to be good upright contributing citizens, or at least to appear to be. A reminder of a modern sociological classic: Belmont & Fishtown - On diverging classes in the United States. (That is a link to his essay summary of the ideas in the book.)
There is also a good (video) talk by Murray at that link, about the book.
I have no idea what Alt-Right refers to. It's a new term but I do not know who it describes. I can't even tell whether it is derogatory or not. Z-man discussed Science and the Alt-Right.
"Science" is an odd word. I guess it applies to knowledge obtained through the scientific method. I do not fetishize it because I am a natural skeptic - and because I know that science is done by human beings with egos and a need for income. Hence Most Scientific Findings Are Wrong or Useless.
Yale's David Gelernter is in the Maggie's Pantheon for many reasons (especially his books), but how he is able to keep his finger on the pulse of regular, non-elite Americans from the leafy, ivy-clad Lefty wards of New Haven, CT, is beyond me:
I’ll vote for Mr. Trump—grimly. But there is no alternative, no shadow of a responsible alternative.
Mr. Trump’s candidacy is a message from the voters. He is the empty gin bottle they have chosen to toss through the window. The message begins with the fact that voters hear what the leaders and pundits don’t: the profound contempt for America and Americans that Mrs. Clinton and President Obama share and their frightening lack of emotional connection to this nation and its people.
Read the whole thing. I feel like Gelernter knows me. No more posts from me about this election. I am moving on to greener pastures.
Of course they are. They might be bad literature, but lyrics are lyrics, and lyrics are poetry. Probably music lyrics came first, though, like chants with drumming or something. The Iliad was music lyrics, or at least a story set to music. The Psalms are songs for which the music has been lost. "Psalm" = Song.
Knowing others is wisdom; Knowing the self is enlightenment. Mastering others requires force; Mastering the self requires strength; He who knows he has enough is rich. Perseverance is a sign of will power. He who stays where he is endures. To die but not to perish is to be eternally present.
Nikil Saval at the NYT thinks it is. Like, I think, most people, I find it dehumanizing, cold, ugly, and intimidating just as its nickname implies. It says to me "You are entering Franz Kafka's nightmare."
That old Whitney Museum in NYC is just as hideous under its new name. It is unpleasant inside, too. I just figure that Bauhaus wasn't ugly or inhuman enough, so, to make a name for themselves, architects had to take ugly to its endpoint.
Philipp Meyer grew up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, where he dropped out of high school and got a GED. After five years working as a bike mechanic and an orderly in a trauma center, he decided to attend college, getting into Cornell University at the age of 22. He graduated with a degree in English and he got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader. After paying off his student loans, he left Wall Street hoping write full time, but after several years of failure moved back to Baltimore and took jobs as an EMT and construction worker. In 2005 he received a fellowship from the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers. In 2009 he published his first novel American Rust, which won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was an Economist Book of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post Book of the Year, and made numerous other “best-of” list. Meyer is a Guggenheim Fellow and one of the second generation of the New Yorker’s 20 best writers under 40. His second novel, The Son, is being published in fifteen languages. He lives mostly in Austin, Texas.
,,,instruction is the least important part of education. Most information is accessible from books and the media. Basic literacy and numeracy are important, but many if not most skills used by adults in daily life are picked up on the job. The main objective of education in every enduring society is to transmit authoritative cultural, political, and ethical traditions from one generation to the next. We can speak of the major purposes of education as the Four I’s: Initiation, Indoctrination, Inculcation, and Instruction.
Homecoming Marine, by Normal Rockwell. I've been to the Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, but missed this one. I'd love to look at all of the detail. (h/t Ace)
The Pew study shows that the endless repetition about climate, and blaming all bad weather on climate (while never blaming nice weather on climate)as in "Due to climate change, the US has gone 10 years without a hurricane") has had some impact, but people are not really too frightened.
For example, their survey indicates that climate-worriers do no more for "the environment" than anybody else. Of course, most of the cute greeny things people do "for the environment" are meaningless and pointless exercises in virtue-signaling and I have to suppose most people know that. More accurately, virtue-signaling and/or magical thinking.
James Miller interviews Gregory Cochran, MIT Physicist, anthropologist, and geneticist. Polymath Cochran discusses everything from politics to racial genetics to medieval Chinese war strategy and pretty much any random topic.
It is a delight to be in on a chat with a true Smart Guy. A long Podcast, Meaty.
Those most likely to be receptive of Trump are those who believe America is in the midst of a great crisis in terms of its economy, its chaotic civil society, its political corruption, and the inability to defend any kind of tradition—or way of life derived from that tradition—because of the transformation of its culture by the intellectual elites. This sweeping cultural transformation occurred almost completely outside the political process of mobilizing public opinion and political majorities. The American people themselves did not participate or consent to the wholesale undermining of their way of life, which government and the bureaucracy helped to facilitate by undermining those institutions of civil society that were dependent upon a public defense of the old morality.
"I trust the businessman only when he’s out to make money – because then he’s going to want to do things my way. When he’s out to do me good, he is going to do it his way."
The ruling class having chosen raw power over law and persuasion, the American people reasonably concluded that raw power is the only way to counter it, and looked for candidates who would do that. Hence, even constitutional scholar Ted Cruz stopped talking about the constitutional implications of President Obama’s actions after polls told him that the public was more interested in what he would do to reverse them, niceties notwithstanding. Had Cruz become the main alternative to the Democratic Party’s dominion, the American people might have been presented with the option of reverting to the rule of law. But that did not happen. Both of the choices before us presuppose force, not law.
The youth will not recall one of the more idiotic TV shows of the 1970s. Tonight's Really Big Show will not be a re-run. It will be live, and it will be exciting. The MSM has been building up the tension for days.
I will welcome your comments below before, during, and after the TV show (9 pm EST). Two deplorable people will compete for your affection or disgust.
The relentlessly arrogant and condescending Noam Chomsky is wrong about most things. The fame which gave him a voice in politics was, of course, his linguistic theory on which, as it turns out, a generation of Linguists have wasted their careers.
