Ξ July 2nd, 2009 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual |
From Michael Leeden:
Long before the modern rationalizations for the “benign” nanny state, Confucius had given his own vision of the perfectly ordered pyramid with the emperor at the top, talking to God, and most of the rest of us at the bottom, lucky for the privilege to talk to their dog.
The bulk of human experience is tyranny, whereas liberty is the ultimate unprobability, a.k.a., America. Government of the people, for the people, by the people cannot survive unless the people has enough intestinal fortitude to make it work.
That reminds me of something J. Rufus Fears said about the American Revolution in his course on the History of Freedom. People rebel for many reasons – oppression, religion, power. The colonies were the least oppressed, most religiously tolerant, independent people on Earth (at least by the standards of the day). In fact, that’s one of the criticisms of the Revolution – both then and now – that the colonists were ungrateful for all the advantages they had. But the leaders of the Revolution weren’t people with nothing to lose – they were wealthy, those with everything to lose. And they were going up against Britain, which had just trounced France in the Seven Years War (French and Indian War). And if they lost, they would suffer the fate of traitors.
A people, with all the advantages in the world, going up against the most powerful nation in the world, risking everything, with the odds stacked against them. And doing it all on principle. The American Revolution was the most idealistic in history.
And it succeeded.
Happy Independence Day.
Ξ December 21st, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Interesting |
I was flipping through some TV channels today, and came across a National Geogrpahic show called “The Devil Bible”, about a medieval text called the Codex Gigas. A couple days ago, I had a casual conversation about Code Geass, and I though the similarities in the names were too close to be coincidental. Even if there’s no actual connection to the story of Code Geass (and it doesn’t appear to have any), anime does have a tradition of taking random western cultural references and using them completely out of context in their storylines (witness Evangelion), so I’m willing to bet that’s what happened here.
Still, the Codex Gigas is an interesting bit of trivia I hadn’t heard about before.
Ξ June 12th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I’ve been bombarded by misconceptions about Republicans and conservative ideology recently. This is a post by Victor David Hanson over at National Review that illustrates quite well, I think, the sort of mindset that most conservatives have. Granted, it’s nominally about Obama, but I’m not posting it because it’s particularly insightful about the Democratic contender but because it shows how conservatives think:
A common trope of many pundits is that when they travel overseas now, they begin to tingle when those abroad, especially in the so-called former Third World, press them on Obama’s chances. Then the now banal theme follows: the Middle Easterner, African, South American, etc. tells the American pundit that he can’t believe an America would pick a (fill in the blank) — former Muslim, person of color, man with Hussein as a middle name, etc. — and that suddenly this liberality has restored his faith in the United States.
Then the pundit, straining to be fair, usually says he doesn’t know whether Obama could change things as much as his foreign admirers imagine, but at least this is an exciting time (finally) to once again be American. Indeed, the argument that an Obama presidency would appeal to our critics overseas and prove our liberality is becoming a powerful reason to vote for Obama for many of our elites.
Aside from the obvious point that we should not pick our presidents on the basis of whether those in mostly autocratic, non-democratic societies approve, there is something very tribal and racialist about all this chauvinism.
If a white male Christian of European ancestry were suddenly a likely successor to the Mubarak dictatorship, or were next in line to take over the Mugabe kleptocracy, or were stealing Venezuela from Hugo Chavez, or were going to be elected the next leader of South Africa, it would be of less than zero importance to me, and I would hope to other Americans of similar backgrounds. And I think most of us would shudder should an Englishman or Australian say “I just hope your next President is another white male Christian like McCain.” I was in Greece in 1988 when the socialist liberal Greeks went ga-ga over Mike Dukakis solely on the basis on his shared ethnic background and it seemed pretty absurd, especially when many promised they would change their dark view of Reagan’s America if a Greek-American were elected President.
So, one, I don’t see what is so great when a foreigner tells an American journalist that his view of America might change should we elect a person closer to his own perceived racial or religious self-image. Seems instead illiberal, tribal, and retrograde. And two, if Egyptians, Iranians, Congolese, or Bolivians want real changes in their own lives, then they should look to their own autocratic systems, not the United States that can do little to alleviate their mostly self-inflicted miseries other than to continue to shell out hundreds of billions in petrodollars and ever more humanitarian aid.
Ξ May 12th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I recently came across a scholarly work investigating the history of the term “No Irish Need Apply”, and what it’s role was in history. Being that a number of elderly Irish-Americans remember signs in their youth with the term (notably, Edward Kennedy), and given the long history of Irish immigrants in America, it’s interesting to dig into the history.
To skip to the end, the basic conclusions of the article were that in isolated cases in the 19th century, such notices may have appeared, but would have almost exclusively been limited toward Irish-Catholic maids, whom mothers did not want to give undue influence over their generally protestant children. It certainly didn’t extend itself to the general workforce, for which there was no evidence to be found.
Ξ April 14th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I just got caught up on the recent Obama flap after getting a hint of it while reading a friend’s blog over the weekend. While he was largely focusing on criticizing Clinton’s response to Obama’s statement (and I have to admit, Hillary sticking up for the rural, gun-owning church-goer does test the limits of incredulity at times), he also inserted a summary of McCain’s response (and indeed, echoed by most of the conservative movement) that Obama is an elitist, but doesn’t go on further to rebut the claim, seemingly rejecting it out of hand.
For some reason that got my gears turning on the subject. (more…)
Ξ March 6th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I’ve been reading through more of Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism, and as I went through the chapter on FDR’s New Deal, and it’s resemblance to Hitler’s Nazism, a major point of the book began to become clearer in my mind – that nationalism isn’t inherently right-wing. (more…)
Ξ February 27th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
William F. Buckley passed away today, at the age of 82, reportedly at his desk, no doubt working on another column. When he founded the National Review back in the 50′s, he introduced it to the world by saying that he would “stand athwart history”. Now that we can lookback and judge the totality of his life, he is one of the rare people in the record of mankind that we can say truly did.
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Ξ January 24th, 2008 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual, Politics |
I frequently read through the comments of politically tinged threads at Slashdot (and used to at Digg as well, but the sheer inanity forced me to stop), and I’ve come to realize that for all the indignation expressed towards the “neo-conservative” that there is a shocking amount of ignorance towards what an actual “neo-conservative” is. To listen to it’s detractors, a neo-conservative is a sinister, shadowy figure that works to manipulate policy for personal gain – frequently in concert with other powerful neo-conservatives. And depending on the mood of the detractor, they may or may not be a Christian fundamentalist. Actually, it sounds an awful lot like the description of the anti-semitic concept of the “International Jew” that so pervaded Europe in the 19th and early 20th century (and is on the rise again). In fact, in conservative circles, it is not uncommon to hear the theory that rantings against neo-conservatives is actually thinly-veiled antisemitism, especially since so many prominent neo-conservatives are Jewish.
So what, then, is a “conservative”, and what is a “neo-conservative”, and what is the difference between the two? While pinning down an exact definition of any ideology is difficult and is surprisingly similar to the Heisenberg Principle (that is the closer you examine it, the less you actually know), I do think a rough over-view of conservatism and neo-conservatism is worthwhile and instructive.
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Ξ December 18th, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ Intellectual |
I’ve frequently mentioned what I call the Narrative of History, and thought I’d try to define exactly what I mean by that here before someone asks me in a conversation and I get tongue-tied. The short and dirty metaphor is to say it’s akin to the forest one is suppose to see through the trees. I think a better way to think of it, however, is of a rope. A rope is made up of many individual threads – all rather minor in their own right but when taken as a whole make up something distinct and identifiable in it’s own right. (more…)
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