Category: Economia

I blame Trump

In a kinder, gentler age, C.S. Lewis pointed out that sex was unlike other appetites.

The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true that most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function.

He continues:

You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act—that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you came to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate on to the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food?

But that was then. This is now.

I got home from Vespers tonight to find, as if our wont, my better half tuned into the Food Channel as she cooked. But the show finishing up was  new to us, Ginormous Food, which concluded with a donut roughly 24″ in diameter and 6″ tall, followed by another new one, Incredible Edible America with the Dunhams, which started with a $777 Las Vegas burger, which was definitely large, but really “justified” the cost by tricks like including paté from the livers of vestal virgins (or something like that).

I didn’t know whether to laugh at the happenstance, or marvel at the cheek of the music editor, when the $777 burger was introduced with the unmistakeable strains of the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem.

Translation:

Chorus: 
The day of wrath, that day will
dissolve the world in ashes,
as David and the Sibyl prophesied.

How great will be the terror,
when the Judge comes
who will smash everything completely!

The trumpet, scattering a marvelous sound
through the tombs of every land,
will gather all before the throne.

Bass: 
Death and Nature shall stand amazed,
when all Creation rises again
to answer to the Judge.

Mezzo-soprano and Chorus: 
A written book will be brought forth,
which contains everything
for which the world will be judged.

Therefore when the Judge takes His seat,
whatever is hidden will be revealed:
nothing shall remain unavenged.

The day of wrath, that day will
dissolve the world in ashes,
as David and the Sibyl prophesied.

Soprano, Mezzo-soprano and Tenor: 
What can a wretch like me say?
Whom shall I ask to intercede for me,
when even the just ones are unsafe?

Food porn: the latest wretched excess from a culture where wretched excess personified now sits in the oval office.

I think I need to go shower now. There’s sure not much to watch on TV anyway.

* * * * *

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Hate update

Aided by a veneer of objectivity, the SPLC has for years served as the media’s expert witness for evaluating “extremism” and “hatred.” But while the SPLC rightly condemns groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Westboro Baptist Church and New Black Panther Party, it has managed to blur the lines, besmirching mainstream groups like the [Family Research Council], as well as people such as social scientist Charles Murray and Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a critic of Islamic extremism.

…

How did the SPLC become the default journalistic resource on purported hate speech, racism and extremism? Morris Dees, still the SPLC’s chief trial attorney, founded the organization in 1971 along with Joseph Levin Jr. , now an emeritus board member. In its early years, the SPLC made a name for itself by winning some high-profile cases against the KKK and other white-supremacist groups. But over time its mission changed. In recent years it has focused on “tolerance education,” hate-group tracking (including an online “hate map”) and fundraising.

Although the SPLC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and therefore statutorily prohibited from engaging in partisan politics, even a cursory review of its website belies its nonpartisan status. During the 2016 election, the SPLC posted “Margins to the Mainstream: Extremists Have Influenced the GOP 2016 Policy Platform” and “Here Are the Extremist Groups Planning to Attend the RNC in Cleveland.” The Democratic platform and convention received no such scrutiny.

(Jeryl Bier, Wall Street Journal)

I’ve noted this for years. When my state bar association invited and lionized Morris Dees, I stayed away because of SPLC’s having morphed via mission creep into a leftist racket that itself foments hate:

Last August SPLC senior fellow Mark Potok tied Donald Trump to David Duke, whom Mr. Trump had denounced. “Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can see the denunciations [of Mr. Duke] are not sincere,” Mr. Potok told the Huffington Post. “The sad reality is that David Duke and Donald Trump are appealing to precisely the same constituency.” Not quite. Mr. Trump took 58% of the vote in Louisiana. Mr. Duke, running for U.S. Senate on the same ballot, managed only 3%.

…

The SPLC’s work arguably contributes to the climate of hate it abhors—and Middlebury isn’t the worst example. In 2012 Floyd Lee Corkins shot and wounded a security guard at the Family Research Council’s headquarters. Mr. Corkins, who pleaded guilty to domestic terrorism, told investigators he had targeted the group after learning of it from the SPLC’s website. The SPLC responded to the shooting with a statement: “We condemn all acts of violence.”

Last week the SPLC found itself in the awkward position of disavowing the man who opened fire on Republican members of Congress during baseball practice. “We’re aware that the SPLC was among hundreds of groups that the man identified as the shooter ‘liked’ on Facebook,” SPLC president Richard Cohen said in a statement. “I want to be as clear as I can possibly be: The SPLC condemns all forms of violence.”

Legally, free speech remains on firm footing, but reckless deployment of the “Hate” bomb against innocent civilians threatens that:

It’s been a very good millennium for the First Amendment.

The modern [U.S. Supreme] Court has repeatedly and forcefully rejected attempts to narrow free speech based on new social norms or theories. [Examples omitted]

In short, the First Amendment is enjoying extremely strong support from the Supreme Court — arguably stronger and more consistent than any other constitutional right, and arguably as strong as the Court has ever been in favor of free speech. It’s a golden age.

So why are so many people so pessimistic?

On the cultural side, we’re mostly hearing stories of woe about free speech. Folks — and here I explicitly include myself — are emphasizing stories about intolerance, heckler’s vetoes, censorship, and academic hostility to different viewpoints …

But there’s substance, too. However clearly the Supreme Court recognizes free speech rights, they’re no good if the government refuses to acknowledge them, as universities have effectively done by refusing to protect unpopular views from violence or hecker’s vetoes. Justice Kennedy isn’t there to tell Dakota McScreamyface to stop hitting me with a bike lock if I engage in crimespeak. As Judge Learned Hand said in his “Spirit of Liberty” speech more than 70 years ago:

I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws, and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there, it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.

The Supreme Court is upholding the black letter of liberty, but are Americans upholding its spirit? When college students, encouraged by professors and administrators, believe that they have a right to be free of offense, no. When Americans hunger to “open up” libel laws or jail flag burners, no. When our attitude towards the hecker’s veto becomes “let’s do it to them because they did it to us,” no. Not only is speech practically impaired, but in the long term the cultural norms necessary to sustain good Supreme Court precedent are eroded.

(Ken White at the Popehat blog) I’d love to see Morris Dees and Ken White in debate over the latter’s toxic Hate List. Meanwhile, the Media should stop relying on its tendentious list and try resuming the actual practive of journalism, an endeavor that I know isn’t easy or very profitable in our chaotic digital age.

* * * * *

There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

The reins of our brains

If you’re used to thinking of sin in terms of “culpability,” as specific and deliberate deeds, then focusing on thoughts can seem impossibly small. But if you think in terms of soul-sickness, of sin as a systemic corruption that marches on to death, then it makes sense to go to the root. That’s what a surgeon would do. We might wish that our faith would instead keep us happy and comfortable, but it’s when the surgeon says, “All we can do is keep her comfortable” that you’re really in trouble.

(Frederica Matthewes-Green, Welcome to the Orthodox Church, page 202)

One of the reasons I think Calvinism is a “good place to be from” is that Calvinist Tipsy realized that sin ran deeper than specific and deliberate deeds. It also ran into thoughtlessness, cluelessness, clouded intellects and even sin’s epiphenomenon of “social friction,” as when Paul and Barnabas had a falling out over John Mark.

But when I read “as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” I mis-translated it into “in any sustained battle between the imagination and the will, the imagination will eventually win.” I got that from C.S. Lewis, I believe. And I do believe it’s true. But the underlying attitude was “as a man thinketh in his heart, so does he deeds sooner or later.” That was the only way thoughts really mattered, thought Calvinist Tipsy. (Maybe I was just a lousy Calvinist.)

One of the reasons I think Orthodoxy is the place to abide is that it knows sin is “soul-sickness … a systemic corruption that marches on to death,” and that thoughts per se matter tremendously.

Some days, though, I wonder if I have reflexively taken guarding my thoughts a little too far.

I have been under the impression that cable and satellite Television had destroyed Television as one of our commonalities — one of the things you can safely broach at the “water cooler” (these days, the office Keurig machine) with a colleague you don’t know well enough to really open up to. The method of destruction: today’s twenty-person office dispersing at 5 pm and going home to watch 20 different, personally-interesting narrowcasts, as opposed to yesterday’s office going home to watch Cronkite and then Dallas — the drama or the Cowboys football team.

And I worried that, neither network TV nor the shopping mall (destroyed by Amazon) being a suitable agora any more, we were left bereft of even crappy commercial glue to hold us together.

But having “done lunch” with colleagues recently, it now seems as if there may have emerged certain “cable shows” that “everyone is watching,” contrary to my impression. I use the term “cable show” loosely; for all I know, they are Netflix or Amazon original content, viewed over an internet stream rather than cable TV. I can’t tell you the name of any of these current shows. I don’t watch them. The cultural allusions are lost on me.

It’s tempting to feel smug about that instead of thinking de gustibus non est disputandum, but what if

[p]urity . . . is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit usefulness in its efforts to remain unspotted[?]

(William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience)  Should I risk being slimed by violence, sex, cynicism or whatever else might assault my imagination, all for solidarity’s sake?

Could I even pull it off, or would I sound like some Aspie trying to make small-talk? Am I an Aspie?

I spend orders of magnitude more time online than on television. I try to avoid both the repulsive and the seductive. Good luck with avoiding seductive on the internet, which is free because “you are the product,” and seduction is the whole point of “free.” But there’s Regular-Seductive (Hammacher-Schlemmer, The Grommet, Amazon, Apple) and then there’s Succubus-Seductive (sorry, I know they’re there, but wouldn’t name them if I could).

Heck, I generally stay away from even the more violent professional sports. It doesn’t seem right to enjoy men trying to knock each other unconscious, for instance.

Is that a virtue, or at least a para-virtue, or am I just being a prig?

One thing I can assure you: I’m not doing it so that I can virtue-signal “Oh, I wouldn’t know about that” when some pop culture topic comes up. Been there, done that, and felt pretty bad about it.

I really kind of wish I could understand what my compadres are watching. It seems benign enough. They are nice people, after all.

But then I see stuff like this (warning: page loads very slowly, but the link was valid Thursday) and this, and I wonder “where did that come from?!” The moral majority apparently is dead. Very dead.

One example of “moral issues” in a Gallup poll is birth control:

One of the six issues showing virtually no change is birth control. Opinions on this issue have been highly permissive since Gallup first asked about it in 2012, ranging between 89% and 91% finding it acceptable.

One of my liberalish Facebook friends wondered not only why the heavy focus on sex, but why birth control was even surveyed. But while I grok her question (I’m surprised it might be as low as 89%) I know enough history to know that 90 years ago, there was virtual Christian unanimity against birth control. It may say more about us, and about our susceptibility to Succubus-Seductive cultural shifts, that such a high proportion of us find the question itself jarring.

I’m open to argument on many things. But I don’t like bad notions insinuating their way into my head through back channels. So I’m careful about to whom I hand the reins of my brain. (As an Orthodox Christian, I should say “nous” instead of “brain,” but darned if I could rhyme that.)

Given my level of trust in the purveyors of popular media, I’d rather eat at the Ptomaine Café or get tattooed by troglodytes with dull needles than watch TV dramas, sitcoms and such with less than full, critical attention at all moments. And that (“Look! A squirrel!”) …

Where was I? Oh, yeah: that just isn’t likely to happen.

So I don’t think my parsimonious viewing habits are likely to change unless, by sheer force of will (and perhaps some technological reminders), I resume watching Major League Baseball as retirement (not quite here yet) frees up my afternoons.

They don’t have Hootchi-Cootchie Cheerleaders in MLB, do they?

* * * * *

Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)

“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.