The Righteous Dotage of the Plains
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first exposes to the British 'quality' press.
One of the markers of the British press's degradation is its inability to actually explain a story. So, today for instance, the Daily Telegraph carries a piece about the determination of fourteen US States to challenge the healthcare reforms that were placed on a legal footing by the President of the United States yesterday. It doesn't say why these challenges are being made, or connect them to the wider anti-Washington movement, or estimate success. I suspect that the writers would not want to. Even though the United States Constitution is not that long, there is amongst the people of the wannabe urban elites an odd and almost superstitious fear of any field to which 'experts' might lay claim. So they obviously haven't bothered to read anything.
Perhaps the attitude is analagous to that which used to be seen amongst certain Orthodox believers back when Russia was poor. I learned it from a man who was tortured by the KGB, basically for refusing to fight in what he believed to be an evil army in Afghanistan. We may have expertise, and understand how to microwave potatoes and to talk on cellphones; but he, he would note, had a grip on his moral vision. That moral vision was never to be challenged by an explanation of how microwave machines actually work. Perhaps prayers might agitate water molecules sufficiently.
History repeats as farce, obviously. In the past few days I have noted that pronouncements can be made on law, presumably relating to the commerce clause (which allows insurance) or the ninth and tenth amendments (which are almost redundant) or the legislative procedures of the House of Representatives, and assertions can be made about 'secession' (ignoring the more interesting possibility that 38 state legislatures could in theory amend the constitution unilaterally) and no one has to support them at all.
The contrast with the American press, in which (for example) pieces by university professors detailing the issues simply and clearly are carried, is fairly instructive. But it isn't just on healthcare that the British let themselves be betrayed.
Allegations about the size of bread in paintings of the last supper from 1400 to around 1850 can be tied to an anachronic observation by an 'anti-obesity coordinator' that the increase in the size of loaves is unsurprising because chain restaurants brought in 'super-size' food in the 1990s.
Global warming, despite all the evidence, is apparently still happening and we know this because people are becoming violent, and only stupid people are 'deniers'. Oh, and people should not smoke in cars because, well, you know.
Meanwhile, some of Gordon Brown's worst enemies are revealing themselves as the worst sort of reformed-Trot whore.
Now, I have nothing against prostitution. I am a non-practising member of the bar and want to stay in good standing, and there is not that much therefore that divides me from the classier sort of escort. There have also been nightshifts in my past when I sold my muscles for money, and my tutorials are anyone's for a few notes. But I have never knowingly met a prostitute, and the nearest I ever came was when I noted how many sex and escort agencies were listed in the Washington DC phone directory whilst perusing it in a monastery in North east DC ten years ago, around the back of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. But I really can't stand authoritarian prigs whose morality hinges on their own advancement. Why is it that they can bend the knee to the righteousness of the lobby and charity industry, be it for Green rubbish or common-or-garden regulatory quickies, then steal my taxes for a job they are not doing?
It's not just Britain. The whole English speaking world went like this some time ago. I've never found any one answer for the venality of our political classes convincing; this is a fallen world and things have probably always been a little like this. It's their stupidity I don't understand. We always knew that very little is learned and an awful lot is reinforced in political science or economics degree courses; it was always obvious that lots of these people had never had any serious job or challenge in their lives. But they are now a menace to all of us.
Ah well. As I write, I wonder how much point there is to ever hoping that people would wake up out of selfishness and just ask what it is that they need to know, in a spirit of humility. Newspapers sell, though badly, so I'm not just inclined to blame the press, liberalism, Thatcherism, the education system, or the lack of a unified culture. Something, however, is terribly wrong with this state.
Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first exposes to the British 'quality' press.
One of the markers of the British press's degradation is its inability to actually explain a story. So, today for instance, the Daily Telegraph carries a piece about the determination of fourteen US States to challenge the healthcare reforms that were placed on a legal footing by the President of the United States yesterday. It doesn't say why these challenges are being made, or connect them to the wider anti-Washington movement, or estimate success. I suspect that the writers would not want to. Even though the United States Constitution is not that long, there is amongst the people of the wannabe urban elites an odd and almost superstitious fear of any field to which 'experts' might lay claim. So they obviously haven't bothered to read anything.
Perhaps the attitude is analagous to that which used to be seen amongst certain Orthodox believers back when Russia was poor. I learned it from a man who was tortured by the KGB, basically for refusing to fight in what he believed to be an evil army in Afghanistan. We may have expertise, and understand how to microwave potatoes and to talk on cellphones; but he, he would note, had a grip on his moral vision. That moral vision was never to be challenged by an explanation of how microwave machines actually work. Perhaps prayers might agitate water molecules sufficiently.
History repeats as farce, obviously. In the past few days I have noted that pronouncements can be made on law, presumably relating to the commerce clause (which allows insurance) or the ninth and tenth amendments (which are almost redundant) or the legislative procedures of the House of Representatives, and assertions can be made about 'secession' (ignoring the more interesting possibility that 38 state legislatures could in theory amend the constitution unilaterally) and no one has to support them at all.
The contrast with the American press, in which (for example) pieces by university professors detailing the issues simply and clearly are carried, is fairly instructive. But it isn't just on healthcare that the British let themselves be betrayed.
Allegations about the size of bread in paintings of the last supper from 1400 to around 1850 can be tied to an anachronic observation by an 'anti-obesity coordinator' that the increase in the size of loaves is unsurprising because chain restaurants brought in 'super-size' food in the 1990s.
Global warming, despite all the evidence, is apparently still happening and we know this because people are becoming violent, and only stupid people are 'deniers'. Oh, and people should not smoke in cars because, well, you know.
Meanwhile, some of Gordon Brown's worst enemies are revealing themselves as the worst sort of reformed-Trot whore.
Now, I have nothing against prostitution. I am a non-practising member of the bar and want to stay in good standing, and there is not that much therefore that divides me from the classier sort of escort. There have also been nightshifts in my past when I sold my muscles for money, and my tutorials are anyone's for a few notes. But I have never knowingly met a prostitute, and the nearest I ever came was when I noted how many sex and escort agencies were listed in the Washington DC phone directory whilst perusing it in a monastery in North east DC ten years ago, around the back of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. But I really can't stand authoritarian prigs whose morality hinges on their own advancement. Why is it that they can bend the knee to the righteousness of the lobby and charity industry, be it for Green rubbish or common-or-garden regulatory quickies, then steal my taxes for a job they are not doing?
It's not just Britain. The whole English speaking world went like this some time ago. I've never found any one answer for the venality of our political classes convincing; this is a fallen world and things have probably always been a little like this. It's their stupidity I don't understand. We always knew that very little is learned and an awful lot is reinforced in political science or economics degree courses; it was always obvious that lots of these people had never had any serious job or challenge in their lives. But they are now a menace to all of us.
Ah well. As I write, I wonder how much point there is to ever hoping that people would wake up out of selfishness and just ask what it is that they need to know, in a spirit of humility. Newspapers sell, though badly, so I'm not just inclined to blame the press, liberalism, Thatcherism, the education system, or the lack of a unified culture. Something, however, is terribly wrong with this state.
Comments
Rather, he is the sort of person who understands that what goes around, comes around. And who does not take Attorneys General of Southern or Western states very seriously. Least of all those running for Governor in the very year of their high-profile actions before the Supreme Court.
Looks like the full diet for which are very teeth are designed is not boiling the earth after all. Whatever next? That no such excuse exists to destroy or prevent secure employment, or to drive down wages or working conditions, or to arrest economic development around the world, or to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, or to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict travel opportunities to the rich? Where would it all end?
"Meanwhile, some of Gordon Brown's worst enemies are revealing themselves as the worst sort of reformed-Trot whore." But there is nothing "reformed" about them. They have followed academic Marxism from economic to moral, social, cultural and constitutional means to exactly the same ends as ever, namely the destruction of the family, of private property, and of the State.
Those were accurately, if hardly profoundly, identified by Engels as having been mutually dependent from the first. "The withering away of the State" is a Marxist term for a Marxist aspiration, part and parcel of which is the "withering away" of the family and the "withering away" of private property. Not only in her definition of politics in terms of economics was Margaret Thatcher anything but a bulwark against the advance of Marxism.
Or, as it renamed itself, neoconservatism in general and New Labour in particular. It is neither conservative nor Labour, any more than she was.