Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Dis n dat

Bright sun, blue sky this morning, but a cooling breeze that feels autumnal.

My neighbor left his back door open and went to work, so both his cat and his dog came to my house for the morning. Both looking for food and human attention. We are not so different.

A link in a web story led to another embarrassing example of otherwise supposedly intelligent men getting all crushy and giggly about Obama. This one was David Brooks, the NYT's official conservative. He saw Obama as a brilliant Burkean (!) fellow intellectual with perfectly creased trousers. I just shake my head. Have these people no dignity? All I have ever seen is a rank progressive bullshit artist who is lucky enough to be half-black. Even Mr Brooks eventually started waking up from his romantic stupor.

The wasps won't give up. Started to build a nest right above my doorway, under the eaves. Chased them off and cleaned the spot out. If she's a dumb queen --and in this neighborhood her sisters would be legion-- she'll keep trying. I don't want to kill her, I just don't want wasps by my back door this year. PETA can sue me for the speciesist bigot that I am.

You know, after watching four minutes of Raintree County last night, I think Elizabeth Taylor was not only a mediocre actress, but a bad actress. A drag queen's dream.

On a political philosophy site, a man asked Ed Feser why libertarianism was a problem. Well, since it has no chance of ever being put into practice, not much. But my own move away from it came for two reasons: first, it is a one-idea ideology, taking a single philosophical principle and trying to make the world work on that basis. Never a good idea. Second, it sees society as really nothing more than a collection of atomic individuals. Just not so. People in groups are not just groups of individuals. It's called culture. And I don't think libertarianism takes that seriously. But it's a useful voice against statism, being so much its opposite. Helped pry me out of liberalism back in 2000.

Caught a few gruesome minutes of Inglourious Basterds, where a Jewish American solider beats a German officer to death with a baseball bat, to the smiles of his buddies. What other kind of person would Hollywood ask us to watch being pulverized while inviting us to share in the moral pleasure of the deed? Nazis for sure. White racists. A serial rapist or child molester. But to avoid any ambiguity, they would all have to be white and male. Only an evil white male allows for pure evil, unsullied by any second thoughts that might occur were he, say, oh, of color, or Muslim, or female.

This civilizational self-hatred of the lynchpin group of the West will bring us down. It's not the feelings of resentment or envy of blacks or Latinos, or women, or Third Worlders. It's the blind complicity of white men in their own undoing.

My anti-Semitism gets provoked when I read entries like Dan Blatt's on anti-American movies in Hollywood. Given the overwhelming power of Jews in Hollywood, it's hard not to make the connection. This is my primary category of deeply disliked Jew: the American one who takes advantage of this country's unparalleled welcome just to corrode it. And make a living at it.

I hate Nazis. Not just because of what they did, but because they gave the Western Left a megasized cartoon to beat up anyone who disagrees with them, the argumentum ad Hitlerum, and to distract attention from the hideous century-long nightmare of Marxism. As Greg Gutfeld says at the end of his nightly monologues, "And if you disagree with me, then you, sir, are worse than Hitler."

On that note, more coffee.

Move on folks. Nothing to see here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re Dan Blatt's "Why can’t Hollywood learn from the box office?": that pro-American movies make money even overseas and anti-American movies lose money even overseas, yet Hollywood still cranks out anti-American movies galore, and few pro-American movies.

I think Lao-Tsu would guess that this is because the rational purpose (making unPickwickian money) is not the eternal purpose.

Anonymous said...

BTW, about President Obama as Burkean intellectual who "understands complexity and the organic nature of change": this isn't so absurd if one considers Burke a promoter of full-court press methods in revolutionary "change."

Burke: “If a great change is to be made in human
affairs the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope, will forward it; and then they, who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.”

That is, what may appear as "organic" [undirected] growth from the random coming together of innumerable small concerns (e.g. the British constitutional tradition) is nevertheless interpretable as orchestrated by a single mind with a "complex" but unify'd or unifying intention, even though that intention not be effected by a fast0-moving concentrated revolutionary regime that issues emergency decress. I guess a long, slow, extended process can be as much revolutionary as the French Revolution. Organic growth can be farm'd intensively and with a view to specific results

I can't see whether the current American president has any unifying or otherwise consistent intention for his Administration. But he does seem to be working the primary Burkean method, that is maintaining continuity in lingo: David Brooks notes that President Obama "talks like us" (the educated class).

P.S. Curious that GWB refer'd to Pope's Dunciad in his first inaugural, and Burke remark'd in a letter to a friend: »Believe me; we are just on the verge of Darkness and one push drives us in—we shall all live, if we live long, to see the prophecy of the Dunciad fulfilled and the age of ignorance come
around once more. ... Is there no one to relieve the world from the curse of obscurity?«

The curse of obscurity is, I guess, the attribution of obscurity to obscurity, as by reputations of 'know-nothing'ism. An age is not really dark if its denizens see that they live in darkness, understand that they have no understanding. Burke's best case scenario would be obscurity fancy'd as enlightenment?

Anonymous said...

The routine Burkean Tocquevillian Straussian etc line of quasi-respect for Christian tradition and morals removes substance from Christianity in the educated class who can take such an attitude seriously as if respected by Socrates and Aquinas and Maimonides. ... The imprudence of prudence! The recklessness of moderation!

It may not even remove the possibility of Christian fanaticism since it abandons serious understanding of Christianity or anything else in the public square (where the watchword is morals for the sake of stability), and fanatical interpretations of Christianity can flourish in lower Mensch.

In a way, Metternich's statesmanship is very impressive. Europe enjoy'd a century of stability, but 'bowing to Christianity with the head, not in the heart' (Tocqueville's formula) permitted new materialist race- and class- fanaticisms to flourish. In the end, the authorities of Christendom preach'd up WW1 for four sustain'd years, and then removed even their potential for street-cred evil by concernfulness that war never happen again. ... Machiavelli notes that Hamitic Niger Christianity grew in lower mensch Japheth Albinus during the stability provided by Shem Severus.

Not that WW1 was Metternich's fault, I'm sure. He wasn't intending that stability be used to build up potential for that explosion of Christian civilization. In any case, he was only a statesman diplomat. What the hierophants will do during stability is another consideration. (They could have been Hegelians, rather than only either evasive leftwing or evasive rightwing Hegelians.)

Anonymous said...

Not fabrication of a new government but "the very [covenantal, joining; echt] yidea of the fabrication of a new government" filled Burke "with disgust and horror" (Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 322).

Cf Strauss's warning that the last man doesn't want "any yid deals" (An Intro to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, p. 97). We may hope he indicates only the jihadi are in danger, I guess.

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