Tuesday, September 04, 2012

Tuesday morning in September

The first morning in months I have had to put on a robe to warm up.

Alexis de Tocqueville's astonishingly prescient 1841 description of contemporary America. 

Southern California is a good, and therefore bad, example.*

*I am in favor of banning naps in the library. Reason: this is code for keeping homeless people from living there. My first visit to the SF public library was a shock. Full of smelly and dirty homeless people. The staff, being all Trotskyites, would or could not expel them. The liberal is morally disarmed, etc.
While I'm quoting, here's CS Lewis in 1948:
"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
As I have noted, liberal progressivism has no internal limiting principle, no point at which it can say, This is enough. It is the mirror image in government of what it accuses capitalism of in commerce. As one wag said of them, Societal bliss is always just one more regulation away.
Speaking of tyrants of the robber baron type, I suspect that if Henry VIII is not in hell, he will be in purgatory for a very long time. The story, with details, of how savagely he treated a group of Carthusian monks, the most reclusive of Catholic orders,  for refusing to recognize his marriage to Anne Bolyn and his usurpation of government of the Church is truly appalling. Those he did not condemn to be hung drawn and quartered, he let die of thirst and starvation, in their own filth, chained to the wall, in prison.

Ben Stein, who used to make sense, now seems to be going the way of all flesh. He writes:  Now, I know Chris Matthews. He is a very pleasant, smart, articulate man.

I have mentioned that when liberals get freaked, they threaten to emigrate and when conservatives get freaked, they threaten to secede. On a local level, it is happening, around Atlanta, where White areas whose high taxes support an unproductive Black area form themselves into separate towns.

This reminds me of one of the shocking thoughts I had this past year, as life under Obama and Holder sunk in, that while the standard narrative is that Whites have kept Blacks from advancing, in reality Whites keep Blacks from drowning.

I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban over the weekend. Still enjoy it very much, although Professor Lupin's professorial nostrums and Serius Black's blather about how memory keeps the dead alive were little bits of moralism and wishful thinking that the story could do without.

Now, as summer fades and the West declines, I'm off to the gym.

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