Wokeness Broke the Navy
Jimbo’s summary of it is succinct, but the whole report is only 23 pages and worth your time. The culture of the Navy is broken, and so are the ships.
If you want an authoritative opinion, long time Milblogger Commander Salamander has written about the report as well.
White adjacency
Did you ever imagine, in your youth, that a term like "white adjacency" would be taken seriously and treated respectfully? I still don't know what it means, other than some reasonable level of socioeconomic success, though I suspect at root it means high IQ. That's a weird, weird idea to push: "What's wrong with the world is that things work out better 'systemically' for people who tend to be able to make a good living by some means or another, including intelligence. We really need to find a way to penalize them."
Bee Stings
Democrat Governors Afraid Cuban Desire For Freedom Could Spread To The U.S.
U.S.—As Cubans cry for “freedom”—a common refrain of right-wing radicals— Democrats are starting to worry that this dangerous movement could gain momentum in the U.S. ...
Trump Rows Across Great Lakes In Surprise Attack To Liberate Michigan
Local Man Would Totally Overthrow Government But Then He’d Have To Get Dressed, Leave House, Ugh
Other States Look To Texas For Advice On How To Get Democrats To Leave
The Babylon Bee Presents: The Top 10 Countries
That last, at least, is worth reading in its entirety. At first, you'll think you see through their ruse, but then ... !
Soccer, Irish American Rap, and Other Strange Things
I don't know why the philosophers are involved, but this is pretty much every soccer match I've ever watched:
Musical Interlude -- When I first heard parts of House of Pain's "Jump Around" in the 90s, I thought it was just another gangster rap song, didn't really care for it.
It came around in my life again a few years later in a completely different context, so different that I actually didn't recognize it. Then it dropped out of my life again for a couple of decades.
For some odd reason, it came up on YouTube for me recently and I decided to play it. Turns out there's an Irish American theme to it, which was completely new to me. If you don't like the music (which I can understand), turn it down and just watch the video. With a different sound, it could fit in here.
Other Irish-themed rap tunes on the same album include "Shamrocks and Shenanigans" and "Danny Boy, Danny Boy."
¡Buena suerte, Cubans!
These uprisings always seem to come at times when the United States is led by a Democrat who won't support them; Iran under Obama, and now Cuba under Biden. I hope they're able to make it work on their own.
They'll have to do. Our ruling class is against the whole idea.
Don't Walk "Curbside"
Every few years we see another round of stories about how progressive women really wish there was more of that chivalry stuff, whatever it might be. This year's iteration is from the New York Post, which interviews people who are similarly confused.
In a liberal city like New York, swimming with single women wishing they weren’t, one could assume Mark wouldn’t have a problem finding a mate. And while he dates and recently had a couple of short-lived relationships, Mark remains single. He’s trying to understand why.“I’m really open-minded and cool about gender stuff on dates, but I always feel like I’m walking on eggshells,” Mark told me. “If I pay for dinner, it signals I don’t value my date as my equal so I’m super casual about it all. If she wants to pay or split it or whatever, that’s fine with me.”I told Mark that, despite his best intentions, his egalitarian dating style could be the problem that’s holding him back. While some women balk at any hint of traditional male gender behavior, more lament the loss of chivalry. I’m one of them. I find it attractive when a man plans our first few dates and knowingly walks curbside when we’re together. It signals he wants to protect me from passing traffic or errant puddle splashes.“When I was a kid, my mom told me to always walk curbside, but I assumed my generation of women would think it’s too old-fashioned,” Mark told me. “Now, I’m really confused.”
The 'curbside' thing was a modification of an older walking custom that is more appropriate. During the early 20th century, men adopted this 'curbside' stance as a way of presenting themselves as shields from the inevitable puddle splashes when cars came along the muddy roads that the cities often still had. It was charming at the time, but no longer is appropriate. Modern American cities (at least) have reasonable drainage except in serious storms.
Rather, you should resume the ancient fashion of always walking on the right side, whichever way the curb is. This is to keep your swordarm free, in case you need to draw a weapon in defense of the lady. With spiking crime rates in cities across the country, this is of renewed importance. (Occasionally this might be reversed for the left-handed.)
Many now choose to arm themselves with handguns instead of blades, and these days quite a few women arm themselves too. Still, if you want to present yourself as the primary protector, prepare to protect her from the far more serious (and, these days, increasingly probable) threat of violence and crime.
Get 'em while you can
It probably will put you on a terrorist watch list, but if you still want to own a Lego U.S. Capitol set, better hurry. Amazon claims the manufacturer has discontinued the item, and the price just hit the roof like it was a Dr. Seuss book.
The on/off switch
After the 2020 election, a tweet that caught my eye said something like, "I don't know for sure that the election was stolen, but I know they couldn't have made it look any dirtier if they'd tried." This thread makes the same point at greater length, and closely approximates my own views. We're in a new place.
This is profoundly disorienting. Many [election skeptics] don't know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it's probably true.
... They always claimed the media had liberal bias, fine, whatever. They still thought the press would admit truth if they were cornered. Now they don't. It's a different thing to watch them invent stories whole cloth in order to destroy regular lives and spark mass violence.
... The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, "no fair!" That's how they felt about Romney's "binders of women" in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.
Open Range
More on the Imagination and Sexuality
AVI posted a piece yesterday that references a discussion we had here a couple of weeks ago. The issue, which we are discussing in terms of the new digital 'reality' that the young occupy, is that sex that is disembodied becomes alienating.
Today, while trying to find an old discussion of Open Range that I wrote years ago, I came across a very similar problem in Hegel's work from the 19th century.
The claim begins in paragraph 448, on the mental faculty of attention. The issue of attention is that you are free to give it, or not; and therefore, if you are to have a passion, it is because you have chosen to give it your attention.But what is the thing to which you are giving your attention? It is an idea: and, therefore, it is your idea. After all, it exists in your mind, and the thoughts you have are your own. He offers an example:Thus we know, for example, that if anyone is able to form a clear picture to himself, say in a poem, of the feelings of joy or sorrow that are overwhelming him he rids himself of the thing that was oppressing his mind and thereby procures for himself relief or complete freedom. For although by contemplating the many aspects of his feelings he seems to increase their power over him, yet he does in fact dimnish this power by making his feelings into something confronting him, something that becomes external to him. Goethe, for instance, particularly in his Werther, brougth himself relief while subjecting the readers of this this romance to the power of feeling.The book he mentions, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sparked a wave of suicides across Europe. The title character is a suicide, killing himself over losing his love.Why was his love worth dying over, though? She was an idea -- that is to say, she was not just a girl, with all the problems any individual girl might have. She was an ideal girl: it was his mind which had made her an ideal that was worth dying over.We remember here our discussion around Chaucer's A Knight's Tale, and the objection raised by female readers that the young knights didn't know -- and therefore could not love -- the lady at all. Hegel seems entirely subject to that line of attack.
Here we have exactly the problem that the digital youth are running into, yet in an embodied reality that ought to prevent it. The problem is that they leave the realm of the physical -- where sex is straightforward -- for the imaginary. Being free of the digital world, their imagination is at least tied to their idea of a being they first encountered as a physical being. In chasing after their own idea rather than the actual girl, though, they lose both the girl and their will to live. Apparently this was common enough to have sparked 'a wave of suicides across Europe' when the works of imagination were novels rather than digital pornography.
At the time I wrote the discussion of Hegel I was still trying to decide if he was on to something, as the ideal gives us aspiration. I am now ready to pronounce upon that. The ideal can point the way to perfection only in the way that art can perfect nature (as Aristotle says). It must begin with what is given by nature, and only seek to perfect what nature has not made perfect.
Hegel's concept is that the physical and the ideal only appear to be different, and in fact all physical things will turn out to be ideas in a higher mind to which we are striving to return -- God, in a word. Even if you are inclined to that model, the nature of the physical things should still be prioritized as already extant in the higher mind, whereas your own imaginations are still the work of your still-lower mind.
Yet even that kind of perfecting is highly problematic when the object of the imagination is someone else and not yourself. You might look at yourself and draft ideas for more perfectly achieving the highest expression of your nature; that is virtue. You might have similar ideas about how someone else could more perfectly achieve their nature: that may not be virtuous, but domineering. A parent might rightly try to help their child in places, but even there a child who does better by being pushed is not necessarily developing the internal drive to perfect themselves. A girl who does not quite live up to your ideal of love and beauty may not really be any of your business at all, and is certainly not obligated to try to attain your ideal for her (which she cannot even access, since it is only in your imagination and she has no access to that).
It seems like this philosophical error has led to a lot of human misery over the centuries. The digital has made it worse by making the idealized/imaginary seem more real and more immediate, and by removing the helpful influence of natural things like pheromones and embodied reality. For Hegel, this should have been an improvement, another step towards the realization that the ideal is actually real. Waves of suicides -- then and now -- strongly suggest that it is not. You cannot think your way to God. You cannot even think your way to love.
Dominique, notre père, combattit les albigeois
Were any of you Singing Nun fans? That line in an otherwise cheerful ditty always made me think of Albigensians locked up in a church and burned.
À l'époque où Jean Sans Terre
D'angleterre était le roi
Dominique, notre père, combattit les albigeois
Trying again: Fuller Brush Man
Babylon Bee has good suggestions for how to get rid of the Vaccine Evangelist who comes to your door.
I found decades ago that a polite and painless way of getting rid of anyone at my front door was to smile pleasantly and explain that I don't discuss [whatever] with people I don't know well. It goes along with Miss Manners's advice to answer impertinent questions with "How soon do you need to know?"
* I have no idea how Blogger could have let me sign in as Grim . . . ?
In Praise of James Jackson
Well known to long-time readers of the Hall is James Jackson, hero of the Revolution and even more heroic in the early American era. Sadly he is not well known outside of students of Georgia's history, but his example is one that we could very much use today as we try to contest corporate domination of what was meant to be a government of, by, and for the people.
Human Events has just kindly published a few thousand words on the subject. Hopefully James Jackson's name and example may become better known to the people of our United States.
"What Happened to You?"
Andrew Sullivan is often asked this question, he says, but would like to reverse the polarity.
The CRT debate is just the latest squall in a tempest brewing and building for five years or so. And, yes, some of the liberal critiques of a Fox News hyped campaign are well taken. Is this a wedge issue for the GOP? Of course it is. Are they using the term “critical race theory” as a cynical, marketing boogeyman? Of course they are. Are some dog whistles involved? A few. Are crude bans on public servants’ speech dangerous? Absolutely. Do many of the alarmists know who Derrick Bell was? Of course not.
But does that mean there isn’t a real issue here? Of course it doesn’t.
Take a big step back. Observe what has happened in our discourse since around 2015. Forget CRT for a moment and ask yourself: is nothing going on here but Republican propaganda and guile? Can you not see that the Republicans may be acting, but they are also reacting — reacting against something that is right in front of our noses?
What is it? It is, I’d argue, the sudden, rapid, stunning shift in the belief system of the American elites. It has sent the whole society into a profound cultural dislocation. It is, in essence, an ongoing moral panic against the specter of “white supremacy,” which is now bizarrely regarded as an accurate description of the largest, freest, most successful multiracial democracy in human history.
[Aside: Derrick Bell was the guy who founded what is most properly called CRT (although the demands to know what 'is really CRT' are a motte-and-bailey tactic). His most famous work isn't merely theoretical, it's actually fantastic -- not in the sense of being excellent, but in the sense of being a made-up fantasy story.]
Sullivan goes on to diagnose the issue as the transformation of the elite ideas of 'social justice' into a rejection of liberalism -- not just 'whiteness' or America or the Founding, but a rejection of the whole 300-year liberal project as itself a form of racism and oppression. That, he says, has big consequences in a nation that was founded precisely to pursue those classical liberal principles.
He doesn't want to go so far as supporting Republicans, of course, who are obviously "a nihilist cult" (and who are ironically, for nihilists, devout believers in God and country). He'd like some fellow Democrats to maybe step back from the pit, is all. But at least he's seeing the pit, recognizing a descent into the abyss.
Fake News Today
BB: "To Combat Transwoman Dominance Of Women's Sports, Olympics Adds Competitive Child Birthing."
That's a great idea, really.
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