Monday, March 31, 2014
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Grooming
Novels don't mention that, at bedtime or waking, people brush their teeth, men shave, men shower and women bathe, and women attend to their hair and make-up.
And yet, people vary quite a lot, in these matters.
And it shows.
Frequency of shaving, bathing, and showering vary, for example.
As do the efforts put into make-up and hair-dressing.
But these things matter.
Doomed to republicanism
All the settler states of the Americas and Oceania that insisted on full independence.
And all the colonies that did the same.
After all, to do otherwise they would've had to create on the fly a caste of hereditary aristocrats, an hereditary monarchy, and worse than any mere established church, a whole collection of ex-officio Lords Spiritual.
Only so could they have reproduced the ancien regime of the European Mother Country.
Whether Spanish, Portuguese, French, or English.
The Dutch were already an odd case.
The 8th Amendment
It bans cruel and unusual federal punishments.
The idea seems to have been to prevent the federal government imposing worse punishments than were common at the time.
It prohibits, after all, only punishments that are both unusual and cruel.
It does not prohibit punishments that are merely unusual, or merely cruel.
And it does not at all address the interesting question whether a punishment might be excessive, given the crime.
The price of integrity
If American judges and politicians were serious about the Constitution the established religion of Hawaii would be Buddhism, that of Utah would be the Mormon Church and polygamy would be legal there, Fundamentalist Christianity would be taught outright in public schools across the South, and the Cardinal Archbishop of Boston would still be keeping Joyce's Ulysses off the shelves and out of the stacks of the libraries and bookstores of Massachusetts.
In Protestant states divorce would be possible only for adultery, and in Catholic states not at all.
Any state could ban all firearms whatsoever.
The right to an attorney would not be a positive right.
The federal constitution would impose only this sure limit on state governments: no monarchy, no aristocracy.
On second thought, if American judges and politicians were serious about the Constitution the Louisiana Purchase would never have happened, nor any territorial expansion since.
The absurdities heap up very fast.
See other posts with this label.
Friends of Abe - a Who's Who
Neo-conservative rather than neo-confederate, I suppose.
The names are interesting and not surprising.
Why isn't Mark Harmon there?
Or Donald Bellisario?
Pro-cop, pro-military, pro-war.
Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish
The liberal hatchet job continues against Paul Ryan
Back in the day, Daniel Patrick Moynihan advised his boss, liberal Richard Nixon, that the poor in America were embedded in a "culture of poverty" that made them unemployable, for the most part, and that there was little hope anything much could be done about it.
Between twenty and thirty percent of whites were implicated in varying degrees, along with the vast majority of blacks.
During his presidency, Nixon famously proposed a universal, guaranteed annual wage.
If you can't teach a man to fish you can anyway give him one.
Today the situation is much worse and I would guess, based on his widely known views on political economy, that Ryan's plan is to stop giving poor Americans fish.
Ryan is far more right-wing than Nixon ever was, and wants to repeal rather than add to the accomplishments of a century of progressivism.
But just as they rarely attack social and Christian conservatives for clericalism, liberals rarely attack Wall Street conservatives, Randians, or libertarians for class war.
They attack the former for sexual bigotry and making war on women; and for being old, white, and male.
And they attack the latter for racism, just as they do the anti-immigrationists.
I, for one, am not amused.
Come to that, as to the last, what else can they do?
Try to prove massive, low-wage immigration is not crushing American wage levels?
Try to convince whites they have nothing to fear from being made a minority in their own country?
Good luck with either.
Anyway, the truth is that liberals invoke class war themes a whole lot less than would seem natural for them, given so many of them are so very bright pink.
Conservatives complain of liberals preaching class war a lot more than liberals actually preach it.
Why?
Rich Democratic contributors are much more important than in the past, and if anything are less open to frank avowal of the true rationale for progressive government control of the economy.
And like the Wall Street and libertarian conservatives they want to flood the country with cheap labor and to send factories and jobs out of the country.
Branding Republicans as racists instead of vicious, Gilded Age plutocrats waging class war against ordinary Americans serves the liberal plutocracy much better.
As for Ryan, the supposed evidence of racism is ridiculous.
But that is how they will smear him, nonetheless.
Cuba edging in from the cold
Individual politicians as well as whole parties and movements all over Latin America have made peace with democracy and a mixed, fundamentally capitalist economic order.
And now a whole country?
Yes, with both, unlike China.
Classification as propaganda
BBC News ranges stories about Turkey under "Europe."
Like this.
Turkey PM faces local election test
Neither culturally nor geographically nor politically nor historically.
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Is anti-EU anti-NATO?
For some, maybe.
Farage stands by EU 'blood' claim
Maybe the scariest part is how far his opponent demonizes Putin and Russia.
Check that beam in thine own eye
But it's the liberal sites that are sneering at, mocking, and openly hammering the elderly, especially the white elderly, and especially old white males.
They've been doing it for at least a couple of years, now.
And even this liberal defense of a key interest of the elderly elicits our sympathy by showing us a picture of an elderly white woman with a cane.
Democrats' core values
The first term D governor is a white male who already looks good for a national career.
I don't know a thing about him but this and already I like him better than Hillary.
Some in the DC bubble are not like the others
Alan Grayson.
The Crimeans exercised their legitimate self-determination, assisted bloodlessly by the Russians, DR and AG said Tuesday.
America should be pleased, they said.
They did not quite say that the Russians are not starting up a new cold war but we and the Europeans are, and quite needlessly.
DR pointed out huge differences between Putin's Russia and the Soviet Union, oddly (for a conservative) omitting the absence of communism, citing instead the presence of opposition newspapers, religion, and elections, much as a liberal of some decades ago might have done, before that moment in the 1960's when liberals of both parties chose public culture-war against Christian faith and morals.
DR was apparently responding to the many absurd comparisons and groundless allegations that have been made, starting even before the crisis of the Ukraine, that Putin is a Stalinist dangerous to America who misses the Soviet past and Russia is a smothering tyranny, a semi-dictatorship somewhere between fascism and communism.
What Putin misses is Russian grandeur and the extent and potency among European powers of the empire of the Tsars.
Those who would oppose any return of Russia to a leading place among European powers find it inconvenient to recall that Russia fought with the Western allies against Germany twice, and that a chief purpose of the post-WW2 division of Germany and the Warsaw pact was to have done with the German threat.
But the prospect of such a rise does not disturb Americans for whose views on foreign affairs and preferences regarding America's place in the world Zbigniew Brzezinski and the National Review cut no ice.
Rules of offense
To whom may one intentionally give offense?
Liberal targets to this day include Russians (remember the flap about gays and the Olympics), Christians, the elderly, moral conservatives, and white men of all ages, everywhere.
Conservative targets include soi-disant "sexual outlaws," feminists, and non-white racists.
And, odd though it may seem, everybody still thinks it's fine to mock the French.
As in "Pardon my French," usually uttered to excuse a blistering streak of Anglo-Saxon.
Liberals and Jews (pleonasm?) are especially good at orchestrating hate campaigns at others for "racism," "insensitivity," "anti-Semitism," and "hate speech," often getting people fired from positions one might have thought secure.
Tables turned?
Friday, March 28, 2014
An effective aphorism stops you cold
Aphorism 461.
There is more chance of getting a good sovereign by inheritance than by election.
464.
Oligarchies never change opinion: their interests are always the same.
Napoleon Bonaparte. Aphorisms and Thoughts, selected by Honore de Balzac.
Noah
The Bible tale is not a story of human courage.
It is not a story of divine justice and it is not a story of divine mercy.
It is a story of a mad God and the astounding destruction he authors.
Probably not how the film frames it.
Critics like the movie.
Recall that the critics - especially the Jews - hated The Passion of the Christ, which was very, very Biblical and very, very Christian.
And, maybe that's the whole reason why they hated The Passion and are fine with Noah.
The Passion was inescapably and distinctly Christian, so they shouted themselves hoarse that it was anti-Semitic.
Noah?
Absolutely nothing about it looks Christian.
Or even Biblical.
Just another disaster movie in which the hero saves his family and a boatload of animals from bad men and bad weather.
But not from God.
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Monsters of history
Many are the historians who have admired Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon for their conquests.
Much as if one admired Hitler for his Final Solution to The Jewish Question.
Perhaps they mean it
They would still be much less bloody and repressive than most - all? - communist regimes.
Egypt to try more than 900 Islamists
You would have to kill a lot more than that.
And would you really regret it, if you were an Egyptian?
Secularist that you are?
Non-Muslim that you are?
Sure, it might scare you.
But, still.
Pique
Rise in number of global executions
That there actually is such a body as Amnesty International is, like much else to do with politics, part blessing and part curse.
Like the extraordinary daring with which liberal judges have lied into existence an American constitution to suit themselves.
Pirates, gangsters, and mafias
I had thought to write something about the state, comparing the worst with regions or cities actually governed, if that is the right word, by criminals.
But then, of course, I realized that the worst of states have been much worse than anything run by pirates, gangsters, or mafias.
Pol Pot.
Mao.
Oh, yes.
Many years ago, when Marshal Ky ran South Vietnam, a friend complained bitterly that US support for that country ought to end because his government was so corrupt.
In response to which I pointed out the only too evident fact that a government can do much worse things to its people than steal from them.
Though I opposed US support for the government of South Vietnam, I at all times hoped for a victory for them.
Not for the sake of the US or for my sake, or for the sake of anyone personally close to me.
But for the sake of the people of South Vietnam.
Not that I had the least inclination to go fight to save them.
Like Dick Cheney and nearly everyone else, I had other priorities.
Wednesday, March 26, 2014
She left her baby in a Burger King?
So she came forward and identified herself?
Amazing.
She has a lawyer?
I'll bet.
The daughter is happy with her?
Weird.
Russia now a regional power and not national security threat number one
Perceptive, moderate, not crazy.
Over-estimates our importance and our proper role in the world, but no worse than he always has.
Immigration and Nationalism in Europe
Very interesting reporting from Pat Buchanan.
Also, he makes a good point.
Perhaps even the nationalist secessionists want to block further ethnically alien immigration, and not just the parties openly concerned about that.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Bias Incident Response Team
Everybody against the FN, again
The French National Front only has one issue: France for the French, and no one else.
For the second time, all the other significant parties have united with one shared purpose: keep the immigrants coming.
And, of course, keep France in the EU.
(All right. That's two, I know.)
Could the EU survive without France?
Alarm at French National Front gains
It is open to all the other parties, of course, to steal the Whigs' clothes.
I say they won't do it.
The American GOP would follow Bismarck into adoption of thorough social democracy, first.
Hell will never get that cold.
I sent Marine an email wishing her luck.
The neoliberal right wants no part of her or the FN.
The Financial Times cries "racist."
That includes the American Wall Street right, the plutocrat right, the open borders and free trade and kill the IRS right.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
A terrible mistake?
Dean Acheson said in public the line of containment did not cover South Korea and that gave us the Korean War.
Someone gave Saddam Hussein a green light to invade Kuwait and that gave us the Gulf War.
And now?
Nato warns over Russia border force
President Barack Obama earlier ruled out sending US troops to Ukraine.
And he said flat out there would be no actual war with Russia.
The perfect man for the job
Spain's ex-PM Adolfo Suarez dies
He and the king did exactly the right thing for Spain, at the time.
He's pretty serious
Pat Buchanan's last six columns have been devoted to keeping America from hammering provocations directed at Russia.
Coates claims blanket impunity for blacks
Biden promises war for Latvia
If you somehow didn't realize that NATO is a Western alliance against Russia, see this.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
The legacy of colonialism
Blame! Blame the white man!
Female Kenyan MPs blast polygamy law
Just kidding.
I was pretending to be a post-colonial theorist, a Western or American liberal, or a feminist of any race or clime.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Avoidance
For anti-warriors, I mean, on the Democrat side.
Hence the virtual silence of anti-war liberal blogs on Topic A in the major media, all over Europe and America, the Ukraine.
Still, they have no trouble indirectly proving their continued loyalty to a ruling class furious, right now, with Russia and its president.
Kossacks on Putin, Wednesday morning
Oh, all right.
For a couple of days the Ukraine story has come in second behind the missing Malaysian airliner.
And on the tabloids I think it's 10th or 11th, behind Ellen's divorce and several stories about celebrity drug addicts and dieters.
Someone once coined the memorable expression, "the attention span of a dog in a field of squirrels."
(But in Europe it's still the top story, though not quite the only story.)
The essence of politics
International politics, he meant, no doubt.
Meaning domestic politics, of course.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Not even legal to discuss it, then? Not even for a member of the government?
Not their first try, either.
His Dutch enemies, I mean.
You know, you believe in free speech or you don't.
That used to be a litmus test for liberals and the entire democratic left.
No more.
"We must confront Putin," says E. J. Dionne. But not with war.
Globalist liberals just never give up.
And they are not much less unfair to and bigoted against Putin and Russia than the neocons.
The Guardian's Simon Tisdall cites John McCain, demands American military support for Ukraine
As I recall, when Europe went to war in 1914 the socialists of every nation behaved as patriots.
The cosmopolitanism of the left is everywhere an assumed hypocritical pose allowing them to denounce what they disapprove, anyway.
Which does not mean they never wrap themselves in the flag and sing "God save the Queen!"
In this article, Tisdall wisely accedes to the impending reunification of Crimea with Russia.
We let the Brits drag us into their wars of choice twice in the 20th Century and we damned well ought never to do it again.
This is Tisdall all but frothing at the mouth.
No Second Crimean War!
The West European powers fought a war in the middle of the 19th Century to deny Russia military use of the Black Sea, keeping Turkey and the Mediterranean an exclusive preserve of the British and French.
The US played no role, of course.
No should we, today.
The Europeans are howling, of course, but show no signs of wanting to carry their own military burdens.
Like so many others, they want us to fight their battles for them.
And the vain, ambitions pinheads of our ruling class are lusting to oblige.
If Ukraine keeps pushing and provokes an actual war with Russia, be sure they will demand we defend them.
They will be joined by Europeans voicing the same demand, and many of our own classe politique.
White Man Marches greeted with universal derision
In thousands of hits on my google news search, not one appeared to be a straight news story about this march against global and national policies of soft genocide directed against whites.
Every story I sampled pointed out with mockery, contempt, and moral condemnation that the marches mostly featured white supremacist or hate groups like the Nazis and the Klan.
And it looked like all the others were the same in spirit.
A very interesting contrast with the press reception of Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March.
You may recall that Farrakhan is the leader of a fake religion, The Nation of Islam, whose absurd and crude doctrines, far stupider than anything in anybody else's holy books, not excepting the Book of Mormon or the Koran, are nothing but expressions of and justifications for the most relentless and bitter hatred of white people.
It remains true, on the other hand, that The Nation has no history of violence or terrorism against whites.
The Klan is infamous for being an organization whose sole purpose was exactly such violence and terrorism, directed against blacks.
And as to the Nazis, well, what can you say about Americans who proudly identify with that history?
Putin's speech
Putin's full Crimea speech annotated
"Annotated" with recurrent interruptions by Bridget Kendall, protesting and contradicting Putin every step of the way, defending and asserting the position of the Western governments.
Why did BBC NEWS feel the need to be so partisan here, where a simple transcript/translation was wanted?
Putin's complaints about 'containment' are perfectly accurate and even mild, in view of the brutal dismemberment of the collapsed Soviet Union and the subsequent behavior of the Western alliance toward Russia.
The Western powers and the Western press have played a stupid and bigoted role frighteningly reminiscent of the run-ups to both of Europe's - and America's - disastrous wars of the 20th Century.
The reaction of the West to the Russian response to the coup in Ukraine, while not greatly surprising, fills me with dismay and fears where it will lead.
And be it noted the Russian people are deliriously cheered by Crimea' s return.
Putin spoke and throughout this crisis has acted not all on his own but for Russia.
Thank God for this.
President Barack Obama ruled out US military involvement in Ukraine on Wednesday, saying: "We do not need to trigger an actual war with Russia."
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Of Human Bondage
As mysterious, various, and odd as human sexuality are human affections.
Some people feel about their pets the way others feel about their children.
And vice versa.
Colombia VP puts dog ahead of career
And in no way does this diminish the great truth that satisfactory intimate relationships are key elements in human happiness, for most of us.
Nor the strength of desire or attachment.
Still, it's a rare man who would die for his horse.
And most of us would think him extravagant.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
FDR's war
Did Franklin Roosevelt save Soviet Russia because he knew the New Deal would have been impossible without American capitalists' fear of communism and might not long survive its demise?
And in Venezuela
Venezuela bid for US 'peace meeting'
Per BBC,
Venezuela blames the US for the anti-government protests that have left 28 people dead in the past month.
The US says Venezuela is using it as a scapegoat for its internal problems.
Frankly, I suspect the US government is the more likely liar, even though that means O must have approved efforts at destabilization of the regime.
Just as he must have done in the case of Ukraine.
Not for the first time, I admit I don't get O, apart from the racial chip on his shoulder and the self-righteous racism we sometimes see, for example, in his attitudes about black crime and white police.
He heads the white government of a white country, and seems to do it with as little difficulty as an Irish congressman representing a Polish district.
That is what made it possible for so many whites, me included, to vote for him.
But his own policies - domestic, too, but mostly foreign - are not out of line with those that made his "spiritual leader" of twenty years cry out, "God damn America!"
Of which a very large part is and has been gratuitous, buttinsky globalism.
Just what we should expect from the kind of man who wants to be president, I suppose.
The kind who want to be the boss, not really for any ulterior or further purpose, but just because they want to be the boss.
The executive personality, in a nutshell.
It's just about ambition, pure will to power.
An inherently expansive, imperialist sort of thing, I imagine, of its nature.
After all, do we not all hear endlessly repeated the claim, however absurd, that the American president is the most powerful leader in the world?
Talk about a job description to appeal to the worst in human nature.
And do not for a moment suppose it is only Republicans who find the myth convenient - or maybe congenial - that America has a mission to save the world.
Russian Crimea
Crimea 'votes for Russia union'
The EU and the USA, who rushed to recognize the illegal Ukrainian government resulting from a democratic coup they largely engineered, have rejected the plebiscite as illegal and refused to accept its validity.
That’s not a good question.
Crazy liberals on a roll
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Newly emboldened, or newly desperate, leftist tells it like it is
Best wishes
Salvador ex-rebel 'wins presidency'
Not exactly a mandate.
But still, in the words of GW, "elections have consequences."
This lady did much better.
100% American exceptionalism
Deadly clash as Ukraine crisis grows
With the unanimous support of the US ruling class, our government is doing its level best to keep Russia weak, isolated, and dismembered.
A matter of no concern whatever, except that a stronger Russia would conflict with America's aspiration to remain the world's unique hyper-puissance, unchallenged as the foremost globo-meddler.
An aspiration utterly doomed, in any case, to failure, perhaps before we get much further into this century.
This is a right wing foreign policy carried out with less craziness by Democrats.
And so is this.
Detroit makes junk. Still.
GM recall 'linked' to 303 deaths
Michael Moore said so and he was right.
US auto makers trashed their own brands selling crap for decades, losing both the global and the US domestic markets to people who made decent cars.
Notorious during those years was Lee Iacocca, who rescued Chrysler, ruined by selling junk, after a government bailout entirely through an ad campaign to convince America what a kick-ass leader he was and what a great job he was doing, turning Chrysler around.
Detroit continued to make junk throughout his tenure.
Only within the last decade has the reputation of American cars been recovering.
This is not going to help.
I drove a four year old Ford Galaxy in college, for a while, and it was already unreliable scrap.
The only other American car I ever had was a three year old, low mileage and well kept Chevy that began to fall apart, complete with peeling paint, almost immediately.
Five year old Asian cars are as reliable and good looking as you could want.
Friday, March 14, 2014
Not a good ending
A happy ending for this show?
So all that brave pessimism that so looked to be the show's one enduring lesson was just the bitter bluster of a disappointed heart?
Should've killed them both, Cohle's last words a reflection of the permanent power of darkness and man's utter isolation.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
US out of Putin's face!
Those people include the President, his SECDEF, and many of his supporters in office, in the media, or in "think tanks" whose job is to keep America the world's number one meddler in other people's affairs.
Relatively few and relatively quiet are those who oppose American meddling, though they seem more numerous or noisy on the right than on the left.
Let me clarify.
Many major Democrat sites are simply ignoring the whole thing.
That they don't endorse the madness is a good thing.
That they don't criticize the madness is a blatant reflection of bias.
The whole Ukraine affair is incredibly stupid, in large part our own fault for encouraging the coup and now insisting on legitimating the illegal new government, and anyways none of our business.
How many Americans need to go without food stamps or health insurance so we can float a billion in guaranteed loans to buy the Ukraine for NATO?
How many elderly have to eat cat food because we can't afford to give them a raise in their Social Security payments because we are spending other billions worldwide aimed at weakening Russia?
What the hell is all this nonsense?
And on the other side of the planet, recall that Reagan got credit for destroying the Soviet Union by forcing them to spend beyond their means on the military to keep up with us.
According to the conservatives, this imposed such economic hardship on the country that the peoples of the USSR refused to take it any more and made a revolution.
What will happen when we go bust trying to keep up with China and Russia as both countries, especially China, grow rich enough and more than rich enough to spend us into the ground?
And in the case of China this will be largely because our neoliberal trade policies enriched China by impoverishing America!
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Obama's pledge to Ukraine
O is being very foolish, though doubtless not so foolish as McCain or Romney would have been.
Not a dime's worth of difference? Democrats do nothing for the working people of America?
Obama planning overtime pay expansion for millions of workers
He can provide overtime pay for many, many workers at the stroke of a pen, without anything from Congress.
About time.
Can he get rid of that stupid exemption for "executive responsibilities"?
That's just a way to let employers screw bottom row supervisory types and make them resent the protections they DON'T get but the people working for them do.
It is not unusual for those folks to make less than their underlings, at least during weeks when OT pay is added in.
And it is not unusual for management to insist on squeezing 50 or 60 hours out of them, every week.
Here are more details of who would be affected, and how.
Shame O can't run again.
I would really like to annoy the Republicans by voting him yet another term.
Yes, yes. Voting is an impotent and irrational gesture.
And mass politics, even in a democracy, is such a repulsive and obscene carnival one cannot help being repelled.
But still.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Did Rubio really say that?
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Maybe they should ban it for being a travesty
'Noah' Banned By Arab Countries
Did they ban Charlton Heston, back in the day?
Does Obama have the nerve to end the embargo?
Who doubts it would facilitate peaceful transition to multi-party democracy?
A transition that would preserve as much as reasonable the socialist patrimony and progressive achievements of the Cuban Revolution.
A transition not at all like the feeding frenzy as the sharks of the New Russia devoured the common wealth of that unhappy people.
The beginning of the end of the Bolivarian Revolution?
As in the Ukraine, the US right openly applauds, and Western governments have meddlesomely supported, coups from the street against lawful governments duly elected according to reasonable democratic standards, so far as we can tell.
A successful coup in Ukraine, but so far only attempted in Venezuela.
The complaint of the American right against the Bolivarian Revolution is its successful and popular hostility to bare-knuckle capitalism and the global institutions of neoliberalism, which have caused it to flirt and seek safety with enemies of America.
The complaint against the lawful and legitimate, democratic government of Ukraine was its decision to move closer to Russia rather than the EU and NATO.
In from the cold in El Salvador
El Salvador ex-guerrilla in poll bid
Mr Sanchez Ceren, 69, was a Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) commander during El Salvador's bloody civil war, which went on from 1980 to 1992.
And I would vote for him, though I was not on his side, back in the day.
Quite a continuing parade of ex-reds, these days, into the democratic left.
Very satisfying.
No one is safe
Bismark made a joke, once.
Something about the folly of committing suicide out of fear of death.
Just so is the rejection of external goods, or in any case of attachment to them, recommended by stoicism only for fear of their being taken away.
What? No meeting with Alexander?
Robin Hard disbelieves utterly in the historicity of any confrontation between Diogenes and Alexander the Great, or any other named figure.
Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes.
The pithy wisdom of insanity, or animal and human nature compared, with a view to understanding virtue, happiness, and the just or good state, in relation to poverty and wealth
Is it fair to say that, empirically, only the most severely damaged humans choose homelessness?
Alcoholics, drug addicts, the most viciously abused of children, and the mad?
In the ancient world, anyway as far as Hellenistic times, the relation of mentor to pupil was particularly intense and personal, sometimes almost cult-like.
And, as we know, among the common perquisites of cult leadership are these two, that the women - and the men and the children - are yours for the taking and the followers give you all their money.
These thoughts in mind, what are we to make of the Dog Philosopher?
On the other hand, do the homeless write books or compose tragedies?
Might that whole poverty-schtick have been no more than one of his stunts, enduring no more than a few days, weeks, or years?
Or might it have been a regular phase in the Cynic training or career? - an idea that seems not to have occurred to Robin Hard, editor of the Oxford paperback, Diogenes the Cynic, Sayings and Anecdotes.
See his remark that Antisthenes would have had no use for the Cynic robe and backpack and could not himself have taught Cynicism to Diogenes because he was married and owned a house.
But, to be fair, that impoverished dog's life was regarded by the later tradition as at once the whole of the Cynics' life of virtue and happiness and, according to RH, a "short cut" to the very same virtue and happiness advocated by the Stoics, without the trouble of scholarship or the demands of theoretical reflection.
Anyway, the stories of Diogenes cast an odd light on the figure of Socrates and the City of Pigs in Republic, Bk. II, don't they?
Perhaps more sardonically even on Plato's dog-guardians, also in Bk. II.
But also and more significantly on the dichotomies that preoccupied Greek ethics from first to last like those between nature and custom, convention, or culture, between internal and external goods, and between natural and vain desires.
And (thus?) perhaps also on the conventional dichotomy between classical (Hellenic) and post-classical (Hellenistic) philosophy.
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose."
The Hellenic/Hellenistic wisdom of Janice Joplin.
And then there are echoes in philosophical pessimism right through the 19th Century.
And there is this.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Friday, March 7, 2014
The myth of Japanese cruelty
Reading The Devil of Nanking, by Mo Hayder.
The Rape of Nanking is the worst the Japanese are accused of in some 12 years of war.
Three or four hundred thousand civilians killed by an army gone wild in one city in December, 1937.
But compare that to Germany's worst in 6 years of war.
The final solution. Auschwitz. Six million dead.
Still, while the final solution is the most frightful cruelty of the war, over all, the Rape of Nanking (some 200 thousand women raped, and most killed, for a total of about 300 thousand killed) might be the worst of its kind.
But maybe not.
The infamy of Guernica has survived through nearly a century, now, of much more awful aerial slaughter.
Dresden, say.
Or the Doolittle air raids.
Or Hiroshima.
Balls
Canada condom piercer verdict upheld
"A person consents to how she will be touched, and she is entitled to decide what sexual activity she agrees to engage in for whatever reason she wishes," the high court wrote in its decision on Friday.
Is that really the law in Canada?
Not sure I would want to be quite so categorical.
And note the raging feminism of that use of "a person" and "she."
Thursday, March 6, 2014
The death of democracy?
Is any democracy able in the long run to force such devastating impoverishment on its people for the sake of future people?
Or for people elsewhere?
I don't believe it.
'Carbon bubble' threatens markets
And maybe the markets don't, either.
As to the undemocracies, well, they could do it.
But none of them that are major economies seem likely to.
Post-foundationalism
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Hillary the looney hawk
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
OK, it's an addictive but relatively harmless substitute for actual smoking
Are these the same folks who want to legalize marijuana?
Actual, hard drugs, too, like heroin or coke?
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Nana
She makes the men who ruin themselves for her as desperate as anyone in Dostoyevsky.
She is cruel and endlessly mercenary, but they are absurd.
Ukraine has a signed US security guarantee
Why the Hell did we offer such a deal?
How many Americans are supposed to die over this?
Are we supposed to risk nuclear exchange?
More dangerous than the arrogance of power is the arrogance of clueless powerlessness.
We can't stop this.
There was never the least chance we could.
The crisis in Crimea could lead the world into a second cold war | Dmitri Trenin
DT does not see the current crisis in the context of supposed broader ambitions.
West's puny response to Ukraine crisis will not deter Vladimir Putin | Simon Tisdall
ST exaggerates those ambitions and needlessly demonizes Putin.
Even dangerously.
We should have stayed out of Europe's first Cold War.
The more so the second, if this really signals another.
US out of NATO.
Please.
Putin is shaping events in Ukraine. It's time the west caught up | Observer editorial
Quotha,
One of the alarming features of the crisis on Ukraine's Crimean peninsula is the staggering confidence with which Vladimir Putin is pursuing his agenda there and in eastern Ukraine.
Another is the staggering cluelessness of the Western classe politique that is surprised that Putin is not frightened of the paper tigers, in this context, that are the EU, NATO, and the USA.
Jesus, is nobody in the Western world even faintly in touch with reality?
Are all of our leaders blithering idiots?
And this is just appalling.
Equally, it is clear that when western political institutions have attempted to penetrate Russia's neighbours – the suggestion of Nato expansion in Georgia, and closer EU integration for Ukraine – Moscow has pushed back hard on both occasions.
Really?
It was against the innocent and laudable and sweet as candy spread of "western institutions" that Putin, that KGB thug, wickedly "pushed back"?
Mother of God.
That NATO is not to this day a military alliance against Russia is just the sort of absolute bullshit with which our political elites deceive only themselves, though they are deluded by the echoes in the Western media they control into believing everyone else has been flummoxed.
NATO should have disbanded when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, or at least US forces should have gone home and left Europe to work out - and pay for - new arrangements on its own.
Instead, for decades we have been shoving NATO up Russia's ass.
Putin objects.
What a shock.
What a meanie.
Class vs. nationalist opposition
Both in Ukraine and in Venezuela, rebels are out to bring down legitimate, elected governments.
The Ukrainian rebellion is led by a more unified and fanatical, nationalist right, reliant in part on crypto-Nazis and anti-Semitism.
Also, the Ukrainian rebels have had powerful outside encouragement.
The opposition in Venezuela seems more like our own conservative movement, right down to the delusions of majority support.
The legacy of slavery
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Whiskey over vodka
I surprise myself.
I find I prefer the flavor of Black Velvet to the flavorless Smirnoff.
A not quite bottom shelf, smooth Canadian whiskey with a somewhat peppery finish to the more securely middle shelf, smooth and flavorless, not peppery global vodka.
Costing about 25% more per unit volume (neither is expensive), the Smirnoff ought to be clearly better, and isn't.
Not that I don't like it, though.
Baby on board!
Remember this the next time you see one of those signs women put on their paramilitary SUV's.
They expect others - especially men - to die for their little darlings.
But . . . .
US trainee nun admits killing baby
And then there is the feminist position on abortion and even infanticide.
Can't wait to hear from the usual suspects about this case.
Only fear accounts for so low a price
Fear of being branded some kind of fan.
Signed copy of Mein Kampf sold in US
An autographed two-volume set of Adolf Hitler's Nazi manifesto Mein Kampf has sold at auction in Los Angeles for $64,850 (£38,700).
The books date from 1925 and 1926 and were purchased by an anonymous US buyer, auctioneer Nate Sanders said.
Hitler inscribed the cloth-bound volumes, one a first edition and the other a second, to Josef Bauer, an early Nazi party member and SS officer.
The Nazi leader offered Bauer his best wishes in the Christmas season.
The online bidding started at $20,000 and concluded on Thursday night.
The books received 11 bids.
Ordinarily, rich people and collectors pay astronomical prices for the most absurd or shocking stuff.
Were it not for the taboo and fear of opprobrium, this would bring bids in the millions, I think.
It went for a derisory sum.
She's counting on the US
Not so much for protection against North Korea as against China.
Think how American withdrawal from the Far East would change the strategic picture.
South Korea would have to align with Japan, as would many others in the region.
That would involve taking a friendlier view of Japan.
Friendlier than this surely.
S Korea warns Japan over sex slaves
South Korean President Park Geun-hye has warned Japan it will only bring isolation on itself if it reviews a statement acknowledging its wartime use of sex slaves.
Probably, the attitude of local states toward Australia and New Zealand would improve, as well.
Currently they sulk, whine, and complain a lot, demanding the right to dump their surplus populations there, thus escaping both an economic and a political burden while gleefully undermining the ethnic integrity, political stability, and future strength of those white settler-states.
But if America withdrew they would need to rely on Japan, but for many reasons would likely not want to rely only on Japan.
And in that context the fact that the Anzacs are white, and not Asian, would be a plus in their eyes.
America, come home.
Putin will send troops
Putin seeks Ukraine troop deployment
I doubt he'll try to restore the boundaries of pre-WW1 Russia, but he's probably going for the pre-WW2 borders, in the long run.
Stalin's post-WW2 borders are out of reach, I think.
But maybe not.
And all that is none of our affair, anyway.
The US has no more reason today to worry about the rise of Russia as a European power than we had in the 19th Century.
US out of NATO, please.
Tell him we can't afford it, we need to spend the money on the welfare of our people
People on Social Security need a raise, people on Medicare need lower premiums and other health related costs, more people need to get on Medicaid in any number of states where voters are just too stupid to believe.
Nope.
Can't afford silly meddling.
Can't afford either conservative or liberal bullshit about American global leadership.
Time to wise up and do the right thing.
Bring the troops home.
Still so very glad this man is not president, never was, never will be
No, we most certainly are not.
We are Americans, and nobody has invaded America, and nobody is going to.
Chill, John.
Let the Republicans diminish veterans’ benefits
Benefits to new troops and vets will not be benefits to the masses, and they make voluntary service too attractive.