Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on Feb 24, 2020 9:54:35 GMT -8
Rush has a good monologue going right now: The Democrats have always been in bed with the Russians and have attempted to use them to undermine the Republican Party. The difference with Bernie Sanders is that he’s honest about his socialism (but perhaps not so honest about his Communism).
I think people need to be taught things. Again, I’ve mentioned the topic of “the wild child” before in books I’ve read. What do you get when a child, for whatever reason, grows up in the wild with little or no human contact? The results are interesting. They are clearly beasts, of a sort, but not necessarily beastly. It’s a mix. They are wild, but their first instinct isn’t to tear the flesh off of another human they come into contact with, although being comfortable with any such contact is a challenge.
But such books will dispel any lazy belief in the supposed innate goodness of human nature. Human nature is such that human beings need to be molded into decent human beings. They are not born that way. There is no world anyone would want to live in where there isn’t some top-down enculturation going on. Call it “indoctrination” or “propaganda” if you will. But as I’ve always said, the question isn’t “if” children need to be indoctrinated. Rather, it’s about what they will be indoctrinated with and for what purpose.
Children right now are being indoctrinated into the anti-democratic, authoritarian belief system of Leftism. What they need to be indoctrinated in is George Washington, the Constitution, American History, our Judeo-Christian roots, and such. We should not allow public schools do indoctrinate them in “gender theory” or any of that rubbish. They need to learn to read and think rationality and to be exposed to good and honorable concepts. They should not be turned into robots for a destructive political ideology
This is not something that Libertarians (or most moderns, for that matter) appreciate. They are perfect practitioners of what Dennis Prager refers to as “cut-flower ethics.” They think the ground below them just naturally leads to freedom without any formative force. To quote Dennis:
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Post by timothylane on Feb 24, 2020 11:11:00 GMT -8
Actually, it would be more like Baldur von Schirach than Joseph Goebbels. Von Schirach was head of the Hitlerjugend, and in general charge of Nazi youth programs. Where this could lead was reported at the time in a book called Education for Death, a summary of which I read in one of my grandmother's old copies of Reader's Digest. (Based on a short classroom discussion, I think a student in Professor Mork's course on German history did a review of it. The book I reviewed, as it happened, was Ferdinand Schevill's biograpy of the Great Elector, Frederick William of Prussia.)
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 2, 2020 8:45:13 GMT -8
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on May 2, 2020 9:29:10 GMT -8
This reminds me of something I noticed as a teenager. Leftists love humanity, they just can't stand people. As with the the thought of "increasing love for love," these scoundrels submit an idea or theory for a person or tangible reality. Of course, the worship of idea/ls and theories requires no effort and does not include the tangible/factual messiness of human relationships.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on May 2, 2020 10:02:40 GMT -8
I doubt we will ever know the real reason. John Paul VI and then Benedict were two powerful proponents of the traditional Church.
It is good to read he is still standing up against the platoons of perverts who have made amazing progress in bending society to their desires.
The present communist pope is a member of Satan's Brigade, in my opinion.
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Brad Nelson
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עַבְדְּךָ֔ אֶת־ הַתְּשׁוּעָ֥ה הַגְּדֹלָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 2, 2020 10:09:15 GMT -8
Dennis Prager had a guest on his show Friday (or Thursday). And they were obviously good friends because they were cracking jokes. And it came up this frequent idea of Prager that “The Left loves humanity. They just hate people. I’m the opposite. I hate humanity and love people.”
He obviously doesn’t love all people. But the point is: the reality is that humanity is deeply flawed but individual people can be very good. He thus doesn’t merely worship an idea, as you pointed out. He’s taking into account tangible reality.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on May 2, 2020 10:13:36 GMT -8
Boy, he and I seem to have very similar thinking. I have often said exactly the same thing.
Humanity, taken as a whole, is a pretty sorry thing. Mobs are notorious for the ease with which they are swayed to do evil.
It is easy to get a mob to tear down and destroy, but almost impossible to get a mob to build or create.
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Post by timothylane on May 2, 2020 10:45:43 GMT -8
In many ways, this is the difference between conservatives and leftists. Conservatives like people for their good qualities but know how bad humanity can be overall. (A knowledge of history will do that.) Leftists have a great faith in humanity, especially without the corruption of civilization (a concept going back to Rousseau). But they're at best indifferent to individuals, a consequence of their collectivism. People are just cogs in the machine, and who cares about a cog?
Or, as my father pointed out in the mid-sixties, the problem with Communism (and leftism in general) is that it regarded its people as human fertilizer, to be expended to fulfill their utopian dreams that always lead to dystopia (unless halted short of that).
The concept probably goes back at least to Jonathan Swift. He could be bitterly misanthropic (the second and fourth of Gulliver's travels target "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth". (This is how the King of Brobdingnag described humanity after Gulliver gave his description of human society as he knew it. You may draw what conclusions you please from the fact that I remember the quote.) I've seen it suggested that the end of the fourth voyage (to the Houynhm land) describes this: Gulliver can't stand people, but recognizes the kindness of the Portuguese captain who rescued him. Gulliver and the captain represent the two sides of the same coin.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on May 2, 2020 10:49:41 GMT -8
It were better had Rousseau been strangled in his crib.
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Post by timothylane on May 9, 2020 17:02:57 GMT -8
Hot Air has an interesting article that could fit in a number of places here. It involves a real life Lord of the Flies situation, albeit with a very different outcome. It seems that back in the 60s, 6 bored teens from a strict Catholic school in Tonga decided to take off for Fiji.
As might be expected from teenagers, their preparations were a bit on the week side. They had to steal a boat (which got them in some trouble when they were finally found) and head off with some supplies. They didn't bother bringing a compass or any maps, but they did have a cooker and some food. They ended up on an uninhabited volcanic island, which fortunately had water and food available. (Eventually they discovered chickens and bananas -- presumably banana palms -- left behind by previous settlers.) This was fortunate, because they were there for nearly a year and a half before someone discovered them and they were able to return to Tonga.
They had a fire, and kept it tended. There was much to do, and they divided up into pairs to do them. When one was badly injured in a fall, they rescued him and took care of him. In other words, they didn't remotely live up to Golding's dark views. Perhaps this was because of their Catholic training (they seem to have tried to maintain their religion). Or perhaps Golding was a very dark individual who wrote about fictional boys like him. Who knows?
After they got back, they were treated as heroes despite the trouble over the stolen boat. The King of Tonga let the oldest (who had helped his father, a fisherman) go into the lobster business -- and he hired the other boys as his crew. The link is:
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Post by kungfuzu on May 9, 2020 18:53:26 GMT -8
Golding's book is just another reason I do not believe in the claim that literature provides "bigger truths" for us. I believe that many readers let literary stereotypes, both of people and situations, become implanted in their brains as truth when they are just yarns.
I forget who wrote it, but some famous author said something like "We lie for a living." I agree with that sentiment. Like journalists, writers too often spice things up or dumb things down to make a point.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 10, 2020 7:39:20 GMT -8
I was trying to find the book by Rutger Bregman. What I did find was his Utopia for Realists. One reviewer writes: This guy is a complete crackpot…which is not to say that he can’t compose a good narrative about a real story. But I do like what Sexton notes in the article: They boys had a grand adventure. Boys being boys, they pursued their inclination for it and their actions were tempered and guided by a belief system and moral code (Catholicism) that does not lend itself to a Bernie Sanders or Fidel Castro outlook on life (or at least that didn’t use to be the case). As one reviewer note: The blind will typically be leading the blind when something novel occurs (including the “novel” coronavirus). That most Catholics have probably forgotten the basis of their faith is troubling as well. Things have changed even from as short ago as the 1960’s. Now they vote in large numbers for Communists. I li0ve this one comment from a commenter: We report. You decide. No comment. |
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 10, 2020 7:42:20 GMT -8
I started reading Lord of the Flies once and was bored to tears. I didn’t make it very far. My Spider Senses were tingling early-on that it was junk. It would appear that I was right.
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Post by timothylane on May 10, 2020 8:59:32 GMT -8
It's very important to consider cultural aspects in how people respond to events, a point C. M. Kornbluth made at the end of his novel The Syndic. Perhaps the difference in events reflects the difference between Golding and normal people. Perhaps it reflects the Catholic training of the boys. Perhaps it reflects the difference between British and Tongan cultures (though the boys obviously weren't pure Tongan in their cultural background). Then, too, I don't know if Golding's boys (I've never read the book or seen any of the movies) were friends to start with, or just strangers brought together by ill chance.
I went back to look at the responses to the article (especially those from after I read it), and noticed the one Brad mentioned as well as another which suggested that this was to be expected of Tongan boys. I also liked the one who had discovered, somewhere along the way, that (as the book mentions at one point, according to another poster) "Lord of the Flies" is a Satanic reference (to be precise, that's what "Baal-zebub" means). I suppose it makes sense that Catholic boys in the 60s would be more resistant to Satan.
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Brad Nelson
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Post by Brad Nelson on May 10, 2020 9:10:47 GMT -8
One can expect that a starched Catholic upbringing was both a benefit and the impetus for these boys’ adventure. Escape the nuns! Escape the nuns! They can be like Marine drill instructors in habits.
I respect these boys, and even envy them, for having a true Mark Twain-like adventure. Or perhaps it was much more like Robinson Crusoe. There was a happy ending so all’s well that ends well.
One would think nowadays there would be big money to be made in offering a more structured (read: safer) adventure. Wouldn’t it be cool to pay $20,000 to be “stranded” on a tropical island for a month? It depends who you are with, of course. I suspect this would work only (as in the case of the Tonga boys) if you were already a part of a semi-coherent group. I sure as hell would not want to be part of a group of strangers on such an island adventure.
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Post by kungfuzu on May 10, 2020 9:55:03 GMT -8
I thought everyone would know who and what the title was alluding to. The fact that the the poster had to point out that the "Lord of the Flies" is Beelzebub is an indication of how far from our Judeo-Christian roots the culture has drifted. It is also another sign that we have lost the common language which used to united the English-speaking world. The King James Bible and Shakespeare gave us thousands of phrases and terms which we all understood. Clearly, these phrases and terms are loosing their universal meaning to us.
I believe it was Piggy who was killed. He was, as I recall, was the weak one who wore glasses. It is true that the strong, particularly the sociopathic strong, will often pick on the weak. On the other hand, it is also the case that others who are strong will often not allow such things.
I had a quick look at Golding's bio on Wikipedia and it says that, as a teenager, he tried to rape a fifteen year old girl. I would say that is a good indication of the type of person he was.
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Post by timothylane on May 10, 2020 10:05:22 GMT -8
Well, I don't think I was ever taught in any school that Beelzebub was Lord of the Flies, even in the catechism courses in my 2 years at Ursuline. As far as I recall, I first encountered this in Isaac Asimov's short story "Flies". (He discussed this more fully in his Biblical guide.) So even 60 years ago it wasn't routine knowledge, though I guess anyone who read Golding's book in school would have encountered this.
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 28, 2020 12:50:17 GMT -8
A nice piece by Theodore Dalrymple. His comments on books and faith mirror mine, pretty much.
By chance, I was reading Durant's "Age of Reason Begins" last night and I went through a number of pages on Montaigne. I have read some Montaigne, but not enough to pass any in depth judgement on him. That said, if Durant's presentation of him is correct, I would say that Montaigne is the person with whom I most closely agree on thoughts of faith, society and governance. That means that I am either 400 years behind the times, Montaigne was years ahead of his times or that there are certain eternal truths which are timeless.
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Post by timothylane on Jul 28, 2020 13:21:22 GMT -8
I suspect a lot of us can understand his attitude toward books. One book I once picked up and read was Biblioholism, which might be described as the condition of someone who would buy a book like that. But all that -- Elizabeth and I had thousands and thousands of books, stored in loads of bookcases and whereever else we could find space form -- was in our house, now sold. We came out with about 1% of our collection, most of which was in the trunk of my car. And that's gone now. Did Elizabeth recover any of them before then? I have no idea.
She gave me a handful of books, most of them probably purchased since then. Some are stored in my nightstand but the rest are in the dresser and closet in my old room, to which theoretically I'll return in a week or two after my quarantine ends. (They tested me today, as usual with a nasal swab, and I should know the results by the end of the week.)
At least I have a humongous collection of e-books, many of them in multiple formats. I shouldn't be running out of reading, at least until some disaster happens.
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kungfuzu
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Post by kungfuzu on Jul 28, 2020 13:50:27 GMT -8
Reading Dalrymple's piece and your comments, made me think of the short piece I wrote for ST.
A Bibliophile
by Kung Fu Zu 6/10/15
I am a person who loves books. Not just the contents of books, but the actual appearance, shape and feel of them. I love the smell of a newly printed book, especially one bound in leather, as one can sometimes find in special editions. When I walk into a library, I see a room full of friends and am overcome with a calm sense of well being. These faithful and patient companions accompany me through life at the pace I choose. They don’t become bored if I sit silently and ponder a thing. There is no fidgeting if I stop and go back to re-read a passage.
These friends have a vast amount of experience and are willing to impart this to me without asking anything in return. All that is required is for me to take the time and effort to pull one of my pals off the shelf and hold him or her in the palm of my hand.
Some of these friends will disappoint me, yet I can avoid them in future without any fear of reproach. Others will surpass anything I expected and take me to places never before imagined. Even better, they will do this for me over and over and over again. Yet they never express dissatisfaction or a feeling of abuse.
If I am clever, all of life’s perils and the multitude of humanity’s mistakes are there for me to see. The lessons of life can be learned without having to suffer the consequences others have endured. Of course, no one escapes all of life’s blunders, but if I have an open mind and am paying attention, many problems can be avoided by listening to my books.
Parents die, siblings and friends may grow distant and difficult to reach, but books are a constant, always at my beck and call. I am required only to open the front leaf and start reading.
In the end, books are an eternal record of those who came before. They are part of the panoply of humanity, its follies and triumphs. Whether in quarto, octavo or today’s Kindle, they are personal fragments of human experience which authors have left behind for others to enjoy and profit from. Whether or not one does so, depends entirely upon one’s self.
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