Man Was Not Meant to Think Alone

I’ve long been struck by the philosophical and theological sundering of man from other men that began in the 16th century. Since ideas matter, as Sola anything and Cartesian navel-gazing replaced living tradition and the Question method and, indeed, the very notion of a ‘school’ of thought, these bad ideas have also resulted in the physical separation of people from each other.

You need people, lots of people, for there to be traditions. You need people, generally a good number of people, to have a school of thought. Neither traditions nor schools of thought are created and maintained through correspondence or Twitter. Real, often obnoxious, people rubbing elbows make them and keep them alive. In the case of Sacred Traditions, those people included the Person of Jesus and His apostles and disciples, and their disciples down to the present day; schools of thought, at least until that fateful 16th century, were formed, developed and reinforced by actual scholars, often in actual physical proximity to each other in actual physical schools, arguing, yelling and occasionally knifing each other (1). It may not have always been pretty, but, boy, you can’t get any more human than that!

In the early 1500s, Luther declares his ‘Alones’ shifting the standard of religious study  from monasteries, which, despite the ‘mono’ in the name, were gatherings of men, to the lone plowboy reading the Bible all on his lonesome. Sure, that plowboy might benefit from talking with others, but in theory, all he needs for spiritual enlightenment is the Good Book and the ability to read it.

In 1630, Descartes goes to his room, pulls the curtains and writes his Meditations, shifting the process of philosophy from what men can figure out by interacting with the world around them – most particularly, interacting with the *people* around them – to what a man such as Descartes, Hume, Berkeley or Kant can figure out in the privacy of his own cranium. If that cranium can even be said to be known to exist.

A gaggle of philosophers. That’s old school! That’s how you do it!

If we hold being Alone in our theology and philosophy to be the highest court above which no appeal can be made, how long will it take for us to assert that being alone in our personal judgements about, say, culture, government and my true self are likewise beyond appeal?

About 500 years, evidently.

Three things this day bring this to mind. First, this excellent essay by David Mills: The Bible’s not enough, which discusses the pervasiveness of Sola Scriptura even among Catholics. Second, a Twitter thread (so shoot me. I mean, think less of me.) where Morgon Newquist tells of her father, in a wheelchair at Disney World, offering to let a little girl sit in front of him to have a better view of a parade – and the parents react like he’s a child molestor. Finally, I’ve recently become part of the the RCIA team at our parish, and was given the task (and 10 minutes!) to explain how the Church reads Scripture.

We are so Alone. The ruins of go it alone theology and philosophy are everywhere. Rather than discovering ourselves in our relationships, we defiantly declare that only we alone can say who we are, depending solely on what we feel we are. We define *individual* rights, and deny they come from nature or nature’s God or even from our relationships to other people. Even the right to vote – especially the right to vote – is seen as definitive of *individual* worth, even if it is only practiced occasionally, and then as part of a large group for the purposes of the large group. It is an expression not of my role in society, but of my personal universe of truth. Thus, instead of seeing losing a vote as a worthy and acceptable outcome and motivation to try to change people’s hearts and minds, each loser is personally threatened, the victors seen as evil people trying to destroy his world.

Many seem to both want rights and want to be able to define them away from others. You must bake me a cake or give up your guns even if neither has any real effect on me, but I get to tell you who I am (and woe if you mess it up) and what world view you must adhere to so that I can feel good about my feelings. This trick is only possible for an more or less unconscious nihilist, who of course believes other’s worthiness depends on how well they support his view of himself, but also betrays how meaningless he feels his own feelings are.

The antidote is religious by definition. We must believe we are all in this together, that nobody can go it alone, in order to understand why the modernist nihilism won’t work. Or rather, why modernist nihilism should never be tried. We can try, doomed though the effort is, to believe in the unity of Mankind without believing in the God Who created that unity. But with or without God, the Brotherhood of Man is like the Equality of Man: nothing you can observe will support such beliefs unless you already believe them without evidence.

1. Documents relate to “a student who attacked his professor with a sword” resulting in great damage being done to a lecture room – and to the lecturer himself.  From Medieval Students. Violence in medieval university towns was not uncommon.  I suspect there’s more than a bit of bias, both in the recording and interpretation of history – violent acts are memorable and judged noteworthy. A period of peace not so much. Read somewhere somebody saying that, by modern standards, the violence of the past was psychopathic. Of course, modern standards tend to overlook violence like firebombing cities, nuclear weapons, and the slaughter of a 100 million unarmed civilians by their own governments, so take that into consideration.

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Brick Oven Blowout: Gearing Up

The last 3.5 posts have been like, heavy, man – death of God, Luther, bad Science!, even quoting Camille Paglia! Therefore, to keep the silly/light quotient adequately high:

Sunday, we’re going to go for a total Brick Oven/Summer’s Over Blowout. Should have the oven door completed by then, which opens up a whole new world of stuff you can bake. Going to fire up the oven around noon or even earlier, heat it for a good 3-4 hours, then, around 3:00 p.m., we’ll start in on pizzas. I’ve been researching recipes that use a brick oven, and have found plenty – not surprising for a 2,500+ year old technology. The goal, such as it is, is just to try stuff, see what works, and, in the process, get to know the oven better.

Been surfing the interwebs in search of ideas. In addition to pizzas, we’ll be trying:

• Breads – at least pizza-dough style and some light rye, maybe sourdough and ciabatta.
• Baked potatoes
• Carrots – saw a roasted honey-glazed recipe that looked pretty good
• Steaks – skirt steak, if I can find any

Charcoal and ash from a 90 minute burn. Will be shooting for a minimum 4 hour burn. To do real Italian-style bread properly, would probably require a minimum 6 hour burn – need to very thoroughly heat all that brick, mortar and concrete so it will hold the temp long enough to bake the bread. But that’s what this whole experiment is about.

The key to many of the vegetable items is cast iron cookware, of which we have some. You preheat the cast iron pans/pots in the oven, then add stuff, then let it bake/fry.

Saw Alton Brown do skirt steaks by simply throwing them – very briefly – directly onto 1000F charcoal. Sounds like fun.

We’ve invited maybe 15-20 people over. I’ve got 10lbs of brisket normalizing (soaking in plain water to pull some of the salt back out and even things up) after 6 days of brining, to make fresh pastrami. So we’ll need some brick oven bread suitable for sandwiches. There will be homemade sauerkraut and olives (from homegrown olives) as well as a few fresh off the vine tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and peppers (late in the season, didn’t have very good volume this year). Hatch green chile is in the local Safeway, roasted a few pounds, so there will be authentic New Mexico style green chile sauce. What does one put authentic New Mexico style green chile sauce on? Just about anything!

Hatch Green Chile, grown in and around Hatch, New Mexico, is only available fresh for a few weeks in the fall. In Santa Fe, a couple hour’s drive north of Hatch, people buy it in 40 lbs boxes at the local grocery stores. Guys will set up roasters – 50-gallon drums where much of the sides have been replaced by expanded metal, on a rotating spindle over a fire – in the parking lot. Throw them a few bucks, and they’ll dump your box of chile into the barrel, spin it over the flames for a few minutes, then dump it back into your box (lined with plastic – doesn’t seem to melt it). You take it home, wipe the charred skin off with a cloth, throw the chile into baggies, and toss the baggies into the freezer. You’re now set for all your green chile needs until next year – if you go easy on it, that is. 

In addition to making the door, I might make a little expanded metal grill-on-legs that one can put into the oven to suspend foods over the coals (some people seem to like that, others throw everything right on the hot bricks or coals) Also got a metal pizza peel with too short a handle for reaching breads toward the back – got a long wooden handle, which I’ll need to swap out.

Got some shopping to do. Should be fun.

On an entirely different and more serious note: my wife heard an interview on NPR (the CD player in the car was giving her trouble, turned on the radio and that’s what was on) wherein a reporter who wrote a book on the Trump campaign opined that denying the results of a Pew study, which Trump is said to have done, was the same as denying gravity – anti-Science! Oh no! Couldn’t find a transcript, just the audio of the interview – and haven’t the time nor stomach to listen through to get the exact quotation. Will try later, time permitting. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks polling data demands anything like the agreement an honest man gives to the theory of gravity and all its beautiful and useful math is a helpless babe in the woods, to be lead wherever her betters choose to lead her.

And then she presumes to lead us. With a sneer. O dolour!

But the party will be fun!

Review: Machiavelli’s History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy

Written toward the end of a lifetime (1469 – 1527) spent as a diplomat and adviser, Machiavelli’s History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy is not the book of his most people read – that would be the Prince, the realpolitik described within it giving us the adjective Machiavellian.

Since I first read the Prince as a youth, I’ve belonged to the minority of non-Italian readers who think the amoral and murderous advice he gives is rather more a cautionary tale than advice per se – that Machiavelli, who pleads throughout for the particular prince to whom the book is dedicated to take action, is hoping to avoid, as much as possible, the violence he describes from copious historical examples. But that’s decidedly a minority opinion, outside of Italy.

Among Italians, I’ve been told, Machiavelli is viewed much more as an Italian patriot than as an advocate of Athens’ position in the Melian Dialogues (“The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”). And so I wanted to read this, his history of the city and nation he so clearly loved.

The book opens with the Fall of Rome, giving what I assume is the 16th century Italian angle on the Vandals – Stilicho and his family – and Visigoths – Alaric and his – and the End of the World, as Lafferty would have it. By the 16th century, it is more than a little odd to talk about Italians as if they could be distinguished in a practical sense from the Germanic auxiliaries/invaders/settlers from which a huge percentage of the norther Italians were descended. Nonetheless, there’s a pro-Italian flavor to Machiavelli’s account I don’t see in Belloc’s or Lafferty’s.

Then comes Odoacer and about 6 centuries about which I know so little it is hard to follow. Turmoil is the main theme here, as it is for almost all history almost everywhere. Italy was shattered, eventually, after the Fall of Rome, and spent the next 1500 years trying to pull itself together.

One main thing gleaned from this period: with all the turmoil, all the ambition petty and grand, that resulted in the endless bloodshed and war and intrigue, it’s much more easy to find some sympathy for the  various popes and their bloodshed, wars and intrigue. Toward the end of the book, Machiavelli says that it’s best, when there’s a choice, not to make alliances with popes, as they don’t generally rule long and you never know what the next one will do. That, (I liberally paraphrase) and the pope might just have religious considerations that muck things up!

Not in any way attempting to excuse the often brutal and murderous behaviors of many of the popes especially starting in the 15th century, just pointing out that a pope back then actually needed armies and land if he didn’t want to spend his reign locked up in somebody’s closet. As bad as a pope might occasionally be, the secular princes could be counted on to be consistently worse.

Things picked up for me in the 13th century, as I started to see more familiar names and her more familiar stories, mostly familiar from having read Dante (he puts in a brief appearance) and art history.

Starting with the 13th century, the History gets to be much more detailed. As the 15th century starts, Machiavelli begins to go into much more detail, as the events were still in living memory when he was a boy. Finally, as 1500 approaches, he starts referring to the Florentines as ‘we’ – this is the history he lived through.

And what a troubled yet glorious time it was, with Lorenzo the Magnificent rising to power, surviving an assassination attempt that claimed his brother, attacked by both the King of Naples and the pope, deserted by allies in Milan and Venice, making a daring trip to Naples to seek reconciliation with the king, succeeding, and then sending ambassadors to the pope – and succeeding again! – riding out troubles at home, and coming out of all that as the most powerful man in Italy, pretty much.

While Machiavelli only touches lightly upon it, at the same time all this violence and insecurity were afflicting Florence, more great art was being produced in that one little corner of the world than anywhere else in such a small place any time in history, with the possible exception a couple of centuries in Athens. Truly amazing.

C. S. Lewis advises one to read an old book each time you’ve read a new one, or, if you must, after each two new ones. You could do much worse for an old book than the History of Florence.

Reading/Writing/Home Improvement Saturday Update

A. Reading Daughter of Danger out loud to the Caboose. He is a big fan of the Swan Knight’s Son series, which I’ve previously read out loud to him. Highly recommend the whole Moth & Cobweb series by John C. Wright, especially if you have children, who need to hear stories of people being good and heroic in the face of implacable evil. Characters wrestle with their consciences, and their consciences win!

I’m halfway through Machiavelli’s History of Florence and the Affairs of Italy, which is free on Kindle at the moment.

The first part was fascinating, covering the Fall of Rome, the murder of Stilicho, his family and the families of the Goth legions and the subsequent sack of Rome by Alaric. I’ve now recently read Belloc’s, Lafferty’s and now Machiavelli’s accounts of the same events – very nice to compare and contrast.

Then Machiavelli covers the 6th – 13th centuries, a period that is to me and I imagine many people a bit of a blur – the various Germanic conquerors staking claims to Lombardy and Naples, emperors and would-be emperors coming to the pope to be crowned or not, popes getting involved in worldly affairs, the Avignon Captivity, rise of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, then the White and Black Guelphs –  I hope by the end of all this to at least remember which was which (and perhaps spell the words correctly).

One striking thing is how often the popes come off as sympathetic, as being forced to take action, of acting as peacemakers, as sending legates to try to prevent violence. Sure, Machiavelli, who no one ever has accused of being a softy or wearing rose colored glasses, tells plenty of appalling tales of greedy, worldly and violent popes – which is what one would expect. But he’s also willing, in passing, to acknowledge the good or at least well-intentioned actions of popes. I did not expect this.

Finally, about 40% of the way in, we reach another period of Italian history where the names and some of the stories are familiar to me. Dante, Brunelleschi, and, of course, the Medici. All those family names and many of the characters from the Divine Comedy put in appearances. Cosmo di Medici comes off as a near-saint – but the bar is pretty low among Florentine politicians. Still, his generosity and failure to hold grudges are in sharp contrast to the other leading historical characters – even if he’s doing it as part of a strategy to keep his head down and his family in power. That’s Machiavelli’s take, at least in part. Haven’t gotten to the attempted murder of Lorenzo and successful murder of his brother yet (a Murder in the Cathedral!) and his extraordinarily adroit handling of the situation which left him and the Medici much more firmly entrenched than they already were.  I’m eager to get Machiavelli’s take, which I assume he would have gotten more or less first hand as a young man.

Otherwise, I get the same general sense from Machiavelli as I do from Tacitus and Thucydides – hubris, blood lust, petty egomania and the violence, political failures and brain-dead stupidity they engender are eternal – as is the desire for the well-governed city.

B. Collected my first rejection letter. I will therefore not be joining the ranks of authors who got their first submitted story published. Feedback was promised, which I eagerly await. Then, as soon as things calm down a little (they will, surely) I’m getting back in the submit stuff saddle! Right now, things truly are extraordinarily complicated, I’m not just being a sissy.

C. At the moment, it is 102F outside with a bullet, on its way to a forecast 113F. This not only harshes my mellow, it seriously hampers my ability to work on the Brick Oven of Doom. Even I, a maniac of epic proportions, won’t try to work in the sun when it’s over 100 outside – at least, not for long.

Nevertheless, got up early and, with an hour break for Mass, worked until 11:45 A.M., when it hit 98F – and got the first coat of stucco on!

 

Getting the insulation on and especially the chicken wire on and tight enough was a bit of a pain, but the stucco itself was about the first part of this project that actually went better than I’d anticipated. I’ve stuccoed a bunch of walls when I’ve gone house building in Mexico (church groups build small tight houses for the folks working at the machiadores just over the border) so I knew how to do it. It just went really, really smoothly, especially with the Caboose helping with the stucco supply – didn’t need to climb down and up to reload.

If things go perfectly – ha! – we might have pizza as early as Monday!!

Some Links & Thoughts

A. Here is a collection of quotes from writers about their education. Some are better than others.  Here are a couple I like:

“Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent then disturbing and chaperoning their parents.”  –George Bernard Shaw

 

“Let none say that I am scoffing at uneducated people; it is not their uneducation but their education that I scoff at. Let none mistake this for a sneer at the half-educated; what I dislike is the educated half. But I dislike it, not because I dislike education, but because, given the modern philosophy or absence of philosophy, education is turned against itself, destroying that very sense of variety and proportion which it is the object of education to give. No man who worships education has got the best out of education; no man who sacrifices everything to education is even educated. . . . What is wrong is a neglect of principle; and the principle is that, without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete.”  –G.K. Chesterson in The Illustrated London News, 1930

 

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”  –Ray Bradbury, in an interview with Sam Weller

Bradbury was my favorite writer in grade school and into high school; Chesterton is probably my favorite writer now.

It’s interesting to note that paeans to one-room schools exist in some numbers, as mentioned by Wayne E. Fuller in this book. (1) Country kids often remembered their non-age-segregated, highly personalized and relevant schooling, schooling most often managed by an amatuer over many fewer hours than now, with great fondness. Does anyone in the last, say, 50 years write about how wonderful were his experiences at PS Whatever? Praising a particular teacher or coach, sure, but the experience as a whole? Maybe kids away from the big urban centers?

B. I’m getting a little bit of a jilted lover thing over SciAm’s enthusiastic backing of gender theory, which is somewhat less scientific than phrenology and astrology and much more virulent & harmful. SciAm – I used to love you! Why? WHY? But mostly, I have a sort of bitter admiration of the ability of the anti-science Marxists – but I repeat myself – to take over a venerable magazine with just the right name from a propaganda perspective and turn it so deftly. It’s akin to my dark admiration for Rahm Emanuel, LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover – vile men, all, but remarkably good at what they did and do. What they did and do will most likely end up with them rotting in Hell, but, boy, are they good at it.

The argument fails at every point – is the subject matter amenable to study using the scientific method? No. Or, to put it another way, are the conclusions something that could even in theory be produced using science? No. Handwavium all the way down.

But millions will  be swayed and have their feelings on the subject validated. In a better world, people committing this sort of abuse of the word ‘science’  would be locked up as enemies of the Republic and peace. They are enemies of truth.

C. Quoting William Tory Harris & myself from a few months back, but this just needs to be harped on:

Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

This wisdom comes from William Torey Harris, the fourth United States Commissioner of Education, from 1889 – 1906. Note the phrase “subsumption of the individual” – Harris was an enthusiastic Hegelian, and subsumption is a term of art.  In a dialectic, the thesis and antithesis contradict each other, and the contradiction is not logically resolved but rather ‘subsumed’ in a dialectical synthesis – they remain in contradiction, but, in the synthesis they exist in a new creative tension that is revealed in concrete History to be true in some greater sense, the law of  noncontradiction be damned (explicitly – see Hegel’s Logic).

In this case, the contradiction to be subsumed is between the idea that people, including children, have rights, among which is the right to pursue happiness however they see fit, and the idea that, in the words of Trotsky, the individual is nothing, only the goal – conforming to the successive unfoldings of the Spirit for Hegelians, the Worker’s Paradise for Marxists – gives any meaning to any individual’s life.

Harris, and all Hegelians and Marxists, needs to have the concept of individual rights eliminated – subsumed, in their usual dishonest and evasive language – in order to achieve the great future History they have been so privileged and enlightened to see. They thank their gods they are not like other men!

And this need to destroy the individual is alive and well TODAY. There was never a reform of the reform, where Harris and his evil ideas were rejected. Woodrow Wilson, an elitist, racist pig if ever there were one,  was down with this, as was Dewey, a ‘can’t make an omelet’ apologist for the slaughters of the Russian Revolution, as were and are all the major gatekeepers to power in the education system. Gender theory is just a flavor of Critical Theory, which is just applied Marxism. As mentioned in an earlier post, Freire’s application of critical theory to education is required reading in all the prestigious schools of education. After the usual fluff, wherein Freire tries to gain our sympathy and tells us how much suffering will be alleviated if only we follow his plan, he gets around to mentioning that, of course, there are no such things as innate human rights, that people who reject and oppose Marxism have by that fact alone no rights, but that people who accept Marxism gain rights in proportion to the degree of their enlightenment. Thus, with perhaps a mitigating tear in our eyes, we can do anything we want deem necessary to our opponents in order to further the revolution – take their stuff goes without saying, but locking them away or murdering them are options completely on the table.

You want to be a teacher today? Chances are you’ll be required to study Freire by enthusiastic acolytes, and it’s a given that you superiors will either actually believe this or, at best, be exactly the kind of useful idiots such a system requires.

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The thing missed today is that IT WORKS! We peons are not of the 1%, but are of the 99%! WE are the automata, “careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom”. Sure, many of us have our doubts and even rebel on some level, but it’s pretty depressing to see how much we all – most definitely including me! – fall in line. With alarming frequency, we identify as members of a political party; we don’t talk about things we know we’re not supposed to talk about, and remain silent in the face of things that should call us to arms, at least figuratively. We accept random things as Gospel – both Chesterton and Lewis point out that it’s the assumptions of schooling that we absorb and make foundational more so than anything actively taught.

We send our kids to school.

D. Finally, all this has me thinking of 1984. Two things: Winston Smith is made to say that 2+2=5, not because his torturers believe it, but to make sure he will agree with anything they say. That’s the level of control sought – total control.

Finally, Orwell, though a socialist himself, was not blind: he names the government under Big Brother Ingsol – short for English Socialism. I’ve long thought and said that it’s a tragedy that we paint all Nazis as monsters – sure, plenty of monsters at the top and even among the rank and file. But the vast majority were not materially different, morally, than you and me. But if we somehow absorb the idea that because the person in front of us does not appear to be a monster, he simply cannot be promoting or supporting evil, we become ripe for supporting evil ourselves. A bunch of perfectly nice people – your dentist or college professor was as likely as not a Nazi if you were a German in 1935 – enabled the Holocaust. That’s the real lesson to be learned.

So Orwell makes Big Brother the end game of what he saw among the people – English Socialists – that he most likely knew best! It’s not going to be skinheads or even Antifa that enable the evil – it will be college professors and doctors and (understandably) frustrated Bernie supporters who open the door for growing evil.

Man, I need to take a walk!

1. The blurb from One-Room Schools of the Middle West: An Illustrated History: “The Midwest’s one-room schools were, Fuller observes, the most democratic in the nation. Located in small, independent school districts, these schools virtually wiped out illiteracy, promoted democratic values, and opened up new vistas beyond the borders of their students’ lives. Entire communities, Fuller shows, revolved around these schools. At various times they were used as churches, polling places, sites of political caucuses, and meeting halls for local organizations. But as America urbanized and the movement to consolidate took hold in rural counties, these little centers of learning were left at the margins of the educational system. Some were torn down, some left to weather away, some sold at auction, and still others transformed into museums. Despite its demise, Fuller argues, here was a school system that worked. His book offers a timely reminder of what schools can accomplish when communities work closely together to educate their children.” Yep.

Science! Puuuuleease! SciAm Done Circling the Drain, Now Exploring Sewer Pipes

I’ve mentioned before, the second subscription I ever got was to Scientific American back in the 1970s, and I used to read pretty much every issue cover to cover for the next 25+ years. Once I got a job that required some travel, always threw it (and SF&F!) into my computer case when I went on business trips, and read it on the plane. So, yea, a big fan.

But it became less and less fun over time. I could understand a certain amount of dumbing down, but – not that dumb. I kinda liked it when the articles were over my head a bit – stretch the mind a little.

Then, sometime in the 90s, read an article on nuclear war that pretty much dispensed with the science entirely, and went straight to advocating for some political policy or other. What? SciAm was my go-to science read – there are plenty of sources to turn to if I felt the need to be politically harangued. 

And it got worse. Finally, maybe 15-20 years ago, I let the subscription lapse. Who needs that nonsense? Since then, SciAm has become the poster-child for putting on the lab coat of Science! in order to promote a particular brand of – let’s just say it = Marxism. I’d generously assume that the useful idiots outnumber the murderous scum actual Marxist, but by now? Who knows?

This springs to mind because it seems SciAm has now gone all in on Gender Theory. Before we start, a recap:

Gender Theory is a branch of Critical Theory.

Critical Theory is Marxism applied in an ‘academic’ setting.

Marxism says science is a tool of oppression in all cases where it can’t be bent to support Marxism. See: Lysenko.

Trofim Lysenko. No trace of barely-contained fanaticism in that face, no sir! 

Marxism starts with its conclusion – that all evils are to be understood as caused solely by some oppressor/oppressed dynamic – and backfills with whatever it can find and ignores or excoriates any contrary evidence via an ad hominem/Kafka trap of some kind. This is the practical meaning of the Marxist formulation of dialectic materialism: the contradictions of the thesis and antithesis are suspended but not resolved within the synthesis. The only truly important thing is the synthesis, which is a historical development beyond the reach of mere logic in any meaningful sense. Contradicting the synthesis proves you wrong, no matter how nonsensical and self-serving the conclusion held by Marxists are.

So, under gender theory, the goal is first and foremost to identify an oppressor/oppressed dynamic that will explain everything. Turns out that identifying people as men or women is oppressive, because, um, something something. A man claiming today to be Napoleon is crazy; the same man claiming to be a woman is oppressed. Don’t bring any of that evil patriarchal logical consistency into it.

Then, having discovered such a well-suited stick, you start beating people with it – the BAD people!!!

Anyway, the article at the Federalist does a good job of exposing the nonsense. Check it out if the whole subject isn’t too depressing to consider.

I didn’t think SciAm could sink much lower. I was wrong.

 

Crazy People By the Numbers & Finding Your Guy Fawkes

Quick review:

Current Estimated Population of America:                                    325,000,000

Est. Number & Percent of Sociopaths:                                             3,250,000 – 16,250,000: 1% – 5%

Est. Number & Percent of Schizophrenics:                                    1,125,000: 0.5%

Est. Number & Percent of Americans w/ Bipolar Disorder:        3,325,000 – 9,975,000: 1% – 3%

And so on, through a menagerie of psychiatric disorders. These were just the ones that came to mind first. Not in any way making light of the horrible suffering endured by those afflicted with these disorders and by those who love them. Merely pointing out how common people who have severely crippled grips on reality are. Not to mention the milder but still debilitating forms of delusion, such as socialism and political partisanship.

With this in mind, I was actually a little surprised that only a few hundreds showed up for that demonstration and counter demonstration that I’ve been diligently ignoring. The organizers could not have been trying very hard if what they wanted was a good show of numbers – there’s a large pool of potential participants. If that’s indeed what they wanted.

The more interesting issue for me has been tracking the efforts of the suicidal narcissists to find, or, if necessary, produce their Guy Fawkes. As long as your opponents keep appearing sane, non-violent and, you know, human, violence against them tends to backfire in the court of public opinion. That’s why any and all opposition is labeled ‘Nazi’. Trouble is, those enemies keep screwing it up by not acting at all like Nazis, and keep pointing out that the inflammatory rhetoric, threats and violence are all coming from the other side.

Thus, the search is on for a useable Guy Fawkes. In a country of 325 million people, millions of whom are certifiably off their rockers, that doesn’t take long.

Keep in mind that, as with the historical Fawkes, the goal here is establish a pretext to silence and eventually get *you*, the calm and rational opposition. Nobody sane objects to locking up dangerous loonies, after all.