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Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Does Tom Coburn believe his own words when he says "John McCain, for all his faults, is the one Republican candidate who can lead us through our wilderness"? Of course, McCain is the only Republican candidate, so Coburn's words make little sense on their face, and Coburn does not say that McCain is the only Republican "who can lead us." To say that McCain is "the only Republican candidate who can..." is an embarrassing inanity.

Anyway, others, including Coburn, would lead better. In effect, Coburn is saying "our guy, with big and ugly warts and whom none of us prefer, is still somewhat better than their guy." An uninspiring announcement. Coburn is on the VP list for McCain (probably won't and shouldn't get the nod because of the small state and a state already in the red and because two senators is not a good idea). Maybe he is just dutifully pitching in and trying to remind McCain of a few things. But the word "remind" suggests that McCain once knew these things -- a dubious proposition. McCain is not a conservative, he is an opportunist. McCain does not perceive principles, he perceives moments.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
An anonymous English Professor is asking some sensible questions about his own progressive assumptions:

"America, ever-idealistic, seems wary of the vocational-education track. We are not comfortable limiting anyone’s options. Telling someone that college is not for him seems harsh and classist and British, as though we were sentencing him to a life in the coal mines. I sympathize with this stance; I subscribe to the American ideal. Unfortunately, it is with me and my red pen that that ideal crashes and burns."

"Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it—try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades."

"For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college."

"I am the man who has to lower the hammer."

UPDATE: Follow the related discussion here.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Apparently, the Roberts court has achieved just too darned much consensus. After decades of griping about a heavily politicized and divided court, the New York Times now complains about the dearth of 5-4 decisions. Astounding but entirely predictable.

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Former New York mayor Ed Koch seems to think so.

What do you think?
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
"Like many left-leaning academics, Anita Clair Fellman, Director of Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University, found Ronald Reagan’s landslide election in 1980 puzzling and troubling. Convinced that modern liberalism reflected the heart and soul of America (at least since Goldwater’s resounding defeat in 1964), feminist scholar Fellman wondered how Reagan’s rhetoric of individualism resonated with so many Americans. Could there have been a strain of individualist, anti-statist political thought lurking in America’s heartland? If so, where did it come from, and how had it been nurtured? In her search for causality, she recalled the endearing series of Little House books written in the 1930s by Laura Ingalls Wilder."

"Fellman argues in her new study Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Impact on American Culture that Wilder’s books not only present a version of American pioneer history with an inchoate individualism, but do so intentionally in an effort to inculcate generations of children with a traditionally conservative view of American history. Indeed, the popularity of Wilder’s books and their ubiquitous presence in American homes and schools serve as the major vehicle for the dissemination of what Fellman egregiously terms 'extreme individualism.'"

Read Dedra Birzer's provocative review of Fellman's book here.

21/05: "Guvment"

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
Patrick Deneen offers another lifetime's worth of insight in a single post:

What is important, then, is not whether guvment is involved - it is finally to what end. And our current end is growth and expansion of the modern project of the human mastery of nature. When we debate over guvment involvement in the market, we obscure the nature of the debate - whether this is the appropriate or sole goal of a society. I would submit that it is a deeply flawed goal - sharing the view of Aristotle that a proper economy is cognizant of limits to moneymaking in the name of fundamental human goods of which prosperity is a part, but only a part.

Those goods include healthy and stable communities which are both formed by culture and in which cultures are maintained and preserved; a sound culture that inculcates central human virtues and that is ably passed on from one generation to the next; a culture that makes and keeps good families; a culture that inculcates the very virtues that will be necessary for a good, humane, and moral economy (one that avoids the abuses that we have recently seen in our financial markets); a culture that strongly emphasizes a sense of gratitude and obligation between generations; a culture that encourages stewardship, conservation and fidelity; and perhaps above all, a culture that reins in and chastens our eternal temptation toward Promethean or sinful self-aggrandizement, that teaches and enforces limits, that calls to our mind our flaws, and that does not allow us to lose sight of our fundamental condition of being dependent upon one another. A further good is our ability to act in concert with one another to achieve and maintain such a culture and polity - citizenship as shared and mutual governance, which goes far beyond our current conception of citizenship as suffrage.


Deneen also demonstrates how Americans' love-affair with untethered "Liberty!" often has unintended consequences. He then reminds us that another alternative tradition exists, manifest broadly in the West, including Aristotle and Aquinas, Burke and Chesterton, and in America, including the Antifederalists, Hawthorne and Melville, Orestes Brownson, Henry Adams, Jonathan Edwards, Santayana and Royce, the Southern Agrarians, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Wendell Berry.

Please read the whole thing here.
Category: General
Posted by: an okie gardener
The AP has the report on the letter Albert Einstein wrote to Eric Gutkind in 1954 and recently sold at auction.

In it, Einstein said, “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.”

“For me,” he added, “the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions.”


Oh, well, you can't be right about everything.
Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
A trenchant quote from the Australian philosopher David Stove:

A primitive society is being devastated by a disease, so you bring modern medicine to bear, and wipe out the disease, only to find that by doing so you have brought on a population explosion. You introduce contraception to control population, and find that you have dismantled a whole culture. At home you legislate to relieve the distress of unmarried mothers, and find you have given a cash incentive to the production of illegitimate children. You guarantee a minimum wage, and find that you have extinguished, not only specific industries, but industry itself as a personal trait. You enable everyone to travel, and one result is, that there is nowhere left worth travelling to. And so on.

This is the oldest and the best argument for conservatism: the argument from the fact that our actions almost always have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. It is an argument from so great and so mournful a fund of experience, that nothing can rationally outweigh it. Yet somehow, at any rate in societies like ours, this argument never is given its due weight. When what is called a “reform” proves to be, yet again, a cure worse than the disease, the assumption is always that what is needed is still more, and still more drastic, "reform."

06/05: UNTHINKABLE?

Category: General
Posted by: Tocqueville
The always insightful Patrick Deneen is on fire again with this latest post:

"For many, the instant response to the growing evidence that the era of cheap energy is over is to insist upon its replacement with something else. Anything short of that is simply unacceptable, even inconceivable. A few years ago, when I began reading and writing about this great challenge we face as a civilization, I assumed that if I - and many others - were able to show the evidence and implications of peak oil, that people would be awoken from their dogmatic slumber and we would at once begin to arrange that we live together more responsibly and demand that our leaders help us toward that end. What I find instead is the absolute demand that something else be found in order to ensure that nothing has to change. So fully defined are we by our profligate way of life that nothing short of its permanent continuation can be deemed acceptable."

. . . .

"These immediate responses - the desperate wish to avoid, at all costs, the prospect of having to change our behavior - are the definite signs that we are not likely to change one iota until we have extracted every last possible form of energy that can be transformed into our active effort to control and master nature and to avoid the possibility of self-restraint. We do so thinking the alternative must be unthinkable, so awful and horrific to be unimaginable. A world built closer together, with greater stability of communities and requisite cooperation among neighbors in order to live, survive, and thrive, and absent the kinetic and kaleidoscopic activity of our age as well as the vast military empire needed to support and defend fuel supply lines - this is the prospect that we must avoid at all costs. We will accept ignorance of any atrocity we are committing in order to avoid an acceptance of limits, the forging of community and the reality of less. Of course, we only delay that day, and make it more likely that the transition to such a world will be violent, bloody and horrific. So long as we can power our IPODs just one more day..."