Protein-packed diets cause add excess nitrogen to the environment through urine, rivaling pollution from agricultural fertilizers https://t.co/8PSUBMx1PE
— Scientific American (@sciam) July 27, 2022
I eat 196 grams a day on my meal plan. I’m basically packing some liquid WMD. I’d like to see the tiny-house-dwelling cricket-muncher who thinks he can do anything about it.
That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.
— Source: General James Rusling, “Interview with President William McKinley,” The Christian Advocate 22 January 1903, 17.
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In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines: “The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been a-making by the advance of European power from age to age.”
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Filipinos slammed the comic-book convention Comic-Con International on social media last week when it referred to a group of Filipino content creators as “Filipinx.”
“The Filipinx Voices in Pop Culture was a fun and educational all Filipinx panel discussing Filipinx influences behind your favorite media,” Comic-Con tweeted on Thursday, using the alternative gender-neutral ethnic term preferred by some gender identity activists to refer to people from the Philippines. Comic-Con’s use of the term drew immediate backlash from users, including Filipinos.
“I’d rather be called a racial slur than Filipinx” one user wrote.
“Please stop trying to impose weird western gender ideology onto people who never wanted it or asked for it in the first place” another said.
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If history is any guide, this burst of moral enthusiasm will pass. It will leave its marks on Western history; some virtuous, but most risible and excessive. And when future historians look back on our time, they will do so with condescension and pity. They will be navigating their own moral panics, of course. But they will also be confident in their own accumulated wisdom—enough, at least, to look upon us with embarrassment and to thank the stars for their own enlightened age. And the cycle explored in this book will begin again.
We can only hope that there will be someone around then to write about how truly awful we all were.
— Noah Rothman, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun
In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of life; all threaten me, some I may escape, of others I am the destined and devoted victim. Sooner or later—and yet in any case how soon!—I shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.
But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and perishing with the day.
— Logan Pearsall Smith, All Trivia: A Collection of Reflections & Aphorisms
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April 9 — “If only something would happen?” Something being the revelation that transfigures existence; works a miraculous presto-chango upon the mundane mortal world — turning the toads and cockroaches back into handsome fairy princes, the Clark Kents into Superman — that calls unexpectedly up on the phone and says: “Your name has just been picked from a hat, like a rabbit, and we are giving you a million dollars,” — or that announces in a sudden telegram: “Congratulations! Lady Rockefeller has just died and left you several estates and an enchanted source of continual private income.” But instead, day after day, there are hardboiled eggs instead of frog legs for breakfast, and doubts and worries buzz and sting like the evils in Pandora’s box.
— Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962
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Our imaginations are captivated by fears and fantasies, monsters and superheroes, agonies and ecstasies, but our day-to-day living mostly presents us with gnats and houseflies. How patiently do we put up with them?
It has been a brutal week, amigos. Record-setting levels of work, and an employee out with Covid until Tuesday. So, while I stare vacantly into the middle distance, trying to remember what it was like when I was capable of stringing two thoughts together, I want to encourage you to read Ed West’s Substack if you aren’t doing so already. I know, everyone and their mother has a Substack these days, and I read quite a few of them, but Ed’s is the only one to which I am an actual paid subscriber, because I don’t want to limit myself to only the free posts. If that isn’t enough to get your clicky finger twitching, well, I have read all of his “banterous short history books” and enjoyed them as well. Hell, even his Twitter feed manages to be full of interesting, dare I say uplifting, content, like a lotus flower floating above the stagnant, stinking swamp of social media. He’s a good fellow with a quintessentially dry British sense of humor, so go check it out while I return to my catatonic trance.
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I am persuaded that the sum of stupidity and folly in the world is at times constant. Far from rejoicing when I see an old error depart, I think of the new error which will come to take its place, and I wonder anxiously if it will not be more inconvenient or more dangerous than the first.
— Alan R. Pratt, The Dark Side
A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.
Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.
This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.
— Michael Young, “We Will Delete You”
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There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.
It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.
The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.
— Kevin D. Williamson, “America on Parole“
Does not civilized living depend on not seeing things as they are? There can be neither order nor stability and continuity without illusions about authority, about the attainability of desired goals, about the quality of our fellow men, and about our own nature. A confrontation with naked, raw reality shreds the fiber of civilized life.
— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath
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Even if we were mad enough to consider all our opinions true, we should still not want them alone to exist: I cannot see why it should be desirable that truth alone should rule and be omnipotent; it is enough for me that it should possess great power. But it must be able to struggle and have great opponents, and one must be able to find relief from it from time to time in untruth — otherwise, it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and make us the same.
— Nietzsche, Daybreak
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The theme of this book is that, for better or worse, lying, untruth, is not an artificial, deviant, or dispensable feature of life. Nature engages in it, sometimes with remarkable ingenuity. Art, with its “telling of beautiful, untrue things,” has at times so dominated the mind of a period thinkers could seriously argue that life may be understood truthfully only in aesthetic terms. The impulse to transcend mere literal fact occurs throughout nature. Quite humble biological organisms evolve as a semblance, an alias; a pictorial rendering of some other, less vulnerable organism, Might we not say, for example, that species of Cycloptera, insects that resemble leaves, trompe d’oeil masterpieces which might have been painted by a seventeenth-century Dutch master, perfect in color, shape, and size, even complete with imitation veins and fungus spots, are works of art? It is a seductive hypothesis that falsehood is “on the side of life,” is the lubricant that makes society run, while truth can be harsh, dangerous, and destructive; too simple, too naked, for the complexities of twenty-first-century society, inheritor of one of the most brutal hundred years in the history of mankind.
— Jeremy Campbell, The Liar’s Tale: A History of Falsehood
The essayist is allowed to be familiar, with the understanding that familiarity differs crucially from being personal. What has changed in recent years, and not in the essay alone, is the new penchant among writers for the uncomfortably personal, chiefly residing in confession. The great essayists have also been great adepts of tact, with bone knowledge of precisely how much of themselves they should reveal, how much to hold back. They did not foist their sadnesses on their readers, did not feature their weaknesses. In contemporary writing, consummate tact has been replaced by constant confession. Contemporary writers, essayists among them, provide us with accounts of their sexual kinks, their addictions, their longings, the nightmares of their childhoods, their mental illnesses. Balzac called the artist, by which he meant chiefly the writer, a prince among men; today the prince has increasingly become a patient.
— Joseph Epstein, Gallimaufry: A Collection of Essays, Reviews, Bits
Recently, the Man with the Chin of Gray and I were joking about our weariness with this sort of thing. I said that “I don’t want to know about it” would probably look pretty sharp translated into Latin, and that I might make that the motto of my family crest. Serendipitously, I happened to read this shortly thereafter in Benedict Beckeld’s Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations:
As the middle class increases its numbers in a civilization’s mature days, knowledge democratizes and theory grows popular. The illusion of reflection and profound thought spreads to all and sundry. With ubiquitous education and at least a smattering of theory for almost everyone, ever larger swathes of society will fall victim to the higher self-placement that tends to go hand in hand with oikophobia. We would therefore do well to turn the in some sense laudable Horatian dictum that Kant quotes in his essay What Is Enlightenment? (1784), namely sapere aude, “dare to know,” which leads to a cohort of busybodies believing that they can steer their societies teleologically by means of superficial knowledge, into an equally laudable nescire aude, “dare not to know,” dare to admit ignorance, dare to be open to doubt and to take yourself somewhat less seriously.
It’s not precisely the same implication, but I think it will suffice for my purposes. Dare to be intellectually humble, yes, but also dare to be intellectually discerning. Learn when to look away for the sake of dignity.
Where moderation is an error, indifference is a crime.
— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books
Dictionary dot com’s Words of the Day for the past week have been: choice, dissent, draconian, autonomy, galvanize, and liberation. Is it really too much to ask to get an interesting, possibly unknown word delivered to my mailbox every morning — you know, just for fun — without it becoming yet another opportunity for political sermonizing? Boy, I really didn’t know what to think previously about complex topics like abortion or federalism, but now that the person in charge of the dictionary email listserv has oh-so-subtly made their point, I’m convinced!
It’s especially weird since the entire argument behind banning him was to limit the reach of his posts, but I’ve seen 15 different screencaps of his Hutchinson thing. Everyone wants to share it themselves. https://t.co/lncD0k4uY0
— Noam Blum (@neontaster) June 28, 2022
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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss