‘Beauty Revealed’ is the title of this self portrait made in 1828. The artist was Sarah Goodridge, 1788-1853, born in Mass. She was 40 years old when she painted her perfect breasts & gifted the miniature painting to the politician, lawyer & orator, Daniel Webster. pic.twitter.com/jLAjgNkoQ2
— Lex Martin Luther Beethoven Ronin Oni (@JulespHamilton) March 26, 2021
If you come from poverty and chaos, you are up against 3 enemies:
— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 25, 2021
1. Dysfunction and deprivation
2. Yourself, as a result of what that environment does to you
3. The ruling class, who wants to keep you mired in it
Women's Soccer Team Sues To Overturn Unjust Law Of Supply And Demandhttps://t.co/jujeOeHWqP
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 25, 2021
Art in motion - Paris - pic.twitter.com/pKeuBr3Rio
— Gabriele Corno (@Gabriele_Corno) March 26, 2021
From Screwtape Proposes a Toast by C.S. Lewis, his sequel to the Screwtape Letters. Published in 1959, Screwtape delivers an after-dinner speech at the Tempters' Training College for young demons. It seem remarkable that Lewis should have foreseen our present circumstance sixty-two years ago. Realistically though, the mind of the authoritarian statist is always with us. Lewis was just marking some of the more common manifestations and they do reappear with cyclic regularity as the totalitarians wage their millennial war against free people and free minds.
This is a long extract because it lays out the general principle of young authoritarian demons and then describes the specific strategies. As a alive and well in 2020-2021 as they were in 1959.
What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence—moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how Democracy (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them ‘tyrants’ then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of corn, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the gen-eral level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, ‘democracy’. But now ‘democracy’ can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
I have said that to secure the damnation of these little souls, these creatures that have almost ceased to be individual, is a laborious and tricky work. But if proper pains and skill are expended, you can be fairly confident of the result. The great sinners seem easier to catch. But then they are incalculable. After you have played them for seventy years, the Enemy may snatch them from your claws in the seventy-first. They are capable, you see, of real repentance. They are conscious of real guilt. They are, if things take the wrong turn, as ready to defy the social pressures around them for the Enemy’s sake as they were to defy them for ours. It is in some ways more trouble- some to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.
My own experience, as I have said, was mainly on the English sector, and I still get more news from it than from any other. It may be that what I am now going to say will not apply so fully to the sectors in which some of you may be operating. But you can make the necessary adjustments when you get there. Some application it will almost certainly have. If it has too little, you must labour to make the country you are dealing with more like what England already is.
In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already become something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. How far its operations there have gone at the present moment, I would not like to say with certainty. Nor does it matter. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments; especially as we ourselves will play our part in the developing. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic’. These differences between the pupils— for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences—must be disguised. This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud-pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have—I believe the English already use the phrase—‘parity of esteem’. An even more drastic scheme is not impossible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma—Beelzebub, what a useful word!—by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coaeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers—or should I say, nurses?—will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.
It can't help but be disturbing to note the parallels with today with universities dropping SAT scores in considering admissions, the push to decolonize the curriculum, the pampering of children with self-esteem, push to students based on their race rather than their performance on tests, etc.
The little vermin are at play again.
Widely touted finding, suggesting that early childhood television exposure causes later attention problems, goes down in failed replication. https://t.co/qvkLChLVKV pic.twitter.com/TEnfLnQVcp
— Rolf Degen (@DegenRolf) March 26, 2021
6 December 1952: Fleet Street, London - Great Smog in 1952 by Edward Miller
From "Around 15 million garments per week flow through Kantamanto, one of the largest secondhand clothing markets in the world...." by Ann Althouse, quoting another article from The Nation (click through for the links.)
The original article is addressing a First World problem of too many westerners buying too many clothes which they don't wear long enough before discarding. One of those pieces where you can conjure a problem but it is kind of hard to get excited about if you are of the non-totalitarian disposition and can't get enamored of coercive solutions which such worrywarts always turn to first.
A great example of honest and open inquiry without ideological axes to grind. From Michigan: America's Covid Outlier by el gato malo. Recall that ell gato malo was banned from Twitter for following the data. He has several questions arising from this map from the New York Times about Covid in Michigan.
If one then looks at the data from the Michigan ER admits, a very different pattern emerges. All ER’s now track admission for covid like illness (CLI). They also track covid diagnoses. this can be expressed as a percentage of all ER admissions. (raw data HERE)In the past, we saw more alignment between CLI symptoms and covid diagnosis, but this really blew out starting in october, then dropped back down some, then really blew out again.This is not typical of any respiratory disease i have ever heard of. Even a 2:1 ratio of diagnosis to symptoms is enough to make you wonder about over-testing and false positives, but 7:1 is simply beyond the pale.This means 1000 people walk in, 15 claim to have CLI symptoms, and 105 get a covid diagnosis.
Posts
All Comments
