Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Odds and ends


My new data backup program is still uploading. Slowly. 14000 MB in 6 days, 12K left. It slows everything up, but once it's done, I won't have to worry about losing stuff.

A snippet from a romantic TV melodrama. A man and woman arguing at home. The woman gets anxious and wonders aloud if their fight is a sign they are in trouble. Man says, "Babe, I'd rather argue with you for the rest of my life than spend a pleasant evening with any other woman."

I get it. Doesn't make me happy that I do, but I do.

I have not said much about particular politics of late, especially about the current presidential administration. Nothing really new to say. Thought he was a bad bad idea back in 2008. Still do. A very very bad idea. I do not wish him well.

Australian-born conservative philosopher Kenneth Minogue has a new book about the dangers of democracy. He understands democracy somewhat like the Founding Fathers, for whom democracy was not a good thing. They were republicans; they saw that democracies become rule by mobs or by servile clients of a paternalist state. Minogue's POV reminds me of Hayek's Road to Serfdom. He has an elegant parsing of a phenomenon which has puzzled me somewhat: how people in our culture gain status by showing contempt for it. The secularized progeny of the Hebrew prophets. He asks if the anti-Western attitudes of liberal Westerners is a case of cultural abasement or cultural megalomania. His answer: the abasement is collective, the megalomania is individual. Bingo.

3 comments:

Steve in Alabama said...

"I get it. Doesn't make me happy that I do, but I do."

I know even you don't buy what you're trying to sell right there.

Better to have loved and lost ...

OreamnosAmericanus said...

It grieves me, Mr Steve in Alabama, that you doubt my verisimilitude :)

Anonymous said...

Re "secularized progeny of the Hebrew prophets": seems so strange to me that the "slave revolt in moral valuation" now comes down from higher man unto lower man. The "affluent" claim to support both "social justice" and "increased funding for the arts and ['high'] culture" against incoming or upcoming tides of low-class oppressors. ... Elijah didn't expect to be invited to the University of Egypt's Jerusalem campus to give a series of lectures on imagery in the tombs of the Pharaohs, plus the danger that the rabble present to building a world-class museum of idolatry in the city.

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