I thought I hated FDR enough. Then I started The New Dealers' War and discovered that I did not hate him enough.

I'm not sure why so many presume that a Caesar or a Franco is coming to save us. Even if he were coming, he would still need armies of /our guys/ already working up the institutions, bureaucracies, branches of the military, and every level of local and state governments. But these people waiting for the dictator-savior don't want to do that work; they just want to be rescued, like damsels. You've either going to win with effort and patience, or you are going to lose badly. That's the situation before us after several decades of leftists marching through the institutions.

Alexis de Tocqueville is the only writer whose meditations on liberty or freedom make me feel anything. “Freedom alone is capable of lifting men's minds above mere mammon worship and the petty personal worries which crop up in the course of every day life, and making them aware at every moment that they belong each and all to a vaster entity, above and around them—their native land. It alone replaces at certain critical moments their natural love of material welfare by a loftier, more virile ideal; offers other objectives than that of getting rich; and sheds a light enabling all to see and appraise men's vices and their virtues as they truly are.”

Need to make a point of liking, reposting, quote-posting, and replying to poasters who go text-only. My tl has too many vids rn. A limited number of vids and pics is fine, but X has to be distinct from IG.

The problem with our schooling system isn't just the aggressive leftism of the teachers or curriculum. If only that were the extent of it! The fix would be simple. The larger problem is the way it's done: - 8 hours of sitting at a desk (hollowing the soul and rounding the shoulders) - standardized leveling for the masses (smart & slow, boys & girls—everyone thrown into the same mix) - emphasis on large scale efficiency (necessary to achieve cost-effectiveness) - cya bureaucratic management (always always always cover your ass!) - state-mandated indoctrination of instructors (chasing away the people you'd actually want influencing the youth) - with utmost safetyism in mind (physical, spiritual, moral, political, etc) All of these have a feminized tone. Really the whole thing is just glorified mass baby-sitting, with educational/propagandistic flavoring. Clearly a relic of an age obsessed with mass-production. This is why "classical" or "Great Books" education doesn't fix the problem, nor do private and/or religious schools (though good ones make the problems marginally less bad). It's the model that needs to be reformed. But that's not a conversation we're ready for, having built so much of our society and economy around our glorified baby-sitting system.

Matthew 22:37-40: "You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments."

Little gems like this remind you of what he once was (and what he should have been). Gotta love the scholarly detachment, the gaze at an insight somewhere in the heavens, followed by a brutal punchline that brings everything back to earth. I hope he gets it together.

"Activist" is one of those words that's normalized by common usage, as though it's not an odd thing to define yourself by your tendency to show up places and BE ACTIVE. With signs. Making yourself a pain in the ass for normal people. It's a dumb word and a dumb way of life. But you've got to give them credit: at least these people show up for stuff they care about. Granted, it's easier to do that when you don't have a job or children, and when donors fund your obnoxiousness. But still. We don't have donors putting money into those things, and our guys are often too busy. In one sense that's good, but it also creates an asymmetry that explains why our side has given up ground for several decades ground to the side with fanatical activists who show up. The truth is that the only thing lamer than an activist is someone who loses to these losers. And modern democratic life tilts in favor of the activists. There's no victory without showing up.

Thank you Marc Goddard for actually enforcing the rules and protecting fighters!

Each chapter of The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise begins with funny passages in which dopey Western intellectuals project all their hopes and dreams (progress, free love, art, pluralism, tolerance, etc) onto a mythological Andalusian Islam. Pretty quickly you realize Al-Andalus is their weaponized standard against which Christendom and the Faith automatically fall short. They love Al-Andalus because they hate their own heritage. Some examples: “[In the Middle Ages there emerged] two Europes—one [Muslim Europe] secure in its defenses, religiously tolerant, and maturing in cultural and scientific sophistication; the other [Christian Europe] an arena of unceasing warfare in which superstition past for religion and the flame of knowledge sputtered weakly.” - David Levering Lewis “European culture had, since the sack of Rome in A.D. 455, gone into a dramatic decline known as the dark ages. Middle Eastern culture, by contrast, was flowering, with the added impetus provided by the new religion of Islam.” - Anthony Wild “In Christian Europe, 99% of the people were illiterate, and even kings could neither read nor write. [Meanwhile in islamic Spain] you had Moorish women who were doctors and lawyers and professors.” - John G Jackson “Muslim rulers of the past were far more tolerant of people of other faiths than were Christian ones. For example, al-Andalus’ multi-cultural, multi-religious states ruled by Muslims gave away to a Christian regime that was grossly intolerant.” - The Economist “In arts and agriculture, learning and tolerance, Al Andalus was a beacon of enlightenment to the rest of Europe.” - James Reston Jr “More astonishing than [Islamic] Spain’s wide-ranging accomplishments, however, was the simple fact that until the destruction of the last Muslim Kingdom by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492, Spain's Muslims, Christians, and Jews often managed to be so tolerance and freedom of worship on the minorities in their midst.” - publishers blurb for A Vanished World by Chris Lowney

I was the kid she’s describing. During freshman year the obvious conclusion occurred to me that school wasn't worth the effort. My teachers were nice people with warm platitudes, but they were also consumer-nihilists who had no clue. In English we read literature written for girls and in history we learned all about the evils committed by our ancestors. Class was mostly an exercise in rule-following and boredom management. The only reasonable response was to check out. Only later did I discover, to my shock, that I liked good books, and that there were things worth pursuing, studying, knowing. So in my case (and I'm guessing I'm not alone), public schooling prevented the development of a love of learning.

"And God saw all the things he had made, and behold they were very good."

We get the world we deserve...