Gregg Smith still writes there, though not so much as Budge. who dominates the site.
Travis Kavulla, now a Montana office holder, is apparently absent. (Kavulla is now in a position of power, and is a truly dangerous man. He has no self-edit ability. Given his chance now he will put his ideas in action without laboratory trial, awareness of untoward effects, or respect for wisdom of the past. He is quite sure he is right about everything. This is the definition of a “radical.”)
Electric City Weblog is now, officially, what it was always meant to be, a right wing circle jerk.
Here’s a post that caught my eye: “Bias,” written by Dave Budge. I cite it in full as it is very short:
Bryan Caplan asks why there is so much attention paid to media bias when there are other institutions that have a more durable effect:
Both the media and schools are largely in left-wing hands – and the content reflects this fact. But consider the stark contrast between the two. Schools, unlike the media, largely target impressionable youth. Schools, unlike the media, are heavily tax-supported. Schools, unlike the media, usually can’t go bankrupt. And finally, schools, unlike the media, have a very high switching cost. Even with a voucher system, changing your kid’s school would remain a much bigger deal than changing the channel.
In short:
Aimed largely at impressionable youth (Media: no, Schools: yes)
Tax-supported (Media: no, Schools: yes)
Can’t go bankrupt (Media: no, Schools: yes)
High switching cost (Media: no, Schools: yes)It’s a good question.
And it nicely sums up our media culture (understanding, at least here, that the “left” is an imagined monster that hardly even exists in this country). I watch The Daily Show each night, and only because it is funny. They often skewer FOX News, calling them out for their obvious mistakes. It doesn’t matter. The people who watch FOX news do not watch The Daily Show, and so are immune to any hosing down with reality. FOX does exactly what it is meant to do – agitprop, which requires intellectual isolation to be effective.
And so in this manner to has Budge, who has banned dissenters from ECW, created a vacuum where he, Natelson and Smith can spout their nonsense without detractors.
It’s apparently all he ever wanted – intellectual isolation, preaching without dissent from the congregation.
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Disclaimer: This site is no way affiliated with Electric City Weblog, The Perfesser, Budge or Kavulla. Any opinions expressed are those of the author and not of the management of Piece of Mind, Inc. “The Perfesser” is registered trademark of Rob Natelson.
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PS: This isn’t a terribly well-written piece, getting absorbed in personalities as it does, but I had it in my mind at the outset that what is happening at ECW, where they are cloistering and talking amongst themselves fairly typifies the nature of discourse in the country as a whole, and especially among right wingers who like to talk about “Econ 101” for the rest of us as they are daily confronted with the failures of their ideology. It is comfortable to fall into a self-affirming group in that situation. ECW is just a blog, like this one.
Piece of Mindful 
There is no question in their minds that the media and schools are “largely in left-wing hands,” and so there is no burden of proof.
How much proof does one need to draw a conclusion? I read the papers. I have kids in school, I see the work they bring home, a pretty big chunk of it droning on about the virtues of Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth et al, the glory of American Indians, the evils of american capitalism in the 19th century, stories about youth conflicted about their sexuality, blah blah blah. I know and interact with the local teachers, most of them reliably left-wing who think fair and balanced means not leading a march to burn down all edifices tainted by money grubbing White men.
Now you come around complaining that things are not Left-wing enough. Where’s your proof that such has ever brought a better life in the long run? It looks to me like you are pimping a historical failure, with your favorite examples rolling on to economic and demographic decline. I guess they just didn’t do it correctly.
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A longer response is required than I have time for right now. Your comment needs to be dissected before shredding.
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OK, I have more time now. But it is difficult to respond to you here because you are not putting up worthy ideas, but merely using words to describe your attitude. There’s nothing wrong with kids learning about Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth et al, and the “glory” of American Indians so long as they also learn about Milton Friedman, John Brown, JFK and Ronald Reagan.
But what do we teach these kids? Why is it not OK for MLK to be an eloquent spokesman for the Civil Rights movement, a courageous man who seemed to know he only had a short time to live, AND to be a heavy drinker and a womanizer … why is it not OK to know that Reagan had presence because of his words and physical gestures, that he was a great actor but not a great thinker? Does that diminish the ideas that he was used to advance? Cannot the ideas stand on their own?
We are dealing with humans, flawed and imperfect, yet vehicles for ideas. What scares you so much that you cringe when you think about a kid knowing about Sojourner Truth or that we mistreated other, weaker and imperfect humans, the original inhabitants here?
In other words, why do those who advance your ideas have to be perfect, while those who advance ideas you don’t like must be corrupt?
There’s no subtlety in your thought. You seem to fear kids knowing about MLK, as if he is an attractive vehicle for subversion. You are dealing with your own fears, and trying to suppress kids curiosity at the same time.
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I don’t have a problem teaching about MLK or Sojourner Truth, but it is done at the expense of other historical figures.
Harriet Tubman is a big hit when kids are asked to name an important historical figure. How can one argue against this, what with the racist charge hanging out there? So we smile and go along.
The other thing we get here is what type of figures are important. I think Henry Ford is pretty important for developing industrial processes and bringing products to market. MLK gets higher marks for lobbying the government to change its policies, policies that were on their way to being changed anyway. I think Edward M. Purcell is pretty important for studying physics and coming to discover nuclear magnetic resonance, but we don’t hear much about him.
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I wonder if schools can teach history effectively – I’ve thought from time to time that it ought to be done as a required reading subject without textbooks, which are tainted by politics (have you seen what Texas is doing?). You can point to thousands of historical figures, but the selection process is, as Max notes below, by nature subject to prejudices.
Do you teach about MLK and mention his drinking, womanizing, and his eloquent opposition to the Vietnam war? Do you talk about his support for a public union as being the reason for his trip to Memphis? When you talk about Henry Ford, in addition to his industrial accomplishments, do you mention his support for Hitler?
I would love to be a history teacher, my way. I’m not saying that I want to impart my ideology on kids. Far from it – I want them to immerse themselves in an array of people, events and ideologies, and walk away thoroughly confused. It will take their entire adult lives to sort it out.
That’s how it should be. If a kid is not confused about history, he’s probably been indoctrinated.
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“If a kid is not confused about history, he’s probably been indoctrinated.”
You can say that again. Although, I would prefer not to use the word “confused,” unless of course the kid had attended a university that had succumbed to historical and cultural relativism, in which case, the kid would definitely be confused.
Rather, I think “adamant” would be a better choice. When someone becomes adamant about history, he has probably been indoctrinated.
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Agreed. That’s a better word.
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As far as taking one’s entire adult life to sort out history, there is a lot of truth to that based on my own personal experience. Of course, the serious student of history must acquire a large inventory of historical information before he should begin the sorting-out process, but once he is in passion of sufficient material, yes, he inevitably asks himself, “What the hell is this all about?”
In my own lifelong interest in history, once I realized how little I knew about my own civilization, I have deliberately excluded the study of non-Western civilizations, just to limit the sorting-out process to some manageable proportions. If I knew for certain that I would live to 150, I surely would look into those other histories, but, given how much study time I have already squander drinking, gambling, and chasing women, I know that my time is now short, and I must use it wisely, if not selfishly.
Sooner or later, but usually later, after absorbing enough history, the question, “What the hell is this all about?” becomes “What the hell is history?” Odd, I know.
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I will have to support Fred on this one based on my experience both as a recent (1993) American history student and lecturer (1995). Fred nails the issue in his opening remarks when he states that advancing minorities, i.e., advancing the politically correct agenda, is “done at the expense of other historical figures.”
As I have mentioned here before, modern historiography is built on the selection, authentication, and interpretation of written documents. Obviously, selection and interpretation are subject to extreme biases; however, they are also subject to intense scrutiny, which may take the form of rebuttal selections and alternate interpretations.
That, at least, is what happens at a scholarly level. If a scholar who is intent on boosting the stock of his favorite minority character selects only documents to show his subject was a great speechwriter, for example, another scholar may rebut that contention by selecting other documents showing the speeches were plagiarized. Interpretation, naturally, is open to abuse also, but an interpretation that is not based on the established evidence, or offers a conclusion that does not follow logically from the established evidence, will fail to be accepted.
Most minority histories fail on one or more of the three tests: selection, authentication, or interpretation. However, even when they pass muster, there is the pedagogical issue of emphasis and de-emphasis, which very often comes down to the number of textbook pages allotted to a subject or the number of lecture hours.
I remember working as a graduate teaching assistant and looking at a brand new American history text written by a notorious left-winger. My politically correct, affirmative action female professor had chosen the book for her upcoming freshman class and wanted my opinion on the text.
I immediately noticed that the book was short on text and big on pictures and graphics. Oh, well, that is modern public education, I thought. I then turned to the index and looked for an entry regarding Thomas Paine. I knew quite a bit about Paine from previous research that I had done, and I wanted to see what the textbook had to say about him, also knowing that Paine had achieved sainthood among the left.
No entry for Thomas Paine! He did not exist in the index. I assumed it was an indexing error and turned to the textbook section on the American Revolution. No Thomas Paine. This is absurd, I thought. Then I turned a page and saw a large sidebar with the title “The Rights of Woman.” What is this? What happened to Paine’s “The Rights of Man”? Yes, political correctness had removed the 18th century’s greatest revolutionary thinker and substituted Mary Wollstonecraft in his place. Nice painting of her, though.
That was a perfect example of emphasis and de-emphasis for the sake of “inclusion.” The freshman American history student never learns about Thomas Paine and his monumental “The Rights of Man,” which, by the way, set off a titanic clash with Edmund Burke, who responded with “Reflections on the Revolution in France.”
This politically driven process of emphasis and de-emphasis not only dumbs-down history, but it also tremendously distorts it by falsely elevating unremarkable people to historical status. Important historical events become disconnected and make no sense, because the persons most responsible for those events have been removed from the narrative, and others, who had little or no effect on events, have been substituted in their place.
[Below, with the permission of the blog owner, I reprint a paper that I wrote on this subject, which explains in more detail the pernicious processes at work and their deleterious effect on civilization.]
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History as Civilization
History is the collective memory of man. Beyond its facts and figures blurred by the work of centuries or distorted by evil design, history is above all an attempt by the generations of man to create a coherent, continuous, and unified world in an otherwise incoherent, discontinuous, and fragmented universe. Its memories bind all manner of things. But history is much more than the mortar of civilization: It is civilization itself; for without history man is merely another unremarkable beast, condemned to forage forever in the fields of time, to live and love and die without an estate or even a marker stone. All of life’s labor is lost without history. And although its lessons are manifold—sometimes simple or abstruse, sometimes transient or permanent—it is plainly understood to be the means by which man has conquered time and space, the means by which he has overcome death and achieved immortality. In history, the dead, the living, and the unborn walk together for all eternity.
Civilization began with the dawn of history. Civilization in its strictest sense did not begin with the domestication of plants or animals, or with the mining of minerals, the building of monuments, or the coming of law and religion. All those things, no matter how long they persisted, ceased to exist each time they slipped from the collective memory. There was no Mycenaean Civilization before Homer created it. There was no war, no Troy, no Helen. Neither men nor gods existed. There were only broken and bleached bones, worn out tools, overturned idols, and the scattered ashes of human habitations before Homer. There were only lost memories. Yet a blind poet looked five hundred years into the past and created a civilization where none had existed. He plucked an entire race from the sea of time. Granted, something was there, shining in the Aegean, something later to be known as Ancient Greece, but it had no name, contained no faces, served no purpose and was incoherently discontinuous. Although a “civilization” may prosper or survive for some small or great amount of time, without history it is doomed to oblivion eventually. This is true because civilization in its deepest sense is a creation of history.
Every aspect of civilization is a potential historical subject—art, commerce, law, philosophy, religion, technology, war—indeed, every possible human endeavor is the proper purview of history. The sum of these works which history has recorded and preserved represents the civilization. When the tide of fortune turns, and the civilization is swept away, only its history remains as a faithful representation, as if an intricate and perfectly shaped shell that once held a living creature. Future men may pick up this history, examine it in detail, and from its lines and general shape surmise what sort of men preceded them. And if the history be well made and truly formed, future generations will hear human voices echo clearly.
The great history takes the highest ground for its view and never looks down. No matter whether a history is concerned with the specific, minute aspects of a particular civilization or whether it be concerned with the grand and general aspects, what matters most is that it rise above the day-to-day affairs of men and see its own long connection to past and future civilization. The principle object of history is to create a shape for civilization by imposing coherency and unity on spatio-temporal events. Only when a history extracts itself from the river of events and moves to the highest perspective can it hope to achieve the continuity civilization craves for its existence. While the merely good histories look down from the mountains, the great history looks across the mountains. Such a history succeeds in not only gathering, authenticating, selecting, and interpreting events, but also places those events within the context of continuing civilization. The great history takes in all the lesser histories that populate the peaks and links them so that they may create a continuous chain. In so doing, the great history spans all time and space.
The poor, the miserable, the downright wretched histories swim in the sink of civilization, continuously tossed back and forth by the treacherous, ever-changing crosscurrents of the popular will. These histories have no perspective worth the name. As they bob up and down in their self-created effluent, they survive only so long as they pander to the urgent but transitory needs of contemporary society. The rulers have a right to rule: Up bobs a history. The disenfranchised demand participation: Up bobs a history. The ex-slaves have no history: Up bobs a history. The treasury is empty, and the atheists, the Jews, the Turks are to blame: Up bobs a history. Men are women, black is white, up is down and up bobs another history. All these “histories,” of course, ultimately sink. They sink not from want of method, persuasiveness, or even occasional accuracy, but rather they disappear because they lack the long perspective civilization needs.
In one way or another, and somewhat ironically, the histories that civilization discards are precisely those that do not understand the essence of civilization. Regardless of whether a certain history has a contemporary ax to grind, if the history fails to connect past civilization with present civilization, it only adds to the discontinuity civilization is trying to avoid and is therefore of no value. A successful history, on the other hand, seeks to connect itself to the past and in so doing automatically guarantees its connection to the future. This may be accomplished only by adding or modifying factual evidence that was missed or mistaken in previous histories, not by a naked reinterpretation of the facts established in those histories. This is to say that no present or future authority may substitute his interpretation of the evidence for a past authority’s interpretation. Only when new facts are discovered may a historical case be reopened, reexamined, and if necessary, rewritten in the light of changed circumstances. Otherwise, historicism is supreme, and its henchman, historical relativism, runs amuck. Mankind knows not whether it comes or goes, and the continuity of civilization is shattered.
It is said that a physical law is valid only if it is “time invariant,” meaning any physical law that purports to describe an event accurately must do so no matter if time is moving forward or backward. Whether such a rule is helpful to the physicist, or will be in some future world, is not of consequence to the present discussion; but the idea of laws operating forward and backward in time is important.
There are those historians who think the law of evidence runs forward or backward in time (meaning it is valid for all times), and thus history is susceptible to revision according to that law. In this thinking they are likely correct; for it has already been established that a revision is required—indeed, demanded—whenever new evidence is unearthed that materially affects the logical conclusions of a historical argument previously put forth. An alternative historical account may spring up by this process to supplement or even rebut the account given by Tacitus, for instance, but Tacitus will nevertheless still stand his ground and forever must be reckoned with vis-à-vis the alternative account. This is the historical process that calls upon the future to judge the past. It is a connecting mechanism.
However, there is another group of historians who think that interpretation is a time-invariant law, and that every historical account is subject to interpretive revision. This group, it would seem, is woefully mistaken because interpretation conforms to no known law whatsoever. In their view, Tacitus’ interpretation of Nero may be easily supplanted by Jones’ interpretation of Nero, which in turn may be replaced by Smith’s interpretation and so on indefinitely, as if nothing past were fixed but rather in flux for all time. This fast shuffle of the collective memory might seem to be a silly, harmless trick were it not that Nero actually does become unstuck in time and begins to wander about the present dressed up in whatever wild costume happens to be appropriate for the occasion.
Nothing good grows out of revisionist interpretation. It is the irrational side of history that enfeebles rather than nourishes the memory of civilization. But besides attempting to substitute a perception acquired at a great distance from events for a perception that was developed in relative proximity to events, backward historical interpretation, because it follows no law, is as whimsical as the wind that bore Odysseus home from war. It was time-invariant interpretation that whipped up the storm that smashed the late 19th century theory of “scientific” history, and it is the howling that haunts all histories still. This is the historical process that calls upon the present to judge the past. It is a disconnecting mechanism.
Not to say that conflicting interpretations of historical events should be shunned altogether. Rather they are to be cherished and preserved, but only if they are contemporaneous with the event under scrutiny. When two histories contradict each other in their interpretation of a particular event, all judgments of accuracy, credibility, logic, motivation, proximity, persuasiveness, and so forth are automatically and indefinitely postponed; that is, the future is allowed to become the continuing arbiter of the past. To posterity devolves the responsibility for deciding which, if any, historical interpretation is the more satisfactory. In this manner, contemporaneous but contradictory interpretations of present events become the catalyst for further inquiry and debate. And therein lies their intrinsic value: What amounted to differing opinions or perspectives in the past will promote differing opinions or perspectives in the future. Thus, while a past civilization is infused with vitality and gains multi-dimensionality in direct proportion to its number of contemporaneous histories, a future civilization can be rejuvenated and take on new dimensions from those same histories. As civilization advances by this process of historical interaction, what was once an unanimated, almost alien former existence that stood aloof in some distant and disconnected past becomes a discernible human shape that possesses vitality and the force of a fully integrated memory, a force capable of operating across time and space. The force of the collective memory, as contained within history, reaches across the centuries and impinges on the present. It dissolves mankind’s ever-emergent, proto-human alienation from civilization by giving each new generation a living, functional memory, that is, a sense of place, of time, of identity and of belonging. As history slowly fills up the collective memory of man with a multitude of images, impressions, and interpretations of the past, it creates the continuity man needs to build his civilization.
If the continuity, integrity, and momentum of civilization are to be preserved, historical revision must be limited to evidentiary matters only. Whatever interpretation the historical past might have given to different evidence, had it been available, is pure speculation, first. Second, past interpretations of historical events are not only unchangeable and permanently incorporated into present history, they are always of value in that they allow a direct view into the thinking of a previous age. Any attempt to revise those interpretations, or to substitute other and perhaps newer interpretations, threatens to unravel civilization. Third, the validity of any interpretation the present chooses to give to new evidence is to be judged solely by the future. Under this analysis, all valid historical interpretations must be based in present time, and only two kinds of histories are permissible: that which corrects past events without interpretation; and that which records present events with interpretation. In this fashion, history can build upon itself, make internal adjustments whenever changed conditions warrant them, and avoid the self-perpetuating pitfalls of interpretive revision by deferring to the judgment of future generations.
Being solely a construct of the human mind designed to impose order and continuity on events, so that a collective memory may be maintained and a civilization created, history naturally tends to reject all retro-interpretations of events as inimical to its goals. The farther events recede, the stronger the rejection of interpretive revision. Besides explaining for the mad scramble of historians to get in the last, definitive word, the closing time window for interpretive revision emphatically proclaims civilization’s demand that events must be permanently fixed before they are admitted to the collective memory. While this self-stabilizing process is not reducible to quantitative analysis, it may be observed, generally, that the civilization with the shortest time allowance for interpretive revision is the younger, stronger civilization; and the civilization with the longest time allowance for interpretive revision is the older, weaker. A civilization fails when the time allowance for interpretive revision becomes indefinite.
Because it is a human construct, history is susceptible to every intellectual and spiritual malady known to man. When man no longer seeks to justify his ways to history but instead forces history to justify its ways to him, civilization begins to chatter and cluck like the Tower of Babel, as every present history undertakes to reinterpret every past history. Driven perhaps by the human conceit that the future may be whatever one pleases, time flies forward and backward as each successive generation revises its interpretation of the past to suit its interpretation of the present in the hope of influencing the future. Civilization becomes ensnared in an unending, degenerative historical cycle, and for all practical purposes, it has no future per se but only a present chasing its tail. This self-absorption, so to speak, this process of history being sucked back into its own vortex, represents the spiraling death of a civilization that has lost its memory.
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That is very eloquent. I agree that history is a necessary component of civilization, but right away comes to mind Churchill’s remark about history being kind to the Allies, because he intended to write that history. I also wondered what it is that makes Paine more important than Wollstonecraft … does it not depend on your gender and ideology? It is merely subjective judgment, no matter the eloquence of Paine. (I agree that no American history is useful without him.)
What I read in your excellent essay is an attempt to remove history from subjectivity. It’s impossible. By no accident, countries impose ideology on history – mythology, if you want. Paine has gone in and out of style. What does that tell you? Texas removed Jefferson from their books, inserted Phyllis Schlafly. That is the teaching of history in microcosm.
Put it this way: Napoleon said that freedom is reserved to a small group of men of “noble mind” – the rest don’t want it. I look at history like that – only a few study it in depth, and fewer than that with any detachment. For the rest, they are fed the right amount of history to make them patriots. What Fred objects to above is feeding them anything that doesn’t make them patriotic enough.
Anyway, read Black Swan. You’ll enjoy it, if no more than for the notion that true freedom is the ability to say “fuck you” before hanging up the phone instead of after.
Here’s a couple of passages from him that I grabbed – he talks quite a bit about history in the early chapters:
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Minorities and women were not excluded from historical accounts simply because they were minorities or women. They do not appear often in the annals of history because they did not significantly influence events. They are not, for the most part, world historical figures, to borrow Hegel’s term.
There is no need for you wonder about the Paine versus Wollstonecraft case. Her “inclusion” is just a lame attempt by feminists to say, “See, girls can do it, too.” Sort of like, “Girls can do science,” if you get my drift.
The test is simple: Which person, Paine or Wollstonecraft, had the greatest impact on revolutionary events in the second half of the 18th century?
I do not know how many copies of Mary’s letter were published, but I can tell you that Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” went through more than 100,000 copies in just a few weeks in the late winter of ’76, an unheard of publishing event at the time. By the time of the Declaration of Independence that summer, Paine’s book had sold more copies than any printed book in Western history, except the Bible. (NB: Paine donated his earnings to the Continental Army then forming.)
Now, if you are familiar with “Common Sense,” and you have read “The Declaration of Independence,” you already know that Jefferson borrowed heavily from the tenor and phraseology found in Paine’s book. Indeed, it could be easily argued that Paine’s work had prepared the American public for Jefferson’s work.
So, who had the greatest impact on revolutionary events in the second half of the 18th century, Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft? And, given limited space in your textbook, or limited lecture time, which of the two would you choose for inclusion in your history course?
[Correction to my earlier post: Both Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Man” and Paine’s “Rights of Man” were reactions to Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” not vice versa.]
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That’s all correct within its own framework. But remember that the Declaration did not mean squat to slaves, and women in the temper of those times were second-class citizens (I’m trying to say that without judging). Howard Zinn comes along later and does a very credible job of inserting women and minorities and labor unions into the ongoing narrative of great white men. I agree with what you say above about Wollstonecraft, but think that you are missing the point that Zinn makes, that there are other narratives going on at the same time of equal importance to other players.
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There are always “other narratives” going on, but they don’t mean squat, which is my point.
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Don’t you see that your narrative, the history of white Europeans, doesn’t mean squat to others? Your’ outlook is too narrow.
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I understand that. But those “others” you speak of are the lesser for it. It is they who suffer for lack of understanding the dominate cultural, not me. I lose nothing by knowing my own history; whereas, they lose everything by not reading it and immersing themselves in their own histories instead.
The modern world is built on the European model of civilization. Everywhere around the globe, successful nations have adopted our way of living as evidenced by their economics, politics, science, technology, and even their use of our principal language: English. And those who have not adopted our ways are still stuck around 15,000 BC or somewhere near the end of the last Ice Age.
Just as my ancient ancestors, the Celts, had no history before they encountered the Greeks and Romans, the “others” you speak of had no history before they encountered us. The reality is this: Western Civilization created history. We gave those “others” the idea of history.
Personally, I think their histories are a pathetic joke, pathetic because their histories are constructed to make them feel as though their failures are not their own fault, and pathetic because their histories drive them deeper into alienation from the dominate culture, which is not going away anytime soon. Concisely, their histories validate their second-class status.
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OT: I thought you would be happy to know that I have tuned into Aljazeera’s Web site for the first time. It seems to be the only news organization with considerable assets on the ground in Egypt and is not pumping out Western liberal media clichés. Not that I believe everything I am hearing, seeing, and reading of course, but any raw information is better than none in a situation like this.
Here is another history lesson: The Western liberal media always falls back on the simplistic models taught in Western history courses. For example, every war America engages in must fit into the Vietnam template. Likewise, every outburst of rioting in an “oppressed” country must fit into the French Revolution template.
It is fairly laughable, and that is why I turned to Aljazeera.
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I doubt you’ll be disabused of your Eurocentricity. The domination of the planet had more to do with internal squabbling that led to constant bloody warfare that led to advances in military technology ahead of much of the planet. Beyond that, you know, we’re pretty much like everyone else.
Mahatma Gandhi on western civ ‘ “I think it would be a good idea.”
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Al Jazeera provides balance – it is not balanced, but offsets the prejudices of the western news outlets.
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Germans of future generations will honor Herr Hitler as a genius, as a brave man, a matchless organizer and much more.
–Mahatma Gandhi
(Over to you.)
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He’s overrated. Not Hitler – Ghandi.
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I know. Gandhi was merely a pathetic little man in a diaper obviously suffering from a Vitamin B12 deficiency.
[Hey, Trotsky, I hope you never lose your sense of humor. You will be just another pinch-faced politically correct pinhead if you do.]
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Whoops. I just realized that Hitler was a vegetarian, also.
Maybe this lack of B12 in historical figures needs to be investigated.
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Golly, Trotsky, I just finished reading your last post, where I was called a “beast,” and now you are claiming the Budge Bunch are all homos. (I know Budge likes tutus, but I am not so sure about the rest of them.)
Anyway, I think you should be the last one to talk about blog writers who lack rigor. Indeed, I think that is your main failing. You toss around clichés and slogans as if they were facts. (And you even make up facts!) You read something and assume it is the authoritative, definitive source on a subject while being totally oblivious to the universe of contrary work. Essentially, you write as if everyone already knows what you know and agrees with you. It is just a matter of discussing what ought to be done.
So there is really nothing rigorous, and therefore nothing persuasive, in your writing. It is just another soapbox harangue. To avoid that, you need to marshal facts that cannot be disputed, while anticipating those that can be disputed, advance the facts in a logical order, and leave your reader with no other conclusion than the one you want him to reach.
Nietzsche once said something to the effect that we only read authors we already agree with. I think that is something you ought to watch out for. Read authors you will probably disagree with, like you are reading me now.
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You’re dead on. But I do allow dissenting views here, actually prefer them. As old Bob Garner said to me, I like to argue, period. I absorb a whole lot of information that way. If only people who agreed with me came here, I’d hang it up.
Now, go to ECW, and tell me that there is any meaningful discussion from varying sides of issues. It is, as I said, a circle jerk.
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“Now, go to ECW, and tell me that there is any meaningful discussion from varying sides of issues. It is, as I said, a circle jerk.”
I look at ECW from time to time, even though I am banned from posting there, and I do not disagree with your opinion of that site. But a lot of blogs are like that—closed. They are like a bunch of old ladies at a quilting bee.
What I do disagree with is your use of the phrase “circle jerk.” That is the same homosexual style used by the vulgar bookstore clerk, who I am sure you do not wish to emulate.
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By the way, Nassim Taleb suggests that the best way to investigate an issue is not to self-validate, but rather to rigorously try to prove hypotheses wrong. Others say that even this is not thorough enough, that we should both validate and deconstruct our ideas, and percolate.
All in all, if I can pull a Kailey here and self-congratulate, I’ve pretty much disabused myself of right wing authoritarian thought and left wing wispiness about the the true nature of people. I got through and over feminism. I look at a situation like Haiti and realize that these people are not doing for themselves. I understand that giving people money destroys people (trust babies especially). I realize that abortion is the taking of a human life, though I still think it ought to be legal. Some dudes are so bad that putting them to death without suffering first is too kind. I came to understand that there is no science of economics, right or left … talk to me five years ago, and none of that would be true.
So I do learn a thing or two along the way. Tell me when was the last time you changed your mind about something, princess.
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Shocking revelations here! Too many for me to cope with, but I will say that I liked most of them.
(Oh, that Haiti thing, man, could I go on about that. I made my daughter-in-law cry twice while I was lecturing her on Haiti. But I promised not to go into anything about what you said….)
I will mention this Taleb character, however briefly. This is the fellow who has been advancing the so-called Black Swan Theory, right? (I hope so.) I have been fascinated by his ideas for some time, but (1) I am too cheap to by the book; and (2) I am afraid that I will not understand it.*
When was the last time I changed my mind about something? That would be last night.
OK, so I have always disliked the BBC, not so much because it is a socialist outfit, but mainly because of its biased and politically correct documentaries and its absurdly elaborate biographies and historical reenactments, most of which seemed designed to pump a little culture into the British working class by proclaiming England as the artistic and literary center of Western Civilization.
I changed my mind about the BBC last night while watching a three-part series entitled, “The Impressionists.” I was just overwhelmed. I even had to give it four stars on Netflix.
First, nearly all the profiled artists were French, justifiably so, and thus there was no British one-upmanship. Second, the cinematography and editing was superb, easily on a par with the best Hollywood craftsmanship. Yes, there was a little of the “revolutionary artists overthrow the established order” and “society never appreciates geniuses” and some other clichés, but overall, the series was quite edifying, and of course visually mind blowing. I could not believe I was watching the BBC.
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* This fear of being unable to comprehend a written work goes back to when I was a teenager and quit high school halfway through the ninth grade. I remember on the day I quit that we were reading Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” and I remember thinking, “Either I don’t understand this book or it is just really awful.” Many years later, after receiving a GED and three college degrees, I realized too late that it was just really awful.
Currently, I am reading “The Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays” by M.M. Bakhtin, and all my childhood fears are coming back. I am beginning to think that I do this to myself deliberately.
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