Civil Society

Big Wheel Cease from Turnin’

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deltaqueen1

The steamboat Delta Queen is a well-known and much-loved vessel. Built in 1926, she is 285 feet long, with a steel hull, powered by two steam engines of 2000HP each. She was originally used for passenger service between San Francisco and Sacramento. After being refurbished in 1945, she began service on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and has operated in that role ever since. Thousands of Americans have enjoyed river cruising on the Delta Queen.

Not any more, though. Delta Queen made her last passenger voyage in 2008, and is now tied up as a hotel in Chattanooga. The end of passenger service is not due to any structural or mechanical problems with the vessel, nor is it due to the difficult economy. Rather, the demise of the Delta Queen says a great deal–not much of it very encouraging–about the political and cultural environment now existing in this country.

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Penumbra Obliterated

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I’ve got a question for any of our readers that happen to be lawyers.

Free access to abortion services appears to be a shibboleth of the Left that they hold particularly dear. That, at least, is the unmistakable conclusion one must draw when considering the actions of the Democrats.

For example, the abortion question was at the forefront of the news all during the Bush administration. Just about every time the President nominated a jurist to fill a vacancy on a court bench, it seems that the Democrats wanted to spend most of their time during the confirmation hearings endlessly grilling the potential judge on their views concerning abortion. If memory serves, it started with Priscilla Owen, who had to wait through four years of wrangling and filibuster before her nomination ever came to a vote! In fact, she would probably still be stuck in confirmation hearing limbo if it wasn’t for the so-called Gang of 14.

There were other issues that got the Dem’s fur up, but it seemed to me that the abortion issue certainly took center stage more often than any other.

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“…their total inability to admit the possibility of a social order which is not made by political design”

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In Britain and among the English-speaking peoples … Locke’s ideas were simply combined with the old English tradition of limited government. Rather than a project for a new society and a new morality, the English revolution of 1688 and, to a lesser extent, the American revolution of 1776 were basically, though not only, a reassertion of the rights of free Englishman to live their lives as they used to live them before—under the common protection of the laws of the land. In other words, what we now call liberal democracy has emerged in the Anglosphere as a natural outgrowth of existing, law-abiding and moral-abiding ways of life. For this reason, liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples has been naturally associated with an ethos of duty—which, as Burke pointed out, is not and should not be deduced from will. For this reason, too, liberal democracy in the Anglosphere has been tremendously stable. And the English-speaking peoples have always been the first to rise in defence of their cherished liberties—their way of life.
 
In continental Europe, by contrast, the idea of liberty has tended to be understood as an adversarial project: adversarial to all existing ways of life simply because, in a sense, they were already there; because they had not been designed by ‘Reason’. This has generated a lasting instability in European politics. This adversarial attitude, combined with a widespread disregard for limited government, has led European politics to be recurrently dominated by two absolutist poles: revolutionary liberals and later revolutionary socialists, on the one hand, and counter-revolutionary conservatives, on the other. They both have aimed at using government without limits to push forward their particular, and usually sectarian, agendas. Their clash—the clash between the so-called liberal project and traditional ways of life—has been at the root of the historical weakness of European liberal democracy, when compared with liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples. This weakness also explains why, differently from the English-speaking peoples, continental Europeans are not usually the first to rise in defence of our liberties when our liberties become at risk.

João Carlos Espada, Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty (2006)

Leszek Kołakowski (October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009)

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A bit of a Chicago Boy, as it turns out. Thanks to Pejman for the tip. Requiescat in pace.

Mindless Verbal Taylorism

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Four customer service stories:

1)Telephoning a restaurant. Call a restaurant on the phone–to make a reservation, check on the specials, whatever..and you will likely hear something like this:

Thank you for calling Snarfer’s Steakhouse, where the elite meet to eat. My name is Tiffany…how may I be of assistance to you today?

You can bet Tiffany didn’t come up with this string of words herself. She has been told exactly what to say, has to say it 100 times a day, and is so tired of saying it that she often slurs the words together:

Thank-you-for-calling-Snarfer’s-Steakhouse-where-etc-etc-etc

Often, the message is so slurred and incomprehensible that I’m not sure I’ve called the right number, resulting in a question:

Is this Snarfer’s Steakhouse?

This kind of thing originated with chain restaurants but can now often be found at many independent restaurants as well.

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