Our friend Henry Gomez has started Bloggers United for Cuban Liberty (BUCL), a worthwhile campaign to pressure Spain to stop being one of Castro’s principal enablers.
Civil Society
Usenet and Discussion Moderation: Religion and Politics
Here’s a long discussion in a Usenet group devoted to bicycling that begins when a veteran, reasonable, commenter announces that he is leaving the group because he is tired of the vicious personal attacks and speech-suppression attempts that increasingly accompany discussions of technical topics as well as anything that veers toward politics. The commenter singles out another contributor for having driven him to decide, finally, to stop commenting.
Stoic Warriors 2 — Where Risk, Pain, and Death Are Ignored
In an earlier blog review of Stoic Warriors – The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, I looked at some of the issues facing the American military as society changes its attitude toward individual suffering.
For several years past, I’ve attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is a spectacular assembly of films on mountain subjects — usually relating to outdoor pursuits, natural environments, and exotic cultures. There, I found the same male appetites for adventure, risk, and camaraderie … with many of the same grim consequences of fear, trauma, loss, and sudden death faced by soldiers. But there was a difference. A big one.
The trailer (below) for a recent year of the Banff film festival runs about five minutes. It does contain advertising but the ads are as interesting as the film excerpts for giving a feel for the festival and, by implication, for the prevailing social ethos.
After the jump, my views on the difference …
The Rough Zones of the Ten Commandments
Lex’s link to Robert Fogel reinforces much that is said and said often on this blog. It doesn’t seem to me particularly good if we have a wide divergence in wealth and some is back scratching. Nonetheless, I’d worry more if all incomes were the same for all the reasons mentioned here so often. It isn’t just, or even mainly, productivity that is gauged by differing wages. Our desires are different; so are our priorities. Someone who spends twenty hours a week reading to and playing with her child may not expect to be as compensated in money as if she were working a 60-hour executive week; she is, however, richly rewarded in other ways. As Fogel observes, the differences between the way we can live is not all that dramatic and many differences are driven by choice. As the comments indicate, discussions of poverty are often snapshots in time. My children should not be making the wage that their parents, after forty years of work experience and three degrees do; my husband’s mother deserves comfort but is not, at 88, a wage earner nor is she building capital but rather spending it.
Syncopated Rhythms
Way back in college I read this ranting essay written in the 1920s by a conservative preacher, warning of the dangers that the “syncopated rhythms” of Jazz poised to society’s moral fiber. The preacher warned that the inherent sensualism of Jazz would lead to a culture of sexual promiscuity, weakened families and associated social problems. As my professors expected me to, I chortled at the preacher’s fevered concerns. Only years later did a realization strike me:
Our culture did in fact evolve just the way the preacher predicted.