Miscellaneous

Goethe, the Original Gretchen, and the Hackers of 1764 (rerun)

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When Goethe was 15, he was already recognized by friends as an exceptional writer.   One of these friends, “Pylades,” told Goethe that he had recently read some of his verses aloud to “some pleasant companions…and not one of them will believe that you have made them.”   Goethe said he didn’t much care whether they believed it or not, but just then one of the “pleasant companions” showed up, and Pylades proposed a way of convincing the fellow of Goethe’s abilities:  “Give him any theme, and he will make you a poem on the spot.”

The disbeliever asked Goethe if he “would venture to compose a pretty love-letter in rhyme, which a modest  young woman might be supposed to write to a young man, to declare her inclination.”

“Nothing easier,” said Goethe, and after thinking for a few minutes commenced to write. The now-former disbeliever was very impressed, said he hoped to see more of Goethe soon, and proposed an expedition into the country.   For this expedition, they were joined by several more young men “of the same rank”…intelligent and knowledgeable, but from the lower and middle classes, earning their livings by copying for lawyers, tutoring children, etc.

These guys told Goethe that they had copied his letter in a mock-feminine hand and had sent it to “a conceited young man, who was now firmly persuaded that a lady to whom he had paid distant court was excessively enamored of him, and sought an opportunity for closer acquaintance.”   The young man had completely fallen for it, and desired to respond to the woman also in verse…but did not believe he had the talent to write such verse.

Believing it was all in good fun, Goethe agreed to also write the reply.   Soon, he met the would-be lover, who was “certainly not very bright” and who was thrilled with “his” response to his inamorata.

While Goethe was with this group, “a girl of uncommon…of incredible beauty” came into the room.   Her name was Gretchen, and she was a relative of one of the tricksters present.  Goethe was quite smitten:

“The form of that girl followed me from that moment on every path;   it was the first durable impression which a female being had made upon me: and as I could find no pretext to see her at home, and would not seek one, I  went to church for love of her, and had soon traced out where she sat. Thus, during the long Protestant service, I gazed my fill at her.”

The tricksters soon prevailed upon Goethe to write another letter, this one from the lady to the sucker.  “I immediately set to work, and thought of every thing that would be in the highest degree pleasing if Gretchen were writing it to me.”  When finished, he read it to one of the tricksters, with Gretchen sitting by the window and spinning.   After the trickster left, Gretchen told Goethe that he should not be participating in this affair:  “The thing seems an innocent jest: it is a jest, but it is not innocent”…and asked why “you, a young man man of good family, rich, independent” would allow himself to be used as a tool in this deception, when she herself, although a dependent relative, had refused to become involved by copying the letters.

Gretchen then read the epistle, commenting that “That is very pretty, but it is a pity that it is not destined for a real purpose.” Goethe said how exciting it would be for a young man to really receive such a letter from a girl he cared about, and…greatly daring…asked: “if any one who knew, prized, honored, and adored you, laid such a paper before you, what would you do”…and pushed the paper, which she had previously pushed back toward him, nearer to Gretchen.

“She smiled, reflected for a moment, took the pen, and subscribed her name.”

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A Profile of a Killer, Part 1: Thomas Matthew Crooks (Updated)

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than seven weeks since an assassin came within the proverbial whisker of killing Donald Trump.

Every story, every incident has multiple dimensions. Something may happen in the present but its causes are rooted in the past and its effects are felt in the future. Then there are the different actors, all with their own stories and trajectories; however, all are united in that one incident for that one moment, like a real-life version of Rashomon. So it was on July 13 in Butler, PA.

Some of the actors have drawn public attention and are in the process of being fleshed out. There was the target, Trump, who came within a hair’s breadth of being killed. That iconic photograph of him, with blood streaming down his face, fist raised high, yelling “fight.” Then there is the stunning incompetence of the Secret Service that day; revelations of dangerously sloped roofs, unsecured buildings, and just the general disarray and poor execution of what was once held to be an elite organization.

Oh and then there was the revelation that the Secret Service had actually RAMPED up security given evidence of an Iranian plot against Trump. I wonder what security for Trump looked like before then.

The third and perhaps most important story is one that has been hardly told at all, in fact has disappeared from view and quite literally has reached a dead end. If Trump is the direct object of the sentence, the one who was acted upon, then why does no one speak of the man who is the subject, who not only performed the action of firing the rifle, but was the presumptive Creator of that day?

I speak of Thomas Matthew Crooks.

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Worth Pondering

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In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.

–Aldous Huxley

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Of First Posts, Coups, and Cabals

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So what to write for a first post? There’s a famous quote, misattributed to Lenin, which states, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” It seems like we live in one of those times

One of my dirty secrets is that I follow the corporate media, scanning stuff like the NY Times and W. Post on a regular basis not such because I need to be informed by events but because as PR outfits of the Left those outlets offers insights into what the other side is thinking.

So this past weekend I saw this column from Maureen Dowd regarding the effort to get Biden to quit the race, “The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup”. As a friend of mine put it, Dowd is the “catty conversationalist for the coastal cognoscenti” who alerts her smug fan base to what is both acceptable to talk about and what opinion to hold. So when she uses the word “coup”, a term many other leftist outlets have condemned the Right for using, it gets my attention.

It’s paywalled so here’s the key quote:

“Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.”

Putsch? An unfortunate term given its history; did Obama, Hakeem, and Pelosi meet in a beer hall before driving over to talk to Biden? What exactly did they say to Biden to get him to quit the race? It must have been pretty good because Biden’s re-election campaign did the equivalent of a car smashing into a wall at 60 mph, one morning he was all in and by the time lunch was finished that day there was the tweet announcing his withdrawal.

Dowd doesn’t go into the particulars, and the real intention of her column is not to offer such explanations but to signal to her faction of the Left that yes, Biden was forced out, but it’s okay and now we need to move on. She is like the trial lawyer who gets out in front of facts that might reflect negatively on her client so that she can spin them. She’s fulfilling the media’s historical role in taking what would be nasty news for the Left and covering it… with a pillow until it stops moving (h/t David Burge). The limited hang-out par excellence.

However we are still left without an explanation of what went down that day when Nancy met Joe resulting in an event unprecedented in American history. If we don’t respect the man then we should respect the office he holds and as even Dowd admits the President of the United States was toppled. To add insult to injury, he was overthrown, but not by by a delegation responding to an ongoing Constitutional process as was the case when Goldwater and Rhodes told Nixon that he was going to be impeached, but by a cabal which found Biden’s presence on the ticket inconvenient for their partisan purposes.

So what offer did Obama, Pelosi, and their fellow cabalists make that Biden couldn’t refuse? What was the kompromat? Biden the man has two personal weakspots, his family and legacy. Hunter was already on his own trajectory through the legal system, but did they threaten Jill or Ashley? Did they threaten to “leak” damning information about those tens of millions in foreign bribes?

The most plausible action was that they threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment, the ultimate hard ball, which would permanently mark his entire presidency as being an invalid.

The buried lede is that all those theories are nothing new, which means of course that their use to blackmail the President of the United States has been a permanent aspect of the past four years. That there always had been an ejector seat upon which Biden had been seated and that his presidency was never his own.

Leave aside that by threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment, the implication was that they were more than willing to put the country at risk and keep an invalid Biden in office as long as he would do their bidding regarding the election. The real problem is that Dowd’s column allows the world a fleeting and final glimpse behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and exposes the cabal that has been running the country with Biden as its compromised puppet for the past four years.

A final peek to let us all know how things really work, that behind the pretense of a constitutional republic is only a filthy cabal. Now that we have had our look, this whole episode can be safely packed away in the same warehouse as Matthew Crooks, Audrey Hale, and Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant, never to be seen again.

That’s the purpose of Dowd’s column; it’s a psy-op, to let you know that what you see is a lie and to convince you that you are powerless to stop it.

Onto the Joy of Kamala.

The Phobia(s) That Are Destroying America

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Many educated/urban/upper-middle-class people show a disturbing level of fear, contempt, and anger directed toward Christians, non-college graduates, and rural people (especially southerners).   This complex of negative emotions often greatly exceeds anything that these same people feel toward radical Islamists or dangerous rogue-state governments. I’m not a Christian myself,  but I’d think that you would be a lot more worried about people who want to cut your head off, blow you up, or at a bare minimum shut down your freedom of speech than about people who want to talk to you about Jesus (or Nascar!)

It seems that there are quite a few people who vote Democratic, even when their domestic and foreign-policy views are not closely aligned with those of the Democratic Party, because they view the Republican Party and its candidates as being dominated by Christians and “rednecks.”  The hostility toward Trump is substantially motivated by hostility toward those who are his supporters (or those who are assumed to be his supporters)

What is the origin of this anti-Christian, anti-noncollege, anti-“redneck” feeling? Some have suggested that it’s a matter of oikophobia … the aversion to the familiar, or “the repudiation of inheritance and home,” as philosopher Roger Scruton uses the term. I think this is doubtless true in some cases: the kid who grew up in a rural Christian home and wants to make a clean break with his family heritage, or the individual who grew up in an oppressively conformist Bible Belt community. But I think such cases represent a relatively small part of the category of people I’m talking about here. A fervently anti-Christian, anti-Southern individual who grew up in New York or Boston or San Francisco is unlikely to be motivated by oikophobia. Indeed, far from being excessively familiar, Christians and Southern people are likely as exotic to him as the most remote tribes of New Guinea.

Equally exotic, but much safer to sneer at. And here, I think, we have the explanation for much, though not all, of the anti-Christian, anti-Southern bigotry. It is a safe outlet for the unfortunately-common human tendency to look down on members of an out group. Safer socially than bigotry against Black people or gays or those New Guinea tribesmen; much less likely to earn you the disapproval of authority figures in school or work or of your neighbors. Safer physically than saying anything negative about Muslims, as you’re much less likely to face violent retaliation.

There are some other factors which I think motivate some people toward the anti-Christian anti-Southern mindset. One is the fear that Christians, especially Southern Christians, are anti-science, and that Republican electoral victories will reduce Federal support for science or even lead to restrictions on scientific research. And indeed, some conservatives/Republicans have been known to make some pretty strange statements, such as former Rep. Paul Broun’s assertion, “All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, the Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell.”

But in realistic terms, there is far more threat to US science from “animal rights” terrorists – the vast majority of whom are politically on the Left – than from anti-evolutionists. And there is even more threat from  pressures on allowable and non-allowable topics for university research…pressures which emanate almost exclusively from the “woke” Left. And numerous followers of “progressivism” are believers in various forms of mysticism, such as magical crystals and a conscious Gaia, which are at least as inconsistent with pure scientific materialism as are the Biblical miracles. At the level of practical technology, the irrational hostility toward nuclear power, genetically-modified crops, etc., comes almost entirely from the Left.

Another factor is sex. Many seem to fear that conservatives/Republicans are anti-sex “Puritans” and will force women into metaphorical (or maybe not so metaphorical!) chastity belts. Democratic Party operatives have done their best to conflate opposition to forcing institutions to pay for birth control with opposition to birth control itself. In reality, no serious Republican national-level politician is remotely proposing the banning of birth control or, for that matter, the banning of homosexuality. And, speaking of “Puritanism,” we should note that the anti-male hostility emanating from certain radical feminists, who are almost entirely creatures of the Left, has done much to poison the relationship between the sexes, especially on college campuses.

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