Leil Leibovitz offers some optimism.
A Reprise Post: Thanks Giving
(A repeat post from 2018. I don’t know if I posted it anywhere but the original milblog.)
You just know, as surely as the sun rises in the east, that when Thanksgiving Day rolls around (and Columbus Day as well) the usual malignant scolds will be hard at work, planting turds in the harvest-festival punchbowl. They have become pinch-faced, joyless neo-Puritans, ruthlessly seeking out any hint of happy celebration and thankfulness for bounty of harvest and generous fortune, jumping on any display of human fellow-feeling – even just having a pleasant time doing things that make the heart glad – insisting that such occasions and people are to be condemned as earnestly as Savonarola ever did, piling up works of art to be burnt in the public square. As HL Menken observed, “It’s the haunting fear of such people, that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” It is their grim, chosen, killjoy duty to stamp out such emotions and celebrations, wherever they may be found. So sayeth the current crop of student activists: “Thanksgiving is a celebration of the ongoing genocide against native peoples and cultures across the globe!”
Which is a breathlessly sweeping condemnation. Let’s just pound it in relentlessly, with trip-hammer insistence: We actual or spiritual descendants of Pilgrims are Bad, Bad People, Who Stole Everything From the Indians, and Celebrating Thanksgiving is As Bad as the Holocaust, Almost!
The 20th century practice of allowing elementary school children to dress up as Indians or Pilgrims these days, reenacting a peaceful feast and celebration of a bountiful harvest together seems in the eyes of the censorious to be about on par with dressing up as SS officers and concentration camp inmates. Never mind that dumping on the poor Pilgrims for three hundred years and a bit of warfare with various Indians rather misses the point of – you know, celebrating a bountiful harvest – as well as grandly oversimplifying history. Never mind the fact that Indians in North America warred on each other with keen enjoyment and no little inventive brutality for centuries. Never mind that according to some accounts, the Wampanoag village and fields adjacent to the Plymouth colony were abandoned, as an epidemic of some kind had depopulated the place two or three years previously. And never mind …
Oh, never mind. Isn’t it more nuanced – or is nuance out of style among the ill-educated inhabitants of the educational-industrial complex – to consider that on that long ago Thanksgiving, two very different peoples, whose descendants would be at each other’s throats for three hundred years, were yet able to join together for a great feast, to be courteous and friendly with each other, for at least a little while?
Can we not settle at table with friends and relations, and simply enjoy a good meal, and appreciate those blessings which we have received, deserved or no? At the very least, can we just smile gently at the censorious scolds and ask them to pass the cranberry relish?
Have a happy Thanksgiving Day. Tell the scolds to get bent. Be happy and have another slice of pumpkin pie that will annoy them more than anything.
Worthwhile Reading & Viewing
How to spot high-agency people. Interesting list.
The genealogy of nuclear fear. (Nuclear here referring to nuclear power, not nuclear war.)
A survey cited at LinkedIn: Gen Z (aged 16-25) wants to work in media and entertainment when they grow up. “This generation values things like work-life balance, flexibility and creativity over more traditional values like job security” also, half of this demographic is interested in pursuing entrepreneurship in some way. Here’s a link to the actual survey.
How much ‘work-life balance’ does a successful actor or director really have, though? And entrepreneurship, other than the most casual, tends to be quite intense in its time demands.
CBS News reports that roughly one in three young shoppers in the U.S. has admitted to giving themselves five-finger discounts at self-checkout counters, according to a recent survey. A response at X:
America does not have the moral cultural norms for there not to be a massive amount of theft. We’re too self-centered, individualistic, and we celebrate envy as a desert claim in the name of “equity.”
There is certainly a big cultural problem here, but I question the idea that Individualism and Community are opposites…traditionally, there has been quite a lot of both in America, as I believe Tocqueville observed. My thought is that both individualism and community are in danger of being replaced, and in many case have been replaced, by anomie.
Claire Lehmann suggests some books for helping children learn about history and philosophy. Other suggestions in the replies.
NYT finally reports what many others have been writing and speaking about for some time: the school closures for Covid are correlated with a sharp decrease in student learning. How do we square this data, though, with what we know about the preexisting generally poor low and declining quality of US public education?
The AI world is all astir with the news that San Altman has been removed as CEO of OpenAI…and now, the board is negotiating with him for his possible return! There are many explanations floating around as to what is really going on. The organization/governance chart for this enterprise, which someone posted at X, is rather…unique.
Speaking of AI, somebody at X thought that Biden should have issued an executive order to require the rehiring of Sam Altman and his associate who also left. (Tweet now deleted.) There was no mention of what possible legal authority Biden might have for issuing such an order, but increasingly people seem not to worry much about such things. The other thing that struck me was that such an order would be analogous to an order by President Eisenhower to require the Traitorous Eight to return to Shockley Semiconductor in 1957. Or, even earlier, to require Bardeen and Brattain to remain at Bell Labs and keep working with Shockley on grounds that the transistor was such a critically important technology for national security and economic well-being.
A lot of people have trouble grasping the idea that if something important is being done by a particular institution, that doesn’t mean it could not be done equally well…or much better…by other institutions, including ones that may not yet exist. We see this phenomenon, for instance, in discussions of education and the future of the Social Security system.
Rage
So a month and a bit after the Oct. 7th pogrom in Israel, the streets of American and European cities, and university/college campuses are filled with rage, and a disgusting display of Jew-hate. It’s as if none of them ever read Shirer’s “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” or had the slightest clue about what happens when the survivors of a genocide have the chance to pay back the perpetrators of mass murder the wholesale murder of kin, friends, and coreligionists with appropriate coin. But mostly … rage. By coincidence, the hand-scribbled ravings of the Covenant School transsexual murderer were leaked to a media outlet it looks like some local police officers are believed to have been the conduit for the leakage. Because what comes clear about the girl who wanted to be a boy was the pure, white-hot insane and murderous rage, which somehow became focused for whatever reason on the kids, kids who were of a privileged enough background that their parents could send them to a religious-sponsored private school. I wonder if the rage grew out of frustration. The kids had something that Audrey Hale felt that she lacked a secure sense of self in the world, comfort within their own skin, innocence and trust, parental approval whatever. They had all that or some other quality and she didn’t and it wasn’t fair and so she was consumed with rage, a rage which could only be assuaged by lashing out.
Who Are the Commissioners?
If you read English naval history, you are sure to run into a reference to The Commissioners for Executing the Office of Lord High Admiral. Your first reaction is likely to be something like, “Huh? WTF? Why couldn’t the Lord High Admiral execute the duties of his own office? Lazy, much?”
The way it worked, as I understand it, was like this:
Some of the time, there was no Lord High Admiral. Hence, it was the duty of the Commissioners to do what a Lord High Admiral would/should have done if such an individual had existed.
At other times, there was indeed a Lord High Admiral, but his role was purely ceremonial, and the Commissioners were the ones who actually performed the duties of the office.
And at still other times, there was indeed a Lord High Admiral who did the admiral-type work. I’m not sure whether in these cases, the Commissioners were still there to serve as assistants, or whether the Commission was temporarily suspended during the tenure of such admirals.
It strikes me that there is a certain parallel with the current situation in the US vis-a-vis Joe Biden. One key difference being that the English people knew who the Commissioners of the Admiralty were. Yet while it is clear that Biden is getting a significant degree of direction and ‘help’ in executing the duties of his office, we in America today don’t have a good understanding of who these helpers/directors might be.
I don’t think there’s anything like a formal “cabal” for telling Joe Biden what to do.” Much more likely, we have a loosely-coupled set of influencers, with power even greater–much greater–than typical of a president’s inner circle. Who are these people? Barack Obama, certainly, and many members of the Obama administration: there is some truth to the statement that the Biden administration has really been the third Obama administration. Doctor Jill Biden, playing the role of Edith Wilson. Ron Klain. Susan Rice. We can only guess who else, because the influencers are not a formal organization from whom transparency can be demanded. It is clear also that Biden is greatly influenced by prominent media figures and academics–clearly, he believes that it is very important to stand in well with the Ivy League:
“Lemme tell you something,” Mr. Biden says, with a clenched jaw. “There’s a river of power that flows through this country. . . . Some people—most people—don’t even know the river is there. But it’s there. Some people know about the river, but they can’t get in . . . they only stand at the edge. And some people, a few, get to swim in the river. All the time. They get to swim their whole lives . . . in the river of power. And that river flows from the Ivy League.”
Like many social climbers, Biden also cares a lot about what ‘Europeans’ think.
Another major difference between our present situation and that of the administration of the Royal Navy: Although the damage that the Commissioners of the Admiralty could do though mistaken decisions was quite substantialships sunk, sailors lost, colonial possessions lost, possibly in the worst case an invasion of England itselfthere was no danger that a bad decision on their part would destroy the entire world. That is not the case with the potential damage that could be done by bad advice from out present ‘Commissioners’
Last month marked the 60st anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is now pretty clear that…despite the previous claims of some of the involved individuals…JFK stood almost alone against the advice of his advisorsincluding his brother Bobbywho insisted on air strikes and/or an invasion of Cuba. (See The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, by Sheldon Stern, which makes extensive use of the now-declassified secret White House recordings) It is also pretty clear that the advisor-recommended reactions would have led to a very bad outcome, quite possibly including general nuclear war.
What are the odds that Biden would stand strongly against the almost-unanimous view of his advisors in a similar situation? I’d say it is pretty low.
Regarding the influence of Obama, @wrtechardthecat wrote at X:
Like the dead hand of an ancient curse, Obama‘s vision, based on a now vanished world, will wreak a path of ruin until it finally collapses on the shambles of all it sought to transform…The once unipolar world is fractured — and is still fracturing — along two lines: the line of Great Powers, Russia, the West and China; and the line of civilizations, Islam and the West. Biden, now over 80, cannot hope to retrieve things in an Obama fourth term…
In less than two years, Biden and his ‘Commissioners’ have done tremendous damage to the United States and the world. It is hard to imagine that any future Democratic administration would not also be heavily subject to the influence of Obama and the other ‘commissioners’ I mentioned above, leaving aside only Doctor Jill Biden. The best hope of minimizing this damage lies in the potential for a Republican House and and Republican Senate. True, many of the candidates are not what we would wish. But ‘the best is the enemy of the good’, and the issue of the moment is not establishing ideal policies but rather avoiding multiple catastrophes.
See also: Commissioner Doctor Jill Biden