The League of David

Zzzzzzzzzz

This blog has gone to sleep.  For now.

I'm working now at my other blog, Making Sense of Jihad.

You never know, however, like Rip Van Winkle, the League may wake up, cranky and energized.

Sometimes

Sometimes a really tall building jutting into the sky is just a really tall building jutting into the sky.

Here's the Washington Monument before they tore it up to make it "safer" from terrorist attacks.  This was taken during the Cherry Blosson Festival, 2003.  It was a day that brought out about 300, 000 people.  I call that the Real Flower Power.

Whenever you see anti-war protests numbers described as "in the thousands" accompanied with a close-in shot of a few obese, pierced young women and a smattering of guys wearing black, compare those images with the number of folks who attend July Fourth and Cherry Blossom festivities on the mall, like this:

Metro estimates that more than 300,000 spectators traveled underground to last year's Fourth of July celebration, which was marred by rain. More than 500,000 people rode Metro to the fireworks display the year before.

It's not even close.

Here's another  tall building jutting into the sky that has nothing to do with the other one.  I just decided to show it off.

Montauk, 1998

Bookstore to the Philistines

From October 2001, San Francisco:

A Year Ago Today

A year ago today my father died.

If someone is near the St Andrew's Cemetary in Salem, VA, please place a flower at his stone for me.

I can't be there in person, but my heart has never left.

Closing One's Mind on Something Solid

It is not at all virtuous to keep your mind continually open, because you are not using your mind as it is meant to be used. You are in fact taking very poor care of it. The mind continually propped open will only collect dust and cigarette butts. 

David Mills

If it seems as if the culture war has entered a new, more belligerent phase, that’s because it has.  We’re heading toward a clash of world views.  On one side are the Philistines, who are becoming increasingly belligerent toward any social or religious tradition or intellectual system that doesn't conform to their idea of "liberal" or "tolerant."  On the other side are people who are fed up with seeing cherished traditions destroyed by people who never regarded them as important in the first place.  It's agenda nihilism; and there's a growing number of people who are willing to stand firm against it. 

Over the next few years many factors will work for and against each side. But if Barbara O’Brien’s recent defense of moral relativism reflects the quality and insight produced by its defenders, then we're looking at a dramatic reawakening of the Christian West.  It's a muddled essay accented with bad and confusing analogies.  It also suffers from the deep internal contradictions that expose moral relativism's inherent weaknesses. 

How do you successfully defend a philosophy that states that nothing is worth defending?  Well, you don't.

O’Brien opens her defense of moral relativism by admitting that she owns many watches:

One of my favorite sayings: A man with one watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure.

I run into people who interpret this to mean that one should have only one watch. But that’s nonsense. The point is that you can be certain something is true, yet be wrong. And once you make up your mind you’ve found the whole and entire truth, you’ve shut your brain off from learning anything. If you want to get closer to the reality of things, stay skeptical.

When I read this, I was reminded of an old roommate who was always late for work.  One of her excuses:  she changed watches, and never knew the exact time.  She was eventually fired.  Reading O'Brien, however, I realized that my roommate was right after all.  3 o'clock is opened to interpretation.  According to Ms. O’Brien, you’re supposed to keep multiple watches just in case one is wrong. Thus, you remain skeptical of the correct time, and opened minded to the possibility that it may not be the time you think it is. 

She never takes the leap of reason here and acknowledge that a man can adjust the time on his watches if he chooses to do so.  He can make all of his watches the same exact time, compared to an absolute.  There actually is a standard, an absolute, for time.  It’s called the atomic clock, and there are hundreds of technical and scientific disciplines that depend on its absolute authority. This is not good enough:

The folly of absolutism is not that there is no Absolute. The folly is that that no doctrine or belief system perfectly and completely contains the Absolute. Believing otherwise is like the guy with one watch. Yes, there is this thing called time, but it’s folly to assume that any one watch perfectly and completely transmits the absolute truth of time, much less measure it accurately.

Even our understanding of what is "relative" is not absolute enough for Barbara:

“Relative” reality is the way human beings ordinarily interpret reality with their brains and senses. In relative reality, for example, time is linear, and individual objects have independent existence – a chair is a chair, for example. But in the absolute, time is not linear, and no-thing has independent existence; there is just This. As the quantum mechanics guys say, it’s all just molecules and space. And in the relative, where a human might see a chair, a dog sees something to pee on.

But the dog is still peeing on a chair, woman.  I hope you're going to clean it up! 

Ms. O’Brien tops off her treatise by showing off her ignorance of Catholic teaching, and her disdain for both Judaism and Christianity:

I understand that all over the world there are Catholic women who are denied birth control because some old guy in the Vatican interprets a 3,000+-year-old passage in Jewish scripture to mean that God doesn’t want people to have sex without the possibility of procreation. And for this reason women’s bodies and minds are depleted by too many pregnancies and too many children. Is this not a “dictatorship of absolutism”? If AIDS spreads through Africa because the Church discourages condoms, is this not a “dictatorship of absolutism”?

Ignore, for a moment, the deep ignorance of church teaching here.  Isn't criticizing church teaching against sin, sort of, judgemental? 

The Philistines' Party

William Voegeli has a wonderful essay in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books that asks the question that many Philistines simply can't answer:

Do you know where you're going to? 
Do you like the things that life is showing you? 
Where are you going to? 
Do you know?

His major criticism of the today's progressive movement -- particularly embodied in the Democratic party -- is its general lack of substance and direction.  What does it stand for?  What is the movement's goal? 

Liberals have a practical reason why they won't say what they ultimately want, and a theoretical reason why they can't say it. The practical reason is that any usably clear statement of what the welfare state should be would define not only a goal but a limit. Conceding that an outer limit exists, and stipulating a location for it, strengthens the hand of conservatives—with liberals having admitted, finally, that the welfare state can and should do only so much, the argument now, the conservatives will say, is over just how much that is.

Keeping open, permanently, the option for the growth of the welfare state reflects the belief that the roster of human needs and aspirations to which the government should minister is endless. Any attempt to curtail it would be arbitrary and wrong. (In his concession speech after losing to Ronald Reagan in 1984, Walter Mondale listed the groups he had devoted his political career to assisting: "the poor, the unemployed, the elderly, the handicapped, the helpless, and the sad" [emphasis added].)

This gets us to the theoretical reason why liberalism cannot incorporate a limiting principle or embrace an ultimate destination. Given humankind's long history of sorrows, most people would consider securing "abundance and liberty for all," ending poverty and achieving racial justice, a pretty good day's work. For LBJ it was, astoundingly, "just the beginning."

Liberal intellectuals who drew up the blueprint for the Great Society regarded peace, prosperity, and justice as achievements that were not merely modest but troubling. They lived with a strange dread—that if Americans' lives became too comfortable the people would decide that the country had been reformed enough, thank you, even though liberals knew there was still—always—work to be done. In 1943 the National Public Resources Board, which FDR hoped would chart the course for a renewed, enlarged post-war New Deal, advocated the recognition of various welfare rights, including the right to "rest, recreation and adventure." In a speech he gave to the Americans for Democratic Action in 1948, the group's first chairman, Wilson Wyatt, rejected "the view that government's only responsibility is to prevent people from starving or freezing to death. We believe it is the function of government to lift the level of human existence. It is the job of government to widen the chance for development of individual personalities."

What to do, what to do...

What should I do with this blog?  Go away?  I'm sure some people wouldn't mind, but if you hate it so much then why would you be reading it?

No, there's got to be some skill or art within me for this stuff.  God isn't cruel.  He wouldn't give me a longing to write without any skill, or potential for skill.

But what should I write about?  I'd hate to do what everyone else is doing: responding to the news.  I have no problem with this format, it's just that there are so many other people who do it better than I could.   Besides, it's a reactionary format, defensive by nature.  The Philistines do something, and some brave soul cries out from the wilderness to point out the evil or injustice in it.

I could try to push back against the tide, but, again, there are other people who do that much better.

Knowing that I have some, if meager, skills and an interest in protecting and preserving Western civilization,  what should I do with this blog?

Hhhhmmm.......

Nature Unbalanced

I didn't need to read Crichton's new novel to be convinced that environmentalism was a waste of time. I knew all that Philistine talk of  "earth in the balance" and "Gaia" was a bunch of crap when I saw my first successful raptor hunt.   It was a great horned owl -- a big bird -- that had just caught a squirrel -- a big rodent.  The squirrel was still alive and was...screaming and thrashing while the owl tore at its head.

It was quite an awful experience.  All the PBS animal shows of my childhood could not prepare me for experiencing the real thing in real time.  A Philistine would say, "Balance of nature, blah, blah, blah.."  But you can say that as much as you want, if you don't see it in action you don't know the sheer horror of nature.   

I don't get out much into real nature anymore, simply because I don't care to.  I'm not interested in peeing in the woods.  I like pavement and cities, mass transit, cars, supermarkets and DSW.  I prefer to read.  But a comfortable life in a man-made world hasn't skewed my understanding of the natural world.   There's more balance in the "environment" of Takoma Park or Bethesda than there is in Shenandoah National Park or the wilderness areas in Washington State.  Balance is a human concept, that poor squirrel had no say in it.

There are volcanoes, hurricanes, and these fucked-up things.  There are massive fish kills, earthquakes, and meteorites.  Man cannot control any of these events, but they all have the power to irrevocably alter the environment, and sometimes kill tens of thousands. 

Thank God someone with the gravitas of Michael Crichton has come along and challenged the conventional wisdom.  Philistines are invested in the idea that the earth needs to be in "balance," because so much of their fundamental ideology depends on it -- population/abortion, globalization/species protection, economic regulation/trade.  You want "balance" on earth?  Talk to the Atlantic Croaker.

Life Imitates Tolkien IV

This time uber-essayist Victor Davis Hanson gets in on the fun.

I Love Rock

Well, actually..rocks.