Reader Robert McNally has informed me that he maintains a site, Tracking the Bright Idea", so those interested in tracking debate about the Bright meme can do so here. Thanks to Robert for that.
One word of caution: quite a large number of sites and blogs are represented at Tracking the Bright Idea, with associated comments, so you'll need an authoritative taxonomy of logical fallacies to identify and keep track of those you'll find. And you'll find a lot. On the other hand, it would make a good exercise for a logic class, and plenty of material is presented there if you care to analyze it (it seemed to me that ad hominem was the most frequently employed).
I still prefer the term "atheist," because it is more specific and more narrowly defined--but that's just the point, I think: "bright" is a public relations exercise, an encouragement, as Richard Dawkins wrote here, to encourage more people to come out, to identify themselves openly as ones adhering to a naturalistic worldview. So I still like "bright." The term doesn't do the job I expect "atheist" to do, but it's inspired a lot of debate--which means interest.
From Article I, Section 7 of the United States Constitution: "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other bills."
And here, courtesy of Hit & Run, is how it is done in practice.
My, my. What ever happened to ideas such as "a government of laws and not of men?" And bear in mind, these guys are paid to behave that way. By you.
Lynn Sislo, over at Reflections in D Minor, asks, "Why don't serious classical composers write music for banjo or steel guitar?" She points out that in the case of Stockhausen, for example, "in addition to the usual violins, pianos, clarinets and so forth you'll also find tam-tams, sine-wave generators, ring modulators, vibraphone, wood blocks, cowbells and glockenspiel." Lynn surmises that composers do not write for the banjo and steel guitar because they are not strange enough.
Lynn, I give you the chromatic harmonica. Granted, it's not the banjo or steel guitar you wondered about--but it's got greater dynamic range than either of them, and a classical repertoire already exists. Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his Romance in D flat in 1952 for American harmonicist Larry Adler, and Darius Milhaud had also written for Adler: his Suite Anglais, op. 234 was written in 1942 and premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Malcolm Arnold wrote a Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, op. 46 (1954), and other composers wrote for Adler as well.
Another American performer was John Sebastian (whose son, John Sebastian, was featured in the Lovin' Spoonful in the 1960s and is a fine blues and folk player), who attracted composers Heitor Villa-Lobos (Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, 1956), Alexander Tcherepnin (Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra, op. 86, 1953), and Alan Hovhaness (Concerto No. 6, op. 114, 1954, and Greek Folk Dances, 1956).
In fact, from what I've found, there are over 60 art pieces written specifically for the chromatic harmonica, with more to come: Robert Bonfiglio is planning to premiere a harmonica concerto by William Bolcolm during the 2005-2006 season of the Minnesota Orchestra.
And a strangeness factor enters here, too. I quote from The Classical Free-Reed, Inc: The Classical Harmonica: "The American composer, Donald Erb (b. 1927), wrote Quintet (1976) for flute doubling on harmonica, clarinet, violin, cello and piano doubling on electric piano with a phase shifter attached. The members of the ensemble also perform on crystal water goblets. Erb also wrote Aura (1984) for string quartet. The violist is required to play a harmonica in C in addition to two water tumblers tuned a perfect fifth apart."
Sorry, Lynn, no banjo. But Donald Erb is still around.
(Note: much of the information here came from two highly informative sites, Henry Doktorski's The Classical Free-Reed, Inc., and Greg Dyer's Harp On! Chromatic Harmonica Reference. A fascinating book is Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers, by Kim Fields. Another enjoyable read is Lynn's own series, "Classical Music for the Absolute Beginner, " found here, here, here, and here.)
New links over to the right, and all worth a look.
Diana Hsieh writes a blog, NoodleFood, when she's not writing papers for graduate school or presentations for The Objectivist Center or doing programming jobs for her clients. Diana keeps tabs on Objectivist communities I don't follow, another reason like to check her blog. I think she's spending time at both The Objectivist Center and The Ayn Rand Institute summer conferences, so she should have a lot to report when she gets back.
As I've written before, I love the subtitle: "Piquance. Impudence. Ordnance." But there's more than that: Rachel Lucas is very good at defending gun rights and at poking idiots where they need to be poked.
Reason Magazine has its own blog: Hit & Run, which I check every day. It's been updated since I began making this blog entry.
Sasha Castel ( La Blogatrice) and Andrew Ian Dodge have now wed, and Sasha and Andrew's Round Table is their online home. Lots of culture stuff here, especially opera, and politics, including British politics. Another daily stop.
Skip Oliva runs Citizens for Voluntary Trade, and, with Nick Provenzo, The Rule of Reason: Weblog of The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism. Capitalism needs to be defended in today's culture, and it can't be defended if we don't keep track of the most egregious assaults. With these two blogs, we can keep track.
So, those are the link updates for now. Check 'em out.
Very, very good short piece on diversity here, by an interesting writer.
Chris Matthew Sciabarra is disappointed that some of his compadres online actually advocate such statist institutions as antitrust laws and public schools. Now, most of the people hanging out at that site do not endorse such monstrosities. But Chris was provoked, and he responds with some thought-inducing comments:
What must be emphasized here is that all of this is part of one interconnected context (can you say "dialectics????): government monopoly of education, advancing government control of domestic and global political economy, the inculcation of conformity, and the undermining of independent thinking. Each of these factors reciprocally reinforces the other. Indeed, they are mutual requisites for the success of statism. Statism requires a docile population, and there is no better way to disarm a populace than by miseducating its children.
Absolutely. In fact, Chris previously mentions government's monopoly privileges as well (especially the issuing of money), and recommends some worthy libertarian classics. "Laissez-faire capitalism," Ayn Rand wrote, "is the only social system that bans force from social relationships." Chris has more to say on the theme of docility and its effects:
Malcolm X once said: "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem." The problem with statism is that it makes all of us "part of the problem"--because we embedded in this system. We go to government schools, we drive on government roads, we mail our letters through government post offices, we are alternately benefiting from some government privilege or being hurt by some government prohibition or exclusion, we pay government taxes, we die in government wars (not all of which are "defensive"--but that's another issue for another day). Being part of the solution requires change, therefore, on every level.
Again, I agree with Chris here: change is needed, and at every level of society. Politically, the change needed is to stop regarding the initiation of force as legitimate. We need to ban force, as Rand said, and therefore to remove government coercion from every area of the economy. In a coerce-commerce mixed economy, all are at the mercy--and at the throats--of all, special interest groups arise to clamor for privileges and favors, and far too often, one gains only at the expense of someone else, who of necessity loses. That is the only way things can be when government creates various grants of monopolistic privilege, or arrogates monopoly to itself: as Chris says, "we are alternately benefiting from some government privilege or being hurt by some government prohibition or exclusion." He continues:
The famous Beatles song goes: "You say you want a revolution. Well, you know we all want to change the world...But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out?"
And there, John Lennon's lyrics point to the problem: when it comes to violence and coercion, not everyone avers "count me out." Lennon himself wasn't sure at first that he actually felt that way: on the single released by The Beatles, "Revolution," he did indeed sing "count me out," just as the lyrics above indicate. But on the earlier version of the song released as "Revolution 1," on the album The Beatles, he clearly sings "count me out...." Is violent revolution the only way to bring about change? Many believe so, and the much-admired John Lennon, as we've seen, had trouble making up his mind on the point. Many of his younger devotees on the New Left felt the same way, regarding Che Guevara with awe and coining such anti-middle class slogans as "The Revolution will not be televised," and the explicitly murderous "Up against the wall, motherfuckers!" And such attitudes go back a long way, as Ludwig von Mises tells us in Human Action:
Today many historians and writers are imbued with the Marxian dogma that the realization of the socialist plans is both unavoidable and the supreme good, and that the labor movement is entrusted with the historical mission of accomplishing this task by a violent overthrow of the capitalistic system. Starting from this tenet, they take it as a matter of course that the parties of the "Left," the elect, in the pursuit of their policies, should resort to acts of violence and to murder. A revolution cannot be consummated by peaceful methods. It is not worthwhile to dwell upon such trifles as the butchering of the four daughters of the last Tsar, of Leon Trotsky, of tens of thousands of Russian bourgeois and so on. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs"; why explicitly mention the eggs broken?
And events have shown us that all statists of all persuasions think this way, from Lenin to Jimmy Carter, who while president made the same "omelet" remark, and including the near-deified John Lennon, who opposed US involvement in Vietnam and Britain's role in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war, but said nary a public thing about the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Afghanistan in 1979. So the communist revolutionary Lenin, the socialist-"pacifist" Lennon and the ostensibly conservative Democrat Carter prove, each in his own way, Mises' point: to a statist, it is a "matter of course" to employ violent coercion, up to and including murder, in the pursuit of political aims. Businesses of all sizes can be regulated out of existence, property can be forfeited to the Internal Revenue Service or to the Drug Enforcement Administration even before one is convicted in a court of law (unlike a forfeit in sports or chess, the forfeit is not offered, but imposed by those taking the property); you can be murdered in your own home if police thugs have a "no-knock" warrant to confiscate drugs, or if you are a Branch Davidian.
Sciabarra again:
Fortunately, for the advocates of freedom, change is not about nihilistic destruction. It is about creation: the creation of alternative voluntary institutions that supplant the old coercive ones. When the very first institution that children encounter is a compulsory one, teaching them to destroy the efficacy of their own minds, it is no wonder that the rest of the society accepts compulsion and coercion as an appropriate social relation.
And Lennon again:
You say you'll change the constitution
Well you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well you know
You better free your mind instead
But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Don't you know it's gonna be all right...
Lennon and Sciabarra are both right on this one: we have to change our heads and our institutions. In fact the great minds Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, John Lennon, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra are in accord with The Anger of Compassion here: we have lots of minds to change; we have, as Chris says, a culture to transform--"but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out."
And yeah, I do think it's gonna be all right.
El Paso gets no respect.
I go to Roscoe Ellis, in my innocence, and what I read stuns me:
And...you may have noticed a slight change in the nomenclature I'm using to identify the time of each individual post here in my journal. I saw recently that Kevin Whited, a young guy "always aware of the tension between the politically possible and the philosophical idea," writing from the Houston area in his Publius TX weblog is doing this. It seems sensible on many different levels, so I'm following his lead and marking Texas Time now.
"Sensible?" Guys, I know where Houston is, and I know where San Antonio is, and I know that they're in Central Time, as is most of Texas. But not all of Texas: El Paso, the largest city on the Texas-Mexico border, is out here in Mountain Time. Did you guys forget how big Texas really is?
I suppose it's simple cosmic justice that Kevin's site has been hacked and isn't available as I write this. It was only to be expected. But, in the immortal words of Bart Simpson, "I didn't do it." Hope you get back soon, Kevin, and have a look at those time zones, eh?
I always thought this was one of the weakest arguments against gun control: "Instead of passing more laws, why not just enforce the ones that are already on the books?"
In and of itself, it's an insubstantial argument, and, what with 25,000 to 30,000 gun control laws "on the books" already--most of them no doubt unconstitutional-- it's bound to be a loser argument as well. As, historically, it has been.
But it brings to mind a question:
President Bush, Republican members of Congress, conservative activists and pundits across the country: Instead of yawping about constitutional amendments enshrining the pledge, or banning flag-burning, or mandating a balanced budget, or a defense of marriage---why not just pay attention to, and adhere to, those amendments we already have on the books?
I'd suggest that a good start would include paying particular attention to the First, Second, and Ninth Amendments. You also need to give some lovin' to the Fourth and the Tenth. But I won't be holding my breath: as I said, I'm just asking a question. Your score on the entire Bill of Rights is already well known.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation couldn't protect her from the Ku Klux Klan, she was told. But 74 year-old Eleanor Roosevelt didn't care--she was packing heat, and had been for decades.
It was 1958, and Mrs. Roosevelt had made plans to speak at a civil rights workshop at Tennessee's Highlander Folk School. There was just one problem:
The Ku Klux Klan learned about her plans. The day before her trip, the elderly, gray-haired woman was contacted by the FBI. "We can't guarantee your safety," they told her. "The Klan's put a bounty on your head, a $25,000 bounty on your head. We can't protect you. You can't go." But the little old lady answered, "I didn't ask for your protection...I have a commitment. I'm going."
And she did. She flew down to the Nashville airport, where she was joined by a friend, an elderly white woman aged 71. The pair got into the car, lay a loaded pistol on the front seat between them, and drove into the night. No Secret Service or police escort. Just the two little old ladies with a gun to keep them safe.
Conclusion: "It was the exercise of her Second Amendment rights that enabled Eleanor Roosevelt to use her First Amendment rights to crusade for the Fourteenth Amendment rights of blacks."
Outstanding. I never knew any of this, but I'm glad I've found out--and my disdain for gun control advocates is even more intense now than before, which I'd hardly thought possible. It's also worth pondering the nature of evil and how it can be fought, and defeated--we can follow the FBI or Department of Homeland Security model, or we can heed Eleanor Roosevelt:
In her 1960 book, You Learn by Living, Mrs. Roosevelt urged her readers not to cower before the world's dangers, but to stare them down: "You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face...You must do the thing which you think you cannot do." (Emphasis in original.)Posted by Craig Ceely at 03:11 PM | Comments (0)
"And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made," etc.
Yes, I was an English major, back in the day, and I read Yeats, so I regarded
this as very cool news: from Slate, we read that the British Library has released a CD, The Spoken Word--Poets, and it includes some stuff you won't believe. Forget Maya Angelou, forget Jewel: this includes the real thing.
The real thing? How about T.S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," or Robert Frost rendering "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening?" Gertrude Stein? Ezra Pound? Robert Graves?
But it gets better than that: you can hear William Butler Yeats on "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," you can actually hear Tennyson himself reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade," and there's even a clip of Robert Browning--yes, Robert Browning--doing some of "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix."
So, go read the Slate article, and listen to the clips. Sure, I know the Tennyson and Browning recordings sound lousy, but there was no Dolby process in 1889, so give Browning a break. And yes, that was 1889.
Thank you, British Library, and I want that CD...
(Oh, and you can get to a picture of Innisfree here...)
(And a tip of the hat to Eugene Volokh)
None.
That's right: we have, and enjoy, no rights granted to us by the government, not at any level.
None.
Does that mean, then, that we have no rights at all?
Oh, no. No, no, no...
I have posted, recently, on the subject of the precarious state of our civil liberties in terms of how today's "conservatives" defend same; but that's not what I'm excited about here. No, for that you need to go to Arthur Silber's excellent blog, and read it for yourself.
No, I am not a conservative: I've no desire to make you feel guilty or anything of the sort. Not at all. You owe me nothing. Grill your steaks and shrimp, quaff your beers, watch your baseball or soccer on TV and please, enjoy all of it. All of it.
But also, go to Arthur's blog, and get a taste of why I am happy that you are able to do so.
And I am happy that you may, if you like, do these things. Yup. This weekend, I can train my Doberman pup, mix martinis, study Latin grammar AND sleep late every day, every single day, jes' cause.
Happy Independence Day from west Texas, y'all!
Ian Hamet is certainly, er, properly oriented, or so it would appear.
According to Michael R. Eades, M.D. and his wife, Mary Dan Eades, M.D., authors of Protein Power, certain notions are what they call vampire myths, myths which "simply refuse to die." For example, the rates of death in China from cardiovascular diseases is similar to that of Americans--contrary to myth. I'd like to add one notion that's had little enough attention paid to it in the blogosphere: the notion that the French rolled over and played dead in front of the German advance in 1940. The popular term is "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," and one variant was expressed by Rachel Lucas:
Almost 60 years ago, thousands of Americans died on a beach in France. They were there to liberate France from the Nazis, who'd been occupying France for four years, ever since France had capitulated to its own chickenshit tendencies and surrendered without so much as a fight.
Trouble is, it didn't happen that way. Not even close. I quote figures from Table 3, German and Allied casualties, 1940 (page 209), of Len Deighton's Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II:
German dead: 27,074
French dead: 90,000
German wounded: 111, 034
French wounded: 200, 000
Sound like chickenshit numbers to you?
Other (total) casualties:
BEF (approx. 40 days fighting): 68,111; Belgian (17 days fighting) 23, 350; Dutch (5 days fighting) 9, 779.
Cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Dutch, five days fighting? We don't hear about Gouda-eating surrender monkeys, do we? Or wooden-shoe wearing surrender monkeys?
And as for that figure of 90,000 French dead: Eugenia C. Kiesling, assistant professor of military history at the United States Military Academy, in her book Arming Against Hitler: France and the Limits of Military Planning, puts the figure at over 120,000.
As Rachel Lucas points out, there are plenty of other reasons to be angry and annoyed with the French government and with much of its population, too. And I agree with her (and you should still check out her blog). But this isn't one of them. The French rollover in 1940 is a myth, although it keeps coming back like a bad penny or, as the good doctors Eades would say, a vampire.
90,000--120,000 dead in May and June 1940? The French didn't roll over and play dead: they were dead.
If we are to honor the thousands who died liberating France from Nazi aggression-occupation, then justice demands we honor those who died defending her from Nazi aggression-invasion. To cheapen the one cheapens the other.
UPDATE: Rachel Lucas has removed the above linked post.