The Classical Look

Good page link from Marginal Revolution: What did ancient Greek statues really look like?

My Favorite Year

Ian Hamet demonstrates good taste and good humor in selecting some of his favorite movies, especially this one.

Class consciousness

"Do you know your place?" is another amusing quiz, this time at the Guardian, and again via Ghost of a Flea.

The section explaining the aristocratic answers is a hoot.

I didn't take the quiz, myself. Taking internet quizzes is so low-class...

Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other...

I don't go around asking people, "What's your sign?" But I just had to know...

How Libra am I?

You are 53% Libra

(Hat tip to Ghost of a Flea)

Doing my part

I mentioned it a few days ago -- although the academics I sourced got the date wrong on their site -- and since then, Sasha Castel and Pejman Yousefzadeh have hopped on the Anger of Compassion bandwagon.

"It" is, of course, the immorally absurd "Buy Nothing Day," which Sasha lampoons in her own fashion; Pejman does the same, and points out one reason (among others) why such ridiculousness is immoral.

Pejman had the right idea (buying himself a new book or CD today), and so did Scott Wickstein, in Sasha's comments section (buying beer). Why not, thinks I to myself, do both?

So I went to Barnes & Noble and bought Thomas J. DiLorenzo's How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present. Enjoying it immensely.

Now these anticapitalist wackos hold certain companies and products in particular disregard, so let's see how I can get the most enjoyment out of this effort: I could buy the beer at Wal-Mart, I could use a credit card, I could drive around in my gas-guzzling, anti-environmental automobile.


That should do nicely. Go thou and do likewise (or something similar), and be sure to read Sasha and Pejman on a regular basis.

Does this make me an Archie Bunker atheist?

Hardhat

You are an atheist, a rationalist, a believer in the triumph of science and of reason over libido. You can’t stand mumbo jumbo, ritual, spiritual nonsense of any kind, and you refuse to allow for these longings in others.


Astrologers, Scientologists and new–age crystal ball creeps are no different in your view from priests, rabbis and imams. They’re all just weak–minded pilgrims on the road to easy answers. Nature as revealed by science is awesome enough for you, but it’s a nature that needs curbing and taming by us on our evolutionary journey to perfection.


Your heros are Einstein, Darwin, Marx and — these days — Gould, Blakemore, Watson, Crick and Rosalind Franklin. Could you be hiding a little behind those absolutist views, worried that, if you let in a few doubts and contradictory ideas, the whole edifice might crumble? Loosen up a bit and try to enjoy the amazing variety of human belief systems. Don’t worry — it’s unlikely you’ll end up chanting your days away in some distant mountain cult.

What kind of humanist are you? Click here to find out.

Thanks to Political Theory Daily Review, which I got to via Marginal Revolution.

From Planet Charles: More on the Duke of Dolts

It goes on and on...

Thanks on this day

Some good reading about how the American Thanksgiving holiday came about, and what conclusions to draw from it: Gary North's "Thanksgiving and Marginal Utility," "Property and the First Thanksgiving," by Gary Galles, and Gary Hull's "Thanksgiving: An American Celebration of the Creation of Wealth."

Hmmm...a Very Gary Thanksgiving, one would be tempted to think. Except for this guy, who remembers to mention the role played by beer and the Pilgrims' (and the Indians') demand for it.

And there should be a list. The Anger of Compassion is thankful for...

David Calvert's invention of the Milo adjustable barbell

Those who designed and marketed the iPod Mini

Torquemada, Afrit, and Ximenes, for creating the modern cryptic crossword, and Caroline Andrews, who taught me how to solve them

And this place.

Ah, there's more, there's so much more. That's a good thing, of course. In fact, I'm off to enjoy some of it...

Well, I don't think it's molybdenum...

Well, I took this quiz twice, with a change of one answer to one question, and got these results to which herb I apparently am...

YOU ARE MOLY


What herb are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Or else I'm...

YOU ARE BASIL


What herb are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I guess. And I've never even heard of moly.

Hopeless, hopeless...

According to my FranklinQuest planner, today is National Stop the Violence Day:

Radio and TV stations are encouraged to promote “peace on the streets” and help put an end to violence on this day . Discuss the current state of violence in your community and the entire U.S. Study the current conflicts in the world arena and what character lessons they hold.

I have a suggestion, of course: why not end the violence represented by the personal income tax? Why not ditch the War on Drugs?

I note, though, another item on the same page:

Buy Nothing Day is November 29
This holiday, celebrated on the biggest shopping day of the year, is a moratorium on consumer spending and a celebration of simplicity that focuses on bringing consumer culture to a more sustainable path. What negative character traits are associated with consumerism? How can students participate in this holiday or share the beauty of buying nothing with others?

Ugh.

The Impertinent Malice of Mediocrity

The type of people finding their way to this blog -- or writing such blogs of their own -- might remark, of The Incredibles, that there are two things they disliked about the movie:

1. That one line of advice: "Don't think." Ugh.

2. The bit at the end, where the kid has to hold back, hide his super-speed as he competes in a footrace.

Okay, I'll give you both.

But here's composer Richard Halley, explaining to Dagny Taggart why he refuses to publish any more of his music: "I saw the impertinent malice of mediocrity boastfully holding up its own emptiness as an abyss to be filled by the bodies of its betters --"

And that's what I liked about The Incredibles.

No right to privacy...no rights, no privacy

It seems that the Republicans, the party of "limited" (heh) government, would like their committee chaircritters in Congress to enjoy unlimited access to your -- that's your income tax records. For whatever reason. Nice, eh?

Here's Joshua Marshall on it, and Joe Gandelman, too.

Don't forget Frank Chodorov, either.

UPDATE: Eric Sheie of Classical Values takes up the subject, as does Charles Hill of Dustbury -- both of which, I'm proud to say, can be found in my blogroll.

The entire nation should learn Latin, beginning with Istook delenda est.

(Hat tip: Radley Balko)

Political Porn

Catching, on C-SPAN, some of Tom Daschle's farewell remarks to the U.S. Senate. Enjoying it, enjojying it far too much.

Don't care what he says. I travel a lot, by air, and his words arguing for the creation of the Transportation Security Administration still ring in my ears: "You can't professionalize, unless you federalize."

I'm personally glad you were defeated for re-election, Senator Daschle. Bye bye, loser.

His Grace, the Duke of Dolts

I lived in the middle east for a number of years, getting most of my news from Brit sources, both print and electronic, and I recall an amusing headline from the Sunday Times, reporting the conclusion reached by a number of psychologists that the famously fumble-tongued His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh is in fact probably not a dolt but is, merely, no more than an indiscreet, rash, impolitic, tactless, blundering, thoughtless, overly outspoken boob.

Maybe so.

However, his son, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Rothesey, is a fucking dolt.

To protect and to serve?

Vin Suprynowicz wants to ask, What do police departments really do?, but writes that his e-mail

sadly, confirms my suspicion that many of our countrymen these days are all too willing to embrace the notion that police shouldn't be restrained by such archaic notions as any "right to privacy," so long as they're pursuing "lawbreakers" in good faith.

I went to grade school in the 1950s, and remember our school reader including a tale of Officer Brown -- I seem to recall him as a beaming, somewhat portly figure twirling an innocuous nightstick as he strolled down the sidewalk, tipping his hat to one and all -- helping little Suzy rescue her cat from a tree.

Does anyone still believe this is what policemen actually do?

Read Stephen Davies' excellent research on "The Private Provision of Police During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," in the 2002 book "The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society." What professor Davies reveals is that modern government police forces were set up -- largely in a delayed response to the French Revolution -- to do "social policing" of the urban working class, wading into the slums on behalf of the ruling elite, inventing new "crimes" for which they could threaten the residents with arrest, thus breaking up any incipient movement toward social revolution before it could bloom.

The creation of government police forces thus did not and does not diminish crime rates, and was never expected to. In fact, the professor finds it generally increases reported crime rates. This makes sense if we stop to think what modern police forces actually do.

Let us suppose that, magically, there were no police. You are sitting at home of an evening, quietly reading a book. Next door, behind his own locked doors, your 21-year-old neighbor, who inherited some handguns from his grandfather, is spending time with his 16- or 17-year-old sweetheart, whose family is happy to know she intends to marry him and bear his children as soon as she graduates high school. At the moment, the two of them are consuming some of the marijuana they grow in their back yard.

If you knew this, would you leap to your feet and race downtown, pounding on the door of the sleeping magistrate, insisting he swear out a warrant so you can rush back to your neighborhood, break into your neighbor's home and arrest him?

Of course not. He's hurting no one.

Wouldn't you, though? Lots of people would. "You gotta obey the law" seems to have as much currency as "Well, he's the lesser of two evils," does, when it comes to politics. I've even read Objectivists arguing that all unjust laws should be observed and enforced and prosecuted to the fullest extent, in order to convince society at large that they should be repealed.

Horsefeathers.

Goddamn good thing horsefeathers exist, too, 'cause otherwise there'd not be too many appropriate words to use in replying to such arguments. Should John Peter Zenger have been convicted? Eh? How about Dred Scott? We still feel pretty good about that one? And let me remind you that that one came all the way from Olympus, from the United States Supreme Court itself.

Suprynowicz continues in today's column:

What the academic research demonstrates is that England had a perfectly adequate set of "laws" from the 13th century right up through 1800 ... and no police. None. It was a polite and pleasant and lawful land ... without any police.

After the police were created, crime rates went up. Why? Because in order to keep the lower classes in line, police cause "crime," by defining as "crimes" things that were never "crimes" before. By lurking outside in the bushes at midnight, peeking in our windows and trying to catch us "having sex and babies, smoking dope that (we've) manufactured and playing with firearms."

And his closing comment is priceless.

The DNA of Literature

Wow, this was a find: it bills itself as "The DNA of Literature," which may sound meaningless, but the content of it is not. So what is it?

"It" is a collection of 300+ Writers-at-Work interviews, originally appearing in The Paris Review and subsequently collected in the series of books bearing the title Writers At Work.

I still recall how excited I was, as a teenager in the Seventies, discovering the interviews in those books: actual writers, talking about how they worked their craft...ah, it was exciting.

All of the 1950s interviews are online now, and free, and their plan is to have everything online by June 2005. Go take a look.

(Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels)

I'm just wilde about aesthetics...

Found this quiz via Pejman Yousefzadeh: Which literature classic am I?

Oscar Wilde: The Portrait of Dorian Gray. You are a
horror novel from the world of dandies, rich
pretty boys, art and aesthetics, and
intellectual debates between ethical people and
decadent pleasure-seekers. You value beauty and
pleasure but realize their dangers, as well.


Which literature classic are you?
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Think Peace and Freedom: Think Armistice Day

Today is Veterans' Day. Many of us in the United States of America are veterans, and some of us were even fortunate enough to be Marines, hoorah...but...

I worry, and I wonder. I worry about my brother Marines in Iraq: I want them to come back here, back to America, safe and whole (I have clients in Iraq, not Marines, but soldiers in the US Army: I worry about them, too). And I wonder about my fellow Americans, patriotic people who observe Veterans' Day with the best, most honest intentions.

I wonder because I can recall finding out, as a boy, that the holiday was once called Armistice Day, and it was a celebration of the armistice which ended the fighting of World War I. How limited, I thought to myself. How quaint. Interesting, as is much of history, but...how narrow was the thinking back then.

I bring this up because for years now I have felt that a holiday which celebrates an armistice -- if not peace, at least a cessation of fighting -- is not quaint or limited, but good. I'm not a war hero myself and I sport no personal combat or valor decorations on my uniforms or on my DD214, but I was in Beirut in '83-84 and came out of there with a Combat Action Ribbon and a conviction that wars were bad things, bad things every time.

Mind you, that doesn't make me a pacifist: if war is a bad thing, then being attacked and offering no defense is even worse. I never thought the slogan "Peace through superior firepower" was simplistic or pro-war, for example. To me, it made perfectly logical, practical, philosophical sense.

But it also makes sense for us to stop and think about what we're doing. Okay, Armistice Day is now gone -- not as gone as Decoration Day, true, but it's been renamed Veterans' Day, and, as Anthony Gregory writes, the change was made with the best of motives. But it's still a change. Was it a positive change?

If you answer that it was, then here's my challenge to you: without looking it up, without asking an expert, just tell me -- What is the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans' Day? Do you know? Do you know anyone who knows? If not, then why do we have two such holidays, explicitly celebrating military service? Again, I'm no pacifist, but we don't have a Mark Twain holiday, or a Thomas Jefferson holiday, or an Aaron Copland or Frank Lloyd Wright or Louis Armstrong holiday.

Just tell me, without looking it up: what's the difference, and why two holidays?

(And for those of you in uniform, especially at sea or in the thick of things: yeah, I think you're worthy of a holiday.)

Good Riddance

So Yasser Arafat is now dead. It's about time.

The headline at CNN.com reads, "Palestinian leader Arafat dies at 75," and the first paragraph of the story reads, "Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, 75, the leader who passionately sought a homeland for his people but was seen by many Israelis as a ruthless terrorist and a roadblock to peace, died early Thursday in Paris."

The BBC News headline at bbc.co.uk: "Veteran leader Yasser Arafat dies."

ABC News Online: "Yasser Arafat, the unchallenged Palestinian leader who fought for decades for statehood but was later seen by many as an obstacle to his people's dreams, has died."

And how does the New York Times online find the words? "Yasir Arafat, the Father and Leader Of Palestinian Nationalism, Dies at 75."

Ladies and gentlemen, these are major news-reporting organs in the two primary English-speaking nations, and what words are chosen to describe Arafat? No, we don't find "thug," "murderer," or "terrorist." Nope. What we have instead is "Leader." "President." "Veteran leader." "Father."

I'll grant you, Arafat was influential: if you have traveled by commercial air at any time since 1968, then your life has been influenced by him. After all, he was the architect of modern hijacking and terrorism. A few weeks ago, when he was flown to Paris, a decades-old observation by William F. Buckley, Jr. came to my mind: that it must be nice indeed to be able to board a passenger plane and know that it won't be blown up or hijacked to Algeria or Tunisia.

Many people in America wonder why Arafat is so loved and admired in the Arab world. A bit of time spent in that world helps explain some of it: in my view, they simply don't know as much about him as we do here. The press in those countries is very tightly controlled, so while there may be religious and cultural prejudice in Arafat's favor, there's also the fact of censorship. One Ramadan in Egypt found me discussing various Islamic and cultural issues with my students, all of whom were educated men (engineers, in fact). They were of course pro-PLO and pro-Arafat. When I mentioned Leon Klinghoffer and the Achille Lauro incident, there was no response from any of the men in the room: they had never heard of it.

On second thought, let's allow Arafat that title "Leader." Hitler used it, too, and he behaved much the same way, and did just about as much good.

The Royal We

Obviously, I'm a beer-drinking Australian philosopher named Bruce. Everyone knows that.

But it seems that I am also Arthur, king of the Britons. I like.

You are King Arthur of the Britons! You let no-one
stand in your way, you are brave and strong!
Keep searching, you'll find the grail yet!


Which Monty Python & the Holy Grail Character are you REALLY?
brought to you by Quizilla

Well, it's better than being an autonomous collective...

Marginal notes

Carl Menger was one of the founders of the "marginal revolution" of the 1870s. His Principles of Economics is now available online, courtesy of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

G'day, Aristotle! G'day, Bruce!

Apparently I'm a philosopher. Cool.

At least, according to the quiz I found by reading The Cheese Stands Alone:

Which Monty Python sketch character am I?

G'day, you're Bruce! You think like a philosopher,
especially after you've had a few cold
ones...Australia RULES!


What Monty Python Sketch Character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I should go have a beer.

Attention to (Birthday) Details

"Attention to detail" was a phrase I heard every day in my Marine Corps career, and today, the 229th birthday of the United States Marine Corps, there is one detail I'd like to address.

Whatever is going on in Fallujah, the obscenity of allowing the enemy to find safety in mosques must be dropped. Such a policy never should have been observed in the first place.

It's not just that I regard Islam as an ideology of evil. I do, but many would disagree with me, and I am not an advocate of genocide or of compelling Muslims to abandon their religious beliefs, however absurd those beliefs are. But the policy of excepting mosques, and only mosques, from the results of military actions, just because they are mosques, is evil, and is indicative of what our leaders find important in life and in philosophy.

Buildings are being damaged and destroyed, in this war as in any other, and I'm in no way arguing that there is anything positive in that. But allowing the destruction of homes and businesses while deliberately sparing mosques is, simply, disgusting.

Businesses represent effort and trade and all that is right and good about relations among men. Homes are refuges, places of rest for adults and play for children -- but there is no policy for deliberately sparing either homes or places of business from destruction. Only mosques.

Marines, I hope your leaders take better care of you this time in Fallujah than they did last year. So happy 229th birthday to you all -- and please, bring each other back.

"Common people like you..."

New music from William Shatner.

Yes, that William Shatner. You'll also hear Joe Jackson and Henry Rollins on some of the tracks. Check out a sample here.

Shatner does have a sense of humor, and has deft enough acting chops to display it. If you doubt me, check out this one, in which he plays an actor whose ambition is to film an unexpurgated, musical version of Julius Caesar, playing all but two of the (female) roles himself.

The character Shatner plays? Why, Bill Shatner. But you have to see it for yourself.

(Hat tip for the music scoop goes to Dean Esmay.)