The Best Posts of the Week of October 1, 2017

We've been writing a lot here recently in any event, and this week we did more than usual.  As is normally the case, I tend to do that when I'm otherwise really busy or under a lot of stress.

Maybe I ought to get a more physical hobby, eh?

Well, this has been a high news week in a series of high news weeks, and like with most such weeks, it hasn't been a good one.  And that has inspired, I suppose, a lot of extra posts this past week.

Some things we covered, and unusually, a little comment on some of them:

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that. 

One of a series that unintentionally turned out to be a series on the death of Hugh Hefner.  Hefner was a creep, but unfortunately a celebrated creep.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month

Hefner liked boobs, but here we tend to worry about women.  And one of the things that women have to face is the horror of breast cancer, which claims the lives of many of them and part of the form of many more.

Lost in the horrors of this past week has been the news that this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. 

Is it murder?

We started to take a second look at some Vietnam War topics following Burns and Novik's documentary on The Vietnam War.  Or choice of introductory topics, the photo of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém turned out to be a poor one for accidental reasons, that being that it went on line the same day that the tragic mass murder in Las Vegas did.  That would tend to make the title of our entry accidentally shocking.

Still, that entry, which went up on a Monday, poses some interesting questions, we think.

Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Ross Douthart of the New York Times says what I did, more bluntly.

A Time Op Ed and a NYT one agreed with us on Hefner.

Well exactly. . . 

Why, I guess, we're surprised that people are surprised.

Mehr Mensch Sein 

Our most important post of the week, but one that will likely be lost.  And a hard topic to, somehow, define.

 

Or, as it translates from the German; "Be more human".

Recently (well, not so recently, as this post has lingered for a long time as it's difficult to write for some reason) I posted a long, and likely almost completely unread, on The Benedict Option.  But it occurs to me in some sort of vague way that people have been grasping for something like that for awhile.  And in a plethora of ways.  Mehr Mensch sein really sums it up, and it was intended to by its originator, who was a Renaissance man and, as part of that, a theologian, but then a true Renaissance man would have to also be a theologian, in part.

And that's part of it.

Western Society has problems, and not just in the United States by any means. Our essay goes on from there.

Infamnia. Vices to Virtues

As we said, it has problems.

I don't post political links on Facebook. . .

And I don't, as noted.  This one too goes on from there.

The problems with every debate on gun control are. . . . 

I rarely post on this issue.  Part of the reason that I don't is that a lot of the commentary I see on it is grossly ill informed, basically being in the same nature of a review of Jim's All Pork Barbecue by  an Orthodox Jewish Vegan food writer.  Not too useful.

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. Looking Again.

Another attempt to look at the issue of violence in context, although it's much like spitting into the wind as it isn't as if I have that broad of an audience or that people really want to take a look at the hard, hard issues.

Robert LaFollette delivers his Free Speech In Wartime speech from the Senate, October 6, 1917.

Yeah, Battling Bob delivered that speech awhile back, but it's a classic.