Showing posts with label Jimmy Akin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jimmy Akin. Show all posts

Friday, February 16, 2024

Tucker "Lord Haw Haw" Carlson on Leadership.

Carlson, as an apologist for the vile, has crossed into territories heretofore not trespassed onto.  Lindbergh and Fr. Coughlin would be aghast.


Emad Eldin Adeeb: In your interview with Putin, you didn’t talk about freedom of speech in Russia, you did not talk about Navalny, about assassinations

Tucker Carlson: Leadership requires killing people

Carlson is becoming the embodiment of Yeoman's Twentieth Rule of Behavior, or as Jimmy Akin would say, "sin makes you stupid".  He's gone from being sort of a political shock d.j., to just flat out saying stuff that's stupid.

Carlson lies, and he knows he's a liar.  Lying is sinful.  His audience likes being lied to. Self-delusion is also sinful in some instances, particularly in believing slanderous lies.  Carlson's lies have made himself, and frankly his audience, increasingly stupid.

The question is how darned dumb can this get before even his followers have had too much.

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

What is wrong with the Putin supporting right?

By DIREKTOR - Own work based on: National Fascist Party logo.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23635340

For those who have not seen this clip of one Tucker Carlson, Trumpite pundit, mocking the appearance of President Zelenskyy in Congress, you need to, truly.

Tucker Carlson mocking applause for Zelenskyy.

How can somebody acting so childish be taken so seriously by a selection of Americans?

Beyond that, how can people actually support the Russians side of a war of aggression, based upon pure Russian Great Slavism?  Fiscal worries, where genuine, are one thing. Narrow-minded, truly, but one thing. Outright supporting the swallowing of Ukraine in the name of Russian Slavic dominance, quite another.

It's the difference, for the history minded, between "supporting the British will be expensive" and thinking that Anschluß is nifty.

What the heck?

Some of this we have to dismiss as the crowd that's fallen for the grifter.

Grifters were originally associated with carnivals, and while it's an insult, it's one that we need to keep in mind implies a relationship.  A grifter can't peddle his graft without an audience.  

The word grifter nearly went out of circulation up until Donald Trump, but now it's come roaring back as a term frequently applied to Trump.  The thing about grifters is that they don't believe their line, but the audience does.

Is Donald J. Trump really a God-fearing Christian man of solid conservative values who seeks to Make American Great Again?

Leaving the Make American Great Again tag line, which is a line that can mean pretty much whatever you want it to, what we know about Trump really is that he's a New York businessman whose made huge sums of money and lost huge sums of money, mostly in real estate.  He was a Democrat for most of his life.  He's of the Vietnam War Era generation, but he didn't serve, having a deferment for shin splints that some have questioned.  He has a BS in economics from the Wharton School of Business, which is generally regarded as the best business school in the United States (Secretary of State elect Chuck Gray is also a graduate of Wharton).  He's been married three times, twice to Eastern European immigrants and once to beauty figure Marla Maples, whom he married shortly after she give birth to their daughter Tiffany.  What can we tell from that?

Well, maybe not all that much, really. Making, and losing, a lot of money is not as hard as it sounds if you were born with a lot of money.  He's certainly not lead a very Christian life in terms of personal conduct with women, but if he's a true Calvinist, which would be assuming a lot, he may figure it doesn't matter.  The best evidence is that whatever he once was, he's become a narcissist who know that he can sell any line to his audience, and what he's been selling has morphed, under the Führerprinzip, is Christian Illiberal Nationalism.  Do I think he's a Christian Illiberal Nationalist?  Probably not really, but that's what's selling.

And that's what's selling for Fox News and Newsmax also. 

So what that might tell us is that Tucker Carlson might not particularly believe a word he's saying.  But it sells.

But if that's true, he's giving it the pretty hard sell.

Let's mention one thing about presentation, before we go on.  Some of Trump's presentation is deeply weird, and Carlson's is as well.  The clip linked in above is massively weird.  An intelligent audience would have to be repulsed by it.

But, as Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin says, "sin make you stupid".  And truly it does.  Much of Trump's presentation is stupid, and Tucker's, linked in above, is also.  Indeed, a vast amount of the Trumpite populist right says things that are stupid, to the horror of other conservatives (such as myself) who can't fathom the wallowing in stupidity.

But wallowing they are, and like a bunch of teenage boys sitting in the back of the bus making fun of people and farting for amusement, we have a whole swath of the current GOP acting in much the same fashion.  And also like such boys, as others look up and say "quit being so stupid", they feel insulted by having their stupidity pointed out and double down on it.

At some point, normally, people grow up and put away childish things.  Chances are that a lot of the people who are now repeating the baloney we hear all the time will deny they ever said it.  But we're not there yet.

Linking this in, Donald Trump has some sort of weird love affair with Vladimir Putin.  A person can truly debate what it is, but it is there.  It may be that Putin is a strong man, and he admires that.  It could be that Putin, who is extremely intelligent, if extremely isolated, did a good job of reading Trump and flattered him to the extent that Trump now loves Putin.

Or it could be something more sinister.

The relationship between Trump and Putin has always been so odd, and Trump has so gone out of his way to help the Russians except when being restrained from doing so, that it's reasonable to ask if Trump is a Russian asset of some sort.  We've discussed that here before.

That wouldn't make Trump's acolytes Russian assets, but they don't have to be.  Whatever it is, Trump admires Putin, so he says fawning things regarding him, and nasty things about his opponents, and Trump's followers go there on the Führerprinzip and take it further.  That requires, at some point, falling in love with Putin yourself and repeating Russian propaganda.

Additionally, Trump has a bit of a vested interest in seeing Ukraine go down in defeat.  The Russians did hurt Hillary Clinton, aiding Trump, by getting into the DNC computers, which Trump was not responsible for but which did help.  Trump himself made a public, flippant, comment regarding breaking into Democratic computers before it was known to have occurred in the 2016 campaign.  And Trump's first impeachment trial prominently featured Ukraine, based on things that he asked Ukraine to do, and they didn't.  There's likely no love lost between Trump and Zelenskyy, and accordingly, Trumpism is naturally aligned with Putinism.

But maybe there's more than that, and maybe that something is that Trumpites and Putin are fellow travelers.

Before Viktor Mihály Orbán became the darling of Illiberal Democrats and Trumpites, that position was occupied by Vladimir Putin.1

At one time, it was easy to forget that under Putin, Russia backslid into an autocratic state.  Russia came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a democracy, but a troubled one.  Putin pulled it away from that back into a one party state, although like a lot of one party states, it retains a theoretical legislative body. The Soviet Union had one, and so did Imperial Russia.  They really aren't in control, nor are the people.

Indeed, in some ways, the Russian people are worse off, in terms of control of their own government, than they've ever been, although that's certainly debatable.  Under the Czar, the Czar actually claimed title to the entire country and everything in it, and even going up into World War One he was free to actually rule by dictate, just as Putin is now.  But, for all its ills, and there were a lot of them (the state of Imperial Russia going into the Great War was pathetic), the Czar was bound by a duty to the Russians and his non Russian subjects, imperfect though it was, and it was very imperfect.  

Under the Soviets, as monstrous as they were, there was at least the overarching theory that they were "the people".

Putin's Russia is for what Putin thinks it should be for.

During the time period before the completely obvious descent into authocracy, when people could still pretend that Russia was democratic, or be fooled that it was, Putin began to enact a series of social laws, and engaged in certain alignments, which, if you could set aside that the country wasn't democratic, appealed to the Western political right.  Putin has completely rejected the Western evolution on tolerance of homosexuality, for example.  Putin has facially embraced Christianity in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it has embraced him, although his real adherence to its tenants can be questioned.  

The point is that a deeply conservative American political right could look to Putin, like it now looks towards Viktor Orbán as somebody who is democratic in the right way.  I.e., not politically liberal and not even letting "progressisim" out of the box.  I.e., somebody who can stand with the prinicpals of "National Conservatism", something we explored here earlier.2

The entire "Statement of Prinpcals" for National Conservatism, which postdates the far right's love affair with Putin, is posted below, but the real core of their swooning over Putin is in these:

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.

* * * 

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

Putin, like Franco in a way, sort of seemed to stand, and still does seem to stand, for a society being deeply rooted in its Christian traditions.

Indeed, as we've noted, Putin, more than any post Soviet leader, has made a public display of aligning himself with the Russian Orthodox Church.  The Russian Orthodox Church has not made any concessions to "progressivism" of any kind. There are no Father James Martin, S.J. figures in the Russian Orthodox Church.

This sort of social conservatism has much broader appeal to many people than the Progressive Left can imagine.  Even in highly secularized France, for instance, the government's establishment of same gender marriages brought out a massive protest in the streets of Paris.  People everywhere have a strong sense that the left is dangerously and bizarrely out to sea on many issues, and part of the reaction to that is a grasping to restore a common cultural understanding of existential matters, a struggle that exists only in Western countries and frankly not elsewhere at all.

But hence the problem of the reaction.  This struggle has been going on for well over a century.  Most people, seemingly, are just waking up to it, in our era, now.  You can argue that it's been going on since the Age of Enlightenment.

The problem here is, and always has been, the natural tendency for people in the struggle to go to the extremes. This is a problem of the left and the right.

Starting with the left, we'd note, with the collapse of the Old Order following World War One, plenty of leftists, liberals and progressives in Western countries were willing to put on blinders and believe that Communist were just Democrats with thick accents.  The editors of the progressive journal, The New Republic, wrote a letter to Stalin, for instance, warning him that people seemed to be doing bad things in his name, completely oblivious to the fact that Stalin was the perpetrator of those bad things.  In the late 1960s and 1970s, members of the American left were willing to pretend that Ho Chi Minh was a misunderstood democrat and always had been, which was very far from the truth.  Early on, people were willing to turn a blind eye to the true political nature of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, before simply ignoring the country entirely.

On the right, the same story holds.  Both the left and the right outside of Spain pretended that their sides were something other than what they really were, with the left pretending that the Spanish Republicans were democrats, rather than Communists. The right ignored the autocratic nature of the Nationalist, and perhaps give us the first example of what we're witnessing now.  Franco never pretended to care for democracy, but he always had supporters in the West that pretended Spain was uniquely incapable of it.

Mussolini received praise at one time from none other than Winston Churchill.  Plenty of right wing Republicans said nice things about Adolph Hitler.  

The thing is, most people woke up when they saw that the putative champions of their positions were not what they pretended.  Most America Firsters went on to support the Allied war effort.  Most deluded leftists lost their admiration for Stalin when the true nature of the Soviet state really came out.  Not too many leftists of the 70s run around singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh today.  By the time of Francisco Franco's death in 1975, he had few fans anywhere.

But there is that time when the deluded prefer to remain deluded.  Charles Lindbergh was giving speeches about abandoning the British within days of the U.S. being brought into World War Two.  A handful of Congressmen and Senators remained not only isolationist, but pro fascist, even into the war itself. 

Delusion has a way of making the deluded look, in the end, foolish.  But usually the mass of people who followed the deluded are allowed to fade away due to their obscurity. The person who, for example, called Tom Cotton an "Anti-American Socialist" (apparently not realizing that you can be a patriotic American socialist) will, should Ukraine win and Putin fall, probably go on to recall having been all in favor of the effort.

Something, however, extremely odd is going on now and some people are falling for it.  We should ask what it is.

And for those on the National Democracy track, any sort of democracy still requires democracy.  It's clear in this contest, who that is.

But doees everyone in the far right even support democracy anymore?3

Footnotes:

1.  As an interesting aside, it's interesting to note that only Giorgia Meloni has approached a sort of hero status with the National Conservative right, and she's the only Catholic in the group.  Putin is Russian Orthodox, although his personal adherence to Orthodoxy is questionable.  Orbán and the Hungarian President Katalin Éva Novák are "Reformed" Christians, as was Admiral Horthy, who perhaps may be, in some ways, their intellectual predecessor.

2.  We looked at that in a post that we entitled:

Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?

The manifesto itself, linked into its source, stated:

National Conservatism: A Statement Of Principles

A world of independent nations is the only alternative to universalist ideologies seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

JUNE 15, 2022

12:01 AM

THE EDMUND BURKE FOUNDATION

NOTE: The following statement was drafted by Will Chamberlain, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Yoram Hazony, Daniel McCarthy, Joshua Mitchell, N.S. Lyons, John O’Sullivan, and R.R. Reno on behalf of the Edmund Burke Foundation. The statement reflects a distinctly Western point of view. However, we look forward to future discourse and collaboration with movements akin to our own in India, Japan, and other non-Western nations. Signatories’ institutional affiliations are included for identification purposes only, and do not imply an endorsement on the part of any institution other than the Edmund Burke Foundation.   

We are citizens of Western nations who have watched with alarm as the traditional beliefs, institutions, and liberties underpinning life in the countries we love have been progressively undermined and overthrown.

We see the tradition of independent, self-governed nations as the foundation for restoring a proper public orientation toward patriotism and courage, honor and loyalty, religion and wisdom, congregation and family, man and woman, the sabbath and the sacred, and reason and justice. We are conservatives because we see such virtues as essential to sustaining our civilization. We see such a restoration as the prerequisite for recovering and maintaining our freedom, security, and prosperity.

We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

Drawing on this heritage, we therefore affirm the following principles:

1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression.

2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image.

3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes.

5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end.

6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-making by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed.

7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs.

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

Signed:

Michael Anton

 Hillsdale College Kirby Center

 Hillsdale College

 Spectator

 Hillsdale College Van Andel Graduate School of Government

 Center for the Renewal of Culture (Croatia)

 Daily Wire

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 National Review

 Edmund Burke Foundation

 Internet Accountability Project

 Modern Reformation

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Election Transparency Initiative

 Hoover Institution

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Hudson Institute

 New York Post

 American Conservative

 American Conservative

 American Reformer

 European Conservative (Austria)

 Hudson Institute

 Merion West (United Kingdom)

 Nazione Futura (Italy)

 Asia Times

 Project 21

 Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)

 Newsweek

 Trinity Western University (Canada)

 Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)

 National Review

 Troy University

 Federalist

 American Greatness

 Nasarean.org

 New Criterion

 Turning Point USA

 Claremont Institute

 Daily Wire

 Center for Immigration Studies

 Jagiellonian University (Poland)

 Ethics and Public Policy Center

 Upheaval

 Intercollegiate Studies Institute

 Washington Times

 Conservative Partnership Institute

 Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life

 AMDC Films

 UnHerd

 Georgetown University

 Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Hungary)

 Danube Institute (United Kingdom)

 Danube Institute

 New Founding

 Zephyr Institute

 Futuro Presente (Portugal)

 New Direction (Poland)

 European Centre for Law and Justice (France)

 Claremont Institute

 First Things

 Townhall

 Manhattan Institute

 Center for Family and Human Rights

 American Moment

 Common Sense Society

 American Moment

 Regnery Publishing

 Air War College

 Be The People News

 Founders Fund

 Center for Renewing America

 Edmund Burke Foundation

 Liz Wheeler Show

 Claremont Institute

 Boise State University

Larry Arnn

Amber Athey

David Azerrad

Stephen Bartulica

Megan Basham

Rachel Bovard

Michael Brendan Dougherty

David Brog

Will Chamberlain

Timon Cline

Edward Corrigan

Ken Cuccinelli

Victor Davis Hanson

Sen. Jim DeMint

Christopher DeMuth

Miranda Devine

Emile Doak

Rod Dreher

Ben Dunson

Alvino-Mario Fantini

John Fonte

Henry George

Francesco Giubilei

David Goldman

Derryck Green

Ofir Haivry

Josh Hammer

Grant Havers

Yoram Hazony

Nate Hochman

Clifford Humphrey

Emily Jashinsky

Julie Kelly

Fr. Benedict Kiely

Roger Kimball

Charlie Kirk

Tom Klingenstein

Michael Knowles

Mark Krikorian

Ryszard Legutko

Brad Littlejohn

N.S. Lyons

Daniel McCarthy

Michael McKenna

Mark Meadows

Arthur Milikh

Amanda Milius

Curt Mills

Joshua Mitchell

Balázs Orban

John O’Sullivan, CBE

Melissa O’Sullivan

Matthew Peterson

Nathan Pinkoski

Jaime Nogueira Pinto

Tomasz Poręba

Grégor Puppinck

David Reaboi

R.R. Reno

Julio Rosas

Christopher Rufo

Austin Ruse

Saurabh Sharma

Marion Smith

Nick Solheim

Thomas Spence

Daniel Strand

Carol Swain

Peter Thiel

Russ Vought

Anna Wellisz

Liz Wheeler

Ryan Williams

Scott Yenor

3. During the 2022 election campaigns I repeatedly heard people on the far right say the age old, unthinking, "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" as if they mutually exclusive.  We are, of course, a democratic republic.

But, in thinking about it, I think some on the far right truly mean that, and by that they mean that the will of the people really doesn't matter, if it can be overcome, one way or another, at the state and local level.  That provides the only rational basis, I'd note, for the ongoing support of any kind for the Electoral College. Some truly mean that democratic results can, and should, be overturned through legalistic extreme measures.

Related Threads:

A Conspiracy Thesis about Conspiracy Theorist. Qanon is the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

Friday, December 3, 2021

I'll be frank that I don't put much credence in diets. . .

and think that a lot of them are basically bunkus.*  And history has demonstrated that a lot of the current thought in any one era on diet in general is probably wrong.

Ice Cream cake, 1937.  I frankly didn't know ice cream cakes existed in 1937, but they obviously did.  Most Americans weren't overweight at this time, for reasons that will be noted below.

There's constantly some new diet fad going around as well as some new theory about what people should eat.  Almost every study on diets demonstrates that people will lose weight on the at first and then regain it.  Up until something I will link in below explored that, the latter was not obvious to me, but what seems to be fairly obvious is that most diet theories are pure bull.

And yet Americans are absolutely fascinated about diets.  No matter where you live or work, you are going to hear constantly from people about some new diet they are on.  Not only are they on it, but now it's popular to combine the diets with the latest pseudo-science about taking this and that, which sound more like solutions to difficult plumbing or automotive problems than they do to losing weight and eating healthy.

A lot of dieting advice and dietary advice is amazingly similar to the same sort of stuff that people used to spout about automobiles all the time.  Car worn out and tired?  No problem, just pour a quart of Amazing Berserkoil into your engine!  It'll detoxify, clarify and contains essential oils that your car will love and admire!

I'm not a nutritionist and have no training in this area at all, but what has always seemed completely obvious to me is that dietary topics ought to be governed by evolutionary biology.  I.e, you are evolved to eat in a certain way, and if you don't eat that way, you're going to have some negative consequence develop.  You are also evolved to engage in certain activities, and if you do them and eat the way that you were evolved to, you'll probably be just fine, health wise, in so far as your health is governed by food intake, and quite a bit of it is.

But that doesn't fit the most recent buy this, eat that, craze.

So it'd be rare indeed for me to link in anything regarding diet. But having recently heard this, this makes scientific sense to me (which very few diets, including the currently popular "Keto" diet do):


Akin, who is known principally as a Catholic Apologist, but who also has a keen interest in a very large range of topics and a command of a blistering number of them, discusses diets and weight loss in general, but as this video makes plain, he's an advocate of what has come to be known as "Intermittent Fasting" and an opponent of processed foods. There's more to it than that, but that's basically what I want to point out by linking this in. To at least that extent (and I'd disagree with him on a few things mentioned in here), I think he's right.

The reason for this has to do with science.

Basically, it seems to me, you are most likely evolved to eat fairly lean meat and simple vegetables and grains because that's what your ancestors did for thousands upon thousands of years.  Do that, and dietary wise, I suspect you'll be just fine.

Illustration of Lapps hunting from 1565, the same way they hunted in 565, and in 1565BC, and so on.  Everyone, in one form or another, lived this way, and you are still supposed to.

I'll credit that in some instances this is a bit altered beyond the very simple (but perhaps hard to apply) extent that it may seem when putting it forth in that fashion.  Evolution does occur, and there are people who are very, very long associated with agriculture. . . although not to the extent you may think and indeed all people are more associated with agriculture than some believe.  People were making bread out of simple grains before they cultivated wheat, it turns out, for example.  And Mediterranean people who cultivated wheat very early on also were big on fish hunting (or, yes fishing).  Pastoral people who took up raising livestock continued hunting and even in Palestine during Christ's time it's known that the Jewish people and their neighbors not only raised livestock, they hunted and fish hunted (yep, fishing).

Now, what additionally also seems to me to be pretty self-evident is that it's usually been the case that the "three squares a day" combined with sitting on your butt all day is not the historic norm.  Nor is "processed food" at all.  You aren't actually evolved to eat a lot of processed food and three big meals a day.  Nor are you evolved to even eat two big meals a day.

Take all of this into account, diet wise, and you are likely good to go, diet wise.

Now, depending upon your individual metabolism you may be able to get away with it, even if you have a sedentary job.  But most people won't be.  And perhaps that's where I depart from Akin.  Akin's commentary in the video states that exercise doesn't matter much in terms of weight loss or gain (he doesn't say that exercise isn't otherwise important), but I frankly very much disagree.  Indeed, I think the lack of exercise that modern American life entails, combined with the advance of processed food, and combined with the constant presence of food, and further combined with the giant proportions that served food now features, combines to make people rather large.  I.e., lack of exercise is an element of that, but a pretty important one.

Indeed, I come by all of these opinions not only because I tend to look at a lot of such things through an evolutionary biology lens, but because I also have some personal experience with all of this, making me a bit of a control set.  So I'm pretty convinced as to all of this.

I've never been obese, but when I was a kid and an early teen I was on the chubby end of things.  I was always pretty active, but I also lived in an environment in which there were three meals a day (as a kid should get) and deserts and soda were also pretty much always available.  My mother never drank soda, but she did drink a lot of sweet tea.  She was an awful cook, but both of my parents liked ice cream quite a bit so we always had ice cream on hand.  My mother had a nearly hyperactive constitution but my father was inclined to carry a slight bit of extra weight as here both of his parents, and myself by extension and genetic inheritance.

One summer when I was 16/17 years old, however, I obtained a job in which I drove for a city garage chasing parts every day.  This was in the pre air-conditioned era, and what that meant was that I reported to work really early and worked a full day.  As a result, I wasn't eating much before I left the door and by and large I simply quit eating at noon.  I was Intermittent Fasting before it had a name and without any particular intent.  I was also pretty active in this role as a parts chaser.

By the end of the summer I'd lost a lot of weight.  Indeed, going into the summer I was at or near my current weight, which is 165 lbs more or less (I slide up and down a bit).  By modern standards that puts me right at the upper level of an "ideal weight" for my height or slightly overweight.  As I've explored before, by the standards of a century ago, that's overweight.  At any rate, however, going into that summer the extra pounds I was carrying included some flab, which isn't good.  By the end of the summer, however, I'd lost ten to fifteen pounds through no effort of my own.  By that time, as I'd lost the desire to eat lunch anymore, I kept loosing until I was around 140 lbs, maybe (probably) less.  When I went into basic training the next year, I likely reported around 135lbs.

In basic training I gained weight up until I came down with pneumonia, at which time I really lost weight as I couldn't eat but was still active.  When I came home from Ft. Sill I weighed 123 lbs, which is really light.  Having said that, photographs of me early in basic training suggest I was getting pretty light at first anyhow.  But, that 123 lbs actually reflected a late Advanced Training weight gain after I got out of the hospital.

Significantly, however, after that first summer the weight I put on or retained was muscle and not fat.  In college, I came up to 145 lbs, the weight I was at when I got married, but again I was really active and my gain in that time came on in muscle.  Since then, through having a sedentary job and what not, I've gained the extra fifteen pounds, or perhaps less on a day-to-day basis, but I'm much more heavily muscled than I was when I was 16.

Now, from time to time for one reason or another, I've gotten to where I'll skip breakfast or lunch, or both.  Doing this on odd occasion is pretty routine for me, but I'll sometimes do it for days in a row.  I just don't always feel like eating breakfast for no particular reason, and I've never regained the desire to eat much lunch.  After I left for college I lost my taste for sweets and I never buy candy for the house, although my wife is the opposite, and she does.  When I left college, I also quit buying soda.

Indeed, in my college years, as I already noted, I lived on a very primitive diet. All wild game and mostly vegetables, for much of the year, that had come from my parents garden.  On that diet, you won't put on weight.  And as noted after I married beef came back into our diet (which I do like), but some desserts, which I very rarely bought or made for myself when single (cherry and apple pies, from our own cherries and apples excepted, and when in season), reappeared.  So its no wonder that I added fifteen pounds, and within a few years.  But I'll drop down to 155 fairly readily when I don't eat lunch for days in a row.

All of which gets to this point.

This time of year is a dietary nightmare.  It's a nightmare in part because the people who are the Keto Schmeato All Bean Burrito Diet are going to be bothering you about that, or whatever the latest dietary fad is, and it's a nightmare as there's a constant flood of food that you don't need to eat going by you constantly.

Indeed, this thread was started some time ago, and I'm just finishing it off now because of this.  I'm hearing about the diets. And this will mean, in part, I'll hear about people who claim to be "fasting" but still eat enough at noon to put me out for the rest of the day, but it's also the case that in my office its freakishly the case that seemingly 3/4s of the office has late in the year birthdays. That means that in November and December there's enough cake going through the office to feed all of Europe for a year, at least calorie wise.

And to add to that, people just start bringing in food at random.  Indeed, there's one person who seemingly does this constantly from their home, and it's all sugary food.  This is surplus from that person's own larders which means that the same is buying, but not eating, lots of cake, candy and the like.  All of which makes it pretty hard to resist, as it's simply there.

And then for some reason cake like cookies, from a newer cookie company, are showing up in the house here.  We're tiny people, and we can't really eat cookies the size of large pizzas, and particularly not sugary ones.  My wife and my daughter love these cookies, but my daughter is so active that she'll burn through the calories no matter what.  Like most modern Americans, however, my job principally entails, active lifestyle wise, sitting on my butt.

Of course, some would say "go to the gym", but I hate that sort of public display.  And frankly, I don't have the time or don't imagine that I do.  And that's the sort of urban Cow's Revenge activity that I really don't like.

All of which caused me, when I got on the scale last night, to be shocked that I've ballooned up to 170 lbs. 

Well, it's not like I don't know what to do.  And it doesn't involve Keto or the Orange Blossom Special Cleanse or something like that.

But it would be a lot easier on a "natural diet", but which I mean one that I shot, caught and grew myself.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Op-Ed: The Nonexistent Line Between Justice And Revenge : NPR


I don't really subscribe to the speaker's thesis, but it is interesting. The speaker, Thane Rosenbaum, who is a lecturer at Fordham University in the College of Law, sets most of his points out well (stumbling one one point, about abstaining from vengeance in war) in only one place.  Rosenbaum's thesis is that all justice is based upon just and measured revenge, and any justice system that doesn't accommodate a desire for revenge is unjust, and probably unworkable.

Something that isn't mentioned in the interview is that Rosenbaum is Jewish and a writer on Jewish topics, in addition to legal topics.  I mention that due to something he said in the interview which is an often missed point, but which is quite accurate.  He cites the Old Testament's maxim that justice should be based on "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" as a limiting, not expansive, principal.  Oddly enough, it was just a few days after listening to this that I heard Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin make the exact same point.

That is a significant point indeed.  Rosenbaum must have come to this in his studies of Jewish topics.  By the same token, Akin came to this via his work as an Apologist.  And it shows how truly erroneous our understandings of some things can be without the appropriate background.

Returning to the "eye for an eye" matter itself, how can that be a limiting law? Well, simply put, the "ancient law," i.e., the law that people seem to carry instinctively, generally accords that violence of any type can be met with supreme violence.  For example, one of the callers in to this show cited the example of Njals Saga, but I don't know if she understood why her comment was off the mark.  Njals Saga, a master work of Icelandic pre Christian literature, provides examples of a legal blood feud that never ends.  The law, seemingly, was not limited.  Killing was rapidly resorted to, and then everyone was off and running as there was no way to satiate the need for unlimited revenge.  An "eye for an eye," however, did the opposite.  It provided that if somebody blinded you in one eye, they could be similarly blinded.  They couldn't be killed. That was a significant limitation in the ancient world.

There are many similar Biblical examples which are misunderstood.  Slavery is discussed in the Old and New Testaments, for example, and some cite that as proof that slavery was sanctioned. However, the citations to slavery are either a limit on the conduct of the master, demonstrating that slaves were people too and not to be mistreated, or they refer to the ancient means of handling prisoners of war.  In ancient times, when resources were so thin, POWs generally became slaves or bargaining chips.  There wasn't much of an option as to anything else, economically.  Instructions on how to treat slaves do not amount to a ratification of it, anymore than an insistence that,  for example, hard drinkers not be abusive and provide for their families would amount to a modern legal sanction of alcoholism.

Another interesting example, also related to warefare, that is often misunderstood is the Old Testament provision that victorious Jewish combatants could take the widows of defeated enemies as wives, provided they allowed them time to mourn.  That seems harsh, but it actuality it was the polar opposite. The norm otherwise was that victorious combatants could simply have the women of defeated enemies, a type of horrific abuse that has carried down to the modern era in many places.  The Old Testament, however, says "no" to that, and requires a marriage.  Not only does it require marriage, however, but the poor woman is allowed to mourn her lost family.  If you think of that, it's pretty stunning.  A victorious soldier would have to be pretty taken with a woman to determine he was going to marry her, allow her to mourn somebody he just aided in killing, and then return to his native land with her.  I wonder how often it actually happened?

Anyhow, this simply brought up a very interesting point, and nicely demonstrates how modern understandings of ancient texts can be so badly off the mark.  Having said all of that, I don't think a modern justice system can really be based on revenge, but then I don't know what really does work in terms of an effective, modern, criminal justice system.