Boris Johnson drops the mask…
…and horrified Brits discover he’s actually Donald Trump.
And it’s not even April Fools Day yet.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
…and horrified Brits discover he’s actually Donald Trump.
And it’s not even April Fools Day yet.
Well, they were screaming “Not My Prime Minister!” I guess they were right after all. Bwah, ha, ha! So sad, 🙂
Now that that’s settled, I’m going to spend the week-end wrapping presents, playing carols, and generally Making Christmas Great Again.
Ho-ho-ho! to all y’all.
First present to be unwrapped after the holidays:
https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-radio/bombshell-rudy-giuliani-uncovers-8-year-long-money-laundering-scheme-in-ukraine-records-lead-to-burisma-bidens
Somebody (SueK?) brought up the point a few posts back that no one of the younger generation “gets” the right’s current references to the Dems and the briar patch.
This guy does (read through to the end).
https://spectator.org/nobody-move-or-nancy-gets-it/
Boris may be dropping the mask but Corbyn & Comrades sure isn’t:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7816009/Rebecca-Long-Bailey-appoints-self-proclaimed-Stalinist.html
“This guy does (read through to the end).”
It seems hard to believe that a people can willingly forget their own history, but through use of political correctness, that seems to be what the left is succeeding in convincing this upcoming generation should do. In fact, they don’t even know that’s what they’re doing.
Wasn’t there a Star Trek episode about this?? (original TV show Star Trek) Seems to me there was…my boys never let us miss a show! It’s only looking back that I see some of the indoctrination that the show included. I guess I did see it, but it was “invisible” because it was basically a completely different culture – but it was theoretically the future of _our_ culture, so I can see now that it was a form of indoctrination for my kids and their generation.
The Bee has been on a roll lately. But then as Maverick would say, they are in a target rich environment.
Wasn’t there a Star Trek episode about this??
SueK: Perhaps “The Way to Eden” in which a group of future hippies hijack the Enterprise to reach a planet that’s supposed to be Eden, where they can live happily ever after in hippie paradise. However, it doesn’t end well for them.
Speaking as an ex-hippie, there was a certain amount on Lost-Paradise thinking among the tribes. As Joni Mitchell sang, mournfully it seems — because she didn’t truly believe it possible, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”
But hippies didn’t build that. The idea has been around for a while.
There was also the related “Burn it down and start over” faction. I was shocked by a Theodore Dalrymple essay on Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas” in which Woolf responds to three different fundraising requests, one from the Women’s College of Cambridge.
“No guinea of earned money should go to rebuilding the college on the old plan. . . . [T]herefore the guinea should be earmarked ‘Rags. Petrol. Matches.’ And this note should be attached to it. ‘Take this guinea and with it burn the college to the ground. Set fire to the old hypocrisies. Let the light of the burning building scare the nightingales and incarnadine the willows. And let the daughters of educated men dance round the fire and heap armful upon armful of dead leaves upon the flames. And let their mothers lean from the upper windows [before, presumably, being burned to death] and cry “Let it blaze! Let it blaze! For we have done with this education!”
“The Rage of Virginia Woolf”
https://www.city-journal.org/html/rage-virginia-woolf-12371.html
What does Woolf want for college?
Do not have museums and libraries with chained books and first editions under glass cases… Let the pictures and the books be new and always changing. Let it be decorated afresh by each generation with their own hands cheaply.
Woolf proceeds to describe a hippie free school! Of course, she was probably cribbing from A.S. Neil’s Summerhill, a real experimental school from the 1920s, which was the prototype for the hippie free school. One saw a copy of Neil’s book on Summerhill in most commune libraries.
“What does _____ want for college?”
Who? Look how that non-entity makes itself to disappear, not even leaving behind a cat’s-smile. No regard is necessary: least of all the outpouring Mr. Dalrymple contributes.
sdferr: Perhaps not in your neck of the woods, but Virginia Woolf’s stock has been pretty high since feminists insisted on her as a great woman writer to be taught in universities. They got their wish. I never got much out of Woolf myself, though I can’t say I tried very hard.
I did love this bit from one of her journals:
If one does not lie back
and sum up
and say to the moment,
this very moment,
stay you are so fair,
what is to be one’s gain, dying?
No: stay, this moment!
No one ever says that enough.
–Virginia Woolf
A friend gave me a long narrow calligraphy of that passage. Wherever I moved I always hung it someplace I could see easily.
Twenty years later it was so yellowed, stained and brittle that I scanned it into a computer and spent about fifty hours repairing the image. Then I took the file and printed several copies and gave them out to friends.
Stay this moment!
I wouldn’t know what my neck of the woods is to be. However, if one could possibly care for the non-entities’ words, one can easily see they eliminate themselves. Presto change-o, self-disappearing! Such are the wondrous effects of absolutists’ relativism.
sdferr: No idea what you’re on about … are you doing the conservative version of the Red Guards minus physical violence to make sure no one should even write or read about the stuff you don’t like? Presto change-o indeed.
Anyway. I find it interesting to trace the history of ideas and influences. Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group, which included John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster and was loosely allied via Lady Ottoline Morrell with the broader world populated by the likes T.S.Eliot and uncle Aldous Huxley.
Huxley’s first novel, “Crome Yellow,” satirized that world and is still a good read or audiobook listen.
I’d like to get off a catchy phrase like Tom Wolfe’s “From Bauhaus to Our House” — “From Bloomsbury to Ourbury” — but it doesn’t really work.
My point, though, is that the stuff that goes on among the intelligentsia eventually gets mainstreamed and we live in the resulting world. In some cases that’s good, e.g. the US Constitution. In other cases, it’s less good, e.g. Das Kapital.
IMO it’s worth understanding how that worked, who the people were and how they were motivated. In Woolf’s case with “Three Guineas” was partly a terrified response to seeing the approach of WW II.
Shall I try again, huxley? For I think perhaps you’ve mistaken my intention.
This progressive says (with Woodrow Wilson, by the way, who described the properly progressive school in almost exactly the same fashion) **throw away all that old stuff: accept only the newly made from your own modern hands!***
How delightful, these modern knowers are, sez I to myself, so taking their prescription seriously, I toss them aside for the non-entities they tell me they must be!
Did that explanation fill out the difficulty? Or does it still remain?
Ah that beacon of intelligence for the ages; the bright young things of England in the 20’s and 30’s. Those same twits that voted not to serve King and country (Oxford Union IIRC) if war came with that German. The same twits who fell in with the Papa Joe and the Stalinist’s, or the Mosley-Brown’s. The exceptions don’t make the rule (Orwell, Waugh. Sayers).
Who’s afraid of Virginia Who?
huxley on December 22, 2019 at 1:53 pm said:
…
Speaking as an ex-hippie, there was a certain amount on Lost-Paradise thinking among the tribes. As Joni Mitchell sang, mournfully it seems — because she didn’t truly believe it possible, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”
* * *
IMO, Mitchell et al. are longing for the original Garden, where no one ever suffered any harm, because they had never encountered anything evil.
(Nevermind that there were only 2 people at the time, which is a somewhat more controlled environment.)
She was right.
We can’t ever go back there.
Once you know there is a difference between good and evil, you are responsible for what you choose to do with that knowledge; throwing it down the memory hole is not an option.
(Although I wonder if the current popularity of the belief that you can return to the beginning is related to the easiness of starting over in video games, although those were probaby not an influence on Mitchell’s thinking.)
The lamenters are instead trying to force a simulacrum of that primal condition by overtly suppressing anything that hurts their feelings, and defining that as the sole criterion of “evil.”
Case in point: Neo’s post on Rowling & the transgender activists “cancelling” her for standing up for the right to assert biological reality.
Yielding to intimidation is not the same thing as choosing not to do evil, especially when the action being enjoined is, in fact, not evil at all.