Interesting that the term Successor Ideology is coming into greater usage.
Means weather is about to change. Indicates an approaching warm front. Or in this case approaching remnant of Tropical storm.
Samozrejme:
I note that the Twitter poster places the beginning of his conversion at the Ferguson shooting, when he actually investigated and discovered that police are actually not more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white one. The data he looked at then are still out there, and yet the vast majority of people think that hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year. It would be easy for the media to report that this is not true, but they don’t. As he says, the media outright lie to us.
Our nation’s tragic failure and devastation in Afghanistan spurred me to think about our place in history, and how this episode might appear in a textbook 100 years from now.
Which spurred me to think more about recent events.
When I was young I often heard the term “The Fall of Rome.” As a child I learned a fair amount about Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. It was everywhere in American culture; books, movies, television. The way the history of the period (roughly 0 AD to the late 1500s) was portrayed I had a sense that there was a singular event that caused Rome to “fall” and then there was a period of darkness (the “Dark Ages”). When I got to College I took some Class. Civ. courses and was surprised to learn the representation of that 1,500 year period in popular culture was not accurate. At one point in those pre-Internet days I was writing an essay for a class and searching a stack of history and reference books for the date of the “Fall of Rome ® .” I couldn’t find one. I had thought there was a specific date when Visigoths or some other Barbarian tribe sacked Rome and that was that. That did happen. On more than one occasion. But Rome continued on. Maybe? Sort-of. Eventually some parts of the government relocated to Constantinople. Or was that a new government? There was Nero’s fire. Christianity started to rise and the Papacy built power in Rome, but maybe that moved to Constantinople at some point also? Roman agriculture waned. And Islamists came through and a lot of Greek and Roman knowledge was adopted and fostered in Arab lands…
What I came to understand was, unlike the fall of the Third Reich, for example, there was no one day when a contemporary Roman citizen would have stated, “Roma non facit” (Rome does not exist). To Romans living through 300 AD – 500 AD life went on. I’m sure many, had a sense times were better prior, but how many knew it would never get better? At least for the Empire known as “Rome?” We lived through something similar with the British Empire in the past century. Most of us have a sense it is so diminished as to be unrecoverable, at least in its prior incarnation, but when did it happen? How?
All this fostered a mental exercise where I imagined a future textbook writing about the “Fall of the U.S.A.” What dates and events would future historians put on a timeline to help future students ace an exam on the subject? The more I think about it, the more I think most of those events are in our past. Further back than most of us realize.
Not to be too dour. Rome still exists. It’s “the eternal city” after all. Italy is a nation. (I studied Latin and Italian and never understood why Latin is called a “dead” language. Romans never stopped speaking it. Italian is simply Latin 2,000 years later.) So many of our institutions seem like facades. Harvard, Yale, the CDC, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Atlantic magazine, the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Tonight Show, Pop Music, the U.S. Military. So many of our Elites have abandoned virtue and honor. Our athletes whine. Our version of Andrew Carnegie is launching himself 70 miles into the air in a metal phallus. Our politicians humiliate themselves for money. Our teachers film themselves mocking their students and the students’ families. Barbarians topple our structures and it takes us 10 years to rebuild structures our grandfathers used to build in a year. We refuse to manage our forests and refuse to use the miracle of uranium fission for energy all because some ignorant protesters who lack basic science comprehension whine like infants and spread fear.
I think future textbooks will show a “Fall of the U.S.A.” timeline where today is on the right, waning side of causal milestones.
“A heavily armed group of bank robbers wreaked havoc across a southeastern Brazilian city early Monday, striking several banks, setting fire to vehicles and tying hostages to their getaway cars, in an assault that left at least three people dead, officials say.” (https://tinyurl.com/rw96d7bc)
The hostages are tied to getaway cars to prevent police from shooting at the criminals. That’s gotta be a metaphor for woke politics.
Robert Schotzberger, Topo Gigio,
Our best hope is more and more black people standing up and vocally denouncing the nonsense enveloping our culture. White America went through a real and necessary shift in the ’70s and ’80s. There is still tremendous racism in black culture and it will take black leaders to denounce it and bring about change.
Most all white Conservatives see the lunacy. White Liberals do not, but white Liberals are afraid of blacks and will kow-tow to whatever “black” culture tells them. It’s happening; Kanye, Zuby, Candace Owens, Zo, Larry Elder… Just not sure if it will happen fast enough to tip the scales.
Don’t lose hope. It was precarious and volatile with whites in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Major change can happen if enough people make their voices heard.
Zaphod @ 11:16am,
If you ever heard Elvis Aaron Presley sing, “Jailhouse Rock” then the Purple Gang is not news to you.
“The Purple Gang was news to me. I need to get out more.”
Not news to me, but then I live on the corridor between Chicago and Detroit.
As Biden is making Obama not be the worst president ever, so to Blinken is set to make Hillary and Kerry not be the worst Sec. of State ever now.
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. . . .
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again. . . .
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Rufus T. Firefly– You’re very welcome. Neo’s blog really has become a place where “. . . the Just [can] Exchange their messages”; I thought of her when I looked up Auden’s poem today.
PA+Cat:
Good choice! I appreciate not wanting to hog too much vertical space. However, you stopped short of Auden’s crucial line:
___________________________
We must love one another or die.
___________________________
There’s a longer story to the poem, on which I never touched bottom. Auden rejected that poem later for his “Selected Poems.”
It was during the aftermath of our own 9-11, the poem was circulated in American media and revived.
In a further triumph for Truth, Justice, and the American Way of Life, P u rd u e Pharma has just reached a bankruptcy deal which protects the owning family (to remain nameless because ‘spam filter’ has been known to favour them) from having to make any compensation payouts to their myriad White Flyover Country Cattle Class Victims in the O x ycontin scandal.
Purple Gang were Detroit mobsters.
I deem this mix of an Australian health bureaucrat to be ‘fake but accurate.’
Yep, I posted that here the other day but it got lost in all Afghanistan all the time.
@Griffin:
The Shifty Dirty Trickster Used Carpet Salesman Trifecta of the Ottoman Empire consisted of Phanariots, Armenians, and of course our eternal chosen friends. This ‘Australian’ specimen is Armenian.
It’s not as if Australia could import some Ottomans to deal with her in the approved manner — place is already full of Turks who also shouldn’t be there.
Diversity. Is Bliss.
No surprise to anyone around here I guess if I say that while I don’t think any other culture’s governance model is directly applicable to the USA or other Western ‘Liberal Democracies’ (oh, puhleeeze!), there is much to be learned by making a really serious effort to understand the lived experience (heh) of Others (double heh). I mean it. Too much Boomer knee-jerk Pavlovian Conditioning in some quarters.
It’s not just necessary to understand the ‘Enemy’ (Always with the Enemies. Might this not itself be a trifle pathological?)… It’s also handy to see how other people live and the compromises and accommodations they have made. Then go look at the differences between your ideals and the way you actually really live.
To wit, this longish article on Putin’s Russia. China is interesting, too… but problem is that China and the Chinese are just too alien for most Westerners to get their heads around. And even when they’re the same as we are in some of their instincts and desires, folks (doubly so Boomers) will tend to (pardon the expression) Orientalize and see Fu Manchu even where he’s not.
So… for your reading pleasure, let’s hop in our troika and take a trot along the Arbat.
Park this next to your Flying Car. The one they stole from your future.
“This song was written by Harold Arlen for the 1939 MGM classic THE WIZARD OF OZ. It is widely believed to be the most loved and enduring popular song of the 20th century. It is played here on the 1929 RCA theremin that once belonged to the late Hollywood thereminist, Dr. Samuel Hoffman.”
Don’t know anything about this Peter Pringle who plays the Theremin in the video I linked above. Just had a look at some of his other videos — seems to be an interesting guy!
This borrowing from the ending of Schubert’s Winterreise played by Peter Pringle on an actual hurdy-gurdy is cute:
The passive listening device which allowed the USSR to listen to conversations inside the USA’s Ambassador’s residential study in Moscow from 1945 to 1952.
@geoffb:
Good one. Cavity resonator in the Great Seal and later on there was the IBM Selectric golf ball hack. Fun times in the USSR.
Lots of other good, not just Soviet stuff under the heading of Tempest. And on to the present day where it’s amazing what you can learn from LED status light flickers.
Thinking of some of the Obama’s Secret Cabal Rules America local chapter ruminations in these comments:
Back when Obama was newly-elected much was made of his refusal to give up his Blackberry.. him being all young and switched on and all. I wonder if any recent pictures or videos show him carrying any kind of mobile device? You’d think a smart fellow who knows something about ‘capabilities’ would not… Especially one pulling strings in the Game of Thrones.
Y’all might want to consider something along the lines of another Hayes Code before Father Coughlin spontaneously resurrects. Just saying 🙂
Saw this change story on twitter.
https://twitter.com/17cShyteposter/status/1429710711173701632
Interesting that the term Successor Ideology is coming into greater usage.
Means weather is about to change. Indicates an approaching warm front. Or in this case approaching remnant of Tropical storm.
Samozrejme:
I note that the Twitter poster places the beginning of his conversion at the Ferguson shooting, when he actually investigated and discovered that police are actually not more likely to shoot a black suspect than a white one. The data he looked at then are still out there, and yet the vast majority of people think that hundreds, if not thousands, of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year. It would be easy for the media to report that this is not true, but they don’t. As he says, the media outright lie to us.
Our nation’s tragic failure and devastation in Afghanistan spurred me to think about our place in history, and how this episode might appear in a textbook 100 years from now.
Which spurred me to think more about recent events.
When I was young I often heard the term “The Fall of Rome.” As a child I learned a fair amount about Ancient Rome and Medieval Europe. It was everywhere in American culture; books, movies, television. The way the history of the period (roughly 0 AD to the late 1500s) was portrayed I had a sense that there was a singular event that caused Rome to “fall” and then there was a period of darkness (the “Dark Ages”). When I got to College I took some Class. Civ. courses and was surprised to learn the representation of that 1,500 year period in popular culture was not accurate. At one point in those pre-Internet days I was writing an essay for a class and searching a stack of history and reference books for the date of the “Fall of Rome ® .” I couldn’t find one. I had thought there was a specific date when Visigoths or some other Barbarian tribe sacked Rome and that was that. That did happen. On more than one occasion. But Rome continued on. Maybe? Sort-of. Eventually some parts of the government relocated to Constantinople. Or was that a new government? There was Nero’s fire. Christianity started to rise and the Papacy built power in Rome, but maybe that moved to Constantinople at some point also? Roman agriculture waned. And Islamists came through and a lot of Greek and Roman knowledge was adopted and fostered in Arab lands…
What I came to understand was, unlike the fall of the Third Reich, for example, there was no one day when a contemporary Roman citizen would have stated, “Roma non facit” (Rome does not exist). To Romans living through 300 AD – 500 AD life went on. I’m sure many, had a sense times were better prior, but how many knew it would never get better? At least for the Empire known as “Rome?” We lived through something similar with the British Empire in the past century. Most of us have a sense it is so diminished as to be unrecoverable, at least in its prior incarnation, but when did it happen? How?
All this fostered a mental exercise where I imagined a future textbook writing about the “Fall of the U.S.A.” What dates and events would future historians put on a timeline to help future students ace an exam on the subject? The more I think about it, the more I think most of those events are in our past. Further back than most of us realize.
Not to be too dour. Rome still exists. It’s “the eternal city” after all. Italy is a nation. (I studied Latin and Italian and never understood why Latin is called a “dead” language. Romans never stopped speaking it. Italian is simply Latin 2,000 years later.) So many of our institutions seem like facades. Harvard, Yale, the CDC, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Atlantic magazine, the New York Times, NBC, CBS, ABC, the Tonight Show, Pop Music, the U.S. Military. So many of our Elites have abandoned virtue and honor. Our athletes whine. Our version of Andrew Carnegie is launching himself 70 miles into the air in a metal phallus. Our politicians humiliate themselves for money. Our teachers film themselves mocking their students and the students’ families. Barbarians topple our structures and it takes us 10 years to rebuild structures our grandfathers used to build in a year. We refuse to manage our forests and refuse to use the miracle of uranium fission for energy all because some ignorant protesters who lack basic science comprehension whine like infants and spread fear.
I think future textbooks will show a “Fall of the U.S.A.” timeline where today is on the right, waning side of causal milestones.
At least he wasn’t a Communist.
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3146577/he-said-he-knew-al-capone-jewish-spy-japanese
The Purple Gang was news to me. I need to get out more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purple_Gang
Open thread comment:
“A heavily armed group of bank robbers wreaked havoc across a southeastern Brazilian city early Monday, striking several banks, setting fire to vehicles and tying hostages to their getaway cars, in an assault that left at least three people dead, officials say.” (https://tinyurl.com/rw96d7bc)
The hostages are tied to getaway cars to prevent police from shooting at the criminals. That’s gotta be a metaphor for woke politics.
Robert Schotzberger, Topo Gigio,
Our best hope is more and more black people standing up and vocally denouncing the nonsense enveloping our culture. White America went through a real and necessary shift in the ’70s and ’80s. There is still tremendous racism in black culture and it will take black leaders to denounce it and bring about change.
Most all white Conservatives see the lunacy. White Liberals do not, but white Liberals are afraid of blacks and will kow-tow to whatever “black” culture tells them. It’s happening; Kanye, Zuby, Candace Owens, Zo, Larry Elder… Just not sure if it will happen fast enough to tip the scales.
Don’t lose hope. It was precarious and volatile with whites in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Major change can happen if enough people make their voices heard.
Zaphod @ 11:16am,
If you ever heard Elvis Aaron Presley sing, “Jailhouse Rock” then the Purple Gang is not news to you.
“The Purple Gang was news to me. I need to get out more.”
Not news to me, but then I live on the corridor between Chicago and Detroit.
As Biden is making Obama not be the worst president ever, so to Blinken is set to make Hillary and Kerry not be the worst Sec. of State ever now.
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/09/01/left-behind-in-afghanistan-by-bidens-mucked-up-state-department-n1474878
Rufus T. Firefly:
I would say the British Empire ended at the end of WW1. That’s when they lost faith in progress and in themselves
Today is the 82nd anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, the opening move of WWII:
A short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBESyRDe3c&ab_channel=EncyclopaediaBritannica
From W.H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939”:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. . . .
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again. . . .
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
The poem in its entirety can be found here:
https://poets.org/poem/september-1-1939
Thanks for sharing the poem, PA+Cat.
Rufus T. Firefly– You’re very welcome. Neo’s blog really has become a place where “. . . the Just [can] Exchange their messages”; I thought of her when I looked up Auden’s poem today.
PA+Cat:
Good choice! I appreciate not wanting to hog too much vertical space. However, you stopped short of Auden’s crucial line:
___________________________
We must love one another or die.
___________________________
There’s a longer story to the poem, on which I never touched bottom. Auden rejected that poem later for his “Selected Poems.”
It was during the aftermath of our own 9-11, the poem was circulated in American media and revived.
In a further triumph for Truth, Justice, and the American Way of Life, P u rd u e Pharma has just reached a bankruptcy deal which protects the owning family (to remain nameless because ‘spam filter’ has been known to favour them) from having to make any compensation payouts to their myriad White Flyover Country Cattle Class Victims in the O x ycontin scandal.
Purple Gang were Detroit mobsters.
I deem this mix of an Australian health bureaucrat to be ‘fake but accurate.’
https://twitter.com/CaldronPool/status/1433019248733921286
Neo: This is very important:
Eric Clapton, a staunch critic of measures designed to tackle the Covid pandemic, has released a song titled “This Has Gotta Stop.”
And, It is really good. Slow Hand Good. Up there with his best:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNt4NIQ7FTA
Walter,
Yep, I posted that here the other day but it got lost in all Afghanistan all the time.
@Griffin:
The Shifty Dirty Trickster Used Carpet Salesman Trifecta of the Ottoman Empire consisted of Phanariots, Armenians, and of course our eternal chosen friends. This ‘Australian’ specimen is Armenian.
It’s not as if Australia could import some Ottomans to deal with her in the approved manner — place is already full of Turks who also shouldn’t be there.
Diversity. Is Bliss.
No surprise to anyone around here I guess if I say that while I don’t think any other culture’s governance model is directly applicable to the USA or other Western ‘Liberal Democracies’ (oh, puhleeeze!), there is much to be learned by making a really serious effort to understand the lived experience (heh) of Others (double heh). I mean it. Too much Boomer knee-jerk Pavlovian Conditioning in some quarters.
It’s not just necessary to understand the ‘Enemy’ (Always with the Enemies. Might this not itself be a trifle pathological?)… It’s also handy to see how other people live and the compromises and accommodations they have made. Then go look at the differences between your ideals and the way you actually really live.
To wit, this longish article on Putin’s Russia. China is interesting, too… but problem is that China and the Chinese are just too alien for most Westerners to get their heads around. And even when they’re the same as we are in some of their instincts and desires, folks (doubly so Boomers) will tend to (pardon the expression) Orientalize and see Fu Manchu even where he’s not.
So… for your reading pleasure, let’s hop in our troika and take a trot along the Arbat.
https://vdare.com/articles/30-years-after-communism-fell-putin-offers-alternative-to-globalism-that-s-why-our-ruling-class-hates-him
Theremin, Baby!
Park this next to your Flying Car. The one they stole from your future.
“This song was written by Harold Arlen for the 1939 MGM classic THE WIZARD OF OZ. It is widely believed to be the most loved and enduring popular song of the 20th century. It is played here on the 1929 RCA theremin that once belonged to the late Hollywood thereminist, Dr. Samuel Hoffman.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6KbEnGnymk
Still…. there’s always those stereotypical Kimchipeople. And ocarinas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaATTu8IVHc
Mayhap Tomorrow Belongs to Them.
Don’t know anything about this Peter Pringle who plays the Theremin in the video I linked above. Just had a look at some of his other videos — seems to be an interesting guy!
This borrowing from the ending of Schubert’s Winterreise played by Peter Pringle on an actual hurdy-gurdy is cute:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxGQBkmSvac
And here he is singing a bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian. Is there nothing this man cannot do?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs
Here’s his Wiki entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pringle
Leon Theremin the inventor of the theremin is interesting for another invention. “The Thing”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
The passive listening device which allowed the USSR to listen to conversations inside the USA’s Ambassador’s residential study in Moscow from 1945 to 1952.
@geoffb:
Good one. Cavity resonator in the Great Seal and later on there was the IBM Selectric golf ball hack. Fun times in the USSR.
Lots of other good, not just Soviet stuff under the heading of Tempest. And on to the present day where it’s amazing what you can learn from LED status light flickers.
Thinking of some of the Obama’s Secret Cabal Rules America local chapter ruminations in these comments:
Back when Obama was newly-elected much was made of his refusal to give up his Blackberry.. him being all young and switched on and all. I wonder if any recent pictures or videos show him carrying any kind of mobile device? You’d think a smart fellow who knows something about ‘capabilities’ would not… Especially one pulling strings in the Game of Thrones.
Y’all might want to consider something along the lines of another Hayes Code before Father Coughlin spontaneously resurrects. Just saying 🙂
https://asiatimes.com/2021/09/china-bans-reality-talent-shows-in-new-crackdown/
Chinky as Mirror. Good enough for Voltaire. Should be good enough for you, too.