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Home » Open thread 5/23/22

Open thread 5/23/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Okay, so the chicken is being cued by a red laser. The bird nevertheless seems to anticipate a few of the higher notes, and the execution is impressive. And then there’s the eating of the flower stems at the end; a nice humble touch:

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Open thread 5/23/22 — 26 Comments

  1. I just happened to stumble upon this information–

    Ralston College is a new college opening up in Savannah, Georgia, it’s Chancellor is Dr. Jordan Peterson, and it’s curriculum is an attempt to “revive and reinvent the traditional university”—to throw off all of the horrific deformations of the Humanities wrought by the Left, and to redirect humanistic education back into traditional paths.

    Their first graduate offering, for 2022-2023, is going to consist of 20 all expenses paid fellowships for “exceptional students” —an intense, one year, four quarter Masters degree program in the Humanities, involving a very heavy program of reading, thought, and discussion of the classics.

    “…focusing on the theme of “the self,” our multidisciplinary curriculum will trace the origins and chronological development of the concept of the self through philosophy, music, architecture, art, and literature.”

    The first quarter to be held in Samos, Greece, where students will have immersive classes in Greek so that they can read some of the ancient classics in the original.

    The last three quarters will take place back in Savannah—one quarter covering ancient classics, one medieval classics, and the final quarter modern classics.

    (They also have other, free podcasts/courses on the Humanities, as well as other subjects, now available on the Web.)

    Applications are now being taken for this first Ralson College Masters degree program in the Humanities. *

    See https://www.ralston.ac/

  3. At Ethics Alarms this morning, Jack discusses the following item that was included in a post at “The Last Refuge” [link below]:

    “How did Robert Mueller and Andrew Weissmann spend 2 years investigating Trump-Russia; with a team of 19 lawyers, $40 million in resources, 40 FBI agents, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 search warrants and 500 witnesses; and not find out that Hillary Clinton created the hoax they were investigating?”

    https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2022/05/22/apparently-while-investigating-trump-russia-robert-mueller-and-andrew-weissmann-never-interviewed-clinton-campaign-manager-robby-mook/

    Some version of this question has probably come up in other venues.

  4. Just another open-thread comment about something I read.

    Regular readers of Neo’s blog know that stories of political changers are one of her staples. Here’s another change story: “Leaving the left” by Meghan Murphy (https://tinyurl.com/2u9v5hpd).

    Murphy is a Canadian writer living in Mexico. Her move south was motivated by her fear of the Canadian government’s assault on civil liberties, especially freedom of speech. Now banned from Twitter, she continues to write and talk about gender identity and women’s rights.

    Murphy starts her story by explaining that she was born into a Marxist family and accepted left-wing politics as obvious truth. Towards the end of her essay, she notes that she’s not one of those people who claims that they didn’t leave the Left, but that the Left left them. Instead, she openly admits that she left of her own free will, that she “didn’t leave the left for any other reason beyond the fact the left became a toxic swamp of irrational hypocrisy and power-hungry, toxic, hate.”

    Worth reading the whole thing.

  6. In response to Another Mike’s post, above: Because the Mueller Investigation did not look as its objective was to force a process crime in order to remove the president. My opinion is that everyone knew it was a lie from the start, which is what makes this one of the most significant political scandals in our nation’s history.

  7. Remember the coin operated attractions in amusement parks? For a quarter a chicken in a box would play the piano or play a game of tic tac toe? Instead of a laser, a piece of chicken feed would fall on the piano keys or the tic tac toe board.

  9. Another common attraction at country fairs was Chicken Bingo. A chicken was in a box with a numbered grid on its floor, and the rubes would bet in which square the chicken would dump, as chickens do.

  10. Snow on Pine–

    About the theme of “the self,” the students could begin with Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, a thick and demanding book (600 pages) that he published in 1989. Taylor is still alive (he’s 90) and active– maybe he could lead a seminar on the subject.

    He’s an interesting man in a lot of ways. He’s Canadian, stood as a candidate in four federal elections in the 1960s but never won. His most famous defeat occurred in 1965, when he lost to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of you-know-who.

  11. Apropos of non-human musicians, there’s a Lithuanian composer named Mindaugas Pie?aitis who became famous for CATcerto, a chamber orchestra piece that he wrote after hearing about Nora, a piano-playing cat. Pie?aitis corresponded with Nora’s owners via e-mail requesting video footage of their cat at the keyboard. Nora’s humans sent the footage, and Pie?aitis duly composed CATcerto, which his chamber orchestra first performed in 2009. The piece is not quite 5 minutes long:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoT66v4EHg&ab_channel=MindaugasPiecaitis

  12. Heh.

    The ancient Greek term generally translated “self” in English is
    idios, from whence comes our “idiot” through the Greek idiotes.

    As a joke, it’s a modern thing. Guess ya had to be there.

  13. sdferr–

    The term “autism,” coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911 to describe what he considered a form of schizophrenia (a term he also coined), comes from the Greek reflexive pronoun autos [not gonna try to use the Greek letters; the blog software seems to choke on non-Latin alphabets]– which refers to the self or one’s self. So I suppose you could say the modern sense of self puts us all somewhere on the autism spectrum.

  14. I suspect the simpler term “soul” in the ancients’ sense is what they’re going for, yet in our modern speech isn’t a possibility as if risible in itself (with a wink to autos included). I jest here only out of friendship and collegial fellow feeling. Their enterprise I welcome; their constraints I merely sidenote.

  18. Mark Levin recited this short op-ed by Gov. Richard Lamm-D on his show last night. Levin did attribute it to Lamm at the start but I don’t believed prefaced it with anything very explanatory.

    Gov. Richard Lamm: My plan to destroy America (2006)

    I have a secret plan to destroy America. If you believe, as many do, that America is too smug, too white-bread, too self-satisfied, too rich … then let’s destroy America. It is not that hard to do. [Lennon’s Imagine?]
    – – –
    5. I would then get the big foundations and Big Business to give these efforts lots of money. I would invest in ethnic identity, and I would establish the cult of victimology. … I would start a grievance industry blaming all minority failure on the majority population.

  21. Heh, Rufus, so we’re back to JJ Rousseau again then. Which, cool. Though we ultimately won’t be satisfied and’ll have further yet to track back.

  22. @ TommyJay > “I have a secret plan to destroy America.”

    Putting it out in a Washington Examiner op-ed isn’t exactly the best way to keep it a secret.
    “Richard Lamm is the former three-term Democratic governor of Colorado.”

    Was he being sarcastic (IOW a disaffected central Democrat), or serious?
    Certainly, the events since then (although in process much earlier) make his plan look like the actual play-book for the left.

    Powerline’s Picks today had a couple of good “companion pieces” – the game plan is, ultimately, not a winning one for the hard left.

    https://unherd.com/2022/05/the-twilight-of-identity-politics/

    Facing the prospect of an electoral bloodbath in November and potential disaster in 2024, figures from the centre of the Democratic Party such as Ruy Teixeira, Jonathan Chait, and Matthew Yglesias have declared a more-or-less open war on the party’s activist-NGO Left wing, which they accuse of tarnishing the Democratic brand by associating it with a host of radical and unpopular positions.

    Further to the Left, some socialist-minded writers such as the New York Times’s Jay Caspian Kang have resurfaced critiques of identity politics familiar from the pre-Trump era: that it inhibits cross-racial solidarity, that it erases class differences and complements rather than antagonises corporate power, and that it reflects the experiences and obsessions of elite-educated professionals whose material interests conflict with those of the masses for whom they claim to speak.

    It is undeniable that the American public — and, increasingly, the Left-wing commentariat — is fed up with the brand of identity politics that has flourished over the past several years, which, though often draped in radical language, ends up finding expression as a corporate-bureaucratic project catering to the petty grievances of the professional class. This may well be describable as a result of “elite capture”, but if so, the project was captured from the beginning. And as the radicals are fond of saying, you can’t use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.

    https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/22/joe-biden-and-racial-demagoguery/

    Finally, we should remember America has always been a fragile country. After all, it is history’s first successful and longest-lasting multiracial constitutional government—the logical reification of the ancient ideas of human political equality, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

    The idea of America has always tried to overcome innate, deeper, and darker human impulses, especially the tic to identify by race, religion, and tribe. That is the historical virus that once unleashed, infects and destroys a society. Witness most recently Rwanda, Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia.

    The ancient human pathology to identify by superficial appearance—to see race, for example, as essential rather than incidental to one’s essence—destroys democracies. It must consciously always be repressed, not cultivated to frighten people to support agendas that are otherwise failing them.

    Joe Biden is said to be an inert puppet of left-wing masters. Perhaps. But more likely his cognitive challenges have stripped away his political savvy and left him in the raw, revealing his real essence, a racialist of the first order, who will use any tragedy to salvage what has become the worst two years of a presidency in modern memory. And most of the people now know it.

    The Left’s “secret plan” to divide America by race is especially dangerous — for Black people now, because they are being lied to about the causes of crime against Blacks; and for White people in the future, because they are being set up as the perpetrators of crimes overwhelmingly committed by Blacks.

    https://www.city-journal.org/using-the-buffalo-tragedy-for-racial-propaganda
    RTWT for the cases and statistics; this is Mac Donald’s conclusion:

    Figures from President Biden on down are telling blacks, nonstop, that they are under lethal threat from whites, and that it is white supremacists, not black criminals, who pose the greatest threat to their safety. “Buffalo attack ignites safety worries for Black Angelenos,” reads a headline in the May 22 Los Angeles Times. New York representative Jerrold Nadler, a sponsor of the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, says, “Democrats are taking the fight straight to the . . . violent extremists that are terrorizing minority institutions.” A Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that 75 percent of black Americans were very or somewhat worried that they or someone they love will be attacked because of their race. A respondent interviewed by the Post says that he is “apprehensive at stoplights, imagining a White man getting out and shooting him in his car.”

    The false claim that we are living through an epidemic of racist shootings of black men by police officers arguably led to the crime waves of 2015 and 2016, and to the more dire anarchy since 2020. With the two-year anniversary of George Floyd’s death upon us, it’s not hard to imagine that the equally false claim that we are living through an epidemic of white-supremacist shootings of blacks could escalate America’s violence.

    And make sure you get a doctor who entered the profession at least a decade ago, because Governor Lamm’s secret plan is also the play book for the AMA.

    https://freebeacon.com/culture/woke-medicine-a-prescription-for-disaster/

  23. sdferr on May 23, 2022 at 1:24 pm
    I recently came to better understand that the ancient Greek city was also a religious focus, with its dedicated God or Goddess (e.g., Athena). Everyone was expected to have full allegiance to the city, rather than for themselves or their family. Religion and state were not separate, and any family gods were subsidiary to the city’s god. But if someone ran afoul of the citizen’s wrath, they might well be exiled, and thereby become a “self” outside the group within the city. Thus the word idiot really applied to the exile, or self. Being exiled without access to the city’s resources was tantamount to a death sentence if you could not find another city to accept you, a low probability situation for most exiles, I gather.

  24. That’s good stuff R2L, as it starts to fill in great gaps in our knowledge of a time so far removed from our own which nevertheless is inseparably at the roots of our own. Or said another way maybe, we can’t know ourselves without them, can we?

  26. I got curious about Governor Lamm’s “Secret Plan to Destroy America” and Wikipedia led to this post from Snopes.
    Although the circulation of the “speech” on the internet has de-contextualized it, the content appears to be genuine.
    Lamm is a hard-core left-wing Democrat-Progressive, based on the policies he enacted in office, but apparently he meant the speech as a warning, not a check-list.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lamm

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/richard-lamm-on-multiculturalism/

    Richard D. Lamm was a Democrat who served as governor of Colorado for twelve years from 1975 to 1987. In 2005, a third-person account of a speech attributed to him, on the perils of multiculturalism, became a viral item online:
    …
    Lamm told us in mid-June 2005 that this text represented a reasonably accurate account of a speech he had given a few years earlier:

    Yes, it is a speech I gave a year and a half ago in Washington D.C. It was a 5 minute speech, and I am amazed and gratified it has received so much coverage.

    He also passed along to us the following “revised version” of his speech:

    I HAVE A PLAN TO DESTROY AMERICA
    RICHARD D. LAMM

    What follows is essentially what was posted by WE in April 20, 2006, which for some reason omitted this paragraph and a final quote from Chomsky (all caps in the original).

    IV. HAVING DONE ALL THIS, I WOULD MAKE OUR FASTEST GROWING DEMOGRAPHIC GROUP THE LEAST EDUCATED – I WOULD ADD A SECOND UNDERCLASS, UNASSIMILATED, UNDEREDUCATED, AND ANTAGONISTIC TO OUR POPULATION. I WOULD HAVE THIS SECOND UNDERCLASS HAVE A 50% DROP OUT RATE FROM SCHOOL.
    …
    “THE SMART WAY TO KEEP PEOPLE PASSIVE AND OBEDIENT IS TO STRICTLY LIMIT THE SPECTRUM OF ACCEPTABLE OPINION, BUT ALLOW VERY LIVELY DEBATE WITHIN THAT SPECTRUM.” — NOAM CHOMSKY, AMERICAN LINGUIST AND US MEDIA AND FOREIGN POLICY CRITIC.

    Lamm passed away in July 2021. His obituary has a shorter version of the Wiki info.
    https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/colorado-gov-richard-lamm-dies-85-79170344

    Lamm swept into Colorado politics as a John F. Kennedy idealist but years later came to be nicknamed “Governor Gloom,” a realist focused on the nation’s future.

    As a legislator, he pushed through one of the first pre-Roe vs. Wade abortion laws. It became a national model.

    “I decided that would probably be the end of my career, but it just seemed to me outrageous that you would force unwilling women to have unwanted children,” Lamm told The Associated Press in a 1996 interview. “I just can’t not fight for what I believe in.”

    Lamm spent much of his last term as governor writing and speaking on the fiscal irresponsibility of his generation and what he called the need to rein in immigration and curtail entitlement programs such as Social Security. He opposed the death penalty as governor but endorsed it after leaving office.

    “Over the 12 years he was governor, he became more conservative, and I think the reason he became more conservative was because he learned the realities of governing and the realities of financially managing a government,” Nancy Dick, Lamm’s lieutenant governor during his last two terms, recalled at the time.

    Lamm initially had the benefit of a Democratic House to help him pass legislation focusing on land use, equal rights, mining severance taxes and growth management. But a Republican wave overtook the Legislature two years into his administration. From then on Lamm battled two hostile chambers.

    The Legislature reined in the power of the executive branch after deciding Lamm had gone too far with growth management policies.

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