I’m going to try something new for the blog. By “new” I mean something I’ve done before, but I’m trying it again a little differently. I do some blog commenting and forum posting here and there, but it’s always seemed like there should be a better way. A response isn’t always worth writing a full blog post of my own. But often the thought I have is kinda long for a comment, or it goes off-topic, so it’s not really appropriate for a comment. I could tweet them, but Twitter sucks, and it doesn’t seem like any of the alternatives are ready yet.
So I’m just going to put them here, with links to the article I’m commenting on, along with other thoughts that pop into my head – basically anything that might be worth expanding into an article later. Then I’ll try to remember to publish it at the end of the day. The comments may not make much sense out of context, so if you don’t want to go read the original articles, feel free to skip these. This is borderline experimental.
http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/08/mailvox-archetypal-forked-tongue.html
Next to Shapiro, no one’s been pushed harder on the chans as someone to follow than Peterson. So one day I thought I’d watch a video he did on philosophy that was highly recommended. It didn’t make much sense to me, which is usually a sign that I should check my wallet. I barely know who Jung and Kant are, though, so it’s possible I just wasn’t educated enough to get it. But here’s the thing: neither is that target audience. They aren’t responding to him because he made a profound point about Jungian archetypes, so they’re following him because something he said hit them in the feels.
http://www.unz.com/freed/decline-in-the-fall-or-late-summer-anyway/
I have to disagree with Fred Reed on one point here:
Americans no longer have a shared identity, a common culture to hold them together. In 1950 America was overwhelmingly white, European, and Christian. How deeply one believed was not the point. Christianity was a matrix binding all
It did matter how deeply it was believed. Sure, there were people in 1950 who didn’t really believe and just went along to get along, but they were the minority. When Christianity was no longer believed by the majority, and became just a shared set of cultural norms, it didn’t take long to discard those in favor of individual freedom and diversity. Now even some atheists realize our society would be better off if we all still went to church on Sundays and tried to have kids in wedlock, but you can’t get a population to follow rules like that unless the people believe the religion that sets them.
And Fred probably shouldn’t look too closely at the Catholicism of his adopted culture, lest he see how skin-deep it is too.
On a lighter note, I found this the other day. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s pretty great.