'Liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate. Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you. And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'
More here.
Memphis Minnie, I'm a Bad Luck Woman, 1936.
Lizzie Douglas (June 3, 1897 – August 6, 1973), known as Memphis Minnie, was a blues guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose recording career lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s. [. . .] She presented herself to the public as being feminine and ladylike, wearing expensive dresses and jewelry, but she was aggressive when she needed to be and was not shy when it came to fighting.[26] According to the blues musician Johnny Shines, "Any men fool with her she'd go for them right away. She didn't take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket knife, pistol, anything she get her hand on she'd use it".[4] (Wikipedia)
Tommy McClennan, Whisky-Headed Woman, 1939. Here is what Canned Heat make of it.
Robert Petway, Catfish Blues, 1941. An influential blues classic. Little is known of the man.
Elmore James, Dust My Broom
Elmore James, It Hurts Me Too
Robert Johnson, Sweet Home Chicago
Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton, et al., Sweet Home Chicago. Looks like a Stratocaster festival. Only Johnny Winter is not playing a Strat.
Slim Harpo, Baby, Scratch My Back
Slim Harpo, Mohair Sam
Here is Epicurus as quoted by Pierre Hadot in a book I highly recommend, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (Blackwell 1995, p. 87):
We must concern ourselves with the healing of our own lives.
He proposes a TETRAPHARMAKOS, a four-fold healing formula:
God presents no fears, death no worries. And while good is readily attainable, evil is readily endurable.
This strikes me as just so much whistling in the dark. How can one be so cocksure that physical death is the annihilation of the self? Shakespeare's Hamlet, in his soliloquy, saw the difficulty:
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause . . . .
And is evil "readily endurable"? See for yourself whether that proposition stands up to a close reading of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago or any other catalog of human horrors.
The Hellenistic systems, the systems of late antiquity (Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism), despite their riches and insights offer us no real solution to the human predicament, a fact of which Augustine was well aware.
Whether or not there is a cure, man cannot be his own doctor.
Not only are we slouching toward Gomorrah, we are sliding toward something like communism. Trump, I fear, is only a temporary brake. Excerpts from an article by Stella Morabito:
Erasure of collective memory. Another crime of radical education reform is its attack on the study of history, civics, and the classics of literature. Today we can see the bitter fruits of such 1960s radical education reform, which has roots going back to 1920s with John Dewey. If we are no longer able to place ourselves and society into the context of historical events, our vision going forward will be blurred at best.
It gets even worse if we don’t learn how our form of government functions. Today fewer and fewer college students have the capacity to understand that the First Amendment serves as a buffer against totalitarianism, not something to be abolished under the pretext of “hate speech.” And depriving students exposure to literary classics like Shakespeare (based on the charge that such works are “Western” and therefore ethnocentric) prevents them from discussing the universal human condition and our common humanity.
Instead, students are increasingly fed grievance studies and identity politics. As universities go this route, it trickles down to K-12 education. As a result, we are losing the social glue of our common traditions and heritage—not just as a nation, but as human beings. This cultivation of ignorance by the education establishment over the years compounds the isolating effect on people. It makes youth especially vulnerable to becoming fodder for power elites.
[ . . .]
Language manipulation. The whole point of the totalitarian abuse of language is to prevent independent thought, the subject of George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” When people accept the abuse of language, and incorporate it into their own vocabularies without thinking about it, they can be easily ventriloquized by power elites.
Victor Klemperer addressed this phenomenon in his book “Language of the Third Reich.” His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis. He writes, “They found it difficult to think about life and morality in any other way. . . .Words are like tiny doses of arsenic, swallowed unnoticed, and then after a while the toxic reaction sets in.”
His thesis was that the Nazi regime’s abuse of language was its primary means of turning all German people into Nazis.Consider all the weaponized memes and slogans we swallow today that shape how we think: “woke,” “bend the knee,” and “cisgender” are just a few. All are meant to modify our thoughts and behaviors in everyday life. An especially aggressive abuse of language are new laws that enforce strange pronoun usages that destabilize the structure of our language. By passing laws that punish the “misgendering” of someone as “hate speech,” we veer into kangaroo court territory, as well as force unnatural changes in our language.
. . . would this world and the people in it be as intellectually stimulating?
Men and women of my stripe love to beat their heads against puzzles, problems, mysteries, and every type of conundrum.
Well, Lord, you have certainly given us fodder for brain-bashing. And if this world is, as your top reps maintain, a divine fiction, one dependent in its Dasein and Sosein moment-by-moment, then I must say you have done a mighty fine job. It seems so bloody real and self-existent as to exclude you as author and itself as just divine text.
If to feel envy is to feel bad when another does well, what should we call the emotion of feeling good when another suffers misfortune? There is no word in English for this as far as I know, but in German it is called Schadenfreude. This word is used in English from time to time, and it is one every educated person should know. It means joy (Freude) at another injuries (Schaden). The great Schopenhauer, somewhere in Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, remarks that while envy (Neid) is human, Schadenfreude is diabolical.
Exactly right. There is something fiendish in feeling positive glee at another’s misery. This is not to imply that envy is not a hateful emotion to be avoided as far as possible. Invidia, after all, is one of the seven deadly sins. From the Latin invidia comes ‘invidious comparison’ which just means an envious comparison.
My translation of the Italian:
To feel envy is human, but to taste joy at the injury of others is diabolical.
From Karl White, esteemed cybernaut:
I found this topic from an online group interesting:
"I tried sharing and discussing my antinatalist beliefs with a Christian Anarchism group I'm a part of. My antinatalism comes directly and exclusively from my Christian faith, and I believe that any Christian who does not become an antinatalist after Bible study on the topic is an inconsistent, divided person. I wasn't met with any hostility. Most understood my stance, but likened my tone to depression (which might be the case).
Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."
Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.
Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.
The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.
Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian-Gnostic. Nietzsche was on to this when he remarked that Christianity is "Platonism for the people." (Beyond Good and Evil, preface) But if the central theme of Christianity is the Incarnation, then this implies a counter-Platonic valorization of this material world of time and change in which men are born and die. God entered this material world as a man, not as a purely spiritual redeemer. Born as a man among men, he valorized birth into a material world for all men. God is one of us, "a slob like one of us" in the words of a '90s song.
"Any Christian who brings life into this world while believing in the existence of hell and our need for salvation is a MONSTER."
I feel the young man's pain, but this is a sentiment that can be reasonably resisted.The Christian idea as I understand it is that by procreating, man participates in the divine creation of souls that have the capacity to share in the unending bliss of the divine life. Apart from the optional doctrine of predestination, souls are free to avoid hell.
Admittedly, my somewhat glib answer leaves us with questions. One is this: if God wanted to manifest his super-eminent glory and goodness, why didn't he create only angels? Why the need for this beautiful but horrifying meat grinder of a world? As Schopenhauer said, "The world is beautiful to behold, but terrible to be (a part of)." And as Kerouac asked, "How can one be clever in a meat grinder?' (Bang on the last link.)
Addendum
I wrote above that Christianity blends motifs that are not obviously compatible. One is Platonic-Plotinian. The other is Jewish-Aristotelian. Brushing with broad strokes we can say the the first motif is other-worldly while the second is this-worldly.
Theses motifs are pretty clearly in tension even if, in the end, they are not contradictory.
We find one indication of this tension in the Thomistic synthesis. Thomas adopts and extends Aristotle's hylomorphic constituent ontology according to which form and matter are not (primary) substances in their own right, but 'factors' or 'principles' invoked in the analysis of primary substances. Socrates, then, is a primary substance composed of substantial form and signate or designated matter (materia signata). But the dude is also alive and conscious. So we have the formula: Anima forma corporis: the soul (life principle) is the form of the body. Soul is to body as form is to matter. This is anti-Platonic. On the Platonic scheme a person is (identically) his soul, and his body is an accidental adjunct. If so, the death of my body is not the death of me. On the Aristotelian scheme, a person is a composite of two 'principles,' soul and body. If so, the death of my body is the death of me. Aristotelian forms are not substances in their own right. They are thus incapable of independent existence, existence apart from the thing of which they are the form.
Thomas adds a strange anti-Aristotelian twist in the case of humans: their souls, without ceasing to be forms, are capable of independent existence after the death of the human bodies of which they are the forms. For this and other reasons there is truth to the quip that Aquinas is an Aristotelian on earth but a Platonist in heaven. Thomas makes this move because he must somehow secure the identity and continuance of souls after death as they await the Resurrection of the body. But then, at least for a time, human souls are substances in their own right.
Despite the horrors of Soviet Communism, the Allied winners of World War II owed a great deal to the Russian people. Russia's male and female soldiers were most responsible for destroying Hitler's vast ground forces, having killed more than two-thirds of the German soldiers lost in the war.
The Soviet Union lost about 27 million soldiers and civilians — about 60 times more than America lost in the war.
Then read this.
Leftists want to strip you of your Constitutional rights. The arguments they employ are worthless when these emotion-driven dopes argue at all. You may think to resist them by exercising your rights. But grave responsibilities attend their exercise.
Know the law. Leftist shysters will surely try to use it against you should you have to shoot in self defense. Get training. Practice regularly. Proficiency with a handgun is the most difficult type of fire arms proficiency to attain.
Much more on this topic in Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
A tough bunch of issues. You figure it out. For me to expatiate further would require doing homework I don’t have time for. No job, no kids, no social commitments, no time!
Related: Free Speech: PragerU sues Google
Stephen Willeford has an answer for you.
The Marxists’ biggest targets have always been the family, religion, and civil society—institutional obstacles to the imposition of the omnipotent state. With the Bolsheviks in power, Lenin set out to destroy them.
Sounds like the Democrat Party program.
Obama did his damndest to undermine civil society. Luckily, he's history and his would-be leftist successor, Felonia von Pantsuit (HT: Kurt Schlichter) has been sent packing on her broom.
I now hand off to myself. If you study the following posts you will get some idea of what civil society is and why it is important:
