Home » Open thread 5/28/22

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Open thread 5/28/22 — 22 Comments

  1. I’d like to see a video about the care of all those items of clothing– I’d think that washing the shifts, skirts, and petticoats alone would be hard work and time-consuming (and not done very often), not to mention keeping the stockings and shoes in good repair.

    To add to what expat said: I’m grateful for easy-care uncomplicated cotton garments, not to mention washing machines and dryers.

  2. The era from 1906 to 1966 was a time when high school students would often take weapons to school, they participated in marksmanship classes, and many students had rifle racks in their cars furnished with rifles used for hunting.

    How many mass school shootings do you think there were in the U.S. between, 1906 and 1966?

    20, 30, 40?

    Just three.

    While there were shootings in high schools during these years, it was usually a shooting where there was one victim and occasionally a couple of them.

    It wasn’t until the mid 1960s that such mass shootings started to become more and more common. *

    What happened? **

    See https://www.based-politics.com/2022/05/28/school-shootings-heres-why-guns-arent-the-root-cause/

    From the discussion below this article on Instapundit.com–

    “I’m not about to fall into the trap of pretending the past was somehow better simply because it was the past. I recognize that things weren’t necessarily better back then. However, it’s ridiculous to believe that nothing has changed, either.

    What was the rare exception back in my day is now an all-too-common occurrence, despite the fact that we had more ready access to firearms at schools back then. It seems that something else has happened, something that has fundamentally changed how people think and act. Clearly, it’s not just the mere presence of guns in American life that’s driving our modern problem. We had guns before we had this sickness.

    Lawmakers and activists would do well to try and get to the bottom of this deeper rot, rather than blaming firearms. Then we might actually be able to make a meaningful reduction in these horrific atrocities.”

    “As Christian Adams wrote in 2018: Flashback 30 Years: Guns Were in Schools… and Nothing Happened.”

    “What changed? The mainstreaming of nihilism. Cultural decay. Chemicals. The deliberate destruction of moral backstops in the culture. A lost commonality of shared societal pressures to enforce right and wrong. And above all, simple, pure, evil.

    Before you retort that we can’t account for the mentally ill, they existed forever.
    Paranoid schizophrenics existed in 1888 and 2018. Mentally ill students weren’t showing up in schools with guns even three decades ago.

    So it must be something else.

    Those who have been so busy destroying the moral backstops in our culture won’t want to have this conversation. They’ll do what they do — mock the truth.

    There was a time in America, before the Snowflakes, when any adult on the block could reprimand a neighborhood kid who was out of line without fear.

    Even thirty years ago, the culture still had invisible restraints developed over centuries. Those restraints, those leveling commonalities, were the target of a half-century of attack by the freewheeling counterculture that has now become the dominant replacement culture.

    Hollywood made fun of these restraints in films too numerous to list.

    The sixties mantra “don’t trust anyone over thirty” has become a billion-dollar industry devoted to the child always being right — a sometimes deeply medicated brat who disrupts the classroom or escapes what used to be resolved with a paddling.

    Instead of telling the kid to quit kicking the back of the seat on a plane, we buy seat guards to protect the seat.

    If you think it’s bad now, just wait until the generation whose babysitter is an iPhone is in high school. You can hardly walk around Walmart these days without tripping over a toddler in a trance, staring at a screen.

    The high school kids who shot rifles in school in 1985 were taught right and wrong. They were taught what to do with their rifle in school, and what not to do. If they got out of line, all the other students and the coach would have come down on them hard. There were no safe spaces, and that was a good thing.

    Flash-forward to today: Please don’t judge him, he had his reasons, says mother of Texas school shooter.

    As a wise woman once wrote,  “It is the fear best expressed in the precept, ‘Judge not, that ye not be judged.’ But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.””

    *For stats see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000)

  3. Snow on Pine says it very correctly.
    Leftism with its atheism, its oppo to any authority other than itself, the degeneration of mandatory in-patient confinement for the mentally gravely ill, and the worship of youth over the older (and wiser) crowd, the right of psychotics and in-jail felons to vote, and the legalization of perverse sexualities based on the phony right of children to choose, all add up to a snowballing disaster that will destroy the America intended by the Constitution.

  4. Snow on Pine:

    And there have been 13 mass school shootings between 1966 and now. See this as well as this. That includes Uvalde. It certainly represents more than the three you state for the first part of the 20th Century, but I think it’s a much smaller total than most people would estimate. Of course, even one is too many.

    There have, however, been school shootings not defined as “mass” shootings, and there were quite a few prior to 1966 as well. See this.

  5. Add to Snow on Pine’s summary the War on Boys. To “empower” girls we’ve moved a long way towards destroying the image of the manly, good man. And the other addition ought to be social media, which is a societal plague. It allows people to live in a virtual world which is unreal and ugly.

  6. “…the War on Boys.”
    Yes. If women can do anything men can, then men are superfluous.

    Also, the glorification of “single mothers” and the abandonment of social disapproval for having babies out of wedlock.

  7. I find this excerpt from ‘History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson
    by Henry Adams
    The First Administration of Thomas Jefferson, Part I, Chapter 1’ regarding the conditions in 1800 United States to be informative

    “The man who in the year 1800 ventured to hope for a new era in the coming century, could lay his hand on no statistics that silenced doubt. The machinery of production showed no radical difference from that familiar to ages long past. The Saxon farmer of the eighth century enjoyed most of the comforts known to Saxon farmers in the eighteenth. The eorls and ceorls of Offa and Ecgbert could not read or write, and did not receive a weekly newspaper with such information as newspapers in that age could supply; yet neither their houses, their clothing, their food and drink, their agricultural tools and methods, their stock, nor their habits were so greatly altered or improved by time that they would have found much difficulty in accommodating their lives to that of their descendants in the eighteenth century. In this respect America was backward. Fifty or a hundred miles inland more than half the houses were log-cabins, which might or might not enjoy the luxury of a glass window. Throughout the South and West houses showed little attempt at luxury; but even in New England the ordinary farmhouse was hardly so well built, so spacious, or so warm as that of a well-to-do contemporary of Charlemagne. The cloth which the farmer’s family wore was still homespun. The hats were manufactured by the village hatter; the clothes were cut and made at home; the shirts, socks, and nearly every other article of dress were also home-made. Hence came a marked air of rusticity which distinguished country from town,—awkward shapes of hat, coat, and trousers, which gave to the Yankee caricature those typical traits that soon disappeared almost as completely as coats of mail and steel head-pieces. The plough was rude and clumsy; the sickle as old as Tubal Cain, and even the cradle not in general use; the flail was unchanged since the Aryan exodus; in Virginia, grain was still commonly trodden out by horses. ”
    https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_During_the_Administrations_of_Thomas_Jefferson_(wikilinked)/First/I:1

    It does strike me, that 50 elapsed years, so 1972-today. Hmm.

  8. While we’re at it, a third conviction in the conspiracy to murder the late Prof. Daniel Markel of Florida State’s law faculty.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/livestream-viewers-react-to-katherine-magbanua-verdict-with-cheers-empathy-and-bohemian-rhapsody/ar-AAXODYS

    Note, law enforcement assembled the salient evidence against these characters over a 22 month period running from July 2014 to May 2016. Florida’s hopeless court system has taken six years to win these convictions, and that’s when one of the three pled guilty and testified for the state. They’ve now arrested and jailed the most tainted member of the Adelson family. The activities of Rivera, Garcia, and Magbanua make no sense absent a commission from the Adelson family.

    Prof. Markel’s children have not seen their paternal-side grandparents in six years and their mother had the audacity to apply (successfully) to a Florida state court to have them stripped of their family name and replaced with hers, as if she’d generated those boys through parthenogenesis. Had there been any justice, they’d have been pried away from their mother in 2016 and dispatched to the care of their aunt and grandparents in Toronto. God only knows what lies they’ve been fed in the last eight years.

  9. I read georgianna, amanda foreman’s very engaging tale of a major figure from that era, the duchess of devonshire, this is who the film the duchess is based on but I thought kiera knightley, was terribly miscast, hailey atwell, who played a somewhat minor character, should have been the lead,

  10. Maybe part of the reason that there have been more frequent school shootings since 1966 is that there are so many more people in the United States: about 332 million now, as opposed to about 196 million in 1966 and about 80 million in 1903.

    Often we’ll hear that other countries don’t have as many shootings. The UK is a favorite choice for this gambit. For comparison, the total population of the UK today is 68 million.

    Comparing the number of crimes in two countries without looking at the difference in the size of the population is meaningless.

  11. Snow on Pine – great comment, especially “There were no safe spaces, and that was a good thing.”

    JK Brown: also an interesting extract. But it fails to emphasize as much as it might the level of literacy in the 1700’s and how that aided communication via printed papers, etc. across the hundreds of miles separating the colonies. The European printing presses of 1450 and later assisted in spreading the Reformation and knowledge of canon law or other legal theories. But it also was one example of a machine, wherein the ability to machine metals and build other machines to make machines was progressing (sorry to have to use that word) from the mid 1700’s onward. Thus Hamilton’s emphasis in 1791 on commerce and manufacture as the best source of wealth and prosperity in the new nation was not so much prescience as almost obviously on the horizon. Jefferson resisted this idea for a while but later came to accept it.

    Thus the ability to create and distribute information was a core contribution from the 1700’s leading to the American Revolution and the prominence of America in the 1800’s. The time gap between 1770 and 1820 in the video does not show how machinery and replaceable parts would have reduced the cost and increased the availability (and quality?) of the “two” lady’s different clothing options.

  12. Hello. I’ve found myself getting into the Dvo?ák symphonies lately. It’s an interesting departure from my usual Beethoven, Brahms or Renaissance lute selections. I thought about these because Dvo?ák spent some time in Iowa once and, having been briefly to Carlsbad in CZ a long time ago, I remember seeing the statue of him there. (That thought in turn got me looking up local hotel prices; it looks like one could have a very nice stay there for not very much money. It is a spa town, after all.)

    I’ve been getting a bit of a travel bug. Daydreaming at work about trips to Crete, Malta… looking up ferries…

  13. And from the “What-the-heck-let’s-just-print-another-several-billion-dollars-worth” File….
    “IRS squanders nearly $1B in erroneous pandemic credits, won’t try to recoup: Treasury watchdog;
    “Despite 6% budget increase, expected addition of 10,000 agents, IRS claims it can’t spare resources to recover $600M in bungled payments.”—
    https://justthenews.com/accountability/watchdogs/sunirs-burns-nearly-1b-erroneous-pandemic-credits-wont-try-recoup-treasury

    “…can’t spare resources…”??
    Or…
    “…can’t be bothered to spare resources…”??

    (IOW “…don’t wanna spare resources…”)

  14. Say what you will about how stodgy, rigid, and confining the pretty conservative morality, mind-set, and expectations for behavior common throughout our society in, say, the time period between 1900 through the early 1960s made things, it wasn’t the transmogrified, distorted, crazy, repugnant, violent mess that the ideas of the Left have created our present time to be.

    And it is has been that Leftist loosening and destruction of standards–quite often turning them on their heads–this Leftist transmogrification which has set up the conditions that promote and make possible a myriad of horrific developments, including the kinds of mass shootings that are increasingly common today.

    Yeah, today’s culture is freewheeling all right, but look at the cost.

  15. https://jonathanturley.org/2022/05/30/the-markel-murder-the-killing-of-fsu-law-professor-takes-sudden-turn-with-arrest-of-ex-brother-in-law-and-conviction-of-his-alleged-accomplice/#more-189324

    Jonathan Turley provides a brief summary of the state of play in the Markel murder case. The problem in re the Adelson family is that they are not a corporation you can put on trial. The culpability of each member must be assessed, and who did what is murky. What we know with fair certainty is that person(s) in that family commissioned the murder of Prof. Markel and that anyone not implicated in that is implicated in hindering the prosecution of the others.

  16. Preach it, brothers! Yeah, preach it!
    “President Biden’s political prisoners;
    “There is a despotic trend in America whenever Democrats are in government. Many leading Democrats and their enforcers reflexively see US citizens primarily as a threat.”—
    https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328439
    “Dennis Prager: Joe Biden’s Buffalo speech was the speech of an indecent man”—
    https://www.bizpacreview.com/2022/05/24/dennis-prager-joe-bidens-buffalo-speech-was-the-speech-of-an-indecent-man-1241866/
    “HE ISN’T MISSING; HE’S SIDING WITH THE REGIME: Biden missing in action as Iranians protest regime and declare ‘America is not the enemy.’”—
    https://instapundit.com/522827/

    …and on, and on, and on it goes…and when it stops—if it stops…

  17. AesopFan–

    I have been a fan and reader of Science Fiction for more than six decades now, and SF has given me many an hour of relaxation and pleasure, and broadened my horizons, as I plunged into and moved through “the land of make believe”–through many different Realities and worlds, encountering strange, wonderful, and sometimes terrifying beings and ideas, and all sorts of “what if” scenarios.

    However, it is one thing to enter into what you believe to be merely “entertainment,” to encounter the worlds and situations, the beings and civilizations which you believe to be some writer’s “flights of fancy”; the product of his or her imagination.

    But, it is quite another thing altogether to come to the slowly dawning conclusion and realization that some of what you had thought to be Fantasy is, in fact, the shape and substance of the actual Reality you are living in, and you then have to try to come to grips with this new knowledge, and to “reframe” everything you thought you knew and believed.

    You are now “outside the wire,” and in unknown, uncharted, and very likely dangerous territory.

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