Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 63

Perfection- Part 2 – Improving the Herd

At some point someone on our side was maintaining that it’s silly to claim Nazis were leftist, because their approach to governance was more traditional and not at all like the Communists.

Me? I say it’s stupid to call something derived from Marxism, and that called itself socialism “right wing” — in the American sense — though the terms right and left are both inadequate for the battles taking place now. I also say that there is nothing more “traditional” than the end result of communism...

The Peasants are Revolting by BGE

The Peasants are Revolting by BGE

Those of us that get our news from the mainstream media may not know that working class people, mostly farmers and truckers, throughout Europe have been protesting the removal of fuel and other subsidies.  It started with protests in Germany where trucks and tractors blocked the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and has spread to (at least) France, Portugal, and Belgium.  It’s hard for me to have too much sympathy for subsidy hogs, but the reasoning, such as it ...

Perfection- Part 1- Inside out

Humans always strive for perfection. It’s something in us. We can conceptualize perfection. We also know when and how we fall short, and in what myriad ways we fail.

To an extent striving for perfection in the individual is fine. To an extent, even, it is a — not unique but the degree of application is unique — part of the American character. When I first came to the US as an exchange student, I was startled at the EXISTENCE of a self-help shelf. Things on how to cope with brokenness, how...

Death Or Ice Cream – A Blast From The Past from August 2012

This is not a post about writing, but it is a post about reading – or a post about fiction and reality, humanity and myth.

There is a way in which fiction forms our mind.  Shakespeare has, after all, been accused of inventing modern men with modern emotions.  Then, through the immense popularity of is plays, these character types, these ways to react to things… spread.

This is possible, though I don’t think it’s true, which is good because if it were it would make a very bad case again...

Black Swan

The first time I heard of deer-blinds — in this case a platform, up on a tree — it was of someone — a kid of 12 — dying because he’d been so still so long that a blood clot, formed from his position against the side, migrating to his heart and killing him.

Metaphorically speaking, I’m that kid, atop that duck blind. Only I’m waiting for the black swan to erupt.

Which is both insane and counterproductive. My watching for it or not won’t make the black swan erupt.

By definition a bla...

Good And Evil

This week our church bulletin had an added feature, and I’m going to bet our pastor, a working class boy, got it pushed on him and he thought “Oh, why not” and didn’t look too closely at it.

Because the church hasn’t given a hint of “praying for cease fire” or anything of the kind. if they had, I’d have left so fast it left a hole in the air. But this amid fairly innocuous questions and answers had a question about what was licit to achieve a good end. And amid a bunch of self-obvious exa...

A Rabble in Memes

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Small, Private Tragedies

I’ve been looking for a way to write about the small private tragedies, for which we each blame ourselves, but which are in fact part of a system that more and more militates against humanity and — in our place, in our time — particularly against young people, and even more particularly against young males.

And then I was reading Francis’ Turner’s Post yesterday and this jumped out at me:

And this has of course had all sorts of bad effects. As the Forbes article he linked to points ou...

DIEing in Nice Red Tape by Francis Turner

DIEing in Nice Red Tape by Francis TurnerIn which I partly agree with David Brooks and Mark Edmundson

Thanks to Stuart Schneiderman1, my attention was drawn to this NY Slimes column by David Brooks (it’s an archive link) in which he points out that there are a lot of bureaucrats in government and business and they seem to mostly subtract value rather than add it.

Brooks in turn links to an article by Mark Edmundson, a professor at the University of Virginia. In that article, wh...

We’re Still Standing

The bad news is that we’re an occupied country. I’ve said that for a long time. The country itself is all right. It’s the structures of power.

Someone on American Greatness not only agrees with me, but traces it to exactly the inflection point:

Since 1933 and the rise to prominence of FDR, America has been an occupied country, governed by a ruling class that hates the nation’s older way of life and wants to see America on the side of the global revolutionary Left. This is why FDR’s ad...