To own something is to have the rights (1) to determine exclusively how it is used, (2) to appropriate exclusively any income or other benefits it yields, and (3) to transfer the foregoing rights to others by sale, gift, or bequest. In this light, it is clear that no one owns a culture, and hence no one may legitimately seek state violence for the defense of such asserted property rights.
One may have preferences about culture. One may have affections for or aversions to a culture or particular elements of a culture. But such preferences do not entail any rights of ownership. Moreover, all cultures are constantly changing to a greater or lesser degree by spontaneous, decentralized processes, including interaction with other cultures. Such interaction has always been the case except for the cultures of people completely isolated from the rest of the world.
To treat the arrival of new members of society who live to some degree in accordance with different cultures as if these persons were “invaders” who threaten to destroy one’s culture is simultaneously to evince little faith in the attractiveness and strength of one’s culture and to seek its defense as the enforcement of property rights where no such rights exist.
The nights are getting shorter I don’t know where to go I am getting older And it’s starting to show And ever since I left my mother It’s much harder to know How to make my own life here How to make my own home
I’ll tell you what’s ferocious. Freddie’s comeback to Sid calling him “Freddie Platinum” when they were recording down the hall from each other at London’s Wessex Studios (Queen for News of the World, Pistols for Bollocks).
Sid Vicious made the mistake one day of bursting into Queen’s control room and antagonizing their frontman. “Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses, then?” he sneered. “Oh, yes, Simon Ferocious,” Mercury replied. “We’re trying our best, dear.”
Then, according to Queen biographer Daniel Nester, Freddie rose from his chair and began to playfully flick the safety pins displayed on the front of Sid’s leather jacket. “Tell me,” he asked, “did you arrange these pins just so?” When Sid stepped forward in an attempt to intimidate Freddie, the singer simply pushed him backwards and inquired, “What are you going to do about it?” Sid immediately backed down. [x]
Church: the origination, power and affairs of a Chosen morale authority distinct from the state.
Think of it in term of Sons of Anarchy. A chosen moral authority, a choice to live by that moral order.
Knife: a sharp instrument used for examination and dissection
Take me to church I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death Good God, let me give you my life
Every Sunday’s getting more bleak A fresh poison each week ‘We were born sick,’ you heard them say it My church offers no absolutes She tells me ‘worship in the bedroom’ The only heaven I’ll be sent to Is when I’m alone with you I was born sick, but I love it
“she” as in his current meaningless church or moral code
Taken in that light it is a conflict between two “churches”. It is a mournful plea for meaning that he doesn’t know is missing
The Democrat takeover of the House means ever further setbacks U.S. defense readiness.
Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm chronicled an unusual weather event when several storm fronts combined to create a storm of unimaginable strength.
Years of cuts in defense spending, the atrophying of our forces strained by seventeen years of war, President Trump’s sudden decision to cut Pentagon spending willy-nilly, and the Democrats’ taking control of the House has created a perfect political storm that will batter the Pentagon and enormously damage our national security.
Time and again, President Trump has demanded that the military be rebuilt to be the biggest, baddest actor on the planet. The 2019 Pentagon budget was increased, at Trump’s request, by an amount too small to do more than just begin the effort to repair the damage done by eight years of Obama’s cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And yet, on October 17, Trump announced that the Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2020 would be $700 billion, a reduction of $16 billion from FY 2019, $33 billion less than the planned budget for FY 2020.
Even if the Pentagon were spending money the right way — which it isn’t, as we’ll see in a minute — Trump’s unexpected decision will be severely worsened by the Democrats’ takeover of the House.
On the day before the election I warned that if the Democrats took control of either house of Congress, they’d immediately return to their old ways of slashing the Pentagon’s budget. That prediction is hardly profound: it’s merely a recognition of the Democrats’ ideology and their actions over the last sixty years.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) is slated to become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. The Pentagon — with the support of the White House — was planning to recapitalize our nuclear forces over the next ten years at a cost of perhaps $1 trillion, but Smith wants to cancel that. He’s said that he wants to fundamentally reset our policy on nuclear weapons and that the recapitalization of the nuke forces was too expensive and unnecessary.
He favors another “BRAC” — base realignment and closure — effort to reduce military bases here and abroad. He opposes Trump’s effort to create a U.S. Space Force not because he thinks it’s not needed but because he doesn’t want to spend enough to create one. (On that one, he’s right for the wrong reasons.)
And that
fact is the thing I can’t quite get past. That a decision I made for a
list I put on the internet has impacted a family business and forever
altered its future. That I have changed family dynamics and
relationships. And it could very easily happen again.
I’ve
been asking myself what the other side of this looks like. How do I do
this better? Is there a way to celebrate a place without the possibility
of destroying it? Or is this just what we are now – a horde with a
checklist and a camera phone, intent on self-producing the destruction
of anything left that feels real, one Instagram story at a time?
Clearly,
I don’t have an answer. I understand there are larger forces involving
tourism and technology and society writ large at play here, and I’m not
enough of a hypocrite to turn this into a morality play about the
internet and the consequences of our actions, but maybe if we were all
as kind to each other as Steve Stanich has been to me, we might just
survive this apocalyptic puddle of shit we currently find ourselves in.
There are three fundamental types of people in the world: 1) those who live to make things, fix things, create things, repair things, improve things; 2) those who simply can’t or won’t do any of the preceding; and 3) those who like to control groups 1 and 2. We are running short of the first group. We have a bumper crop of the second and third. As a society, we are in trouble. Civilizations decline when the first group falls below a certain threshold. One gets the feeling that we are near that cutoff.
To paraphrase our late president, “If you like your socialist candidate, you can keep your socialist candidate.” I would end with this warning to all the suburbanites and Millennials out there: if you like things in your life to function, if you like to eat at your local salad bar and not visit an E.R. later that evening, if you like trusting that the landing gear on your flight to Disneyworld will really lock in place when lowered, and if you like to ride Amtrak and not end your ride with your car on its side, then think very, very seriously about not electing that socialist – from the school board to the White House.
CultML 