We Need More Studies!

Not just the amount of time, but what sort of screen time: video games, or using social media? Posting selfies?

Thread:
1. I join emerging consensus that “screen time” is not well-linked to mental health problems for teens. Yet @jean_twenge and I find that most studies that clear “screen time” do not clear social media for girls. Great summary by Markham Heid:
https://t.co/S91U3tmgbv

— Jonathan Haidt (@JonHaidt) May 3, 2020

The Last Narc

Edit. I don't know why the Amazon youtube channel took its video for the trailer down. Here's an alternative.

Tony Blauer & Dom Raso - High Gear / ADAPTIV

From almost 4 years ago:



High Gear ADAPTIV Suit

Socons at Work

The arguments in the essay are probably ok. But tweeting a link to an old and politically irrelevant essay?

It must be nice to have financial security like that at a think tank or an academic institution and not have to worry about real survival. "But financial security allows me to speak the truth about important issues." Sure.

The Fall of Fertility: How Redefining Marriage Will Further Declining Birthrates in the United States https://t.co/sp8D5jjpHj

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) May 10, 2020

"Step Up to the Firing Line"

or be left behind with the women.

Seriously, all these academics, "conservative" or "integralist" or whatever label they prefer... show us how much you care about republican virtue, political liberty, the common good... all of this talk is meaningless if you don't have skin in the game, when you are living under the protection of your employer, sheltered from unemployment because you have tenure or some other form of financial security thanks to your employer.

Model 1 Tomahawk

Black, Coyote Brown, OD Green

Related:


Another knife made for holding it through a fist.

Skin in the Game

2018 Google Talk:

The State Above All

Because "patriotism."

The Future of Catholic Philosophy/Academia?

A panel discussion with Elizabeth C. Shaw, Mark Spencer, and chaired by Robert McNamara.

Representing Aristotelianism, Thomism, and Phenomenology (Edith Stein).


Part of the problem is due to the format -- less than 40 minutes, divided up among 3 speakers of 3 different traditions, meant to complement each other and provide the foundation for the next speaker. Instead, we end up with no single account that is developed satisfactorily.

I didn't bother to take notes. Off the top of my head:

1. The Aristotelian presentation focused on the mean and that it is relative to us. A good point but she didn't go any further because of time constraints.

2. Re: the Thomistic presentation. He jumped to a metaphysical account of sex differences, without looking at the physical or biological account execept superficially, was a mistake.

3. (2) Reminds me that the Aristotelian categories of being needs to be reconsidered in light of everything that has been discovered since then about natural substances of all degrees of complexity.

4. The account of the relation of soul to body as form to matter is wrong. While the proposition that biological sex is rooted in matter (taken from Aquinas), this does not mean that sex is not related to form. It depends on how one understands the relation of matter to form, and I have to say again that natural philosophy, physike, has been neglected by Catholic academic philosophers for too long.

5. The Phenomenological presentation: Virtues are the same for men and women but they are colored for men and women (or perceived? to be different). But why resort to univocal naming when analogous naming is possible? As for a sort of unitary quality, manliness or womanliness, well I would prefer to use those words to talk about subrational or corational differences.

Jockeying to Be AMOG

in the guise of an academic debate about the Constitution and republican government.

I am not going to write much here about the essay. Latin integralists should be criticized; but should they be criticized based on the historical association of integralists with political movements deemed unsavory? At least he doesn't call them Naz1s! One of his criticisms of the Latin integralists is that they are young men who haven't grown up in institutions that would have enabled them to acquire republican virtue. He offers the Roman Catholic parish as an example of such an institution, and was mocked by Latin integralists for doing so. I can't disagree with them on that score, and find it difficult to believe that he has more "republican virtue" than the Latin integralists, nor does he have that status with which he can lecture Latin integralists. He isn't young, but he is barely middle-aged, and not a senior, and while some of the followers of Latin integralists are young, the prominent advocates are not. If he is going to "save" the young ones, what does he have to offer than parish life for them?

Arguably, republican virtue started to die out after 1865. And it is unlikely that any of these intellectuals will do the things that real American republicans would say are necessary, instead of some sort of LARPing through academia or the internet or social media.

Want to do something that is politically relevant and may even be necessary for the future? Get in shape, G&G up, and train. How many of these "conservatives" or "integralissts" are going to do that? In that respect, various prepper groups are way ahead in the game, and they don't need to preach about republican virtue as they are living it.

A Strawman and a Scotsman Walk into the Café de Flore by James M. Patterson

The critical alliances that integralists struck with fascists during the interwar years has had a considerable influence on neo-integralists from L. Brent Bozell’s Triumph to the present. https://t.co/DBeJeRiMBZ

— Law & Liberty (@LawLiberty) May 11, 2020

God Bless Him.

This is real republican virtue.

I think his understanding of the Constitution as supreme is wrong, but he is following his conscience and believes it is part of his duty to protect the liberty of the people.

ZeroHedge: Seattle Cop Prepares To Be Fired After Refusing To Remove Viral Video Reminding Officers Not To Obey 'Tyrannical Orders'

View this post on Instagram

I’ve received tons of questions regarding my termination from the Port of Seattle Police. So I figured I should explain. I have been placed on administrative leave (still being paid) pending investigation. I was told by both the agency and my union that this will result in termination due to it being an insubordination charge for refusing to take down the video. I’m not sure what the timeline looks like. I walk un-intimidated into the fray. Thank you for all the support🙏🏻 #police #liberty #constitution #quarantine @unclesamsmisguidedchildren @eddiebravo10p @cameronrhanes @granderson33

A post shared by Greg Anderson (@granderson33) on May 11, 2020 at 6:15am PDT

Herman: Port of Seattle cop reminded officers to respect the Bill of Rights — now his bosses want him fired By Todd Herman
Seattle Times
KIRO7

Inside the Blue Line

website

History by a Liberal Democrat

Who is a stooge of the oligarchs. She may be a liberal ideologue, but she serves at the pleasure of those who have even more power than the power she wields in academia.

OUP: Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Régime to the Present Day by Sheri Berman

Journal of Democracy





A review: The Making and Unmaking of European Democracy by Samuel Gregg (Acton Blog)

It seem that she has an incomplete picture of the rise of bureaucracy and other instruments of the centralization of power that enabled the rise of the state, even before the regime of the state changed to "democracy," but really, "oligarchy" is the more appropriate term.

What was central to the ancien régime—and Berman demonstrates this convincingly—was the confirmation or granting of legal privileges to particular groups, most notably the nobility and clergy, by European rulers. This sanctioning of legal privileges (such as noble and clerical exemption from taxation or giving the aristocracy a formal monopoly of appointments to the officer corps and the civil service) was an effective way for monarchs to gain such groups’ acquiescence in, and even support for, the ruler’s centralization of power.

Who are the oligarchs who facilitated the rise of "democracy"? Should we be looking at the usual suspects, the mercantile and entrepreneurial class, lawyers, and so on? After all, we are not talking about individuals but families and extended networks or alliances seeking to promote their private good in the name of the "people."

Samuel Gregg, liberal, is like Sheri Berman, another liberal, though they may have different beliefs about individual morality. (I don't doubt that Berman is some form of feminist.) Both of them believe in the illusion that is "liberal democracy" which is actually oligarchy, just as Gregg cucks for "free markets."

But They Are the Ones Who Are Having Babies

Maybe the progs are thinking of demographic replacement followed by ideological indoctrination of the newcomers will tip the balance in their favor.

What happened to "dialogue" and "encountering the other" for these progs? Just accuse them of heresy and be done with it.

Grace on the Margins: The trope that the future of the church can be found among young, conservative Christians has reared its hackneyed head again. https://t.co/N8TEWFLNhV

— NCR (@NCRonline) May 12, 2020

Edit.
Rod Dreher: Yale-Educated Lesbian Catholic: ‘Ewww! Weirdos!’

Sellier & Bellot Subsonic Ammunition

LTC Frank Bourne

Is That Just a Bag?

More:

More US-Made Masks

Joseon Fist 조선주먹

Hancinema

Liberal Republicanism

A subversion of a good regime with bad assumptions about society. Yankee personal background? Or just his intellectual background?

Republican Liberty and the Failure of Substantive Due Process by James R. Rogers

Republican liberty means that people are not subjected to the arbitrary will of another, which is slavery. Hence, the repeated identification by the American colonists of the abuses of British rule with an intent to reduce Americans to the status of slaves. The argument wasn’t that Americans asserted the British designed to make chattel slaves of Americans. Rather, the Americans argued that if the principle be granted allowing for arbitrary governance, then they had conceded the critical principle distinguishing freemen from slaves, and there was no logical stopping point between their state and the state of abject slavery.

If citizens are subjected to the will of some who are not accountable to them, how is that republicanism? This is a very poor definition of liberty, if that is all there is to it. Liberty means not being ruled by another, first of all by a foreign power, and second, by a domestic power which has no just claim to authority. As for the will being the principle under consideration, rather than order or reason, I don't know if the author is being sloppy or deliberate in espousing some form of voluntarism. Slaves are subject to the rule of another, it may be just or it may be unjust, and whether it is to be judged arbitrary or not depends on whether the good of the one ruled is considered or not. (I am not going to explain here how the good of the slave is to be taken into account and what protections slaves should have from their masters, except to say that there are standards of justice prohibiting masters from harming their slaves unjustly.)

Chivalry and Courtly Love

Too bad Dalrock's blog is not still active -- he could have posted this link.

Imaginative Conservative: Chaucer & the Heresy of Courtly Love by Mitchell Kalpakgian

Martin van Creveld Traces a Scenario

Impossible?

Should it occur to anyone to start curbing the excesses of feminism in earnest, then obviously the most important step will be to deprive women of the right to vote. In itself, doing so ought not to be too difficult. In most modern countries, feeding in the right computer program and pressing a few buttons would suffice to do the job. No longer will my wife and I receive our Israeli, blue and white, voting cards in tandem. Instead of pinning two cards to the fridge as, in the past year, we have done no fewer than three times, I shall do so only with one. To prevent disenfranchised women from disrupting the voting process, as some of them regularly did at the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps a few of the noisiest ones should be placed under protective custody for a couple of days. Having each polling station watched by a policeman or two would not present a problem either.

The real problem is a different one. In ancient Greece, women’s rights and democracy were entirely separate. Neither in Athens nor in any other city were women allowed either to vote or to hold public office. To the extent that it was democratic, as in some respects it was, the same applied to republican Rome. Not so in the modern world. In it, right from the beginning the demand for women’s enfranchisement has been riding piggyback on democracy. When Congress issued the Declaration of Independence Abigail Adams, wife of president to-be John Adams, complained that it mentioned men but not women. As the French Revolution broke out more than one woman insisted that the newly-adopted rights of men should be extended to women too. The best-known one was no other than Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792). Another, Olympe de Gouges, was actually executed; though less for denouncing the “despotic” rule of men over women than for advocating a return of the monarchy. Not accidentally did John Stuart Mill, the most ardent male feminist of all time, publish The Subjection of Women in 1869, the year that marked a vast extension of the British electorate. To this day it is almost exclusively democratic countries that pay attention to women’s rights. Neither Putin, nor Xi, nor Khamenei, nor Kim Jong-un seems to be very interested in them. Nor, since they do not put great store on attracting female voters, or any voters for that matter, is there any reason why they should.

Anglo-American feminism was bad from the get go; first-wave feminism is irredeemable.

Derrick Jensen

The Real John McCain

Neil Kumar, America Astray, Part 1 : 

After the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu, the Vietnamese ransomed their French POWs; the French government paid the price, and their men were returned. Schanberg’s sources revealed that after the American withdrawal, the Vietnamese made the same demand; though President Nixon assented to a $3.25 billion payment and 591 prisoners were released in 1973, including John McCain, Congress refused to authorize the “humanitarian assistance” funds because of the shattered maxim that “America doesn’t lose wars.” As the years dragged on and nothing was done, the existence of the POWs became nothing but a political liability to be hidden at all costs. As such, the American public was kept in the dark, our POWs condemned to a lingering death.

According to Schanberg, “there exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that ‘men were left behind.’” Schanberg believed that the number was “probably hundreds.”

Schanberg discovered that throughout his Senate tenure, McCain worked tirelessly to hide this information by codifying prohibitions to keep POW documents classified. Presenting himself to the public as a champion of veterans and our most famous POW, McCain instead behaved as the opposite. In 1991, veteran and family pressure resulted in the creation of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, chaired by John Kerry, although McCain was the most important figure on the committee. McCain was not alone, though; every Administration since Nixon’s was complicit in the tragedy. Schanberg concluded that the Senate committee, though publicly pledging to finally get to the bottom of the issue, privately colluded with the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Future Vice President Dick Cheney and future Secretary of Defense Robert Gates led the respective organizations at the time.

Lord have mercy.

Yes, Sir

The American Federation of Republics Oligarchy

Clyde Wilson, The Way We Are Now:

Want to understand who the real rulers are in our “American democracy”? It has little to do with elections or with the politicians on television. The real rulers may be identified as those who get the most benefit from the government and almost always get their way. (Or, to put it another way, the real rulers are those with enough money to buy Congresspersons.) Take the recent epidemic relief bill, passed unanimously by Congress and both parties: $2 billion to be dispersed for temporary relief to the people, most of whom will never recover from months of lost work. $8 billion for the Banksters, who allegedly are necessary for our prosperity and are Too Big to Jail. The 1% will get ever richer and have even more control over the wealth of American society. This has been “American democracy” since Lincoln. But there are no longer enough real citizens around to notice and most don’t care as long as they are reasonably prosperous. In hard times they turn to their real rulers for relief.