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My Extra Virtues
Quillette today has a piece on “The Nine Intellectual Virtues” for our universities including “temperance, carefulness, respect, patience, charity, humility… docility… thoughtfulness… and courage.”
Which is fine, but I believe, as a believer in the Iselin cult of Real Simple, that we also need to keep things simple and fun. There need to be jokes, like the classic punch-line jokes developed by Jewish comics in the Catskills. And there need to be maxims and aphorisms. That’s why I keep a blog post of “Assorted Opinions, Maxims, and Aphorisms.” For instance, I created this one:
Nietzsche: I philosophize with a hammer. Me: No, Fritzi; you philosophize with the one-liner.
I’m reading a book about Nietzsche and the Germans, and I find that everyone from the “radical right” to all kinds of lefties to even traditional conservatives got something from Nietzsche. Why? Because Nietzsche is fun.
If you are a philosopher, you can philsophize forever writing about Kant and appearances and things-in-themselves. But I have made an aphorism:
We cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances.
I asked Grok about this and, Yay Elon, it replied:
Yes, that’s a concise and accurate summary of one of the most famous (and controversial) claims in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy[.]
And then got more complicated:
Kant argues that human knowledge is fundamentally limited: we can never know things as they are in themselves (Dinge an sich or “things-in-themselves,” also called noumena), but only things as they appear to us (appearances or phenomena).
Did you know that Albert Einstein was reading Kant at age 13? La Wik:
At thirteen, when his range of enthusiasms had broadened to include music and philosophy,[30] Talmud introduced Einstein to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant became his favorite philosopher; according to Talmud, "At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him."[27]
I have maintained for a while that Kant leads directly to relativity, do not pass go, but I had No Idea!
I have also started to wonder about the importance of jokes and humor, and I have decided that jokes and humor are really good as aids to memory. We remember better something that’s a little naughty and clever instead of something that is long-drawn-out and boring. Like those Jewish comics in the Catskills.
Plus, humans need fun and laughter. Life may be a Vale of Tears, but humans also like to laugh and have fun.
Maybe I get all this in my jeans. Because one of my Dad’s sayings was that he had a problem with men that had “absolutely no sense of humour.”
| perm | 02/25/26 2:15 am ET | comments |
Susan Rice Proves Nazi Jurist's Point
If you have been wondering whether Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt is right with his dictum about politics, that:
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
Not forgetting Curtis Yarvin that:
There is no politics without an enemy.
We now have further confirmation of Schmitt’s idea.
Here’s American philosopher Susan Rice, who opined on politics recently.
“If these corporations think that the Democrats, when they come back in power, are gonna, you know, play by the old rules, and say, ‘Oh, never mind, we’ll forgive you for all the people you’ve fired, all the policies and principles you’ve violated, all, you know, the laws you’ve skirted,’ I think they’ve got another thing coming,” Rice said.
Your mission, if you accept it, Madam Ambassador, is to stop treating political opponents as enemies.
Back in 2022 I wrote a piece “Politics and Enemies” about all this. I found that even the Canadian government, eh, needed enemies in the Battle of the Bouncy Castles.
Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists.
Now I think that Susan Rice, although perfectly competent to be an Ambassador to the United Nations and solid member of the regime nomenklatura, is not strategically smart. So she gets all riled up, as she is supposed to, by the regime Narrative, that Trump is an autocrat, and really, Literally Hitler.
See, honey baby chile, the Narrative is for the yokels, not for the noble ones.
She is not smart enough to realize that she is being manipulated. So obviously, corporate bigwigs that “Danced with a Man, Who’s Danced with a Girl, Who’s Danced with the Prince of Wales” — I mean Trump — are gonna be clobbered in the next Democratic administration.
Unless they vote Republican. Again.
We’ve been having fun “noticing” the corruption in Minnesota involving local Democratic politicians and Somali pirates. But that was last week. Now we have the curious case of burning cars in the streets of Jalisco, Mexico, after the arrest of Cartel CEO El Mencho.
Guess what, Susan Rice. We just learned a lesson from Mexico. The real domestic enemies of our regime are not Trump and billionaires and corporations and extreme right armed insurrectionists. They are drug cartels that effectively, we can see in the aftermath of the killing of a drug king pin, operate a state within a state in Mexico. There’s even a word — “Narco-bloqueos” — in Mexico when the cartels block the streets with burning vehicles.
We can see, indeed, that in Mexico there is a lot of dancing with a local politician that dances with a drug lord that dances with the princes of the national government.
And I am sure that the same sort of thing goes on in the US. Because politicians need money to run for office, and guess who has lots of ready money…
Do you see the point, Susan Rice? If the government of Mexico has a problem just keeping the drug cartels down to a dull roar, maybe we all need a politics that just limits itself to dealing with foreign enemies abroad and domestic criminals at home. And nothing else.
“Limited government,” don’tcha know.
If the politicians spend half their time thinking up new ways to spend money then they are not spending that time thinking about how to keep crooks and criminals from driving around the neighborhood telling small businessmen and women: “nice little business you got here. Pity if something should happen to it.”
This is not that hard, Madam Ambassador.
| perm | 02/23/26 11:31 pm ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Without capitalists, socialism would be unaffordable. — Larry Elder
In 1900 poor women worked and rich women were supported by Daddy or Hubby. In 2020 rich women work and poor women are supported by gubmint checks.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The left experienced as a Great Reaction, a lurch back from the modern to the primitive
