Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
The great banker-journalist Walter Bagehot said it well almost 150 years ago:
History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.
Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences…
:
I think there is a certain worldview that comes from violent experience. It’s something like…manhood. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest badass to be a man, but you have to be willing to throw down when the time is right.A man who has been in a fight or played violent sports has experienced more of life and manhood than a man who hasn’t. Fisticuffs, wrestling matches, knife fights, violent sport, duels with baseball bats, facing down guns, or getting crushed in the football field—men who have had these experiences are different from men who have not. Men who have trained for or experienced such encounters know about bravery and mental fortitude from firsthand experience. Men who have been tested physically know that inequality is a physical fact. Men who know how to deal out violence know that radical feminism’s tenets — that women and men are equal — are a lie.
Well: Not so sure about that last one. Or, let us say this: It may be a lie that women are the same as men, but it is not so much an untruth as it used to be, just a few short years ago, that men are the same as women. That one is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
By way of Gerard, again.
The rest of us rings true, though. I’ve been noticing for awhile, now, it seems there is one skill being gradually replaced by another. The older skill was made possible by weighing of consequences: How are you going to be building this bridge? Now, how are you going to be building it, knowing you will be among the people driving on it. It involves a certain way of thinking.
The newer skill is described in Thing I Know #435. I ain’t got it, or much of it, anyway…
I notice there is an ability some people have and some people do not have. We might think of it as the ability to comprehend definitions that have provide no objectively discerned meaning, applying interpretations that require the human element. Is this room tastefully decorated, is that joke funny, is it fun to watch that person give a speech. In our time, this ability is generally mutually exclusive from the ability to perceive truth. It isn’t hard to demonstrate: Was so-and-so only kidding when he said such-and-such. We see people heckled, ridiculed, scolded, for failing to “get the irony” or for having taken something too literally. The danger involved in diagnosing learning disabilities in, and prescribing medication for, these people is that it sidelines most of the people who might have the ability to get something useful built. An irony-genius, or denizen of a relative-reality universe, isn’t in a good position to build anything involving any level of complexity because you have to perceive hard, concrete, cause-and-effect relationships to do things like that.
Locklin closes with:
Teddy Roosevelt, my ideal President, kept a lion and a bear as pets in the White House and took his daily exercise doing jiu-jitsu and boxing. He even lost vision in an eye in a friendly boxing match while he was president. Our last three glorious leaders are men who kept fluffy dogs and went jogging…
:
I’m no great shakes: I’m a shrimpy egghead in a suit who thinks about math all day. I don’t train for fighting anymore, and my experiences with violence are fairly limited. Nonetheless, I judge people on these sorts of things. When I first meet a man, I don’t care what kind of sheepskins or awards he has on his walls. I don’t care if he is liberal or conservative. I want to know if they have my back in a fight. That’s really the only thing that matters.
I sit behind a desk and write code. I’m surrounded on all sides by Sergeants and Lieutenants and Warrant Officers and Majors and Colonels who dress in fatigues, and have to pass the Army’s PT. They’re not muscle-heads by any means, but at least they have a regimen, their bodies have to be up to code.
Mine, looks like I’ve been writing code.
But, there is a cycle taking place here. You do it wrong, the results suck, you show some certain level of humility and say “Those results, they stink on ice, I don’t like those.” Then you look for something under your control that you can change — which is an acknowledgment that that first go-round, you did something differently than the way you should have done it. Or, you did something you shouldn’t have done at all. Or, didn’t do something you should’ve.
Then, you get better results. Or not, which means you need to work on your skills figuring out what’s wrong, because now you’ve messed up the execution twice, and the post-mortem phase once.
What these girly-men who think in this “new” way all have in common is, they somehow can’t, or won’t, complete that cycle. The hundredth time they try something, their attempt will be indistinguishable from the first time they try something. They won’t, and maybe can’t, learn. They fail at that brand of personal improvement that relies on admitting that improvement is needed, or possible.
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Even these days, when my biggest confrontation seems to be crossword puzzles, I can recognize when I’m stuck in obviously “wrong thinking”.
- CaptDMO | 09/28/2014 @ 08:28Only putting such conflicts aside, doing ANYTHING else (I ALWAYS seem to have a list of other “pencil boy’s” fires to put out. ) and resuming without the previous “crap” stuck in my head, seems to let me go “Gee”, and subsequently CRUSH the challenge put fourth by the constructor.
Oooooohh yeah, I done been punched in the face a few times in my youth. Including by some *ahem* “girls”. I “blame” my own choice of circumstance.
I USED to hang with a dangerous crowd. I STILL “sport” dirty fingernails, own fast cars, and LEATHER uh…moccasins…., but WITHOUT TASSLES!!!!!!!!!
Those experiences do change you. Not permanently though. You can still relearn bad habits. For example, one such experience drove me away from the bottle for years. I associated the smell of Southern Comfort with the smell of brains, blood, dead bodies and excrement blended on a hot pavement. This was only a few days after narrowly missing being killed by a crashing B-52.
- P_Ang | 09/29/2014 @ 14:52I’m older now, and much fatter. I have a couple ruptured disks. I’ve gone back to the occasional sip of whiskey. Not habits that are beneficial. My friend wanted me to show him some hand-to-hand combat moves the other day. I felt like a nine-year old showing a bully his slow-motion moves he learned in his first fifteen minute class.
Yet, there is some underlying truth here too. I have cleaned, oiled and well-maintained guns at strategic positions around the house. When cars misfire or transformers blow I immediately know and identify spots I subconsciously already identified as cover. My shooting skills are still excellent, though practice has slowed to a couple times a year. I can repeat the rules of Deadly Force well over twenty years later.
It sounds terrifying to the uninitiated. “He must be a nut/fascist/fanatic/paranoid/truther” say the libs. In fact, it’s merely a state of knowing. You’ve been through it before and survived. If it happens again you’re better prepared to face it and deal with it, or disregard it and carry on. It doesn’t matter if you’re a soldier, an accountant, a politician, or a programmer. Experience teaches you to ride the storm easier than the uninitiated or the unprepared.