Geoff's Miscellany

Nobody wants to be weak. Weakness leads to losing.

Weakness leads to resentment.^[1]

Intellectual weakness is perhaps the most subtle weakness.

It compounds itself. Physical weakness makes us feel bad.

Intellectual weakness makes us feel smug or leaves us unable to see our weaknesses, intellectual weakness is like a disease with an immune system of its own protecting it from detection.

You've heard it before. You have some problem and well-meaning person mothers you by saying with a straight face: "Just be yourself."

If "be yourself" means "be honest about yourself, your weaknesses, and your abilities, lie neither to yourself or others" then I agree. If it means do what you truly and really think is best, then I absolutely agree. 

I don’t make it a habit of reading Vice magazine. But I clicked a link today that referenced a recently released study I had read a few months ago. The author let it be known that her whole point was to try to demonize male self-improvement by associating all masculinity with the dreaded Trumppernaut. But she also made several basic errors, like implicitly supporting socialism, failing to observe that the results aren’t indicative of individual character but policy preferences, or that other things like education among net-contributors also predicts aversion to wealth redistribution. Anyway, when my eyes flitted away from the cacophony of disconnected claims clustered around interview quotes, I saw several Vice headlines: 

While I am a Christian and therefore find allegiance to the kingdom of God, the person of Christ, my family, and personal virtue to trump loyalty to a nation or a state, I still really love being American. I went through a brief phase where my interest in Anabaptist theology and concerns for the dangers of statist loyalty and patriotic idolatry caused me to through out any concept of national identity with its abuses. That’s what Seneca and many of the early church fathers did with anger, it’s dangerous, so root it all out. But I do love America. I am, as David Bentley Hart says of himself, something of an american chauvinist. And so this closing salvo from Paul Johnson’s book, A History of the American People was touching to me, if not naive in some respects (I typed it because I wanted the passage to stick in my mind, any errors below are my own). It’s worth reading without my rambling reflections beneath it: 

To be a man is first to be human:

1. To be a man is to seek virtue.
2. To seek virtue, a man must seek adventure. Courage requires risk.
3. To be a man is to build.
4. To build is to restore the past or to create the future. 
5. To be a man is to destroy and incorporate that which opposes building. The fur of the predator becomes the pelt of the hunter. The cave of monsters becomes a home. The fire becomes a tool.
6. To build is to reason. To be a man is, therefore to seek truth.  

1. To be a man is to love women.
2. To be a man is to find a woman.
3. To be a man is to be desirable to women.
4. To be a man is to be desirable, in particular, to the woman. 
5. To be a man is to not be a woman.
6. To be a man is to be strong, durable, and steady.
7. To be a man is to fight. Man builds and destroys, woman builds and sustains.
8. To be a man is to need the company of men apart from women.

1. If a man needs the company of other men, then their families become a tribe.
2. To have a tribe is to have honor.
3. To have honor is to know shame. Men shame other men when their behavior is unbecoming of their status, family, the group norms, or the truth. 
4. To have a tribe is to be wary of danger.
5. To be a man, then, is to preserve the old ways. For just as to be human is to build the future, to be a man is to ensure that the progress of the past is not lost. 

Together we will make America Great Again, better than ever before.

It’s a phrase and sentiment that is not unique to Trump and I recall hearing Bill Clinton say it several times and saw a Reagan speech in class in which Ronald Reagan also said it:

In the three most recent adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock, Elementary, and the Game of Shadows) at crucial moments Holmes is deceived by Moriarty into making a tactical error and in the mean time a song about demon forces is played.

There Are Spoilers Below

In the movie, Holmes is fooled into thinking Moriarty intended to bomb an Opera house during Don Giovanni. Upon Holmes’ arrival, the chorus of demons is played as the main character is received into Hell. 

Ross Douthat opined on the death of the arch-pornographer:

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.