I like to say things like ‘when I become the ruler of the Universe’…but, really, if I ever became that, I would pluck Thomas Sowell out and make him do the actual ruler. Because he is that awesome.
I would place Thomas Sowell along with Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Feynman, Thomas Payne and, well, all the giants that advanced humanity. The only difference between him and them is that he is still alive, able to share his wisdom with us.
So far, I hope to have established that Ancient Greeks tried a path to integrate the peoples they had conquered by matching their head god with Zeus, the Ancient Greek’s head god, which worked rather well for the larger integration, but created the problem of all the ‘goddess queens’ that were now left over…
These became, in the mythology, human women Zeus had affairs with.
The conquered men had only to blame their head god (who became fused with Zeus) for being capricious, but, whom did the conquered women have?
One of their own – a human woman from their tribe – was so awesome as to cause Zeus, the to dog god, to fall in love with her, carry her off, do all kinds of dangerous things for the love of this woman – one of their own.
In comes Hera.
She is the Goddess of ‘family’ – yet she is always being cheated on by her husband, Zeus. And with human women – to add insult to the injury!
Hera is the Goddess of protecting the nuclear family – and she cannot do it with her own family!
This rather turns Hera nasty: she cannot control her husband, the king of Gods, from cheating on her, but she still is a goddess and has the powers that come along with it. Hera, not able to punish her husband, takes her anger out on his human lovers and their children.
And she does it in very, very mean ways. There are books written just about the ways Hera punished the women Zeus romanced (whether they were willing or not).
But…let us remember: Hera threw away her son (Hephaestus/Vulcan) to what she thought would be his death simply because he was born deformed. She may be the goddess of the hearth, family and childbirth, but she did throw away her baby for having been born deformed.
So, how did she treat the children of her husband, Zeus, and human women?
Not nicely.
When there arose a particularly awesome specimen of humanity, the son of Zeus and a human woman, Hera was not happy. Like, a lot ‘not happy’.
And, she made Hercules suffer, every chance she got.
There was nothing anyone could say to her to convince her that Hercules was actually a good guy, who did good things to help people.
Yes, he had been given a bunch of tasks to do, and he did them well and cleverly, but, outside of that, he is said to have helped folks who needed help, lending his muscle power as well as his intelligence, where and when needed.
Perhaps we can argue about his worth – but, the one not willing to engage in such an argument was Hera.
For her, Hercules was a symbol of her husband’s infidelity. He had to be destroyed.
The more famous Hercules got, the more necessary it was for Hera to absolutely destroy him.
And she did – in the most devious way possible.
Hercules had a wife and two children. He loved them and protected them.
Hera knew this.
And, she had her goddess powers.
She used these powers.
When Hercules came home one day, he saw a big monster and two little monsters attacking his home – and, loving his family, he slew them to protect his wife and children.
Except that, these were not monsters, they were his wife and children. Hera’s magic made him see them as monsters. So, he slew them.
Hera’s magic made Hercules kill his own family. His wife and children…
It destroyed Hercules.
This is a sad end to an epic story – but it is really important in our times.
Hera suffered from ‘Hercules derangement syndrome’ because she had been wronged. Her role as the protector goddess of the family was challenged by her husband’s infidelity and his bastard child’s excellence.
There was no way to talk Hera down from her vengeance.
Her very being as the queen of the gods, as the patroness of the family, was completely uprooted by the very existence of Hercules. Her very essence, her reason for being, is undermined by the very existence of Hercules.
These are high stakes, for a goddess, a top goddess.
Somehow, I do not think that chatting with her about the good things Hercules did would change her mind. Rather, I think the person doing the chatting would end up in a bit of smoke…
As we enter the story, Hera is the Queen Goddess – but her husband , Zeus, is habitually with other women.
This is not so much a function of who Zeus is, as it is a by-product of fusing Ancient Greek’s mythology with their conquered peoples, matching their head god with Zeus to facilitate their integration into the Hellenic culture, but having the previous head queen goddess left over.
‘Obviously’, these were women Zeus had had affairs with, which challenged Hera’s position in the pantheon of deities.
OK, nasty but…
She had to keep her position, both as a goddess and as the queen of the Gods, being the wife of Zeus.
So, Hera had to ‘fight back’ to remain who she was.
I suspect that this is where this aspect of Hera, as the patron of wronged women, came from.
Regardless, Hera was the ultimate step-mother-from hell.
Is it really coincidence that her step-son was the ultimate masculine embodiment?
Hera (Romanized as Juno).
She is the long suffering wife (and sister – this is the Egyptian influence on Greek mythology, where the Pharaoh married his sister to ‘keep the bloodlines pure’) who is the goddess of marriage, hearth (family home) and protector of women (especially during childbirth).
When Ancient Greeks conquered a people, they integrated their main god into Zeus, claiming they were really one and the same and making the cultural/social integration of the conquered peoples that much more possible.
‘Integrating’ the ‘queen consort’ was much more difficult.
The way that Ancient Greeks integrated their ‘head god’ Zeus into being just another interpretation of the conquered peoples’ ‘head god’ in order to harmonize the conquered people’s mythology with the Greek one – well, it dealt a rather raw deal to the ‘head queen’ of the conquered people’s pantheon: the ‘head god’, Zeus, had a queen (Hera), so, who or what was this other queen goddess of the conquered peoples’ pantheon?
She became Zeus’s mistress.
They all did… and Hera ‘had to’ deal with it, within the constrains of the Ancient Greek Mythology – which she did, in epic Hera way, as has been recorded in myth of how she had treated Hercules.
When the Ancient Greeks would conquer another peoples, they would claim that their main God, the head of their pantheon, is just another manifestation of the Greek head god, Zeus (Romanized as Jupiter), so, there really is not that much of a difference between them. They all worship the same capricious head god – this time, this side won, but if Zeus (by any other name) wanted, the other side would have won.
No shame in defeat – God’s did it. A way to ‘save face’…
We may not appreciate this now in our time, but, that is an extremely important aspect of integrating the defeated peoples’ culture into the winning one in a positive, constructive manner.
It seems that the Ancient Greeks understood (knowingly or not) that destroying a conquered culture’s ‘origin myth’ is devastating, for – what we now know – is a few generations.
So, whether by instinct, knowledge or wisdom, the Ancient Greeks avoided that.
Instead of denigrating the defeated peoples’ mythology, they went out of their way to graft it on to their own mythology, thereby giving the conquered peoples’ a channel to integrate into the Greek culture. This benefited both: new blood, new ideas – but within the same overarching cultural framework that is necessary to hold a society together.
Which makes ‘integrating’ the various ‘goddess queens’ that much more difficult…(coming next)
Mark Steyn’s struggles run well over a decade long and have been well covered on this blog. Now, we have an update – of sorts.
Mark Steyn is a Canadian journalist who is very intelligent, charismatic as well as eloquent.
And, deliciously sarcastic.
He got himself into trouble by criticizing ‘The Mann’ himself, an extremely litigious individual who is the author of the now long-debunked by (in 2004/2005 by McIntyre and McKitrick, if memory serves me correctly) ‘Hockey Stick Hoax’ that would turn any data entered into an ‘a Hockey Stick’ graph of ‘catastrophic climate change’ and that is still the basis of the current de-carbonization conspiracy that enriches many large businesses while lowering the living standards of human beings.
Twelve or so years in to the litigation (a punishment in itself), in the highly politicized D.C. area of Columbia in the USA (where the jury is suspected of being not exactly impartial), Mark Steyn was found to have caused $1.00 of actual damages to Dr. Mann – and then ordered to pay him $1,000,000.00 plus court costs anyways.
Well, here is an update to the story: not a win as such, but, perhaps a glimmer of a light.
Of course, not before the process caused Mark multiple heart attacks.
Mark Steyn is not the Only Canadian Michael Mann had sued, leading to him earning the colloquial term ‘Canuckaphobic’ up here in my neck of woods.
At least one of the subjects of his lawsuits, also a Canadian (Dr. Tim Ball), had been sued almost literally to death by Michael Mann. Let’s hope there is hope for Mark Steyn and for the future!
In the mean time, I present you with a musical classic: Hide the Decline!
Please, prove me wrong.
There is a lot to unpack with President Donald Trump. Some of it is good and some of it is bad. No, I am not fence-sitting, I am being realistic.
Mercantilism is a better economic model than what Biden’s administration put forth, but, it is seriously inferior to Austrian Economics – even opposed to them at times.
Heck, there is even a really good conspiracy theory (that will never be proven or disproven, because the surrounding data had been systematically destroyed for political reasons, which may or may not have anything to do with theories of economy) that the Austro-Hungarian Prince had been assassinated (leading to Franz Josef being the successor to the crown) precisely because he was a proponent of the Austrian model of economics (think Von Mises) and was planning to put these principles into play upon his rising to the throne.
Yeah, a while ago.
But, this is a valid direction to ruminate in, as Mercantilism was most alive just before then, and was being uprooted by ‘the Austrian School of economics’.
Rooting out inefficiencies and underhanded ways that taxpayer money has been handed over to partisan actors – that is a good thing.
But, the mercantilist mindset is a bitter pill to swallow – if you want to support President Trump.
The most (sadly) interesting thing – from a disinterested 5,000m perspective – is that President Trump’s political opponents are not attacking him on the things that they should: they are being petty and short-sighted, without laying out a reasoned opposition to his mercantilism. It is as if they are working from ignorance, not knowledge.
And that is sad, very sad.
Growing up on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, I got a first hand education on the difference between communism and socialism.
Yet, having arrived on the right side of the curtain, and seeing it fall down, I still studied this topic: what differentiates communism from socialism. And, it has been a life-long study – which brought me back to the basics, as I had been taught them, in a communist propaganda school.
Which they actually were truthful about.
Communism can only come around when all of the populace agree to this co-mingling of effort vs benefit. According to Marx, this would mean the State is no longer needed, as the populace will just do what is needed, without anyone telling/directing them to do so.
People will produce things – from food on up – because they want to, and they will not be paid to do so because they love doing what it is they are doing. In return, they will get goods from everyone else, because they too are giving the results of their toil away for free!
In other words, one is expected to work hard, to the best of their abilities – without ever reaping the benefits, as those are reaped by the greater society.
And that should be award enough.
The problem is that this might have worked in our earliest societies – which is what socialism/communism is trying to emulate, even though this does not scale up, as we have seen in history, over and over.
So, what IS the difference between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’?
VIOLENCE.
Communism can only be achieved by having a 100% brainwashed populace that works towards ‘the common goal’ – whatever that goal is put forth from above.
Socialism is the step before communism: the children are in school, being brain-washed (I was taught it will take a minimum of 5 generations to ‘perfect’ the children), but everyone else has communist ideals imposed on them by force.
This is not frivolous speak – it is what we had been taught in school. Socialism requires force to be imposed, until people are brainwashed enough for the force not to be needed.
In other words, socialism is communism imposed by force.
Dr. James Lindsay is a Mathematician who, along with friends Helen Pluckrose and Dr. Peter Boghossian noticed that there was a marked lack of rigour and scientific method in highly regarded, peer-reviewed papers published on a particular part of the Social Sciences, derogatorily referred to a Grievance Studies. To see if they were correct, they wrote a number of bogus papers with very poor scientific methods and a lot of popular buzzwords and claims of the Grievance Studies.
Surprise surprise, their papers (like how dog-owners react to male-on-female humping vs male-on-male humping in dog parks and how these reactions ‘prove’ inherent sexism in our culture) began to be published and acclaimed. I actually remember some of these papers being papers being touted in mainstream media (MSM) and rolling my eyes – and it is a sad commentary that so many people accepted them as ‘science’ because they were ‘peer-reviewed’…because none of us quite realized that the ‘peers’ doing the ‘reviewing’ were not scientists but ideologues.
When what they thought were transparently fake and somewhat satirical papers began to be cited and nominated for scientific excellence awards, the trio pulled the plug on the project and revealed what they had done.
Perhaps some of my details of the story are fuzzy by the flow of time, but the major point remains.
Since then Dr. Lindsay has taken a deep dive into the world of Grievance Studies and what were the underlying principles that let to them and their open disdain in rejecting the scientific method and instead treating purely political screeds as ‘science’. He has gone to many primary sources and slugged through them, as well as some excellent analyst like Maj. Stephen Coughlin of Unconstrained Analytics. Here is one of Stephen Coughlin’s ‘briefs’:
Winston Marshall prides himself on being a banjo player in some band, but had to quit because he liked a book written by a journalist who was seriously injured by Antifa. Now, he has a wildly successful program here he interviews the greatest thinkers of our times and helps unlock the complexity of their arguments to those of us just learning about the topic can follow with ease – but they are complex topics.
For example, in the video below, James Lindsay and Winston Marshall delve into what is wokism (best explanation so far is that it is Critical Constructionist Epistemology, where the ‘way of knowing’ is constructed on the foundation of the Critical Theory as evolved from the original Frankfurt School teachings – yes, big words – but they really explain them) and the difference between the ‘woke right’ and the ‘woke left’ as well as the different flavours of conservatism and leftism/progressivism in our current political milieu and how the second coming of Donald Trump to the Presidency disrupts how the various groups are evolving.
It is only an hour-and-a-bit long, but is is distilled information that is made comprehensible and Winston Marshall asks all the questions I would have asked for clarification when the wording got too technical.
Warning: James Lindsay – in any of his videos/podcasts/interviews will stretch your mind. But, Winston Marshall is such a skilled interviewer, he makes it enjoyable.
So, please, do enjoy this video:
Many European countries have adopted ‘proportional representation’ as their means of electing their elected representatives.
Yes, there are many variations of how ‘proportional representation’ is implemented, so, let me be at least a little bit specific.
I am referring to a system where registered parties are listed on the voting ballot and voters (again, the qualifications for who is ‘a voter’ may vary, but that is not a path I want to explore in this post) cast their votes for a specific party.
If ‘Party A’ receives 20% of the vote, they are allotted 20% of the seats in the house/chamber/etc. of the representatives. The party that received that portion of the votes/seats (the translation may not be 100% accurate, but as close as possible without chopping representatives into fractions, figuratively – or time based) then names its members who will take these seats and represent the voters who had chosen this party.
This seems like a very fair system in one aspect: the populace is represented proportionally. If your party got only 8% of the votes overall, that party would still get 8% of the representatives.
Let’s compare one alternative, which is based mostly on the Anglosphere culture: a country is divided up into areas – hopefully representing roughly similar number of voters per area (but, again, this and jerrymandering are topics for another post). Real world is not ideal and burdened with history, but, the ideal would be for each ‘riding’ to represent roughly similar number of voters. Then, the voters chose candidates in ‘their’ riding – where they reside – based on the character and political positions that candidate has put forward.
Some candidates (most, these days) are affiliated with political parties: political parties will actually have internal contests as to who can represent that party in a specific riding. But, independents are just as able to put their name on the ballot, and, if they appeal to enough voters, they can win ‘the seat’ to represent their constituents.
The benefit of this system is that the voters have chosen to represent them in the legislative body – and, that person is personally responsible to them for each and every vote they cast, each and every piece of legislation they put forward.
If their constituents overwhelmingly disagree with the way their elected representative’s party is moving forward, they are (theoretically) free to vote their conscience rather than the party line, because they are (again, theoretically) responsible to the voters in their riding, not the party they are affiliated with. It happens seldom, but it does happen.
It also happens that elected representatives, if their party becomes too extreme, leave their party and sit as independents or members of another party. This is not an everyday thing, nor is it rare or unheard of. The point is, whatever they do, these folks are answerable (theoretically) primarily to the people wo directly elected them, and only secondarily to their party.
The problem with this system is that with multiple parties, a person can win a seat with 30% of the vote in a multi-candidate race and a party can form a government with barely 33% of the popular vote. So, yes, a party with 51+% of the popular vote can lose, if the contested ridings are skin tight loses while the ridings they win in are blowouts. More votes does not translate to more seats, and the seats have it.
In this light, proportional representation sounds rather nice…except that…
In proportional representation, it is the party that gets the seats and appoints its members to it. These members now have no responsibility to any group of actual voters – their only responsibility is to the party, as it is at the pleasure of the party that they have their seats.
Yes, I have used the term ‘theoretical’ rather frequently regarding party vs voter affiliation/responsibility/responsiveness. And, yes, the parties ‘whip’ the vote of members by threats of all kinds, but, the members are still responsible to the people who elected them and a representative that crosses their will too far will be voted out, regardless the party. Not often, but it has been done.
Still, the primary responsibility of an elected representative is to champion the causes the majority of their constituents support.
This is the problem with proportional representation: the sitting member is not responsible to any group of voters, only to the party that appointed them to one of the seats they had won.
Being responsible to voters is one thing. Being responsible to the party that placed you into your seat is quite another.
Yes, in both systems, it is a balancing act.
And, the more powerful parties become, the less responsive representatives will be to their members.
So, let us strive for a system where the majority of representatives are independent of parties as much as possible and responsive to the will of their voters, whom they are supposed to represent.
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 