Yes, I did a short chapter for "Love Stinks". It took me all day to get at it when I was supposed to start early in the morning, but I did get it done. Between getting up in the morning and finishing that chapter, I:
- walked down to Dollar Genral for beans and cat food;
- fixed a pork tenderloin in the slow cooker (turned out very well and devoured it later)
- made a trip to McClure's for Coke Zero;
- produced three, or four posts for the blog (which will be published this week);
- watched swatches of Love In The Time of Cholera;
- downloaded music between crashes of Chrome;
- and did some reading online.
I found A CONVERSATION WITH FARAH ALI by Swetha Amit (Attticus Review) informative for her writing methods and writing about the effects of climate change.
The mythos of leadership came from Aeon. The myth is that leaders are self-made; like almost every overnight success, there is more to the story. The essay is a good reminder of that. This paragraph sums up the argument and raises a point for American future (the world's future?).
Some of the leaders in history who provide us with the most insight and inspiration might not have had formal power or authority. They might not even be famous. They might not have succeeded, and they might not have won. But these leaders often make a lasting impression on us – and the biggest impact. Perhaps this is because the conception of leadership that we find in II Samuel, with its insistence on morality as a constraint on even the most powerful rulers, still has purchase in our world today – and that the message on leadership in the Hebrew scripture has not been entirely overturned by the Machiavellian viewpoint. At least, not yet.
American evangelical Christians flock to an outspokenly immoral person; an admitted sexual predator. Over in Russia, Putin corrupts the Orthodox Church into condoning war against another Orthodox country.
That passage also brought to mind a bit from David Hume that has stuck in my head for decades:
In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between Authority and Liberty; and neither of them can ever absolutely prevail in the contest. A great sacrifice of liberty must necessarily be made in every government; yet even the authority, which confines liberty, can never, and perhaps ought never, in any constitution, to become quite entire and uncontroulable. The sultan is master of the life and fortune of any individual; but will not be permitted to impose new taxes on his subjects: a French monarch can impose taxes at pleasure; but would find it dangerous to attempt the lives and fortunes of individuals. Religion also, in most countries, is commonly found to be a very intractable principle; and other principles or prejudices frequently resist all the authority of the civil magistrate; whose power, being founded on opinion, can never subvert other opinions, equally rooted with that of his title to dominion. The government, which, in common appellation, receives the appellation of free, is that which admits of a partition of power among several members, whose united authority is no less, or is commonly greater than that of any monarch; but who, in the usual course of administration, must act by general and equal laws, that are previously known to all the members and to all their subjects. In this sense, it must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.
I heard of Ty Seagall on the radio while in prison. I understand he is a prolific guitar whiz. Pitchfork reviews his latest album: Three Bells. Check him out.
This is the song where I discovered Seagall:
I was up early this morning. I am supposed to be doing laundry and legal work. Instead, I have been doing posts and downloading music. Hey, I want to be prepared when I lose my easy access to the Internet!
What I have learned this morning? Well, it is cold outside, we had a hard frost, and it is kind of foggy.
Great Britain has wild boars: Groundbreakers by Chantal Lyons review – the whole hog. I ahd thoughtt hey were extinct, and it turns out I was right:
Groundbreakers tells the story of the uncomfortable disruption of this status quo by a large-headed, fleet-footed interloper: Sus scrofa, the wild boar. Lyons, a naturalist and science communicator, traces the scrappy, unofficial populations that have sprung up across Britain since the 1980s, the first since they were hunted to extinction more than 300 years ago. The descendants of farmed animals that escaped or were deliberately released, they exist in a legal and cultural limbo, without official recognition as a wild native species. About 2,600 animals now live wild from south-east England to north-west Scotland, with their stronghold in the ancient Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Lyons goes in search of them – with forays to larger, more unruly populations in France and Spain, where the singer Shakira claimed two boar stole her handbag in a Barcelona park in 2021 – to discover the impact of their return.
Indiana used to ahve this problem: Scrub Hub: Do we have wild pigs in Indiana? Are they wreaking havoc like everywhere else? (Indianapolis Star). Yes, I ahd to see what was going on around here.
Democracy is on my mind with Trump running for President and so many Americans wishing for a dictatorship. I still have no idea why Americans think they will benefit from a dictatorship, especially those white men with only a high school education who flock to Trump. They will not benefit from any such dictatorship - those benefiting will be the elites they resent and resent. It may be that democracy is too much work for these men. There may be a problem of democractic hubris, too. Those are my conclusions after reading Adventures in Democracy by Erica Benner review – many men, many minds.
Why, then, do many people in post-communist eastern Europe complain about the shortcomings of this system? Ewa, one of the students Benner taught in Poland in the 1990s, ventured an explanation: “Some people felt more free in the 1980s … fighting the communists.” It was the capacity to effect change that felt satisfying. “Now,” Ewa thought, “it feels like the rules and policies come from somewhere else, not from us.” Widespread dismissal of such post-communist scepticism has Benner wondering whether the world-historical victory of democracy over autocracy hasn’t also eroded “a basic democratic virtue: the capacity for self-criticism”.
She points to what can happen when champions of liberal democracy assume the battle for the moral high ground is won. Hillary Clinton’s description of half of Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” during her presidential campaign in 2016 was a factor in her electoral loss, as she admitted herself a year later.
It is going on 9 AM and time for laundry.
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