Interesting Article
Transcript: Discussion of “Mars is Heaven,” by Ray Bradbury
Matt Tiabbi and Walter Kirn have a series of two-party blog/podcast discussions in the America This Week series. The two men are quite different in their backgrounds, and neither mirrors mine in the least. I’ve followed Kirn for some time and enjoy his insights.
It takes some effort to piece Virtual Mirage together. Sometimes it’s just me throwing spaghetti against the wall – as is the case here – submitted for your review.
Walter Kirn: We picked this strange story, or maybe I confessed to picking it. It’s a story that was written in 1948 by the late Ray Bradbury. I picked it because the theme is spectacle and the theme is enchantment and the way that people are seduced by illusion. In Mars is Heaven, a crew of space explorers lands on Mars and finds, to their surprise but also their great delight, that Mars is a 1927 picket fence, a small American town. It’s an apple pie barbershop quartet kind of place where beautiful young maidens and vigorous young boys and wise old pipe-smoking dads all sit around and exude the very best of Protestant white Americana…
Mongolian Throat Singing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SZuFi9htLA
Mongolia is not much these days, but there was a time…
Driving Around
The painters are still at the White Wolf Mine, renewing the exterior trim and doing some inside work as well. It drives me to the trails.
Wild turkeys. There are a lot of them making noise around the White Wolf Mine on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim – called a “rafter” of turkeys – when you have more than one.
Operation Mountain Resolve
Factions
The Left-to-Right political spectrum measures how much of a collectivist you are. In the modern world where the Orwellian playbook is worshiped as a model rather than a cautionary tome, the spectrum describing politics as left to right is just a tool of the elitist media and elitist oligarch-worshiping professors. It has no meaning outside that.
Explaining that Nazis (Totalitarian National Socialists) are “right” of (Totalitarian) International Socialists makes as little sense as explaining that Iranian Shia is left of Saudi Sunni. One faction stones adulterous women with larger stones and the other favors smaller stones.
A freedom index is studiously excluded from discussion in the discourse of elitists who control the world and almost all of its institutions. Moderates are identified by these institutions as vile so there is no place for them on the scale that is designed to point fingers and evoke hatred.
The terms have further shifted meaning in America and have taken on religious overtones where the GOP is now the populist Christian faction and the democrats are the elitist death-cult faction, modern Albigensianism. The growing number of Independent voters are barbarians at the gates.
H/T Frank
The Ho
The spaghetti looks good today.
Truth about the spectrum.
As a youngster, it used to be confusing as to the terms.
I grew up thinking it was authoritarian vs libertarian.
But the authoritarian need not be a collectivist. Just a dictator.
Fascist is a term that lost all literal meaning when Mussolini died.
And it gets used daily.
‘Fascism’ is just saying National Socialism in Italian.
Yes, both fascism and national socialism in Spain and Germany were ‘right.’ They were right of the dominant opposing parties, which were all-out international socialism/marxism. In comparison to actual right-wing politics, they were and still are very left.
Government control via indirect methods over all aspects of the countries’ populations.
And fancy uniforms. Can’t forget about the fancy uniforms for all.
Still left of the middle.
Yeah, what is with these Nat’l Soc/Fasc types needing to wear the resplendent uniform, complete with fuzzy riding crop?
Don’t forget the spiffy boots…
Heh…and beret.
A leopard beret as in Wag the Dog.
You didn’t ask, but it’s a Chinook.
And it is flown by outstanding pilots. How many of the guys bragging at the bar could hover like this crew, rotors clearing the trees with less than the standard safety clearance. Nope. They know what they are doing and for sure are not garet troopers.
Mountain Resolve was in the Nuristan area in Afghanistan in November or early December of 03. I was in charge of a data center in Kuwait that relayed the video back to CENTCOM. Videos from Afghan missions and the Lacy/Scott Peterson story was all the buzz in the office besides the first arrivial of the Marines.
I love the infographic, reminds me of those perpetual motion machines we drew in Junior High when bored in class.
And here I thought it was a gaggle of turkeys. Proper term duly noted.
THAT is some seriously exceptional Helo skills…Afghanistan I presume with the mud-hut tower LZ.
Harris- Goes to yesterday’s “low information voter” aspect. Betting if you did a street poll most City dwellers would say she is black with slaves, most rural folks would know her heritage…and that would be reflected in 2024, assuming Joe doesn’t blow a gasket before then, falling over some lint.
Thanks for The Hu…needed me some Mongolian In Your Face tunes to go with my strong coffee.
…”she’s black with slaves in her ancestry.
I think Gaggle is for geese on the ground and turkeys can be a gang as well as rafter.
Yes. My poor attempt at humor…which “gang” fits nicely into my second humor fail (below).
The Hu. I think their sound calls to anyone with even a trace of the warrior-poet spirit.
The band–
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQ7XW0_teB4
Jerry Pournelle offered a two axis chart that was more informative/descriptive than the one dimensional Left-Right one. I see references to it on occasion. It could probably use some updating after all this time, but I don’t have the knowledge/experience to do a good job of it.
It ain’t the spagheti (al dente or mush) that keeps us coming back for more: it’s the sauces.from butter to fra diavolo we wait for. And the cream, mussels, various herbs the various commenters add that make your blog replete with info and interest.
Spaghetti makes good wallpaper – keep throwing!
Didn’t know about “rafter” but now I do and I will properly address them when they wake me up at the crack of dawn. No disrespect was intended when I called them a flock, or some other word that begins with F.
I enjoy listening to the Hu. I have heard the song before but had not seen the video.
The spaghetti was very good today. I agree with boron that there is a lot of knowledge to be had by reading the various commentators.
Harris. She appears as stupid as a rock when you hear her but there must be some cunning there even aside of her other “talents”.
“Rafter”…you and me. My term was “gaggle”, so now that’s freed up I will refer to the DC turkeys as The Gag-gle (Harris may be excluded from that considering her primary rise through the ranks talent.)
There’s a wonderful documentary, “Genghis Blues,” about an American blues musician who went to Mongolia to learn throat singing.
Nice chat between Kern and Taibbi, but it’s at least 50 years out of date. The Ivy League hasn’t been a WASP power base for decades. It’s more of a Jewish power base than WASP. Look at who the presidents of Harvard have been, for example. (And Harvard is the one that matters most.)
They are correct however about how Ivies, especially Harvard, are the entryway (necessary but not sufficient) to many positions of power and influence. As but one example, with the exception of Amy Coney Barrett (Notre Dame IIRC), in recent times the vast majority of other SCOTUS justices are Harvard or Yale.
And as for the Plimoth (sic) colonists, they didn’t come here for religious freedom and freedom of thought as we were taught in school. They were basically kicked out of England because they were such obnoxious, self-righteous bastards that no one could stand them.
None of the historians I interview are of that opinion.
About the Pilgrims or about Harvard?
Pilgrims.
Ah. Well that’s guess I’ll have to defer to your historians.
Oh yeah, Billionaire meme. I look at the photo and think to myself: Is that curvature of the Earth, or barrel distortion in the lens?
Sigh. Geekery does not rest. Even when you want it to shut up and take a nap every once in a while.
Curvature…somewhere over the horizon is the edge tho.
Geekery – there was one anime that features a gal’s bobbling boobs while a bullet passed by. That triggered an online discussion about video frame rates, muzzle velocity of the rifle in question, all to determine how fast the boobs were bouncing.
Sigh. Geekery does not rest. Even when you want it to shut up and take a nap every once in a while.
TRUTH!
I think there was an episode of The Twilight Zone back in the ’60s (the original series, Rod Serling days) that was much like “Mars is Heaven.” Perhaps based on Bradbury. Seems awfully familiar and I think I remember scenes in B&W from it.
It was “The Elegy”, first season, episode 20.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegy_(The_Twilight_Zone)
There is a lot of philosophy underpinning the Twilight Zone.
That was sad.
The liberal-to-libertarian political spectrum measures how much of a collectivist you are. Moderates tend to be moderately liberal, and both left and right ends are highly liberal. Ask someone their public policy position about abortion: if they have one, they are a liberal, who feels they deserve to rule other humans.
The difference between suppressing speech and suppressing commerce/actions is a red herring. Both are necessary for freedom, so which one you suppress is only a cosmetic difference.
I assume then that you are not opposed to someone murdering you because to forbid it is to rule your murderer.
I was hoping for discussion built on the foundation of recognizing the difference between offensive and defensive force.
Okay, let’s try this scenario. I sincerely believe your ancestors “genocided” mine. I’m going to teach your children that they bear original sin for those acts and they are guilty guilty guilty. Then because we believe in open borders and free immigration, I’m going to import millions of violent, stupid people with minimal impulse control and virtually no future time orientation into where you live. (Such stupid violent people being totally incapable of understanding, much less adhering to, some dipshit fantasy “non aggression principle” by the way.)
I sincerely believe that what I’m doing is defensive because I know that your original sin makes You want to genocide Me. I’m pre-emptively defending myself against Your aggression by destroying your culture and your folk. But I’m not shooting at you, nor coercing you personally, not even saying harsh words to you personally. How does libertarianism deal with that?
From a military perspective, you should be able to go on the offensive immediately because the best defense is a strong offense. Forward basing becomes a defensive strategy because you want to fight them before they invade the homeland.
Eliminating the enemy’s capacity for offensive action is the key to a defensive strategy.
How in actual practice are these third-worlders “destroying” my culture and my folk? Please give a concrete definition of what you mean by “destroy”. If they poop on the sidewalk that’s a trespass and a libertarian can prosecute it. The first-world mainstream media talking heads are also trying to convince me to surrender my culture, but it’s just talk and I seem able to defend my mind against it.
I hold adults of normal ability morally responsible for their own actions. The third-worlders you invite in are not lumps of pollution you are dumping on the sidewalk, they are human beings; I hold them individually accountable for behaving reasonably in the first world society they have entered voluntarily. If somebody talks them into participating in crime, I have no qualms with prosecuting them for that.
I don’t lump “third-worlders” into one group. Some bring skill sets to the USA that are useful, they are educated people who have learned English before coming and want to productively integrate into society. Usually, they are not “illegal aliens”. They immediately contribute and don’t create a burden on society.
Another group, unskilled military-age males, who speak no English might be useful as laborers but should be allowed to enter legally through a sponsorship program where an employer is waiting for them. Give them work visas and they can go home when they’re finished.
Women who enter for the purpose of delivering an anchor baby (usually at public expense) should be excluded from entry unless we can enact laws to eliminate the anchor baby situation.
Libertarianism will never work because of human nature. It might have a chance if the entire population are high IQ and highly conscientious, with an internal ethos that is both universalist and reasonably tolerant. Which functionally means with heavy Christian influence, like it or not. And the population probably needs to be white, northern/Western European ancestry. Behavior is downstream from culture which is downstream from biology. (Obviously there are exceptions, hell, I’m one of them, but in general it’s true.)
The third world people themselves are not here explicitly to destroy the West, they are the tools of those who seek to destroy the West. Again, there are exceptions. For example, I met a very intelligent Somali, an Uber driver, who treated me to a 30-minute rant against the weakness and moral decadence of the US (and Sweden where his wife was living 100% on the dole — but those damned Swedes are not giving her enough money). Conversely, literally the stupidest human being (without some chromosomal problem) I have met in the last 10 years was “Jean from Haiti” also an Uber driver. There are a lot more Jeans than genius angry Somalis pouring in. A very close friend who worked 5 years as a physician in the Bronx (huge patient base of illegals from the Caribbean, plus some inner city American Blacks) has tales of scams, corruption, violence, abuse, and plain stupidity that the ordinary American mostly refuses to believe. (I’ve myself have been told “no, that can’t be true. No one could do that to another human being!” in response to the experience of women who’ve been sex trafficked, or those with opioid addiction. People – in general – Have No Idea because they don’t want to know about it. The true horrors humans gladly perpetrate on each other daily most Americans can’t even imagine. I’m sure our host and no few of the commenters who have been in Bad Places and In The Shit could tell stories that would disturb even me.)
If you don’t see how this wave of strangers (especially the Jeans) are destroying the folk and culture, you’re either willfully blind or an idiot. And I’m pretty sure you’re a very intelligent person in terms of IQ. I noticed that you said that YOU’RE able to resist the propaganda and gaslighting of the “elites”. What about your neighbor who is a decent person but not as smart or philosophically inclined as you? Or goofy cousin Bob or the elderly widow up the street who’s getting along in years and can’t look out for herself so well anymore and is a great target for scammers of all sorts.
I was feeling a little bad for coming at you a bit hard in my prior comment from last night. But you kindly relieved me of that burden of guilt, so thanks. The libertarianism you seem to present is so atomized and so individual-centric that it makes no provision for the not so bright or the weak. It also is not very fault-tolerant in terms of dealing with predators. Human existence and society MUST be about more than the individual. Family, clan, kith and kin, folk, culture, and shared heritage and history. All these matter immensely.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same subject, libertarianism. Libertarianism does not require the bad human actor to accept or even understand the requirements of honest behavior; it merely requires libertarians to prosecute offenses made against them. Mike_C, I accept your reports of crime on top of crime as fact. But why aren’t the victims prosecuting the bad actors in this target-rich environment? I think it’s too much self-loathing, which Darwin will correct shortly.
Any human able to use a spoken language has enough brains to be held morally accountable as a legal adult. I see lots of actually retarded humans cheerfully bagging groceries at the store, and they don’t find civil behavior to be a crushing mental load. Like the meme sign says, you are entering the first world, set your watch ahead 1,400 years. Whereas liberal political correctness is massively racist, and believes many genetic compositions are permanently unable to live in the first world.
“Voting”, “welfare”, and “government” are “official” forms of predation. They are a criminal attack which should be repelled. I believe the military game theory says, if the human groups can MAD each other, then and only then do you have stable peace, as long as the tech continues to enable mutual MAD. Drones and electronic communications are close to supplying MAD for individuals. The age of protection rackets is about to end.
Sigh. I’m ashamed of myself. Sorry for wasting your electrons and space with the above, Larry.
I had the sense to walk away from this stuff at age 18, and now decades later I’m re-engaging. Whatta maroon I’m being. Sorry, folks.
Not everything was “invented here” but the influence of Northern Europeans and the Lutheran work ethic can’t be overstated. That’s the opposite of what is being encouraged to land in the US. The work ethic is falling by the wayside. The victim and entitlement culture is built for vote-buying because it lacks all moral fiber.