Sunday, February 18, 2007
THE SOCIALIST DISEASE RUNS ITS COURSE
It must pain the NY Times to have to report that Hugo Chavez' "reforms" in Venzuela are having the predictable result of creating shortages of food and other basic necessities. Unlike the Russian and Chinese socialist revolutions that had lots of low-hanging fruit to harvest in industrialization and literacy (and therefore to mask the essential inefficiency of socialist central planning), Chavez' revolution can only depress productivity.
Time after time, the same result. Yet no one learns. Why?
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 11:34 AM
Saturday, February 10, 2007
SOME FEMININE TRAGEDIES
I actually have the most superficial of personal connnection to two recent news items about romantic tragedies involving two very different women. Am I posting about the death of Anna Nicole Smith? Believe it or not, yes. I saw her once, as she swept with her entourage through the lobby of the building where my office is -- she was there in the course of her many legal battles. This would have been four or five years ago. I must say she was a striking figure -- very tall and perhaps in an intermediate stage of her "zaftig-ness." Her nervous vanity was like a tangible aura surrounding her, her eyes surveying the people who stopped and turned to stare as she passed out of the building to a waiting limosine. There was clearly something very sad about her, but also magnetic.
At any rate, here's a little essay that puts an interesting light on the trajectory of her life.
And then there's the crashing emotional disaster of astronaut Lisa Nowak. As I blogged back in September, I briefly met Stephanie Wilson, Nowak's crewmate on the STS-121 flight to the International Space Station. I came across an extremely good article at TCS Daily by Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings that puts the Nowak melt-down in the context of the bloated and under-utilized NASA astronaut corp, explaining the unecessary pressures this puts on the far-too-many people to whom NASA gives the label "astronaut."
Of course, the stresses Simberg identifies apply to all of the astronaut corp, and only Nowak has cracked in the tagic and stupid way she did. But he does make an interesting connection between her sad story, and the larger sad story of NASA's decades-long decline, that is the subject of rantings here from time to time...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 9:56 AM
Saturday, February 03, 2007
ANOTHER ENLIGHTENMENT
I'm trying to work my way through a little book called Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Towards a Politics of Radical Engagement, by Stephen Eric Bronner. I don't remember buying it, and it came to hand when I simply worked down to that book in the stack of unread material in my library. Within the first couple of sentences, I realized I'd taken a wrong turn into the world of contemporary leftist academia. The postmodernist "critical theory" vocabulary, nervous, lecturing didactic tone, and thin, thin scholarship was immediately evident. Within a couple of pages I encountered the flabergasting proposition that the two most important creations of the Enlightenment were liberalism and socialism. Really.
"What is this guy smoking?" I asked myself. Pretty soon, it was clear -- here we have a mainstream academic leftist "political theorist" trying to ever so gently steer the juggernaut of contemporary academic political thought away from the total subjectivism and moral relativism of the French postmodernist morass into which it has fallen. But he's trying to clothe the Enlightenment in late 19th century Marxism -- he makes no real distinction between 17th and early 18th century liberalism -- real liberalism -- and the dialectics of Hegel and the mental midgets Marx and Engels, whom he quotes repeatedly as authoratative. And very tellingly, he includes the monster Rousseau in the canon of "Enlightenment thinkers."
I suppose I should take heart in the realization that at least some people in academia realize that they've lead our institutions of higher culture down a dead end. But the iron grip that Marxism continues to hold over leftist thought in the West is intractible. It makes them incapable of seeing the fundamental chasm that divides the figures of the real Enlightenment -- Spinoza, Hume, Smith -- from the wretched creatures like Rousseau who came after them. It's sad, really: This fellow Bronner knows that something is wrong, but he's been blinded to the origins of the problem.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:05 PM
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