Baffled European

Tag: Endless lies

  • The idiot box

    There is a debate across Europe about allowing children to use mobile phones. Banning them from schools is the demand, or one demand at least. I don’t know enough about the issues and it doesn’t apply to me. I’m quite happy for others to do what they think best.

    However, I do remember a similar moral panic in the 1980s. People were concerned about children watching television. What they watch. How often. Parents were advised to monitor their children’s viewing habits. It rots the brain, you see.

    The only source of information that the president of the USA understands is television. As a former game show host, this is only natural. He has appointed dozens of Fox News presenters to important positions in the government. Daily security briefings in the White House are performed in Fox News style, with advisers pretending to be TV presenters. And now we have the LA disturbances – great television.

    So should we ban children from using mobiles? Should we ban them from watching television? I think the evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of people are fine. They understand the difference between the real world and what they see on a screen, and they behave accordingly.

    Unfortunately, there are those who become addicted, and are unable to function normally, as a result of the distorted view they have of the world. I don’t know what to do in such cases, but they should never, ever, be allowed to become president.

  • The worst idea ever

    Why are they all such massive racists?

    Racism is not a law of nature – it’s a human invention. It has its origins at the start of the 16th century, at a time of the Reformation and the discovery of the New World. People were trying to make sense of a world that had suddenly changed. Racism seemed to offer answers to their questions. Trouble was, all the answers are wrong.

    It has been challenged from time to time by people looking for some sort of evidence or basis to its claims. It always fails these challenges and then mutates into a new form that is immune from the last challenge.

    The most recent setback was the shoah, which most people – though evidently not all – consider a very bad idea. That’s by no means its only crime. Racism has a solid record of persecution, oppression, extortion, torture, rape, murder, war and genocide. It has no predictive power for anything and has zero virtues.

    It’s been a popular mass delusion for centuries and has drenched our culture with its poison. It’s so well established that we grasp for racist tools such as affirmative action as part of our attempts to undo some of the mess. Like everything else racist, these are also useless.

    The entire leadership of the USA believes unquestioningly, reflexively, in this baseless garbage. It dominates their thinking and decisions. And it’s total bullshit.

  • A question of honour

    A sliver of sanity in the US as a judge rules that you can’t simply declare thousands of people to be “dishonourable” and exclude them from the army. The trans soldiers are thus to be reinstated, after months of being illegally discriminated against. But their cards are marked and the government won’t stop there.

    The most galling thing of this episode (so far) is that President Bonespurs himself, who was too scared to join the army, is the one who decides who is “honourable” or not. This order violates the very constitution he swore an oath of honour to protect.

    But what is honour anyway, and why is it so important? Everybody knows what it is, but defining it is more difficult.

    In the Middle Ages, people relied on oaths of fealty to maintain the structure of society. From peasants to the King, everybody promised to serve their Lord and Master. Anybody who broke this oath was dishonourable. They were outcast, shunned by all who knew them.

    Losing your honour was a terrible punishment. Gentlemen would fight duels to the death over “honour”. This was still commonplace at the time the US constitution was written.

    We don’t bother with “honour” much nowadays. We have NDAs and other legal instruments to precisely define people’s behaviour, rather than relying on a vague and outdated concept. Losing your honour today is pretty meaningless and explains why it is no impediment to becoming president.