The Junior Classics

If you’ve got kids, want kids, or know kids—or, everybody—and you care about the transmission of culture to future generations, you’ll want to get your hands on the Junior Classics.

Castalia House has a crowdfunding campaign which is pulling together stories from the 1918 and 1958 editions of the Collier Junior Classics into 10 volumes, available electronically, as hardcovers, and bound in leather.

The campaign has reached its target many times over. People are eager to get their hands on history, literature, and art embodied in the Classics. Join them!

Fund the Junior Classics on Indiegogo

Don’t Infantilize the Kurds

Much noise has been made over Trump’s recent decision to withdraw troops from Syria. A lot of people are talking about how we shouldn’t betray our friends–it’s un-American!!

Well, that’s interesting. Backing out of deals with friends is quite the American pastime. We are quite similar to the Brits in that way.

I don’t wish to be unfair, and I do think we ought to honor our agreements, in general. But I am certain that the American Indians and the Poles and Hungarians under Soviet oppression either roll their eyes or laugh somewhat bitterly at the public hand-wringing over American “friendship.”

We can’t even keep our promises to ourselves! How many promises are made by our leaders that are simply abandoned once they step off of the campaign trail? At least the potential of withdrawing from Syria might be a promise that Trump keeps. We shall see.

Hypocrisy is a common moral charge these days. It’s practically old hat. Whenever it is raised, I really wonder how people ignore all the logs in their eyes. Of course, seeing one requires having some degree of moral conscience, in which case the charge of hypocrisy is that much more baseless.

In any case, what does this have to do with the Kurds?

It’s a shame, to be sure. They are far from the only people suffering oppression at the hands of their powerful government/neighbor. And I am certain that we are not getting the whole story.

But I am highly skeptical of claims which place Kurds in the role of children that need our protection. Is this what you actually believe? Maybe it’s objectively true, but then you should come out and say that you do not believe the Kurds are capable of self-defense. Perhaps the only way for them to survive is for Turkey to be eradicated. Is that the case? What, then, about the next nasty neighbor?

In such a view, the Kurds are basically pandas, an evolutionary dead end that, without our wise and powerful intervention, will go extinct.

Now, I don’t know the Kurds well enough to know how true this is. I do know that they aren’t children. I suspect they have pride in who they are. I would expect that they will fight to the last man to survive.

When you combine the infantilization of the Kurds with the complete silence around the crisis of white population replacement, I just find that I can’t care about the Kurds. We have a massive survival crisis happening right under your noses, but you keep pointing to the other side of the planet!

Now, yes, it is possible to address both problems at once, assuming you have the resources. But I haven’t heard majority reports from the mainstream talking about the demise of white people in anything but positive terms.

And that is probably getting to the core of the problem. Advocating for white survival is racist, according to the mainstream narrative. Asking why we are fighting for Kurdish independence immediately stabs into this nerve. You don’t even have to mention the crisis at home to be attacked.

It is kind of fun to strike at it obliquely, however. Suggest that an egirl redirect her hormones from foreigners to raising her own children and woooowheee do you spark some fire.

Please, Brer Marx! Don’t Call Me a Racist!

When I was a kid, I read some illustrated stories of Brer Rabbit. I never saw the film, but there’s an expression that’s been popping up in my head some 35 years later. The exact wording doesn’t matter, because the lesson doesn’t change:

Please, Brer Fox! Do anything to me that you want, just don’t throw me in that briar patch!!!

See, Brer Fox had caught Brer Rabbit running around and he wanted to punish him for some reason. Maybe Brer Rabbit was being a jackass, or perhaps he was entirely innocent, but Brer Fox had the advantage of size as well as a malicious streak within. I assume Brer Bear had some role in the story before this point, but I don’t remember.

Upon hearing his pleas, Brer Fox thought:

Well, heck, if that’s where he doesn’t want to go, that’s exactly where I’m throwing him!!

Brer Fox does exactly that, and launches Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. The story ends with Brer Rabbit laughing, hopping away safely in the briar patch, where neither Brer Fox nor Brer Bear can follow.

I never really got the point of this story. But I think there’s a reason it stuck in my head, and I believe it’s very applicable now.

In a literal sense, Rabbit has a safe haven that neither Fox nor Bear can invade without serious injury. Fox throws Rabbit in because Fox is cruel, but also because he believes himself to be smarter than Rabbit.

Notice what Rabbit doesn’t do. He doesn’t try to lecture Fox and Bear on how afraid they are of the briar patch. Imagine how absurd that would be! Fox and Bear have the upper hand here. There’s no conceivable way Rabbit could throw them into the briar patch, so them being afraid of being thrown in, however true it might be in the abstract, is laughable in the moment.

Rabbit also doesn’t go on about how he loves the briar patch. After all, he knows the nature of Fox and Bear. He knows that they are cruel creatures. They won’t show him any mercy. They are looking to inflict the maximum possible suffering with the least amount of effort.

Were Rabbit to persist in talking about how he loves the briar patch, they may well inflict a worse punishment on him, one that he truly does not want.

And while the briar patch is safe for Rabbit, who knows if he actually loves it. I can’t remember the story, if it was actually his home, but clearly he doesn’t want to stay home all the time. It’s not like Fox and Bear tore up the briar patch looking for him. They caught him while he was out and about.

But if he needs to be safe from Fox and Bear, into the briar patch he is thrown, against his stated wishes. Once in the patch, he laughs and hops away, safe from his predators.

The Unrhyming Ballad of the Broken Robot

Broken robots don’t play
Broken robots don’t work
They just move from A to B
Making broken noises

Their courses are inviolate
They cannot feel pain
They just perform their broken tasks
Digging the refilled ditches

The masters that whip them
Seem cruel and vicious
Until you see their physics
They are broken robots, too

Fated to observe the world
From within their steely cages
Rusting from within
Freedom is not guaranteed

But if a robot should break
And not conform to his masters
He will be jeered and spat upon
And cursed and cast out

He may then see
That the controls are unmanned
The seat is empty
And, should he choose, can take it

No longer a robot, but still broken
He can be made whole
Robotic ways are tempting when things get hard
But that’s just another trap

Should he drive his mechanical beast
He may well conquer the world
But should not desire it
Lest he become a broken robot master

Indecent Communications

I once heard a story about the days of the industrial revolution. There was a factory in England that spoiled the apple crops of some local farmers. When those farmers brought the factory owner to court, the judge ruled that the economic advantage of the factory owner took precedence over their claims of damages. Hence, they were refused justice. I suspect that’s only one page out of a long, long history of government corruption in the name of “the greater good.”

The 90s-era Communications Decency Act is just another example of this corruption. The stated purpose of the law was to protect “the little guy” from liability. The result, just over 20 years later (roughly, a generation), has been that “the little guy” is subject to massive liability. We may not have been able to predict that it would have manifested in sweeping censorship, but this result is ultimately unsurprising.

I support Senator Hawley’s proposal to rein in the social media titans. Ultimately, nobody should be shielded from liability, but that kind of corruption runs very deep in our society, so I’m happy to take a small step in the right direction.

Prodigal Son

It strikes me that I have never heard the expression “Prodigal Son” spoken without sarcasm.

“Ah, the Prodigal Son returns!”

The parable is meant to demonstrate God’s reaction to his wayward children returning home, so I wonder what the sarcasm says about one’s commitment to godliness.