Disney and Reality

In which I respond to the lyrics of  ‘Colors of the Wind’ from Disney’s Pocahontas. A song supposedly written from the perspective of a Powhatan woman but actually written by two Jewish men. Disney typically isn’t concerned with following the source material it plunders for films — especially when history comes into it. Disney is hardly the only guilty party here as it has become a trope to portray the American Indians as peaceful people, living in harmony with nature as seen in other films like Dances with Wolves and 2005’s incredibly boring The New World (which was also focused on Pocahontas and John Smith). Though there were certainly tribes of American Indians that were more placid; the Powhatan were certainly not.

To disabuse people from fanciful lies, I will respond to these trite lyrics with the reality.

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Thoughts on being Smartphoneless

Almost five years ago, I wrote my thoughts on Facebook after a few months of being off it. In 2018, I was planning to do the same thing with my aging smartphone and had decided not to replace it when it finally died that year. After a few months I relented and got a new one. As a result of this article by Roosh V and part of my Lenten penance this year, I decided to finally do away with my smartphone altogether. My perfectly functional phone was sold and my accounts, data and everything deleted or backed-up elsewhere — which was an ordeal of its own. I now own a very simple 3G phone (the same model as Roosh), that I need primarily for work and family reasons.

Here, I will outline some thoughts on doing this and some observations I’ve had over the years since these little toys became widespread and the rapid social change they brought with them.

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Life is Easier – So Should Religion Be

We are now well into the season of Lent for 2021 and so far at least, without any hint that we’re going to be deprived of the Mass again during this Holy Time. The Feast of St. Joseph was the last time I attended Mass last year for many months and as all with properly functioning minds now know, for no good reason at all. Hindsight or not.

I do feel compelled during this time to write on the subject of Lent and I have a couple of topics in mind. The one I will cover today can be understood by the title of the post.

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Intelligence and the Appearance of It

I like books. I read quite a lot of them and I have never been without a significant backlog of books to read since I was a teenager. Not everyone is like this though and there is nothing necessarily wrong with not being a reader. Most people in human history (including some truly great men), have not been able to read at all.

It also very much depends on what you read. Certain types of women are fond of reminding men that they consume a large chunk of the book market but they are far less fond of giving specifics. The specifics being a lot of romance, erotica pornography, self-help and general tosh. Men are better but not by a whole lot when it comes to popular genres and authors. Although I enjoy a lot of the historical fiction consumed by men, many books in this genre are the male equivalent of the romance novels that dominate so much of the female market.

So I do not consider it necessarily good or bad to read as it very much depends on what you read. I certainly believe that what I read is a lot higher-brow and respectable than the average reader and this is not simply a matter of taste. There are objectively bad and objectively good books. Most of the latter (particularly fiction), were published before the 1950s and I consider very little of what is published today to be worth publishing let alone reading. I expect the future will agree with me and a lot of these works will be lost to time and largely unlamented.

Now that this extended introduction is out of the way, I can get to the main purpose of the post which was originally inspired by a Twitter thread by Mencius Moldbugman (not the real Moldbug) which is posted below.

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Tolerating the Intolerable

It should hardly need pointing out that our leaders are not benevolent and kind people who want the best for us. They definitely want us to believe this but it pretty obviously isn’t the case. They can be quite ruthless when they feel threatened and as recent events show, don’t have much regard for the laws and traditions that have shaped the nation.

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Gamers Rose Up

This is a fast moving story and not one I’m directly involved in but I wanted to make some brief commentary on it. If you want an excellent, concise background to the whole story then Louis Rossmann has a video on it that is posted below.

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Australia Belongs to Us

The above video was produced by the Australia Day Council which appears to be a government funded organisation. The Federal Government in Australia has apparently been led by “conservatives” since 2013 and yet the above video was produced with them in office. Now I don’t actually expect conservative governments to do anything to preserve our national culture and heritage and I haven’t for quite a while now but it is important to point this out. That is for anyone is still clinging to the idea that the Liberal party or any prominent voices on the Right will do a thing to oppose the methodical destruction of our nation and culture. In fact, I don’t believe if Labor had been in power for the last seven years that anything would be substantially different. 

If it isn’t obvious what’s wrong with the video then I shall explain. 

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The Games of 2020

I might have written before that I don’t think much of the idea of a “Game of the Year” or really an “[Anything] of the Year”. Being a native of a country that insists on awarding citizens such titles, you’d think I might feel different but I don’t. Realistically, nobody is going to play every game released in a single year and even if they somehow managed it, their personal taste will have a significant effect on their judgement. The same is true of film awards where the average person probably couldn’t name three movies that won best picture in the last ten years because its decided by people who have tastes completely at odds with the average movie-goer.

As I have substantially reduced the amount of gaming I do, I am also limited with what I had access to. So a number of “critically” acclaimed games such as Ghost of Tsushima and The Last of Us Part II were unavailable to me. The latter wasn’t a problem as I did not think well of the first game. The former, I imagine I would have enjoyed but then I am absolutely sick of Ubisoft style, open-world-action-narrative-collectable genre mashes, so maybe not. Refreshingly, the new games I played this year all stuck to one genre and I can say that all of them did the chosen genre proud.

So rather than select a game I liked best, I’m just going to write some brief commentary on each game I played this year. They are covered in the order I played them.

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The Prelude to Tyranny

I’ve been reading Plato’s Republic and I was struck by this passage in Part IX. Plato argues that democracy rises out of oligarchy which leads eventually to tyranny. This doesn’t quite fit wit what we are living through today which seems more like oligarchy arising out of democracy. Or perhaps, democracy was always an illusion and oligarchy has been the norm for all of the modern period. These quibbles aren’t important though as the portion I have bolded strongly correlate with our experiences today. There are indeed a number of other passages that also fit but this section is particularly prescient considering how long ago it was written.

‘[Democracy] goes on to abuse as servile and contemptible those who obey the authorities and reserves its approval, in private life as well as public, for rules who behave like subjects and subjects who behave like rulers. In such a society the principle of liberty is bound to go to extremes – it will permeate private life, and in the end infect even the domestic animals with anarchy.’
How do you mean ?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it becomes the thing for father and son to change places, the father standing in awe of his son, and the son neither respecting nor fearing his parents, in order to assert his independence; and there’s no distinction between citizen and alien and foreigner. And there are other more trivial things. The teacher fears and panders to his pupils, who in turn despise their teachers and attendants; and the young as a whole imitate their elders, argue with them and set themselves up against them, while their elders try to avoid the reputation of being disagreeable or strict by aping the young and mixing with them on terms of easy good fellowship. The extreme of popular liberty is reached when slaves – male and female – have the same liberty as their owners – not to mention the complete equality and liberty in the relations between the sexes generally.’
‘Let’s have the whole story while we’re at it, as Aeschylus says.’
‘Right,’ I said; ‘you shall. You would never believe – unless you had seen it for yourself – how much more liberty the domestic animals have in a democracy. Love me love my dog, as the proverb has it, and the same is true of the horses and donkeys as well. They walk about the streets with a fine freedom, and bump into people they meet if they don’t get out of their way. Everything is full of this spirit of liberty.’
‘You’re telling me’ he said. I’ve often suffered from it on my way out of town.’
‘What it all comes to is this I said, ‘that the minds of the citizens become so sensitive that the least vestige of restraint is resented as intolerable, till finally, as you know, in their determination to have no master they disregard all laws, written or unwritten.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘Well, this is the root from which tyranny springs,’ I said; ‘a promising beginning.’
‘Yes, but what happens next?’ he asked.
‘The same disease which afflicted and finally destroyed oligarchy, afflicts democracy, in which it has more scope, still more virulently and enslaves it. Indeed, any extreme is liable to produce a violent reaction; this is as true of the weather and plants and animals as of political societies.’
‘It’s what one would expect.’
‘‘So from an extreme of liberty one is likely to get, in the individual and in society, a reaction to an extreme of subjection. And if that is so, we should expect tyranny to result from democracy, the most savage subjection from an excess of liberty.”

Plato’s Republic, Part IX [Book VIII] – Tyranny

I’m sure I’m very far from the first to notice this but it is always fun to discover these things on your own. On the book in general, this latter part has been far more enjoyable than the rest. It has me wondering how many people actually know the kind of society Socrates advocated? He is usually presented as a great philosopher that was martyred for his beliefs but given what he was advocating, I think I sympathise more with the rulers of the time.

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Pauline Hanson was right

Back in 1996, I was in middle school and as is to be expected, not well-informed where politics and society were concerned. John Howard was the Prime Minister and he would remain so until 2007. Regardless of your politics, he was a successful and generally popular leader as his four election victories should attest. At the time and up until recently, I generally had a good opinion of him too. I didn’t agree at the time with his decision for Australia to join the US in their disastrous (and still ongoing), Middle Eastern wars. And I remained consistent on this and my instincts proved correct as there are increasingly few people of any political persuasion that still defend these wars today.

Something else I liked about John Howard was his stance on immigration which I thought was a strong one. The most vivid demonstration of this came with what is known as the “Tampa affair” in 2001 around the same time as the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and elsewhere. John Howard refused to allow “refugees” that had been rescued by a Norwegian boat entry into Australia and had the audacity to defend our sovereignty from foreigners. Many Australians considered this to be bad and still do but most then (and still now), do not. Our distance from other major nations and our island geography mostly help us to avoid the mess the United States is in but Howard’s response to the Tampa affair at least helped us to avoid the similar lawlessness at our borders on a smaller scale.

The problem is this was mostly all smoke and mirrors.

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