Friday Hodgepodge
Friday, October 14, 2022
Blog Roundup
Due to unusual time constraints, the next blog post here will occur next Tuesday, October 18. Have a great weekend.
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1. I had either not known about or forgotten that Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead was condensed, serialized, and syndicated in newspapers -- with illustrations -- back in the day, with excellent results, according to New Ideal, a blog by the Ayn Rand Institute:
Rand was especially pleased with the description of The Fountainhead that appeared above the illustration panel for all thirty installments. "Did you notice their caption for the story?" she wrote to Baker. "'Based on the great, best-selling novel of a man who dared to pit his genius against the world.' They did that -- I had nothing to do with it -- I never discussed the subject of a caption with them and never saw it until I received the proofs. There is what I consider good salesmanship. They knew it was a man's story -- and they stressed its real theme in a dramatic way."It's a longish read, but I enjoyed the fascinating behind-the scenes look.
If the Ayn Rand Institute hasn't already had this published in book form, I think it should consider arranging to do so.
2. The Pacific Legal Foundation is suing Joe Biden for his rule-by-fiat bribe to young voters rendered gullible by our atrocious higher education system.
Brian Phillips reports:
The plaintiff in the lawsuit is Frank Garrison, a public interest lawyer in Indiana. He has been making payments on his student loans for six years. He will automatically have $20,000 of his debt cancelled."He did not ask for cancellation, doesn't want it, and has no way to opt out of it," according to Pacific Legal, whose latest update on the case is here.
3. At The Roots of Progress is an interesting post condensing some preliminary research and thinking about the question, "What are the best examples of catastrophic resource shortages?
Jason Crawford calls out the conservationist approach along the way, and his thoughts on the question are worthwhile:
The next paragraph ticks off some interesting things we will soon face shortages in, but perhaps that is a subject for later...Overall, the trend seems to be towards better resource management over time. The most devastating examples are also the most ancient. By the time you get to the 18th and 19th centuries, society is anticipating resource shortages and proactively addressing them: sperm whales, elephants, guano, etc. (Although maybe the transition off of whale oil was not perfect.) This goes against popular narratives and many people's intuitions, but it shouldn't be surprising. Better knowledge and technology help us monitor resources and deal with shortages. The "knowledge" here includes scientific knowledge and economic statistics, both of which were lacking until recently. [links omitted]
Image by William M Davis, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, due to 1874 publication date.
4. And speaking of shortages and how markets deal with them, Jaana Woiceshyn defends grocers, who are among the usual falsely-accused during inflationary times -- which are always caused by the same governments that people will call upon to punish anyone who dares to react:
Medline is right to push back against the criticisms of the grocers' profits because he and other grocery CEOs who have operated profitable businesses in challenging conditions do not deserve blame and scorn but praise and gratitude for doing what they do.I completely agree.
Grocery stores managed to stay open and sell food while governments hampered their operations. Governments caused supply chain disruptions by economic lockdowns and other restrictions, contributed to the energy crisis and inflation through carbon taxes and by not permitting oil and natural gas developments (including LNG terminals for shipping natural gas to Europe that desperately needs it) and further raised inflation by increasing the money supply and government debt.
-- CAV
5 comments:
Yo, Gus, I believe ARI published the comic version of The Fountainhead a couple of decades ago. At the very least, I have a copy of it, either in electronic or paper form, in a box in a storage unit somewhere. It was quite good indeed, though as you can tell my memory of it has somewhat faded over the decades.
Also, a curiosity for the historically minded: Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. This is a recording of an entry from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of that event. (The Chronicle was maintained separately at nine different monasteries and added to after the unified part that started it under King Alfred the Great--or at least that's the number of surviving copies. The quality of the various entries, naturally, varies widely.)
Good. The samples at the post were impressive.
Yo, Gus, interesting news from 1379, so this comment goes from Old English to Middle English. If you've read much about Chaucer's life, you'll know that he was involved in legal action for a case of raptus, so prima facie rape, but the term at the time had a variety of meanings besides "rape," basically having to do with abduction. There's thus been much discussion of whether he was a rapist. Interesting discovery in the legal archives--it seems to have been a labor dispute, in that he lured away a servant with the offer of higher wages, which was illegal under the law at the time, and was thus charged with "abduction" by her former employer. Our professor (a feminist scholar) went into the possible meanings of the term in class, but I am not sure that was one of the possibilities she expounded on.
And this essay on Slate has some interest, with the necessary caveats. Above all, the author's discussion of the uncomfortable defenses of Chaucer by earlier commentors is, alas, on point.
Snedcat,
Having studied Latin and some Roman history -- which admittedly makes me a rare (and probably suspect) bird today -- I am hardly surprised that Chaucer is not a "rapist" in the modern sense of the word.
Still, I'm glad to see this made clear enough that even many of today's fashionable intellectuals may feel a need to be somewhat circumspect about throwing that word around Chaucer now, despite the fact that he was (gasp) male.
Gus
Yo, Gus, a couple of comments about the Chaucer thing. First, if you're going to talk about the past, you really need to study your history (heh), and especially legal history, as the same term gets expanded and adapted generation after generation as institutions and ideas change. Raptus of course had a wider range of meanings in the past, but used for a violation of restrictions on hiring is a bit of a new one to me. Reminds me of this famous misstep in print (with sequels!) you mentioned to me a while ago. If I'd run across the term, I would have been puzzled to no end, and you can be sure I'd have looked into it a lot more carefully than Wolfe did, because English legal language is a congeries of bizarreties of many vintages. (As you might know, English law has many doublets, one word common law and the other canon law--"let or hindrance" I think is one example. Similarly, while "rule of thumb" had nothing to do with beating wives, it is similar to customary law on what wood peasants could take from their lord's forests--fallen branches no wider than the thumb [possibly the source of this phrase], wood blown down by high winds [the source of the term "windfall"], or dead branches that could be pulled down by the bare arm or by a curved staff [the source of the term "by hook or by crook," "crook" meaning the crook of the arm].)
Second, while I agree with Samantha Katz Seal's comments about male critics trying to wrap their heads (badly) around Chaucer as a rapist, I do get irritated with the constant statement that Chaucer propagated "rape culture" (which is one of those motte-and-bailey terms you can use in a procrustean stretch-to-fit for anything getting up your dander). It is possible he did in fact do so in some meaning of the term, but the examples seem to me to reflect a studious failure to distinguish the author from the narrator--which with The Canterbury Tales is an especially stupid thing to do, since there's Chaucer vs. the poem's overall narrator vs. the narrator of each tale.
Consider, for example, "The Miller's Tale." The young boarder Nicolas falls in love or lust with Alison, wife of a carpenter, and first grabs her by the pudendum. She reproaches him that he's too forward, so he then seduces her with words of love. Rape culture, right? A reflection of it, yes--because it's a direct and obvious reference to Andreas Capellanus's Art of Courtly Love, in which Capellanus discusses all the different considerations when wooing a lady, then adds that if she's of common birth, just do with her as you wish. In other words, he's clearly reflecting "rape culture," but does that propagate it? Perhaps in the eye of a strait-brained callow moron, yes.
And within that tale, all three main characters sin in one way or another and are punished in amusing and ironic fashion with an injury (to body or pride) in or near the part with which they sinned--except, to some extent, Alison, probably indicative of Chaucer's sympathy for her. And from the tale to the frame, the miller is drunk and doesn't like the reeve, a woodworker, so in return the reeve then tells a tale about two students (yuck, heh) who seduce the wife and the daughter of a miller, causing wrangling and ugliness in the frame story--which not only reflects their characters but is also presumably a sly condemnation of the sin of wrath: Releasing your anger disproportionately so that both parties are injured. There's a lot going on in Chaucer, which is why you'd need a much better argument than listing literary unpleasantness to go on about apologies for rape culture.
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