Letter to the Editor: This message is intended to respond to your recent blog: "David French and the Chimerical Flibbertigibbet." I understand the main thrust of your argument in this ...
Some Letters That Met the Deadline. Like This Guy.
Almost as Good as Living in Her Basement
“They were romantic individualists who valued self-reliance and were possessed of a grand contempt for mass society. As Thoreau, who is best known for spending two years ‘roughing it’ in a cabin on Walden Pond (his mother actually brought him regular meals and did his washing), famously wrote, ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’”
Nation of Rebels, p. 69
Imitation Where It Counts
“Ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children”
David French and the Chimerical Flibbertigibbet
Introduction: The United States has a written Constitution, as in, written down, which has been a wonderful firewall and blessing. But America also has, as all nations do, an unwritten constitution. ...
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On Being the Hero in Your Own Show
“The idea of a counterculture is ultimately based on a mistake. At best, countercultural rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economic consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else”
Nation of Rebels, p. 65
And Do You Really Want To?
“If someone loses his temper, and you clean up after him, regardless of whether he is a two-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, you are going to have to do it again . . . You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.”
Stands to Reason
There’s That Also
“The idea that marijuana liberates the mind is something that only someone who is stoned could believe.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 61
Rasputin in Jammies
“Many time, parents are reluctant to discipline when it is needed, because they think their child is feeble-minded when it comes to godly cause and effect. A mom says, ‘I don’t think my little baa-lamb’—known to outsiders as the wailing tornado, and to his siblings as Rasputin in footie jammies—“understands the connection between the whining and the spanking. He looks so sad and bewildered.’ Doesn’t understand disciplinary cause and effect, you say? But how can this be, when he is a veritable genius when it comes to ungodly cause and effect? Tell me, does he understand the connection between whining and getting whatever it is he wants”.
The Rebels That Aren’t
“With this theory of co-optation in place, the counterculture itself becomes a ‘total ideology,’ a completely closed system of thought immune to falsification, in which every apparent exception simply confirms the rule. For generations now, countercultural rebels have been pumping out ‘subversive’ music, ‘subversive’ art, ‘subversive’ literature, ‘subversive’ clothing, while universities have been packed full of professors disseminating ‘subversive’ ideas to their students. So much subversion, and yet the system seems to tolerate it quite well. Does this suggest that the system is perhaps not so repressive after all? ‘On the contrary,’ says the countercultural rebel. ‘It shows that the system is even more repressive than we thought—look at how skillfully it co-opts all of this subversion!’ Back in 1965, Herbert Marcuse coined a term to describe this peculiar sort of repression. He called it ‘repressive tolerance.’ It’s an idea that makes about as much sense now as it did then”
Nation of Rebels, p. 35