Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen.
The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), 6.43.
On April 27, 1759, English philosopher and author Mary Wollstonecraft was born. Wollstonecraft wrote several important political treatises, including her response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), and her valiant effort in the emancipation of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
English philosopher, psychologist, sociologist, and political theorist Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, on April 27, 1820. Among Spencer’s most famous books are First Principles, Principles of Ethics (chiefly its first part, The Data of Ethics), The Study of Sociology, The Man versus the State, and two editions of Social Statics. Spencer was an evolutionary theorist as well as a religious and political philosopher, and coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He called the basic principle of a free political order “The Law of Equal Freedom.”
Wollstonecraft married anarchist philosopher and bookseller William Godwin; the couple begat one daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Mary Wollstonecraft died on September 10, 1797.
Spencer never married, dying on December 8, 1903.
Apropos of yesterday’s subject, population decline, China’s population collapse was a focus but not the focus. On YouTube, however, many “content creators” are focusing more acutely on China’s version of the problem. The ‘This Thread’ podcast claims, for instance, that China’s situation is much worse than compared to that of the U.S.:
A number of YouTubers are concentrating on a much bolder claim: that the CCP has been lying about its population for years, and that the total population is a tiny fraction of what officials claim. This presenter argues, for instance, that the country’s population is probably less than half a billion:
Look around on YouTube, and you’ll find video after video portraying China’s biggest cities as seemingly empty! Where did they all go? That’s their question. These YouTubers also suggest that Chinese pandemic deaths have been extraordinarily high, persistent, and consistently covered up.
Caution: most outside observers consider this YouTube trend a species of folk fiction, something like the dreaded “conspiracy theory”: false, hyperbolic, crazy — not to put too fine a point on it. But we do know that governments lie; we know that communists lie with more alacrity and out of greater necessity — so maybe there is something to the notion that 1.4 billion people is not just a small statistical fib, but the grandest example of the Big Lie.
A prophet such as we could use again today, strong, zealous, angry and gloomy in opposition to the leaders, the masses, indeed the whole world.
Felix Mendelssohn, referring to Elijah (from the Book of Kings), to his pastor Julius Schubring, 1846, regarding the composer’s Elijah published that year.
On April 26, 1777, Sybil Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British. Her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s more famous effort.
Sybil’s story first appeared in Martha J. Lamb’s History of the City of New York (1880), based on Ludington family oral history, twenty years after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow commemorated Revere in “Paul Revere’s Ride,” a once-popular and quite famous poem. Sybil was commemorated on an 8-cent U.S. Postage Stamp in 1975.
Actual evidence for Miss Ludington’s adventure is slim to none, however.
Maybe not in this case: he was listening to a lecture on his country’s population collapse. He was pleading with young women to have more children. North Korea is experiencing negative population growth: well below the “replacement rate.”
An inevitable result of horrific North Korean tyranny?
Well, population decline is almost a universal phenomenon. North Korea’s population rate is alarming, but so is South Korea’s — which is much, much freer.
And Japan’s, for that matter; and Europe’s.
So what do we make of the population growth alarmists from the 1960s and ’70s? I refer to folks like Paul Erlich, who wrote The Population Bomb, and the “experts” who made up The Club of Rome, with its infamous 1972 report, The Limits of Growth.
Magnificently bad prophets.
But they had a huge impact — at least on Communist China, which instituted the One Child policy in 1979. Now, that country’s population trend has reversed, with an increasing rate of decline.
Moreover, there may be a lot less people in China than was boasted of — official government stats admit a 2.08 million person drop from 2022 to 2023, following the previous (and first official) drop of 850,000. We can only guess the actual population, because communists lie. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, estimates that China’s population was less than 1.28 billion in 2022, not 1.41 billion, with the decline starting in 2018, not 2022.
Ask yourself: how many civilizations have survived a population implosion?
And for peoples with ponzi-like pension systems, this is even more devastating.
The Chinese are cursed, but so are we — for we all live in interesting times.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.
Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy (1951), Ralph Mannheim, translator.
On April 25, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
On June 11th of last year, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the House of Representatives interviewed former Governor of the State of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, in pursuance of getting to the bottom of the disaster that was COVID in New York and beyond.
Cuomo had counsel; the interrogation was transcribed.
The focus? The governor’s disastrous decision to send coronavirus patients back to his state’s nursing homes, where they quickly spread the new disease to its most vulnerable targets.
On October 30th, the Select Subcommittee sent an official letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, “a detailed referral for criminal charges against Mr. Cuomo pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 1001,” which Garland unsurprisingly ignored.
Partisans sometimes stick together; fearing being hanged separately.
On Monday, Representative James Comer, chair of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a repeat request, but this time to the new AG, Pam Bondi.
The case against Cuomo is fairly clear: “Mr. Cuomo provided false statements to the Select Subcommittee in what appears to be a conscious, calculated effort to insulate himself from accountability.”
Cuomo made multiple criminally false statements, including that he was neither involved in the drafting nor the review of the state’s report, “Factors Associated with Nursing Home Infections and Fatalities in New York State during the COVID-19 Global Health Crisis” (2020).
It is worth remembering that the legacy news media made Governor Cuomo their pandemic hero and sex symbol, even as his policies killed as many as 10,000 people.
How to hold media folk accountable?
You already have: the media’s low ratings.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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And do you agree with me, that the first condition of an artist should be to bear respect towards what is great, and to bow to it and acknowledge it, and not attempt to extinguish great flames for the sake of making his own rushlight burn more brightly?
Felix Mendelssohn, in a letter to to Wilhelm Taubert, August 27, 1831, cited from Reisebriefe von Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Aus den Jahren 1830 bis 1832 (Leipzig: Hermann Mendelssohn, 1862) p. 256; translation from Emil Naumann (trans. F. Praeger) The History of Music (London: Cassell, 1886) vol. 2, p. 1052-53.