On September 8, 1264, Boleslaus the Pious, Duke of Greater Poland, promulgated the Statute of Kalisz, guaranteeing Jews safety and personal liberties and giving battei din jurisdiction over Jewish matters.
On the same date in 1883, former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant drove in the final “golden spike” completing the Northern Pacific Railway in a ceremony at Gold Creek, Montana.
The inescapable conclusion is that subjectivity, relativity and irrationalism are advocated [by Richard Rorty] not in order to let in all opinions, but precisely so as to exclude the opinions of people who believe in old authorities and objective truths. This is the short cut to [Antonio] Gramsci’s new cultural hegemony: not to vindicate the new culture against the old, but to show that there are no grounds for either, so that nothing remains save political commitment.
Thus, almost all those who espouse the relativistic ‘methods’ introduced into the humanities by Foucault, Derrida and Rorty are vehement adherents to a code of political correctness that condemns deviation in absolute and intransigent terms. The relativistic theory exists in order to support an absolutist doctrine. We should not be surprised therefore at the extreme disarray that entered the camp of deconstruction, when it was discovered that one of the leading ecclesiastics, Paul de Man, once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that Paul de Man had once been a communist — even if he taken part in some of the great communist crimes. In such a case he would haved enjoyed the same compassionate endorsement as was afforded to [György] Lukács, [Maurice] Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.
Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2005), (pp. 236-237).
On September 7, 2008, the US Government “took control” of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the United States, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Both of these had been created by Congress as part of a concerted plan to make home ownership easier, and both had gotten completely out of hand during the many years of their existence, especially under new rules established by politicians in the 1990s. The after-market that they helped create — the packaged mortgage market — was what imploded in 2007–2008, leading to the economic slump that Nicholas Nassim Taleb referred to as setting the U.S. government on President Obama’s economic policy course of “eight years of Novocain.”
The 911 call released last weekend is . . . hard to forget. It is the one where, as The New York Times reports, “The dispatcher, Donna Reneau, repeatedly told a sobbing Ms. [Debbie] Stevens to calm down.”
With a tone — condescending and worse.
As television station KATV informs, the 911 operator “was working her last shift after previously resigning,” when she “answered Stevens’ call for help” and “can be heard yelling at her.”
Delivering newspapers at 4 am in Fort Smith, Arkansas, Stevens was caught up in rapidly rising flood waters and washed off the road.
The water is “all the way up to my neck,” Stevens desperately told dispatcher Reneau. “I’m the only one in the vehicle with all of my papers floating around me. Please help me. I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to die,” the dispatcher replied. “I don’t know why you’re freaking out.”
“This will teach you next time,” she lectured, “don’t drive in the water.”
Indeed, Ms. Stevens will never again “drive in the water.”
She died.
In fact, she had not driven into the water, but drowned in the rising flood water that overtook her SUV nonetheless.
Following release of audio from the 911 call, the Ft. Smith police acknowledged that the dispatcher sounded “calloused and uncaring at times.”
Dispatcher Reneau’s behavior wasn’t criminal, however, says her supervisor. And having already quit, she cannot be fired.
Perhaps there is a lesson: More often than we know it folks don’t so much need a tongue-lashing or an eye-roll or a dismissive tone as much as they need some help.
Especially important if you work for 911.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ernest Bramah, “The Story of Tong So, the Averter of Calamities,” Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat (1928). Pictured: detail of the cover of the 1974 Ballantine edition of the quoted book.
However deep you dig a well it affords no refuge in the time of flood.
On September 6, 1843, Yves Guyot was born. A journalist, economist, and political activist, he once endured a six-month prison term for his campaign against the prefecture of police. He served as minister of public works under the premiership of P.E. Tirard in 1889, retaining his portfolio in the cabinet of Charles de Freycinet until 1892. A free-trade liberal, he lost his seat in the election of 1893 owing to his militant attitude against socialism. His many books included The Principles of Social Economy (1892), The Tyranny of Socialism (1894), The Comedy of Protection (1906), Socialistic Fallacies (1910), and Where and Why Public Ownership Has Failed (1914). He served as editor of Journal des Économistes, following the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari.
Illustration is a detail from a caricature by artist André Gill (1840-1885).
On the face of it, it seems like a good idea.
After the horrific Columbine school shooting spree of 1999, “Safe2Tell” was invented to provide students, parents and schools a telephone/online interface (including iOS and Android) to report suspicious gun-related behavior.
But the devil is in the . . . ideas ricocheting in the heads of the people doing the implementing.
A student of a Loveland, Colorado, high school posted to social media his excitement about going shooting with his mother, with photos of several handguns and an AR-15. He expressed his enthusiasm with “Finna be lit,” which, Jay Stooksberry of Reason explains, means “going to have a fun time.”
Somebody anonymously alerted the Safe2Tell system, and the police stopped by the lad’s home while he was still out shooting.
Was the anonymous notice earnest? Or was it, instead, something far more ominous? Kids have dubbed the alert system “Safe2Swat,” referring to “swatting,” which, The Complete Colorado explains, “is a term that is used when someone deceptively sends police and other emergency services to another person’s address through false reporting of an emergency or criminal action.”
Though the police were quick to dismiss the worry, the local school was not. “The following morning,” as Stooksberry tells the tale, the lad’s mother “received a voicemail from the Thompson Valley School District, stating that, until further notice, her son was not allowed to return to school.”
While the administration finally relented, its handling of the situation led to the student being harassed at school by other students.
Who may have “swatted” him in the original report.
Not a fun time — “finna be NOT lit”?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy (1995), “The Nature of Philosophy” (p. 6).
Responding to British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, on September 5, 1774. Virginian Peyton Randolph (pictured) was appointed as the first president of Congress. John Adams, Patrick Henry, John Jay and George Washington were among the delegates.