Common Sense with Paul Jacob

Today

Cicero, Cornwallis, Craig, et al.

Post author By Redactor
Post date January 3, 2021
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On the third of January in 1777, American General George Washington defeats British General Lord Cornwallis’s forces in the Battle of Princeton.

On January 3, 1933, Minnie D. Craig (pictured above) became the first woman elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.

On the same date in 1977, Apple Computer was incorporated.

January 3rd birthdays include that of Cicero (106 BC), Roman philosopher and theorist of republicanism, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 AD), English philologist and author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Both authors were deeply concerned about the problem of absolute power.

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Thought

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding between the two communities in South Africa can be removed.
Mohandas K. Gandhi, Indian Opinion, October 1, 1903.

Today

Fourth to Ratify

On January 2, 1788, Georgia became the fourth state to ratify the United States Constitution.

On the second day of 1819, the Panic of 1819, the first major peacetime financial crisis in the United States, began. The classic historical treatment of this crisis remains Murray Rothbard’s dissertation.

media and media people

Reality About Fake News

“Fake news entered the world with the emergence of descriptive language,” writes philosopher Ray Scott Percival on Medium, “perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

And it is here to stay, because we lack a “fool-proof algorithm” for “disposing of fake news” without cranking out a different variety of fake news.

“But this should not demoralise us,” Percival admonishes. “It is no different from the situation of science. Removing error has to be a piecemeal, tentative enterprise.”

Percival, following a line of argument from philosopher Karl Popper, denies there is such a thing as “manifest truth.” It’s a delusion, says Percival. (The title of his multi-part essay is “Fake News and the Manifest Truth Delusion.”) But you don’t necessarily need to accept wholly his Popperian take on epistemology (or should that be “epistemics”?) to agree with his important conclusion, that a “ministry of fake news is a fantasy, a tool of oppression, suppression and stagnation, and would unavoidably impair our best means of error-correction.”

He recognizes that error isn’t the half of it. People lie. And some lies look pretty convincing, so we spread them. But the bizarre part of the current “fake news” mania is this: too many earnest citizens turn to government to stop “fake news,” though the biggest and most influential liar has always been the government.

What to do? Well, our “biggest gain in the control of error would be through the separation of science and the corrupting influences of politics (e.g. state funding, licensing etc.) and the chilling effect of political correctness on open discussion.”

Percival wants to “keep the enlightenment alive and kicking.” I like to think that’s just common sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags fake news, knowledge, ministry of truth, truth

Thought

Richard Overton

For every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself; and of this no second may presume to deprive any of without manifest violation and affront to the very principles of nature and of the rules of equity and justice between man and man. Mine and thine cannot be, except this be. No man has power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s. I may be but an individual, enjoy my self and my self-propriety and may right myself no more than my self, or presume any further; if I do, I am an encroacher and an invader upon another man’s right — to which I have no right. For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom. . . .
From “Richard Overton shoots An Arrow against all Tyrants from the prison of Newgate into the prerogative bowels of the arbitrary House of Lords and all other usurpers and tyrants whatsoever” (1646).

Today

Slave Trade

On January 1, 1808, the importation of slaves into the United States was banned.

education and schooling ideological culture

Totalitarians Gloat

For generations, even millennia, boys read The Iliad with admiration for Achilles, and men referenced the clever Odysseus from that other Homeric epic, The Odyssey.

By my day, neither were required reading. If I’ve read The Odyssey, it was the same version the Coen Brothers referenced when concocting their terrific film, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) — the Classic Comics version.

Nowadays, teachers gloat, online, about expunging the poem from the canon.

Rod Dreher, in “Cancel Cult Comes For Homer,” explains the context for this latter development: the politically correct “intersectionalism” of public school teachers in the “#DisruptTexts” movement. “‘Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),’ tweeted Shea Martin in June. ‘Hahaha,’ replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. ‘Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!’”

Why? All that ancient racism and sexism.

Expelling the classics from schooling is absurd, of course, exposure to a diversity of ideas and historical achievements being what we used to call a “liberal education.” But today’s canon controllers are not liberal activists. They are, Dreher insists, totalitarian ones.

And they are quite emboldened — their ground-up, crowdsourced movement gets the usual pat approval by tax-funded educational institutions. It’s not a conspiracy if they boast about it on Twitter.

Here is a fun fact about The Odyssey: Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon (1872) and The Way of All Flesh (1903), conjectured that the real author of the poem was a woman. Yes, an “authoress.”

Nevertheless, that would not likely convince woke cultists to put The Odyssey back on your kids’ reading lists.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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