Kraus, Die Fackel, no. 46 (October 9, 1917).
War: first, one hopes to win; then one expects the enemy to lose; then, one is satisfied that the enemy too is suffering; in the end, one is surprised that everyone has lost.
On May 27, 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi began his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian unification.
In 1927 on this date in May, the Ford Motor Company ceased manufacture of the Ford Model T (pictured above), the last of this model coming off the line the day previous. Over 16 million Model T Fords had been sold; it was a world-transformative product. On the 27th, the company began to retool plants to make the Ford Model A.
Exactly 70 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he was in office.
In 2015 on the 27th of May, the commercial space company SpaceX was approved as a contractor to the U.S. military for satellite launches; SpaceX has since led the world in its use of
A question that has answers.
Stanislav Andreski, Social Sciences as Sorcery (1972), p. 187.
Like many other things, the laudable ideal of combining education and research has its seamy side, in that graduate teaching offers an opportunity to recruit cheap (and in a way forced) labour for the captains of the research industry.
On May 26, 451, the Sassanid Empire defeated the Armenians at the battle of
On May 26, 1328, scholastic philosopher and Franciscan friar William of Ockham and other Franciscan leaders secretly exited Avignon, fearing a death sentence from Pope John XXII. On the same day in 1538, the city of Geneva expelled John Calvin and his followers, who headed to exile in Strasbourg.
The seventeenth century is everywhere a time in which the state’s power over everything individual increases, whether that power be in absolutist hands or may be considered the result of a contract, etc. People begin to dispute the sacred right of the individual ruler or authority without being aware that at the same time they are playing into the hands of a colossal state power.
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on History
May 25, 1818, the Swiss historian and academic Jacob Burckhardt was born. Burckhardt’s best-known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860
Burckhardt died on August 8, 1897.
Karl Kraus, about his newsletter, Die Fackel.
I and my public understand each other very well: it does not hear what I say, and I don’t say what it wants to hear.
“The biggest topic in British political circles on Monday . . . was milkshakes,” writes Mike Ford in The New Republic, “or, rather, one milkshake in
Milkshake, you ask?
Yes. Milkshake.
The shake in question “was lobbed by a bystander in Newcastle at Nigel Farage, a Brexit Party candidate in the European Parliament elections later this week.” And Mr. Ford goes on to note that infamous Internet figures Tommy Robinson and Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin (the latter inaccurately dubbed “alt-right”) have received multiple hits of thrown cold, frothy confections.
It is “a thing.” A meme — a replicable operation.
Burger King has even encouraged the fad, if in a bizarrely mercenary way.
“Throwing a milkshake at someone is rude at worst,” Ford asserts. “It may also qualify as assault in some jurisdictions, especially in the United States.” That second sentence contradicts the first. It is assault “at worst.”
Ford’s op-ed, entitled “Why Milkshaking Works,” has a tagline: “The far right fears nothing more than public humiliation.”
Really? Look, no one wants the inconvenience of these stupid attacks, but it is the unhingedness of the left that shines through, here — a threatening, punching, shouting-down, spilling-upon movement that I suspect mainly grows the ranks of the anti-left.*
The New Republic has long been a progressive rag: the “new” in the title referred to the magazine’s support for progressivism.
Fitting, then, to see it cheer on, this week, the idiotic, unkind extremism of current progressive culture.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Of course, to some on the left all non-leftists are “far right.” This is called the phenomenon of “the left pole.”
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Nothing in the world is better suited to laziness than orthodoxy. If you gag your mouth, stop up your ears and put a blinder over your eyes, you can sleep peacefully.
Jacob Burckhardt was a teacher and reserved, cautious mentor to Friedrich Nietzsche.