March 2, 2025

WELL I’M GLAD TO SEE EUROPE STEPPING UP. PERHAPS THE FIRST STEP IS FOR THEM TO HAVE FUNCTIONAL ARMED FORCES.

But how can you have a coalition of the willing that depends on “strong backing” from the country you’re castigating as unwilling?

Posted at 6:24 pm by Glenn Reynolds 389

CHRISTIANITY’S DECLINE HAS STOPPED: That’s the message from a massive new survey by Pew. Silicon Valley pioneer investor and Southern Baptist social media influencer Rod Martin digs deep into the Pew data and finds all kind of encouraging indicators of returning health.

Posted at 2:43 pm by Mark Tapscott 136

I MEAN, HE’S NOT WRONG.

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds 398

JOSEPH CAMPBELL:  ‘The Internet? Bah!’ Remembering 1995, the year of the world wide web.

Skeptics scoffed that the “massive seething monument to human expression” was little more than a fad. No contrarian was more insistent than Clifford Stoll, an astronomer who in 1995 brought out the book, “Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway.” It makes for entertaining reading — if mostly for its jaw-dropping assortment of misguided predictions. Stoll, who said he been online for years, wrote, for example:

  • “Video-on-demand, that killer application of communications, will remain a dream.”
  • “I don’t believe that phone books, newspapers, magazines, or corner video stores will disappear as computer networks spread. Nor do I think that my telephone will merge with my computer, to become some sort of information appliance.”
  • “What will the electronic book look like? Some sort of miniature laptop computer, I’d guess. We’ll download selections and page through them electronically. Try reading electronic books. They’re awful.”

Stoll previewed his book in an essay in Newsweek on Feb. 27, 1995, that has become something of a cult classic, which is frequently rediscovered online. The essay, in which Stoll dismissed the online world as a “most trendy and oversold community,” appeared beneath the headline, “The Internet? Bah!”

This is history repeating, of course. In 1977, Creative Computing magazine reprinted a speech by Arthur C. Clarke to ATT and MIT at the “Convocation on Communications in Celebration of the Centennial of the Telephone,” in which he said:

Man is the communicating animal;  he demands news, information, entertainment, almost as much as food. In fact, as a functioning human being, he can survive much longer without food — even without water! — than without information, as experiments in sensory deprivation have shown. This is a truly astonishing fact; one could construct a whole philosophy around it.

So any major advance in communications capability that can be conceived can be realized in practice, and that same advance will come into widespread use just as soon as it is practicable. Often sooner; the public can’t wait for “state of the art” to settle down. Remember the first clumsy phonographs, radios, tape recorders? And would you believe the date of the first music broadcast? It was barely a year after the invention of the telephone! On April 2, 1877, a “telegraphic harmony” apparatus in Philadelphia sent “Yankee Doodle” to sixteen loudspeakers — well, soft-speakers — in New York’s Steinway Hall. Alexander Graham Bell was in the audience, and one would like to know if he complimented the promoter — his now forgotten rival, Elisha Gray, who got to the Patent Office just those fatal few hours too late…

Gray was not the only one to be caught out by the momentum of events. When news of the telephone reached England through Cyrus Field’s undersea telegraphic cable, the chief engineer of the Post Office was asked whether this new Yankee invention would be of any practical value. He gave the forthright reply: “No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone — but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.”

The telephone? Bah!

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll 291

QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining? For 50 years, we’ve been hearing from men who feel threatened by the gains of women and minorities. Now that the manosphere is in charge, the victim mentality has to go.

The manosphere won. Bro podcasters top the charts. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg declares his company needs more “masculine energy.” Elon Musk shares a post saying only “high-status males” should run the country. The White House kills diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, and so do multiple companies, from Target to McDonalds.

OK, men, so will you finally quit complaining?

In 2021, Joe Rogan famously said, “It will eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk…It will be, ‘You’re not allowed to go outside’…I’m not joking. It really will get there, it’s that crazy.” But Rogan’s complaint is actually an old one that has exploded as a rallying cry every decade or so for more than 50 years. White guys have blamed others for their job losses, educational failures, economic problems and drug addictions.

Somebody else is always at fault. The mighty white guy, it turns out, is quite the delicate flower.

“The white male is the most persecuted person in the United States,” a retired marketing executive declared in a Newsweek cover story in 1993. The magazine cataloged a litany of white men’s gripes: a culture that demonized them, diversity programs run amok, women and Black people getting jobs that were rightfully theirs. “This is a weird moment to be a white man,” it reported. “Suddenly white American males are surrounded by feminists, multiculturalists, P.C. policepersons, affirmative-action employers…all of them saying the same thing: You’ve been a bad boy.”

Sound familiar?

Racism and sexism are as old as time. But the “oppressed white man” trope is a relatively modern invention, with roots in the civil-rights and women’s-rights victories of the 1960s. Protests and lawsuits followed, with aggrieved white men turning the language of civil rights on its head. “Talk about rights; we’ve got no rights!” a crowd of white Detroit police officers chanted in 1975, protesting a court ruling in favor of the department’s relatively few Black and female officers.

The TV character Archie Bunker, the oppressed white guy’s avatar, captured that spirit in a 1974 “All in the Family” episode, when he complained about a female colleague whose pay was equal to his: “What’s the point of a man working hard all his life, trying to get someplace, if all he’s gonna do is wind up equal?!”

The Wall Street Journal has apparently decided to boldly go where Pinch Sulzberger of the New York Times went before in the mid-1990s.

Interesting choice of artwork to accompany Joanne Lipman’s article, though. Archie Bunker was a leftist Hollywood parody of the typical Nixon voter in 1970 created by Norman Lear. Michael Douglas’ William Foster, aka “D-FENS” of Falling Down was a leftist Hollywood parody of the typical Reagan/Bush voter by Joel Schumacher and his writer, Ebbe Row Smith. Rogan, Zuckerburg and Musk were all staunch Obama voters until he tried to make a power grab for Silicon Valley in his third term.

Exit quote:

Posted at 12:14 pm by Ed Driscoll 321

UNCLE SUGAR’S CHECKBOOK IS CLOSED, BUT THEY’RE TOO POOR TO TAKE HIS PLACE:

The richest European countries are poorer than Mississippi, though they all look down on Mississippi.

Posted at 9:04 am by Glenn Reynolds 722

IT TOOK LONG ENOUGH: Hidden behind paywall, but The WSJ has an interesting article about reintroducing shop class in schools. IIRC, Glenn and others have mentioned that most Gen-X and Z’ers don’t even know how to change a tire.

I was at an AutoZone recently to replace an oil filter wrench. The kid gave me the “deer in the headlights” look, and just went to his checkout computer screen to see what I was talking about.

“Have you ever changed oil in a car?” I asked.
You get three guesses at what his response was, and the first two guesses don’t count.

Posted at 8:41 am by Charles Glasser 538