Southerners, like Blue Ridge Hunt Master Ann McIntosh, are even courteous to hounds.
Glenn Reynolds devotes one of his postings to noting the differences in manners one encounters upon changing latitudes.
As a recent (female) Yankee transplant to the south, I can’t speak of past southern manners, but I can speak of what I’ve seen and experienced since I’ve been here. It’s been nothing short of culture shock, in a wonderful way. I work in a retail store where it’s occasionally required of me to help customers out to their cars with heavy packages. I have no problem with this, but I have yet to seen a man let me take the heavier box, and if I try to, they won’t let me. My male co-workers won’t curse in front of me, or even discuss “inappropriate†subjects without first saying “excuse my language†or “pardon me for thisâ€. I routinely have customers tell me not to worry about helping them with heavy packag, and that I should make the guys carry them. I’m called “ma’amâ€! (And occasionally, “darlin’â€, which is also perfectly acceptable.) I’m treated like a lady wherever I go, not just another random customer. I rarely have to open a door for myself, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been offered assistance to my car when my arms are full after grocery shopping, from both men and women alike. …
I’m amazed and grateful for a culture that teaches such manners. If this is a decline in southern manners, then I can only imagine what they were like at their peak.
UPDATE: Reader Bruce Webster writes: “I’ve lived in Texas twice — two years in Houston (1979-81), and 18 months in Dallas (1998-99). The phenomenon is real. There is a cultural graciousness that permeates all ages. It doesn’t mean there aren’t jerks there (though I suspect a lot of them are transplants), but it does mean that there are genuine good manners everywhere. I think it’s the guns. :-) ..Bruce.â€
T. Elliot Gaiser responds to the liberal desire to protect the innocent from the allegedly coercive power of marketing.
The progressive vision of the world seems to hold unshakable faith in expert studies as revealing the truth. This vision also assumes that people, being naturally good and rational after Rousseau’s doctrines, will always make the right choice if they have the right information. The progressive views supposedly false information that could lead people to choose something the experts have ruled the wrong choice (e.g. advertising by Pepsi, or Tobacco companies for that matter) as a dire threat to freedom. It’s like good marketing for something the experts don’t like is coercion in the progressive mind.
But a free society will not long endure if every time “studies” say particular behavior is harmful, the federal government is called in to curb free speech because it might influence people in a direction contrary to contemporary science. Even the most teeth-destroying sugar water supplier deserve to make an argument for their product. To paraphrase Voltaire’s phrase, I may disagree vehemently with your advertising, but I’ll defend to the death your right to advertise.
A paper published on Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical Physical & Engineering Sciences may offer the explanation of how Viking mariners a thousand years ago were able to navigate the North Atlantic between Europe and the Old World, traveling great distances by sea in high latitudes in which cloudy weather frequently denied visibility of the sun.
Before the invention of the magnetic compass, navigating with a sundial would have been difficult, particularly on overcast days. Ancient Viking lore suggests that they had a magical tool to find the sun, even when the star was hidden.
Researchers have now discovered the crystal that would have made such a magical apparatus possible. The Vikings could have used a common calcite crystal, called an Icelandic spar, to find the sun in the high latitudes where they would have had to battle long twilights and cloudy skies to navigate. This special “sunstone” could find the direction of the sun even when it was out of view because it plays a trick with the light.
“The Vikings could have discovered this, simply by choosing a transparent crystal and looking through it through a small hole in a screen,” study researcher Guy Ropars wrote in an email to LiveScience. “The understanding of the complete mechanism and the knowledge of the polarization of light is not necessary.”
To use the crystal, the Vikings would have held the stone up to the center of the sky (from their perspective). When sunlight hits the crystal, that light gets polarized and broken into an “ordinary” and an “extraordinary” beam.
On a clear day, the Vikings would have rotated the crystal until the two beams lined up. Since these two beams line up and have the same brightness at only one angle, by noting where the sun is when this happens the Vikings could establish a reference point that could be used even when the sun wasn’t visible.
There are several other types of crystal that have this same property, but they wouldn’t have been too useful because they aren’t as clear or as common, the researchers said. The Icelandic spar that the researchers analyzed is very common along the coasts of Iceland, and is also common today in Brazil and Mexico.
While none of these Icelandic spar crystals has been found in a Viking settlement, one was recently discovered in an Elizabethan shipwreck from 1592 in the English Channel.
Viking navigation from Norway to America in the northern latitudes remains a mystery for physicists, historians and archaeologists. Polarimetric methods using absorbing dichroic crystals as polarizers to detect a hidden Sun direction using the polarized skylight have led to controversies. Indeed, these techniques may lack in sensitivity, especially when the degree of polarization is low. Here, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that using the transparent common Iceland spar as a depolarizer, the Vikings could have performed a precise navigation under different conditions. Indeed, when simply rotated, such a birefringent crystal can completely depolarize, at the so-called isotropy point, any partially polarized state of light, allowing us to guess the direction of the Sun. By equalizing the intensities of the ordinary and extraordinary beams at the isotropy point, we show that the Sun direction can be determined easily, thanks to a simple sensitive differential two-image observation. A precision of a few degrees could be reached even under dark crepuscular conditions. The exciting recent discovery of such an Iceland spar in the Alderney Elizabethan ship that sank two centuries before the introduction of the polarization of light in optics may support the use of the calcite crystal for navigation purposes.
On the same subject, Fjordman marvels at Western political leaders actively supporting Islamic revolutionaries in the Middle East. It was Qaddafi versus Al Qaeda after all, and we supported al Qaeda.
Many ordinary citizens, when witnessing our so-called leaders supporting our enemies, wonder whether Western political elites have lost their grip on reality. What are they trying to achieve with such stupid and suicidal policies? Why do they want to export democracy to Islamic countries, even if this brings radical organizations with hostile agendas to power, at the same time as the democratic system is being de facto abolished in Europe by the European Union?
My personal view is that the cultural, economic and especially immigration policies currently promoted by the ruling elites throughout virtually the entire Western world are harmful to the long-term interests of the European peoples who created this civilization. One fundamental question that has been hotly debated on the Internet by dissident writers is whether this trend is entirely accidental, and exclusively reflects the purely impersonal forces of technological globalization, or whether there is also a purpose and a plan behind some of these changes. …
Today the ruling ideology is an absolute egalitarianism that if you analyze it closely actually amounts to saying that all cultures have an equal right to exist, except the European one which is evil.
Translation: “One hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing!”
Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical journal, was in 2007 the only publication in France to print the Danish Mohammed cartoons. As a result, Charlie Hebdo was then charged with slandering a group on the basis of religion, but was finally acquitted after a two day trial.
Charlie Hebdotoday intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.
The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared yet, when last night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.
The bravery and readiness to defend the principle of free speech of the American urban elites was promptly demonstrated by Time Magazine’s Bureau chief, the aptly named Bruce Crumley.
Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections†of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they†aren’t going to tell “us†what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?
The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. ..
[Y]eah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the “illegal†bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.
All of which leads inevitably to the reflection that objectionable as the bigoted barbarian fanatics who firebombed Charlie Hebdo are, lickspittle cowards, appeasers, and traitors to their own culture and civilization like the invertebrate Mr. Crumbley are even more of a blight on the face of the planet.
Bugger Islam, and bugger bed-wetting liberalism twice.
Kenneth Anderson penetrates through the general confusion about what the Occupy Wall Street protests are all about and explains that what we see is the indignation of the low-end intellectual clerisy left behind by more successful representatives of the same class.
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing — and by the fact that it is actually, two distinct strands, a privileged one and a semi-privileged one. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google. …
The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem — they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.
The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class — the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies — with or without the benefit of law school — has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. …
The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class. It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites.
Anderson is perfectly correct. Just as in places like Egypt and Tunisia, the penchant for empire-building on the part of the Academic industry combined with the general recognition of university education as the path to success and security led the United States to run through a vastly over-inflated system of ersatz higher education a large population with resulting delusions of self importance and entitlement and no means of satisfying them. Naturally, they think the system is unjust. Those other guys, over there, they have money and power, and we, the purer, nobler spirits, who majored in Afro-American Musical Traditions or Gender Inequity Studies are working in Starbucks. It’s so not fair! Rage against the Machine!
Glenn Reynolds wonders aloud about the Herman Cain sexual harassment media frenzy: “Would Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Anna Palmer and Kenneth Vogel have put their names on a similar piece, with no named sources, aimed at Barack Obama? Would Politico have run it?”
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Herman Cain demonstrates a new way of dealing with these kinds of charges, and America learns that this candidate can sing!
