plasticbasket: August 2017

Thursday, August 31, 2017

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

It's impossible for a man to live and breathe underwater . . . Anyway

No one gets the apocalypse they wished for.

From Jacob Siegel:

https://thejacobsiegel.com/the-strange-hero-of-hunger/

George Orwell, who knew a thing or two about a thing or two, had this to say in the Summer of ‘41.

"The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions—racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war—which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action."

Orwell was giving an explanation for why Britain’s progressives like H.G. Wells had missed the rise of Hitler. It was because they wrote him off as absurd, a ridiculous character with his little mustache, clueless about the affairs of the modern world. It was beneath people like Wells to worry about Hitler. They thought that only what they deemed important mattered. The world doesn’t run on seriousness. Donald Trump obviously isn’t Hitler but he isn’t exactly serious either.