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Not the riots
I put these monthly diaries together from things I’ve jotted down as they occurred to me through the month, in approximate chronological order.
At the time this diary goes up on VDARE.com at the beginning of June, all the news is about the anti-cop and anti-white riots. Those riots didn’t start up until the last few days of May, though. The few things I had to say about them in May, I put into my May 29th podcast. I shall have more to say on the topic in my June podcasts and diary.
So this May diary is riot-free. It’s not about the riots. This is either (a) a serious dereliction of commentarial duty on my part, or (b) a welcome relief to readers from all the riot coverage. You be the judge.
The Geezer Election
It is now well-nigh certain that in November we shall elect a President aged either 74½ or almost-78. There’s been surprisingly little comment about this.
My opinion? I think it’s awful. Speaking from my mid-seventies, I don’t want anyone my age running the country.
Charles Murray (age 77) agrees. On Twitter, he writes:
The Presidency … done right is too demanding for people over 70. They’re too far past the peak, intellectually and in terms of energy. Some can still do a good job. But not as good as they could have done at 50 or 60.
Murray lets loose his inner quant:
From 1900-1956, the age range when first elected was 46-62 with 7 of 10 in their 50s. From 1960-2016, it was 43-70 with only 4 of 10 in their 50s. https://t.co/gpL1VeuYuu
— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) May 27, 2020
It’s not just cognitive decline, although that is surely in play with Joe Biden. At our age you just don’t care so much about the public world and its follies. Why should you? You’ll soon be out of it.
Oh sure, you may get another twenty years or so; but twenty years isn’t what it once was. You think of something that happened twenty years ago, and: “Was that really twenty years ago? Seems like just yesterday …”
And yes, you care about your kids, and the world they’ll live in. That’s an essentially private sort of caring, though. To hold it steady in the context of large national affairs demands a level of mental abstraction no normal person can keep up for very long.
Furthermore, as the actor Quentin Crisp observed: “At the end of the run, you can overact outrageously.”
In our nation of a third of a billion, isn’t there some experienced, sensible, politically-savvy, fifty- or sixty-something executive one of our two big parties could have chosen as a Presidential candidate? No? Really? This is very strange. Isn’t it?
(Perhaps I should have omitted that Quentin Crisp quote. You never know who’s reading.)
How are things in Glocca Morra?
A friend, native to Southeast Europe, recently moved to Ireland. He sent me a lengthy report on the place. Some extracts:
The Irish are predominantly kind and friendly people. Except for the horrendous underclass that one meets on the streets of Dublin, I can say that almost all of my interactions with the native population were positive. Having worked a stressful job back home, this whole thing feels like an extended holiday—and a large part of it is the calm temperament of the Irish people …
On the other hand, this is the most pozzed country in the world. If Ireland ever was a Catholic country with a rebellious attitude, that part of it is dead. Installation of the new religion has been completed here—diversity, multiculturalism, equality, feminism, those are the new gods …
The largest event in Dublin is the Gay Pride Parade … Abortion is practically celebrated as a new sacrament. They are obsessed with talking about it …
We have a health section on the internal web of the company I work for. Hoping that I’ll find some useful info regarding additional health insurance there, I discovered that most articles are about fighting depression, sitting comfortably in your computer chair, raising a child in a same-sex marriage and dealing with gender reassignment surgery …
The term “wife” is slowly being replaced by “partner.” Women are far less charming and far more bossy around here. I ran my mouth after a couple of beers at a company Christmas party and found that men here are completely neutered: they find my Balkan jokes demeaning to women and my remark that “chicks backpacking through dangerous parts of the world is just stupid” was deemed to be hypocrisy and double standards …
In the civil service department where I spend most of my days there’s a canteen with a telescreen. I am not joking—the largest television I have ever seen, displaying how diverse and inclusive this company is, with all the smiling faces of gays, blacks and overweight women loudly bragging about how supernaturally wonderful it is to work there. The volume never goes down …
I’ve been taking an evening course in event management in my free time, something that I had both interest and some work experience in for a while. I’m a guy in my mid-30s hanging around 19-25-year-olds, and I expected us to sip pints and talk nonsense after the class and then I’ll leave them to get wasted because I have to work in the morning.
How wrong I was. There is really something different about these youngsters today.
The teacher is a fat feminist and about 50 percent of the lessons are about the importance of diversity, inclusion and equality. Only I seem to notice that there’s something odd in such a massive adoration of political slogans.
Constant warnings about using plastic cups for water coolers and on events we will be organizing in the future. Constant warnings about climate change and polluting the oceans, and how we are damaging the developing countries with all our waste and we owe them help because of that …
ORDER IT NOWI believe that the reason why Ireland has gone so far down the road of insane leftism is because they are provincials of the US Global Empire. As an English-speaking country, the fact that Ireland was a rustic Catholic country for so long is a symbol of shame. The Irish are distant inhabitants of outer provinces of USGE and they must prove their loyalty to the progressive ideology far more than some other country where the process was started earlier …
In that regard, Ireland seems to share the same sickness with Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Their elites are glowing with joy whenever they receive some kind of recognition from the more central and higher-status organs of Polygon Progressivism. They don’t want to be backward peasants and hacks, they want to be proud provincials. The greatest reward for them is having the New York Times writing an article on how well their ideological struggle has gone, about equal to getting a blessing from the Pope himself in the Middle Ages. This country is doomed.
As a side note, I visited England twice while being here … If England is dead, there’s still some flesh on that carcass. There is a special kindness, spirit and humor to your people, and I must say I found them generally a better company than the Irish.
Thanks, pal. The transformation of Ireland this past fifty years from a deeply conservative, devout, poor-but-proud rustic nation—the priest-ridden potato republic—to the Heart of Wokeness has been simply astounding. It belongs in a book someone might write (publishers: I can be reached via VDARE.com) about other similar overnight transformations:
- Meiji Japan a hundred years previously, turning itself from a feudal nation uninterested in the outside world to an industrialized imperialist power.
- Atatürk’s dramatic modernization of Turkey following the collapse of Ottoman rule after 1922.
- The savage Magyar horde of steppe nomads becoming the Christian Kingdom of Hungary under Géza and Stephen after the Battle of Lechfeld.
History does not proceed at a steady pace.
A 400-mile beach with attached farm
I have for many years been airing my suspicion that Uruguay is one of those “small, quiet countries you never hear about, where nothing much happens and the citizenry chug along in cheerful prosperity, enjoying as much happiness as the human condition will allow, minding their nation’s own business, and grateful for its obscurity.”
Well, I have a new recruit to the cause of Uruguay-boosterism: dissident psychologist James Thompson over at The Unz Review. Here he was, posting on May 20th.
James’ main point is to tell us how well Uruguay has coped with the coronavirus outbreak. His introduction, though, is very Derbish.
Uruguay is a small country on the eastern coast of South America between Argentina and Brazil. Mostly European in demographics, it was long considered the Switzerland of South America because, fearful of the usual local tendency towards dictatorship, it shared power in a plural executive, was early in separating Church and State, in giving votes to women, allowing divorce, and generally being sensible. It has low corruption, high press freedom, a democratic tradition which survived a 70s lapse into military dictatorship, and no terrorism, a good standard of living, and an excellent standard of beaches. In fact, think of a 400-mile beach with an excellent farm attached.
Is it too late for me to learn Spanish, I wonder?
Adjective alive
I have mentioned before my mother’s use of nurse words, one of which was “cachectic,” which is medical jargon for “looking really unwell.”
(My mother pronounced it with an English “ch,” as in “much.” An American friend with medical training tells me, however, that the “ch” is pronounced Greek-style, as in “mechanic.” Webster’s Dictionary agrees. I don’t know whether this is a British-U.S. difference of opinion, or a change over the decades—Mum did her training around 1930. I favor the English “ch” just from filial piety.)
If you want a living illustration of the adjective “cachectic,” I offer you Dr. Barbara Ferrer.
Dr. Ferrer is the director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Yearning for normality
Mid-May. Passing through the dining-room on my way to the downstairs study, I catch the smell of lilac. My lady has a lilac tree in the back yard. She has snipped off some branches and put them in a vase on the dining-room table.
The smell of lilac is exceptionally evocative for me. Lilac was a favorite of my mother’s. We had lilac in our back yard in Northampton seventy years ago. I played happily under that little tree for many hours. It was a very little tree, just barely not a bush; but then, I was a very little person, just barely not an infant.
Settled at the computer in my study, I commence browsing the day’s news for snippets to use in my weekly podcast. One that catches my eye is at the Daily Mail website. There among all the inconsequential gossip about celebrities, Royals, and politicians is this little gem:
My Lancaster saved my life: 19-year-old rear gunner Ron Needle had the loneliest and deadliest job of the war—and one night 20,000ft over Munich, disaster struck, sparking a breathtaking survival story
May 16, 2020
It’s a WW2 story. The Lancaster was a British bomber, used during the last three years of the war in the great allied air raids on Germany. WW2 historian John Nichol has written a book about the Lancaster, publication date May 16th. This Daily Mail piece is extracted from the book.
That headline gives the essence of what happened to Ron Needle (who died last August aged 95). His story is not exceptionally remarkable, as war stories go; but it’s a reminder of how appallingly dangerous it was to be bomber crew. It was in fact a fifty-fifty life. John Nichol:
The average age of the seven-man crew was a mere 22. Of 7,377 Lancasters built during the war, over half were lost to enemy action and in training accidents …
Of the 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, just under half were killed flying missions.
The scent of lilac still in my nostrils, a chain of neurons is firing deeper, deeper, …
Seventy years ago in England the war was still close, the memories vivid, the music still played. Especially popular were songs that expressed a yearning for normal life, when all the horrors and dislocations of war would be over: When the Lights Go On Again, The White Cliffs of Dover, I’ll Be Seeing You.
Those were originally wartime songs, to be sure. Everyone’s life has spells of misery and chaos, though. At such times the longing for restoration of a peaceful, stable normality is powerful, and these songs still speak to it. They easily survived into peacetime: Jo Stafford’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” (actually written in 1938, but raised to popularity by the war) has nearly two million hits on YouTube, suggesting an appeal far wider than just octogenarians who remember the war.
The Ivor Novello weepie We’ll Gather Lilacs was in this genre:
We’ll gather lilacs in the Spring again
And walk together down an English lane,
Until our hearts have learned to sing again,
When you come home once more.And in the evening by the firelight’s glow
You’ll hold me close and never let me go.
Your eyes will tell me all I want to know,
When you come home once more.
After a double whammy like this—the fragrance of lilac, then the war story—those neurons are now firing all the way down to 1940-something.
My sister and I are playing on the living-room carpet in front of a glowing coal fire, my Dad in his armchair listening to the radio—BBC Light Programme—Mum in her chair on the other side doing needlework. George the Sixth is on the throne, Clement Attlee‘s in Number Ten Downing Street, Harry Truman‘s in the White House, Stalin‘s in the Kremlin. From the radio are issuing the voices of Anne Ziegler and Webster Booth: We’ll gather lilacs …
OK, so now I’m going to tell you that we’re all yearning for this coronavirus business to end and normal life to resume, just like the folk back in WW2, right?
Not really. Yes, there is some of that yearning-for-normality going round; I catch bits of it in conversation now and then. Still, a parallel between WW2 and today’s events would be facile.
This new flu is nasty all right, and I certainly wouldn’t make light of it. Proper sympathy is due to the afflicted and bereaved, to those suffering the misery and dislocation of unemployment, or the disappointment and despair of losing a business built up through years of struggle, plans, hopes, and sacrifices. I wouldn’t withhold an ounce of that sympathy.
Still, we are not living through a worldwide cataclysm of destruction and death, as my parents’ generation did. It would dishonor their memory, it would be impertinent, to draw parallels with our current problems. Our world, virus and all, is far more comfortable and secure than theirs.
A fifty-fifty life? As best I can figure, even for me—a geezer with a blood condition—the risk of dying from COVID-19 is no more than zero point something percent. For healthy 19-year-olds, like Ron Needle climbing into the rear gun turret of his Lancaster, it’s zero point zero zero something percent.
And while I’m no keener on dying than you are, dying under sedation in a modern hospital is not to be compared with dropping to earth from twenty thousand feet in a tangle of burning wreckage while listening to the death-shrieks of your friends.
(Nor, taking the other side of Bomber Command’s mission, is sitting at home in lockdown boredom to be compared with crouching in a damp, unventilated, rat-infested concrete shelter while planes fly overhead dropping 4,000-lb bombs on your neighborhood.)
As nation-scale catastrophes go, this pandemic, with all due sympathies and absolutely no offense to anyone, is minor-league.
Lie of the land
In my May 22nd Radio Derb I said that China’s national legislature, whose annual session had just begun, is merely totalitarian theater, rubber-stamping decisions made by the ChiCom party bosses. Still, I added, announcements made in these sessions give clues as to what the Party bosses are thinking.
Carefully scrutinized and sensibly interpreted, they can give us the lie of the land.
A friend emailed in to say she’d thought the correct expression is “lay of the land.” Then, checking, she found that this is a British-American difference in usage. Brit-educated English-speakers like me say “lie of the land”; if you’ve had an American education you prefer “lay of the land.”
Thereby hangs a tale.
In the World Wars of the twentieth century, with so many men in the armed forces, Britain had a severe shortage of farm labor. The governments created a Women’s Land Army to meet the problem. It has a write-up at the BBC website. WLA recruits, mostly young, were called Land Girls. There’s a BBC series about them, this picture gives you the idea.
When U.S. servicemen were stationed in Britain during WW2 they were usually on bases in the countryside, with WLA gals working farms nearby. There was considerable GI-WLA fraternization.
Working in the U.S.A. in the early 1970s, I had an American colleague who, thirty years earlier, had actually been on the GI side of that fraternization. He told me that a particularly, er, popular WLA girl would be awarded the epithet “Lay of the Land.”
Did Brit locals get the joke? I wish I had asked.
Lie, Lady, Lie
“Lie” and “lay” are nouns there, but there may be some connection with the very common confusion between the verbs “to lie” and “to lay.”
That confusion seems now to be perfectly transatlantic. The British Daily Mail Online runs regular stories about someone “laying in [for example] the street.” What was he laying? I murmur reflexively to myself. Eggs? Plans? Linoleum? Railroad tracks? If I’m told the subject is “laying down,” the murmur goes: What kind of down? Goose down? Swansdown? Eider down?
Originally, though, the confusion was just American. It must have seeped across the Atlantic when I wasn’t paying attention.
I know this because the movie musical Oklahoma! was a huge hit in England when it reached us in 1956. It was particularly a huge hit with my sister, who got a long-playing record of all the songs. When you have a two-years-older teenage sister with a record-player and a favorite LP, there is no way to avoid being imprinted for life with all the lyrics therefrom.
One of the Oklahoma! songs, “Pore Jud Is Daid,” includes the lines:
Pore Jud is daid.
A candle lights his haid
He’s layin’ in a cawfin made of wood.
I knew, at age eleven, that was wrong. Pore Jud wasn’t layin’, he was lyin’, and that’s no lie … sorry, sorry. Hence my reflexive murmuring down to the present day.
Possibly some local dialects in England use “lay” for the intransitive verb; American usages often have their roots in dialect British English. My local dialect didn’t, though; and by 1956 I was anyway embarked on my secondary education at a good academic school where dialect speech was not tolerated. The lie-lay distinction was perfectly clear to me.
The lie-lay confusion infects foreigners trying to master English. My wife, a native speaker of Mandarin, is fluent in English, with a bigger vocabulary than most Americans, but she still confesses insecurity about “lie” and “lay,” especially in the imperfect and perfect tenses.
I grumble back at her about the problems facing learners of Chinese, in which a one-syllable word can have many unrelated meanings. The Chinese word that sounds like English “lie” means “come” and hardly ever anything else. The word that sounds like “lay,” however, can mean “tired,” “thunder,” “teardrop,” “category,” or “accumulate,” all in common usage, with half a dozen less-common meanings.
Among those latter you’d think would be the Chinese word for a Hawaiian lei, the flower circlet. Off to my English-Chinese dictionary.
lei, n. 花圈
That’s pronounced hua-quan, “flower-circlet.” This is disappointing somehow, like them not just using the Chinese syllable wei to translate “whey.”
(Supplementary, just-barely-relevant recollection. I first encountered the word “lei,” for the Hawaiian thingy, at about the same time I was being imprinted with the lyrics of Oklahoma! I had discovered science fiction and fantasy, and read the Fredric Brown short story “The Angelic Angleworm,” which gets considerable mileage out of “lei”—not only the Hawaiian sort, but also the Romanian monetary unit, singular leu, plural lei or ley, currently trading at 4.36229 to the dollar. Also “lye,” and the noun “lie,” … It’s a cute story, although for full comprehension you need to know something about Linotype mats.)
The slow death of print newspapers
Linotype … newspapers ….
My morning New York Post the other day came delivered with, inserted in its pages, an envelope from AARP. Special Offer Inside, it promised. FREE GIFT For New and Renewing Members.
Just another reminder that having a daily newspaper delivery, ink on paper, is nowadays a geezer thing. If I walk my dog early I can see which nearby driveways have newspapers waiting in them. It’s the older cohort of neighbors. Does anyone under fifty still get a newspaper delivered?
Spring-cleaning my attic earlier in the month, I turned up the issue of the Post from December 31st, 1999, which was a Friday. My wife had saved it as a memento.
Browsing in it, I was struck by how much more content there was. For comparison I checked against the edition for May 22nd, 2020, also a Friday.
For one thing, the paper was just physically bigger twenty years ago: 88 pages, size 11¾ inches by 14¾. Now we’re down to 48 pages, 11 inches by 12. That’s a nearly sixty percent reduction in print area.
On a quick leaf-through I tallied the following breakdowns of pages, consolidating part-pages into appropriate categories. For 1999:
- 11 news
- 2 gossip
- 32 ads (including show and movie listings)
- 2 opinion
- 5 business
- 15 arts & entertainment
- 19 sports
- 2 comics & games
For 2020:
- 12 news
- 1 gossip
- 6 ads (including show and movie listings)
- 3 opinion
- 3 business
- 8 arts & entertainment
- 14 sports
- 1 comics & games
The biggest difference there is of course in ads. Some of that is virus-related. In 1999 full-page ads for department stores—remember department stores?—and supermarkets showed up every few pages; Macy‘s had a double spread. The 2020 Post has just one such ad, for Gristedes (a local supermarket chain).
Print-newspaper ads have been dwindling for years, though, along with the readership. The 1999 Post had a page and a half of classified ads; that has shrunk to a quarter of a page.
It is of course pointless to mind this. I do mind it a little, just because I have a lifelong habit of reading a newspaper at breakfast and I don’t want to change my habits. The world moves on as it must, though, and there are way bigger things to mind about.
And some things are eternal. Ambition, for example.
Movie Bomb of the Month
On the recommendation of an acquaintance, we rented Justin Kurzel’s 2015 movie version of Macbeth.
I know the play pretty well, having taken and passed an examination on it at age fifteen. If you buy me a drink I can still declaim the “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow” speech from Act Five, the words of which stirred Kenneth Clark to the observation that:
There have been great pessimists since [Shakespeare’s] time — Leopardi, Baudelaire—but who else has felt so strongly the absolute meaninglessness of human life?
So I came to Kurzel’s movie knowing the plot. That was just as well. I don’t see how anyone that didn’t could figure out what was happening. The male actors all looked confusingly the same. Is this one Banquo, Macduff, or Macbeth?
As for declaiming, there was none. The dialogue was all muttered or whispered, decorated sometimes, erratically, with traces of Glasgow accent. The only time Macbeth raised his voice was when uttering his very last word, “Enough!”—mirroring my own feelings at that point in the movie. The splendid fighting lines that come immediately before were all delivered in a breathy whisper.
I will not yield,
To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet
And to be baited with the rabble’s curse.
Though Birnam Wood be come to Dunsinane,
And thou opposed, being of no woman born,
Yet I will try the last. Before my body
I throw my warlike shield. Lay on, Macduff,
And damned be him that first cries, “Hold, enough!”
I understand that movie directors try for atmosphere, but Kurzel tried way too hard. The atmosphere here was as deep and thick as Jupiter’s.
The settings were all wrong, too, in ways that made no sense. Shakespeare’s Macbeth receives King Duncan in his castle: “This castle hath a pleasant seat,” says the king … but not in this production. Here everyone’s living in tents. They couldn’t have rented a castle for the shoot?
Nor does Birnham Wood come to Dunsinane by Malcolm’s men advancing under hacked-off tree branches (“Let every soldier hew him down a bough …”) It just goes up in flames for reasons not explained.
Since you can’t very well make yourself known to occupants of a tent by knocking, all that repetitive knocking in Act Two is omitted. (Repetitive and, yes, very atmospheric: the Bard knew his business.) This meant the entire porter’s scene had to be dropped.
We snickering schoolboys cherished that scene for its early fragment of Sex Ed. Drink, the porter tells Macduff, “provokes and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but takes away the performance.” Useful knowledge to acquire at age fifteen.
Our other favorite part, the list of ingredients for the witches’ broth in Act Four, is also left out. Perhaps Kurzel feared that “Liver of blaspheming Jew” might bring the ADL attorneys down on him.
So, not for me. I’ll give Kurzel credit for authenticity in one respect, though: Everyone in the movie looks like an 11th-century Scot. Nobody was black, or East or South Asian, or obviously transexual. How did he get away with that?
Math Corner
My worked solution to last month’s brainteaser is here.
For this month I shall lift one from my AMS page-a-day desk calendar, the page for May 2nd. They credit it to the book Geometry Snacks by Ed Southall and Vincent Pantaloni.
Given that the two shaded triangles are equilateral, what is the shaded angle? No, you can’t use a protractor.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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To spin things back around to the riots, I’ve noticed that the Left seems to use the same effective technique for conducting riots as they do for taking over countries, like the former nation of Ireland. At the vanguard of both is man-shaming, a powerful technique, when used by women to browbeat out the last of any remaining manly testosterone; the bitch-domination which soon quells all debate. A forward guard of such women is used as the front line, playing the all-important victim, the bleating-lamb-to-the-slaughter, the innocent young white woman. These useful idiots are followed soon after by unmitigated thugs, who hold back just long enough before they blitzkrieg through the front line, lighter fluid in hand. So in the vandalizing of both shops and democracies, any resistance is first disarmed by natural sympathy, and then disabled by the globalist shock troops.
Here under the sun I lie,
And as I lie, gaze at the sky.
Yesterday here too I lay,
And could have lain thus all the day.
As a man of half-Irish blood, I really am ashamed. The EU’s money that came pouring in in the decades since the 1990s made the Irish weak because it effectively united the country with good roads and foreign investors (who have often used the Irish tax system to their advantage). That, and the natural timidness of the men and aggressiveness of the women made baby-killing inevitable.
St. Patrick weeps.
As the ancient saying has it:
“Ireland – the Land of Lice and Hunger”.
Your friends comments on Ireland are interesting but as far as the UK is concerned the grooming gangs scandal is maximum pozz. They are not Pakistani grooming gangs because that would be racist. 100% pozzed (whatever that means).
great allied air raids on Germany
Great? Certainly one of the great crimes against civilization in the 20th century. Killing women and children, destroying some of the most beautiful cities in the world, reducing the achievements of centuries of Western civilization to rubble. And the net result was mostly to make ordinary Germans more dependent on the Nazi regime to provide them with food and housing.
What about “As I Lay Dying”?
What is this poor soul laying?
That was some timely stuff, lack of riot, oops, protest discussion notwithstanding. My wife has gotten about as spooked about this country over the last 5 days as I’ve been for the last 15 years. She mentioned New Zealand, and I mentioned Uruguay.
Here’s are my pros and cons, with the big assumption that they will let you the heck in to begin with:
For Uruguay, sure, you’ve got to learn a language. However, Spanish is pretty much the easiest one to learn, maybe even easier than C++. Seriously, I took a 6 week class decades ago, and a bunch of it has stuck with me (she was a very good teacher). If you like outdoor recreation such as hiking in the mountains, New Zealand has by far more varied terrain and climate too. Uruguay is the size of S. Carolina with plainer terrain. It’s highest point is 1700ft, and I doubt the climate varies much – it’s humid subtropical, not too bad if you don’t mind a fairly high humidity level. (The beach sounds nice though!).
As you wrote wrt all the English speaking countries (and great info. from your Balkan friend), New Zealand is pozzed as all hell. I can’t stand to even think of living with that Jacinda broad, the loony lefty described in Peak Stupidity‘s “Affirmative Action for the marble-supply-challenged”. It’s not gonna be all due process and rule-of-law and all that, but at least you won’t get all of the sickening matriarchal crap from a Latin American “strongman”.
New Zealand has allowed immigration from all over too. That’s good for getting in, but bad for living there (some of that “I don’t want to live in any country that would accept me as an immigrant” thinking, haha).
Really, I wish you wouldn’t mention Uruguay so much, Mr. Derbyshire. Shhhh, you gonna ruin it. There’s a commenter here on unz who goes by AaronFromMVD (I hope that is correct), for which the “MVD” stands for Montevideo. He’s an expat, I believe from America, who’s been down there 3 years or so. I hope he will chime in here, but he’s got his own daily news English web site too – The Montevideo Standard.
Lastly, this may be the first of your math puzzles I’ll take a look at in a long time. It’s geometry, how hard can it be?
Alongside useful gentile idiots, so-called hate laws in the UK are mostly the result of Jewish agitation much like the ADL labeling dissenting voices white supremacists and anti-Semites in the U.S. to circumvent the First Amendment.
Jews and their allies have also been trying to censor talking about those appalling gangs and their cultural background under the guise of so-called Islamophobia. This is also what usually prevents police from taking action against often Pakistani pimps and their co-ethnic clients.
Jews and Muslims in ‘landmark’ stand against hate crime
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-46355210
Barons of Bullshit: A Trip Around the Runnymede Gasbag Community
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/12/06/barons-of-bullshit-a-trip-around-the-runnymede-gasbag-community/
We Irish wanted everything we saw on Californian TV – not only the standard of living but the racial diversity, not only the racial diversity but the glamorous racial tension – “whither Irish racism” editorials are as luxurious and titillating a part of the modern Irish scene as SUVs and ski trips.
At the vanguard of both is man-shaming…
Ireland was ahead of the rest of the world in this area. The church shamed men for their sexual hungers. The broken economy made it harder for men to take pride in being a breadwinner. Neutrality was promoted as a noble value and an example to the world rather than as pragmatically taking advantage of happening to be situated underneath the NATO umbrella, while the Irishmen who fought in WW1 were written out of history, so the connection to a military heritage and to that heroic or protective aspect of masculinity was lost. As a tiny nation plugged into the global economy, we had no real control over the economic levers, so a lot of political discussion was about moral posturing and maintenance of ideological facades.
I’m a guy in my mid-30s hanging around 19-25-year-olds, and I expected us to sip pints and talk nonsense after the class and then I’ll leave them to get wasted because I have to work in the morning. How wrong I was…
I haven’t seen this directly, but a friend of mine who works with that generation was taken aback by an office Christmas party where nobody was drinking. Maybe it represents some sort of progress in that they actually enjoy each other’s company and sober, orderly, turn-taking, conversation.
There’s a reason why Balkan diaspora tends to prefer living near Latinos in the US.
The whites are just too cucked. Getting all fired up and offended over anything. It’s like blacks if they were pansies
I still remember that article where some Serbian guy was stopped by the police in Stockholm because they thought he was juicing, but he was purely natty. And like, visibly so, just a tall guy who lifts a lot, nothing extreme
Just to add on to the Ireland story:
I was there 30 years ago. From my impressions of the country on that trip, I’d say that most of this slide must have happened since then, so in 30, not even 50, years.
The $ was low then, so I hitchhiked mostly, and I existed for those 10 days on the my version of the Irish 4 basic food groups: Bread baguettes, blocks of cheddar cheese, Cadbury bars, and Guinness beer. I don’t recall eating any potatoes.
There is no Ireland anymore. At least when they were ruled by an English king, they were able to remain a distinct people. Now, as a satellite of Brussels they have a homosexual Hindu PM who cavorts shirtless in a public park with his “lover”. A small country, they will be bred put of existence before the end of the century by immigrants. For all the Pope’s did for them, they should’ve converted. I’ll bet even England would’ve remained Pale and somewhat conservative if the Irish had remained.
A lot of what went wrong with Ireland was first, giving the Catholic church much too much power, and then, the reaction to finding out just how corrupt and bad it really was.
Re, Ireland. Makes one yearn for the small, mid-late century, inward looking euro fascist republics of De Valera, Franco and Salazar. Don’t miss your water until your well runs dry.
Lol. Both overreact to inanities, but whites (well, white women mostly) will lecture you endlessly about racism / patriarchy / climate change / whatever. Blacks will just punch you in the face or pull a knife because they feel “dissed”.
Not sure. Both Quebec and Ireland were Catholic societies with very high white fertility and traditional values, which ended up unraveling starting in the 60s, just as they rejected the Catholic religion (and Catholicism itself was being subverted by Vatican II). Not saying that it the institution is not corrupt, it always was, but the reasons for the moral decay of Ireland and Quebec are other.
Nah, let’s elect someone older, like Betty White. America might sleep easier knowing its Prez is napping in the afternoon or off to bed at 7pm.
You should invest in Ireland, where the capital us Dublin every day … it almost keeps up with Central Bank money printing.
The word “great” has several meanings.
From Merriam-Websters:
Definition of great (Entry 1 of 3)
1a: notably large in size : HUGE
” in giving votes to women, allowing divorce, and generally being sensible.”
” in giving votes to women, allowing divorce, but otherwise being sensible.”
tftfy
Agree. Derbyshire is an unreconstructed Statist. Changes of his State readily and easily accommodated.
120 degrees? I’m a lazy idiot, won’t work the math for the exercise to the end, I’m just assuming the angle will be the same as for a regular sized equilateral triangle coupled with an infinitesimal one.
de Valera wasn’t a fascist, he tried to stop the the Blueshirts going to Spain to fight for Franco, de Valera was similar to Salazar but not as smart
The church in Ireland was fine until it was subverted by homosexuals, they run a group strategy, thats what the normal priests can’t see, they assume all the other priests are just like them, a bit like Jews in the west, White normies remain blind to the hidden group strategy
Ehh – Kontad Adenauer served until his 87th year as Bundeskanzer – and he did so outstandingly well.
– Even leftists like philosopher Jürgen Habermas do agree (and that’s saying something, Jürgen Habermas is a dyed in the wool leftist ever since he left the Hitler-youth – up to this day. Oh – Habermas published a 1100p. first-rate philosophical tome in 2019 – when he turned 90 (This Too a History of Philosophy).
So much to the declining intellectual strengths. I mean. His head was maybe even stronger than now in his fifties or sixties, but how much IQ-power / intellectual strength do you really need to decently run a country – like the USA? – I mean – didn’t Barack Obama successfully do it, or the younger Bush? – I mean, I sure don’t want to hurt no one (Steve Miller / The Joker) and definitely no American soul but isn’t it correct to state that neither of the two seems all too bright. I mean – they are brighter than average, and that seems to have served them well, didn’t it?
Quebec is a good addition to Derb’s list of rapid social transformations.
Overview:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution
“ Also during the time of the Quiet Revolution, Quebec experienced a large drop in the total fertility rate (known as TFR: the lifetime average number of live births per woman of child-bearing age) falling from 3.8 in 1960 to 1.9 in 1970.
“Starting in 1960, Québec experienced a drop in fertility that was so sharp and rapid, it was almost unparalleled in the developed countries.”
New Zealand can be a very nice, idylllic country to live in. However there are snakes. One is as a white male, you can never show self pride without being knocked down. The assumption is show erudition and you are a phony or racist. It is hard to imagine how a country runs on that principle and indeed New Zealand is falling to pieces. You might find your route to wild places blocked by fat beefy men claiming that territory belongs to them and keep out. The cost of living is very high and weather unpredictable. Contrary to perception, it is a large place and difficult to get around. New Zealand is a sort of cross between England, Los Angeles and Bolivia.
That’s what I got too, lazy idiot. First it is known the shaded angle is the same as the one right under it. The large scalene triangle that angle belongs to has two other unknown angles, but since the shaded triangles are both equilateral, the sum of those angles is given to be equal to 60º, which is equal to the internal angles of the equilateral triangle itself. (In opposition to having one triangle be inifitesimal, note that if the two equilateral triangles were identical, the line would divide their 60º internal angle into two 30º angles) Since in euclidean geometry the sums of the internal angles of any triangle is equal to 180º, the angle under the shaded angle, and thus the shaded angle itself, must be equal to 180º-60º=120º.
120 seems correct. The two long half clear, half grey triangles whose longest sides cross at the angle in question are similar (or is it “congruent”? — they have same length sides and identical angles). This means that complementary angle immediately to the left of the shaded angle must be 60 (b/c part of a triangle whose other two angles are 60 + x and 60 – x, which means the third angle is 60 so it all adds up to 180). So if that angle is 60, the complement must be 120.
Speaking of math, has anyone here seen the G Floyd toxicology report that was apparently released today or yesterday with listed drugs and amounts found in GF’s blood? Were the amounts of fentanyl and methamphetamine enough to cause heart or lung failure? Or merely a minor buzz?
So just the same as England then? But upside-down and with eight more sheep, and slightly less rain.
Seemingly out of nowhere, but probably with the fall of the West as a background, Eliot’s words came into my mind whilst dozing this morning:
“We are the hollow men
We are “the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”
I remembered reading them as a teenager and now nearly 50 years later the dedication to that poem takes on added significance “To the old guy”.
I think this be the first time I have visited your corner of these woods so your mention of memory and lilacs then echoed in my own mind another of Eliot”s poems:
“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”
But this then brought up from the depths of youth another of his poems:
“Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain”.
with the boy, the old man and reader being one.
The dedication should read “A penny for the Old guy”.
Uruguay “was early in separating Church and State, in giving votes to women, allowing divorce, and generally being sensible.”
“The transformation of Ireland this past fifty years from a deeply conservative, devout, poor-but-proud rustic nation—the priest-ridden potato republic—to the Heart of Wokeness has been simply astounding.”
Which is it supposed to be? WHICH, goddam it! I’ve got to have some basis for my grumpy critiques of what’s going on.
“Originally, though, the confusion was just American. It must have seeped across the Atlantic when I wasn’t paying attention.”
Actually, Fowler makes much of it, so it must have been a problem over a 100 years ago.
Lie is the present, lay is the causative: Cause to x. Lie, lay (cause to lie); fall, fell (cause to fall), etc.
I had this all explained to me when learning Sanskrit (which has a whole verbal system devoted to it)
“I don’t see how anyone that didn’t could figure out what was happening. The male actors all looked confusingly the same. Is this one Banquo, Macduff, or Macbeth?”
I had to watch The Departed about 8 times before I could tell Matt Damon, DaCaprio and Marky Mark apart. The first time I thought Damon and DaCaprio were the same guy. Modern actors are like that; no one can mistake Nicholson or Sheen for someone else (other than Joe Estavez, I guess)
“Nobody was … obviously transexual. How did he get away with that?”
Obviously? Hedging your bets? “Unsex me now!”
“the natural timidness of the men and aggressiveness of the women made baby-killing inevitable.”
So, in the absence of birth control or abortion, it still took Ireland, what, 150 years to recover from the potato famine/emigration? I don’t think abortion or birth control can really be the problem, now can it? What would Oscar “Four children” Wilde have to say?
Yeah, all those men in dresses were perfectly normal until, what, 1989? Forget Luther, even Peter Damien saw it was a homosexual cult in the 9th century.
Curiously, I have also had a verse running through my head for the past few days now:
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men
The subconscious connection here is being confronted by “little” as in “small minded” men i.e. the “Woke”, who confuse small-mindedly categorizing everyone by appearance as Enlightenment itself.
In a story I once heard about the Ku Klux Klan in the province of Saskatchewan in the 1930’s, a Roman Catholic priest was referred to as a “black-skirted she-cat of a man.”
Presumably there was some ill will.
New Zealand has some bumpy road ahead that’s for sure. It took 30 odd years of very sober economic management to claw the country to some form of prosperity (albeit still near the bottom of developed countries). This is nonetheless an achievement for such an isolated place.
However that generation of politicians and bureaucrats is gone, having selflessly managed that project. It is a great national misfortunate that luck threw Jacinda into the role during these times – she interprets these things as a mandate. And polls, and the political culture are running in her favour.
I guess she will get an absolute mandate next election, then hold on. It’s hard to understate her supreme ignorance – she seems genuinely incurious about principles of political philosophy, economics, public policy, etc. She just wants to do good and be kind. How hard can that be?
It’s going to be interesting.
Gerontion
T. S Eliot.
Take this quote (or indeed any part of the prom) as summing up the “modern world” —
“These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? “…
Again, it’s my peculiar sense of humor but: “if you want a living illustration of the adjective “cachectic,” I offer you Dr. Barbara Ferrer.”
She’s the director of the LA County Dept of Health.
Check the photo again. It’s not just funny, it’s fucking rich.
I think the book will soon be published.
Crawford Gribben, “The Rise and Fall of Catholic Ireland”, Oxford University Press 2021
Gribben is Professor of History at Queen’s University Belfast and a Scotsman to boot. Inter alia, he is an expert on Puritanism.
I find this significant. I would imagine that the Thought Police are now too powerful in the Republic for any Catholic academic to write anything other than an apologetic account of the subject. An apology, not an apologia.
I look forward to publication and will be buying a copy.
Mary Kenny wrote it 20 years ago https://tinyurl.com/y7t7z4vx
Quite a few people were fooled by the facade of the Catholic Church, and others who wanted to criticize or investigate wrongdoing were intimidated into silence. This allowed wrongdoing to fester and grow and grow and grow.
It’s a lot more than a few kiddy-diddling priests. It’s other priests who covered for them and got them out of parishes where they’d become notorious, to new parishes where new victims awaited, trained their whole lives to trust the man in the Roman collar. It’s bishops who worried more about priests, even priests who should have never been ordained and should have been defrocked, than about the lay people they victimized.
It’s “orphanages” and “laundries” that made Alcatraz look almost endurable by comparison. The Magdelene Laundries made the prison in Orange is the New Black look like Club Med, and girls were sent there for stupid, frivolous reasons, or for daring to get pregnant out of wedlock.
And it’s a cowardly press that was too easily intimidated by Catholic money and power, combined with a lot of lay Catholics who reflexively defended “Mother Church” from any criticism whatsoever. If they had been cleaning their own house, their credibility as moral guides might have survived better.
About the Irish — makes sense. In his book The Old World in The New published in 1920, E.A. Ross pointed out that Irish immigrants were an ethnocentric bunch who weren’t exactly rocket scientist material, loved politics, prone to rioting, corruption and crime, though good for some rowdy fun at the bar; Irish women were well liked as teachers, but loved to run around with Jewish men.
Some of their Jewified children and grandchildren have since returned to Ireland to guide the gullible mindless yet affable Irish into the JWO. Their current PM is a gay half Indian. So woke.
In his book Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World about the 2008 financial crisis, Michael Lewis painted Ireland (along with Iceland and Greece) as the new third world run by crooks and greedy fools.
Analyzing the rapid decline of the West cannot be done in polite society; a panoply of media-enforced taboos transforms a relatively simple diagnosis into a byzantine tangle of ideological brambles; this is deliberate.
But it all boils down to the great white Christian nations being suckered into fighting two needless and easily-avoided wars, both on behalf of the same bad actors who would eventually inherit the West, if not the Earth. Of all the losses those wars imposed upon the West the very worst was the pointless death of the best, bravest and most selfless men the 20th century had known – men who, once violently removed from the Caucasian gene-pool, could not possibly be replaced (and obviously, were not). And that is why we’ve gone whirling down the sewage drain, particularly after the turn of the century, at frightening speed.
On the other hand, we have spent the past half-century in enforced mourning over the Big Big Winners of the World War bonanza, who replaced that much-vaunted “six million” lickety-split, thereupon rewriting every jot and tittle of the rules of Western society. And don’t bother correcting my math – it’s 50+, not 70+ years; because the term “Holocaust” only entered the lexicon in the very early 70s, after the last best hope for Western civilization – Senator Joseph McCarthy – was defeated, humiliated and just possibly murdered for his efforts. That, to this day, schoolchildren are lied to regarding his fight for human freedom – encouraged to defile his memory openly and casually, and cheered when they do – is not just a ongoing stain in our history, but a reminder of why our world is on fire everywhere you look.
But what does this have to do with Ireland, you paranoid-schizophrenic neo-Nazi racist sexist non-kneeler to the new holy orthodoxy?, you may ask. Ask Derb; who, when it comes to pirouetting around calling out the authors and engineers of everything he rails against, is reduced to shy murmurs explaining why nothing good can come from dwelling upon what he calls “the Jew thing”. He’s so petrified of meeting the same ignoble fate of Joe Sobran and Sam Francis that he’s managed to talk himself out of recognizing that they’ve already meted out that same fate to him, with zero hope of ever being officially “rehabilitated” in time for his obituaries.
Geraldine Comiskey has written numerous articles for EMJ’s Culture Wars on the collapse of Irish Catholicism.
https://culturewars.com/news?author=5d6e66b2411119000153298f#show-archive
And EMJ has done great interviews with Irish journalist and writer John Waters discussing the collapse of Irish Catholicism:
…that has won the World Cup twice, and hosted the first. They are the smallest country by population to win and, with the exception of Switzerland and perhaps Korea, the smallest by area to host.
Derb hates soccer, so he may not have know this.
Uruguay produced one of the more convincing British Invasion knock-offs outside the English-speaking world:
On the other hand, I’ve never heard any critic of Jews say that the ACLU was wrong and William Jennings Bryan was right about teaching Darwin, and that John Scopes deserved his fine, and a long prison sentence to boot.
Why the silence? Do they have you cowed, too?
https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/it-was-83-years-ago-week
What would Bryan have to say about this?
“Hard as it might be to believe, controversy over the teaching of evolution still exists in many parts of our country to this day. It was just in 2005, that Judge John E. Jones III ruled in a landmark case brought by the ACLU and our allies that so-called “intelligent design” is little more than creationism under a different name and represents a particular religious belief, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, that has no place being taught in a science classroom setting.”
Mary Kenny’s book was prophetic, but even she didn’t see Ireland as shot to buggery as its Taoiseach. Professor Gribben is an excellent historian and he’s writing the obituary. And when you get to our ages, Mr D, you do like to read the obituary column.
Thanks for the reply, Mr D. You may be getting on a bit, but you’re still tending the garden.
Ireland was less affluent than Britain. It has not in five generations been a particularly poor country. The ratio of Irish gdp per capita to that of Britain and the U.S. has been as follows:
In re Britain:
1870: 0.62
1913: 0.57
1939: 0.49
1955: 0.49
1973: 0.55
1990: 0.70
in re the US
1870: 0.63
1913: 0.45
1929: 0.36
1947: 0.30
1973: 0.36
1990: 0.48
It’s long been at least a high middle income country and usually a second-rank affluent country.
Art, official GDP is one thing, but the truth on the ground is another. I was there in the late 1980s. It was not at all a wealthy country then. People I talked to (over that 10 days) told me how lots of young people were still leaving the country for better opportunities.
You do this quite often, Art, on iSteve too, arguing with quick sets of numbers searched off the internet but no experience and knowledge of the big picture.
Thank God the Irish are getting the what for. If it wasn’t for those degenerate celts, history may have played out differently in American politics and for the better. With a modern average IQ of 92, on par with slavic states that had to endure generations of communism right after getting decimated by World Wars, there was no way the Irish wouldn’t end up being a bunch of insular retards prone to getting Jew World Ordered.
Shit, is it any wonder that the first straight up Irish-Catholic president was elected under suspicion of mob interference, was a serial philanderer (and possible murderer!), a pill popper and an incompetent shithead who got his ass handed to him during a conference with Nikita Khrushchev? The Irish are a plague in Caucasian societies. They even manage to have their own gypsies without a lick of Indian DNA to them.
Good riddance to the potato rubbish.
Badwhite, Chinese poontanging Derbyshire keeps getting stupider and stupider.
You scribble that Ireland is the most pozzed country in the world, but fail to scribble that you are one of the most pozzed, cucked Western males in the world.
You scribble that” Uruguay is one of those “small, quiet countries you never hear about, where nothing much happens and the citizenry chug along in cheerful prosperity, enjoying as much happiness as the human condition will allow, minding their nation’s own business, and grateful for its obscurity.” Uruguay is such a nation because the population is Caucasian and Christian. Your pagan, Chinese family is not. I doubt they want to go to Uruguay. Since you are now thinking of relocating, how about if instead of moving south, you move east, i.e., China? Your pagan, Chinese family will feel right at home.
I also see that you’re still plumping “Chinese intelligence,” an oxymoron. You scribble that your imported Chinese woman has a bigger vocabulary than “most Americans.” Here is an article where you state that whites cannot be made to be as smart as Asians: https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/of-course-harvard-discriminates-against-asians/
Thus, your “most Americans” means pretty much everyone but you and your barely mediocre Chinese family. Your Chinese woman feels insecure about “lie” and “lay.” Does she pronounce these words as “rie” and “ray??
Focus on improving your Mandarin.
Good point, but are our only choices Poz and Popery?
In Bristol and its environs, “lay” is invariably used instead of “lie” in dialect, much to the distress of properly educated teachers. Since America was discovered and developed from Bristol, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the uneducated dialect speakers had some impact on American speech.
Incidentally, Hillary Rodham’s ancestors were from Bristol.
‘Art, official GDP is one thing, but the truth on the ground is another.’
Indeed. My wife and I visited Japan in 2014 or so. Wonderful country, but I was surprised to realize the people were in just about every material sense poor. Offhand, their standard of living seemed to be about that of American welfare recipients. Cracked windows, aging appliances, cramped apartments, no car…
Obviously, compensations, but wealthy? Not exactly…
“Good and kind” is exactly what children (real human children, birth to adolescence, maybe to marriage) need. It’s a great policy for a mother, surprisingly difficult to execute, and requires a good husband who provides income and an abstract structure for the child. Even in a family, “good and kind” fails without income and structure.
Just to be perverse:
That position can be argued for. Influencing public law by means of an artificial case is a major cause of our current predicament. Doing it in the cause of a scientific theory is very close to making science a matter of law and politics. Doing it to discredit a religion upon which contemporary society was based is very close to PC. I’ve read that Scopes, if things went wrong, was prepared to say that he had never taught evolution, and so must be innocent. A jail sentence for what amounts to contempt of court seems about right to me, although 20 years might be overdoing it a bit, maybe.
In any case, Darwin’s idea of evolution is now thought of as a secondary (although important) influence on life here on the third planet from the sun (see science popularization, Peter Ward & Joe Kirschvink, _A New History of Life_, 2016. Ward is an active researcher in the book’s general area of interest.). Worthwhile book, you won’t waste your time.
The conclusion that Darwin’s theory wasn’t the last word (I mean, it was 1800s, on very limited evidence compared to that available today) makes the whole Scopes trial seem as pointless as the various Communist revolutions that ended up as just another Asian Tiger.
Of course the catholic church did all those things, but the reason you know about them is because the catholic church is no longer the ruling class of Ireland. In short elite institutionalised Pedophilia existed and exists everywhere, and is investigated rarely. The ruling class has to fall, or lose power.
I’m in my mid-thirties, and I’ve been collecting newspapers since I was a kid. But I’m an extreme outlier, if not an outright freak.
I began reading Calvin and Hobbes in my hometown paper – the Miami Herald – not long after I first learned how to read. For my tenth birthday, my father got me my very own subscription to The New York Times. In high school I routinely “borrowed” non-circulating papers and even magazines from the library. (Nobody missed them even then.)
At one point in my twenties I subscribed to six dailies, and I lugged all of them around with me everywhere I went in my laptop manbag. (At the time, I had a two-hour commute by bus and train. Smartphones had yet to become ubiquitous. Boredom was still a thing.) I could not walk through an airport or a train station without stopping in the newsstand to pick up an out-of-town daily or two.
Over the years I allowed some of my subscriptions to lapse. My daily reading list dwindled to five, then four, then three, then two. In 2016, with some regret, I dumped the Herald after the paper ran a front-page banner headline announcing “We’re With Her.” Calvin and Hobbes had been dead for over 20 years and the Sunday TV section was long gone, but it still hurt.
Earlier this year I bit the bullet and canned my subscription to The Wall Street Journal. I’d long since joined the ranks of the iPhone zombies staring incessantly at their bright shiny screens, but to the bitter end I made a token effort every day to peer inside the dead-tree edition of the WSJ.
In the late ’80s, Richard Saul Wurman claimed in Information Anxiety that “a weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.” The Times is considerably smaller now, but I suspect that the amount of outrageous leftist propaganda printed in a weekday edition of the Times is still comparable to that printed in the average issue of Pravda in, say, 1937.
In the ’70s, Walter Cronkite declared that the script of a half-hour television newscast set in type would fill about two-thirds of a standard newspaper page. But the standard page is a good three or four inches narrower than it was then, and TV news anchors talk a lot faster.
For the record, the standard width of an American broadsheet paper has dwindled from 18 inches (folded) in the 1920s to 16.5 inches in the ’40s to 15 inches in the ’60s to 13.5 inches in the ’80s to 12.5 inches in the early 2000s to 11 inches today.
