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Just Causes Password required Wedding in May Subscribe in a reader Enter your email address: Delivered by FeedBurner March 17, 2019 A poet, a scholar and a mighty warrior A great gentleman has gone to meet his maker. An empty place in our hearts. RIP #GreyphusTheMagnificent #GreyphusTheTerrible . #Gravitas #BestPurrboxEver . #Earnest . #DesktopCompanionAnimalParExcellence pic.twitter.com/AzPrIvt856 — Sissy Willis (@SissyWillis) February 1, 2019 Posted by Sissy Willis on March 17, 2019 at 09:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | | September 12, 2018 "A revival of tribalism in thinking and politics" "Many people bitterly resent it when members of the other group hold power," notes former liberal mugged by reality Roger L. Simon: Members of the knowledge class tend to think that Republican leaders are simple-minded, uncultured morons. Members of the business class tend to think that Democratic leaders are decadent elitists. In other words, along with the policy and cultural differences that divide the groups, there are disagreements on these crucial questions: Which talents should we admire most? Which path to wisdom is right? Which sort of person deserves the highest status? That's the kind of stuff that really gets people riled up . . . with their overwhelming cultural and financial power, these elite groups do frame the choices the rest of the country must face. If not for the civil war within the educated class, this country would be far less polarized. We are reminded of Australian Scholar Keith Windschuttle's argument in The Killing of History , where he "tackles head-on the pernicious but widely held ideas that objective truth is an illusion and that history is nothing more than a fancy kind of literature," as Roger Kimball wrote in his Wall Street Journal review in August of 1996, plucked from our snail file this very day: The focus of his attack is the cult of so-called "theory" -- that poisonous combination of radical skepticism, left-wing politics and deliberate obscurantism that has overtaken the study of the humanities everywhere. Indeed, he shows that this form of intellectual incontinence now affects many disciplines outside the humanities. We noticed the phenomenon with horror in the air-headed discourse of some of the faculty members at the Harvard Design School (known in our day as the GSD) during our otherwise luminescent studies there in the late nineties. Most academic writing these days is deliberately obscure and jargon-laden. A follower of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, put it quite baldly when he dismissed another critic's work because of his "unproblematic prose and the clarity of his presentation, which are the conceptual tools of conservatism." An anti-Western bias is a common if not quite universal feature of the attack on objective, empirically verifiable truth that Mr. Windschuttle documents. This breeds the consummate irony that by jettisoning one European perspective -- theory-mad academic radicals merely wind up with another entrenched European perspective: cultural relativism. It is around such issues that the arcane theories of Derrida, Foucault and other academic radicals collide with the real world. For the cultural relativism that stands behind the attack on history is part and parcel of what Mr. Windschuttle calls "a revival of tribalism in thinking and politics" . . . and it is in this sense that the postmodern academics who busy themselves denying the possibility of objectivity and truth are complicit in political as well as intellectual barbarism. Written five years before 9/11, how these words resonate in our day. Note: This post was published late July of 2007. We accessed it years later on September 11 of 2018 to make a grammatical correction but were unable to republish with original date. Frustrated. Posted by Sissy Willis on September 12, 2018 at 09:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | | January 24, 2018 Present at the re-creation Twitter buddy Pete602 caught old-style pols Rep. Adam Schiff and Sen. Diane Feinstein in the social-media headlights of a newly empowered electorate this morning: If Schiff and Feinstein want to see "Russian bots" they can look out the window. We are their "bots" and we have torches and pitchforks. #tcot #pjnet #p2 pic.twitter.com/sixFOhgNBh — pete602 (@petefrt) January 24, 2018 Like Peter Finch's Howard Beale, we are " mad as hell ," but unlike Beale's passive television audience who " do whatever the tube tells you ," we deplorables can see behind the curtain and don't have to let fake-news pols get away with their tendentious false narratives any more. Case in point, the power of the twitter hashtag to spread the word. Jim Hoft at GatewayPundit explains: BOOM! Twitter DESTROYS Adam Schiff and Sen. Feinstein: Internal Analysis Finds NO RUSSIAN BOTS Behind #ReleaseTheMemo. Last week, the House Intelligence Committee quietly voted to make available to fellow House members “a memo documenting abuse of the FISA program,” reports Fox News’s Chad Pergram. As TGP’s Cristina Laila reported previously — News of the FISA memo spread like wildfire on social media. Trump supporters pushed a #ReleaseTheMemo campaign after GOP Reps came forward demanding the document be released to the American public. We were part of that Reynoldsian grassroots Army of Davids that tweeted early and often in the last few days using the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag and inundated Schiff’s office with phone calls confirming we are not Russian bots . Desperate Democrats like Adam Schiff (above) trotted out their shopworn Russia, Russia, Russia narrative to try to hold back the cascade of truth spilling out over the damn of official lies. Then came the Democrats' lame attempt to stem the tide: On Tuesday, Rep. Adam...