Weekly Digest

WBH Digest 2025-01-17: Agony and Ecstasy

Maybe just agony?

I've said in the past that great men are often ridden by their obsessions. Based on this story from J. Daniel Sawyer, pain can also serve as a spur to accomplishment.

The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
–G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ignatius Press, San Francisco (1995)

Beware of an old man in a profession where men die young.

I was absolutely less familiar with the minor gods of Rome than I expected.

Funranium Labs – The Fringes of Regulation

There are a number of interesting holdovers in American law from the Cold War. Among them must assuredly be accounted the status of nuclear facilities in the law, which produce interesting edge cases.

Managing a chain restaurant is criminally underpaid work.

Spawn of Mars: The Definition of High Art

Despite having been a writer for decades now and having had the unsurprising and frequent inclination, as a producer of art, to contemplate the nature of art, it was many years until I realized something that I think is very true.

Let me begin by stating the obvious: All works are not substantially equal. However much the academics might want to de-privilege the canon, there remains a qualitative difference between high art and low art. This, to be sure, is not news. If you think I am merely about to scoff at academics who overpraise hip-hop or graffiti, you would be wrong. Such academics, however much they perdure, have been adequately ridiculed already. My question is only this: Given the obvious fact that some art is high and some low, what is it, in the end, that distinguishes high from low? And my answer is this: Depth of information.

Owen Cyclops has a lot more to say than this, but this snippet spoke to me:

i can see why they thought this. theoretically, if "art" is up on a pedestal, it's "elevated", if we start deconstructing that, it could elevate everything else. maybe we could get everyone to look at literally everything as art: themselves, their floor, a blank wall, and so on.

but, this isn't what happened. in fact, the total opposite happened. "art" just came off the pedestal. "art" became de-elevated and just became "another thing". "the space of art is no different from the space of your linoleum tiles" didn't elevate linoleum tiles to the status of art, it just brought art down to the level of having as much significance as a random floor in a home depot - which, to the average person, is nothing.

and this project was largely successful. the public responded accordingly. if, as the comic states, art is just "another space" like any other, why go see it? i'm always in "a space". so, people don't go, and they don't care.

Morgoth's Review: Our Multicultural Reactor 5

Cloaking themselves proudly in the language and rhetorical garb of human rights and tolerance, the British State has, in recent decades, been culpable for what would, in their terminology, constitute a humanitarian catastrophe. Adorning themselves with universalistic bromides like a peacock fluffing its resplendent tail feathers to bamboozle a potential mate or rival, the British Establishment oversaw a decades-long crime against humanity. As Westerners, it irks and irritates us to think that Our People could be the victims of barbarism on such a scale. Such language is reserved for places like Iraq, Cambodia, Afghanistan, or anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

One of the better pieces on the recently returned to the news Rotherham Rape Gangs, which of course were not limited to Rotherham.

There is unfortunately nothing surprising in the gang rape disaster for me, as I have been following it for more than a decade now.

Fluid the Druid: Conan as represented in AD&D 1e

Due to Conan's status as a culture hero, he is one of the larger influences that went into Dungeons and Dragons. Fluid the Druid breaks down his appearances in official game materials and compares these portrayals to the Robert E. Howard stories.