Change and Progress

Tony Robbins has said:

Change is automatic. Progress is not.

Bertrand Russell has said (quoted with the image in my LinkedIn essay):

Change is one thing, progress is another. Change is scientific, progress is ethical; change is indubitable, whereas progress is a matter of controversy.

These quotes address the dogma of progress; the belief that progress is inevitable – that we are always progressing. The Whig Theory of History is a theory that history marches onward towards ever higher levels of progress. The theory is misconceived, misguided, and a fallacy!

Misogynism?

Today is Redstockings Day.

Are you a misogynist for not wanting to send women to the front? Are you a misogynist for being a gentleman and walking closest to the road? Are you a misogynist for not wanting your kid to spend his days in a daycare center?


Previously: Redstockings...

Ray Stevens Christmas

Blimey Cow

has some interesting videos:

The Amazing DST

Redstockings...

We know there is a feminist fantasy of history, but there is also a feminist fantasy of contemporary times. Dr. Thomas Sowell dismantles it (yes, Dr. Sowell is a young man in the clip, but it was a fantasy of contemporary times at that time, and this particular claim is still part of the feminist fantasy of contemporary times):

Previously: Day for Redstockings

Diversity

Good Intentions...

Dr. Ron Paul and Mr. Daniel McAdams:

Day for Redstockings

It's that day of year again.

Peter Hitchens has some thoughts.

His late brother:

Over at Taki's Magazine, says Matt Forney:

It’s a shock for those accustomed to youth revolting against their parents to see Millennials begging authority figures for approval. The Baby Boomer mantra of “Don’t trust anyone over 30” is deader than Jim Morrison, as is the cynicism of Generation X. Left-wing Twitter witch-hunts are powerful precisely because young women are desperate for a mommy figure to pat them on the head for being good little girls.

Previously: International Redstockings Day

Randoms of December

Over at his weblog More Right, Mr. Michael Anissimov responds to an attack from David Brin of last year, and Mr. Anissimov says:

Just because a mob can storm a palace and murder a king in cold blood does not mean that democracy is the end-of-history best government ever.

Over at Mises Canada, Ms. Lilly Wang writes on the situation in Hong Kong and concludes:

The major focus should be on the Rule of Law. The question to ask is how to make sure the government is bounded by the law, and how the Judiciary and Legislative Council will be well maintained. Hong Kong inherits British Common Law, which is more complete than the civil law in mainland China. It will be easier to make changes. These institutions are the keys to a free society, and they need much more time and effort to be improved. Changes may be minor, and less noticeable than a request to vote for a Chief Executive, but these institutions will be far more reliable.

Over at Taki's Magazine, writes Mr. Michael Warren Davis:

But the idea that Americans adore the Duchess of Cambridge because she happens to have magnificent taste is as patently silly as the idea that monarchy was the real wedge that drove England and America apart. In fact, a brilliant new book by Eric Nelson, called The Royalist Revolution (out this October on Harvard University Press), shows how the patriots overwhelmingly saw themselves as rebels against Parliament, but for the king. It wasn’t until George III removed the revolutionaries from royal protection that they struck out on their own republican path.

Says PolarWashington:

Thus when power is diffused, as in a democracy, one finds that nobody is responsible for the current state of affairs.

Utters Mr. P. D. Mangan:

Modern skeptics are only skeptical of what they've been told to be skeptical of. On everything else they're gullible as children.

Expresses AntiDem:

"We're on the right side of history" say people who both hate and are blankly ignorant of history.

Mr. Schuyler Dugle responds:

and also who have no clue how history works.

Exclaims Duck Enlightenment:

being pro-democracy is basically like saying you think trending hashtags are an appropriate way to run a government

Over at his blog Commonsense & Wonder, articulates Mr. Bruce Fein:

Democratically elected leaders can be every bit as tyrannical and aggressive towards the United States as unelected dictators. Hamas, listed as an international terrorist organization, decisively triumphed in Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. It has ruled in Gaza since 2007, routinely denies human rights, chronically attacks Israel, and execrates the United States.

A Selection from August

Over at LewRockwell.com, writes “Bionic Mosquito”:

Barzun identifies the Great War, and at it roots the transition from classical liberalism to a socialist society, as the beginning of the end for Western civilization. It seems to me that we are now living through the final convulsions, as witnessed by the remaining centralizing structures acting and reacting almost reflexively to maintain and extend control in the face of the inevitable progression toward decentralization.

Also at LewRockwell.com, writes Ryan McMaken:

Europe during the bourgeois century was certainly no utopia. The new cities were filled with disease, pollution, and crime. Medical science had yet to achieve what it would in the twentieth century, and of course, standards of living remained low when compared to today. But even if we consider these problems, which plague many societies even today, the enormous gains made for ordinary people, thanks to industrialization and the rise of free trade, were fostered all the more by the rise of classical liberalism which actively sought to avoid war, political repression, and economic intervention as the means to a more prosperous society.

Too at LewRockwell.com, writes Eric Margolis:

As a former soldier and military historian, I’ve always felt that WWI was the most tragic conflict in modern history: a totally avoidable madness that wrecked Europe’s glittering civilization and led directly to World War II, Hitler and Stalin.

Tea at Trianon provides a quote regarding August of 1914.

Over at his weblog Royal World, Theodore Harvey gives some thoughts on democracy. More August musings from Royal World.

Says Peter Hitchens in a Mail on Sunday column:

The best thing would be to get the old hereditaries back, but our media and political classes are too stupid and malevolent to allow that.

At his blog, Mr. Hitchens also says:

The Wiki Man continues to dispute clear facts about the British declaration of war on Germany in 1914, available to any interested party, claiming that they are matters of opinion.He even suggests that (despite it being well known to everyone interested that it wasn't so) that the Commons did vote on our entry into war. They did not. I understand that this *seems* incredible to anyone used to the modern age, and to anyone who thinks that our entry to war was an open and honest process. But it is by grasping that these unbelievable things actually happened (or did not happen) that we understand that the entry into war was not open or honest. There was no obligation to Belgium. Parliament had no opportunity to vote on the war until after it had irrevocably begun.

Stossel on the Thought Police

Sverdrup Government

In this bicentennial year of the Norwegian Constitution, 130 years ago today, the first Norwegian parliamentary Cabinet took office with Johan Sverdrup under King Oscar II.

Norwegian Military Tattoo

The Norwegian Military Tattoo is a biannual event in Oslo. It took place this past weekend.

Friday afternoon there was a parade from the fort to City Hall, with a following concert in front of the city hall.

This year's event was specifically in honor of the bicentenary of the Constitution of the Kingdom of Norway.

When one sees women in police officer uniform it is often in pairs, i.e., with a male colleague.

At this event, heading out from the fort, there were three women dressing up as policemen:

And that's not all. At City Hall Square, there were seven of them, women only:

If there is any of part of the police and military domain that is supposed to be theatrical or theater-like, it must be parades and tattoos.

No to Bare Chests

Over at The Daily Telegraph, Dr. Tim Stanley laments the culture of bare chests.


H/T: LewRockwell.com

April Randoms

Over at Taki's Magazine, John Derbyshire has some suggestions for amending the federal Constitution of those United States, amongst others, withholding the vote in federal elections from all civilian federal employees.

Royal World has a few thoughts on the recent Australian Royal visit.

Ad Orientem observes a return to the white tie.

Over at The American Conservative, W. James Antle III reflects on anti-anti-war Republicans.

An article at The American Interest, interestingly concludes:

As Richard Dowden, the director of the Royal African Society, put it, “[M]ake no mistake, parliamentary democracy as we in the West understand it, has no role in today’s Ethiopia. Out of the 547 elected members of the country’s lower chamber only one is from an opposition party. I met him. Girma Seifu Maru is a nice man but a lonely one. As Meles Zenawi said: ‘There is no connection between democracy and development.’”

Who Serves in the U.S. Senate?

H/T: Ad Orientem

International Redstockings Day

In the passing year we have seen much madness. For instance, the quest to send women to the front marches on.

Enjoy these videos:

Please check out Tea at Trianon and The Thinking Housewife on this day. These blogs are goods places to start if you need an antidote to the feminist fantasy of history.


Previously: Redstockings Day

Randoms of February

Over at The American Conservative, Wilfred M. McClay reviews William Murchison's The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson. Dr. McClay in particular notes:

As the historian Forrest McDonald has speculated, Dickinson, who was admired even more than Jefferson for the eloquence of his pen and was an older and more seasoned man, might well have been the one invited to draft the Declaration—if only he had signaled a willingness to “swallow his scruples and voted for independence.” Had that happened, McDonald continued, the Declaration “would have been based upon English constitutional history rather than, as was Jefferson’s, upon natural-rights theory—with vastly different implications.”

Also at The American Conservative, Paul Robinson reflects on how Russia could have stayed out of the Great War. Writes Dr. Robinson:

Durnovo disliked the Franco-Russian alliance. Republican France and Tsarist Russia had nothing in common. The conservative German Empire, by contrast, was a much more natural ally.

Over at RadixJournal.com, Dr. Sean Gabb makes a case for the English landed aristocracy.

Over at More Right, Samo Burja gives some arguments for monarchy.

At same weblog, Michael Anissimov debunks modernity.

Over at The Mad Monarchist, Alberta Royalist gives a review of BBC's Cousins at War.

Says Mr. Theodore Harvey over at his blog Royal World:

The world is a mess. Everyone deplores it. But not enough people yet draw the obvious conclusion: Modern Political "Progress" Is Not Working!

Utters Outis Nusquam:

Modernity did not replace tradition with reason, it replaced tradition with opinion polls.

MEP Daniel Hannan reflects on where Nazism belongs on the political spectrum.

Schiff on College

Mr. Peter Schiff talks to a few people: