Come on Sunday without Fail

Since on this ever happy day, all nature's full of love and play,
yet harmless still if my design, 'tis but to be your Valentine.

— World's Oldest Printed Valentine Card

While there's a Valentine's letter from 1477, the world's oldest Valentine card dates from 1790, a time when literate lovers of every social class secretly exchanged soupy notes.

The card features the word Love and a hand-drawn dove and hearts on the front, and inside a handwritten poem that begins, "Life they say is but a span, let's be happy while we can." 

The sender probably cribbed the poem, as in the 18th century you could buy books full of suggested verses for lovers.

The world's oldest printed Valentine's card, dating from 1797, features hand-tinted cupids on the outside, surrounded by the verse quoted above.

The card was sent by a certain Miss Mossday to Mr. Brown of Dover Place, Kent Road, London. 

Inside she wrote, "As I have repeatedly requested you to come, I think you must have some reason for not complying with my request. But as I have something particular to say to you, I could wish you make it all agreeable to come on Sunday without fail."

Clearly, she didn't copy that from a book.

Two centuries later, we still send our squeezes cards on Valentine's Day. 

Most of us rely on Hallmark to express our feelings.

But if you're feeling lovey-dovey this Valentine's Day, you might consider buying a blank card and using Poem Generator to pen a love poem.

I tried it, and here are the results:

For My Lovely Rose

A Love Poem by Bob

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Ladies are lovely,
And so are you.

Orchids are white,
Ghost ones are rare,
My speech is free,
And so is your hair.

Magnolia grows,
With buds like eggs,
Hands are shapely,
And so are your legs.

Sunflowers reach,
Up to the skies,
Your grin is foxy,
And so are your eyes.

Foxgloves in hedges,
Surround the farms,
My air is warm,
And so are your arms.

Daisies are pretty,
Daffies have style,
A baby is cute,
And so is your smile.

Start with You

When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author.

— John McPhee

Far too many writers inject themselves into otherwise interesting pieces.

If you're one of the culprits, please, get over yourself. 

We don't care that you struggled to start your piece; thought about it for days on end; wrote about the same topic in the past; wrote on a tablet; wrote with your cat in your lap; wrote while suffering anguish about the state of the world; wrote late into the night; absolutely adore your subject; absolutely loathe your subject; are uncertain you've done your subject justice; or are delighted with your final product.

We. Don't. Care.

We care about the world outside your ego. 

Readers, if nothing else, are avid. 

They're searching for news, opinions, and new ideas.

Your ego provides none of that.

The masterful writer John McPhee put it succinctly:

"Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader."

To the extent that your piece is "all about you"—your process, insecurities, devotion, or judgements—your editorial job is crystal clear.

Cut the crap.

NOTE: Here's an example of "it's all about me" writing.

Pronoun Police

The pronoun is one of the most terrifying masks man has invented.

― John Fowles

Goodly readers on occasion complain that my old-school use of pronouns and impatience with pronouns of choice reveal insensitivity and bias.

Under the hot lights of these pronoun police, I'll admit, I'd probably cop a plea.

But for the moment suffice it to say my one true bias is a bias for brevity.

Brevity speeds communication; and life's too short to stuff a mushroom.

But, incisive as it is, brevity almost always ruffles feathers. 

By fostering favoritism, brevity can't help but trigger the aggrieved.

• Men at work. 
• Boys will be boys. 
• Drama queen.
• All men are created equal.

We could easily enough scrub favoritism from these phrases, but what value would we really add?

• Proletariats laboring up ahead.
• Youths will behave as they frequently do.
• Histrionic person.
• All human beings either are created equal or turn out that way due to randomized instances of syngamy.

I wish I could be as cheery about our current obsession with wokish circumlocution as the linguist John McWhorter, who recently applauded this sentence:

• The boy wants to see a picture of herself.

"There are times when the language firmament shifts under people’s feet," he wrote in The New York Times. "They get through it."

And if they don't, the pronoun police will be there to assist.

Nouning

All bad writers are in love with the epic.

― Ernest Hemingway

The English language isn't precious; but it has its charms.

So when self-proclaimed wordsmiths defile it, I get pretty sore.

Among the greatest defilers are consultants.

When they speak, gibberish bursts from their mouths like puss from a boil; and when they write—or, as they prefer, when they "wordsmith"—clear English turns into hooey.

Consultants love, in particular, nouning: deadening verbs by converting them into nouns.

Nouning, they believe, elevates their jejune statements—and justifies their fees.

For example:

We're experiencing a disconnect.

Watch for my invite.

I know a foolproof hack.

That was an epic pivot.

That was an epic fail.

Equally vile are headline writers. 

When they start nouning, you'd better reach for the kidney dish. 

For example:

AMC hoping sales reach $5.2 billion. Here’s why that’s a big ask.

Windows 11 preview: What’s in the latest build?

Dems put divides aside, rally behind Biden.

Need a good eat plan?

Feeling anxious? Declutter your overwhlem.

Nouns like these aren't just pompous. They're nauseating.

"Many of us dislike reading or hearing clusters of such nouns," says wordsmith Henry Hitchens.

"We associate them with legalese, bureaucracy, corporate jive, advertising or the more hollow kinds of academic prose. Writing packed with nominalizations is commonly regarded as slovenly, obfuscatory, pretentious or merely ugly."

Ugly is right.

So I ask—as your consultant—need a solve for this problem?

The next time you encounter a nouner, grab a hammer.

Day of Infamy

A malicious arson attack.

— Suzanne Scott

It seems the brutal War on Christmas came to Fox News this week when a vagrant torched the company's "All American" Christmas tree on New York's Avenue of the Americas.

Caught off guard, company executives immediately compared the incident to Pearl Harbor, even though police said the arsonist had no political motive.

In a memo to the staff, Fox News' CEO Suzanne Scott described the attack as "deliberate and brazen."

"This act of cowardice will not deter us," she said, promising a new All-American Christmas tree would be erected where the old one stood.

Within a day, one was.

At the relighting ceremony, on-air personality Jacques DeGraff told reporters, "These colors don't run," referring to the red, white and blue decorations.

Conflating Christmas with the 4th of July is classic Fox News.

But why network executives should get upset when a citizen then stages a fireworks show makes no sense.

Pardon My French

When I see certain social science theories imported from the US, I say we must re-invest in the field of social science.

— Emmanuel Macron

Merde alors!

Something stinks. 

The French, believe it or not, are complaining about the "American" export they call wokisme.

 

President Macron complained last year that wokisme is undermining the whole nation. 

And now French grammarians are complaining that wokisme is corrupting the French language.

Putain!

The French rather conveniently forget that wokisme originated in—of all places—France!

French philosopher Michel Foucault concocted it. 

In the late 1970s, Foucault's radical beliefs vent viral, spreading in less than a decade from the cafes of Paris to the classrooms of America—doubtless making Foucault the single-most influential French export since Coco Chanel.

A disciple of the German Nihilist Friedrich Nietzsche and the French Marxist Louis Althusser, Foucault saw the world in the starkest of terms: as a endless warfare between the powerful and the powerless; between oppressors and the oppressed. 

Foucault interpreted culture—in the broadest sense of the word—to be the club the powerful wield to assure their power. 

And culture surrounds us. Turn over any rock, you'll find the same thing: the people in power subjugating everyone else.

Foucault's idea informs almost every aspect of the "American" woke movement.

And now the chickens have come home to roost.

Or, as we used to say in grammar school, he who smelt it, dealt it.

Monikers

Monikers have always fascinated me.

The Sultan of Swat. 

The Wizard of Menlo Park.

The Angel of the Battlefield. 

The Desert Fox. 

The Elephant Man.  

Moniker is a hobo's term meaning "nickname." It was borrowed directly from Shelta, the form of Gaelic spoken by Irish gypsies.

But not all monikers are alike.

Sobriquets are praiseworthy monikers. 

Epithets are derogatory ones.

A sobriquet—derived from the Old French word for jest—is bestowed out of fondness (the Old French word sobriquet literally meant a "chuck under the chin.") A sobriquet is also bestowed out of awe. The Man of Steel is an example.

An epithet—derived from the Greek word for added—is bestowed in order to disparage.* The Mutton-Eating Monarch is an example.

Grammarians would say sobriquets and epithets are adjectives (adjectival phrases). But onomasticians insist that, because they substitute for a person's proper name, sobriquets and epithets are in fact pronouns.

If that's the case, I might start insisting my pronoun of choice isn't he, she, or they, but "The Maven of Monikers."

Sadly, fanciful monikers are fast becoming extinct. But some are ageless. 

Among the hundreds of ageless sobriquets, my favorite include:

• The Bard (William Shakespeare)
• The Boss (Bruce Springsteen)
• The Duke (John Wayne)
• The Father of His Country (George Washington)
• The Godfather of Soul (James Brown)
• The Governator (Arnold Schwarzenneger) 
• The Great Emancipator (Abraham Lincoln)
• The King of Rock & Roll (Elvis Presley)
• The Lion of Round Top (Strong Vincent)
• The Man from Uncle (Napoleon Solo)
• The Prince of Peace (Jesus Christ)
• The Swamp Fox (Francis Marion)

Among the hundreds of ageless epithets, my favorite include:

• The Bastard of Bolton (Ramsay Bolton)
• The Boston Strangler (Albert DeSalvo)
• The Butcher of Lyon (Klaus Barbie)
• The Hick from French Lick (Larry Bird)
• The Iron Lady (Margaret Thatcher)
• The Kid (William Bonney)
• The Little Corporal (Napoleon Bonaparte)
• The Louisville Lip (Mohammed Ali)
• The Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart)
• The Tangerine Tornado (Donald Trump)
• The Teflon Don (John Gotti)
• The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski)

What are your favs?

*Nickname literally means "added name." The word derives from the Old English word ekename. Over time, English speakers garbled it. "Babe Ruth had an ekename" became "Babe Ruth had a nickname."

Get the Name of the Dog

My task is, by the power of the written word, 

to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, 

before all, to make you see.

— Joseph Conrad

In The Elements of Style, Strunk and White pooh-pooh lazy writers—the majority—because they're so often satisfied with imprecision.

You see their slothfulness on display every day:

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made."
  
  
• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years."
  
  
• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable."

By saying so little, sentences like these tax readers' minds. They squander readers' energy in guessing what the writer means to say.

Good writing avoids imprecision by drawing word-pictures.

Word-pictures comprise concrete details—specifics—that allow readers easily to imagine the world the writer seeks to depict. 

Anything less is filler. Eyewash. Baloney. Horse hockey.

• "The Searchers is the greatest Western ever made" merely tells you the writer likes this cowboy movie.

• "The number of Americans diagnosed with 'broken heart' syndrome has steadily risen in the past 15 years" merely tells you that incidents of a weird disease have increased.

• "Some records from The British Invasion in the mid-'60s can be very valuable" merely tells you there's demand for vinyl recordings by bands like Peter & Gordon.

Precision, on the other hand, would have told you, among other things, what distinguishes The Searchers from all the other hundreds of Westerns; how fast cases of "broken heart" are accelerating—and whether the disease affects a lot of people, or only a few; and which mop-top bands' records are hot.

Lazy writers favor the generic, as Victorian sociologist Herbert Spencer said in The Philosophy of Style; and, because they do, they always leave readers guessing. They should, instead, aim to produce "vivid impressions" with their words.

Writers should avoid, Spencer said, abstract sentences like "When the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the penal code will be severe." They should write instead "When men delight in battles, bullfights, and gladiatorial combat, they will punish by hanging, burning, and the rack."

Spencer calls the use of vivid word-pictures a "thorough maxim of composition."

Writing coach Peter Roy Clark calls Spencer's maxim "Get the name of the dog" (or the "Fido Theorem").

"Such was my affection for this writing strategy," Clark once told an interviewer, "I wanted to use it as a book title. 

"Anticipating the literalism of SEO, my publisher decided the title should reflect what the book was really about. In the end, Get the Name of the Dog became Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer. 

"Get the name of the dog" does appear in Clark's Writing Tools as Tool Number 14. But it's much more important.

"It ranks as Number 1 in my heart," Clark said. "Every strategic move I’ve shared over 30 years derives its existence from the Fido Theorem. 

"'Get the name of the dog' stands, for me, for the whole. In other words, if the writer remembers to get the dog’s name, he or she will be curious enough and attentive enough to gather all the relevant details in their epiphanic particularity."

Got an email to write? A memo? A report? 

Get the name of the dog.

Tom Foolery

The mob has no memory; it can never comprehend when its own interests are at stake.

― Alexandre Koyré

Despite his pivotal role in our nation's founding, slaveholder Thomas Jefferson is about to be cancelled.

Watching the wholesale cancellation of the Confederates, mossbacks like myself knew, in our hearts, the founder's days were numbered.

Being White and powerful, his erasure was inevitable.

Mobs are just as oppressive as governments, and faster acting.

And have no doubt it's a mob that's gunning for Jefferson, a multiracial one comprising angry Blacks, Latinos, and Asians. 

When it comes to condemning Whites' hypocrisy, this mob's unstoppable.

Hypocrisy like Jefferson's no doubt merits condemnation.

But cancellation?

Jefferson deserves better.

Jefferson's cancellation lumps the Founding Fathers with the Confederates "in a way which minimizes the crimes and problems of the Confederacy," Jefferson scholar Annette Gordon-Reed told The New York Times.

I agree with her.

While Jefferson owned slaves, he didn't extol slavery; he called it, in fact, a "moral and political depravity" he'd abolish were abolition "practicable."

For my own part, I've tried for years to plumb the depths of Jefferson's hypocrisy and finally found forgiveness in historian Henry Wiencek's dark biography, Master of the Mountain.

In Master of the Mountain, Wiencek makes clear that Jefferson, our celebrant of liberty and equality, kept slaves because he could not bear to lose Monticello to his creditors, nor see his daughter and grandchildren plunged into poverty. 

Had he been frugal (he spent a fortune he didn't have on books, groceries, and fine wines) and smart about business (farming and manufacturing), Jefferson well might have freed his slaves. But he was neither, and he didn't.

Instead, Jefferson ran up enormous debt and remained, his whole life, a slave to his slaves, earning a four percent profit from breeding and selling them—a "bonanza," according to Wiencek.

Jefferson, a failure at farming and a klutz at commerce, sold out his ideals for a soft life.

And for his sin—monetizing people—the mob has moved to cancel the author of our Declaration of Independence, decrying all statues of Jefferson as symbols of "the disgusting and racist basis on which America was founded."

But that's the way of mobs. 

Forgiveness demands acceptance, something mobs suck at.

Mobs are really only good at vengeance.

So here's my prediction of who's next on the block.

Jesus Christ, founder of the most oppressive institution in the history of the world.

It's inevitable.

Welcome the twilight of the idols.

Strawman

There is a strange interdependence between
thoughtlessness and evil.

— Hannah Arendt

I'm tired of Conservatives' relentless use of the strawman.

A "strawman" is an argument that substitutes an opponent's statement with a distortion thereof, in order to "disprove" it.

A strawman is fallacious. It takes its form in this manner:

Liberal: Black lives matter.

Conservative: My opponent says Black lives matter, but White lives don't. I'm sorry, all lives matter. He's dead wrong.

The Conservative in this case has distorted the Liberal's claim by assuming (1) it excludes all lives but Blacks' and (2) that to "matter" means to "prevail."

To prevent use of a strawman, you need to present a steelman.

A "steelman" is an iron-clad argument. It makes the strongest possible case for a claim and prevents your opponent from distorting your position.

It might take this form:

Liberal: Blacks suffer from systemic racism in this country. Our entire way of life devalues Black lives, and puts Blacks at a material disadvantage—socially, economically, and politically. Without conscious effort, we thwart Blacks' attempts to live peacefully and well, and treat them as if their God-given lives didn't matter. But, in their own eyes at least, they do matter.

Conservative: So, you're saying the system is rigged?

Liberal: Bingo!

A steelman grants the opponent the benefit of the doubt and assumes his intentions aren't evil.

Sadly, that's not always the case. And so you often hear debates like this:

Liberal: Blacks suffer from systemic racism.

Conservative: Blacks don't suffer racism—that's ancient history. They just want preferential treatment. The whole idea that there's systemic racism is Marxist hogwash.

Telegraphic counterarguments like the one above betray both the evil intentions and shallow-mindedness of their makers, two common qualities of Conservatives today; qualities that put persuasion out of reach.

As philosopher John Stuart Mill said, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of it."

If he only had a brain!

Villany vs. Stupidity

You have attributed conditions to villainy
that simply result from stupidity.

— Robert A. Heinlein

As we sail toward Columbus Day, Madrid's “Trumpista” president Isabel Díaz Ayuso took advantage of an interview in New York this week to bash Critical Race Theory.

Díaz Ayuso warned that the theory is a "revisionist, dangerous, and pernicious" ideology that will lead to "cultural regression." 

She also lambasted the Indigenous movement, calling it a "dangerous current of communism" and an "attack against Spain." 

Díaz Ayuso called New York's recent decision to rename Columbus Day (now Indigenous People's Day) "fatal."

"Why are we revising the history of Spain in America," she asked, "when all it did was bring universities, civilization, and the West to the American continent?"

Her remarks echo Steve Bannon's 2014 Vatican remarks, in which he described Europe's past exploits as the foundation of a "civilization that really is the flower of mankind"

The day after the interview, Díaz Ayuso denounced Pope Francis for apologizing for the Catholic Church's support of the conquistadors.

Why vilify Spain, she asks, when the conquistadors merely made a few mistakes?

Out of Their Hats

Nothing annoys me more than uninformed people 

not considering the effects of what they say.

— Charlotte Ritchie

The Golden Age of Hollywood is a delightful Facebook group that posts "lost" movie-studio stills.

A still posted yesterday showed an ashen and attenuated Humphrey Bogart, riding on a swing with his seven-year-old daughter. 

One inconscient commentator wrote, "How could this pipsqueak ever have been a romantic interest in film? I will never understand."

Her comment unleashed a predictable torrent  of rejoinders to the effect that Bogie had been the heartthrob of millions, and that the poignant still had been shot only days before the beloved actor's early death from throat cancer.

Granted social media gives a grandstand to goofballs, I still must ask: why do so many uniformed nobodies feel the need to tear down adored icons? 

And why do they always seem to be speaking out of their hats?

The reason is deep-seated: iconoclasm is a handy form of ego defense, a band-aide for wounds received in childhood at the hands of critical parents, caretakers, siblings, and peers.

When those wounds go untreated, the child grows up to be an asshole: an unrestrained critic of all the things others hold in esteem.

And she can't help but come off as a mean-spirited fool.

Fluff

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

— Mark Twain

Verbose writing is frilly, flowery, frivolous and fluff-brained. A thing, at all costs, to avoid.

But some fluff is tasty.

Take, for example, the kind used to make a Fluffernutter.

The Fluffernutter was invented in by one Emma Curtis, who with her brother began making and marketing Snowflake Marshmallow Crème in 1913 in their home-state of Massachusetts.

The great-great-great-granddaughter of Paul Revere, Emma knew to keep watch on her competitors, of which there were scores.

To outdo them, she published brochures packed with recipes for marshmallow-crème treats, and advertised the brochures in newspapers and on radio. 

One, published in the middle of World War I, contained Emma's short recipe for the Liberty, a marshmallow crème and peanut butter sandwich.

The Liberty became her all-time hit.

But, sadly, Emma was not to reap all its rewards.

A local competitor, Durkee-Mower, trumped Emma, not by running ads, but by sponsoring an entire radio show. 

Named The Flufferettes, it aired in the half-hour spot before The Jack Benny Show and featured comedy, music, and recipes—including the recipe for the Liberty.

In 1960, Durkee-Mower's ad agency renamed Emma's sandwich The Fluffernutter, and rest, as we say, is history.

Going to Pieces

We all could use a little mercy now.

I know we don't deserve it, but we need it anyhow.

— Mary Gauthier

No surprise here: a Gallup poll shows our esteem for Internet providers has tanked.

In the relentless pursuit of profits, these companies have turned a modern miracle into the vilest of cesspools.

Lies, vulgarity and stupidity are the rule, rather than the exception.

In a civil war of words, brothers fight brothers; sisters, sisters; husbands, wives. 

And everyone goes to pieces.

But there is a way to keep it together: do some good.

“I was once a fortunate man, but at some point fortune abandoned me," the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius wrote. "But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.”

Don't just stand there: do something good. Today. Tomorrow. The next day. And the next. 

If you expect the trolls to surrender, don't hold your breath. 

If you hope to fix stupid, fuggedaboutit.

Just refuse to be implicated in the lies and the ugliness and do some good.

As the proverb says, "Let not mercy and truth forsake you; bind them about your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart, and so find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man."

Fire the Writer

Well, that's putting your foot in your mouth. Or your toe in your mouth.

On its website, the amateur-league baseball team Savannah Bananas boasts that "we toe the line."

We are not your typical baseball team. We are different. We take chances. We toe the line. We test the rules. We challenge the way things are suppose to be.

The writer doesn't know the meaning of "toe the line." 

The idiom means do what is expected or act according to another's rules.

You can't both be a maverick and toe the line.

Dear Writer: strike one, you're out! 

NOTE: Toe the line comes not from baseball, but track and field. Officials used to shout, "Toe the line!" Now they shout, "On your mark!"

Real America

WARNING: Content may be offensive to some audiences.

Rep. Jim Jordan retweeted video from a Wisconsin football game yesterday with the comment, "Real America is done with Covid-19."

The phrase "Real America" is Jordan's equivalent of ein Volk, a phrase popularized by Adolph Hitler in the 1930s.

It's best defined not by what it means, but by what it doesn't.

Real America is not...

Real America is not Civilized America—those pain-in-the-ass weirdos who insist on wearing masks.

Real America is not Immuno-compromised America—those annoying wimps who worry they'll catch Covid-19. 

Real America is not Black America—those whiney, dangerous, hip-hop lovin' ingrates.

Real America is not Latino America—those lazy, foreign, Catholic beaners.

Real America is not Asian America—those creepy gooks who want our jobs.

Real America is not Indigenous America—those all-time champion losers.  

Real America is not Gay America—those unrepentant degenerates.

Real America is not East Coast America—those latte-sippin' socialists.

Real America is not West Coast America—those tree-huggin' communists.

Real America is not Jewish America—those overeducated loudmouths.

Real America is not Muslim America—those people who're worse than Jews.

Real America is not Poor America—those welfare-squanderin' weaklings.

Real America is not Homeless America—those whack jobs who foul the land beneath our beautiful freeways.

Real America is not Disabled America—those embarrassing feebs. 

Real America is not Old America—those wrinkled, funny-smelling people.

Real America is not Female America—those witchy pretenders to equality.

Real America is not Expert America—those Commies with doctorates from fancy-pants universities.

Real America is not Liberal America—the true enemies of Real America. You know, Democrats.

My advice to Jim to is simple: grow a toothbrush mustache. 

You'll complete the outfit.

NOTE: Fascism is hardly new in America. Learn more.

Incredulous

Like most small-bore, pretentious men, he shows the tendency to strike an emotional attitude and then, using that prejudice as a base, draw vast, unreasonable, philosophical conclusions.

— John D. MacDonald

The more closed the mind, the more open the mouth.

I encountered this phenomenon on Facebook recently. 

A philosopher posted an op-ed he'd published in Newsweek that argued for adding philosophy to elementary school curriculums.

Philosophy will improve kids' ability to think critically, he promised. 

"Absolutely not," one comment said. "The ability to think critically is not philosophy. Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most."

No evidence. No source. Just bluster.

An argument like the one offered in the comment is known among philosophers as an argument from incredulity. It holds:

I don't know a thing to be true;
therefore, it must be false.

Arguments from incredulity are moronic, but we hear them all the time:

• "Vaccines can't be safe. Nobody should get one."
  
  
• “Humans could not have evolved from a single cell. Darwin is bunk."
  
  
• "No one would work if the government paid him not to. Socialism is wrong."
  
  
• "Immigrants shouldn't be allowed here. They're not like Americans."
  
  
• "It's always cold here in North Dakota. Global warming is bullshit."

• "Philosophy is not meant for everyone and is totally not needed for most." 

People prone to arguments from incredulity can't imagine that many true things are unimaginable. (Take, for example, that brick walls aren't really solid; that we're moving through space at 1.3 million miles an hour; or that matter is essentially mental. 

Our convictions, however strong, don't make a statement false. 

Only buffoons believe they do.

Condemnant quo non intellegunt, as the Romans said.

"They condemn that which they do not understand."

Slap Happy

 

Best remembered for the "slap heard round the world," General George Patton was perhaps the least woke leader in the history of the US military.

Grandson of a Confederate, Patton paraded his contempt for minorities for the whole world to see.

Citing the general's saltiness, Donald Trump yesterday asked the crowd at a GOP rally in Alabama, "Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. I don't think he was too woke."

Trump kicked off the rally by playing a six-minute clip from the opening of the 1970 movie Patton, in which actor George C. Scott gives "The Speech," an oration the real-life Patton delivered repeatedly throughout World War II.

Trump said the clip was appropriate, given his listeners' intelligence. 

Trump went on to give his own 90-minute speech, in which he lambasted “woke generals," blaming them for losing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We’re getting tired of the woke generals that we have, right?” Trump asked. "Do you think that General Patton was woke? I don’t think so. He was the exact opposite."

Patton most vividly displays the general's anti-woke urges in the soldier-slapping scene, when he shows no pity for a PTSD-afflicted private:

Patton: What's the matter with you?

Private: I guess I just can't take it, sir.

Patton: What did you say?

Private: It's my nerves, sir. I just can't stand the shelling anymore.

Patton: Your nerves? Hell, you're just a goddamn coward. [Slaps private. Turns to doctors.] I won't have a yellow bastard sitting here crying in front of these brave men who've been wounded in battle. [Slaps private again.] Shut up! [Turns to doctors.] Don't admit this yellow bastard. There's nothing wrong with him! I won't have sons of bitches who're afraid to fight stinking up this place of honor. [Turns to private.] You're going back to the front, my friend. You may get shot, you may get killed, but you're going up to the fighting. Either that or I'm going to stand you up in front of a firing squad. I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamn bastard! [Turns to doctors.] Get him out of here! Send him up to the front! You hear me? [Turns to private.] You goddamn coward! I won't have cowards in my army!

I wonder how Patton might have reacted had he encountered the then 22-year-old Donald Trump at the draft board in 1968:

Patton: What's the matter with you?

Trump: I guess it's my heel, sir.

Patton: What did you say?

Trump: It's my heel, sir. I have a bone spur.

Patton: This is the fifth time you've used that bullshit excuse! Hell, you're just a goddamn coward. [Turns to doctors.] Admit this yellow bastard. Nothing wrong with him. [Turns to Trump.] You're going to Vietnam, my friend. You may get shot, you may get killed, but you're going to Vietnam. Either that or I'll stand you up in front of a firing squad. I ought to shoot you myself, you bastard! 

Trump: But I have a note from my doctor!

Patton: Shut up! [Slaps Trump.] What do you take me for, you gutless, malingering goddamn sissy? One of those woke generals?

Trump: You woke? I don't think so.

Patton: [Slaps Trump again.] Shut up!