FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
No bio...
User ID: 1739
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
How much money are they actually giving out here? How many local libraries are going to disappear because they don't have federal grants?
You can search their list of awarded grants here (https://www.imls.gov/grants/awarded-grants) and for calibration's sake I looked up the town whose library I spent the most time in as a wee one, wandering the stacks. Looks like that library has received zilch from the IMLS. They did give a local wildlife park near the town $1,775 back in 2003, and the local "Pioneer Farm Museum" (which is just a little farm all done up in historical style where kids can take a trip and learn how to churn butter or whatever) got $6,370 in 2002. That's it.
Searching around, they seem to give out a lot of $10,000 grants to native tribes, presumably for village libraries. So where is the big money?
So I went ahead and searched for Tacoma, which was the closest city to where I grew up that had proper museums, big ones that people like to go to. What did I find? $400k to the University of Washington, $630k to something called "Environment & Culture Partners" which appears to be an NGO that tries to get museums to talk more about climate change, $170k to the Museum of Glass (a great museum I must admit, check it out if you're in Tacoma), $250k for the Children's Museum, $145k for the 9th and 10th Horse Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers Museum (never heard of it), $140k to the Washington State Historical Society, and $25,000 (Back in 2014) to the Pierce County Library System (which, come to think of it, my hometown library was part of. Still, 25k spread over all the libraries in Pierce County is kind of small potatoes).
My test seems like a mixed bag, since the Glass Museum and Children's Museum were pretty nice to go to as a kid (and even today, for the glass one). On the other hand, shouldn't a big city like Tacoma be able to support their own museums? I doubt either of these places would close their doors without the IMLS in any case: the Museum of glass got exactly two grants, one in 2024 and one in 2006, so I doubt they're relying on the money to stay open. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of this money gets funneled to universities and NGOs.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
You know how every time there's a new potential pandemic you hear about how new diseases are deadlier because the pathogen is not adapted to human hosts? And how a well adapted pathogen doesn't want to kill the host, it wants to live in the host long enough to propagate to other hosts?
TB is arguably the most human adapted pathogen out there. It has our immune system beat six ways from Sunday, kills slowly over an extended period of time, and can lie dormant for years before becoming active again (which means healthy people you let through customs may have a passive infection, and will only turn active and contagious later when they're already in the country). It is also arguably the most difficult bacterial infection to cure. You need to be on multiple powerful medications with significant side effects (including potential blindness) for 6-9 months in order to cure it.
If a TB strain managed to become resistant to one of those medications then it may not be possible to cure it, not without new drug development. In the US we've managed to mostly extirpate the disease at great cost over many years of effort. If an antibiotic resistant strain showed up it could undo decades of progress in US health.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8mo ago
The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject
I disagree with this premise vehemently. The purpose of art is to communicate beauty and truth. Sometimes the truth communicated is about horror, inasmuch as it is a part of the greater truth of the human condition, but the things you describe are small subcategories of art. They are not foundational to what art is.
I don’t have time to defend that position, but it needs to be said. Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent: you’re missing 99% of the picture.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
On the other side of the fence, you have Nvidia releasing an open foundational model for robotics and partnering with Disney of all companies to make a droid robot.
It's not that weird that they're partnering with Disney. When Walt pushed the company to develop animatronics in the 60s their work was groundbreaking. Making the animatronic Lincoln for the world's fair was extremely difficult. They kept running into new engineering problems and having to invent their way out of them. Since then they've sunk huge amounts of money and talent into improving animatronics further. Have you seen some of the most recent Disney animatronics? They're incredibly lifelike, and other companies just can't manage to imitate their quality.
So I figure Disney has a lot of experience, technology, and capital that would be useful for making lifelike robots that are aesthetically pleasing.
There really isn't a good way for someone to return to the "European traditions before Christianity". Modern neo-paganism has almost nothing in common with actual pre-Christian paganism. They share some of the same names for gods, and that's about it. 95% of their practices are things that were made up in the 1800s by the occultists and romanticists of the time.
As an example, how many practitioners of Asatru join the military in order that they may hopefully die gloriously in battle, so that they may be chosen by the Valkyrie to join Odin in Valhalla? How many of them respect the marriage oaths, since the souls of adulterers will be consigned to Nastrond to be devoured by wolves and poisoned by serpents? How many of them, when they have grown old or sick, will pick up a gun and attempt death by cop? After all, those who die of old age or sickness are consigned to Hel's cold halls. How many of them will even consider human sacrifice, as their ancestors did among the hanging trees of Uppsala? How many of them support slavery, as the three adulteries of Rigr clearly separated the races of thralls, churls, and jarls?
The fact is that we don't really know all that much about northern European paganism, and what we do know the neo-Pagans mostly don't do. They're cosplaying as pagans, making it up as they go.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
And did most of them really eat your internal organs after raping your children?
Depends on the tribe, really. I recall that the Five Civilized Tribes weren't so bad, but when you get to the plains it's a real horror show. The Comanche were not nice guys, to say the least.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
5mo ago
You can just do things.
That realization was the most striking aspect of Trump’s first term. It hit me when he moved the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. Bush had talked about doing it for years but somehow it never happened, just like he somehow never got us Supreme Court Justices that would overturn Roe, or a hundred other things. Then Trump comes along and just does it. It could have been done all along. You can just do things.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
8mo ago
Its the best case scenario for him. He can go to his grave claiming that he would have won if they had let him race.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
10mo ago
Kamala is happy to fight in the dirt with Trump, because she too can have a full debate without saying anything substantial.
Then why hasn't she done any interviews, answered any questions from the media, or agreed to more debates? She's terrified of being put on the spot. Remember, this is the woman who was so nervous about having dinner with a big doner that she had her staff put on a practice dinner for her.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
28d ago
C. S. Lewis wrote a bit in a letter about the appeal of fantasy over real sex which seems appropriate:
For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and even grandchildren) and turns it back: sending the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.
And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifice or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.
Among these shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification is ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself.
Pornography asks far less of us than sex with another person does. If it displeases us we can skip to another bit of porn. We never have to think about pleasing another person, or do something that brings us little pleasure because it brings our partner great pleasure, or think of any needs but our own. Very tempting!
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
This scales much beyond this case. "Oh, we are sorry your honor, we honestly thought that you had authorized that no-knock raid against that (suspected) Tesla-burning terrorist. Anyhow, now he is dead, so there is nothing we can do about that misunderstanding. All's well that ends well, I guess."
That's already how things work, and how they have worked for years. Ever heard of qualified immunity? I means if the cops get the address wrong and shoot you to death they just have to say "Whoops, our bad, sorry about that. Total mistake on our part" and they're good to go. The Supreme Court recently declined to overturn a cop's qualified immunity for having done exactly that. (Well, not exactly that: they only flashbanged them and held the family at gunpoint, but if they'd gone ahead and shot them it would be much the same).
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
An additional bit of info: for 2024 their largest grantees were:
California State Library: $15,705,702
Texas State Library and Archives Commission: $12,512,132
State Library of Florida: $9,533,426
New York State Library: $8,125,215
Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries: $5,891,819
The big grantees are all state libraries, looks like they give a grant to each state. The lowest state library grant? Wyoming State Library, $1,220,427.
The smallest grant of 2024? $2,510 to the Seneca Nation of Indians, in a grant they will use for a "Kid's Reading Project".
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
"I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. " C. S. Lewis, "Religion Without Dogma?"
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Last I checked, Daily Wire was doing a victory lap after Trump's election. This doesn't seem like the result of Boreing screwing up, he's always been more interested in making movies.
Though their DailyWire+ subscriber counts are not public, they have announced numbers from time to time. They said they had 1,000,000 subscribers in 2022. According to Axios last year they had over $200 million in revenue, and in 2023 they had a capital valuation of over $1 billion (https://www.axios.com/2024/12/10/the-daily-wire-eyes-growth-investment-in-2025).
I don't see any signs of Daily Wire declining, in a business sense. They seem to be headed up and to the right.
If you're talking about actual speechcraft: as in, oratory, speechifying, talking out loud to a crowd, etc, then I have one piece of advice that it seems people desperately need: stop saying "Um"! Or "Um" derivatives such as "like", "er", "you know", "really", etc. It seems like everybody I hear give a speech can't help but pepper the whole speech with them. Trump is a notable exception, but he gives so many speeches that it's expected he would get the basics right.
There is a method which can cure you of this common bad habit. It was performed on my by my venerable public speaking professor, and I can testify to it's efficacy. Get a friend, and give them a bell; one of those bells you see at reception desks, where you give it a good whack on top and it lets out a loud ring. Then start talking. It doesn't matter what, any kind of monologue will do as long as it's not memorized. Tell them to ring the bell every time you let out a filler word. That's it. After doing a few sessions of this your filler words will be gone. Just make sure the bell is loud enough to be a bit startleing.
As far as writing goes, I can only pass on the advice of the great C. S. Lewis (who, whatever anyone thinks of him, was undoubtedly as successful and extremely effective writer). Here is a cosolidated list of his writing advice, gathered from a few different sources:
- Always try to use language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else. The reader, we must remember, does not start by knowing what we mean. If our words are ambiguous, our meaning will escape him. I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.
- Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
- Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
- Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the things you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us the thing is “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers “Please, will you do my job for me.”
- Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Museums, libraries, etc., primarily benefit local communities. Why should my tax dollars go to a local library 1,000 miles away: can't they fund their own library if it matters so much to them?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
The amount per taxpayer is small, sure, but the question is whether the amount should be used to fund other people's libraries. That question remains the same whether the tax is $1.50 or $1,000 per taxpayer.
As explained in that comment, most of library funding is already local, and in the case of Alabama, you pointed out that Alabama effectively got $0 from the federal government for 2024.
Puerto Rico got $2,147,080 and they're not even a state.
And I don't want to encourage local and regional brilliance, I want to encourage people paying for the services they enjoy instead of getting other people who don't enjoy them to pay for it.
Which is probably why most of the Christians here don’t like it. It’s pretty heretical! Mostly the Jesus parts. When you downgrade Jesus from “God incarnate” to “guy who did the best at being good” then it’s going to be more palatable to atheists (since it keeps God in the mysterious “ground if all being” box where he’s not likely to do anything to offend*) and less palatable to Christian’s (the guys whose hope is salvation through the intercession of Christ).
*Lewis wrote on this in his autobiography (emphasis mine):
"The Absolute Mind—better still, the Absolute—was impersonal, or it knew itself (but not us?) only in us, and it was so absolute that it wasn’t really much more like a mind than anything else. And anyway, the more muddled one got about it and the more contradictions one committed, the more this proved that our discursive thought moved only on the level of 'Appearance', and 'Reality' must be somewhere else. And where else but, of course, in the Absolute? There, not here, was 'the fuller splendour' behind the 'sensuous curtain'. The emotion that went with all this was certainly religious. But this was a religion that cost nothing. We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us. It was “there”; safely and immovably “there”. It would never come “here”, never (to be blunt) make a nuisance of Itself. This quasi-religion was all a one-way street; all eros (as Dr. Nygren would say) steaming up, but no agape darting down. There was nothing to fear; better still, nothing to obey."
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
Let's assume that $211m was equally distributed among the states
It is not. They make their largest grants to state libraries, but they don't distribute it evenly. In 2024 they didn't even give Alabama state libraries a grant at all! California got $15,705,702 for their state library system, the only grant that went to anybody in Alabama whatsoever in 2024 was $184,876 to the Alabama African American Civil Rights Heritage Sites Consortium.
Here's the full list of 2024 grantees under their "Grants to State Libraries" program:
California State Library $15,705,702
Texas State Library and Archives Commission $12,512,132
State Library of Florida $9,533,426
New York State Library $8,125,215
Pennsylvania Office of Commonwealth Libraries $5,891,819
Illinois State Library $5,736,330
State Library of Ohio $5,448,084
Georgia Board of Regents $5,162,498
North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources $5,089,381
Library of Michigan $4,788,124
New Jersey State Library $4,506,420
Library of Virginia $4,289,358
Washington State Library $3,948,629
Arizona State Library $3,804,635
Tennessee State Library and Archives $3,689,581
Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners $3,642,371
Indiana State Library $3,589,836
Missouri State Library $3,338,467
Maryland State Library Agency $3,332,465
WI Div. for Libraries and Community Learning $3,230,831
Colorado Department of Education $3,218,246
MN Dept of CFL/Library Development & Services $3,165,524
South Carolina State Library $3,028,013
State Library of Louisiana $2,726,161
KY Department for Libraries and Archives $2,708,198
Oregon State Library $2,597,695
Oklahoma Department of Libraries $2,529,938
Utah State Library Division $2,289,874
State Library of Iowa $2,210,343
Nevada State Library and Archives $2,205,502
Connecticut State Library $2,164,184
Arkansas State Library $2,157,781
PR Dept. of ED/Public Library Programs $2,147,080
Kansas State Library $2,109,780
Mississippi Library Commission $2,109,457
New Mexico State Library $1,797,977
Nebraska Library Commission $1,746,652
Idaho State Library $1,741,500
West Virginia Library Commission $1,668,036
Hawaii State Public Library System $1,541,630
New Hampshire State Library $1,529,144
Maine State Library $1,526,754
Montana State Library, Natural Resource Information System $1,427,530
Rhode Island Office of Library & Information Services $1,413,623
Delaware Division of Libraries $1,389,442
South Dakota State Library $1,346,956
State Library, North Dakota $1,295,858
Alaska State Library $1,276,792
District of Columbia Public Library $1,256,248
State of Vermont Department of Libraries $1,244,357
Wyoming State Library $1,220,427
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
1mo ago
Olive beat me to it! Here's the full quote, from a letter Lewis wrote to a friend in 1939:
What did you think of Snowwhite and the VII Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
3mo ago
The last two paragraphs I quoted use opposing arguments to come to the same conclusion: Similarities to the "monomyth" are evidence of Truth and differences from the "monomyth" are also evidence of Truth.
C. S. Lewis laid out the central "similarity to monomyth argument" in more detail in his essay "Religion Without Dogmas" He's a key quote:
"If you start from a naturalistic philosophy, then something like the view of Euhemerus or the view of Frazer is likely to result. But I am not a naturalist. I believe that in the huge mass of mythology which has come down to us a good many different sources are mixed—true history, allegory, ritual, the human delight in storytelling, etc. But among these sources I include the supernatural, both diabolical and divine. We need here concern ourselves only with the latter. If my religion is erroneous, then occurrences of similar motifs in pagan stories are, of course, instances of the same, or a similar error. But if my religion is true, then these stories may well be a preparatio evangelica, a divine hinting in poetic and ritual form at the same central truth which was later focused and (so to speak) historicized in the Incarnation. To me, who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ and Plato before St. Augustine, the anthropological argument against Christianity has never been formidable. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in its coffin: just as if you started by knowing that there were no such things as crocodiles, then the various stories about dragons might help to confirm your disbelief."
In his autobiography he discussed the "difference from monomyth" argument:
"I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste. And yet the very matter which they set down in their artless, historical fashion—those narrow, unattractive Jews, too blind to the mythical wealth of the Pagan world around them—was precisely the matter of the great myths. If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not “a religion”, nor “a philosophy”. It is the summing up and actuality of them all."
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
11mo ago
Governments should be terrified of riots. Unless you’re capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill (like China or North Korea) no government has the ability to stop a riot when it gets large enough. 100 police cannot stop 1,000 rioters, much less 10,000. I believe that many in government on the left treated left wing protests with kid gloves partly out of knowledge of how difficult it is to control riots, but mostly from ideological commitments that favored the rioters cause. Now those same officials think they can crack down on right wing rioters successfully, and they will find they’re sorely mistaken. The best way to stop rioters is to stop the riot from beginning in the first place: if you let it get this far, with this much built up resentment, and having shattered the cultural value that rioting is wrong (which might have otherwise kept normies from jointing in), there may be no way to put the genii back in the bottle. At this point there may be nothing they can do but hunker down and try to mitigate the damage until the riots burn themselves out.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
2mo ago
I don't really see how these pagan beliefs are more outlandish than anything in the Bible, if taken literally.
The trouble is that nobody does, including the neo-pagans. They mostly just get together and try to cast spells and protect the environment. You get lesbian Wiccans calling on the blessing of fertility goddesses, and not recognizing the irony of that one bit.
FlyingLionWithABook
Has a C. S. Lewis quote for that.
6mo ago
And the floors are concrete. And they don’t have rules against dogs!
I disagree strongly that what you describe is sadism: what you describe is the natural desire for justice. Calling that sadism is a trick the left uses to attack the idea of punishment as a whole. C. S. Lewis wrote about this in his essay "Delilnquents in the Snow": though he was describing 1950s Britian what he wrote applies to the modern U.S.A. just as well.
More options
Context Copy link