Well, today is the First of July. Pride Month is over. Above, Old Glory flying in Spain.
(Link goes to Twitter, if you are having trouble linking right now.)
Perhaps today we can prepare for the holiday weekend and maybe discuss independence and freedom a little.
France
The French are having some trouble right now. So here, for contrast, are some flags flown in Normandy by French People not long ago:
actually, having visited Normandy a few times, ppl should know the French ppl there typically fly both the US and FR flag.. the French also meticulously care for the American graves. It was actually quite emotional to see.
Meanwhile, in Paris, maybe this is a little too much freedom:
Supreme Court Decisions
The left is apoplectic over the Supreme Court's decisions on affirmative action, freedom of conscience and student loans. Apoplectic.
I have seen posts on the "corrupt" Supreme Court in my social media. What have you seen?
Mike Lee's commentary on the Supreme Court decision concerning Student Loans. Heh.
There are a couple of minor corrections in the Twitter thread, plus this:
It was an act of cruelty by @POTUS
to offer help he could not legally provide.
Thought Piece for the Weekend
Back on the 29th, J.J. Sefton's Morning Report highlighted a piece by Daniel Greenfield on Politics and the End of Private Lives.
I didn't see much discussion about it in the comments, but there's a lot to think about in this piece:
The social web is much more stifling than any Soviet communal apartment. A family might have been stuck with one bedroom, but at least they had a door that they could close. The internet has taken down all the doors. Making the private public is a core leftist program. The old hackers claimed that "information wants to be free". Information is less free than it ever was, but people's lives have become public property. The 'free' public services of Google, Facebook and others offer convenience in exchange for information. Family life and political participation leave a trail. Disputes spill out into their ugliness into social media. From the media to social media, everyone is invited to judge the private lives that have become public commodities.
It took Americans longer to collectivize the personal than it did the Chinese. And we did it in a typically individualistic fashion. To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, when collectivism came to America, it did so by flying emojis offering character creators, personalized algorithm suggestions and relevant ads. . .
Cancel culture politicized the personal. But for it to work, we had to give up our private lives.
In a collectivist society, everyone is either a model citizen or a problem. Individualism is an offense against the system. . .
. . . The American Revolution was fought over, among other matters, because the colonists refused to be feudal peasants who were expected to open their doors and quarter British soldiers in their homes at the demand of a king. Contemporary Americans assume that they are obligated to let officers of the state, not only the police but a long list of inspectors and authority figures into their homes, and have made their homes and lives into just another node on the internet for everyone to pass through when they please.
Inhabiting public lives has not made us any happier. Statistics show a sharp increase in depression and suicide rates for teens beginning with the popularization of the smartphone. Critics and experts point to the devastating impact of phones on public happiness, yet fail to boil it down succinctly to what adults understand, but teens never had a chance to experience.
Like the child stars and teen musicians of another era, a generation has come of age and another is coming of age without any sense of what living a private life is even like. . .
America was founded as a free society and has become a totalitarian state. . . A new revolution will make the personal, private once again. It is a revolution that can begin with us when we do not answer a question, fill in a form, turn over data or share our lives or scrutinize the lives of others who are not our family or our friends.
You may wish to read the whole thing, and discuss it with your family, or with The Horde, here. Using a nic, perhaps.
Weekend
You never know when you'll see something like this:
Music
Hope you have something nice planned for this long holiday weekend. Cooking anything interesting?
This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.
Last week's thread, Is Pride Month starting to lose its way?
Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.