Dumb Things Read on the Internet, Vol. 1

"I suppose it’s possible that Dear Leader’s regime may seek to consolidate political power to the point where the transcendent is eclipsed by a world-immanent polis. And, while there is always a remnant that will worship God there appears a point when the libido dominandi surges and engages in the passion of war and death. The problem is that the world-transcendent truth, which is the ordering force of the soul, has been rejected by the current world-immanent regime, the milieu, the politeia and disorder dominates as men engage in Apostrophe, the turning away from the Divine ground.

"The good news is that remnant may just be the Tea Party people."

Ah, there it is. I'd never considered the Connexion between the world-immanent and its Remnant in the inimmanent. How the world-transcendent Orders de anima homo--and how to evade the Milieu-catalyzed Apostrophe--is a Story for another Day.

It's easier to believe that a computer program chose words randomly from Hegel and composed them thusly than it is to believe that another human being sits around having thoughts like that all day long, isn't it?

If it helps at all, "Dear Leader" is a reference to President Obama. Or Rocky and Bullwinkle.



Notice the resemblance?

See the original quotation, here.

See, the problem with FPR is...

Both Aaron and I have at times been peeved, other times prit'near enraged, by posts of varying levels of wrongness at the internet's preëminent collection of localists, Front Porch Republic. There, it is taken for granted that any "true" "localist" must be against evangelicals/abortion/same-sex marriage/Obama. (And this is only in writings by editors. Various commenters—Mr Cheeks chief among them—reach teabaggity levels of craziness on a regular basis.) Now, it is true that I am against some of these things. But I have difficulty accepting that they are all inimical to the idea of community. Take my local farmers' market (which I visited today), for example: what difference to that community would it make if my waitress at the market café attended the Praise Jebus Bible Temple? Or if the woman selling specialty salts happened to have spousal benefits with the woman selling scented candles a few booths down? Or even if the apple-seller man voted for Obama? (Abortion, I admit, may be a different case—it certainly is, from a moral standpoint. But I suppose the odds are quite good that some woman I saw today once had a safe and legal abortion. Did that affect the community?) Yet all of these things would be heavily discouraged, if not verboten, in the idealized community envisioned by one or another of the Front Porchers.

This, I think, may be the chief problem with FPR: every contributor has a differ'nt idea of what the basis of localism is. So you have Médaille ranting about distributism while Peters bemoans the utter failures of Protestantism while Fox tries to reconcile the localist impulse with the Democratic platform. And meanwhile, in the peanut gallery, we have comments extolling the One True Faith (be it Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Calvinist), defending the "localism" of multimillion-dollar sports franchises, and damning Obama's socialism and Kenyan nationality. The only thing we can agree on is that Wendell Berry happens to be right (at least, some of the time).