Our World

Can you really be ‘passionate’ about digital marketing?

I suspect Montaigne was being coy when he complained of the “wild and useless weeds” that would encroach on his mind in idleness. It is to those wild shoots that Montaigne owed his genre-defining essais, and thus his lasting influence. Spontaneous growth testifies to fertile ground, which is certainly better than the alternatives. One alternative is a barren mind. Another, seemingly opposed but often one and the same, is the harried or overwhelmed state of those consumed by careerist ambition — which stands for many or most of us.

Montaigne left such pursuits behind in the 1560s, at age 38, when he retired from public office to embark on a life of contemplation, thanks to which we have his published work. In solitude, he gave himself over to the world and his own mind — his “back shop”. He was there for the weeds.

When I was growing up in the 1950s in Weston-super-Mare, England was largely a middle-class society. The values of the middle class were dictated from above and would work their way down the social ladder. My family may have been on one of that ladder’s lower rungs but we had middle-class values: although my father left school at 16, I never heard him mispronounce a word or make a spelling mistake. People tried to do their job well; they weren’t overly concerned with becoming rich, they just wanted enough money to get by, and live a good life.

The most controversial topics to cover in journalism aren’t what you might first think. Foreign affairs? Religion? Trump, Biden, Clinton?

Nope. Not by a long shot. Sure, people are deeply passionate about these topics. But I’ve learned from my years of newspaper writing that the topics that are most likely to result in your inbox being flooded are voicing an opinion on parking and pets.

That’s because these issues affect people directly in their daily lives, sometimes on an hourly basis. There’s no escaping them.

My heart places me in the “No such thing as a bad dog school” but Pitbulls unfortunately have to be excluded.

Citizens won’t sacrifice themselves

Western politics is defined by a conflict that is always awkward and sometimes cringe. On the one hand, our leaders are full of loud-mouthed passion, warning that the days of peace are over and that we now need to prepare for total, generational war. On the other, it’s beyond obvious that nobody cares. Across Europe and America, politicians now openly exhort their populations to feel righteous patriotism and to answer the call of duty, but all seem to accomplish exactly nothing: our militaries are shrinking due to a lack of recruits, polling shows a massive disinterest in fighting for King and Country, the young in particular remain completely unmoved. Even in embattled Ukraine, young men are choosing to dodge the draft and go clubbing instead.

Welcome fellow members of the internal proletariat! Anyone got a match?

Related … h/t Hermes

This is the most important video on the internet right now.

Best 90 seconds you will spend all day is watching this MSNBC clip.

Seriously.

pic.twitter.com/bbUNNQ7Wec

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 24, 2024

The unmarried thirtysomething is a rising star in the West. Some of them might be in common-law relationships, some may have kids, but many of them won’t have either. The future on the horizon is one of greater solitude, an affliction that will likely cost us political stability and economic success, on top of general well-being.

This is an acute issue in Canada: the most recent set of odds given by Statistics Canada peg a person’s chances of ever marrying at a mere 44 per cent — that’s down from 74 per cent in 1991.

Feminism has left middle-aged women like me single, childless and depressed

I increasingly feel that feminism has failed my generation. It is a peculiarity of the West that it is divided into sets which differ profoundly in their beliefs. This state of affairs began with the Reformation and has grown more pronounced ever since. There were Protestants and Catholics who differed fundamentally not only on faith but on practical matters. It was among Protestant communities that feminism first emerged, and it is in Protestant countries such as America and Britain in which feminist beliefs have been at their most vocal and strident in tone, like a religion with no dilution of agnosticism. Margaret Thatcher, though she would have denied it, was a feminist de facto, and no Catholic country could have produced her like.

Thucydides famously wrote that wars are produced by fear, honor, and interest.

The great historian Victor Davis Hanson titled his book on World War II The Second World Wars because the conflicts that evolved into that global war began as separate wars: Japan versus China; Italy versus Ethiopia; Japan versus Soviet Russia; Soviet Russia and Germany versus Poland; Soviet Russia versus Finland; England and France versus Germany; Italy versus France; Germany versus Soviet Russia; Japan versus the United States and England; and Germany and Italy versus the United States. Similarly, in 1912 fighting broke out in the Balkans; then Austria-Hungary went to war against Serbia; Germany declared war on Russia; Russia waged war on Austria-Hungary; Germany attacked Belgium and France, and England declared war on Germany. Later, Italy and the United States joined the war. Those conflicts also evolved into a global war waged on five continents, on the high seas, and in the air.

For more than 70 years, a slender volume written by a dockworker who died in 1983 has been handed around by presidents, would-be presidents, journalists, students, and more as a guide—decade after decade—to epochal and baffling events.

Published in 1951 in the shadow of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union, Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements became one of President Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite books. As the former Supreme Allied Commander of European forces during World War II, Eisenhower saw firsthand the rise of mass movements and how they turn destructive. During one of the nation’s first televised presidential press conferences, Ike cited the book, turning it into a bestseller.

The casino floor was heaving as gamblers, such as Sally Cresswell, a 57-year-old estate agent from Texas, hit the slots at the Tropicana for one last dance with Lady Luck.

During its heyday in the middle of the last century, the hotel represented the glitz and the glamour of Las Vegas, the casino town that sprung up in the middle of the Nevada desert and was controlled by the mob.

Today you have to listen hard to hear the dying strains of the Rat Pack here, with the gangsters who once called Sin City home long gone. As a vivid illustration of the changing face of Las Vegas, the Tropicana takes some beating.

Over Easter Weekend in 1964, two gangs from opposite sides of the cultural spectrum clashed at Clacton-on-Sea. It would never happen now

“Clacton on Sea,” proclaimed an advert in the Daily Mirror on Easter Saturday, 1964: “Seven Miles of Golden Sands. Beautiful Gardens. Fast Electric Trains from London.” Yet any holidaymakers who made the trip probably wished they had stayed at home, not just because it was the coldest Easter since 1883, but primarily on account of the visiting rival groups of young Londoners whose behaviour dominated the following day’s newspaper headlines.

“‘Wild Ones’ Invade Seaside – 90 Arrests” said the Mirror’s front page, drawing a parallel with the 1953 Marlon Brando biker film, blaming the trouble on “1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motorcycles”.

Progressives are rediscovering old truths about the sexes

Modern revolutions — those we know to have failed — share an impractical conceit. In the minds of their architects, the establishment of a wholly new social contract has meant renovating human nature itself.

France’s revolution, which begat the utopian tradition, was predicated on the assumption that humanity unshackled from superstition and guided by pure reason would enter a new epoch of Enlightenment. That utopian ideal was carried forward by the Paris Commune and, eventually, the Soviets, who sought to erase from the human experience concepts such as property, enterprise, and individuality. Throughout, the revolutionaries’ ambition was matched only by their contempt for the world as it was. Robert Owen, the founder of one similarly ill-fated experiment in utopian design, in America, professed that the social reformer’s goal is to stamp out “that greatest of all errors, the notion that individuals form their own characters.”

It is easy to become somewhat despondent with the apparent condition of the West and of the world generally, but that conclusion is deceptive and unjustified. The war in Ukraine remains a largely unsuccessful act of naked aggression by Russia that has exposed the military of that country as inept and inefficient. Russia has a legitimate historic interest in Ukraine, but as almost the whole world recognized, it had no right to try to subjugate that country, especially having, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, guaranteed the frontiers of Ukraine when it gave up the nuclear weapons it inherited from the USSR. What is needed now is someone of the stature and competence representing an adequately influential jurisdiction, to bring the war to an end on the basis of giving a little to the Russians and securing absolute and ironclad guarantees from Russia and NATO of the revised borders of a sovereign Ukraine.

With home prices so high, living on wheels seems a reasonable alternative. Many find it isn’t.

Siena Juhlin bought a white Ford Transit in August and decided to make it her home. She needed a new place to live, and the idea of traveling full time in a big cargo van sounded like a fairy tale. Soon, she was off, decamping from her waitressing job in Missouri with plans to live off her savings while exploring the West Coast.

That lasted two months. In California, Juhlin’s transmission died. Ever since, she has been working three part-time jobs to regain the $5,000 she had to spend to get it fixed.

It wasn’t exactly the journey she expected—but she still prefers it to her old life as an apartment dweller. “Everything is 10 times harder,” said Juhlin, 23. “But everything is also amazingly beautiful and rewarding.”

When I read that our government despises us, I’m tempted to respond that the feeling is mutual. But as Andrew Breitbart warned, politics is downstream of culture. So there’s a “Picture of Dorian Voter” problem here.

Certainly when a “Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force” study calls us misinformed conspiracy-minded kooks who hate politicians, I want to shake the morning paper at them. On March 25 alone I encountered our finance minister asking senators to pass a money-shredding bill unread. And in addition to $59.5 million to consultants, federal bureaucrats clocked 134,000 hours of their own highly-paid pensionable time on the wretched ArriveCan app

Leading doctors have warned of a mysterious new “epidemic” of abdominal cancers in younger people.

Following the Princess of Wales’s announcement of her diagnosis on Friday, specialist clinicians have said that in recent years they have seen a significant increase in under-45s presenting with cancers typically seen in older patients.

Many are fit and outwardly healthy, prompting a scramble among scientists to establish what is causing the trend.

The Princess of Wales is undergoing treatment for cancer, she has announced in a personal video message, but told the world: “I am going to be ok.”

The Princess is undergoing a course of preventative chemotherapy and has said she is focused on making a “full recovery”.

The cancer was identified during tests after her abdominal surgery on Jan 16, and she began treatment in late February.

Kate Middleton, Princess of Wales, has announced that she has been diagnosed with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy.pic.twitter.com/zmxtLVpHlu

— Ground News (@Ground_app) March 22, 2024