“Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of goodness in the wrong way.”  -CS Lewis

Matt Yglesias:  Any means of forcing Japanese surrender would have killed incredible numbers of civilians, the guilty parties are the imperial officials who insisted on continuing a hopeless war.

Me:  And most importantly way more of our guys.

Marxist He/Hims: 

Nationalism is gross.

Beyond America's borders do not live a lesser people.

Actually soldiers of any sort dying is better than civilians of any sort dying.

“There is none of our impulses which the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining mother love or patriotism.”  -CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you’d never know which were which.”  -CS Lewis, Prince Caspian

People have a tendency to wallpaper over times and places with which they are unfamiliar with a  kind of light blue color.  "Oh that tribe I know nothing about?  Sure maybe some of them were mean but by and large I bet they were nice."

In some cases the wallpaper is covering a horrible infestation.

Consider the not-atypical Roman conquering of Carthage.  How was it different from the conquests of Hitler?  The past WAS Hitler.

The quarrel is begun... In such a strait the wisest may well be perplexed, and the boldest staggered. The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any land-marks from the wisdom of our ancestors, to guide us. At best we can only follow the spirit of their proceeding in other cases.  –Edmund Burke, 1770 describing a conflict between the King and the House of Commons

"Whoever said ‘the customer is always right’ was a customer."  –Jimmy Hatlo in Daytona Beach Morning Journal April 2, 1943

I was reading a mainstream history website about technological contributions of various ancient regions.  When I got to sub-saharan Africa, there was one entry:  The Dogon people of Mali.  They knew thousands of years before everyone else about Jupiter's moons and the Sirius star system, things practically invisible to the naked eye.  Or so the website said.  It turns out, to a few brave souls, the likelihood that one anthropologist lied seemed a little stronger than the mystical discovery by otherwise backward people isolated in the interior of Africa.  One even went back to check.

“I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, and then bullying my way to the top, that is the conclusion I've come to.”  ― Lee Kuan Yew

We write things down, both to help us remember, and to help us forget. –Naval

There's a genre of leftwing error that relies on knowing exactly one thing about a topic.  If you know two or zero you can't have the leftwing view.

Heard from a leftist lady today that Americans are fat because they're poor: Let's demolish this like a fat guy with a McDouble.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment. -Francois de La Rochefoucauld

One of the links between Freud and Marx is their purportedly rational, scientific-sounding explanations for things. You get the same stuff from Magnus Hirschfeld, of Weimar Sex Clinic fame. A lot of what is going on is the academic laundering of a particular worldview.  -@threejacques

A Twitter spat goaded me into watching one of Rogan's monumental interviews with current Democrat vice-frontrunner RFK Jr.  The question at hand is, "Is he a kook?"  Which I understand is a North American slang word.  To my British former overlords, the question is, "Is he batty?  A nutter?  Mental?"  Anyway, spoiler alert:  Yeah he is a bit.

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.” -Shakespeare, Macbeth 

h/t Zaid Jilani:  Wired doesn't recommend Ring doorbells because they can be used by the homeowner to easily provide evidence to police. Good lord. 

Ben and Jerry's released a statement about how stolen land must be returned to the natives! And then a tribe which once resided where Ben and Jerry's HQ lies accepted hah.

"CHARACTER Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself." -Shakespeare, Macbeth

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,

Win us with honest trifles, to betray ’s

In deepest consequence.”  -William Shakespeare

"Land acknowledgments are low key the most based thing imaginable. Reciting the names of all the people you conquered at the start of every meeting."  -@typesfast

"I wonder if victims of affirmative action will ask for reparations now that it has been ruled unconstitutional."  -@ScottAdamsSays

Criticisms of the early USA almost always describe most or even all of the world in 1776.  "They didn't let women or blacks vote."

But not one country in the world elected its leaders at that time.  Is not some of a good thing to be commended?

“your cause of sorrow. Must not be measured by his worth, for then. It hath no end.”  -William Shakespeare

"You will have heard before this reaches you of the Commencement of a Civil War; the End of it perhaps neither myself, nor you, who are much younger, may live to see."  -Ben Franklin, 1775

"Almost half the signers of the Declaration of Independence had some form of seminary training or degree."  -A Patriot's History of the United States

"France... came away from the conflict with... a terrific debt, which played no small part in its own revolution in 1789."  -A Patriot's History of the United States

"THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country..."  -Thomas Paine, 1776