Popular Mechanics has a terrific list of one hundred skills – from automotive to technological to military – that every man ought to have in his repertoire. Women should have some of them down too (hat-tip to Lew Rockwell).
Mastering these may make more sense for libertarians than wrangling about court appointments. You’re also much more more likely to win over big-government friends if you can show them how handy you are.
There’s nothing more persuasive than someone who can walk the walk…
Paste them on your fridge door or computer screen and start working through the ones you think you could use. I don’t think I have even half of them down and mostly those are from the household category. Some of these skills seem pretty esoteric to me, though. I mean, do you really need to know how to “run rapids in a canoe” for everyday survival?
On the other hand, I can think of a few much more useful skills that are missing from the list…. Budget cooking, securing your computer from viruses and trojans, and cleaning up stains on different kinds of materials, for example…
And right now, understanding just how your bank and broker operate should be on the very top of any survival list.
What about, “Figuring out how much your really owe on that loan on your house” ?
Now, that was the only skill anyone needed to know in the last ten years.
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
– G. K. Chesterton
I’m a reluctant traveler.
I left India because I had to. The best libraries, the latest research, the most influential centers of learning are in the West. You can’t “make it” in India – or even just do well enough – without some sort of credentialing from the West.
I would have been quite happy to stay in the lap of my family, if it hadn’t been for that. Family life in India is usually more sheltering than family life in the West, even if it too is changing rapidly these days…
It took me nearly ten years to get out, from the first feverish scrawl to a New York college when I was twelve…. to the stamp on my passport in Chennai.
But Chennai wasn’t home either. In India, I lived in Ooty, in Bangalore, in Chennai, and in several smaller towns I’ve half-forgotten.
In America, I stayed put, circling Philadelphia and DC for nearly two decades.
There were many reasons for that. In the first place, the contrast between how much cars were used in America, and how much they weren’t in India, made me so guilty about driving that I forced myself to take buses and trains when I could. Overtly, there were other more obvious reasons for not driving. But the psychological factor was this…
I wasn’t producing enough to consume that much fuel, I told myself.
The calculus of production and consumption kept me occupied for the next decade.
It had a useful result. I became a dexterous saver.
I saved…on nothing.
On ten dollars an hour. On fifty-cent raises.
A dollar here. A hundred there.
I weighed tomatoes in the grocery store. I squinted at weights on labels.
I saved anxiously, religiously.
Waiting for shoes to drop, for rainy days.
For some hole of perpetual anxiety to fill.
It was a malarial guilt bred from the mosquito swamps of the poor and the deprived and the hungry and the crowded and the dirty and the dying and the malnourished and the sick that cling to the dark half of this planet.
Those were the days when buying a cup of coffee would send me into a melancholic funk, comparing what it cost me to what it cost my brother in India.
I knew the comparison was somehow not quite legitimate.
I made it anyway. It made buying anything difficult for me at first.
After ten years, the anxiety waned. I began to see that my calculations missed something – I’m not sure what.
The guilt eased, but the habit of saving remained.
And now I had the money to spend, I no longer wanted anything well enough to spend it on.
I listened to friends talking about their travels and I wondered….why?
You could watch a trek in the Himalayas, white-water rafting, scuba-diving or anything else wrapped up in a comforter at home. The adventurers and the vagabonds didn’t have all that much to show for their time or money except a few albums of photos, souvenirs, a few wild stories, memories. Ruthlessly, I calculated the costs and the benefits and struck travel from my list of worthy activities.
Bah, humbug. It was nothing more than a status symbol, the epicurean whim of those who had more money than sense.
It was treating your fellow man like a creature in a zoo you poked bananas to through the bars. It was voyeurism. It was fetishizing geography, exoticizing human beings, consuming places like commodities. It was a waste of money, of energy — yours and the earth’s.
I still think some of those things. Only not so confidently.
I still only travel with a business or family purpose of some kind. I take pictures, not of unknown heroes arching on stone horses, but of empty houses. I tell myself it’s work.
Streets of old houses. Facades. Interiors.
Bathrooms. Patios. Stairways. Steps. Tile. Masonry. I climbed thousands of steps in the medinas of Morocco, examining the colors and the work of the old tile. Is it really 17th century, or is it revamped? I fingered the dates on plaster friezes. I climbed onto the roofs of crumbling mansions and talked to contractors about renovation costs, while other travelers drank in the bars and cavorted on the beaches.
My beaches are nearly always empty and wind-swept. They have gulls or pink flamingos or crows. There are rarely bodies, dressed or undressed.
There are few people in my pictures.
I don’t take pictures of people, and I ward them off myself. I have a horror of being captured by the lens of strangers and pinned to their albums forever. Of being passed around in their homes with coffee and dessert. I loathe the thought. It seems barbaric. If you can’t tape a conversation legally without someone’s permission, how can you film them?
So my travel album is stark.
Pictures of cathedrals and towers and mountains all over the world can be found every where. Why should I add to the clutter?
Toward the end of my visits, I start asking myself what about this trip was so necessary that it needed to harness steel monsters, burning through oceans of fuel, roaring inaudibly night and day in the clouds?
I have no good answer.
Then I saw Chesterton’s lines. There’s some small justification in them for the traveler.
They make sense. But oddly. In the opposite way.
Traveling hasn’t made me that much more a stranger in my two homelands.
I’ve always been a stranger in them. My sharpest memories are off alterity, not identity.
Traveling makes me realize I’m not as estranged from my twin motherlands as I often feel. It shows me how much more of both I have in me than I think.
Joseph’s Box has been mentioned by The Independent’s literary editor Boyd Tonkin in an article on the Booker Prize as one of the novels that should have been a contender. Well, we did enter it … but, like Tonkin, have given up expecting anything other than the obvious from most big literary prizes. But it’s great to see some recognition for this stunningly original novel. Tonkin says: ‘We should never have expected a jury as orthodox in taste as the one James Naughtie chairs to seek out as waywardly extravagant a novel as Joseph’s Box by the Scottish doctor-author Suhayl Saadi, which drives us deep into the history and myths of Europe and south Asia alike. But, in a bolder year, he and other writers from non-corporate imprints might have stood a better chance.’
Publication date is tomorrow (Friday 31 July). Take a look at the book-specific website, www.josephsbox.co.uk, which is a whole world in itself. Order the book at only £10.99 (RRP is £13.99) or the e-book at just £7.
One reader, commenting on my Berlusconi post, defends Larry Flynt’s attacks on Jerry Falwell (something I’ve written on before).
Note: Flynt attacked Rev. Jerry Falwell with a satire in print of the pastor having sex with his mother. Falwell sued Flynt and lost.
I decide to debate the assertions he made in his comment, point-by-point in this post, because they misuse language in ways that are quite common these days.
COMMENT: “I found Flynt’s raunchy satire of Falwell to be very funny and appropriate, although I can understand if others might have different opinions…..”
RAJIVA: Funny? Sexually and publicly humiliating someone in terms that rubbishes the most sensitive areas of their life – their family, their mother, their childhood affections, their sexuality, their religious beliefs, the public’s perception of their work as a minister, their capacity to perform professionally (counseling young people on sexuality or faith or family) – is “very funny,” and “appropriate”?
Actually, it’s considered torture (when done in the military), domestic abuse (when done in the family), and sexual harassment (when done in the work-place).
But it seems as though, if it’s printed, then suddenly it goes scot-free, it gets tagged “free speech.”
Well, some speech is not speech. It’s effectively action. And it should be treated as action.
Libel is a tort.
COMMENT: “He wasn’t attacking Falwell directly, so much as his absurd pompous messianic holier-than-thou persona and the oppressive and xenophobic underpinnings of his beliefs — the very same oppressive and xenophobic culture that was trying to silence and sue him.”
RAJIVA: You’re doing a lot of name-calling.
I disagree with Falwell’s fundamentalism. I never found him to be “holier than thou”. He was genuinely affable, as far as I could tell. Your opinion that someone else is personally xenophobic and oppressive doesn’t equate to their actually being those things, unless you show some evidence of injury, as I did in my previous response. Whatever Falwell said, he said quite courteously and even affectionately, when he spoke to Flynt. I saw them on TV (after the lawsuit, I believe).
COMMENT: The two had completely and violently opposing views on almost everything — I don’t see how anyone can be “cheerful” and “tolerant” and “reasonable” with someone who so thoroughly undermines one’s values.
RAJIVA: The essence of civilization and civility is to be tolerant of views that undermine your own. I have good friends who are evangelical Christians and devout Catholics. Many of them probably hope I will leave off my “heretical” views. It doesn’t bother me at all. And likewise, they aren’t bothered by my questioning of their dogmas. Ideology is only a dimension of personality…
COMMENT: Moreover, Falwell was not cheerful nor tolerant nor reasonable — he brutally tried to sue Flynt for $45M because of this insignificant work of fiction printed in his own private subscription-based magazine,
RAJIVA: You’re worried about the “brutality” of suing a man who made a huge fortune out of overtly misogynistic imagery of female sexuality (this is Hustler, not Playboy)….That’s a twist. Why should you “tolerate” any injury done to you? Do you tolerate muggers and bank robbers or financial criminals? Why should you tolerate vicious slanders in the media? Being civil in debate doesn’t mean you have to give up your legal rights, I hope.
The image was very damaging to Falwell and to his memories of his mother. It was degrading. How do you cap the monetary damages on that? Personally, I don’t think monetary damages alone are suitable for all torts. I think Flynt needed to have some small taste of what he himself had inflicted.
And it’s interesting that he ultimately did. His daughter accused him of incest, didn’t she?
Karma?
What’s more, it turned out, he was the incestuous one. Cheap psychoanalysis isn’t very useful usually, but in this case, it does seem that some compulsion made Flynt deride Falwell for exactly what he (not Falwell) was guilty of.
Shades of all those CEOs and political bosses who harass their female employees…. and then protect themselves by turning around and preemptively accusing disaffected employees of “stalking”… or in other ways undermining their professional claims. I’m talking about the sainted Bill Clinton, beloved of liberal feminists….and of a few other people……
I’m sure this satisfaction with punishment won’t sit well with those who see religious and spiritual values as all “milque-toast” and “mildness.” –
To me, that’s a sign of the decay in our sensibilities and the loss of the noble and chivalric value of honor, which is now confined to the Muslim world, or so it seems.
COMMENT: “Not to mention the far more insidious repressive venom he would spew to his students (all his draconian Religious anti-sexuality stuff, and twisted anti-free-speech poison).
RAJIVA: Did Falwell libel anyone when he was expressing his views? No. Then, those are precisely the views the first amendment is for, not for nasty, libelous attacks.
Also, disliking Hustler-type imagery and language don’t make you anti-sex or repressed, unless your idea of sex is not much more than what boys scrawl on bathroom walls. People can be quite sexual, and not want their sex lives displayed like graffiti.
Or can’t anyone tell the difference any longer? Throwing around the word “prudish” at anyone who doesn’t agree with your own level of tolerance for public coarseness is a misuse of the word.
COMMENT: I’m still not sure how the two managed to become friends later in life. (Also, unless there is more credible evidence — why doesn’t Tanya take a polygraph like her dad did? she already wrote a book about it — one can’t simply assume such character-assassinating crimes :b.))
RAJIVA: Again, most of your argument is personal bile, ad hominem, and assumption.
Jerry Falwell got on with Flynt at the end because, like him or not, Falwell took his religious beliefs seriously, and really did feel he could “hate the sin and love the sinner.” That may not sit well with the left, but my opinion of him has nothing to do with his political views or his dogmas – none of which I share. My opinion of him is based on my perception that whatever he was otherwise, as a public person, he presented himself genially, affably, and reasonably (
[Correction: I should add the phrase ‘when speaking to other people.’ It is true that Falwell used harsh language about groups of people, but that was language based on evangelical and fundamentalist criteria that he held about their behavior. This was the argument I made in a piece called, “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother, and the Rest of Us Ho’s”].
He did not deserve the filth slur thrown at him by Flynt, he was a better man than Flynt
(Correction: I should add the phrase – ‘in this respect’), and Flynt recognized it at some level….
Update: The fact that through most of history both secular and religious thinkers have regarded homosexual behavior as morally wrong can provide some rational justification for differentiating between Falwell’s attacks on homosexual behavior ( in language like “part of a Satanic system”) and any other random personal attack on another human being. There is a distinction that can be made between those two types of attacks.
Camille Paglia makes this point in an essay she wrote about a Martha Nussbaum critique that I’ll try to link here…
From an article on Indian revolutionary leader and philosopher-poet, Aurobindo, later known for his system of yoga, “integral yoga.”
“The fact that Sri Aurobindo did not receive a favorable reception in India intellectual circles during the last half a century has been very unfortunate but not very surprising, because he was in his views and in his vision so radical and so much ahead of his times, that he effectively alienated four of the strongest intellectual establishments in the country, namely, the traditional Hindu religious establishment, the Gandhian establishment, the politically non-committed but eurocentric university intellectuals who are the products of Macaulay’s educational system, and also the leftist, communist/socialist establishment.
The Hindu religious establishment did not take kindly to Sri Aurobindo because he emphatically denied world-negation as the central thrust of Indian culture. Many of our countrymen still take great pride in the Shankarite and Buddhist legacy of regarding the world as a delusion, and therefore as of no value. His insistence on worldly progress being a quintessential part of the Indian spiritual tradition alienated Sri Aurobindo from the Hindu establishment, strangely enough. The Gandhian establishment was not entirely happy with Sri Aurobindo because of his insistence that India must cultivate the kshatriya (warrior) spirit, not merely Bhakti and Jnana.
The reason why the academic establishment in India was opposed to Sri Aurobindo is that he rejected the colonial-missionary model of history, which regarded the Aryan invasion theory as its crown-jewel. Sri Aurobindo was probably the first to issue a warning against the invasion theory in his book On the Vedas, written nearly 80 years ago. Nor was Sri Aurobindo an uncritical admirer of the Western liberal-humanistic tradition.
The reasons for the neglect Sri Aurobindo suffered among leftist intelligentsia in India was that he was cold to the promises of communists and the dreams of socialists, and because of his strong spiritual orientation. But it must be pointed out that Sri Aurobindo was not opposed to communist ideology per se as can be seen from the following statements of his:
‘‘If communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul’s brotherhood and the death of egoism. A forced association and a mechanical comradeship would end in a world-wide fiasco.’’
1.Shortly after blogging on certain ongoing and past problems, I got two emails. Each of them is from an IP from my residence in the US… and now here abroad. The messages were odd and mildly threatening.
2. RSS feeds and twitter have been broken – for some time apparently.
3. And now, the latest – my wiki entry (set up by others) has been tagged to be deleted. Why now suddenly? After 5 years and support by numbers of people? Editing is one thing. Why tagged for deletion?
He loved women so little, he publicly humiliated them – his wife of 19 years and the mother of his 3 children, in this case – by telling a topless model he would marry her instantly if he could.
This is a “bad boy”? Boy? This Dionysos is a 71-year old (correction: I read 72, in some accounts) man with a reptilian stare and matching gonads, who ‘bought’ sexual favors from astute “pros” or near underage women with daddy-complexes. If sexual realism suggests that ‘that’s what all men want’ – then sexual realism should tell us that minus his money, all he was was a dried up old creep.
He ‘loved’ one young thing enough to attend her 18th party, but apparently didn’t attend his own children’s 18th birthday parties.
Love?
From appearances, Berlusconi didn’t “love” anything but power and sex.
Adultery, in a marriage where both partners live separately, isn’t the problem. The problem is the public pain and humiliation Berlusconi repeatedly inflicted on his family by his compulsive behavior.
He ‘loved’ his lusts and physical drives. Whether this should be the object of public censure, titillation, or gloating is another thing.
Personally, I think his control of Italian media, his gagging of critical journalists and his bribing his way out of legal charges are things libertarians should be much more concerned with….
Still, casting his behavior as some kind of splendid victim-less frolicking is dubious. He seems to be a lecher and a liar who subjected his wife and children (she wasn’t the first, either) to endless pain.
The New York Times is wrong on a number of things. But they’re not wrong to consider him corrupt – and, “aging Lothario” is putting it very nicely.
Berlusconi is a senile goat.
Paleolibertarians shouldn’t be using him as the centerpiece of a “boys will be boys” argument.
The NY Times notes how both political sides are taking partisan stands in contradiction to their professed principles:
“Things are completely turned upside down,” said Gianluca Nicoletti, a commentator for Il Sole 24 Ore radio. “Those who always represented the family and faithful couples are happy to justify hanky-panky,” he said. While some on the left, “which always professed a belief in total sexual freedom, are now like inquisitors with their fingers wagging.”
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
–Bishop Desmond Tutu (via 321gold)
They proved to me by convincing reasons that God does not exist; Afterwards I saw God, for he came and embraced me. And now what am I to believe- the reasoning of others or my own experience? Truth is what the soul has seen and experienced; the rest is appearance, prejudice and opinion.
— Sri. Aurobindo
[Aurobindo, one of the brightest minds that ever existed, a poet, polymath, revolutionary turned sage, and author of some of the most profound books ever written, is for me the central figure of modern India – not Gandhi. And he is for me also the central figure the West has to adopt from the East…]
Suhayl Saadi’s novel