In a bookstores your mind can go window shopping.
Adapted from Jonah Goldberg co founder of The Dispatch and a brilliant wordsmith.
Photo is from a Powell’s Bookstore Postcard.
Bookstores
Recreational Beliefs
Recreational Beliefs
Recreational beliefs are beliefs that you hold that don’t effect the way you live your life. For instance: Believing that aliens have landed on earth and the government is covering it up is a recreational belief: Believing that there is a conspiracy to make us all vegetarians is a recreational belief. and believing that Trump actually won the 2020 election is also a recreational belief.
Recreational beliefs have use as a signal of group membership; they are easy to hold without demanding any action.
I believe that the lithium in Tesla batteries lowers Tesla drivers fertility.
I Agree
Sanity
Why America
“But where are we going I asked?”
“We are going to America.”My father said.
“Why America?” I prodded.
“Because son.” he replied “we were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”
From Suicide of the West by Jonah Goldberg. Possibly an apocryphal story about refugees from the Hungarian revolution against the Soviets in 1956. “Something doesn’t have to be a fact to illustrate a truth.” Rabbi Kollin
The image is from a Postcrossing card I received from Kansas USA last week.
Suicide of the West
Jonah Goldberg is a great writer and an even better researcher. In this book, which I will quote often in maxim posts, he goes down the rabbit hole chasing Donald Trump and ends up far from his original big picture view of the our political trends.
Goldberg sees the world pretty much the same way that I do and he write about it much better than I do. So if you want to know my world view read Suicide of the West. I’m more sanguine than Goldberg about the future. I think we’ll muddle through. The “Miracle” of democratic capitalism has created so much wealth that we have surpluses everywhere for the first time in history. This gives us the running room to figure out how to accommodate the romantic angst that infects so many. We survived Marx and Lenin and we will survive Madero and Sanders.
If you want to see a balanced conservative view read this book.