Other Side of the Solstice

While walking in a hungover melancholy yesterday I noticed that the effect of setting sunlight upon buildings and ground was nearly identical to that of a summer dusk, just shorter is all, and it made me long for hard heat in a way that I'm not usually prone to.  Still I'd go so far to say that the sun is beautiful, and always with us even when he's distant tired and weak. 

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I found this interesting piece  of Donner Party conservatism  via Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon.  Can't have being young serve as any excuse for going soft now can we?  In fact we should be forcing pregnant women to eat nothing but wild game meat in the hope that this is what comes out of their breasts when it's time to feed their newborns. 

There does seem to be a worldwide trend towards, on the one hand, a growing "liberal' consensus, (defined in the loosest possible sense to allow for a wide world) a general utilitarianism that views peace good health and common welfare to be the highest ends of the state, which is to say as ends unto themselves instead of abstract utopian rewards for victory in some defining struggle.  Yet on the other hand those who believe in defining life by such struggle tend to believe ever more fiercely in whatever the cultural equivalent of The Great Cause might be, even while their numbers grow progressively smaller.  There are eight thousand years of poetry which sing of how triumph over the enemy and manful suffering towards that end are the greatest goods that anyone can ever hope to accomplish.  All this poetry is bound to effect some people, and now it seems as if these people are heartbroken by the modern erosion of this ethos, the loss of a mindset that can at least justify the suffering which must come to us all even if can't prevent it.  There is also no understating how much modern comfort and plenty threaten the old securities of hierarchy and obedience.  The irregular seasons and uncertain food supply are the main reasons why a bill of rights isn't coming to Westoros any time soon,  also the main reason why the Most Epic Conflict of All Time is something that happens there at least once every generation.  So it is with the 'traditional' social structures of our world. These coercive power structures have always been buttressed by and dependent on the presumption of scarcity and the need to regularly fight others for scarce resources.  Now as we come ever closer to a world where having the basics of life guaranteed is the universal standard the authoritarian ideal of child bowing to mother bowing to father bowing to lord to king to God grows ever more fantastic; and those who consider this ideal to be the only possible source of coherent identity look upon our hopeful future to find nothing but universal schizophrenia.