right — a right is an enforceable moral claim upon another person. It follows that, for every right, there is a corresponding prohibition or obligation. For example, people have a right to life because murder is wrong. We have a right to private property because theft is wrong. Children have a right to be cared for by their parents, because parents have an obligation to care for their children. If anything is claimed to be a right, you ought to be able to flip it around and find a crime on the other side.
privilege — an additional legal or procedural right granted to one person but not others, by an authority. Privileges can be based upon seniority; for example, high-school seniors may be allowed to drive their own vehicle to school, leave campus for lunch, or pull off a “senior prank” without being punished. Or a privilege may be awarded on a case by case basis. For example, Darius asked Haman, “What should be done for the man the king delights to honor?” Haman’s answer was the man should be dressed in the king’s robe, mounted upon the king’s horse, and paraded through the city. These were privileges. Privileges can be one-time, or they can be enjoyed indefinitely, like the right of officers to eat in the captain’s cabin. Privileges can be revoked in response to bad behavior. If someone enjoys something good, but it is not a special right granted by an authority or by virtue of seniority, then the good thing is not actually a privilege but perhaps one of the things below.
advantage — a factor of any kind, from any cause, that makes it easier for someone to accomplish a goal. If the feature does not help the person accomplish the goal in view, then it is not an advantage with respect to that goal. For example, being tall is an advantage if you want to make a basket, but not if you want to take a long bus ride. Thomas Sowell has pointed out that it is very common for people who are envious of each other, for example, siblings, to each consider the other more advantaged.
benefit — a benefit is a good thing that comes to someone as a result of something else. Benefits can come to us as a result of a privilege, as a gift, from luck, or even as a result of something bad (“the benefit of experience”). Not all benefits are privileges. This is a flexible word with a wide range of meaning. Every factor in our lives has both costs and benefits. Because this is such a wide category, many benefits come to people due to factors beyond any one person’s control.
blessings, needs, the ideal — These words all describe the life we would like everyone, ideally, to have. We would like everyone to have good health; enough to eat; a clean, comfortable home; two loving parents; and a good education. We might describe these things as things people “need” in order to thrive, though many, many people live without them. Given that people seem to need them, but they turn out to be more of an ideal, we can infer that this is the sort of environment human beings were designed to function in before the world fell. We try to get as close to these as possible. To the degree that they are lacking, we suffer. When we have these things, we can consider them blessings or gifts. They are not rights in the sense of enforceable moral claims on others. To try to compel others to provide these things would, in most cases, be impossible or would constitute us doing them an injustice. (The exception is two married parents, which can be justly compelled to some degree.) Continuing with the ideals, we would like everybody to be good-looking, athletic, intelligent, talented, comfortable in their own skin, have good friends, and be easily understand by others. This is our ideal, but obviously it would be insane to try to compel other people to provide these things for us. Then we find ourselves in Harrison Bergeron territory.
It is my observation that many people use the word “right” to describe things they would like everyone to have. They say “right” when they mean “need” or “ideal.”
I’ve also noticed that many people describe every perceived advantage or benefit as a “privilege.” This is at best unclear language; at worst, it’s an attempt to foment class war. We need to cut it out.
If you are able to view video embeds on my blog, please enjoy Disney’s exploration of this concept:
Charles Fillmore, the cofounder of Unity, wrote an entire book called Prosperity in 1945 about lessons and laws of abundance. He even changes Psalm 23 to say, “The Lord is my banker. My credit is good … Though I walk in the very shadow of debt, I shall fear no evil … Thou fillest my wallet with plenty.” Can you believe it?
(Is the above really the latest Sunshine Blogger Award logo? Looks kinda messy.)
So, Bookstooge sort-of-nominated me for the Sunshine Blogger Award! Thank you, Bookstooge! I am so flattered. I think his exact words were, “If you’re reading this, consider yourself nominated, because it means you have a pulse.”
Rules For The Sunshine Blogger Award:
Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog.
Thank the person who nominated you.
Provide a link to your nominator’s blog.
Answer your nominators’ questions.
Nominate up to 11 bloggers.
Ask your nominees 11 questions.
Notify your nominees by commenting on at least one of their blog posts.
Questions from Bookstooge:
Why Would Anyone Consider Cereal to be Soup?
It’s because they are trying to categorize things according to algorithmic rules/decision trees instead of the way the human mind normally works, which is by constructing a schema for the thing in question and then eyeballing it.
With schemas, if the thing mostly resembles the schema, it is considered an instance of that thing, even if it misses checking some important boxes. And if it checks all the boxes but manifestly does NOT resemble the schema at all, then it’s not an instance of that thing.
Cereal is in the latter category. It’s an ungodly modern creation of Mr. Kellogg, who believed that eating meat was morally wrong as well as unhealthy, and sought to banish it from the breakfast table. And I say this as someone who very much likes breakfast cereal, particularly as an evening snack, even though I know it has wreaked havoc with my metabolism (see question #10).
2. Why Do You Blog?
I blog to get you interested in my books. Go buy ’em. BUT, warning, don’t buy the Kindle version of The Strange Land until the end of next week, when it will cost 99 cents because of a special promo.
3. How Do You Justify Your Existence? (I got that one from the Tales of the Black Widowers, good isn’t it?)
“So God created man. In the image of God created He him, male and female created He them. And He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, the cattle and the creatures that move along the ground.'”
Edit: By quoting this passage, I am NOT asserting that the only justification for our life is to reproduce … i.e., that your life somehow has no meaning if you are not a parent. I happen to have been given three children, but that’s God’s gift to me, not mine to Him. No, the point of quoting this passage is this: I justify my existence because God made me. He made us. He wanted there to be people. He wanted us to exist as male and female. And, per the latter part of the passage, He wanted there to be a lot of us. If you exist and you are a human, He is happy about that.
4. How Do You Choose Who to Follow?
Unfortunately, I’m a lot like Trump in this way. If you say nice things to me, I like you and then I follow you.
An alternative route is that you posted something that really interested me. This usually means book reviews, discussion about writing, theology, ancient history, and sometimes art.
5. If John McClane and John Wick were tied on a railroad track and you could only set one of them free, which would you choose and why?
O.K., I had to duckduckgo him, but John McClane is the Bruce Willis character in Die Hard. I would save John McClane instead of John Wick for the following reasons:
John Wick could definitely save himself.
I only saw the first Die Hard, but in it, John McClane is a family man, whereas John Wick doesn’t even have a dog anymore.
Once when we were in Indonesia, somebody swore that my husband looked exactly like Bruce Willis and now I can’t unsee it. That makes me think Bruce Willis is even more handsome.
6. In a game of Parcheesi, who would win, Spongebob Squarepants or the Doom Slayer?
I expect Spongebob to win in the same way that Bugs Bunny would.
7. Do you feel guilty about all of my oxygen that you are breathing?
Yes. My gosh, don’t remind me!
8. What is your favorite movie?
It’s a tie between The Princess Bride and a little hidden gem called Undercover Blues.
9. If you were going to be “accidentally but on purpose” killed tomorrow, how would you spend today?
I would write long letters to each of my children. If I had extra time, I’d move on to my husband, then other close family and friends.
I might try to transfer the rights to my books so they don’t go out of print, but I don’t think that could be done in one day. If you snooze, you lose, and I guess I snost and I lost.
10. Are mirrors Friend, or Foe?
Friend, but only in the sense of “faithful are the wounds of.”
11. If you could change ONE THING about your blog, what would it be?
Every single visit to my blog would result in a book purchase and then a breathless review on Amazon GO BUY MY BOOKS PEOPLE!
Ahem. I Nominate:
I nominate seven friends (the number of perfection!) plus Bookstooge cause I want to hear his answers too. And I nominate you, Reader, if you want to do it! After all, you are breathing! Which might provide the answer to my first question!
murder — Murder has to have the following components: direct killing, of a human being, intentional, and unlawful. Therefore, the following things are not murder: Executing someone who has committed a capital crime (lawful). Killing an enemy soldier in war (lawful). Accidentally killing civilians in war (unintentional). Shooting in self-defense (unintentional, and in the case of a firefight, indirect). Killing an animal, even a highly sentient animal (not human). Being unable to provide prompt medical care for someone who is OD’ing while in your custody (not direct or intentional, and also not actually killing).
genocide — direct, intentional, systematic killing of an entire ethnic group, with the express purpose of wiping them out. Not genocide: a war that has a devastating impact upon a particular ethnic group, unless all the abovementioned components of genocide are present. Invasion and conquest. Intermarriage. Taking captives. Poverty. Death of a culture because of any of these causes or because of urbanization. All of these are tragic things that have happened to many, many ethnic groups throughout history, but they are not genocide. Definitely not genocide: natural cultural change that happens because of the spread of an innovation like the written word, or a new religion.
… et regno occupato per tres potentissimos ac firmissimos populos totius Galliae sese potiri posse sperant.
Here’s the English translation given in the book:
“… and hope that, when they have seized the sovereignty, they will, by means of the three most powerful and valiant nations, be enabled to obtain possession of the whole of Gaul.”
Here’s my bumbling translation:
”… and having seized the kingdom, through three most powerful and brave peoples, they hoped to be able to be made able to all of Gaul … um … ones.”
Let’s zoom in on the phrase I am having trouble with:
sese potiri posse sperant
Now, this looks to me like “they hope [sperant] … to be able [posse] … to be MADE able [potiri] … ones [sese].”
Is it really “they hope to be able to be made able”? That’s just a ridiculous amount of helping verbs. It reminds me of the man quoted by Dave Barry, who allegedly said to his wife after she couldn’t get a ride, “If I’d a’ known you’d a’ wanted to went, I’d a seed you’d a’ got to get to go.”
But let’s look up potiri. I think it’s the passive infinitive of posse “to be able,” but maybe it’s something else.
[Duck-Duck-Go]
Ah-ha! It’s a different verb.
potior, potiris, potiri I, potitus sum (Dep.)Verb
user edited
Translations
to obtain, to acquire, to grasp, to attain, to reach (goal), to come by (experiences)
So, I’m reading A Return to Modesty, which I stumbled upon in my dad’s extensive personal library.
This book came out in 1999. I remember hearing about it at the time. I was a Christian girl in my early 20s, just a year away from getting married though I didn’t yet know it. Wendy Shalit, the author of Return, was just a year older than me. I remember being jealous of her (a girl my age who had already published a book!). I also remember that it was rather snippily received. One female reviewer mentioned that it was difficult to take “being lectured to about modesty by a 24-year-old.”
That, of course, is not a coincidence. As Shalit points out in the intro, modern sexual-liberation-niks don’t just disagree with modesty-niks; they actually hate them:
I was fascinated … with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was “obviously very troubled,” and that one seemed to have a “creepy” relationship with her father. Or “Maybe she just had a Bad Experience.” Either way, whatever her problem is, “why doesn’t the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won’t take it all so seriously?”
I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: “They’re sick, I’m telling you! I’ve heard of them with their not-touching, and they’re sick, sick, sick!” Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.
I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks.
ibid, pp. 5 – 6
By writing this book, of course, Shalit put herself among their number. She notes that feminists are often open to what she has to say about women needing privacy, dignity, and romantic dreams of a monogamous relationship … until they find out that she’s an “extreme right-winger,” that is, someone who thinks female modesty (and chastity and reticence and embarrassment and all the other things that come with it) is a good thing.
Shalit first learned of what she calls modestyniks by looking at engagement, wedding, and post-wedding pictures of an elderly couple’s granddaughter, who was following “tzniut, the Jewish laws of sexual modesty.”
In this [picture] the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy–only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. “That’s for the head covering,” her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. “A married woman cannot leave her head uncovered.”
That’s how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat.
ibid, p 4
All the reviewers who in 1999 were reacting to the thesis of Shalit’s book were so excited–or offended– by its serious content, that they failed to convey that Shalit is a terrific writer: spunky, funny, able to move from chuckles like this to very serious and heartbreaking content, and back, multiple times in the same chapter or even on the same page.
When I picked up this book from my dad’s library, in preparation for drafting my own book on the logistics of modesty (a project now shelved), I thought I might just thumb through it. I didn’t expect that it would lure me in, as books do, and prove to be a page-turner. But it has.
I won’t go over all the ways Shalit enumerates that the Sexual Revolution and second-wave feminism, by destroying the notion of female modesty, have opened Pandora’s Box for girls and boys both. I’ve ranted about it elsewhere, and so have many others. You could probably write such a rant yourself, and maybe you even have. I will say that it’s really poignant to read a book like this written in 1999.
The 90s are now officially A Long Time Ago. Cars from the 90s are now antiques (!). I am even starting to see memes that portray the 90s in a similar way that we once portrayed the 50s: a naive, wholesome time, when we didn’t have all the problems we have now. For example, one meme said something like, “The 90s were so problem-free that Kurt Cobain had to kill himself because he had nothing to be depressed about.”
As someone who came of age in the 90s, I cry foul. We were a good 30+ years after the Sexual Revolution and 20+ after Roe. We were deep into the divorce and moms-having-serial-boyfriends epidemic. We had anorexia and bulimia and cutting. Ninties kids did not have one foot in pre-1960s social norms; instead, we were completely unmoored from any kind of consistent or coherent framework for how to relate to the opposite sex, or even how to become a man or woman, except that we knew that both of those things were bad. Shalit’s book focuses on the destructive messages that girls and young women got:
Be independent. Don’t count on anyone. Have the low expectations you’re supposed to have. Be independent. Don’t ask any questions. Don’t demand more than what we say you can have. Don’t feel anything you’re not supposed to feel. Do as you’re told. Be independent! Don’t embarrass yourself by loving someone other than yourself. Remember, don’t trust anyone! Show him that you’re an independent person.
ibid, p. 94
… but of course, boys got a very similar litany about how they were not supposed to be polite or gentlemanly or, God forbid, protective of women, and in fact they were not supposed to take any initiative at anything.
They also were sadly unprepared for the fact that women have lots of emotions:
“My ex-girlfriends? Well, let’s see … she was a nut, and then she was a nut, and then her … let’s see … yes, she was a nut, and then … yeah, she was a nut, too, come to think of it! It’s strange that I’ve had such bad luck, to date so many nuts. Anyway, then there was what’s-her-name, who was evil. She left me. God, that really sucked! She was really evil! And then there was another nut …”
What makes a man perceive a woman as a “a nut”? And can all women be nuts? A silly question. Clearly all women can’t be nuts. What does it mean, then, when a society judges that a considerable number of its women are, in fact, nuts? Could it tell us something about how we view womanhood?
ibid, p. 163
If I had read this book in the 90s, I probably would have agreed with it, in a slightly superior, glad-you-finally-came-to-the-modesty-party kind of way, like the smug 20-something Christian know-it-all that I was at the time. I also would have missed a lot of the content that is now resonating with me. Because I’ve spent the 26 years since this book was published wrestling with these very issues and going on these very rants.
I might have been raised in a Christian home. I might have come up in a social environment that was relatively traditional compared to the secular one in which Shalit grew up. I even, somehow, escaped the super-explicit sex-ed elementary school classes in the public schools that Shalit was spared only because her mom found out what was happening, threw a fit, and got Shalit a pass to sit out that class in the library. (I’m not sure how I escaped the explicit sex-ed, to be honest. I went to public schools. Possibly it’s because our family moved a couple of times and school districts were on different schedules.)
But even with being–you would expect–sheltered, I still absorbed all the same messages she did, directly from the teat of society, as it were. As a Christian, I did get the message that you were supposed to be chaste until marriage (opposite of the message she got). But on the other hand I received, loud and clear, the picture of the ideal woman as tough, smart, independent, unconcerned about her clothing or appearance, ready to go join the Navy S.E.A.L.s … basically, a woman with a man’s mind and as close as possible to a man’s body. Girls who had their wedding all planned out at the age of 9 and had already picked out names for their kids, and who wore pink and giggled and blushed and so forth, were “stupid.” I’m a 90s kid, after all.
Anyway … the sad thing about reading this book is, almost thirty years later, nothing has changed. Shalit predicted a return to modesty among my generation. We were figuring out, she said, that modesty is natural to us, it protects us, it’s ultimately more romantic and even sensual. That was why, she said, we liked Jane Austen so much. And while I plead guilty on all charges, it turns out that longing for a return to female modesty has not been enough. You cannot just bring back an entire social system that is lying in smithereens at your feet. There weren’t any rules or norms or consensus about how a girl–or boy–should dress or talk or behave, and we didn’t know what to do. None of us knew what to do. And when I look at my kids’ generation, they still don’t.
I live in the West, where you can see long distances. About twenty-five miles south of our house is wind farm perched on the foothills. At night, you can clearly see the windmills’ lights twinkling. This painting portrays a more close-up view, glimpsed as I started the drive home on a winter evening.
I never minded seeing wind farms, even in the daytime. I had a positive association with them, almost entirely because of the cover of a Petra album I had as a teenager:
I also believed what I was told, that these windmills would provide cleaner power than oil, coal, and natural gas.
Then, I started hearing about the downsides of wind farms. I heard that people who live near them develop health problems. I heard that, shockingly, it is not unusual for birds to get chopped up by them. The windmills have to be built in naturally windy areas, which are also migration routes for birds, which are apparently hard-wired in to the birds and can’t be changed.
Then, I found out that these turbines are expensive to build, last only about twenty years, and are difficult to dispose of:
Unfortunately, my aesthetic response to these windmills has already been locked in by Petra. I don’t think it’s going to change. Now, though, I no longer think of them as a good thing, a step in the right direction. I think of them as evidence that we are living in a sci-fi dystopia. Maybe some day, the wind farm in my part of the state will come down. But this little painting will remain as evidence that I lived in the Age of Man when we feared the imminent end of the world and thought we could forestall it by building these things.
Well, we have made it through February, when I did a post about something I love every single week. Phew, I’m certainly glad that is over with! What a relief to get into March, and start writing about stuff I hate again.
Just kidding. I didn’t hate this book; in fact, I mostly really enjoyed it. It just wasn’t a perfect bull’s-eye like all the stuff I posted about last month.
This 2024 book is narrated by Jolene, a Canadian woman whose mother is Iranian-Canadian and who works in a regular, that is to say fairly miserable, office. She has social anxiety, a moderate drinking problem, a big cohort of Persian Aunties (her mom’s friends) who really really hope she will get married, and a dark trauma from high school. Oh, and she has a habit of adding passive-aggressive postscripts to her e-mails to her colleagues, hidden in white text.
One day she forgets to turn the text white, and that kicks off her madcap adventures.
If this setup sounds like it’ll be boring and full of self-pity, all I can say is it’s anything but. Jolene, despite her hermitlike ways, is a keen observer of human nature and is mistress of the witty, cunning turn of phrase, which is exactly what makes her e-mail postscripts so devastating, and this narrative so fun to follow.
This little human [baby] doesn’t even realize the greatness of this: the only time in your life when people will simply ignore your public outbursts. The rest of us must cry without actually crying. This child, I learn as Celeste continues to soothe it, is named Thomas. I watch his little eyes dart around the room, taking it all in. Maybe Thomas is just now realizing that eventually he will grow up to spend all his daylight hours under fluorescent lights and water-stained ceiling tiles.
I don’t mean to chuckle at this depressing thought, and I stifle it as soon as I can, but that doesn’t stop a few eyes from drawing my way while I pretend I didn’t just cackle at a technically crying baby.
Then Thomas begins being passed around like a hot burrito. I curl my hands close against my chest and try to back away. When Caitlin takes said bundle, it stops crying in an instant, and her face softens in a way that makes me realize how hard it’s been lately.
“So, how is being a mom?”
Celeste starts describing things that sound dire as sh-t.
Gregory randomly pokes the ——- baby in the belly, and the cries start again in a screeching pitch.
Has anyone ever punched him in the face?
“How was the birth?” Stu for some cursed reason has to ask. I take a step back in order to avoid sticking around for Celeste’s answer.
Rhonda flashes me a disapproving stare. Why is it socially acceptable to discuss a human getting pushed or cut out of a body, yet somehow, it’s unprofessional for me to simply work rather than hold the tiny person I don’t even know?
page 102
That’s a pretty good sample of the writing style — and also a pretty good, lively description of what it’s like to be a woman with social anxiety or maybe autistic tendencies. Very very relatable.
I finished this book very quickly because of the good writing. However, it’s not uplifting or heartwarming. Jolene is engaging in some pretty significant deception throughout almost the entire book, which made it hard to enjoy. She’s under a lot of stress with several different crises bubbling (including one with the Persian Aunties), which keeps the pace fast, but makes the read also stressful. I knock off one star for this dynamic and for the author’s use of the phrase “white-passing.”
