I’m on Letterboxd
Recently I learned of Letterboxd, a social media site for film fans, and decided to sign up to talk about silent film. My profile is here. Follow me if you’re so inclined.
Yearly Archives: 2025
A primer on Trumpism for libertarians
It shouldn’t be necessary to write this. The way Trump is running the presidency is so obviously hostile to liberty that libertarians should be unanimous in opposing him. Some people who call themselves libertarians, though, don’t quite get it. A few actually support him.
The Democrats aren’t good, but the issues with them aren’t as urgent. The first thing is to stop the country from sinking into dictatorship, then we can worry about excessive regulation and runaway deficit spending. Let me outline the main reasons Trump is a major danger and requires unequivocal opposition.
A lot of this will be familiar to many of you. I’m sorry that I have to belabor the obvious. Even if it’s all familiar, you might find some value in having all these items in one place.
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Reclaiming the American narrative
Narratives are a powerful thing in shaping a culture or a political movement. Narratives are patterns of explanation that turn a series of events into a story. They ascribe a consistent purpose to actions and show one event leading to another. Sometimes narratives stray from the facts, but they don’t have to. What makes a narrative is an underlying direction and a causal chain.
They’re often more powerful than facts for influencing people. Convince people of a narrative’s validity, and they’ll ignore or reject what doesn’t fit it. They’ll accept even implausible conclusions that fit with it. They’ll admire people who promote it and dislike ones who contradict it. To persuade large numbers of people, it isn’t enough to muster facts; it’s necessary to assemble them into a story.
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“Its hour come round at last” 1
My mind keeps coming back to Yeats’ 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.” He wrote it shortly after World War I, knowing that nothing had really been resolved. In retrospect, we know the answer to his question, “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
We also know the answer to that question today in America. We see again that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.” There’s plenty of noise opposing Trump, yet too little broad-based opposition. Congress is, with a handful of exceptions, divided between the Minion Party and the Coward Party. Outrage should be building to the point of besieging the White House, but as far as I can tell, it’s declining. People’s idea of opposing Trump is to put “#Resist” into a social media hashtag.
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Accompanying Buster Keaton films 1
This post is for the Buster Keaton Blogathon run from the Silent-ology blog.
I accompany silent movies. Four times a year, I accompany one for a live audience at the Plaistow, NH Library. In addition, I post public domain silent films with my accompaniment on YouTube. In just a few days I’ll accompany One Week as part of the library’s 25th anniversary in its present building. In July I’ll be accompanying The General at the library. In 2023 I accompanied Steamboat Bill, Jr.
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A library tour on the NH seacoast 1
Thursday was a rainy day, chilly for late May, and I needed to do something to improve my mood, so I set out on an afternoon’s tour of libraries near the New Hampshire coastline. The towns in this region mostly have small land areas, and each other has its own library, so I could cover a lot without too much travel. The ones I put on my list were South Hampton, Seabrook, Hampton, Rye, and Stratham. On the way home I passed right by the East Kingston library, so I dropped in there, as well as the Plaistow library.
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Spohr’s string quartets 31-36
After a long gap, Spohr wrote six final string quartets. The numbering gets confusing because he withdrew the last two, having rewritten one of them in a different key. There’s a detailed discussion by Keith Warsop of these quartets on the Spohr Society’s website.
Important composers are generally expected to produce some of their best work, or at least their most adventurous, toward the end of their lives. Spohr had done his best writing long before. He even lost confidence in his own writing, withdrawing or abandoning several pieces, including the Requiem and the Tenth Symphony. He may have seen himself as a relic. When he died in 1859, Brahms wrote that he was “probably the last of those who still belonged to an artistic period more satisfying than the one through which we now suffer.”
But he wasn’t completely finished! These quartets explore new directions and are less exhibitionistic, and some are rewarding to listen to.
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Balticon 1
With Balticon coming around again, I took another look at their code of conduct. It still has some disturbing features, and I’m not going, although it’s within a day’s driving distance and will likely have a good filk program.
There is a blanket prohibition on “Slurs and derogatory comments about a person, group, or category of people.” That presumably includes, just to come up with some examples, the Chengdu con chair, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Russian army, billionaires, Neil Gaiman, and the new Pope. It will be one dull convention if no one can say anything bad about any of those people! When attendees can be accused without eyewitness testimony, it’s even worse. This isn’t just hypothetical; in 2022 Balticon used this provision to make life miserable for one of its program participants.
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Words for defending freedom
Here’s a list of suggestions for effectively opposing Trump’s power grab. I don’t claim to do all these things well; some of them could be notes to myself. Feel free to quote from here, but consider linking back to this post.
Promote principles, not factions.
Focus. A few well-made points are better than a laundry list.
Anger weakens your case, and cursing rarely persuades.
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A curiously missing word
A few days ago, I started to write something complaining about people who use “white supremacy” when they mean “white supremacism.” Supremacy, I was going to say, is the state of being supreme. Usually they mean the unfounded assertion of being supreme. People who make that claim are supremacists, so the claim should be called supremacism, right? Like “racist” and “racism.”
But my spelling checker complained about the word “supremacism,” so I checked to make sure. Neither Merriam-Webster nor dictionary.com recognizes it as a word, though both recognize “supremacist.” The OED recognizes the word, though, so it’s OK to use it east of the Atlantic.
If one word exists, shouldn’t the other? I’d start a campaign to get it listed in dictionaries, except that “campaigning for supremacism” doesn’t sound so good.