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Great news, Bob! You can retire now. You can step down. No need to continue with what you are doing. Dave is The Man. He’s got the picture. Amen.
Comment by joe rorke
ME:
Now that Trager is here I want to point out to you that you have about the only minds in our generation that are still alive right here. To an old man who presumes to be a leader, what Joe says sounds like a real putdown.
But it is nothing of the sort to me or to Joe.
Dave is getting a lot of fan mail here. Mark said that Dave should have his own blog.
Why reinvent the wheel?
I will, eventually, find out what this bandwidth costs me and whether I can afford it. Dave HAS his own blog, if I have anything to do with it.
Where else, in all the world, will you find a Bob and a Joe to give him hell and talent like Dave and Pain and a giant intellect — though out of shape — like Trager?
How many times do I have to say this:
READ THE COMMENTS.
Damn it, READ THE COMMENTS!
Did I mention READ THE COMMENTS!!!!!!!!!!!!
This blog exists to make you THINK!!!! I am lighting a fire here. YOU are the fire.
Back before he got soft from dealing with third-rate minds and intellectual corpses, Trager made a statement that has sustained me:
“Bob, your talent is that things jump out at you that other people don’t even notice.”
My one goal is for YOU to be the ones that things jump out at.
To my regret, Dave isn’t there yet. Trager has gotten too intellectually soft to be there yet.
But I have never before found a group of minds that are so close!!!
If you read my first book in my own name, you will wonder why it evoked such a furious response. Everything in it is political common sense today. But,as I keep saying, it provoked an infuriated cover article in National Review.
Take the BASICS. Go back to the BASICS. Notice what no one else notices.
You HAVE a blog.
USE the damned thing!
#1 by Dave on 10/12/2006 - 4:39 pm
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Our problems remain the same they were in antiquity, and that is the ability to perceive what is truly important.
I think of it as “useful visibility”. But in any generation there are only a handful of people who have the talent to make any real contribution to “useful visibility”.
The way you know who these people are is that their intellectual contributions persist through time.
For example, Claus von Clausewitz in the early nineteenth century wrote a book to teach heads of state and others who might be interested how to evaluate the job performance of senior military commanders while giving them plenty of good advice about military and political affairs.
Claus von Clausewitz was a hero. He was a man with a superior intellect who discharged his moral responsibility for being a human with a superior intellect by giving his fellow humans very good coaching on what needs to be understood to solve the basic problems of human existence.
Real problems, not pretended problems.
It was not Claus von Clausewitz’s fault that in the early 21st century the leaders of the most powerful country in the world were too derelict to bother to study his works and understand his advice.
As a superior intellect, he discharged his moral responsibility to life.
That is the way I feel about BW.
I am well educated enough to know the BW is genuinely a superior intellect. They’re very few of them and that fact is not an artifact of our “corrupt” time. It is baked in the cake, just a part of the human condition, that there will be only a few superior intellects in existence at any given time.
But it is terrible for a person with a superior intellect to ignore is his moral responsibility to life. If he does, he is cheating God, and he knows it. That is why I think BW does his blog, articles, books, and other activities.
People who have superior minds always know it. It is not a matter of them being some sort of egotists. They know it because through their entire lives they have to endure having 5 perceptions to every ordinary person’s 1 perception.
It is horribly frustrating for them. Truman Capote used to talk about that. He said that it is what drove him to madness. Just the frustration of being several times more astute than everybody else.
So if you are like BW you get a double whammy. You get to be perpetually frustrated while at the same time you get the moral responsibility. Good deal, huh?
#2 by joe rorke on 10/12/2006 - 7:17 pm
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This gets back to sparring. I use the boxing analogy because it’s all I know. Here’s what I know: if you keep on sparring with people who you can knock all around the ring you are not going to become a better boxer. You must spar with people who are damned near as good as you are and then you might get better. Actually, sometimes your sparring partner will get better than you. Then you’re screwed. He gets to go for the title and you get to shine shoes.
Surely, Bob, you know that I did not attempt to put you down. I was trying to make your life easier. I don’t like to see you working so hard.
I don’t know if it’s Alzheimer’s or not but I don’t remember mentioning that Dave had his own blog. Anyway, I’m staying on this blog. One is enough for me.
#3 by Mark on 10/13/2006 - 9:28 am
“Damn it, READ THE COMMENTS!”
DAMN IT READ WHO WROTE THE COMMENTS BOB! I am the one who said Dave needed his own blog, not whatshisname — but since I’m not an old fart who’s been in the trenches for centuries and since I didn’t know all the original founders of the Klan up close and personal, and since I didn’t ride with the White Russians against Stalin’s horde, and since I don’t know Joe Sobran personally or even like his nauseating commentaries on our great god and savior Bill Shakespeare — I’m not worth mentioning, now am I?!