Tag Archives: Facebook Notes

Family

Great-Grandma and Typhoid

The second summer we were here was full of such sickness as I had never seen or thought of. . . . It was typhoid.

In the process of unpacking from our recent move, I have at my hand once again a letter that my Great-Grandma Nourse wrote from Louisiana in 1938 to a friend in California. It tells the story of her family’s life after their move from California to Louisiana and covers a roughly four year period during the Great Depression from around 1934 to 1938. It was written to an old family friend back in California and was later returned to my grandmother by one of that friend’s descendants.

The purpose of this post is to share that letter.

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Politics

Trump Ascended

On June 15, 2015, one day before Trump officially announced his candidacy for president, I told a former student of mine who had been hyping Trump on his FB wall, “Nick, you lower yourself every single time you post about this sleazeball. Every. Single. Time.”

From that time I have watched with a mix of impressed fascination and (increasing) horror as Trump first systematically crushed the GOP and then humbled Hillary and the vaunted Clinton machine to finally ascend to the White House.

All that time I have been anything but subtle about my personal disgust towards Donald Trump and my opposition to his candidacy. I have regarded him as a dangerous fascist and said so clearly and often. I have been as vocal in this matter as I have ever been on any political issue. #NeverTrump #NeverEverTrump

And yet, here we are. Trump has won. He has won it all.

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The Environment

My Environmental Conversion

Environmentalism is becoming my number one issue.

In the long term, other current issues are mostly irrelevant. Whatever legislation or policies we implement on issues like gay rights or gun control or religious freedom will only make a difference during our day. In one hundred years, or in five hundred years, when we and all those who knew us are dead and no one remembers us, new generations will come along and re-fight these issues and rewrite all we did.

Even the most influential triumphs (things like the Declaration of Independence or the Fall of Communism) are extremely fleeting in their effects. In another two centuries–or ten–no one knows what the world will be like. Maybe the center of the Earth will be Mecca. Or maybe it will be Tokyo. Or Salt Lake City. It’s extremely unlikely that the Fall of Communism will be much remembered–much less who the next US Supreme Court justice is.

Environmentalism is different.

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The Environment

A Single Day’s Work

The morning after the Brexit vote, as the status-quo-shattering results were becoming clear, Hamburger Morgenpost, the daily newspaper in Hamburg, Germany, rolled out a front page featuring a large portrait of Winston Churchill and a long headline in bold letters: Etwas aufzubauen mag die langsame und mühsame Arbeit von Jahren sein. Es zu zerstören kann der gedankenlose Akt eines einzigen Tages sein.

The headline is a translation of words Churchill delivered on September 29, 1959 in a speech to the Conservative Party Association in his constituency of Woodford: “To build may be the slow and laborious task of years; to destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.”

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Technology

Why I’m Leaving Facebook

Note: I first made the decision to leave Facebook and migrate my content to this site in 2014. It would be seven years after that decision before I actually got the blog set up in September 2021 and started moving content over. I left Facebook permanently in May 2022. Looking back, I still entirely agree with the rationale below (although I came to like the Messenger app as the best part of Facebook and hardest thing to leave in the end). I have not missed Facebook or the interactions I had there. (DL, June 13, 2023).

After many months of consideration, I have decided to begin the process of disengaging from Facebook.

The primary reason is that I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the way FB manipulates users: curating our news feeds, constantly inserting ads and links to third-party content, giving priority to paid posts, etc. I have ceased to feel like what I see on FB every day is an honest reflection of my friends’ activities and interests; it isn’t. It’s a revenue stream optimized by FB for me to get me clicking on things that aren’t first-and-foremost about my friends, but rather about making FB money.

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Books

Neuromancer

Neuromancer (William Gibson, pub. 1984) was published when I was six years old, won a ton of awards, and put a lot of juice in the cyberpunk sub-genre. (All I know about cyberpunk I learned on Wikipedia, but basically I take it as a kind of sci-fi-noir that (usually?) incorporates lots of networky technology.)

I was drawn to the book for two reasons (I mean, aside from the fact that it’s a sci-fi novel. Duh.). First, I wanted something good. I don’t get to read sci-fi very often, so no time for garbage. Neuromancer was the first novel to win all three big sci-fi awards, and it’s on lots of “best of” lists, so it seemed promising. Second, I wanted something dystopian (More Blade Runner than Star Trek); I don’t know, maybe it’s a phase I’m in. Anyways, Neuromancer seemed to fit the bill on both counts.

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Politics

Thank God for Barack Obama

I predicted to a friend yesterday that Obama would win in a landslide. I have felt that way all Summer. On the morning after, Andrew Sullivan captures my feelings about Romney and right-wing media:

[This election] has revealed that Fox News, Drudge, and the rest have been engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to create an alternative reality and get the rest of us to go along. . . . What was defeated tonight was not just Romney, a hollow cynic, but a whole mountain of mendacity and delusion. That sound you hear is the cognitive dissonance ringing in the ears of ideologues and cynics. Any true conservative longs for that sound, the sound of reality arriving to pierce through fantasy and fanaticism.

I want to share a challenge with my conservative friends: Did you buy into the story that a media conspiracy was twisting the polls? Did you reflexively dismiss bad news during this campaign as media bias? Did you look to Drudge, Fox, Rush, Hannity, Beck, Dinesh D’Souza, et al. to give you the *real* story?

Don’t. They are as blinded by bias and ulterior motives as any in the “mainstream” media. I hope you can see that now.

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Books

Authors

Note: This was one of those social media lists that people do. It’s a great list, but I’m somewhat disconcerted to realize that eleven years later, my list is still largely the same. That the shape of my intellectual life has changed so little since my early 30s feels like it should be a red flag of some kind. (DL, Sept. 7, 20201)

The Rules: Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who’ve influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Briefly describe the nature of their influence.  

We’re looking for voices that have led you to consider new thoughts or significantly shaped your perspective on something.

I’m excluding biblical authors (like Paul), but there’s little doubt that the influence of the Bible on my life and thinking, both directly and filtered through other authors, has far surpassed all other influences combined.

In the order I thought of them, which probably means something.

  • J. R. R. Tolkien (the shape of my imagination and the products it produces)
  • C. S. Lewis (ditto)
  • Richard Halliburton (fostered a culturally outward focus rooted in world travel and history)
  • Andrew Sullivan (my disillusionment with all things Republican. Moving from Malkin to Sullivan as daily blog-reading has had significant influence)
  • Michael Behe (demonstrating to me Darwin’s failure to explain the origins of life)
  • Alan Keyes (shaped my perspective on politics and the trouble with the American republic)
  • Frederick Wheelock (taught me Latin and how to teach Latin)
  • David Macaulay (helped me visualize the past and present)
  • Edmund Spenser (profound professional influence. The existence of Edmund Spenser’s writings have literally changed my course in life, for good and ill. Very strong influence on my conception of good poetry.)
  • Tom Clancy (helped me understand what modern war and nuclear terrorism look like)
  • John Bunyan (how I conceptualize the Christian life)
  • Hannah Whitall Smith (Wow. Still trying to wrap my head around what happened there. Pretty sure it wasn’t good.)
  • Harry Berger (definitively showed me that all those godless pagan literary critics I heard about at Bob Jones can be godless pagan stinking geniuses. Helped me understand what being a Ph.D. in English lit is all about.)
  • Fanny Crosby, Isaac Watts, and Charles Wesley. (different authors, same book. 🙂 My conception of what Christian music can be.)
  • Epic poets, especially Milton, the aforementioned Spenser, and the Beowulf author. (I cheated, I know. Sue me. My conception of what poetry is, or used to be, capable of) 
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Movies & TV

Why You Should go See Avatar as Soon as Possible

Note: I wrote this Facebook Note in the first flush of excitement and awe after having seen James Cameron’s Avatar, which I still regard as one of my top two or three favorite movies ever. It quite effectively captures the passionate certainty that used to define my Christian worldview and the way I read the world through that lens. I think the analysis of the various kinds of fiction and why they’re written is still accurate, but I myself have much less certainty about my own worldview. I’m still as opinionated though. (DL, Sept. 7, 2021)

*This note is unfinished, but I’m posting it now because you can see where my thoughts trend. I may or may not get to finish it.*

Avatar is the best movie I’ve ever seen.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s the best movie that’s ever been made.

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