The “scratch and dent” computer I bought from the Dell Outlet website with a discount coupon arrived today. I think I got a screamin’ deal. I bought it because I needed a Linux computer for some contract work I am doing in the evenings to get one of my old employers over the hump with a product they are trying to get out. So I spent most of yesterday evening loading all the tools I need to do the development onto the new computer. That included Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Qt/Qt Creator, OpenCV (finally moving to version 3!), a subversion client, etc., etc. I needed to build OpenCV in a specific way required by the application so I did that, too.
The upshot to all this is that I needed to sit and wait for things to finish downloading, installing and building. During that time, I found a great article about three phases through which civilizations pass: Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent. Here is the premise of the article titled A Tour of Our Decadent Civilization on the Sultan Knish blog:
It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.
Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.
Christian and I had an interesting talk about all this on the phone a couple of nights ago. The thing that amazes me is that the vast bulk of people in America do not get it. In our conversation we attributed it to the fact that most people under the age of 30 get their information from Reddit, Slashdot, Comedy Central and Huffington Post while people over 30 get their information from Facebook.
I think we are partially right. People buy into the pseudo-scholarship of Richard Dawkins, Bart Ehrman, Marcus Borg, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris and the like who represent their false ideas based on personal agendas and/or ruminations way outside their fields of expertise. It makes its way into pop culture because it allows people license to live how they want in the moment rather than do the hard work and self denial based on morays driven by objective truth.
The conclusion of the matter is the same as it has always been. Our chunk of civilization in our time and place will wake up one way or the other. Unless there are changes, it will be a very rude awakening.
Betty Blonde #388 – 01/11/2010
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