The virtue of excellence

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Liberal-tarian victory

Foseti snarks that the liberaltarian ideal leads to this victory for saggy pants:
Wearing saggy pants that hang from your thighs and expose your underwear may be ridiculous, but it is not illegal, a Bronx judge has ruled.
Hurrah then, for saggy pants.  I think they're ridiculous as well, but then I'm an old fogey.  Old fogeys have been suggesting the death of civilization from bad manners of the young for at least 2500 2700 hundred years.  May I quote Hesiod from the 8th century BC:
I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on
frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond
words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and
respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise
[disrespectful] and impatient of restraint
Ignoring these old fogeys has, in the realm of music, resulted in jazz, rock, and rap among other things.  Missing any one of those would suck.  My regular song rotation includes Midnight Oil, Outkast, Leonard Cohen, Lady Antebellum, Rush, Billy Joel, Trace Adkins, Queensryche, Mussorgsky, Willie, Shaggy, Jordan Kare, The Who, Lady Gaga, and Bob Dylan among others.  
I'm with Matt Ridley here, requoting:
I find that my disagreement is mostly with reactionaries of all political colours: blue ones who dislike cultural change, red ones who dislike economic change and green ones who dislike technological change.
 This counts as cultural change, offends the blue reactionaries, and its distastefulness is attributable almost entirely to prejudices of the current day.  I'd think especially that a hyper-reactionary like Foseti would know this.  It's certainly no less ridiculous than togas or neckties.

1 comment:

Mark Horning said...

Man, that beats my favorite Cicero Quote by a good 750 years:

"Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book." - Marcus Tullius Cicero