For those who have been following along and calling their local shops to see if one could be tracked down: I’ve located the hat in Chicago. It’s been ordered and is shipping out to me tomorrow.
If you do, then you seriously should consider buying a nice Leica M8 and then promptly handing it over to me.
Every now and then, a quick scan of ORblogs yields something useful. In this case a pointer to The Secular Conscience by Austin Dacey.
Where did secular liberalism go wrong?
It has been undone by its own ideas. The first idea is that matters of conscience — religion, ethics, and values — are private matters. The privatizing of conscience started with two important principles: religion should be separated from the state and people should not be forced to believe one way or the other. But it went further to say that belief has no place in the public sphere. Conscience belongs in homes and houses of worship, not in the marketplace. By making conscience private, secular liberals had hoped to prevent believers from introducing sectarian beliefs into politics. But of course they couldn’t, since freedom of belief means believers are free to speak their minds in public.
Instead, secularism imposed a gag order on itself. Because “private” is equated with “personal” and “subjective,” questions of conscience were placed out of bounds of serious critical evaluation.
…
… The mistake lies in thinking that because conscience is free from coercion, it must be free from criticism, reason, truth, or independent, objective standards of right and wrong. The indispensable principle of freedom of belief has mutated into an unthinking assumption that matters of belief are immune to critical public inquiry and shared evaluative norms.
All of that is from the book’s introduction, which the author excerpts on his website. That introduction also includes what might be amongst my favorite sentences ever: “Susceptibility to public criticism is the price of admission to public debate. Religious conscience does not get in free.”
“I just want to report that this morning I personally checked John McCain’s bearings,” proclaimed Senator Joementum. “He has not lost any of them. They are all in really great shape.”
Or, for that matter, anyone know of a shop local to wherever in the United States they happen to be which currently has a large “Johnny” porkpie hat from Bailey in stock?
While there’s been no specific triggering event for such a thing, I have to say that I do not think I could adequately express the degree to which I do not want to be at work today.
As I write this, however, it occurs to me that while there’s been no specific triggering event at work, I’ve only just now noticed, consciously anyway, that today is one month since my Dad died.
“Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game,” reports Time. Her much-vaunted chief strategist, for example, mistakenly believed that the Democrats awarded their delegates winner-take-all rather than proportionally — and then stuck with the strategy based upon that incorrect belief anyway.
Now, imagine Hillary governing the same way, by picking people based upon loyalty rather than knowledge and ability. Isn’t that what the GOPresidency has been doing for the past seven years?
Anyone know of a store in town that sells items from the Bailey Hat Company? I’ve had a series, now, of unfortunate and annoying events transpire around trying to order a Bailey hat from a company online, and am now left without the intended hat, and as of this moment apparently no way to try to get one prior to leaving for my Dad’s requested post-mortem “party” back East at the end of the month.
In other words, if anyone knows of such a local store, please let me know ASAP, or I’m shit out of luck.
Addendum: For the record, first I ordered the wrong size and had to send the hat back.
Then, days after submitting the order for the replacement hat in the correct size, i get email from the company through which I was doing all of this, telling me that the hat won’t be shipped until mid-June. While their website currently indicates the hat as a pre-order not shipping until June, it did not at all indicate this when I placed the order.
And so now I’ve cancelled the replacement order, and am left with no way I can see of obtaining said hat in time, and am now also awaiting two entirely separate refunds — one for the returned hat, and one for the cancelled order.
