We Three Things
By Jeff Kouba
Medieval Europe saw the world as divided into three orders. Those who pray, those who fight, and those who work.
The first, those who pray, consisted of the clergy. The second, those who fight, consisted of the nobility. The third, those who work, consisted of the serfs, peasants and others who worked the land.
The orders were complementary, and each contributed to society as a whole. The workers were the economic engine and put food on the table. The Church certainly played a role in civic life, but faith was also an integral part of life and seeking God’s favor was both a Christian’s duty and desire. The nobility and the knights that came from it fought to preserve it all.
In France, these orders became known as Estates, and these Estates made up the Ancien Régime which lasted until the French Revolution.
In the 18th century, following from these institions, the Press became known as the Fourth Estate.
The appellation may have started as a witticism, but journalists, convinced of their own priesthood, eventually took it seriously.
While our national media at one time may have functioned as a watchdog, speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, our Fourth Estate has become PR flacks and gatekeepers for the side they have chosen.
Rather than complementing other sectors of society, and contributing to the whole, our Fourth Estate works against those it disagrees with, and that is not a recipe for a healthy society.
July 5th, 2022 at 7:09 am
Speaking of which, het a load of this crap and tell me the wretched reprobates are not panicking.
There’s so much blatant political bias I couldn’t begin to parse it all. So I’ll just leave you with this edict, from your betters at NPR:
“ The 2020 election is a settled question…”
So don’t bring it up again, peasants.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109538056/election-deniers-are-spreading-misinformation-nationwide-here-are-4-things-to-kn
July 5th, 2022 at 7:14 am
Decent rant, but I think it overlooks that the kind of people who become journalists are, in my opinion, narcissists with a varying amounts of creepiness. They’re not your friends.
Moreover, pre-Boomer, they were often if not mostly working class with a knack for writing (Pat Reusse). Ever since, they’re mostly college educated middle class or better who look down on the working class while aspiring to be important (Taylor Lorenz).
July 5th, 2022 at 7:15 am
“Election deniers”? So they are talking about Stacey Abrams, Hillary Clinton . . . and, well, too many Democrats to list?
July 5th, 2022 at 7:57 am
It took me a bit of time to find it, but I unearthed a Hugh Hewitt column about his visit to Clomubia’s School of journalism: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/the-medias-ancien-r-233-gime
Hewitt pays special attention to the makeup of the students at CSJ (per JDM’s 7:14 comment). Hewitt found that the CSJ students did not represent the population of the US. The CSJ student was more likely to be an ethnic minority, to come from a prosperous family, to be foreign born, and especially to be female.
And this article was written in 2006. Doubtless the bias of CSJ students has become worse since then.
July 5th, 2022 at 8:56 am
The three estates had other functions besides the principal ones mentioned.
The Lord of the manor sat as judge for disputes between commoners. He raised his sons with knowledge of the law and wisdom to dispense justice, the better to maintain stability in his realm. The clergy preserved literacy and maintained records. They also enforced standards of conduct with threat of damnation.
None of the estates were perfect but they preserved a rough balance for centuries. Compare to today, where the people who assert they are “our betters” have no respect for the law, the clergy’s standard of conduct damns them, and the only constant is change for the worse as Washington D.C. fumbles.
History shows democracies are replaced by oligarchies until a tyrant seizes control before being dethroned by the people, whereupon the cycle begins again. Can we skip oligarchy by the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros, go straight to the tyrant, please? Might be nice to have someone in charge, for a change.
July 5th, 2022 at 9:05 am
The only good thing about a European-style aristocracy is that their wealth & status were tied to hereditary land holdings. Merchants and industrialists were tied to a capitalist system rather than a nation, and their wealth was (and is) portable.
During the cold war capitalism was identified with the West, anti-capitalism with the East.
Not anymore.
So we are ruled by an elite who identify strongly with their financial interests and these financial interests are not tied to their nation.
And we are now witnessing the instability of this system. The rulers have nothing in common with the ruled, not religion, not patriotism, not financial interests.
July 5th, 2022 at 9:42 am
Swift wrote: “The 2020 election is a settled question…”
“we have lots of theories, but no evidence.” ~ Rudy Giuliani
July 5th, 2022 at 9:52 am
MP +1 We have arrived at the borderless, nationless utopia. Hope you like it!
July 5th, 2022 at 10:09 am
It doesn’t matter whether I like it or not, JPA. It is unstable.
I think that the elites — let’s call them the Davos crowd — believes that mankind is a material creature bound to the material laws of creation. Governing, as they see it, is a matter of using reason to define proper goals of governance and using rational means to carry those goals out.
This can’t work because men are not material creatures bound to the material laws of creation. At our core is unreason. Attempting to bind man to natural laws is wrong, and people react against the scheme. As for our would be rulers, they are just as irrational as the rest of us.
July 5th, 2022 at 10:36 am
The rulers have nothing in common with the ruled, not religion, not patriotism, not financial interests.
That’s true, MP. But they do comprise a tribe, nonetheless. They arrange marriages between their offspring to cement their positions of power, just as in the old days. They may or may not compete financially, but the competition is secondary to maintaining the health of the tribe. Keeping the unwashed mob crushed is key, and that’s where media come in, and why people like Soros gift millions to degenerate groups like Media Matters, Slate, NPR and why a scumbag like Zucker would buy a failing legacy media group like WaPo.
Control the narrative; control the low IQ target population. The effect can be seen, *and measured* in the inchoate, disconnected, uniformed ramblings of nitwits like Peevee and rAT Emery.
July 5th, 2022 at 11:42 am
Everyone can now see that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were completely baseless. In Bill Barr’s words: “Bull shit”. Even Trump’s own daughter no longer believes he won the election.
July 5th, 2022 at 12:17 pm
Right on queue, Blade mentions “low IQ target population”, Emery shows up to bloviate.
July 5th, 2022 at 12:51 pm
Totally not a thread-jack, though.
Jeff was talking about kings. In certain card games, kings can be trumps which brings the word Trump into the discussion and opens the door for E comment about the stolen election.
See? Easy.
E’s “can’t prove it” fixation puts me in mind of Bill Clinton’s comment that he didn’t believe you could find evidence to prove he changed government policy solely because of a campaign contribution. Didn’t say he didn’t do it, said you’ll never find the evidence proving he did it. A sharp observer would note that’s not quite the same thing. But we’re not talking about a sharp observer, are we?
July 5th, 2022 at 12:55 pm
Right on queue, Blade mentions “low IQ target population”, Emery shows up to bloviate.
He’s a walking billboard, BH; a gift; a veritable fountain of LMMFAO.
July 5th, 2022 at 1:03 pm
JD, Bubba Clinton will go down as the most expert and prolific parser of words ever to sit in the White House.
When you compare him to the leaking latrine bucket in there today, you cannot help but get nostalgic.
July 5th, 2022 at 1:20 pm
The Nazi’s considered themselves entirely rational creatures. Killing the weak was a task that was necessary if humanity was to thrive. In the letters Nazi officers wrote home from the front, the word they kept mentioning, as a thing to avoid, was “sentimentality,” giving things irrational emotional weight. I am certain that Stalin’s commissars described their murder of thousands in identical terms.
July 5th, 2022 at 2:08 pm
Poor journalism on both sides of the divide.
From the Breitbart-aligned National Pulse:
“’Rentboy’ is a colloquial term for young men who have sex with older men in exchange for money, often under dubious circumstances.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/07/05/biden-doe-official-defended-underage-sex-site/
As opposed to older men paying young for sex in non-dubious circumstances? Like maybe if they were in love? Lol.
July 5th, 2022 at 3:07 pm
The Nazi’s considered themselves entirely rational creatures.
MP, it is worse than that, they had willing, entirely rational participants. My great aunt’s last words to her family as she refused to board the plane as Nazis were about to enter the city where “I’ll stay behind, Germans are a cultured people and they would be better than the soviets.” Those where the last words my family heard from her.
July 5th, 2022 at 3:24 pm
JPA, I believe that modern historians do themselves no favors when they try to depict the Nazi’s as people attempting to restore a barbaric vision of the past. The Nazis did not see themselves that way. They did not bring the Kaiser out of exile and put him back on the throne. They did not put the aristocrats back in charge of the government. National socialism was a new thing, as new as marxism-leninism. The Nazi vision of race war as the engine of history was as novel as Lenin and Stalin’s vision of class war as the engine of history.
July 5th, 2022 at 4:15 pm
The Nazi’s weren’t really bourgeois. They were too attached to an actual homeland. To the bourgeois, patriotism was a value that could be taken too far. Not to the Nazis. To the Nazis, love of a particular piece of land was the ultimate value, the value without which all other values collapsed. As for the Soviets, Nabokov, in his lecture on Gustav Flaubert, wrote of the Flaubert’s use of the word “bourgeois,” “I shall clear up the term completely if I say that, for instance, today in communist Russia, Soviet literature, Soviet art, Soviet music, Soviet aspirations are fundamentally and smugly bourgeois. It is the lace curtain behind the iron one. A Soviet official, small or big, is the perfect type of bourgeois mind, of a philistine.”
Certainly the Nazi ideology, regardless of the behavior of individual Nazis, was not bourgeois. It loved battle and conflict too much. The Marxism-Leninism paradise was a bourgeois paradise, free of conflict, “bread and peace” in Trotsky’s words.
The Nazi paradise was “War for the Fatherland and Glory for the Fatherland.”
July 5th, 2022 at 4:36 pm
Say, rAT?
Blade (Who tf is Swift?) wrote: “So I’ll just leave you with this edict, from your betters at NPR:
“ The 2020 election is a settled question…””
Because you’re an idiot, I’ll clarify: from your betters at NPR
The quotations are a clue, nitwit. It’s quoting someone else…quotations: quoting…get it?
LMAO, you fucking asshole.
July 6th, 2022 at 8:46 am
^ I know everyone wants to play partisan games, but seriously, have some modicum of self-respect and belief in evidence and truth.
July 6th, 2022 at 8:56 am
^ You and the January 6th traitors are playing the same partisan games as the Roman Inquisition played with Galileo. You decide the answer in advance, then adjust the proceedings to reach the desired outcome. You think repeating a lie often enough will make it true. It will not.
Galileo’s response to their verdict that the Earth stood still while the Sun revolved around it: and yet, it moves.
My response to your verdict that the 2020 election was the cleanest, fairest and most perfect election ever: and yet, it was stolen
July 6th, 2022 at 9:58 am
175 million voters: “You fuckers stole the election!”
DNC (crooking finger): “I’m going to say this one, more time; I did not have illicit relations with that election, Miss 2020.”
July 6th, 2022 at 11:20 am
To any rational person, Trump’s culpability, driven by his narcissism and sheer incompetence, is clear. But until Republicans in power are brave enough to speak the truth and disavow him, even if they risk losing his cult-like supporters, it will be difficult to hold him and his followers accountable. Although we’ve heard from secretaries of states, aides, and election workers, where are Meadows, McConnell, McCarthy, Cipollone and other key players who witnessed and even participated in the big lie and the actions and decisions that led to the January 6 insurrection?
In 1974, Republicans took their oath to the constitution seriously enough to stand up to Nixon. Sadly, today’s Republicans seem to be more interested in holding onto power —
even at the expense of our democracy.
July 6th, 2022 at 12:01 pm
🚨Being brought down by a sex scandal that Boris Johnson wasn’t directly involved in, genuinely didn’t see that coming.
How long till Boris Johnson sends a mob to Buckingham Palace to sack the Queen or something.
Send the orange shit-gibbon to the UK
they’ll sort him out. Trump has become the Black Knight in Monty Python: “’tis but a scratch” — like the Black Knight, he has become a figure of ridicule and he is finished.
July 6th, 2022 at 12:25 pm
Geez, Emery. Speaking of narcissistic behavior. Just like you and your “elected”DemoCommie and media masters, you all think that you know what’s best for everyone else. You go be a good little stooge, bot boy. Your feeble attempts to justify the entire corrupt cabal that you swore your allegiance to, are comedy gold.
July 6th, 2022 at 1:01 pm
Emery loses his shit even thinking about Trump.
But he denies that he has TDS.
Must be depressing for him to think that, according to recent polls, Trump will beat Biden handily in 2024 if he chooses to run.
July 6th, 2022 at 1:06 pm
The U.K.’s government seems to be dysfunctional in a comparatively orderly and functional way. They at least seem to have the ability to be embarrassed by people on their own team.
July 6th, 2022 at 3:22 pm
” . . . even if they risk losing his cult-like supporters . . . ”
Which is known in certain political circles as “their base,” about 80 million of us who are already disgruntled with them for failing to stand up against a stolen election.
Yeah, great idea, purge Trump and everyone who supports him, slim down the Republican Party to just Mitch, Mitt, and Cindy. Save a fortune on ballrooms for the next convention. Great idea. Brilliant.
July 6th, 2022 at 4:41 pm
One thing of note here is that historically, the three/four estates worked well not because of genuine virtue, but really more rivalry. For example, I’m reading some Dark Ages work in translation, Die Geschichte Dietrich von Bern, the story of a contemporary of Attilla, and the long and short of it is that the “heroic” knights don’t come across very well. Even the best of them murder people pretty much at will. So the rivalry (excommunication, failure to pay taxes) probably worked pretty well for keeping that system going far more than actual virtue.
And in that light, what we have today is the breakdown in rivalries between the ruling class and the media, to the detriment of the working class.
July 7th, 2022 at 5:36 pm
“They at least seem to have the ability to be embarrassed by people on their own team”
Says the Biden booster
LOL.
July 8th, 2022 at 12:34 pm
Woolly is SiTD’s Brexit Booster 🇬🇧🇬🇧
Soon the UK will have to address the elephant in the room and ask the question: Did Boris Johnson also lie about the reasons for and benefits of Brexit?
From a Rooster to a feather duster….