For those of us of an earnest cast, this fable was always straightforward.
The fable concerns a grasshopper that has spent the warm months singing while the ant (or ants in some editions) worked to store up food for winter. When that season arrives, the grasshopper finds itself dying of hunger and upon asking the ant for food is only rebuked for its idleness. …The story is used to teach the virtues of hard work and saving, and the perils of improvidence. Some versions of the fable state a moral at the end, along the lines of “Idleness brings want”, “To work today is to eat tomorrow”, “Beware of winter before it comes”.
Are you some kinda rube? Of course that’s not what the story really means. Think of the story from the grasshopper’s POV.
There was, nevertheless, an alternative tradition in which the ant was seen as a bad example. … It relates that the ant was once a man who was always busy farming. Not satisfied with the results of his own labour, he plundered his neighbours’ crops at night. This angered the king of the gods, who turned him into what is now an ant. Yet even though the man had changed his shape, he did not change his habits and still goes around the fields gathering the fruits of other people’s labour, storing them up for himself. The moral of the fable is that it is easier to change in appearance than to change one’s moral nature.
From this perspective the only way the man who was always busy farming could succeed was by stealing from others. And the ant’s work is not honest labor but theft. And of course the subject has changed.
Here’s the situation we find ourselves in. We felt bad about telling the grasshoppers to go pound sand, and we’ve been carrying them, some completely, most for work. To the point that they’ve eaten everything we’ve made, everything we’ve saved, and all the seed, and have somehow gotten us in a position that they can dictate what we pay for their work, even though to pay for them now we have to borrow against our grandchildren’s future work.
The grasshoppers want to postpone a reckoning until the grandchildren ants are actually starving, and the objective correlation of forces indicate success we are too weak to resist.
The time for choosing, the time to act, the time for fortitude is now.
When it comes to animal fables, most progressives are scorpions.
It needs said:
America is a big stupid grasshopper and China India Brazil are industrious ants and they make stuff and save monies while Obama screams at Eric Cantor and runs crying to his room.
At NRO:
Recent debt ceiling vote dates and raises.
Seems 4 out of the 7 were in election years. One just before the 2008 election.
On FauxNewz right now they’re saying that the McConnell deal is probably a go.
Bunch of pussies.
Fuck em. Kill them all. Let God sort them out.
That second interpretation is a little too nuanced. Aesop wasn’t famous for his subtlety.
That is the cherry on top of the steaming pile.
Yes and the small short term one.
I think of progressives more as brood parasites.
My money’s always on the ants. Dirty socialist grasshoppers beware!
I was asked by an earnest could-be-ex democrat how we’ve gotten to where we are at. I started to talk about the long march, and I could see I was losing her. I started to talk about incrementalism, and I could see I was losing her again. I started to try to relate the whole enchilada to a family, and I could see a glimmer or two. We need to be right at the highest level, and be able to package everything into accessible terms, if we are going to beat people who are willing and enabled to lie shamelessly.
A little Jake Tapper, being a WH correspondent(classical).
Listening to the former Soviet dissident conversing with Peter Robinson this week has been a kick. Most prominent, in his view, of the three major causes of the fall of Soviet Communism was Soviet Communism’s own internal inconsistencies (they were manifold), leading inexorably to it’s own demise.
So we too may think of the absurdities of modern American political progressivism. It pretends to know much, for instance, about how to shape a just and stable society. We need only glance above at JHo’s post on Nancy Pelosi or alternatively at the object of her foolish praise, Barack Obama, to see just how empty a claim this is. Theirs is a silly and bumbling pseudo-science.
Robinson’s guest, Mr. Yarim-Agaev, recommends we stick to firm truth, and never play on the ground which makes up our opponent’s strength. In his case vs. the KGB, whose strength was violence and strong-arming plus lies (hence the stick to the truth part), the dissidents chose to aim at non-violence, along with their knowledge that the system the KGB represented couldn’t possibly stand, on account of an inability to cease wrecking itself.
strengthwise bumblefuck and the dirty socialists own the media and academia and the illiterate union whores own the cops and the schools and most government flunky jobs and a lot of manufacturing
Team R owns canned goods and ammo
It’s inevitable that the good ‘ol boys network in the Senate will result in the House being sold down the river. If McConnell doesn’t do it, Graham and the Maine floosies will.
Which is why the House needs to just pass a damn bill and dump this mess in laps where it properly belongs; before it’s too late.
And a larger measure of the truth about human beings hf. Would that count for anything?
the media hates truth and they’re vicious and Team R’s last nominee for president was both a superlative media whore and a renowned coward
if this was one of those if-I-were-a-betting-man things I wouldn’t have to give it a whole lot of thought
But just like the KGB, our lying media work in the interests of a systematic proposal or world view, if we may, which leads to ruin. Or at least, so I believe. Let them have their way entirely and the ruin would come all the faster. We see it all over the world, do we not?
So, were they to have their every wish, we’d soon be in the position Gov Daniels described he’d prefer not to be in, namely:
There’s little doubt of it, I think. Indeed, Obama’s reign may serve to put the country off progressivism for the rest of time, though it’s sure to be one of those sooner or later sort of propositions.
Oh, look! This little douchebag is lying.
Oh, that sucks, huh? Except the debt ceiling isn’t the problem the rating agencies are looking at.
Laurel is Hardy, or Dolph Lundgren or Dyan Cannon or whoever you’d like him to be.
i wonder if could grow cucumbers on my balcony
Carney, though I’m fairly sure he thinks himself clever, spends that entire conversation with Tapper demonstrating how and why Barack Obama can’t understand even his own political interests, and doesn’t seem to realize it in the least. It’s kind of amazing when you think about it.
Whitefly loves them some cucumbers. Sphinx moths too I think.
oh crap those are about already done in carin’s minty for this year, them whiteflies
mint I mean
Carney is horrific. He’s both a stiff and a bad liar. At least Gibbs had some entertainment value.
Plant you some ginger root hf, long as you got clean soil free of nematodes. Nothing seems to bother it and it grows well enough you get both a nice green spray of stuff above ground and then after awhile some rhizome to eat.
i could try but honestly I don’t like ginger root cause it’s a huge chore to peel and I kinda suck at it – and then i don’t know what to do with it exactly… the jew grocery store sells ginger paste which comes in a huge – really huge – lasts-forever jar – so I have that in the fridge
you know what I should try is purslane… I’ll stop at a nursery this weekend
I miss Mr. Spies sometimes
Truth to say, I don’t bother to peel it, just slice and chop or whatever. But I like to eat it, so that helps.
Rick Santelli says Bring it on! (The “bitches” is implied)
But it certainly is congruent with Marxism. Curious, innit? Almost as if that “alternate interpretation” were cooked up by some Marxist to turn the original fable on its head.
In fact, if you follow through the citations, you end up at this text:
That’s it. Sum total. No mention of a grasshopper.
Now, the question becomes — is this the same ant? Is this the origin of all ants, or just one? Are Aesop’s fables populated with a recurring cast, or are they, well, just allegories meant to illustrate and point with each standing on its own?
In “The Lion, the Ass, and the Fox”, the Lion eats the Ass after being upset at the Ass’s careful division of their supply of food. In “The Ass’s Brains”, the Lion and the Fox trap the Ass, kill it, and after the Lion takes a nap, discover that the Ass has no brains (presumably eaten by the Fox). Either the Ass rises, phoenix-like, from the Lion’s dung, or the stories stand alone and the Ant of one story has no more relation to the Ant of another story than the Ass of one story has to that of another.
(This is one of the reasons why I hate Wikipedia. It allows idiots to smear dung all over our culture behind a veneer of intellectualism.)