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Daily Bread for 11.26.22: The Weakness Implicit in Musk’s Culture War Question

Good morning.

Saturday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny with a high of 54. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM for 9h 22m 31s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.6% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1838, the Wisconsin legislature assembles in Madison for the first time:

On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City.

Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished.

On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government.


On November 25th, Elon Musk asked (trolled, really) a question about culture wars on his private social media platform. Thomas Jefferson provides an excellent reply:

There’s much talk about Musk as a libertarian, or techno-libertarian (whatever that’s supposed to be, as all advocates of free markets embrace technological innovation). If he were libertarian, then he wouldn’t be so exercised over cultural differences and debates present in every age. It’s often the populists, whether of left or right, who worry over these debates. Musk is a billionaire who frets over cultural issues as though he were an ordinary, agitated conservative populist. 

How soon until he walks into a school board meeting and starts whining about an imaginary CRT curriculum or a Marxist/Socialist/Globalist cabal? 

Concern over culture wars quickly devolves into a desire to limit speech, inquiry, and debate in a free society. This desire to limit is part weakness and  part arrogance, the two varying in proportion case by case. 

A private platform can set its own standards. Society should not be so constrained and cramped. 

See also The Populists Circle Disney (Yes, Disney).


 Explore the Orion Nebula via multiple space-based observatories:

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