Puzzlement

I've long had this question, but yesterday it came to the fore.

Walking down the street behind a teenaged boy, darkskinned fella who could have been Latin or Black, and I see that not only are his jeans slung low to show his underpants, but his underpants were slung low to show his ass, crack included.

Now I am puzzled. Teenaged boys are the most homophobic group on earth. And teenaged boyz of color are the most of the most.

So why do they walk around with their asses showing?

Do humans have a nature?

One of the places where the left and right often part company is on the question of whether human nature is subject to change. Leftists often fall in love, oddly, with tyrannical thugs who try to recreate their subject peoples in the image of the Socialist New Man or some such thing. Mao, Pol Pot, the whole evil Marxist enterprise. If only The Right People were in charge, Progress would bring us closer to Utopia. It ends in the Killing Fields and the Gulag.

Righties, on the other hand, tend to think that history is a more reliable predictor of human behavior than theory. On that model, we can expect more of the same. Despite their Enlightenment bravado, our Founding Fathers put together a governmental form that would both give us room to try new things and, via the tripartite balance of power among the legislators, executives and judges, intentionally use our natural vices to keep each other in relative check.

I have often said that Original Sin is the only Christian doctrine that requires mere observation, not faith, to accept.

Anyhoo. Being a Jungian in many things and not a liberal --a none too common combo these days, in which Jung's followers are dominated by utopian feminist boomer pacifists-- I read this review by VDH on the role of war in human life.

Archetypes are not ghostly beings, but the natural repertoire of the species: our inborn and hardwired predilections for perception, attitude, thought, and action. No surprise for me in this book.

Higher taxes are patriotic

Biden bidening, as Heidegger would say.

From The Man, Victor Davis Hanson, via Instapundit:

In short, the problem is not whether we think the affable Biden's latest slip/goof/outrage is important, but whether we think anything he says any more is important. The next time he tries to offer something serious, from the AIG matter and coal power to campaign ads and Sarah Palin, I think we are at the point where most will smile, ignore him, and think "That's just Biden being Biden." He could give the Gettyburg Address tomorrow, and the public wouldn't know whether he wrote it, whether he was going to retract it, whether it was true, or whether he was serious.

Greenies at play

Apparently...and this really shocks me...the good and conscious green eco-people who want to save the environment may not be who they want to think they are. A first in history.

Biden my time

Do you think the Obama people vetted Joe Biden sufficiently before they chose him?

He might not even be aware of those extra 6 states in the Union that Barry Hussein O. discovered.

PS Don't worry that Joe B invented an impossible historical event. It's truthy.

Who'd a thunk it?

Comparative crime rates between my City by the Bay
and my ancestral Gotham.
I had no idea.

Maybe Rudy Giuliani should become Mayor of SF.

Amen. Amen. Amen.

From Bill Whittle, a passionate meditation on defending The City.

And a great moment from Lord of the Rings: "I bid you stand, Men of the West!"

Rosenbergs in America

While even Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's sons have finally admitted that their parents were spies for the Soviet Union*, I wonder if the lavender-diaper-baby author of Angels in America will rewrite his ponderous script, one that took us on a sometimes brilliantly surprising trip to ZZZ Same Ol Same Ol?

It's in the Times. It has to be true.

(HT Five Feet of Fury).

Privilege in black and white

John Stossel, who was helpful in showing me a libertarian alternative to liberalism as I made my way toward a more conservative stance (no smooth trip for a gay man) , has some characteristically sensible things to say about the bogus notion of "white privilege". And it applies to all the other "privileges", too: male, abled, fit, attractive, wealthy, English-speaking, adult, etc.

And isn't funny that the group now outstripping whites on almost every measure is not white?
How can that be? That can be Asian. Asians succeed because they outwhite whites and they do not adopt an attitude.

To expect that in any society of the size and complexity of ours --and I would submit, any society at all-- there would not be dominant groups and that those dominant groups would not get any societal benefits, is just plain utopian bullshit. No society of the size and complexity of ours can function without them. And I have long known that in liberal circles, a reverse privilege exists quite strongly: victim privilege.

What is excoriated as "privilege" in the Marxoid social science PC world is actually nature, social nature. Welcome to planet Earth, kids. Get used to it. And stop whining.

PS. I wonder. Let's take a global survey and watch how every society handles differences between the dominant group and the minority groups. Or between themselves and their neighbors outside the the tribe, the clan, the nation, the race. Who, I wonder, would be the group most likely to allow social mixture, access to status, and even a repentantly amends-oriented political policy for the "Others"? Hmmmm.

Poor Iran

So misunderstood by the ignorant West and so distorted by the shadow projections of Bible-thumping Americans.

Example.

Another reason I ain't a liberal no more

This totally predictable piece by Mark "Obama is a LightWorker" Morford.

Bama vs Mama thru Old World Eyes

As a particularly insightful, erudite and profound friend of mine named Dieter recently remarked (more than once), "Sarah Palin is the OJ of contemporary politics."

The koan-like wisdom of this viewpoint means, I think, that she has provoked and thrown into relief some deep and trans-rational cultural conflicts. No kiddin'. The combo of rightish adulation and leftish meltdowned venom shows she is no yawner. Rail number three, as Dieter might say.

Gerard Baker writes from London about the side-effect of Governor Sarah in challenging Barry Hussein O's rock-star style: when you look at how he talks and then at how he has spent his life acting, fissures appear. More than fissures.

Baker also agrees with Moi that the heart of the Democrat agenda is to turn America into Europe and bring us troglodytic Yankee slobs into line with the bien-pensants of the Old World, one which is on its last demographic and cultural legs.

I have lived in Europe and have lived with Europeans here in North America. I am unimpressed. No wonder we had a revolution to kick them out.

I remember living in Rome one year in the 70's, with an academic in the house, who had loudly embraced "human rights" as his boring mantra and who took every opportunity to borishly transgress any social form that smacked of formality and hierarchy. At our dining table, we ate from stacked plates, one plate for each course. One day my American irritation with this pretense kicked in and I decided to eat the second course off the same plate as the first. This hero of egalitarian ferment saw me out of the corner of his eye, leapt from his chair and grabbed the plate from me, upbraiding me for my lack of manners. Voila Europe.

Although on the surface they have repented of their colonial version of Manifest Destiny, the "mission civilatrice", they remain as smug and superior and hypocritical (and resentful) as ever, now directing their incredulous taste and wisdom at the last bastion of barbarism on the planet, the good ol USA.

To put it into simple American, "Fuck 'em."

Archetypal politics

Berkeley liberal mouthpiece George Lakoff writes about psychology and politics. He holds that the Republicans stand for the Strict Father mode of governance, while the Democrats are the party of the Nurturing Parent. His PC tenets, as all PC tenets do, prevent him from telling the truth. It is the party of the Nurturing (or is that Smothering and Controlling?) Mother.

You can guess who I favor. If all the teenagers in your town are organized into gangs, how long do you think the Metrosexual Teen Quaker Meeting is going to last?

Patriarchy is the natural mode of human political organization, even when the government is headed by a woman. Consider the few female heads of state: a very butch bunch.

One of the ways I have described my political hejira (sic :-)) from left to right is that I gave up worshipping the Great Mother and her Puer Son-Lover and took my place in the ranks of those who serve the Great King and his Warrior-Prince Son. Nurturing is for home and family and neighborhood, not for international relations with the other gangs in this fallen world.

Here's a piece that divides Mr Obama from Mr McCain on two values: honor vs empathy. Or, to put it another way, a father vs Mommy. (H/T 2 RealClearPolitics).

Seven years

And it was not the work of "terrorists", generic criminals. It was the work of the Muslim Jihad.

What a piece of work is man

A fit man in his fifties. Pretty damn nice.

Ouch

From my years in Canada, I know the writings and opinions of Barbara Amiel, a high-powered woman of the right. I have not always appreciated her. But her piece on how the feminist left has responded to Governor Palin is a well-crafted, right-on-the-money observation: feminism is not the friend of women but only of women who follow the tenets of liberal feminism.

Same goes for the left and race, religion, etc. Nothing (with the exception of George W Bush) provokes a liberal to unseemly acting-out than a member of an Officially Designated Victim Group who does not follow the script. Eg, Condoleeza Rice. As some wag once wrote, the goal of liberalism is not the spread of freedom, but the spread of liberalism.

Couldn't resist

Your daily laugh, courtesy of EarthFirst!.

Reminds me a bit of graduate school...

When I was teaching a Master's (!) course a few years ago, the issue came up of how to distinguish living from non-living phenomena. I started out with what I thought was a 1+1=2 kind of example by noting that non-living phenomena show no discernible reaction of pain when attacked and, to illustrate, kicked an empty chair with the side of my shoe.

One of the women in the class jumped, visibly shocked, and said to me, with no sense of irony and no little bathos in her voice, "But how can you be sure?"

I didn't know whether to expel her on the spot or slit my own wrists.

As an old curmudgeonly friend of mine use to say, "It is one of the mysteries of God's universe that it contains more horse's asses than horses."

I'm gonna have a great day. Really.

Poor Tali babies

Imagine some members of the German American Bund in the US complaining during WWII, that Nazi war prisoners were being held in a former synagogue and that this insensitivity to their cultural values was abusive.

This stuff kills me.

PS, the Arabic above reads, "Crusader Infidel". Has a nice ring to it, no?

Uranians

The HRC, the LGBTQ arm of the Democrat Party, has posters up in my neighborhood with the bold and audacious slogan, "Love Conquers Hate". Well, it doesn't conquer here. I hate this image.

The pretty boy is all glistening from some kind of makeup, he's wearing lipstick and his eyebrows are clipped and his eyes done. A DQ in male clothing. Just what the world needs more of.