Marginal notes, mostly irritable

 

I try to be amiable and amusing in company, but when I am in my own company, I am sluggish and irritable. As it said on the T-shirt my sister gave me years ago, "Un homme seul est en mauvaise compagnie." "A man alone is in bad company."

The images of the Japanese quake and tsunami are really impressive. Awful, both in the modern sense of very bad and the antique sense of awe-inspiring. Sad, and worrisome, in terms of their human effects. What the  repercussions will be on the 3rd largest economy in the world: probably not good. And as has been noted, the lack of looting and violence is quite remarkable. One of the results of a homogeneous society that privileges conformity and harmony?

Dominic West is damn fine lookin'. Stars with Julianne Moore in 2004 The Forgotten. Still shots don't do him justice. Damn fine lookin'.

On a commercial for cheaper business phone service, a worker calls the big phone bill  "the white elephant in the room." An apple a day gathers no moss.

So much liberalism is what Jung called negative inflation. A combination of grandiosity and self-hatred. This strange strategy of gaining high moral standing by cutting yourself off at the knees. As with so much liberalism, I sense a religious form emptied of its traditional content: Christian confession of sin. Humility is a great Christian virtue and admitting one's sinfulness paradoxically gains one a certain standing both the God and the community. Emptied of the divine, however, it becomes an exhibitionistic narcissistic suicidality.

And this kind of liberal lying digusts me. A Washington Post page that purports to replace our myths about Islam starts out with a bold-faced lie. To show that Islam is as American as apple pie, this professor asserts that mosques have been in American since colonial times. Huh? Then why is the first building an early 20th century piece? Because Dr. Mythbreaker tell us that a mosque is "anywhere Muslims pray." And since a Muslim slave* prayed in Maryland in the 1730's...that was a mosque. It's like saying that there are churches in Saudi Arabia because the church is the assembly of baptized Christians and there are lots of them in that country, working as servants or in foreign enclaves. Maybe the definition of mosque is true within the confines of Muslim theology, but it's also therefore true that America is an infidel land which belongs by divine right to Allah and the Muslims. In the real world, a mosque is a building set aside for Muslim worship. Rank BS. I have such contempt for useful dhimmi idiots puffed up with PhDs.

The Dayton Ohio police department has racheted down its passing grade on qualification exams on orders from the (Federal!) Department of Justice, so that more (unqualified) blacks can join the force. If I were black, I'd be so embarassed. We're all equal, except that blacks are dumber and have to be given jobs they are not qualified for. That's the message, like it or not, from the racialist Mommy State.

Interesting program on America in 10,000 BC, about the paleo-Indians. It now seems that a variety of peoples came over to North America from Asia and that some of them were more Caucasoid, like the Ainu of northern Japan, but in the computer graphics, the paleos all looked not only very Caucasian but with a modern American physiognomy. Seemed like a strange choice. I resent PC revisionism, which usually has women and people of color in places and roles they would not have had, but this seemed oddly and similarly off.

The idiot offspring of Pierre Elliot Trudeau recently complained that a Canadian immigration pamphlet which described female genital mutilation, honor killings and spousal abuse as "barbaric" was an inappropriate use of language. Mustn't offend the barbarians by calling them barbarian. What a waste of space and air.

I would normally applaud the fact that Canada shows some balls for once, but the only reason this issue was tackled is because it affects women.

Feminism and the current role of women in the West could only have happened and continue in a world made and maintained by men. Compliant men.

Although my interest in religion is personal and of very long standing, my criticism of liberalism in religion is part of my concern for the self-identity of the West. I am not the first non-churchgoing conservative to recognize that it's important for a Western society to have a lot of church-goers. And for religion, especially real forms of Christianity, to have a public presence in the public square and not be banished to the realm of the private. Because that vacuum will be filled by the liberal State and its civilization-destroying pieties.

More History Channel prejudice and mistakes. When the Normans conquered England in 1066, "they imposed their Christian religion on the largely pagan Anglo-Saxon tribes." Bullshit. England was largely Christianized already, for hundreds of years. And when the Romans withdrew in the early 5th century, most of the Roman Britons were Christian.

Every time I see a woman hit a man or throw something at him or pour something on him or gratuitously insult him or destroy something of his on TV or in the movies, I think she deserves equal treatment. Immediately.

Like I said, irritable.

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*This Muslim slave has a fascinating story. He was on a slave-trading mission in his native West Africa (slavery is a perfectly acceptable institution in Islam) when he was captured by other black African slavers and sold off to Europeans. He was eventually repatriated. One wonders if he went back to slave-trading...