Yesterday was a pretty well wasted day, even by my currently underachieving standards. Today will be better. I promise.
Running across stories about Official LGBT-dom getting the State to force people to engage with them, in business or religion, makes me angry. But the discrimination laws basically treat every "protected group" as if it were Black. It sees no difference between a Christian photographer who did not want to go to a lesbian commitment ceremony to work and a hotel owner who refuses Blacks a room for the night. The law is indeed an ass. Regulatory socialism doesn't have to confiscate your property and your labor when it determines exactly how you may or may not use it. And the 1964 Civil Rights Act seems increasingly to me to have been a huge mistake. Goldwater was right. Federal overkill that revamped the State into The Crusading Church of Equality.
It just seems wrongheaded and stupid when majorities can be railroaded so easily by minorities. But our national Liberal religion now has equality as its Prime Directive. The One God Equality in the Holy Trinity of Diversity, Sensitivity and Inclusion. Equality is just one among many historical American political goods but by being absolutized and universalized it has become cancerous. It can only be enacted by increased policing and Divine Equality legitimizes all sorts of coercion. Freedom always suffers by it.
Since it is in the nature of Progress never to stop, the egalitarians will always move on to the next unconquered issue. Without a new problem to solve, what do liberals have to do? Utopia is always one more regulation away. Thinking of how much liberalism has changed the world in the last 50 years and what it wants to keep doing for another 50, the nightmare version of America that Covington's novels describe does not seem impossible. And his uber-violent reactions seem more understandable.
Am I an Angry White Male? Well, to quote the bumper stickers, if you're a white male and you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Of course it is not "equality" but revenge, the replacement of historically successful groups by Official Sacred Victim groups. The partial Harrison Bergeron syndrome.
For the foreseeable future, only the Historically Oppressor Groups will be wearing handicaps, to level the playing field...
Saw an opinion piece BTW, entitled White America owes Black America nothing. Amen. Know wh'am sayin'?
Running across stories about Official LGBT-dom getting the State to force people to engage with them, in business or religion, makes me angry. But the discrimination laws basically treat every "protected group" as if it were Black. It sees no difference between a Christian photographer who did not want to go to a lesbian commitment ceremony to work and a hotel owner who refuses Blacks a room for the night. The law is indeed an ass. Regulatory socialism doesn't have to confiscate your property and your labor when it determines exactly how you may or may not use it. And the 1964 Civil Rights Act seems increasingly to me to have been a huge mistake. Goldwater was right. Federal overkill that revamped the State into The Crusading Church of Equality.
It just seems wrongheaded and stupid when majorities can be railroaded so easily by minorities. But our national Liberal religion now has equality as its Prime Directive. The One God Equality in the Holy Trinity of Diversity, Sensitivity and Inclusion. Equality is just one among many historical American political goods but by being absolutized and universalized it has become cancerous. It can only be enacted by increased policing and Divine Equality legitimizes all sorts of coercion. Freedom always suffers by it.
Since it is in the nature of Progress never to stop, the egalitarians will always move on to the next unconquered issue. Without a new problem to solve, what do liberals have to do? Utopia is always one more regulation away. Thinking of how much liberalism has changed the world in the last 50 years and what it wants to keep doing for another 50, the nightmare version of America that Covington's novels describe does not seem impossible. And his uber-violent reactions seem more understandable.
Am I an Angry White Male? Well, to quote the bumper stickers, if you're a white male and you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Of course it is not "equality" but revenge, the replacement of historically successful groups by Official Sacred Victim groups. The partial Harrison Bergeron syndrome.
For the foreseeable future, only the Historically Oppressor Groups will be wearing handicaps, to level the playing field...
Saw an opinion piece BTW, entitled White America owes Black America nothing. Amen. Know wh'am sayin'?
9 comments:
Ex Cathedra notes, 'the discrimination laws basically treat every "protected group" as if it were Black,' but at the same time 'it is not "equality" but revenge, the replacement of historically successful groups by Official Sacred Victim groups.'
It would be difficult to interpret Jews or homosexuals as "historically unsuccessful." (Hitler is still our ego anti-ideal, so I guess anti-semitism is still a condemn'd sort of discriminating hatred.
And Islamophobia is condemn'd in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxony on grounds that Muslims brought Christians science and mathematics.
And the paradigm hating discriminator, the low-class white Republican Christian fundamentalist creatonist, is deem'd a spectacular cultural failure, economically and educationally successful only by comparison with the underclass. This odious type is contemptible plus violently hateful in his religion, his politics, his culture (NASCAR, huntin' and fishin', patrioticness), and his exclusivism (racism, sexism, homophobia) which is absurd inequality since he is rejecting his cultural superiors.
And yet, Ex Cathedra turns out to be right: the culturally unsuccessful low-class white Republican Christian fundamentalist is in a way the most historically successful Founder of all: he has created apparently the hate system that white higher-man, leading POCs and women, is engaged in dissolving in an unprecedented emergency action.
Ancient Rome fell by neglect, decadence, laziness, etc, and by preferring to hire mercenaries rather than going to war themselves or in their sons.
Modern American Rome is falling by the energetic leadership of the Patricians: "We must intersection American Man before it's too late!"
An unprecedented mode of decadence. It would have been easier to bow down before the USSR on grounds of inevitability. And indeed the USSR was never free from assistance by western capitalism. ...
Hobbes proposed that »The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crown'd upon the grave thereof.« (Leviathan IV ch 47 ¶21).
Maybe the Patricians of hating the hatred in lower man are the ghost of the Politburo -- with their Five Year Plans of bloating Sovereign Debt while managing not to restore decaying infrastructure and showing not the least concern if bureaucracy absorbs public money ostensibly intended for education and social services; their liberal and conservative Think Tank theories for renewing this or that aspect of lost American productivity atop real contempt for real productivity; Pravda proclamations of green idealism, renewing the family idealism, inclusivization idealisms, dialogue idealism in apparent unconcern about infinite porno in the most technologically creative formats, etc. ...
Allah is the sequel to everything (Quran 31:22) (sc the sequel to any version of the everything system, ta panta, whose permitting glory according to nihilism is nothingness. But is Anglo-Saxony's energetic self-ruining merely a version of 'everything'?
I ought to have emphasized that low-class white man, who causes homo-phobia or class division by resenting rather than accepting in simple oneness the valuation put upon him by high-class white man, is culturally worse than the Hispanic, black etc underclass upon whom he does exclusivism by failing to affirm that they are culturally and spiritually superior to him in their giftednesses in social-justice resistance and protest against him, also in urban graffiti tableaux, in music and in celebration and affirmation of life (though one must be careful in such valuations to avoid stereotyping and condescension). He won't even confess that any dysfunctions in their lifestyle or ethics are caused by his failure to affirm them.
I vaguely remember Straussians' assertions that Christianity according to Machiavelli "aim'd too high."
This is curious, since obviously Machiavelli objects to Christianity's or modernity's enabling the world to be ingloriously dominated by effeminate liars supported by wolves. Aiming at effeminacy and versatility in hypocrisy isn't aiming at some lofty impossible impractical goal. Obviously it is the easiest taxis or mode and order to do! Cf today's communitarian liberal idealists in government and social-justice churchmanship.
The key mistake according to Machiavelli according to Straussians is Cesare Borgia's failure to prevent elevation to the papacy a cardinal whom he had offended (sc blasphemed against?) or who had cause to fear him. (Prince ch 7, end).
I seem to recall that Straussians say Cesare Borgia supposed that Julius II would 'forgive' him. Does this mean Cesare expected that Julius (the other half of the Julius Caesar name) would permit his project to go forward?
I guess that Alexander 6 began in his natural (sc not supernatural or legitimated) son Cesare a project to unit Italy, the root, razza geographically consider'd, by temporal means. This process would remove the Church's temporal power -- a way of blaspheming the spiritual power by revealing that the spiritual is temporal and that spirit does not wish to rule either as spirit or by force of arms, but by both, each accordingly as convenient (sometimes by selling church offices, sometimes by force of arms, sometimes by propaganda about Jesus or the saints, sometimes by magic e.g. worshipping statues, placing territories under Interdict to spook the population with each stillborn baby or defective livestock birth or sudden death etc.
Even as late as manuals for the Baltimore Catechism RC divines declared that the pope should not be deprived of temporal power. Prot divines accepted loss of temporal power but only with acceptance of invisibility or non-manifestness (clergy as 'secular' moral leaders, reformers etc, that don't even mention spiritual power).
But I suppose that 'aiming to high' might mean taking aim at no-form (tohu js8414 THW) or aiming, putting an "I am" in tohu. I doubt a legitimated (not a non-ego!) Ego is Machiavelli's objection, but it maybe is Straussians' objection to Christianity, to the Bible, to Plato, to Augustine, Machavelli and onward up to Nietzsche and Heidegger.
Amidst tohu, how shall the Ego sum quis ego sum judge value? Perhaps by revaluing tohu's complement bohu or formalism with a view to the implicit essence in formalism seen via the idea of the Good? ... How could formlessness and emptiness not wish for form and essence?
We may even see a claim to spiritual power in Mennonites, radical orthodox, Yoder, Hauerwasians et al, who reserve the right to value-judge the state and the world as 'perdition.'
This whether the Mennonites merely withdrawing (along their inner path) from the world in condemning the world (apparently not using the world for the attainment of eternal life. John 3:14-19), or whether they advance into the world demanding that structures of perdition such as the economy, public policy, the marketplace, education and culture, the state, the military and police system, be held to the standards of the Beatitudes as Jesus' programme for the world.
Well, hey, if Mammonites et al can use the Old Testament and (as they supposed) common sense practicalness to trump the Beatitudes vis-a-vis resisting evil in children and adolescents by coercive force and capital punishment, maybe it's right for them to demand abolition of Lockean realisticness about man in the name of the Beatitudes' unrealisticness which requires us to dismiss realisticness re human nature and the institutions of perdition.
Jesus didn't say "Love thine enemies" with a view to worldly success but quite in the expectation of worldly failure. Therefore, an economics, educational policy, etc that results in disaster is exactly what Jesus demands of worldly institutions regardless of the separation of religion and politics which supposedly means Christians must not impose biblical standards on politics and society etc despite the wishes of atheists, agnostic, Buddhists, Muslims, Darwinians, Hindus, not to mention Christians who happen to have beliefs that don't support the agenda of the Mennonite Central Committee, feminist theology etc.
On the suggestion in Cesare Borgia of a unification of Italy by temporal power that offends or blasphemes against the spiritual power that won't rule as spiritual power: the name 'valentino' sc valens, growing, values.
And Cesare bore this name from a double origin: first his position as Cardinal of Valencia -- a position he resign'd, the first cardinal of the Church ever to resign; and upon the same day he resign'd his cardinalship King Louis 12 of France named him Duke of Valentinois.
re affirmation of Life
kb in Romerbrief would have it that sin is life, and Christ event death is no preparative to some sort of new yes
-but since says re Esau and Jacob, that Esau precedes as idoloatry to the negation brought by Jacob (the re-probation done by Jews, acc to Hegel in Phenomenology), life as sin is a No, idolatry is a No. The Christ even arrives as the negation of the negation that is sin.
-KB claims to one of his non-egos sin, idolatry is necessary, but this is Amalekite: sin is an unnecessary, intentional disobedience
-They would like to interpret sin as mere “moral failure,” and suppress the biblical understanding of sin that is reveal’d in faith: »Sin though is something essentially other than a moral failure. It’s sin only in the sphere of belief. Sin is unbelief, the revolt against God as the Redeemer. If repentance , in unity with the forgiveness of sin and only so, can will the return of the past , this repentance’s will of returnin, represented in thinking, remains metaphysically determined , and is possible only so, i.e., through relation to the eternal will of the redeeming God.« Heidegger, What is Call’d Thinking? p. 105 german 44.
In proposing that sin is necessary, Barth denies that sin is to be regretted. Repentance is impossible. One doesn't really repent or regret the means one used to arrive at the desired end -- unless a better means was possible, in which case the means used wasn't necessary.
This isn’t pertinent only to vile sectarians et al. In “Life Against Death,” Desublimator Norman Oberon O. Brown proposes, seems to me, ultimately an affirmation of Life whatever (cf our pro-Life whatever activists), perhaps by prestidigiationing away the distinction between life and deadness.
The Oberon of desublimation can appeal to Nietzsche, who declared “Let us guard our selves from saying that Death is opposed to Life. Aliveness is merely a species of deadness, and a very* rare species.” Gay Sci ¶109.
*sehr in German suggesting seer (cf species translated as Art). ‘very’ in English etymologically suggesting covenantal between Self and ego.
But this statement by Nietzsche on life (‘sin’ Sunde has the etymology of ‘is’ sc living) is really closer to Christian dogma. For a Self to declare to his self that he is a sinner is to admit to willful disobedience to God, though he looks to God to redeem him from his sinful self-presentation. By confessing sin, a Self does not pretend to be a failure in morally shaping his self. Sin is a rare species of deadness. Sin is a greater achievement than mere ‘moral failure.’ It is more bold.
Nietzsche does not at all say that because Life whatever or sin is a species of deadness the difference between life and death is unimportant. Nevertheless, by closing off the usual pessimistic objections to life used by those who still keep on living, and the Christian expedients for redeeming sinful selfings, he drives European Selfs into willful life whatever as though unconnected with the arrival of death experience, and calls on the Grand Inquisitor’s personnel to give such selfing Gelassenheit rather than to rescue such selfings. Etc. Etc. …
On nothingness as the glory permitting the everything system: Heidegger reveals nothingness is non-being, and that ex-istence is non-being or occurs in the west in a negation of the original negation of fake 'is' from the east. ... I guess grace of itself only perfects or negates the fake 'is' from the east.
Why should non-being be the glory and not a new being, a resurrected eternal being or eternal life -- in the aion of the Father Self?
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