I am overstating the case, but one of the things that always put me off morality and ethics as a study, especially in the Catholic realm with which I am most familiar, was the anxiety that infected the border between is and ought, how the world and the human race actually are and how, if we were good, we ought to be. Sometimes nature was a good, to be imitated, and sometimes a fallen state, what we are put into this world, Mr Allnut, to rise above.
Being constantly haunted by The Perfect Good was exhausting. As one priest put it, living constantly in the presence of the Twice-Born.
Now I can't remember why I started this post.
Now that, my friends, is how, in Jungian psychology, a complex works.
Ah, now I remember.
In politics, we have the Platonic prescriptive and the Machiavellian descriptive. When I hear the Pope --whichever one he be-- blabbering on about peace, etc. all the time, it strikes me as pablum, a deflated coin of little value. A kindergarten nanny in a white dress yelling, Be nice! Be nice! to all the bad children. We know how effective that is. Christian morality --which I certainly do not dismiss as a whole-- is nonetheless infected with this idealist highminded dreaming. Without its bloody mythology, creedal self-confidence and doctrine of Original Sin, it becomes Liberalism.
Today, Easter, is the heortological anniversary of the Irish Easter Rising, which led to the liberation of the Irish from British rule. In a distinctly Machiavellian vein, a fascinating review of the 1996 movie Michael Collins as a primer for how power is actually challenged and defeated, and at what cost. It's a long article and it's racially incorrect, so be warned.
And as always, I post this Easter pic in memory of my friend Friar Cornelius, who loved life and people but who was no fool. Twas he who said to me, Well, brother, we both know that the world is a train wreck, but that doesn't mean you can't have a nice day.
If you remove Hebrew and Jewish, (and change the logo, of course) from this Facebook ad, name the one group whose name you are not allowed to fill in the blank with.
Although I picked it to watch because Dan Futterman is in it, the 1992 film with nothing but narcissistic and immature multiply-married/partnered parents --and their shut-down but too-wise and ironically distanced children--is painful to watch. The women are either bimbos, whiners, or bitches. The men overgrown boys. As the centerpiece child says to the camera, My dad is 40, looks like he's 30, thinks like he's 20 and acts like he's 10.
And typically, when the anti-heroine early teen tomboy runs away from all the dysfunctionality, she is sheltered by a big wholesome family, on the Mormon style. Her response? Wise-assed eye-rolling contempt. An apprentice of the adults she is running away from. Harbinger of life as a woman who can be appeased by nothing?
Dan, though a mere pup of 25, had his appeal even then.
I have seen too many movies where the children are more adult than the adults.
It was shot in the Inyo National Forest, over in the eastern Sierras, where B and I have gone in summers, which is nice to see.
My fascination with Mormonism continues. As a work of individual religious imagination, Joseph Smith's conception has few equals. With St Paul, Mohammed and Nanak. Whatever his flaws of character or whatever the historically fatal fault lines in Mormonism's doctrine or however controlling the church is of its members, it is certainly not one more cookie cutter Protestant sect eternally obsessing over sola fide and sola scriptura. Although contemporary LDS apologists want to make it acceptable as part of the Christian world, it is precisely its post-Christian (and pre-Christian) elements which make it so compelling.
And however comfortable Mormons now are, their ancestors' westward Exodus is utterly admirable for sheer guts.
And were Ex Cathedra to wonder about a national anthem for his fantasy post-USA Republic, one of the contenders would be a Mormon hymn. The tune is non-Mormon, coming from that great American (Protestant) Sacred Harp tradition, by one Jesse Tom White, a Baptist. Alternatively, its source is "an English folk song." The words are LDS, however, written early British convert William Clayton, who was also a Joseph Smith intimate and help provide the text of the amazing King Follet Discourse. That extraordinary funeral sermon, so extraordinary that it never even made it into the Mormon canon of scripture, exemplifies much of what made Smith an original American religious genius.
I confess that whenever I hear this hymn, Come, Come, Ye Saints, it makes the hair on my head stand up. This arrangement is softer than the one I first heard (and can't find), and takes longer to get a head of steam on, but you can see the potential.
Liberal culture idolizes science. When it comes to the physical world, the empirical and measurable is the unquestioned standard. Just try questioning the standard evolutionary narrative.
When it comes to the human world, however, utter superstition reigns and we are required, every day, to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
There are three elements of dominance: power, resources and status.
(Which is why Ex Cathedra'sdefinition of Liberalism includes all three as targets of the dispossession agenda of the previous subalterns.)
While Whites --both in America and throughout the world-- still have massive ownership of resources and very considerable power, what we have lost is status.
Loss of status is just as fatal to dominance as loss of power or resources.
If you lose status, you lose respect, deference, your place in the hierarchy. At its worst --and we have it at its worst-- you lose your self-respect, your own belief in your right to live and thrive.
If you lose status, then your possession of power or resources is simply an accident, or even a crime, to be remedied by those who deserve to possess them.
Consider the status of wealthy Jews in traditional Britain post 1655 after Cromwell reversed the 1290 royal edict expelling them. Money they had, but the ruling classes considered them outsiders and aliens, socially and certainly maritally unwelcome. No status.
The irony of the White Privilege game is that only a group which has lost status would be vulnerable to that kind of critique to begin with and put up with it at all.
I believe it was in his The Closing of the American Mind that Allan Bloom pointed out the difference between prescriptive and descriptive political thinkers. Plato described largely what he thought ought to happen, while Machiavelli described what actually happens.
No expert, I yet have this Machiavellian thought:
If a group is not dominant, it is subservient. There is little middle ground.
One of the flaws Obama shares with George W Bush is the assumption --in public at least-- that "we all want basically the same things."
Hidden in there is the American assumption that all these "basically same things" can be compatible.
First of all, we all want "freedom", but that just translates into my ability to live life among my own kind and not necessarily at all allowing other people to do so. This is part of the abstraction that Westerners are particularly prone to, the huge underestimation --at least in public-- of the archetypal power of blood and soil. One of the many frauds within multiculturalism is that it requires us both to worship and to ignore culture, depending on the situation.
Nobody really believes in Universal Human Rights except Westerners. Everyone else subscribes to them only insofar as it benefits them and their tribe. They are often savages and barbarians and thugs but they are not foolish.
(While I'm at it, with thanks to John Kekes, isn't the existence of separate nations just a global form of segregation? If segregation within a nation is deeply evil, then why is the segregation that is the defintion of nations not just as evil? That is the unasserted assumption within the drive to integrate White nations via massive Third World immigration. )
The Pope's decision to use the foot-washing of the Holy Thursday Mass as an advertisement for his "church of the poor" campaign has failed to impress at least one priest willing to say it out loud, calling it "a theological stunt."
Yesterday, the day of the Last Supper, I had supper at the home of the Calabrese heretic B, who holds to the doctrine of impanation, that on this day "God turned himself into a loaf of bread." Despite his theological flaw, he makes a fine dinner and is a most excellent host.
Roast sausage, cannellini with spinach, and cheese ravioli with chicken and olives. Antipasti was cantelope wrapped in proscuitto, cold asparagus in olive oil and lemon juice, grape tomatoes. Pinot grigio was the vino. Dessert was strawberries and biscotti. As I say, an excellent host.
I also found myself the recipient of a belated birthday gift, an iphone 5. Quite the magical object. Show that even heretics can be kind.
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The wise saying attributed to Voltaire: If you wish to know who your true masters are, find out who you are not allowed to criticize.
These are the Sacred People.
Ex Cathedra's corollary is: If you wish to know who your true masters are, find out who you are not allowed to insult or make fun of.
This is a country where an illegal alien lectures a Congressional committee not to call him or any other illegal aliens illegal and now a Congressman has to apologize --and do it to the satisfaction of the Sacred People and their Keepers-- for using a word they don't like.
Now you tell me who are the true masters here.
(You'd think his White Privilege would protect him, but I guess that's not how it works.)
In addition to being infallible, Ex Cathedra is also fair.
In his homily to the priests at the Holy Thursday Chrism Mass, Pope Francis made this observation, that priests who are not living out their calling sometimes become collectors, either of antiques or of novelties. Not bad psychology. Distraction is a typical way of avoiding the issue.
Of course, PF's notion of what priest and the Church should do is obsessively repeated, apparently to the exclusion of all else. But in this case, he made a good point.
On the subway, half way down the car, a teenage Black kid, long hair, striped shirt, pants with his ass out, got offended by something another Black kid, a girl, was saying on her phone, about 10 feet away. He started a tirade, in a style rather particular to his socio-economic group, the basic theme of which was, "You don't know me, nigga. Nigga. Nigga. You don't know me, nigga." Repeated many times at varying volumes as he sat there.
Where's The Punisher when you need him to take care of the dirty laundry?
4:40 ff things heat up, with 6:20 ff especially satisfying.
What was that Pope Francis was saying the other day?
My wish is that the dialogue between us should help to build bridges connecting all people, in such a way that everyone can see in the other not an enemy, not a rival, but a brother or sister to be welcomed and embraced!
Yeah, right.
All the forms of ungrounded idealism, religious or not, that call us to blind ourselves to reality and to waste our energy in pursuit of impossibilities really piss me off.
The traitorous American Catholic bishops got together with their Mexican colleagues from Aztlan and put out a document back in 2003 called Strangers No Longer: Together On The Journey of Hope --God, just the title makes me want to puke--which is basically a blueprint for the destruction of White America, naming a "right to migrate."
Take a look at the immigration practices of Mexico. You know that millions of foreign invaders would not be given "a comprehensive path to citizenship" in the country to whose flood of exiles we are supposed to give unquestioning hospitality.
Build five encampments in relatively similar environments, but several miles distant from one another, each one set up to provide initial shelter, sewage, food and medical supplies, etc. for 10,000 people each for a year.
Populate Camp 1 with Japanese, Camp 2 with Poles, Camp 3 with Jews (Israeli and non), Camp 4 with American Blacks and Camp 5 with Mexicans.*
Given what is known about each group's cultural capital, its actual values and interests, its cultural styles and its mental and physical qualities, what's the likelihood that you could predict what each encampment would become after one year, or five years or ten years?
One of the "shadow" sides of multiculturalism, which its proponents don't want to face, is that each culture --just by virtue of being a particular culture, this and not that, Icelandic and not Arab-- has predictable patterns of behavior enmeshed with particular endowments, beliefs and attitudes. These are based on what typically, generally, most of the time happens with these groups. What the multiculties want us to believe, no, require us to believe, is that with all these differences, they are all equally worthwhile in every way. (Or at least every way that multiculties think they should; no one is whining about the absence of Jews in the NBA.) And, and this is the killer, that they are all capable of achieving the same levels of adaptive success, in every field, as the most successful ones. And if they aren't doing that, it's the fault --conspiracy or inherent evil-- of the successful ones.
So one must ask, since Asians in America outstrip the generality of American Whites in education and wealth, what are they doing to keep us down?
A conspiracy? The Protocols of the Elders of Beijing? Or their culture?
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PS. A historical example. It's the 16th, 17th, 18th or 19th century. You're an inhabitant of, well, any place on earth that is not Europe. One afternoon, on your beaches or your borders, shows up a few dozen people with whitish skin: some families with kids, a couple of soldiers, a merchant, a guide and a priest or two. What do you think is gonna happen? After all, they're just a few wandering strangers, right?
*Lest I be accused of patriarchal bias...we could add a sixth camp composed entirely of wymyn. Now that would be interesting.
Mrs. Mezvinsky will raise a little pagan baby from Africa. Sounds like those little cardboard coin boxes we used to fill up in Lent for them...Like I said, la mission civilatrice continues under other names.
Now His Holiness has decided not to live in the papal apartments, but to book a room at the Domus Sanctae Marthae, the hotel just inside the Vatican walls, so he can hang with his peeps.
This will be read, as so many of his other antics are, as a repudiation of his predecessor, and of almost all his predecessors. All his press and crowd appeal comes simply from refusing to do what is expected of him and of making dramatic gestures and going on about poverty and the environment. Does he really think it will have much effect? As if he thought these things up himself? And it once again puts the spotlight on his personality and tastes. If I hear one more cooing sigh about his "simplicity and humility"...
The man is a moral exhibitionist. It's what they get for electing a Jesuit.
(PS. April 2, even the very liberal Commonweal magazine hosted an op ed piece wondering if the Pope, by breaking church rules on Holy Thursday, washing the feet not only of women, but of a Muslim, was not comporting himself like a Roman Emperor who was above the law?)
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A very over-the-top political commentator complains that, despite the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech, he still suffers social stigma and exclusion for his opinions and that this is unconstitutional.
Sorry, dude. The Constitution, at least the original one with the Bill of Rights, limits the State, not the citizens. If you say unpopular things and people exclude you, that's their right. The government is not supposed to take action against you, but everyone else is free to react as they will.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which took in $40 million last year alone, has been around for more than 40 years. This deeply and passionately anti-racist business non-profit, protecting us from dastardly White supremacists, sits right in the middle of one of the Blackest cities in the US but has never had a single People of Color among its top echelon. Not one. Ever.
Sorta like Obama-worshippers CNN and MSNBC.
However, Rebs Dees, Cohen and Levin are doing six-figure well, despite that lamentable lacuna. Maybe they need some "affirmative action?"
"There are some 40,000 children in California ... that live with same-sex parents, and they want their parents to have full recognition and full status.”"
So now the purported desires and voices of children is a legal argument?
Not only have I found a resemblance between Me-in-fantasy and Henry VIII, I now discover that I have a little venn with the loathesome finger-wagging nanny, carbon-gobbling mansion owner and Internet inventor, Al Gore.
He titled his propaganda piece on Anthropogenic Global Warming An Inconvenient Truth.
I can relate.
One of the first experiences which pried me loose from Liberalism back around 2000 was realizing that when I saw things that I was not supposed to see, my instinct was to deny that I was seeing them or to concoct a politically-correct explanation for them. The alternative, seeing inconvenient truths, was that I fell under the self-imposed ban of latae sententiae excommunication from the communion of Decent People. If I persisted in seeing what was in front of my lying eyes, I had to judge myself a Bad Person. And if I spoke of these things aloud, I would be publicly shunned, ferendae sententiae, like an Amish adulterer.
I guess a lot of my Ex Cathedra ranting is really about inconvenient truths: realities that I am not allowed to notice because my moral and intellectual betters tell me so. Especially when it comes to observing and assessing the beliefs, attitudes and behaviors of Official Sacred Victims in Groups. Yet evil neocon Midge Decter's "bigoted formulation" was right: to really understand a group, you have to "know them as a group."Reb Wise's razor makes that clear.
First I discover a kinship with Henry VIII. Now The Cassandra of Manbearpig.
The RC Church has wholly bought into the post-war liberal vision of "universal human rights." Of course these are far from being universal, being utterly European. The current version of that continent's gift for imperialism. La mission civilatrice has simply morphed into the global community. Instead of clerical missionaries carrying the Gospel into benighted lands, we have the hordes of NGO volunteers for Development and Human Rights, riding on the foreign aid of the "developed" (mostly White) countries, trying force everyone to become European style liberal democracies.
Both in America and Europe, the Church practically salivates at the thought of mass immigration into its ancestral lands. Once proud of its conviction that it was The One True Faith, it now apes the pathetic White Protestants in trying to show its cultured despisers how cool it is.
But there is an internal contradiction here, I think. The Apostolic Churches, the ancient ones with unbroken roots in the empires contemporary with Rome, all bear distinct cultural and ethnic identities. Along with these identities come forms of worship called rites. In the Latin West, we have the Roman rite (which supplanted the French, Spanish and Celtic rites). In the Orthodox East, we have the Byzantine Rite, fundamentally Greek, but tweaked differently by the Slavs and the Arabs. There are quite a few other rites as well, linked to very specific ethnic groups and their languages: the Assyrians, the Syrians, the Indians, the Copts in Egypt and the Ethiopians, the Armenians and the Maronites.
The contemporary Catholic Church is very adamant that all these rites be preserved intact. That is, it holds that particular ethnic groups, along with their languages and history, have a right to the preservation of their rite. Under the rubric of liturgy (!), Catholicism, which is now so trendily allergic to the ethnostate, holds the ethno-rite to be inviolable.
And if people from other rites want to attend, or even formally become member, they have to integrate into it, not change it to suit them. What they are assuming is that these nations, racial and ethnic specificities, must be protected from mongrelization and assimilation. Because without Copts, there is no Coptic rite. No one would expect Africans to be either capable of or interested in maintaining the Armenian rite. So because of the rite, the particular people must be protected as such.
At least for the non-Romans. Largely out of a desire to make amends to the Orthodox and the Orientals and to show a good faith rejection of its former Latinizing imperialism, Rome tries hard to treat these Eastern ethno-rites as if they were priceless museum pieces. Hands off, most of the time. As for its own Roman rite, where it feels no foreign gaze, it is open to all sorts of hanky panky, as the stream of mortifyingly inane rituals in the last 50 years has shown.
My point, though, is that while Rome expects Europe and America to act as if they had no ethno-rights, it privileges other non-Western ethnic groups' rights to maintain their ethnic existence via the protection it lends to their ethno-rites.
Old CG Jung ramped up Heraclitus' idea of enantiodromia from a philosophical fragment into a psychological law. Enantiodromia is about the tendency of things to turn into their opposite. For Jung, when a conscious attitude was extremely one-sided, the unconscious tended to create a countervailing attitude that would eventually break through.
My favorite examples are the socially conscious Boomers, who started out with the Berkeley Free Speech movement and wound up, with their university speech codes and politically-correct language orthodoxy, to be the most linguistically totalitarian generation in memory.
My positive attitude toward traditional religion is based on its capacity to resist the expansion of the State. I always favored Becket over Henry II. When I want to insult Obama, I compare him to Henry VIII.
And when I want to think of how paltry and pusillanimous my life has been, I just recall the gruesome fates of those Catholics, the monks especially, who refused to kiss the royal glutes and tell him that, yes, his new marriage was cool and yes, he was the Pope of England, Ireland and Wales.
During my reveries of the weekend about my alternative post-American republic, I thought it wise to chart a conscious course between theocracy and secularism. And I was clear that Islam would be a religio illicita precisely because it is inherently theocratic.
But when I thought of Catholicism, I realized that I had a problem. The liberalized Catholicism flowing from Vatican II, with its self-serving and ten-minutes-old obsessions about "the dignity of the human person" and "universal human rights", has thrown its lot with the Third World. Even if that means, witness Magdi Allam's defection from Mother Rome, fostering an influx of racially, culturally and religiously alien peoples into the European heartland of old Catholicism. The Catholics certainly also agitated against the Afrikaaner regime, whose fall has provided us with the spectacle of Black-run South Africa, crime, poverty and corruption-ridden world capital of rape.*
So the Catholic Church in the Alternative Republic would be a non-theocratic but constantly contestatious religion, hostile to an ethnostate. How would Ex Cathedra VIII handle these meddlesome priests?
I have a differentiated fantasy life. I can take pleasure in my image of the Forest of Gallows without actually wanting this to happen in real time and place. At least this week. So in my subsidiary fantasies about my fantasy Republic, there are a varied set of fantasy options for dealing with fantasy opposition. None of them involve hanging, drawing and quartering or leaving monks to die of thirst and starvation while chained to a wall, lying in their own filth. I'm big on exile and ex-migration. And other non-bloody means.
But for a religion like contemporary Roman Catholicism, I think, if it turned out to be as boringly noxious about racial egalitarianism as I assume it would be, along with exiling individual clerics or nuns, there could be a tax-related issue. Any non-theocratic religion that found itself at serious odds with the Republic would be invited to sign a concordat accepting the Constitution, or else find itself heavily taxed. That might get some response.
But here I'd be, a fantasy version of Henry VIII Lite, enforcing the supremacy of the State over the Church. (Although I wouldn't force them to pay for contraception.) Hello, enantiodromia.
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*I may have overstepped. It might be outdone by another African paradise, The Congo.
Ran across a young American priest's blog. He's studying in Rome and this is the view from his room.
The more familiar view from the front.
On the site of a temple that Marcus Agrippa had raised in 27 BC, during the Republic, Emperor Hadrian had the Pantheon, shrine to All the Gods, built in 126 AD. In continual use, first as a Roman temple and then as a Catholic church.
And its amazing interior. With the open oculus in the ceiling and the unreinforced solid concrete dome, still the world's largest of that type.
The Muslim-born Italian journalist who converted to Catholicism and was baptized on Easter of 2005 by Pope Benedict has now announced that, while remaining Christian, he was leaving the Church because of its dhimmi attitude toward Islam and its fostering of destructive illegal immigration into Italy.
Ex Cathedra sympathizes.
He uses an interesting Italian phrase to further describe the Church's attitude: buonismo. Buonismo, literally, good-ism, implies goody-goody sentimentality. What I tend to call highminded moralism, a compulsion to be seen as good that overcomes all considerations of reality or prudence.
My cousin the nun, a fine human being who believes six impossible things before breakfast, ie is a devout member of the Church of Liberalism and the Sisters of Charity, posted on FB that Paul Ryans's budget undermines the best of America. According to Sister Simone, the voice of Nuns On The Bus.
I wonder, though, how the Sisters of Charity put together their budget? Do they borrow themselves into oblivion?
My cousin works as a fundraiser, to get money from rich people to provide home and medical care for the aging members of her order (the great majority; at age 58, she is the 2nd youngest...) since the order attract new members and cannot make enough to do it themselves...
My voluminous commentor jpnill --who mostly comments by email-- passed along an article about famous anti-White, I mean, anti-racist and White privilege activist, American Jew Tim Wise.
When confronted by a Black woman of conservative politics about where she fit in, he asked her a charming question: Since, after 50 years of civil rights legislation, etc. Blacks still fall far behind Whites on every measure*, how do you explain that? 1. By the effects of White racism or 2. by the cultural and/or biological inferiorities of Blacks?
Who ya gonna blame, girl, Whitey or ya own peeps?
It's an interesting question, and I leave it to Ex Cathedra's readers to ponder Reb Wise's Occamist quandry.
*He left out certain kinds of sports, music and entertainment, where Blacks equal or excel us.
Being out of internet reach for a day, down in the San Joaquin Valley, I was musing about a political order that would attempt reverse the many ills of the current regime of unfolding catastrophe. (It would doubtless produce its own ills; that is the nature of man on Earth.) And, synchronistically, I was reading some of Simon Schama's volume on the madness of the French Revolution, Citizens. Mass insanity in the names of equality and reason.
What I came up with in this fantasy order incorporated Harold Covington's earned grades of citizenship and his libertarian attitude toward firearms. It also reminded me of the conscious ethnocentrism of the State of Israel and the realistic minority politics of the Ottoman Empire, with a dollop of the Original 13 Colonies and the Wild West.
Multiculturalism, feminism, redistributionism, pacifism, transnationalism, secularism and (radical) environmentalism would definitely not be on the menu. It would not be based on grand universal values enunciated from On High, but built for the sake of a particular people, adapting to their realities, for their survival and flourishing.
It is one of the many madnesses of our current culture that ethnicity and race are considered paramount in shaping identity yet must be both publicly denied as marks of worth and obsessively named as tags of power. Race isn't real, they sometimes tell us, but it is the most obsessive, taboo and compulsively watched element in American life. The twisted dogmas of the Church of Liberalism make the Trinity and Transubstantiation seem simply obvious by comparison.
Conservatives, libertarians and traditionalists would find things in my imagined Republic both to love and to hate. Liberals would hate every bit of it. Which, of course, is fine with Ex Cathedra.
One example. It would be clear that this fantasy Republic would not be a Christian country, in the sense of a theocracy with a State religion, but would recognize itself as a country of Christians, in the broad sense. (Even now in the US, fully 80%+ so name themselves.) And since people and culture precede the State, the State, while standing aloof from religious matters, would honor the expression of religion in public. So, both not theocratic and not anti-religiously secularist. The way the US once was.
I resurrected the Roman notion of religio licita, lawful religion. All religions would be assumed to be such unless it were shown clearly that by both doctrine and behavior, a faith was incompatible with the existence of the Republic. The point of that, of course, would be to restrict Islam. And satisfyingly, to treat it much as Muslims treat Christians in the dhimmi mode.
In place of the idolatry of equality, I use equity: treating what is the same in the same way and what is different, differently, but not arbitrarily. Liberal society abhors unequal treatment except* when it comes to affirmative action or age discrimination, which discrimination is actually required by both Constitution and law. About that it is both unconscious and (as-always) self-righteous. I just extend that not-the-same treatment of young people to other areas of life where, frankly, it also makes sense.
As I sketched the critical whys and wherefores of differing status for differing groups, I asked myself what the Achilles' heel of Whites might be. Two items popped up right away: a more than ordinary attachment to fratricidal wars, and a vulnerability to foolish idealist and utopian ideologies and schemes. This second is true even, or especially, when these grand visions lead to their own destruction; they hold onto the dream rather than waking up and saving their lives. Another baleful result of decaying post-Christianity.
*Except, too, when it feels that it is redressing historic wrongs by granting privileged treatment to Official Victim Groups. As the Equalities Minister in Britain said, In order for everyone to be equal, some people have to be treated unequally. Pure Orwell.
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Although Liberals are generally paranoid about imminent theocracy from the Right --unless it's Islamic-- and devoted to Jefferson's "separation of church and state" --unless the church are Black -- what has actually happened, IMHO, is that the Liberal State is in fact its own Church. In American, the State has absorbed and replaced the Church.
Liberalism is a complete religious faith. Although devoid of a deity (like Buddhism and Jainism) it nonetheless has its sacred figures, mythology, rites and, above all, morality. It not only has no need of the Church, but is in active competition with it. It can only tolerate a Church that is compliant with the Liberal agenda.
I support traditional religion, despite its unfriendliness to men like me, because it is one of the few remaining points of resistance to this Ecclesia Saecularis.
Today is March 25th, the date of the Annunciation. It is also Holy Week. Clash of the liturgical titans. In the Roman Church, Holy Week wins and the Annunciation is postponed until the Monday after the Easter Octave.
I remember a March 25th back around 1970 or so. It was Good Friday and the liturgy in the little community of brothers I was living with was pretty minimal. I was hungry for something more substantial, so I went off to the local Russian Orthodox church. I got plenty of substantial, but in that funny Orthodox way.
It seems that the Russians didn't resolve the liturgical clash; they combined the two feasts. So you had the strange experience of Jesus' being conceived in Mary's womb and dying on the cross in the same ceremony. The priest, in typical blunt and unsentimental Slavic pastoral style, unsmilingly told the people during his sermon not to call him and complain about it because it wasn't his fault and to call the bishop instead.
As I used to tell the friendly and always smiling Protestant pastors I knew in Toronto, when you have the True Faith and Real Sacraments, you don't have to be nice.
Maybe “civil rights” were about vengeance rather than equality all along. Maybe many whites have been lulled into tolerance, only to find that nonwhites interpret this as weakness instead."
In my Alternative Republic, without fear of the superstitious shibboleths that create the bizarre contradictions of our penal code, there'd be room for more imaginative forms of justice. Which could actually be more just than our default move of long-term warehousing.
A lot of attitudes toward things like capital punishment are about aesthetics, really. Would I rather be beheaded by a Saudi swordsman or fried in the chair in America? One is bloody, but very swift while the other is gruesome but no skin is visibly broken. One is public, the other private. From the point of view of the criminal, I'd take the sword. So much moral posturing is partly about messiness and public-ness.
PS. Reminds me of when my car was stolen by a group of young bruthas from Richmond and trashed. I had fantasies of them tied to large trees, with enthusiastic flogging.
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One of the things I like about the Harry Potter stories is that the female author does not idealize females.
In The Half-Blood Prince, Hermione and Harry's future wife Ginnie gang up on him to find out about the secret of his potions book. Frustrated female curiosity: the source of cosmic catastrophe in both orthdox and Gnostic creation stories.
They combine a sense of moral outrage, envy, boundary violation, accusation and then trickery and outright physical force to get what they want. It is part of the dishonesty of female privilege, the belief they have that they can provoke a male and suffer no consequences for it. Not my favorite female characteristic.
If two males ganged up on a female like this, well, you know.
It's to Rowling's credit that, despite all the highminded morals in the story, she is observant of human --and specifically female-- flaw.
The first porn film I ever saw was Sometime Sweet Susan, back in the 70's. In those days, you had to go to a theatre and buy a ticket. Having a co-conspirator gave me the guts to go in. (I will not tell you about my first visit to a gay porn theatre. After that experience, I'm surprised I didn't turn straight.)
The male star --and of course, he's the only one I remember-- was one Harry Reems. He died of cancer the other day, after a serendipitous porn career, fighting a federal indictment for conspiracy because of acting in the infamous Deep Throat, years of alcoholism, getting sober and married and having a career as a realtor in Utah.
Here's Harry as I first saw him, and still remember him.
As much as I respect and admire the Christian religion, especially its ancient and larger Apostolic branches of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, there are times when spokesmen for this faith just blab drivel, entirely forgetting that they are fallen men speaking to fallen man in a fallen world. This is especially so in the last half-century, when the Second Vatican Council took place at precisely the same time as the eruption of The Sixties and both got married together, producing what one old priest called The Church Effervescent.
I suspect that some day all the utopian pieties and sentimental overreaches of this Council and its followup will seem as too-strange-to-take-seriously as the pronouncements of late medieval Pope Boniface VIII: We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.
Pope Francis, laying out his program of confronting poverty, both spiritual and material, includes this kind of universal niceness drivel:
My wish is that the dialogue between us should help to build bridges connecting all people, in such a way that everyone can see in the other not an enemy, not a rival, but a brother or sister to be welcomed and embraced!
And the new Archbishop of Canterbury, in his recent enthronement ceremony --which included some appallingly embarrassing African dancers and all sorts of multiculti and feminist PC antics--
promised that
There is every possible reason for optimism about the future of Christian faith in our world and in this country...We are called to step out of the comfort of our own traditions and places, and go into the waves, reaching for the hand of Christ. Let us provoke each other to heed the call of Christ, to be clear in our declaration of Christ, committed in prayer to Christ, and we will see a world transformed.
Every possible reason for optimism about Christianity in utterly post and often vehemently anti-Christian Britain, plus, if they are good Christians, we will see a world transformed.
What planet do these guys live on? The stuff smells of the utopian hubris that drives the Liberal West, as if all of previous human history (to say nothing of a little reflection on our own flawed souls and our daily interactions with other homines sapientes) were just a bit of bother and if only we were all nicer to one another, the Millennium would be just around the corner.
My Blogger hit counter tells me that this past month I have had my all-time high number of visits, over 25,000.
One of the reasons is a sudden surge of interest in a post I did back in September 2011, enjoying the rude remarks of the then Prime Minister of Italy about the German Premier. Almost 5000.
And another one linking to a blog where a Black guy gives an unusual reason why he's afraid of big muscular Black Guys. Another 5000. (In that one, it must be the picture...)
Shows you what a high-class readership Ex Cathedra has.
"Liberalism speaks the language of individual freedom
in service of the growth of State paternalism."
Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind [1963]
(Although State maternalism is a better description of our Nanny.)
Requiring us to believe that we are nothing more than the results of untold aeons of savage apery, we are then commanded to live like angels.
Ex Cathedra, Who's The Monkey? [2012]
Why does it seem that every new "civil right"* discovered by the Liberal regime requires a policing bureaucracy to reduce the freedom (and increase the taxes) of other people not its direct beneficiaries?
Ex Cathedra, [Just Now]
* How often do you hear/read "[Fill-in-the-blank-cause] is the Civil Rights issue of our day." Of course, this means that every day will have one and it will never end.
I am --as a Five-- a natural fan of typologies. They map the soul. I like maps.
The emeritus and the present popes seem to be typological opposites.
Benedict was a contemplative introvert, an intellectual and an aesthete. His religion was about truth and beauty. As an introverted thinking type, his personality tended to look for places to hide in plain sight: inside books and encyclicals and lectures, and inside ancient ritual forms and structures. He related to people, both as individuals and crowds, by inviting them into these structures, both intellectual and aesthetic, where he was the host rather than the star. In charge, but personally muted.
Francis is an activist extravert, a devotionalist and a moralist. His religion is about love and good works. As an extraverted feeling type, his personality tends to look for places to assert itself in imaginative romances with both otherworldly and thisworldly beings and in spontaneous but morally oriented interactions with crowds and groups. In his interactions, he is always front and center as an ego, even when --or especially when-- enacting gestures of humility. By his "humble" dramatics he becomes the star of his show.
Ratzinger, though a diocesan priest, has a more Benedictine monastic style, as his choice of name indicated. Here it is the rhythm of the liturgy, the daily and ancient structure of images, gestures and ideas which shapes a man, slowly and over time, but within a fixed community that is withdrawn from the outside world.
Both styles create ironies and paradoxes. The interiority and military submission to the ideals of the Jesuit corps has created many very strong individual personalities. The withdrawal and communal submission to rule and ritual and work created centers of civilization around communities where hardly anyone stood out but the abbot, but around which towns and cities grew up.
In order to be eligible for ordination to the priesthood of the Church of Rome, you have to be a Roman Catholic. Gender aside, I doubt that you'd find more than a handful of priesthood-hungry wymyns who'd actually qualify*. They bring with them --as all female clergy do-- the Liberal virus which infects them and then it just continues its work dismantling the now captive host. It's basically a matter of pacifists trying to join the army cause that's where the power and prestige lie.
They wanna wear the uniform, but refuse to fight.
*The excommunicated ex-priest and martyr ---hmmm, sounds familiar--- who wrote this turgid bit of bathos quotes with approval Garry Wills utterly Protestant new book, which completely rejects the priesthood. What is it with these people? They are the anti-Groucho Marxists, who only want to belong to clubs that would not have them as members.
Despite the fact that I have lived a pretty post-modern life, I have no affection for PoMo as a philosophy or attitude. Stephen Hicks said all that needs to be said about it: The failure of epistemology made post-modernism possible; the failure of socialism made post-modernism necessary. It is simply the subversive epistemological strategy of the anti-Western Left. But one of its not-stupid insights is that phenomena assumed by rhetoric to be unitary are usually far more fragmentary.
Huh? An example. We speak of "homosexuality" as if it were One Thing, when, on close inspection, there is a good case to be made for speaking plurally of "homosexualities," as the PoMo's like to do. Obsessively.On one level, this is a banal observation, but like most banal observations, it can be helpful in the right situation.
Take G-Baby and the GayBros. Although the sexual behaviors they might engage in would likely be quite similar, I can't imagine that they would be experiencing these things in similar ways. They are both homosexual, but what leaps out at me, at least, are their differences, not their sameness.
I have come more and more to the conclusion that in the real world, homosexuality is not just about erotic attraction, sexual object orientation, but also about gender...well, here I have to digress.
I distinguish between gender identity and gender identification. People with gender identity issues come under the rubric of trans, the notion that you can have the body of one sex but disidentify so strongly with it that you think of yourself as belonging to the opposite sex. If the persistence of drag in gay life is any indication, this condition may also be situational and transitory. Gender identification has to do with which gender you find resonance and empathy with. You can be clear that you are a male, but still feel vastly more comfortable with the feminine than with the masculine. That is gender identification. In gender identity, you identify as; in gender identification, you identify not as, but with. It's a real but a fine distinction. In ordinary life, for men especially, identifying too much with the opposite sex will have other people identifying you as the opposite sex. This dynamic produces the primal gay wound, I suspect: rejected from the male tribe, being held in contempt by the very object of your love and desire.
The disastrous, but unfortunately logical inclusion of the T in what used to be "the gay community" indicates a psychological truth that I have both recognized and resisted: that along with sexual object attraction, opposite gender identification is --for most gays-- an equally basic issue. The ham-fisted and often gruesome activities of the reparative therapy crowd, like so many ham-fisted and gruesome activities, contains a kernel of truth. Their whole approach is based on getting gays to adapt to classical/typical gender roles. Basically, masculinizing them.
This, I suspect, replicates psychologically a mistake made by the physical sciences back in the day, when it was hoped that giving testosterone shots to homos would make them be attracted to girls. Well, of course all it did was make them attracted to more boys more often!
I can tell that I'm rambling. For now, all I want to say is that both sexual desire and gender identification are part of the homosexual soul's work. And a huge part of how the other 98% of the world reacts to us.
Having long admired Scott Wirth's contribution to Samesex Love and the Path to Wholeness, describing the circularity of homosexual male development, I should have been less resistant. But sometimes even Ex Cathedra's psyche gets in the way of his magisterial mind.
all suffer from a comment problem. The commentors are all keeping an eye on each other for "uncharitable" language or policing any other form of un-niceness or "rash judgment". Like a bunch of old religiously correct hens.
I used to hate that when I was working in the Church. All the tiptoeing and beveling and qualifying. Of course, these pious people despised each other heartily, as all members of tribes do.
I sometimes used to enjoy just being blunt and watching the hens jump.
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Today is the Vernal Equinox. Winter is over. The first Full Moon of Spring will take place a week from now, March 27th. The Sunday which follows that will therefore, as established by the Council of Nicea in 325 AD, be Easter.
The GOP has just put out a report on why it lost in 2012 and how to chart a way forward. Guess what it doesn't talk about.
Mr Matt Parrot opines:
Imagine for a moment an Indian chief releasing a statement that given the large number of White settlers flooding into the region, he has decided to place the interests of these settlers over the interests of his tribesmen, and actively replace his tribesmen with settlers in the prominent roles within the tribe. This chief would be a traitor, would he not? Of course, contemporary White tribes are understood to be the only tribes which have no legitimate group interests, no right to a voice, and no right to resist their displacement and replacement. Our chiefs are the only chiefs who fight over which one of them is most thoroughly and effectively betraying his tribe.
While minorities are jockeying for better seats on the bus, we’re busy throwing each other under the bus.
Seeing a trailer for The Bible series reminds me of what any barroom atheist knows, that the God of the "Good Book" is brutal. Far from "respecting the inherent dignity of the human person and human rights", he brooks no opposition and has his very bloody way whenever it suits him.
Just two examples in the episode make the point clear. First, Joshua and the Israelites attack the people of Jericho, who had done them no harm, but merely stood in their way as they invade the land God promised them (without consulting the current inhabitants). With the exception of the traitorous prostitute Rahab, they put the entire town to the sword. Second, when newly-made King Saul disobeys Prophet Samuel's divine command of total genocide (and animalcide) against the Amalekites, he replaces him with David.
(Kinda makes me think of Allah...)
What would he make of Pope Francis?
In this day and age, the Deity of the Scriptures would be up on charges at The Hague for war crimes against humanity.
I'm not sayin' who's wrong and who's right, God or enlightened humanism. I'm just sayin'.
God our Father and Mother Nature have created the conditions within which we must live. And a lot of them are tough. Gauzy visions of Gaia and Our Loving Father In Heaven are hard to jibe with the slaughterhouse on which we actually travel through space.
In Jack Donovan's lucidly archetypal book on the masculine, The Way of Men, he asserts that the nucleus of masculinity is The Gang. A group of men, organized, who stake and hold a turf. It's the nucleus of the State. Seems pretty accurate to me.
And is it not a truth of common sense that if you do not defend your turf, someone else will take it?
Here's my dark thought: there are not enough race riots.
One example of many possible. When I read stories, and see videos, of dark-skinned aliens in England beating up on native White British kids, what I do not see are mobs of White British men taking disproportionate revenge. Or even gangs of White British kids. And that is sad. Because it tells the Asian and African thugs that they can carry on abusing the English, without real consequence.
How horrible of you to think that, much less say it, Ex Cathedra!
Hey, I didn't make the rules:
If you do not defend your turf, someone else will take it.
Viewed some of the Pope's installation/inauguration ceremony. A plainer aesthetic. I have no beef at all with pomp and circumstance, but I am glad to see the lace replaced by linen. And if the high stovepipe mitres are gone, that would be nice, too. He apparently never sings any of the liturgy, all recitation. Blah.
My skeptical opinion of Papa Francesco remains: a lot of pious devotionalism linked to a lot of pious moralism. And my allergy to "humble and simple" remains as well. Every time he does something out of the ordinary, "humbly and simply", he draws attention to himself. That's how those folks roll. Populist cute. And after he's broken this and that and this and that tradition, etc. what then? Boring. Remember all that humble papal kissing of the tarmack back in the day? Or when Paul VI sold his triple tiara? No, I thought not.
Plus we have the now de rigueur reaching out in friendship to everyone, blah, blah. This is not Christianity, especially not Catholicism. It is what Liberalism requires of religion as price for its polite toleration by its cultured despisers. I am especially unimpressed by breathless hopes that "better relations with Islam" will come with the new guy. That, my friends, is a distinctly dhimmi one-way street.
Looks like there's more evidence that Global Warming, one of the pillars of the Liberal faith, may be going the way of the dinosaurs.
Speaking of which, the GOP did a post-mortem on their loss of 2012. I think they're past hope. Ms Coulter might agree. The 60% of Whites who gave Romney 90% of his votes are the only constituency who give a faint damn about non-Liberal policies. Our numbers are shrinking. And most importantly, we have allowed ourselves to be completely silenced as a racial group.
On that front, the Afro mayor of Afro Philadelphia responded to an article that said Whites in his town were afraid to speak out and tell the truth about race by calling for a legal crackdown on the magazine that printed the story. It's like the Muslims who rioted and killed because Benedict said they were violent. Do these people have no sense of irony?
An American and a Frenchman get gay-married in Vancouver. The American lose his job there and his visa, so he'd have to come back to the US and his French partner would have to go...where?
So he hangs himself. And then the French guy kills himself.
And it's America's fault for not having gay marriage? Why not France's? Or Canada's immigration laws?
First of all, America is chock full of illegal immigrants, all over the fucking place. Tens of millions of 'em. And if you live in San Francisco, even the police will never bother you about it. Official policy.
Is your only option legal status or killing yourself?
The government's anti-discrimination laws allow it to determine things like where you must send your child to (public) school and to whom you must sell your house.
What?
No. It only forbids you from refusing to sell your house to someone because you don't like their color or ethnicity.
But my question is, if they can do that, why can't they eventually require you to sell it to someone precisely because of their color or ethnicity?
If they forbid you from exercising your free choice in selling what you own, in order to prevent segregated neighborhoods, why can't they force you to sell it to certain people, in order to achieve integrated neighborhoods?
And don't tell me that's just crazy and it'll never happen. Look around.
Whatever the legal pathway, is it not perfectly congruent with the current trajectory?
Remember, socialism comes in two flavors. Confiscatory socialism takes ownership of things that once were in private hands. Regulatory socialism leaves the ownership in private hands but so tightly regulates those hands that all they can really do is sign the check to the tax man.
I accept the scientific consensus that there are real and consequential (racial) differences in the average intelligence, but a caveat is necessary: There is no human as willfully, malignantly, and self-destructively stupid as a White person in the throes of a moral panic.
I only caught a few minutes of this series, by accident. And guess what? It was the Sodom and Gomorrah story. A trailer shows Samson. Black African. Ok, I get it. Jesus.
Lots of fiddling with the text, so I was uninterested in seeing any more of it.
A well-known Catholic blogress responded to complaints that Pope Francis, when Archbishop of Buenos Aires, said hurtful things about gays. He called gay marriage a deceit of the Father of Lies.
This blogress then shifted to the phrase "intrinsically disordered", which is how the Church sees homosexuality. What would it feel like to be "intrinsically disordered?" Not nice. Are these phrases hurtful?
Then she realized that since she is a bit of a fattie with a food problem, she, too, is "intrinsically disordered." Cool, no? So it's not so bad after all. I guess, says her adipose self, we're all kinda "intrinsically disordered" about something. Actually, comforting. So "same-sex attracted" Catholics really should be ok with it.
Sigh.
You're wrong, Catholic blogress. When the Church tells gays that we are "intrinsically disordered", it does not recommend that we cut back on the gay sex a bit and moderate that man-on-man action so that we lose the weight of sinfulness. It tells us not to eat.
At all. Ever.
See the diff, Ms. Lane Bryant?
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PS. I understand the rationale for the Catholic rejection of homosexuality. It's a moral system whose priority is the protection and promotion of marriage and family. Anything that does not contribute to that is out of bounds. Perfectly understandable.
But what pisses me off is when they minimize what it means for a Catholic with "same-sex attraction" as their only sexual orientation. Because for most people, sexual activity is very likely to be part of personal love. So having an "intrinsically disordered" eros not only means no sex, it means no love. Yeah, friendship, blah, blah. You know what I mean.
The message to homosexual people is clear and it is damning: your deepest desire for full communion with another beloved person is sick. How can that not infect your entire sense of self?
So. I get the doctrine. Fine. But what pisses me off is when they make believe it's not a massive blow to the soul to have someone believe that about themselves.
It's not dieting, Ms. Culona Inchiavabile. It's starvation.
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There are so many stupid mistakes in the BBC Father Brown series. Just plain lazy and stupid. I get to wondering if it isn't conscious. You get a young woman and a Turk to write it...what do you expect?
A FB friend linked to CBS 60 Minutes piece on the American nuns and their problem with Rome. My previous critique stands. They never answer the charges directly. It's all playing the victim and name-calling ("the inquisition) and sloganeering ("a place at the table") and decoying and avoiding the issue, distracting with tu quoque and ad hominem and prevarication...Jeez, all coming down to a great example of why they should not be granted any more power than they have already. A stereotype of how women argue. Can't answer a simple question. And they expect the Church of Rome to take them into its priesthood?
A Trojan (night)mare.
PS. Even reliably leftliberal religion writer Reb Jeffrey Weiss found the cheap one-sidedness too much to take.
Much is being made of the new Pope's "humility and simplicity", seen in his shoes and his name and his pronouncements, as well as his bus-riding history in Argentina and glad-handing with parishioners . Having had twenty years of living with the occasional "humble" and "simple" monk, Ex Cathedra is suspicious of these things.
In matters of religion and authority, humility can be a tactic. Take Christ himself, for example.
At the Last Supper, in St John's version, he undertakes what is normally the work of a servant or slave, to wash the feet of the guests. In our culture, it is analogous to being a shoe shine boy.
It's a big deal, and St Peter, true to form, resists and makes a fuss. It is very telling, though, that when Peter refuses to have Jesus do this for him, out of humility, the humble-gesture-making Jesus asserts his authority and tells him to either submit to the act or get out.
And then, when he's finished using his authority to force his disciples to submit to his act of humility --do you catch the irony ther?-- he returns to his place as their "Lord and Master." Having never, except in gesture, left it. True, he is on his way to his death, but that, too was his choice, not theirs. His submission to God, never to them.
This was not at all out of character. What liberal lovers of Jesus The Servant always forget is that the Jesus of the Gospels never submitted to any other authority than his own sense of God's authority. Not once. He never consulted or sought consensus. He had no peers, no equals. None. And even in reflecting on his lowly gesture of foot-washing, he reminds the apostles that he is their "Lord and Master." This makes Jesus, IMHO, a very iffy model of service and humility for ordinary mortals. Similarly with popes.
Here we have the paradox of men of authority enacting momentary gestures of humility, but certainly not abdicating their place in the hierarchy. On the contrary, it is only their unquestioned authority, their higher rank in the range of dominance, that makes these gestures at all interesting. For them, acting humbly is a free choice, not an enforced condition. And so, while momentarily mimicking the role of a lower order, they actually re-enforce their higher place.
A Pope riding the bus is only interesting because that's not what Popes do. But if riding the bus becomes the regular thing, it loses all its interest.
Just a slob like one of us Just a stranger on the bus Trying to make his way home
So these touching gestures are all, in the end, tactics of power.
I'm not saying it's wrong. Not at all. I'm saying that it's not as simple as portrayed.
As I said, having lived for two decades among men who supposedly valued humility and simplicity, I am skeptical.
Liberals are all gushy and gooey about Pope Francis right now. Gosh, he’s the Pope of the poor! That means he is going to dismantle everything that John Paul II and Benedict XVI did, those meanies. They somehow manage to imagine that not putting on a mozzetta is the moral equivalent of donning sack cloth and a piece of twine as a belt. Wearing black shoes is the equivalent of wearing tattered sandals. Just like St. Francis of Assisi, right? He’s going to ratchet down all the high liturgy. How wonderful after these horrible years of gold and lace. Hopefully he’ll soon just wear a little wooden cross around his neck and maybe say Mass on a card-table set up in the middle of the Via della Conciliazione. Then he’ll walk down the Tiber River to the card-board box he sleeps in under the Milvian Bridge.
Nope. Pretty soon they are going to see that Pope Francis is hard core when it comes to Catholic teachings.
