tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38413397.post164589762407224476..comments2023-12-19T15:10:02.866-08:00Comments on ex cathedra: Minor quirk or telling symptomUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38413397.post-42703416109317452962011-12-04T13:45:58.084-08:002011-12-04T13:45:58.084-08:00Our cruelty instincts are more sublime too. Italia...Our cruelty instincts are more sublime too. Italians would never put their head of state on trial and inquisition him about his sexual doings. That sort of thing takes guts and tremendous acting skills. Kenneth Starr deserved an Oscar, surely. ... Ultimately, the Russians never had a chance against us. How could the spectating Gods prefer their clumsy antics to ours? ... If we do destroy our system and China replaces us in 'hegemony,' the globalized world will be a lot more boring.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38413397.post-6430816001310992342011-12-04T13:42:03.990-08:002011-12-04T13:42:03.990-08:00P.S. Machiavelli observed that Italy was dominated...P.S. Machiavelli observed that Italy was dominated by prelates who look'd like prelates but thought and acted like mafiosi.<br /><br />The Anglo-Saxons drew the conclusion: think like a mafiosi but look like a Methodist. And who dominated India and Africa etc? The Italians or the naive Anglo-Saxons?<br /><br />Admittedly, this appearance system can work only if "society" and "church" continue to seem to believe in morality, to work for social change etc. But church and society are still committed to this. ...<br /><br />After WW2, Eleanor Roosevelt was just the right personage and pretense to follow the slaughter, the bombings, the ruin (including the halt of the lofity internationalist red army in their advance, in order to permit the Nazis to deal properly with the Warsaw uprising). What were Church and Society to say? »Let's put an honest Pope Alexander 6 type of guy in charge of the new Europe?« ... Another try at Christian Democracy: Conrad Adenauer -- devoted Catholic, progressive etc etc, more or less openly mock'd eastern Germany as "Asia." ... Recently the Nobel committee gave their idealism-onward prize according to their liking of the slogan "Hope We Can Believe In," rather than hurtful "neo-conservative" honesty about power. ...Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38413397.post-83536546232817553742011-12-04T13:30:40.561-08:002011-12-04T13:30:40.561-08:001. Our duplicity in such apparent openness outmano...1. Our duplicity in such apparent openness outmanoeuvred the Italians' simplistic duplicity for world rule. They could not learn from their Machiavelli what he try'd to teach them: a mafioso can win this or that street fight, but it's the set of appearances call'd Boy Scouts, Moral Rearmament, the League of Women Voters, the Peace Corps, who dominate the world.<br /><br />2. Christianity's opposition to or rather "strictures on" same-sex love may have been inherited not only from Judaism but also from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. ... But the decisive consideration may have been "class": if Christianity was to grow in the moral element of society, it could not seem to enthuse for anything fancy, which included Ouranian love. Paul was not especially successful in Athens (Acts 17), unless by offering the 'cultural elite' the hint that they could find the boredom-relief they needed by following and superintending the innovations of the vulgus in religiosity. Ordinary vulgar paganism had totally burnt out if we may believe an altar to the unknown God in Athens. The previous chapter on pagan worship in collision with Paul's ministry shows that the pagan devotees had abandon'd religion and began to be worry'd by Paul's intrusion only when their livelihood became endanger'd. ...<br /><br />P.S. Utterly low class 'same sex' things occur: Xenophon's Symposium allows that vulgar Aphrodite includes this. But you can expect zilch from it as a vehicle for social change or whatnot, no more than you can get any renewal impetus from hetero pornography appetites -- except by repression or sublimation. ... Our idealists can't even get low-class gay men, marry'd [sc to women] or not, to recognize that the label MSM on health warnings applies to them, let alone "gay" or "LGBT."<br /><br />When it comes to "social change," then, the necessary class is the middle-class. Aristos contributed a few exceptional geniuses to Christianity. Peasants and proles contributed a few geniuses too, but always this contribution involved ascending up to middle-class ways.<br /><br />The era of desublimation isn't ultimately any different. The activism for same-sex marriage and ordination etc has been thoroughly middle-class and reformist. The "sex positive" activism has also been absurdly ponderous and moralizing. I mean, Cripes, what sort of an alienation from sensuality is imply'd when "sex positive" occurs to you as a motto. Gay Pride parades are enjoy'd by one sort of person, while a totally other sort of person does journalism insisting that we mustn't be judgemental, in middle-class obedience to an ancient critic of hypocritial pharisees. (If you aren't totally perfect, you mayn't condemn anyone except white male republican creationist fundamentalists.)<br /><br />Even when the same person both enjoys a desublimation gay pride parade and writes reformist idealizing journalism (that it's simply shocking that the mayor of Toronto wouldn't attend and affirm the gay pride parade this summer!), he does so in a different compartment of his psyche -- the middle-class compartment.<br /><br />And why should we expect anything different? Desublimation was devised by an academic as an agenda for journalistic-ecclesiastical labouring in our civilization, not as a way really to have polymorphous sexfun.<br /><br />If you need to have an academic tell you to be sex positive, you wouldn't know a good time if it knock'd you out cold, bound your hands and feet and toss'd you in a small tool shed to perish. (if I may use a line from Roz Chast).Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com