Back from the shop

The keyboard works. But now the colors are doing their shake and shimmer distortion dance. So my laptop is back...and not quite. I'll give it a chance overnight to heal itself, like last time.

Not having internet access or email has helped me honor my Lenten desire to avoid news that brings out my dark side. Not entirely however..the net is the occasion, not the cause. The cause is the world. Or me.

Lenten withdrawal

One of the other criteria for things I am trying to give up for Lent, along with what causes aneurism or provokes murderous fantasies, are items that make me sympathetic to secession. Such as items which include the word Michelle.

When liberals get fed up, as when GWB was elected, they often fantasize about leaving America for Canada or Europe. US conservatives have nowhere to go. So they fantasize about secession.

Some days I understand why.

PS I used the virtual keyboard in the Windows disabled access package to type this.

Now, off to the laptop shop til who knows when.

Mo e techno p oblems

Laptop to go to shop this A.M.

Suddenl some of the ke s on the ke boa d will not wo k.

Two lette s and half of the nume als.

It's alwa s effin sumthing.

In the Lenten spirit

of avoiding things that upset me, here's some soothing and moving images:

Karan Singh Grover, 32, Indian TV and film actor. Damn, the kid's got shoulders.

Epistemically challenged

...ontologically mean and morally corrupt." In these or similar words, Gnostic elucidator Cyril O'Regan describes the state of the human race.

Wm Blake's Urizen

I plowed through his two books on Gnosticism several years ago. And I mean plowed through. A brilliant guy, but a with the style of an OCD paranoid lawyer. He illuminated the Gnostic mind and project uniquely well, with his outline of the Valentinian narrative grammar*. But he held to the orthodox faith and charged Gnostics with, among other things, trespassing the bounds of the human condition. Fair enough, a Gnostic would plead guilty.

But O'Regan's sense of the limits of man rings true: our grasp of the world, while real, is limited; we find our small selves within an unimaginably large universe not of our making; and our track record for behaving well is dismal indeed. So a little humility is called for, says O'R.

What is true of the race is true of the individual. Yes, even of the Gnostic sympathizer, Ex Cathedra.

I never liked Lent, the 40-day fasting liturgical season before Easter that we are now in. I guess part of it was living in meterological climes back East and North, where the weather was already depressing enough without a season of self-flagellation laid on top of it.

Purple-covered images in the later stages of Lent

Nowadays, with my minimal and nominal practice of it, if I think of it as going into short-term therapy, it's not so bad. Especially with the mild San Francisco winters, which are really more like East Coast autumns, but with greenery all around.






__________________________

*For those of you with the interest and stomach for it, this clip from my Amazon review:

The familiar orthodox narrative is of a self-sufficient but communitarian Deity (Father, Son and Spirit) who creates a variegated universe out of love and whose special human creation freely turns on this love to choose willful selfishness; the divine Son becomes incarnate, and by his obedience and sacrificial death restores the possibility of original communion, through the community of the Church and with the communitarian Deity.

The Valentinian narrative describes a self-sufficient communitarian divine world of many variegated characters, where one of them likewise chooses wilfulness for the sake of knowledge and thus falls from this communion into a space of alienation and ignorance, indirectly creating the universe of matter and psyche and entrapping parts of his/herself therein. An envoy from the divine world enters this universe to awaken the entrapped and fragmented divinities caught therein (humans) and this self-knowledge restores them to their original home.

In the orthodox narrative, God becomes man out of love, so that men might become gods by grace. In the Gnostic narrative, God becomes man out of need, so that men might remember by grace that they are gods by nature. Salvation by grace, faith and works vs salvation by nature, knowledge and identity.

O'Regan sees this second narrative, using characters and material from the Bible, as a parasitic deformation, a spiritual pathology, where the proper estate of man as an ontologically inferior, morally weak and epistemically challenged creature is overblown into a self-aggrandizement based on special knowledge of the divine causes of the state of the universe.

Dying orders of lefty nuns

Five shrinking orders of Dominican sisters, aka EcoFeminist Democrats, are dressing up their need to pool their aging resources with the verbiage of "Committed Collaboration". The girls are really good at this kind of talk, as I have noted before. They live in a linguistic bubble of bloviation where ordinary English seems a dream. Electing one of them as prioress of their Leadership Team --they love that-- they parenthetically explained that prioress means "first among equals". Uh, no. Prioress, like Prior, means simply First. The girls, good feminists, are terrified of power-over.

This team gave shape and form to a process for committed collaboration. They identified groups already in collaboration, shared calendars of congregational events, nurtured the relationships that had been developing among sisters and associates by arranging gatherings, launched a grant application process for collaborative pilot projects, and initiated a search for a Promoter of Collaboration for the five congregations.

Ah, giving shape, identifying, sharing, nurturing, launching, initiating...They must have read How To Beef Up Your Resume and Mission Statement.

They found their Promoter and installed her:

The day began in the new office at the motherhouse, with the sisters standing together and blessing the five directions, and gifting Mary Ellen with congregational logos to decorate the new office.

In case you think that there are four directions, you silly Eurocentrist, China has five. These girls are as multicultural as Jesus was. (Oh, wait. Unless they approached him, he never worked with Gentiles. And only had male apostles. Sorry.)

Aaaand, since Kate Winslett got a Golden Globe for Mildred Pierce and part of the film was shot in that very office, --how cool-- Mary Ellen, Golden Among Equals, got her own little prize. Now that is what I call "sanctifying the culture."

Of course these Speak Truth To Power gals neglect to mention that they are forced into doing this because they are getting old, no one is joining and their numbers and resources are dwindling. That would be too plain and simple to admit. It's all dressed up as a New Initiative.

I look forward to their Committed Collaboration Cemetery Conference in a few years: "As a committed sign of unity in collaborative mission, all the Sisters will now be launched into burial in nurturing Mother Gaia at single and holistic cemetery site, which also serves as part of our Sustainable Living Earth Center for eco-justice and anti-racist knitting initiatives. The Passed-On Sisters look forward to diverse and inclusive ministries in the Next World, supporting the Damned in their efforts for peace and justice against the oppression of the Male-Supremacist God."

The moral lenses of the Sixties generation: cynical and sentimental

Sentimentality was cynicism’s other side. Both attitudes dehumanize people by turning them into caricatures, but whereas the caricatures of the cynic generate hatred and contempt, the caricatures of the sentimentalist provoke tears. Both attributes are equally distant from the real world, and both are corruptly self-conscious. The cynic is proud of his acumen in not being taken in by the world, while the sentimentalist regards his tears as proof of a compassionate sensibility. Put the two attitudes together and you have melodrama: quite a distance from reality, indeed, but better perhaps than either attitude by itself. The politics of the liberal mind is a melodrama of oppressors and victims.

...

Today, the successors of those generous souls who agitated
for giving money to the Third World are agitating for the “forgiveness” of the
resulting debts that now hang heavily around the necks of the peoples of those
countries. This is a campaign which suggests one more possible definition of the
liberal mind—as a boundless enthusiasm for spending other people’s money.

But the logical point comes back to the basic unreality of the liberal mind: namely, a refusal to think in terms of real human beings. Instead, the generic man of liberal thought is like a window dresser’s dummy—merely a vehicle for provoking hatred or tears.
As the liberal mind has diffused itself through modern society, our understanding of
real people engaged in real politics has weakened. Whole classes of people have been
lost to an image of martyrdom.

Kenneth Minogue
1963

Liberalism described

The liberalism that I mention here, with its synonym adjective progressive, means the following:

Under the overriding rubric of
equality for all,
a value that is deemed beyond criticism,
Liberalism's goal
is to constantly increase
the status, the wealth and the power
of specially designated subjacent groups
--to be named as victims--
at the expense of
and
to the detriment of
the status, the wealth and the power
of specially designated successful groups
--to be named as oppressors.--

Liberalism's methods
are

the continual expansion 

of the State's coercive power of regulation and taxation,

and the use of various forms of socio-cultural control:

news media, entertainment, education, language.

It is an egalitarian narrative of revenge-by-replacement, a punitive Manichean melodrama of victimization and oppression. The goal, while preached as equality and non-discrimination, is actually to replace one system of dominance with another. Liberalism is therefore revolutionary, but by increments in State power and cultural change.

While preaching open-mindedness and tolerance, it actually requires Borg-like dogmatism and total compliance, regardless of the claims of fact or outcome. It bears all the marks of a crypto-religious faith and can be usefully understood as a toxically degraded form of Western Christianity.

Liberalism's synonym is progressive because it is continuous and has no internal brake. Once a problem has been addressed, others will follow it. There are always new problems for the Liberal State and Culture to "solve."

All Liberal programs and agendas eventually require more State regulation and more taxation. It is their answer to everything. Even where the first step appears to be a removal of barriers or disliked laws, the second step is always a forest of supporting laws and regulations designed to protect whatever has just been "liberated."

Contemporary Liberalism is a form of zero-sum Gramscian cultural Marxism in that it aims for an expansionist dictatorship of seven interlocking "proletariats" consisting of racial, gender, economic, and ideological groups which will completely replace any traditionally successful or powerful (but always non-Liberal) groups.

The victim groups, because they are considered to be victims lacking power, have unlimited moral capital; the successful groups, because they are considered oppressors holding power, have no moral capital at all. Liberals thus have no defense against the desires of victims (codes as "needs" or "rights"), whatever they may be.

The currency and coin of the realm of Liberalism is perceived moral superiority. This is always the real desire.

Eg, in any conflict between Blacks and Whites, Blacks are always the morally righteous victims and the Whites the morally bankrupt oppressors. For example, the strong Leftist belief that Blacks can't be "racist", only Whites can.

The Seven Pillars
or Seven-Spoked Wheel of Liberalism

Multiculturalism targets Whites.
Feminism targets Men.
Redistributionism targets wealth creators, aka Capitalists.

Pacifism targets Male Power-as-Violence.
Secularism targets traditional Christianity.
Transnationalism targets the (Western/American) Nation-State.
Environmentalism targets the Western Consumer.

The unprecedented bile directed against George W Bush can be explained by the fact that he embodied everything that this seven-fold ideology loathes.

Various subset ideologies and victim groups exist, of course, but I think they can usually be subsumed under one or more of these seven, the first three of which are the classics:

Race, Gender, Class.

LGBTism is a subset which combines feminist and multicultural themes, along with a hefty dose of secularism. The Animal Rights people are environmentalists: non-human nature comes first. ProPalestinian Israel-hatred is not about religion but about multiculturalism and transnationalism. Etc.

The most bizarre characteristic of liberalism, on the surface, is its supportive, exculpatory and admiring attitude toward Islam*, a religion characterized by divinely sanctioned violence, strong restrictions on women, primitive homophobia, autocracy and theocracy, and economic habits making for huge distinctions between the few rich and the many poor. But it is anti-Western (as is liberalism, "the ideology of Western suicide") and even though it is a religion, it is a Third World faith and so liberals have coded it as a Non-White race and so it has all the multicultural rights and privileges of People of Color. "Islamophobia" is almost always called "racist." Liberals live in constant vigilance against the spectre of a White Male American Christian Capitalist Police-State, a Republic of Gilead, while the Islamic Republic of Anywhere more than fits that bill, but is utterly ignored as any kind of threat.

*Now that I think of it, Hitler's Nazis and Stalin's Communists had a period of non-aggression and cooperation, too. So it's not unprecedented.

Fake independence

When I really started thinking about economics, I happened on the question: Who creates wealth? And I realized that I have never created any in my life. I move around --for services rendered-- the wealth that others create. Earning a living is not the same as creating the environment in which people can earn a living. It's sorta like the difference between having money and having cash in your pocket.

An anti-feminist blog I recently found has now gone private. But I have used Google's cache to find a way in. This set of blunt thoughts from the author about women and men, wealth and independence.

Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain

The feminist movement is a giant ponzi scheme, which never generates its own wealth or culture, but constantly steals from others lower down. The women at the top are either the lawyers, professors, and government workers, or the biggest victims. Victimhood buys its own status. The ones paying in are forced to - the men with alimony and child support around their necks; and men who pay taxes.

The so-called liberation of women was built off of the backs of men. Without men, empowered females have nothing. Government cutbacks prove this. Women are the first to suffer from government cutbacks, a line which seeks to show women as victims. What it really shows is how men have for so long been forced to foot the bill of female liberation. Men get to work the hot, uncomfortable or dangerous jobs (or live in polluted Asia to avoid the minefield of feminist culture) while women seek air conditioned comfort. All those HR jobs are provided by men who are doing the real producing, in other words.

The New York Times' Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain* is one of those articles that says the above without meaning to say it. That women bear the brunt of austerity means that men bear the brunt of taxpaying and receive few government services in return. Men are sidelined.

Austerity measures will bring something of a better balance to society. Take day care, for example. Why is the government doing the mother's job? Why do women believe the feminist propaganda that women's work, in the home, is inferior to being a banker or a professor? Let men do those jobs so that women can stay at home and be proper mothers. The article offers typical womanist victimology:

“It would just be like losing a right arm,” she said. “I’d have to drop that one day a week, just to be able to be at home with Joshua,” her 2-year-old. 

OMG lady, you mean you'd have to stay at home and be a mother? How outrageous! What a victim you are!

Incidentally, if women are so empowered, why do they become such pathetic weakling victims the moment the government pulls the plug on a program? Is it real empowerment if you're so utterly dependent on something else? Isn't that more of a parent-child relationship? Aren't women, so completely government dependent, simply being child-like?

The modern woman moans and groans when heavily-indebted and heavily-taxing governments start to pull back from places to which they never should have gone:

Manchester, where Ms. Bradshaw, her partner, Lee Mellor, and their rambunctious blond boys live in a neighborhood of worn brown row houses, announced last month it was shutting its day care centers, which serve 800 children.

Like many cities and institutions around Britain, Manchester is searching for savings to close the gap created by the national government’s withdrawal of £3.5 billion, or about $5.6 billion, in support to localities this year, a drop of nearly 12 percent under Prime Minister David Cameron’s tough austerity program. Billions of pounds more are to vanish by 2015.

Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, has also lifted a requirement that the municipal authorities fund and operate Sure Start children’s centers, which offer services including prenatal checkups, breast-feeding support and day care. Their creation was a flagship achievement of the Labour government of the former prime minister Tony Blair; many strapped local councils are now closing the centers or scaling them back. 

Here we see Mr. Cameron being made out to be the bad guy, just like daddy is bad when he says no to the children and their requests. People - women above all - have defined their lives a little too closely to the government, and have refused to become independent. This is part of the lack of responsibility that has been drilled into women.

Manchester is broke. Britain is broke. The West is broke. Largely because feminism wanted to build some false utopia, where women could play cowgirl and empowered raunch bitch with no responsibility. In fact, the party lasted a lot shorter than I would have predicted. Maybe this is just a speed-bump on the road to greater skankiness.

The following words can only come out of a culture that is thoroughly Marxist and thoroughly white knight, as, again without meaning to, it shows just how spoiled women are:

As Britain shaves public services and benefits, advocates contend that women bear more than their fair share of the pain.

“The idea that what we should be doing is rolling back the state, it has really important implications for women,” said Professor Sue Himmelweit, an economist and policy coordinator of the Women’s Budget Group, an advocacy group. “Women lose particularly from public sector cuts. First of all, they lose their jobs.”

Women account for two-thirds of employees in the public sector, where the government’s budget monitor says 710,000 jobs are to disappear. They rely more heavily than men on public services and financial assistance and are expected to lose 70 percent of the £18 billion being cut from benefits like housing support and tax credits for the working poor, says the Fawcett Society, a group pushing for greater gender equality.

Because they are poorer and live longer than men, women will be disproportionately affected by reductions in services to the elderly. 

The last bit, whining about women's longer lives, is a Hillary Clinton-type comment ("The greatest sufferers of war are the women because they lose their men.") Rather than looking at the gigantic elephant in the room called Men live fewer years than women, those with an opinion just spin women live longer than men into the old entitlement machine. Women are victims because they live longer than men. Their longer lives entitle them to more money - from men through the state. 

And further up in the block quote, it is noted that women "bear more than their fair share of the pain." Isn't that because women have all along been receiving more than fair ? Isn't it because feminists have used the government to entitle women off of the backs and hard work of men? Isn't it a bit of justice that women should suffer cutbacks? This is the sort of princess thinking that is destroying our society. Daddy always gives me a new car for my birthday. Poor me. This year, I get a miserable new bicycle and a Louis Vuitton. I hate daddy!

But despite all that foot-stomping and temper-tantrumming, the following words from the article really take the cake:

 “I’m not going to be as independent when I’m older,” she said. “It’s almost like we’re going back, women are becoming more dependent on men now.”

Her co-worker Teresa Angeletta, 53, sees progress slipping away.

“It’s like when my mum would wait for my dad — he’d come home with his wages and put them on the table,” she recalled. “She didn’t have money of her own.”

How were these women ever independent? As the cutbacks show, they never were, but had simply changed whom they depended on. Or had they: Weren't these women all these years simply dependent on male taxes? Instead of daddy coming home and laying his wage directly on the kitchen table, the government did it, grabbing money from men. Women still didn't have their own wealth.

Progress slipping away: How was grabbing tax from men to give to entitled princesses ever progress?

Recap: Women in the above article complain that they aren't receiving such a gigantic bigger share from the government than men anymore, but a smaller bigger share. Women complain that they live longer than men so need more gov money. Women complain that they have to stay at home and mother children - like mothers, for God's sake. Women complain that they might have to accept money from a hard-working husband.

Ladies, you ain't independent, and you never were. If this article doesn't prove that, then you're hopeless.

____________________

*This reminds Ex Cathedra of the famous likely NYT headline when the Second Coming happens: World To End Tomorrow. Women And Minorities Hardest Hit.

Unum necessarium

I ran across a few religion sites of the liberal persuasion recently and was struck once more with the overwhelming fetish about inclusion. Once inclusion becomes the dominant value, it becomes the only value, the only idea. Nothing else is possible, or even needed. But it is empty. It drives out all other values and ideas. The inclusive/egalitarian drive is cancerous and viral.

The Spiritus Christi (ex)Catholic Community --another word they swoon over-- in NY state. They broke with the RC Church in the late 90's over women's liturgical roles, gay unions and open communion.  "Welcoming and including everyone", says on its website: Jesus said “no one who comes to my table will ever be rejected.” Lie. Never said that. At least not in Scripture. But I guess they think it's truthy.


Diversity and sensitivity are part of the new trinity, but they flow from inclusion, are mere modulations of it. A major major cultural trance is this need to level everyone. It saves you from thinking very deeply because equal inclusion is the only issue, ever. It is the feminine gone into overdrive, with affiliation becoming the only public virtue. Hierarchy, the male energy, is repressed so that loud affirmations of equality become a route to... power. Neat, no?

Like all forms of egalitarianism, one of its functions is to insulate the believer from moral condemnation and provide a ready mode of definition and difference against all the "unjust and sinful structures" of reality. My first lover was a seminarian whose quick mind was fueled almost entirely by his feeling function, one full of resentment and power drive, by the way. He came to define the Perfect Church as one in which the only people to be excluded were those who wanted to exclude anybody else. Like paranoia, radical inclusion is a closed loop. Once you are in the business of making everyone welcome and equal, who could possibly criticise you? And when you are done, what do you have left to offer? A night in which all cows are black? (And you can bet that some cows will be more equal than others.)

You are the epitome of 21st century virtue.

And as boring as you are dangerous.