A new ism

I ran across a new ism with which to hector and badger people: antiziganism.

It means you don't like Gypsies. Whom we are supposed to call "Roma people."

Back when I was in ultraPC AIDS work, I once used the word "gypped" and was chastised for my anti-Gypsy racism. It had never occurred to me, of course, that there was any connection. Part of my white male privilege, to be unconscious of subaltern oppression.

Ah, how I long for those days!

The Wiki article is really funny.

As an endogamous culture with a tendency to practise self-segregation, the Romanis have generally resisted assimilation with the indigenous communities of whichever countries they have moved to; they have thus successfully preserved their distinctive and unique culture.

Distinctive and unique Roma shack with distinctive and unique unkempt Roma children

It seems that they have always been loathed by any people with whom they came in contact. I ran into them when I lived in Italy in the 70's. It was never pleasant.

And in this article, which piously catalogues them as victims of racism, prejudice, bigotry and stereotyping "as thieves, tramps, con men and fortune tellers," there is a large image of a Czech housing development that they reduced to a distinctive and unique ruin! And this explanation:

"Transparent" panel building (panelák) in Chanov ghetto near Most, Czech Republic. The housing estate was a sought after location, when it was built in 1970s with flats of the highest category. The authorities introduced a model plan of cohabitation of majority population and Roma, however with the rising percentage of Roma inhabitants (who were assigned luxurious flats after being relocated from poverty-stricken locations) the majority population gradually left, eventually leading to establishment of exclusively Roma district.^[89] A poll in 2007 marked the district as the worst place of Ústí nad Labem Region.^[89] The depicted panel building in the middle was stripped off everything that had any value by the Roma inhabitants and in the end had to be torn down.^[90] Despite debt on rent in excess of €3,5 million in total, all the tenants of remaining buildings are still provided with water and electricity,^[91] unlike in many other European countries.

Fair and balanced. Ziganism: pro or anti? You decide.

PS Funny update:

PPS update:

My very moral friend Bill responded to my unfriendly remark about the "Roma" by saying that Hitler had killed a lot of them. In his world, if Hitler didn't like you, that makes you ok because you are a victim. Non sequitur, but typical. Genetic testing, by the way, verifies that they are Indians, of low caste. 

Conquistadors and Indians

Tenochtitlan

As part of a program on engineering marvels of world history, the achievements of the Aztecs were highlighted. Truly truly impressive, especially for a people who used neither the wheel nor pack animals. (Though they had sewage and garbage systems far outstripping the Europeans, who had...none.) Human intelligence and direct human labor did it all. It was a refreshing change to see the Aztecs treated as a morally ambiguous imperialist power rather than noble savages in a brown paradise. So when the Spaniards arrived, part of what allowed them to take down this civilization so swiftly was the cooperation of many thousands of subject Indian peoples who hated the Aztec yoke. 

Another oddity was the passivity of Moctezuma, who knew of the strangers' arrival very quickly, but waited until they approached Tenochtitlan before taking any action against them. It's not unrealistic to think that he could have wiped out the 500 invaders if he had rushed to the coast. But he waited. (Sound familiar?)

 Mexico City

Pizarro had less than 200 men and he took down the Inca empire.

In both cases, the technological superiority of the numerically tiny Spanish was greatly amplified by the internal divisions in both empires and by the temporizing and inaction of their leaders.

In the end, disease might have been the deciding factor, a biological weapon that the invaders did not even know they had and the vast extent of which has only recently been discovered.

But when I contemplate the (inevitable) fate of the native peoples of what is now the Americas, nowadays I am much less inclined to feel sorry for them than I am to see them as a lesson for our own future as contemporary Americans that we ignore at our peril.

I am not alone

Granted that most conservative blogsites do not feature pictures of eye candy. But a couple, at least, do. Heteros, but combining robust rightwingery with lusty schwingery.

Camp of the Saints and Conservative Grapevine are at least two I can recall offhand.

Camp of the Saints, name after Jean Raspail's 1972 dystopian/apocalyptic novel of the First World swallowed up by the Third, says:

I like to describe myself as an 18th Century conservative. I am not an ideologue and, therefore, do not subscribe to any ‘ist’ or ‘ism’. I want to be left alone. I believe the Federal Government should not be allowed to take any actions not permitted by The Constitution. State and local governments should, likewise, be bound by their constitutions and charters. Life is absurd. Any man who does not have at least one vice should not be trusted. The 17th Amendment should be repealed [and possibly the 19th]*. Thomas Jefferson was a blackguard.  Vlad The Impaler was a hero.

 *(For you Constitutional non-scholars, the 17th (1913) removed the Senate from choice by state legislatures and gave it to popular vote, and the 19th (1920) allowed females to vote.)

Like myself, he is also a pro-Catholic fallen Catholic.

So, in the spirit of right-wing hetero/homo blogger solidarity...

Another reason to hate Islam

The only reason we have the mass of intrusive security procedures at the airport is Muslims.

Were it not for the Muslim terrorists,

I could have brought home to San Francisco a 4 oz bottle of Gravy Master. Instead, I have to have it mailed to me, with the extra cost involved.

I would not have had to pay $25 to check my luggage because it contained silver butter knives that my Mom gave me, a wedding gift when she married my father.

I would not have to keep a stash of toothpaste, scissors, deodorant, etc. in my brother's house in New York because I can't carry them on the plane.

I would not have had to put my hands over my head in an Xray machine so some stranger can assess my dick and balls for explosives.

Not only is this stuff timeconsuming and more expensive, but it makes the citizenry get used to being herded like cattle at the hands of the State and its below-average IQ agents, all for our own good.

You know who's fault it is? Muslims.

Yup, I mean "Sic"*

*That's Latin for "yup."

 

From a posting by a guy on his 1950's Catholic childhood, one not very different from mine.

One summer, against my vigorous protestations, my parents even abandoned me to a YMCA camp for two weeks. There, around the campfire we sang songs with lyrics right out of a Baptist playbook:

The B-I-B-L-E
Yes that’s the book for me.
I stand alone on the word of God
The B-I-B-L-E.

There was no Latin translation.

:)

Self-criticism and self-hatred

 

It is said that one of the strengths of Western Civ is our capacity to engage in self-criticism. Coming from the religious background that I do, I am well familiar with this activity. I was taught a method of examining my conscience from the time I was seven years old! And I am also familiar with its distortion. In Catholicism, which has absorbed a great deal of Aristotelian attitude, virtue and vice are often seen in terms of moderation and prudence. (Along with justice and courage, these four Cardinal Virtues of Aristotle's ethics were taught as if they'd fallen from the mouth of the Holy Spirit.)

When it came to humility or the sense of sin, the extremes to be avoided were laxity, which let you off the hook too easily, and scrupulosity, which tied you up in knots of useless guilt over past or imagined infractions.
The Scylla of presumption and Charybdis of despair. Hearing the confession of a scrupulous person is a trial, lemme tell ya. Sort of like trying to calm a paranoid.

Anyway, watching the History Channel, it is clear to me how Western characters, especially those connected with Christianity, are routinely debunked and non-Westerners get a whitewash. In its series on the Barbarians, all the conversions to Christianity are reduced either to pressure from a politically ambitious and usually bloody king or fear of a now-chaotic world. While we are tsk-ingly corrected for imagining that Islamic jihad is a holy war, holy war is the central to the narrative of how Europe became Christian. It is part of a deep trend among the intellectual classes to negatively reframe our entire history, especially insofar as it has anything to do with Christianity, in the most reductionist and ethically dubious of categories. Like the loudmouth sinner at a revival meeting, whoever condemns himself the most gets the spotlight and the ovation.
One of the ironies is that these enlightened bien-pensants resemble nothing so much as the very Christian flagellants who roamed through Europe during the Black Death, hoping by their masochism to appease God's wrath.

What is absent, however, is any sense that these university-bound experts might have some issues themselves, sitting on their asses in libraries, doing moral autopsies on men who actually acted in the real and complex and dangerous world. I have known a lot of academics in my time; they are not a pretty crowd. What's the old saying? Politics in academia are so vicious because there is so little at stake.The lack of nuance of which conservatives are supposedly guilty is in abundant supply in the ivory tower and the History Channel.

Part of the trouble with this noble self-criticism, based as it is on the multiculty prescript that one may critique one's one people but not another's (especially if brown), is that the other groups are not doing this. While Westerners flagellate themselves in this ongoing and interminable White Lent, the other tribes are flexing their muscles, singing their virtues and heartily agreeing with us that we do not deserve to live. This is a part of why Obama's repentance and apology tours provoke me so much.

A lot of liberal behavior reminds me of two particularly female psychopathologies: bulemia and self-cutting.
Liberals, especially the comfortable classes, alternately gobble up the pleasures of the West and then, guilt ridden, vomit them out. And it seems that they are happiest when they are cutting up their own bodies.

What's the likely outcome, if a civilization succumbs to scruples --with its bizarre paradox of self-absorption and self-loathing--and all around them the others are dancing?

Read any history lately?

To his grave

Monastic family and blood family combine 

at the funeral of an English Dominican laybrother, who died at 86. 

Multicultural moments

A friend with a lot of recent immigrant connections was shopping at a Lebanese butcher shop. He knows the butcher, Rami, as well as his cousin, Bahil, who now runs a cafe.

Friend to Rami: Your cousin Bahil has a funny name.
Rami: And he gets uglier by the year.

Friend to ExCathedra: Now that's conversation!

Huh? Continued

One of the neanderthals from Jersey Shore is selling something and says, "Keepin it real is what it's all about."

WFT is that supposed to mean?

Really.

Social justice!

Just desserts!