Good Humor(ed) Men

An easy smile on a sexy man. A minor theophany.

The importance of great quips

LADY BRACKNEEL: And what are your politics, Mr. Worthing?
WORTHING: Well, I am afraid, Lady Bracknell, that I really have none. I am a Liberal.



CECILY
Then have we got to part?
ALGERNON
I am afraid so. It's a very painful parting.
CECILY
It is always painful to part from people whom one has known for a very brief space of time. The absence of old friends one can endure with equanimity.





MISS PRISM
Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
CECILY
Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
MISS PRISM
The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.

Epochal presidents

Although we have kept the same Constitution for 200+ years, the country has, of course, changed. Was watching a History Channel piece on the Louisiana Purchase as an example. Fascinatingly complex.

Certain Presidents seem to mark sea-changes in the country's history.

From Washington to John Quincy, we had the period of the Gentlemen Founders, but Andrew Jackson changed everything. Lincoln was the next transformative administration. Next I'd list Teddy Roosevelt and especially Woodrow Wilson. Then, of course, the massive morph of Federal power under FDR.

In the last 65 years...are we still unfolding the logical outcomes of FDR's country? Too close to say: JFK and Democrats following him certainly are the proximate markers of the Republic's continuing alteration up to the loathsome Barack Hussein Obama.

Although Righties tend to romanticize Ronald Reagan, if you ask yourself where his "revolution" is now...??

My conservative brain tends to focus on the relationship between demographics and government power.

Fantasies

and no pictures of naked men. Hey, it's Sunday.

I made a FB comment decrying universal suffrage and lo and behold, another commentor directed me to his FB page, which is full of his proposed Constitutional amendments.

Given the difficulty of amending the Constitution --thank God and the Framing Fathers-- this is usually a passtime for intellectuals and cranks, insofar as these are different categories. It's a narrow literary form requiring discipline. Which I am not in the mood for this morning.

But since I am an intellectual and a crank, I thought I'd just lay out in scattershot style some of the structural and legal changes I'd make if I were --contradictorially-- King of America. Just for an interim period, of course, until I had restored The Republic. And regardless of minor details like opposition, or unintended outcomes. Even reasonably foreseeable outcomes.


For starters and in no particular order:

Universal suffrage would go, for sure. Just as a talking point, I'd try limiting the franchise to male citizens who had done military service and/or were married, with perhaps different levels of voting power for owners and renters. Owners get 2 votes, renters 1.

All the anti-discrimination legislation would go, and all the pro-discrimination laws as well. End any Human Rights Commissions. Forbid the use of the words diversity, sensitivity, inclusion or multiculturalism. Kill the ADA.

Kehoe would be voided.

Term limits for Congress.

End no-fault divorce

End welfare for unwed mothers.

End anchor baby citizenship.

Drive out, by various means, illegal immigrants. Make it easy, for instance, to deport immediately any non-citizen who could not provide proof of legal presence. The same "due process" you get when you drive without a license.

Reform the immigration laws to shut down the Third World invasion and make the US prefer immigrants of European extraction.

Beef up 2nd amendment rights and freedom of association rights.

Make English the official language.

Segregate prisons by race (to end the epidemic of black on white prison rape).

Register all Muslims as agents of a foreign hostile power.

Forbid citizens from having or giving their children stupid names.

Differentiate "equality before the law" so that you could legally adapt to the naturally differing conditions of minor children and adults, men and women, citizens and non citizens.

Void Roe v Wade and return that issue to the States.

Alter the 9/11 memorials in NY and Pennsylvania to make it clear that these acts were done by Muslim jihadis in the name of Islam.

Restore Washingtons and Lincolns birthdays. MLK relegated to states.

Make a simple tax code that does not penalize enterprise.

Shred the Federal bureaucracy.

Pretty well void any legislation that Obama signed. And offer him exile in Nigeria, so he could dream of his father.

Where is Innocent III

when you need him?

At a German Easter Mass for families and children, the bidding prayers were lead by the Easter Bunny.

Alas

About to watch a Netflix DVD of Mars Attacks! and discover, on opening it up, that the disc is cracked. Alas and alack. Now have to wait for a replacement.

The fags are at it again

Their freedom and diversity BS is simply that, BS.

_______

Moronics

A FB friend has a homo FB friend who is quite handsome and a complete moron. I have left out the intervening comments, but it doesn't really matter. Behold, without attribution and hence without permission, his brilliance:


You mean rich white straight and Christian people having their way and controlling society? That would be something now wouldn't it?...

They just need to realize we live in a pluralistic democratic republic and that this intrinsically entails a loosening of their ridiculously rigid tenets of selfishness and exclusion in the name of God and country. It's a ruse that's anachronistic and divisive and doesn't serve the greater good.

God is personal. We need to respect that right. But pushing a myopic notion of God on the masses is not okay and doesn't belong in politics. Yes I would rather have a free for all 'utopia' than a cadre of rich shitkicking 'manly men' white good old boys trying to shove their poison kool-aid down my throat in the name of 'freedom' any day.

People are a lot more conservative than those boys give 'em credit for. But they need to get off the bully pulpit (no pun intended ) because it's a sham.

Our beautiful country was founded by well-meaning slave owners. 100 years later we counted slaves as 3/5 of a person. And that was a compromise!

(Responding to point that white Christian males were the ones who ended slavery:)

White Christian males were the only force period. Why should it have taken so long? No you're right. The aforementioned 'luminaries ' deserve a pat on the back. Go Chris!tian white guys! Woot woot

And wrong. The left idolizes those that dare to think outside the box and fight for the greater good. The right idolizes those that preserve the status quo and their own right to property.

Stop being reductionist. The left is full of people who are spiritual, love this country, but who don't want to see everyone fall through the cracks. Your heroes created this 'open mouth' mess. Deal with it. It's about time. All that foresight and interest in the good of humankind. Hogwash!! Nobody wants to take away your right to call the left 'godless' or to criticize 'the welfare state'. Its taken a long time for the greed and exclusion of our progenitors to get to the point where it can be criticized openly but it's about time. We don't need a narrow minded minority telling us that we're unAmerican because we don't espouse their notions of God and virtue. It's too late for that. We have to consider everyone now.


Civil war, anyone?

Girls Gone Wild

Watching sets of British TV series, both contemporary and historical, reminds me that wymyn, regardless of class or education or race, have absolutely no claim to group moral superiority compared with men. If they have done less damage in history, it is only because they lack the means, not the will. (And they have also done far far less to create civilization and high culture than men...everything from plumbing to Mozart, vastly a male undertaking.)

Reminded me about my psychology program years ago, largely a female class. As individuals, I rather liked many of them. One semester, though, a female prof the girls were fond of  had to take a sick leave and another female prof came in to replace here. Perfectly nice and competent woman. But she was a White Southerner with big hair. This group of highly conscious and evolved California feminists decided immediately and en masse, for no discernible reason, to hate her. Just like they synchronized their periods. Their hive mind created all kinds of completely illusory problems with the poor woman. Folie a vingt-deux. It was creepy and very revealing. A living workshop in psychological group projection.

Although I have never lived with women since I left home at 18, I have worked with them often. Some days I seriously wonder if the Nineteenth Amendment was not a huge mistake.

In this case the victim to be dismembered was another female; hardly novel, though.

A funny memory from that otherwise revolting episode of the vigilante Bacchantes was a bitchy crack one of them made about the new prof's big hair: "What's she hiding in there? The Lindbergh baby?"

200K

According to the Blogger stats, Ex Cathedra has just had 200,000 hits since its inception in December 2006. 2800 posts. Sounds like a lot, but given the size of the blogspheric realm, we remain, though infallible, the tiniest of duchies.


When I first started it, I wondered if I'd keep up my interest. Never thought it would become the letting-off-steam addictive distraction that it's turned into.

Part right

Although not an expert in the field of Angry Muslims like Robert Spencer, I think his answer here is only half right:

RUBIN: What are the main reasons you think it is so hard for Western policymakers, journalists, and academics to understand and deal accurately with Islam and political Islamic movements?
SPENCER: I think the main reason is that Islam is a religion.

Only partly true, sir. If a worldwide campaign of terrorism and social pressure had been launched by the Afrikaaners' Dutch Reformed Church, you can bet not a stone would be left unturned in unmasking it. It is the race of Muslims that makes the difference. Islam is a Third World Brown-and-Black Peoples religion and as such, Islam is coded as a non-White race in public discourse, with all the rights to lying license and deference and BS that comes with it.


PS. Speaking of race...or rather, keeping your mouth shut about it...a rise in NYC subway crime of late. Here's some of the text about two suspects.

The suspect is described by police as a man in his early to mid 20s, approximately 6-feet and 175 pounds.  He was last seen wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt with navy blue jogging pants and a black baseball cap.

The suspect is described by police as a man between 30 to 40 years old, approximately 5-5 and 150 pounds with brown eyes, short black hair and a mustache. He was last seen wearing a black and orange sweatshirt.

Aaaaaaaand here's the pictures.

Gee, what important descriptor might have been omitted? Was one of them a "white Hispanic"?
RegimeOfLies.com

More thoughtcrimes

In the wake of AG "My People" & "Affirmative Action Has Just Begun" Holder's decision to sue a Florida fire department because not enough Blacks get promoted --they flunk the written test-- I continue my thoughtcrime experiment of how the different racial groups would fare without each other. If his Nation of Cowards broke up and there were several separate post-USA sovereign States based on race (White, Black, Latino, Asian, Amerindian....even a citystate for LGBTs), how would they fare?

It looks like the White Republic would quickly go into civil war mode because, as I said, I think that the primary conflict is between Whites, liberals vs conservatives*. But if we simply stay on the level of basic survival...capacity to create order, have and use skills and resources, set up systems for healthcare, police and fire and military, banking and money systems, even garbage collection, heat and water and light, maintenance of infrastructure and technology, schooling, etc...the new Caucasian state would do just fine. To put it bluntly, the Whites do not need the other groups to survive.

In a Black State, who would handle all that?

Which leads me to my thoughtcrime of the day: as endlessly dissatisfied and resentful as many Blacks seem to be within the current structure, despite a half century of America's dismantling barriers and supporting special treatment, would they actually be better off outside it?  Whites could get along without them, but could they get along without us?

You do the math.

*But since liberals are against owning guns and would thus be at a disadvantage, I suspect they'd get a separate State pretty easily, just because the conservatives would be so happy to be rid of them.

Equality blues

I thought I was critical of the egalitarian trance the West is in. Alex Curtagic makes the case that the absolutizing fetish of equality is rankly evil, the moral scourge of modernity.

...egalitarianism has a terrorist history, beginning with the French Revolution, a movement comprising criminals, psychopaths, alcoholics, defectives, and sociopathic geniuses. This may also be because egalitarianism attracts the worst elements of any population, since they are the ones with most to gain by equality policies.

Communism may be dead, but Marx's ghost is alive and well. The West may have won the battle but lost the war. Now that everyone is speaking and thinking in the same language again, we can get back to building the Tower of Babel.

Since I have noticed it, it continues to amaze me how various majorities in the West --men, Whites, heterosexuals, people who can walk upright and speak English-- have now adopted a default psychological attitude of anxiety in relation to various minorities, a debilitating and servile fear of offending them. The grownups living in terror of the teenagers' moods. They have simply been talked into it. And in the space of a single lifetime. An internalization of Burnham's brilliant insight that "the liberal is always morally disarmed in the presence of those he deems less well off than himself." Suicidal indeed.

Whites, White men especially, may have created the modern world as we know it, an unparalleled achievement. But now they are revealed as the most foolish people on earth, selling out their birthright for a deeply potty message.

A novel about nothing...ness

From TV series A Dance to the Music of Time, the Between The Wars British upper classes decaying, Time magazine considered this multibook series the 43rd most important novel of the 20th century...I don't know, somehow total obscurity might be a less disappointing accolade.

As one of the principle characters collapses into bed in a drunken stupor, asking for sleeping pills: I dislike waking at four...and thinking things over.Me, too.

Although bad boy stock broker Jonathan Cake brightens things up now and again...



PS.  By the end of the series, the suicide of the West is apparent. Lord Widmerpool says it all.

Nanny goes to court

"The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts."

GK Chesterton
who died in 1936

Allan Bloom on the feminist revolution

And here is where the whole business turns nasty. The souls of men --their ambitious, warlike, protective, possessive character-- must be dismantled in order to liberate women from their domination. Machismo --the polemical description of maleness or spiritedness, which was the central natural passion in men's souls in the psychology of the ancients, the passion of attachment and loyalty-- was the villain, the source of the difference between the sexes. The feminists were only completing the job done by Hobbes in his project of taming the harsh elements in the soul. With machismo discredited, the positive task is to make men caring, sensitive, even nurturing, to fit the restructured family. Thus once again men must be re-educated according to an abstract project. They must accept the "feminine elements" in their nature. A host of Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep types invade the schools, popular psychology, TV and the movies, making the project respectable. Men tend to undergo this re-education somewhat sullenly but studiously, in order to avoid the opprobrium of the sexist label and to keep peace with their wives and girlfriends. And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them "care" is another thing and the project must inevitably fail.

The Closing of the American Mind, p.129.

Typical

From the website of a Catholic parish that hosts a Men Only monthly meeting on a variety of topics. From their post about how the group got started:

During this time the group was open to all and only two women ever came.  We prayed and believed this was God's providence.  God was showing us that men needed a group that allowed them to come, talk about the issues that mattered most and share in a common bond of brotherhood rooted Catholicism.  Modern society has tried to kill true manhood and we hoped this was one way to help restore it.  Of course once we said it was for men only a lot of women said, "Hey we want to come!"  Sorry gals too late.

A modest proposal!

In the hyped-up wake of the contemptible Tray-von vs The White Hispanic* soap opera, the conservative and neo-conservative journal National Review fired writer John Derbyshire for printing in another publication his White/Asian version of "The Talk" that Black parents apparently give their kids about how to deal with the realities of race in America. It was blunt, expressed some inconvenient truths and therefore created a panic of self-righteousness. A second writer, of the racial realist school, was dumped soon after.

National Review hosts an annual cruise, a chance to hang out with conservative luminaries and raise money for the magazine.

A pseudonymous wag, himself apparently blacklisted, --oh, sorry, is that racist?--offered an amusing and modest proposal to help the right wingers at NR really establish their anti-racist bona fides. Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg stuck on a boat for a week with a hundred "No Limit Niggas"*...now that would be a hoot.









*This is so sexist. His father is Zimmerman, his mother is Peruvian. So we quash the rich feminine aboriginal lineage in favor of the culturally dominant patriarchal identity. Appalling.

We've all seen pix of Mr Zimmerman. Suppose I, a purely Northern European guy, had attacked Mr. Zimmerman. Do you doubt for one nanosecond that I'd be the racist, attacking a Latino? When it comes to the race game, Americans are insane.

**Cute little Tray-von's charming culturally diverse on-screen handle.


____________________

Lying by euphemism

On my last day in NYC, I thought I'd check out the Met to see if any exhibits were of interest. They have one on the transition from the Byzantine empire to the empire of Islam. Paragraph one outlines the extent and style of the Eastern Roman Empire. Paragraph two:

In the same (7th) century, the newly established faith of Islam emerged from Mecca and Medina along the Red Sea trade route and reached westward into the empire's southern provinces. Political and religious authority was transferred from the long established Christian Byzantine Empire to the newly established Umayyad and later Abbasid Muslim dynasties.

See? Wasn't that nice? It "emerged" and "reached westward" and "political and religious authority was transferred" as if by magic. How did that "newly established faith" manage this? Pamphlets? Barefoot wandering monks?  Soup kitchens? Since it followed "the Red Sea trade route", should we imagine it came via missionary merchants?

No mention of century-long military invasion, imperialist conquest and colonial submission. To say nothing of armies marching in France and a 1000 year plus history of piracy and raiding and attempts at further conquest.

You wonder why I call it the Regime of Lies?

What's in a name?

On FB, a Sister of Charity who is also my cousin, and a wonderful person, has posted the equivalent of a bumper sticker, responding to the recent Vatican decision to reform the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella org for most orders of greying US nuns. It reads: My conscience tells me to stand with the Catholic Sisters.

Well, that is really the question: are the Sisters still Catholic? At their 2007 meeting, even their keynote speaker admitted that some of their member congregations had quietly "moved beyond" Christianity while remaining Catholic on paper.

If you were a space alien and wanted to know about this big 1 billion member 2000 year old  religion and decided to check out the websites of the orders of Catholic sisters which belong to LCWR to find out, you'd get a seriously deranged picture. It's not only what they emphasize, but what they are resoundly silent about. An odd version of Wittgenstein's dictum: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

Although Ex Cathedra does not practice his ancestral faith, he knows what it is; it was partly out of respect for the reality of what Catholicism is rather than what I wanted it to be. Like his general reaction to the liberal Regime of Lies, it is not really about hypocrisy or heresy, but about being insulted: asked to buy what is patently a ten-minutes-old bill of goods as if it were the real thing. So when its representatives want to use the cover and prestige of their Church belonging to foster ecofeminism and lefty liberation-theology social justice statism, etc. he is not a fan.

Blind in one eye

Funny how liberal Catholics want to make immemorial teachings like the all-male priesthood die the death of a thousand qualifications but treat the ten-minutes old Catholic social teaching as if it is manna from heaven. About that they are functionally fundamentalist: literal and unquestioning.

And although they are very big on the "social justice" parts --aka government structures that transfer wealth-- they are almost universally silent on abortion. And you never hear them addressing problems that create poverty --like having kids without being married--- unless the solution means more government money for after-the-fact institutions and programs.

The number one reason that Blacks are such a mess is that they have detonated their family structure. If you could put that back together, both they and the rest of the country would significantly improve. And about that, from these types, you heard nada.

And don't get me started on illegal immigration.

More revelations from The Beyond

Latest LCWR newsletter

 As lithely envisioned

“A problem cannot be solved within the same
consciousness that created it.” –Albert Einstein

Thirty-five LCWR members and justice and peace
coordinators gathered at Bethany Center near
Tampa from March 5 to 8 to explore “Consciousness
and Campaigns: Spirituality and Politics beyond
Dualism.”

In a society and church increasingly characterized
by polarization and misunderstanding, how can
people of good will find common ground? Where can
people of faith find communion?

Dr Trelawny, Divination Professor at Hogwarts

With the guidance of executive director of NETWORK,
Simone Campbell, SSS, and composer and retreat director
Jan Novotka, the group journeyed from contemplative
silence and meditative song, to analysis of systems
that divide, to an awakening to the essential unity of all.

Sleeeeepy...you are getting veeeeery sleeeeeepy...

Saving the best for last...

Participants were challenged to dive deep into the mystical
unitive consciousness and to cross the false boundaries
and categories which divide and limit efforts to
effect systemic change.

Or...how do we nuns get everyone to vote Democrat????

As cetateanly eventuated

TV Land

As readers of Ex Cathedra know, even though he has been without TV since December and does not read the papers, the Net is enough to provoke him to his (admittedly brilliant) rantings.

Visiting the parental home for several days, it has been a shock to run into talk radio all day and TV news all evening. Talking (and shouting) heads. I retire to my room early just to get away from it, even when I agree with it.

And the commercials. Mother of God.

Giving the Devil his due

One of the many striking things that Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind was that in the Sixties, it suddenly became an unquestioned article of faith among the Enlightened Ones that both universal brotherhood and complete personal satisfaction could be achieved, simultaneously and without any conflict. If we all get to do our own thing, then peace on earth will arrive.

When you think about it, it's insane.

On this planet, pretty well everything costs something and everything has a downside for someone. Nothing will make everyone happy. Promises of all-inclusive happiness simply hide the costs of the benefits.

Several incidents of late brought home to me the continuing Regime of Lies that characterizes the current social contract. We are all supposed to assume universal human equality and harmony and respect, even when we a. tolerate the very kind of behavior from Sacred Victim Groups that we would righteously quash among our own and b. contemptuously dismiss any viewpoint in our diverse paradise that does not match the Official Viewpoints and Attitudes required of the diverse members of the aforesaid inclusive (and sensitive) paradise.

It bothers me not because it is hypocritical. Mere hypocrisy is trivial. It's an easy brush to tar with. (Oops. Is that raciss?) And it's moralistic. The Regime of Lies bothers me because it insults my intelligence and wastes my time.

So I am here to give a moderate moment of applause to two groups not normally on Ex Cathedra's list of Greatest Hits: Islam and White Nationalism.

These groups get mild kudos from me because they are clear and unapologetic about who should be in charge and what should be the lot of those who are not. Compared to the pussified venom and anocranial antics of Orwellian progressives, it is a kind of a relief to read about people who believe that they are meant to rule and have no interest in whether that bothers you or hurts your little feelings. In fact, if it does, they rather like that.

Islam is abundantly clear that it is the final and perfect religion for all mankind. There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet is not a question. Or an opinion. It is an absolute creedal assertion. So when the Muslim Horde of Peace arrives in your town, sword in hand, to do you the great favor of inviting you to The Original and Last True Religion, you have a choice: convert or face the consequences.

If you decline and you are a polytheist --the ultimate filth in Muslim eyes-- your life is forfeit. If you decline and you are an errant monotheist of a revealed Book, you can be tolerated as a distinctly second class resident of the New World, as long as you agree and show proper submission. No fun for the Jewish and Christian dhimmis, as they are called, the "protected" unbelievers, but perfectly consistent with the self-understanding of Islam. No apologies offered. Take it or leave it.  In some places and periods, life for the dhimmis was not endless misery. But no matter how well they might be treated, it was always clear as a bell --or the muezzin's voice-- who was in charge and on what grounds and on whose terms tolerance was extended.  No insulting intelligence. No wasting time.

White Nationalism is a much more recent and unsettled phenomenon, although you can make a case that, prior to the mid-20th century, it was the de facto social and political regime. As a surprising example, Abraham Lincoln's views on Blacks, despite his opposition to slavery as an institution, make it hard to distinguish him from current partisans of a White supremacist politics. Although the internal world of WN politics is, unsurprisingly, fractured and fractious, and worse, it is refreshingly clear even when shockingly blunt. At its most polite end, it expresses a clear and unambiguous preference and advocacy for the White race apart from and above any other. At its other end, it is very willing to translate that preference into a strategy of Any Means Necessary, so that the elimination of its enemies is promoted without ambiguity or hand-wringing. Again, the point is clear: no insulting your intelligence or wasting your time.



Both of these groups are, to put it mildly, unfriendly to man-loving fellas like me. It is a measure of my irritation with the slobberingly pro-gay denizens of the Regime of Lies that I am driven, just for the pleasure of a moment's clarity, to offer them faint praise.

Inquisition cracks down on wymyn

It turns out that the Vatican intends to reform the LCWR, the flagship organization of the gray and dying liberal American nuns. The press has cast it in the terms of my post's title, of course. "Coralling nuns", as one headline put it. But really, what have the girls been thinking?

Focus in reports will be on their thundering silence of abortion and homosexuality, which the report mentions. But the heart of the whole thing will get lost, which is that Rome has discovered that as far as this group is concerned, Christ is either a cipher or an afterthought. As the document says,

the Assessment reveals serious doctrinal problems which affect many in
Consecrated Life. On the doctrinal level, this crisis is characterized by a diminution of the
fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a “constant and lively sense of the Church” among some Religious.

The Church, on most of their websites, is either The People of God or a sinful patriarchal institution which needs the reforming benefit of the sisters' "prophetic" critique, based on "the signs of the times." And the Mass, because it requires a male priest, is something of a disputed question, or an optional form of devotion. The organization will now have the benefit of three bishops to oversee their "renewal".

A lot of these women really are ecofeminist Democrats who have a lot more in common with Unitarian Universalists and Episcopalians --save for the ethnic thing. with the old Catholic or Christian shell just there for convenience and sentiment.

And whilst under investigation by Rome, who do they invite to be their upcoming Keynote Speaker? A contemporary version of Madame Blavatsky.

Do these ladies not know what the word Catholic means? 

PS A lot of commentors accuse Rome and the bishops of hypocrisy because of their catastrophic handling of the clergy sex abuse mess. No doubt they failed bigtime there and gave the Church's enemies a freebie that keeps on giving.  But what a lot of people don't understand is that, despite its big moral code, Catholicism --if I may speak of it as a mythic organism-- cares a lot more about doctrine and sacraments than about human bad behavior. Bad behavior is a constant. But perhaps precisely because of this, Catholic identity --same for the Orthodox-- is rooted in dogma and in sacraments, which means the centrality of a doctrinally and sacrally empowered priesthood. The Church authorities will always take this more seriously than bad behavior. If you don't accept that, then sooner or later you'll be a Protestant, either overtly or covertly. All that blather about The People of God --which usually sounds like Thirty of the  Good Folks Of St. Finbar's Parish-- is public relations.

PPS. NPR and the nun head of the lefty social justice org see this simply as patriarchs unable to deal with strong women. Well, that explains everything.

Offensive. It's the new Heretical.

I admit it, I used to find Kirk Cameron kinda hot. For a long time now he has been a very orthodox Evangelical, active in the media wing of that religious world.

He winds up on an interview show with Empty Suit Piers Morgan, one of our journalistic betters, --and British to boot, so very sophisticated and all. Cameron's in a film that asserts America's downfall if it does not turn to God. Hardly original.

Talking about the film with CNN's Piers Morgan, Cameron gave his unvarnished opinion when asked about homosexuality. It's "unnatural," he said on the April 2 show. "I think that it's -- it's detrimental, and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization."

The response drew rebukes from gay rights organizations, and ridicule from several Hollywood stars, including an off-color video from a group of fellow former child actors.

As Morgan later summed up the backlash, many people were "shocked by the fact of this sweet nice boy from 'Growing Pains' has come out with what he clearly felt were perfectly normal comments but actually in the cold light of day are transparently offensive."

"I just don't think you can sit there with a straight face and say 'I'm a Christian, God-fearing, all-around good person, but by the way, I hate these people who were born the way they were.'"

Mr. Piers is now also a theologian, evidently. And of course "Hollywood stars", "former child actors" and "gay rights organizations" certainly have the bead on the moral compass well in hand...

What is totally lacking, of course, is anyone engaging Cameron's point of view. All they do is dump. Now if we had a movie about some early Protestant hero, or a victim of the Inquisition, and the authorities were all yelling "Heresy! Heresy!", we could all sit back and see how pathetically unable they were to actually face the issues involved.

But now we are so sophisticated that when an orthodox Evangelical states a completely unsurprising orthodox Evangelical point of view, Our Moral and Intellectual Role Models have the combined equivalent of a Victorian fainting spell and a schoolyard gang-up.

Very impressive, all around.

Good one

Jack Donovan: "...the gay left's idea of "diversity" is a lot like The Village People. They can all wear different stupid outfits so long as they sing the same stupid song."

Language games

Over at Andrew Klavan, Andrew Klavan is trying to be a nice guy, a Good Conservative. It's about race and who's a racist, etc. Zzzzzzz.

The whole discussion is doomed from the start. Because as long as we accept the terms, literally, the terms "racist" and "not racist", we get nowhere. Not that there's anywhere to go in any case.

As long as that Sword of Damocles (pardon the White EuroCentric reference) hangs over the issue, it's just ping pong. Which is Cantonese for BS. It's as useless as homophobe, Islamophobe, sexist, xenophobe, antiSemite, etc. etc. It only means Whose Side Are You On?

And it's based on the fraudulent assumption that all Blacks (unless Republicans) are victims of White Racism and therefore have absolute moral capital as judges of who and who is not OK.  If Mitt Romney, rather than Jesse Jackson, had said he was nervous around groups of young Black men, we'd be hearing about it still and he'd be replaying Henry IV at Canossa.

Because in every case, someone is waiting to play the judge as to whether, based on your beliefs (or even your facts...especially your facts), your attitudes or your behavior, you are The Worst Kind of Bad Person or Okay For Now As Long As You Feel Bad. One of Us or one of Them.

I have no problem with Us or Them. But it's the gameplaying about it that irks me.

Mother Nature has the last laugh

HT to FB friend Leah Kabacker for the link.

For those of you who had the Ms.Fortune to Ms. the slogan behind the image Ms.Fluke is showcasing, it's a sacred text of classical feminism: A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.

Increasing numbers of men agree....

Aging brain

To see if my brain still works, I tried to fill in the names of all the Lower 48 states on a blank US map.

(In 5th grade geography, Sister Maria Celina made us draw the map entirely from memory. I got 100%)

Got everything right now except

Switched Minnesota and Wisconsin, Vermont and New Hampshire

Misplaced Missouri,
And totally blanked on Indiana and Arkansas.

Now for something completely different

I cyber-stumbled onto an excerpt from a novel about an attempt to wrest control of the Northwest US from America and make it into a White homeland. An index of technical terms included "stukach", informer, from the Russian period under Stalin. It is considered so insulting as to be a legal "killing word", one which could legally lead to a duel to the death. The two other such words in the new country's law code are "wigger" and...."attorney".

LOL.

Gene pool dining

Saturday dinner with Bro #3, wife and child: Pulled pork, shoulder dryrubbed and slow smoked for six hours in his big backyard barbecue, with rice and beans, guacamole, salad and chianti.

Sunday dinner out with Bro #1 and wife: Shared grilled calamari with lemon, meatballs of prosciutto and mortadella in tomato sauce, then gnocchi with fennel sausage and mushrooms, a Ligurian white, blood-orange sorbet and coffee.

When I asked the waitress for Pinot Grigio, she said they didn't have any. When I said, No Pinot Grigio in an Italian restaurant? she replied curtly, It's because we're an Italian restaurant that we don't have Pinot Grigio...That would surprise the folks in Friuli and Veneto. Clearly the girl was periodic or something. But I enjoyed the meal so much I forgot to cut her tip in half. I really need to bone up on my vindictiveness.

On the way home, at Spring and Lafayette,  I missed by inches being run down in the one way street by a speeding cyclist going the wrong way. Close call.

9/11 Memorial

Though I am just a few subway stops away from the 9/11 site, which I visited shortly after the Muslims blew it up in 2001, I will not go to the memorial. No need to have a stroke.

Everything I know about it, and its equally revolting sister-memorial in Pennsylvania, indicates that it memorializes what is wrong with our dickless culture. One thing it certainly avoids is any connection between Islam and September 11 2001. Honoring the dead by refusing to name who killed them all. That might hurt someone's feelings.

A positive review in the Lifestyle section of WaPo --again, never once mentioning Muslims and Islam-- spends its time looking forward to a day when the dynamics of this "memorial" will facilitate forgetting what it meant.

I sometimes think that I have fallen through the looking glass.

Right fact, skewed story

On discovering that many youngsters on Twitter were tweeting their amazement on discovering that the Titanic was not fictional, but an actual ship that sunk, I quizzed my 13 year old niece about it.

What's Titanic?

A movie coming out for the 100th anniversary, opening in April, starring Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslett.

What's the story about?

They're on this big ship and they fall in love. He's poor and she's rich. And the ship sinks and he dies because he's poor and they save the rich people.

And is it a made-up story or did it really happen?

No, it really happened. Except for the part about Leonardo and Kate. That's made up. That's kinda like Romeo and Juliet.



I was pleased that the gene pool is still holding.

But she did buy the simplistic class narrative. (A future Democrat voter.)  In fact, gender was far more determinative of survival than class. Men died far more often, women were saved.

Manhattan afternoon

Since it's so bright and warm, took a stroll on the High Line, the urban promenade park recently created out of 20 blocks of elevated railroad tracks along 10th Avenue. It was full of people walking along the length of the park, with its unusual views of Manhattan and the Hudson River.

Amazingly, for a city borough with a White population at about half, and the neighborhoods around the Line heavily Latino, the folks on the High Line were almost 95% White.

Some of the "public art" along the way was definitely White. I had to alter the photo below for legibility, but this is actually 40 feet high on a side of a building right at a turn in the Line.

Really. Who else would make this kind of stuff? :)

Asians were the next noticeable group, including a lot of Indians, maybe 4.5% . Moving from one end to the other, I don't think I saw more than two dozen Blacks, and at least half of them were with Whites. English far outstripped all the other languages I heard along the way, with French and Hindi and Chinese the occasional other ones. Not a single word of Spanish in well over an hour.


Now that's an unusual Manhattan afternoon.

Ethical shell game

I wandered into Starbucks today and found myself staring at a wooden wall poster full of ethics, virtue and goodness, based on stuff like this. I almost walked out.

Now businesses like this, to please the liberal egos of their latte-lapping customer base, must play the Benneton and Whole Foods game and sell you righteousness with your morning brew. You'd think they were Global NGO's just selling coffee to underwrite their good works.

Talk about splendida vitia.


PS. A thought about the structure of liberal moralism, a kind of narcissism (self obsession plus a core of self hatred) in which ethical status is show by self-criticism, when the self is the group, and a show of selflessness by concentrating on object of concern that are distant from oneself or one's group, the more distant the better. And if they hate you, even better than that. When it comes to animals and The Earth, one even moves beyond one's species...And it's covered under an ever widening Circle of Concern.

A perverted version of Christianity, like much of liberalism.

Credit for this particular idea from "moral leapfrogging" in Steve Sailer's The Self-Righteous Hive Mind:

In contrast, modern liberals’ defining trait is making a public spectacle of how their loyalties leapfrog over some unworthy folks relatively close to them in favor of other people they barely know (or in the case of profoundly liberal sci-fi movies such as Avatar, other 10-foot-tall blue space creatures they barely know).

This urge toward leapfrogging loyalties has less to do with sympathy for the poor underdog (white liberals’ traditional favorites, such as soccer and the federal government, are hardly underdogs) as it is a desire to get one up in status on people they know and don’t like. 

New evidence

that Universal Suffrage is a terrible idea. And this website is run by a woman.

All you really need is to watch a few episodes of Leno's JayWalking to come to the same conclusion.

Obama right for perhaps second time

Acting with the dignity and restraint we expect from the President of the Republic, Barry Hussein O reiterated his opinion that Kanye West is a jackass. True enough, but he thought that by mentioning that he's "A Chicago guy. Smart. Talented", he would do more than oxymoronize.

Mr West, an African American hiphop artist and one of the One Percent, who is worth $90 million, is crying, as my grandmother used to say, all the way to the bank.

Peanuts!

From a critical review of Jimmy Carter's Bible book

H.L. Mencken, the bad boy of Baltimore journalism in the Roaring Twenties, once suggested, tongue firmly in cheek, that all failed candidates for president should be quietly hanged, so that their further maunderings would not upset the young. One can only imagine what Mencken (who used to deride the sanctimonious President Wilson as “the Archangel Woodrow”) would say about condign punishment for Jimmy Carter. In any case, Mr. Carter would do us all a great favor if he would lay off theology and exegesis. Like foreign policy, these are disciplines manifestly beyond his capabilities..

LOL!

The Original Thirteen

Off to New York tomorrow for a 10 day family visit.

Leaving home always provokes anxiety, although once I reach the airport in SF, I feel better.

WiFi will be available, so my immortal prose and infallible opinions will likely continue.

Sad

Gay therapist just finished book on flourishing after forty and then killed himself.

Muslim missionary tactics

From Ibn Ishaq's biography of Mohammad, the earliest account of his life.

The apostle said, “Kill any Jew that fails into your power.” Thereupon Muhayyisa b. Mas’ud leapt upon Ibn Sunayna, a Jewish merchant with whom they had social and business relations, and killed him. Huwayyisa was not a Muslim at the time though he was the elder brother. When Muhayyisa killed him Huwayyisa began to beat him, saying, “You enemy of God, did you kill him when much of the fat on your belly comes from his wealth?” Muhayyisa answered, “Had the one who ordered me to kill him ordered me to kill you I would have cut your head off.” He said that this was the beginning of Huwayyisa’s acceptance of Islam. The other replied, “By God, if Muhammad had ordered you to kill me would you have killed me?” He said, “Yes, by God, had he ordered me to cut off your head I would have done so.” He exclaimed, “By God, a religion which can bring you to this is marvelous!” and he became a Muslim.

Guess who's in charge of America?

Bros of a feather

Pleasant denials

People say they want a world that’s more rational, but a world that’s out of step with human nature isn’t more rational at all.

Donovan, Jack (2012-03-22). The Way of Men (Kindle Locations 2380-2381). DISSONANT HUM. Kindle Edition.

Going thru Jack Donovan's book on men again, that theme jumped out at me. He also notes that the current social system is based on a pleasant denial of human nature.

Reminds me of how entrenched is the liberal notion that people really are the way we want them to be. No amount of evidence can shake that faith. Indeed, the endless problem-solving social engineering project which is liberalism is based on that doctrine. Lists of all the ways in which it is not the case merely become more urgent, even frantic, reasons for more programs to make it be true and propaganda to convince us of it.

UnVenn My Heart

B sometimes remarks on people who agree with him on politics, for instance,  but whose personality, attitudes or lack of brains about it makes him regret that they share common ground. "He agrees with me and I still wish he would shut up."

A commentor at a site I visit, self-named as "RightWingHippieChick" makes me feel the same way. If her recent remarks are any indication, she may have changed her political orientation, but she is as fatuous, naive, pollyanna and just plain dumb as any Hippie Chick you've ever met. As part of a discussion about race and IQ, one of her several brilliant contributions was to hope that if we could talk "openly and honestly" about it, maybe a drug could be developed (Hippie Chick indeed) that would make all of us smarter!

Rabbis and Sacraments

The Judaism that we know, and have known for the last 2000 years, is one particular form of that religion, the one that outlasted all the others. It is not the Judaism of the priesthood but the Judaism of the Rabbis. In the competition between the priests and the Pharisees, the Pharisees won.

Although its roots go back before the destruction of the Temple --and its mythology sends it back to Moses, of course-- the rabbis' transformation of the Mosaic religion of the preceding 1000 years was both massive and brilliant. It moved the Jews from being the people of the Temple and the Land to being the people of the Books. Plural. The Torah, the Prophets, the Writings...and the post-scriptural but crucial Talmud, the multivolumed record of rabbis arguing.

From the tracts of the Talmud

One of the slogans of the early rabbis --in the 200's or so AD-- was this: Build a fence around the Torah. This meant that a whole field of oral law was created, law not written in the Five Books of Moses. Its role was partly to prevent Jews from even getting close to transgressing any of the original written commandments.

For instance, the Torah forbids cooking a kid-goat in its mother's milk; the oral law, the fence, forbade eating any kind of meat with milk at all so the eventually two separate sets of dishes and utensils were created.. Also, since writing was considered work that broke the Sabbath, it was forbidden on that day even to touch a pen. And so it goes. As you move farther from the center, so to speak, the rules and behaviors can look strange and unconnected, but there is a logic to it all.

Although the Catholic Church has not consciously adopted this slogan, of course --one more adapted to a religion of holy law like Judaism (or Islam, with its Sharia) than a doctrinal/sacramental one-- I wonder if the same impulse has contributed to the creation of the Catholic sexual ethic (which, once upon a time, would not have been seen as unusual as it is now). On a conscious level, it is a combination of scriptural teaching, Old and New Testaments, and a commitment to the natural law. (I wouldn't be surprised if centuries of monastic introspection had some influence as well.)

Manual of Moral Theology

But the detailed attention given to varieties of sexual thoughts and acts makes more sense if it is seen as a kind of unconsciously Talmudic fence built around the sacrament of Matrimony, which reveals the natures of males and females and creates the family. Anything sexual that even remotely detracts from or threatens that will be ruled out of court, with a vehemence sometimes hard to understand*.

Hence we had the moral tradition of de sexto nulla materia parva: Concerning the sixth (commandment), no matter is small. Or "when it comes to sex, there's no such thing as a minor issue." Condemnation not only of things like solitary masturbation, but even thoughts about sex, makes more sense in this light. If the underlying anxiety is about the centrality and strength of marriage, then even if the particulars of the ethic seem individually obsessive, --as orthodox Jewish rules appear to be, about dishes and pens-- it might reveal what all the fuss is really about: building a fence around the sacrament.


PS. If you're not bored already. There used to be something called the Six Commandment of the Church. Everyone learned them in Catechism in my day. They required Catholics to attend Mass on Sundays and holydays, keep the days of fast and abstinence, confess yearly, receive Communion at least once during Eastertime, contribute financially to the Church, and keep the marriage laws. Breaking these was sinful, often mortally so. People found it odd that murder, adultery, missing Mass and eating meat on Friday were all grave offenses. Again, if you look at the Six as a whole, they describe a practicing Catholic. It was building a fence of concrete Catholic identity through clear practice and mostly ritual behavior to clarify who was in and who was out. Making it a matter of sin meant that it was serious. And being Catholic used to be serious.

*It is well known that Catholicism considers homosexual activity "intrinsically and gravely disordered" but not so well known that the Catechism (2352) uses exactly the same language to describe masturbation.

Underbelly Icon

Undercover Brother, 2002

Saving Black Culture from Repression by The Man

Rainy day items

Lee Harris, whose work I have enjoyed, seems to be back to writing again. His piece on whether Iran is a "rational actor" is exemplary. People assume that if a group is a "rational actor" then they are like "us" and can be easily dealt with. Way too simple. Rational actors can be as dangerous as irrational ones.

Reminds me of the knee-jerk criticism that when you are hard on a particular group you are guilty of "dehumanizing" them. Well, when conflicts reach a certain pitch, a lot of that happens, and necessarily so, if you want to survive. Cause you can bet that they're gonna dehumanize you. But the groups I dislike, no matter what I call them, are dangerous to me and what I value precisely because they are human. The feral gang, for example. Or one of Obama's sons. If they were Orcs, they'd be less dangerous.

Watched a mid-80's PD James mystery last night. The lead detective wore a three-piece corduroy suit in earthtones. I had one just like it. Except for the color, I still like the look.

Referring to an earlier post, I was wondering where in the blogosphere or public life do most of the speech codes and intellectual taboos lie. Every group has them, but it seems to me that it is in the domains ruled by the progressive, enlightened, open-minded and forward-looking that you have by far the largest energy for generating Shut Up-ness. The descendants of the Berkeley Free Speech movement created university Speech Codes. Big Brother in bell bottoms. Funny how that happens.

Still enjoying a line from Samuel Huntington about the political change brought about by the Sixties Generation: the arrogance of power was replaced by the arrogance of morality.

An amusing switching of places between troglodyte Catholicism of yesteryear and the splendid ethics of the Secular HighMinded: "error has no rights." Aquinas compared the punishment of heretics with the punishment of counterfeiters: if the State protects its economy by force and coercion against producers of false money, how much more the immortal souls of believers against the producers of false religion? In our day, the issues have changed and the inquisitors wear different clothes, but the mindset continues.

I was waiting for a friend at a local cafe yesterday afternoon. Unlike today, it was bright and temperate. Though I tried to distract myself in the meanwhile by reading on my smart phone about Israel's problems with Iran (scary stuff), I could not help but overhear the conversations around me for a half hour. I know it's judgmental, but inane is the word. (And these were straight people, by the way, mixed male and female.) I humbly hope that when my friend arrived, our gabbing was not quite as inane.  I used to have a theory that since God is omnipresent and can, indeed must by definition "hear" not only all the conversations the human race has ever had,  but all the thoughts in our billions of heads, to say nothing of all the prayers, that He was long ago driven mad.

I take Blogger for granted. Even grouse now and then about some of its features. But really, it's amazing. And totally free.

"Shut up about my clothes," the Emperor explained.

One of my reactive traits comes into play when someone says You Can't Say That or You Can't Think That or You Shouldn't Feel That.

I don't know why, but for as long as I can remember, and had the words, my internal reaction is, Fuck You. Perhaps it's just my Five-ish share of my mother Eve's transgressive instinct. When you tell a human being that you can eat from any tree in the whole garden except for that one, that one becomes the only interesting tree in the garden. Everyone knows that.  (God knew that, of course, which is why the Avoid The Tree of Knowledge thing was bait for a set-up. But I digress.)

And then, after my FU riposte,  I become curious. Curious about why that word, thought or feeling is so unsettling to the person or persons who are kindly telling me to shut up.

These same people are also likely to want to steer me in a direction of their choosing. One they may even believe is simple a matter of seeing what's there. But the combo of Look Here, Not There and Say This and Never Say That only produces in me a kind of rebellion. I'm free, White and 21, so I'll look where I want.

The Tray-von/Zimmerman show and the Derbyshire Deluge encapsulate a lot of it. The MSM and the Obama "He Looks Like My Son"* regime want us to focus all our energy and attention on a single killing, one which they figured would fit The Grand Narrative of White Racism and Black Suffering. Then, oops, slight script change, Senor Zimmerman had to be made "a White Hispanic". (By the same logic, Obama is a White African). And cute little Tray turned out to be something of a wannabe thug. But the Race Juggernaut rolls on. Look here, not there.

The background to this single encounter lies in Derbyshire's Talk To My Children. As he said in an interview today, he believed all the optimistic social engineering of the 60's, but a half century later, the failure is all around us, plain as day, but strictly forbidden to notice. He wants his kids to face reality. Parts of it ain't pretty. And because it threatens The Grand Narrative, he and it must be silenced. Lay the sins on the scapegoat and drive him out into the desert.

The facts are that certain racial and ethnic groups have manifest and empirical strengths of genetics and culture which make them, as a group, consistently better performers than others. I am thinking here of East Asians and Jews. Combine very high average IQs, strong families, and cultures which reward delayed gratification, learning and competitive accomplishment in high-income fields and it's no surprise that, as groups, they have higher measures of success than (for Asians) Whites or (for Jews) other Whites.

No one is going to deny this outright, even if it makes them uncomfortable. Even "positive stereotypes"** are dangerous, they say, because they inspire envy and the resentment of invidious comparisons. Or suddenly, in a breathtaking pirouette away from group-based obsessions like privilege, reparations, level playing fields, legacies of this and that, disparate impact and affirmative action, Only Individuals Count. But because they can smell where the argument is going, many people of a certain type will really be itching for the Shut Up button. There is an implication that groups are not equal. And this violates the Prime Directive of contemporary progressive, enlightened and forward-thinking post-racial society.

The real manure hits the cooling device when you look at Blacks as a group. Need I say more?

Well, of course not, Ex C. Just shut up.


**I recall sitting in a meeting during my gay community nonprofit days and having to listen politely to some Chinese guy whine about Asians being tagged as "the model minority" because they approximated White Middle Class values. All the others, mostly White, nodded sympathetically and knowingly. It may have been at that moment that I thought, "I am so over this shit."

The Age of Anxiety

The title of Auden's 1947 poem is of wide application. Anxiety is a constant in human life, being a variant of fear. And fear, anger, sorrow and joy are the Big Four.

One of the reasons I feel that America, and the West, is unravelling is because the values that shape our public culture, the liberal values to which one must bend the knee as the price of admission into polite society, are founded on anxiety. Which is a clinical word for fear.

The current Tray-von Passion Play, and the eruption of moral outrage over John Derbyshire, point up the seismic flaw in what this country has come to be. The historically and (for a few more decades, anyway) demographically dominant, central and utterly irreplaceable group is now entirely in psychological bondage to a terror of offending the minorities.

Think about it. It's stunning.

You may find this analogy insulting, but it seems little different to me from parents living in fear of upsetting their children. And if a child declares him or herself upset with one of the parents, regardless of the reason, the other one sides with the child and attacks the partner.

And the full scenario comes into play merely by words, words alone. You may not lift a finger to actually do harm or damage; all you have to do is say the wrong thing (or sometimes, not say the expected thing in the right way) and retribution is at hand. Even, or especially, if what you say is true.
Hurt feelings, sensibilities or just pride trump all.

And given the incredible transformation that has come from 24/7 global mass media, the Internet above all, "public culture" has effectively moved vast areas of our formerly private lives into a virtual public arena. Arena being the operative word, a zone of combat.

What society can long endure like this?

Am I Right

about this dogma of the Left?

Any group of humans whatsoever,
regardless of how apparently different,
can live together peacefully.

The assumption is that they must all subscribe to universal (aka liberal) values and support a set of legal, social and economic institutions designed to promote justice and equality.

If groups of humans do not comply with this dogma and tensions and grievances develop between groups, then it must be the faulty attitudes or institutions of parts of these diverse groups, not the natural and unavoidable outcome of placing incompatible groups in close proximity.

Does anyone actually believe this? But for multiculturalism to make sense, they'd have to.

The Dykes of Charity

I remember back in the 80's and early 90's being very unimpressed with the sisters of Mother Theresa's order, the Missionaries of Charity, for their taking up AIDS work. When gay men were rejecting the Church's assessment of their sexuality and asserting themselves, they were to be condemned. But when they were sick and dying, these little sari-clad women would come and take care of them. It felt like a case of moral oneupsnunship, preferring you when you are weak to when you are strong.

I just made a hitherto unmade connection between these nuns and the lesbians in the AIDS organizations I worked in back in Toronto. Most of them really disliked men. We were the agents of The Patriarchy. Gay men, being somewhat at odds with The Patriarchy on erotic grounds, were slightly less obnoxious to them. But only slightly. Yet they wound up taking care of gay guys with AIDS. The similarity between them and the nuns just passed through my head.


PS. While googling for fotos, I found this site. If you want to laugh and get dizzy at the same time, enjoy.

OBTW

In reading the mainstream responses to Derbyshire's article, I have not found anyone who decided to dial back the outrage and deal with the content. It's all about screeds and rants and shock and outrage and insensitivity and offense. Waves of adjectives, all ramping up the Ultimate Sin: racist. Were I in therapy with the mainstream, I'd say he hit a nerve, right in the middle of the autonomic system.

But it reminded me that whenever a liberal, be it someone I just met or someone who knew me when, has discovered my political views, I am never asked a curious question about why I think that way or why I changed my mind. There is always some ad hominem reaction to me or my background or my mental health, --ranging from pitying to contemptuous--but never, "Really? What makes you think that way?"

Tribe and gangs and parties

Not much difference, really. I have never known a human group that did not subdivide into smaller groups, related to each other by tension. And I lived in monasteries for twenty years. The Founding Fathers usually had their feet on the ground, but when they hoped for a system of government without parties, it was naive. It's what humans do, dividing into groups, staking out turf, suspecting the others.

The pastel dream of universal (or even local) harmony has about as much chance as making lions give up their attachment to pride territory and gender role. It may not be pretty, but evidently it fits the species for survival. And if Jack Donovan is right, for men it is practically constitutive of masculinity.

Tribes, gangs and parties --and nations and empires-- are inevitable, but how they relate to each other varies enormously. I have the limited experience only one lifetime, even with a reasonable knowledge of history, but it seems to me that since the mid 60's, America has been generally moving from vigorous inter-group competition and conflict (normal) to an undeclared chronic civil war. After a certain point, there is no discussion or debate, just polemic and demonization.

I do not make this statement from some high promontory above the fray. My blog is precisely for ranting, for polemic and demonization. By the time I started it in 2006, it already seemed clear to me that there were inimical tribes in play, as dogmatically identified as any religion, and that my tiny spot in the blogosphere was not for some illusory "dialogue" --generally a waste of time: few ever really changes their tribal mind-- for but blowing off steam. Like most converts, I am highly adept at seeing the flaws in the position I left behind.

Partly out of upbringing and circumstance, partly out of character, I naturally make a big distinction between individuals and their groups. Otherwise, I'd have no friends, and a much smaller family.

And now that Lent is over, I can celebrate the Easter season by reading articles which I know will give me a stroke! :)

Two men I admire, Andrew Klavan and Victor Davis Hanson, take up similar themes today, from the Right of Center point of view: There is one set of rules for My Tribe, another for You People. Andrew is light-hearted and amusing, as he often is, a kind of conservative Columbo. VDH is ponderously detailed but the dude don't miss a trick.

Klavan mentions Stanley Fish in brief. Lee Harris, whom I'm glad to see is writing again, takes Fish apart here. But this is old news, Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance territory.

Shadows lengthen

Christmas doesn't produce peace and Easter doesn't bring resurrection. The holidays, anyway.

Following on the Tray-von soap opera, John Derbyshire --now formerly of National Review*-- wrote a very blunt and unpleasant piece about Black America, most of which most of White America knows but will not say in public. Howls for his head on a plate not only from Afro types like The Atlantic's** "Ta-Nehisi" Coates, but good White liberals and conservatives. Incidents like this, increasingly common, make his "screed" seem like common sense under the Regime of Lies.

But the lalalalalal-close-my-ears-I-cant-hear-you reactions ("such ideas are not worthy of a part in the national discussion") are disheartening. Minogue's point about the kind of panic that grips liberals who can smell an argument they will lose...One of the commentors in the fray loudly and proudly asserts that there is no link whatever between race and IQ. That Red Queen believes far more than six impossible things before breakfast. He probably thinks men and women are interchangeable and that Romanians are just as smart as Jews. And I bet he's someone who holds creationists in contempt for believing that God put the dinosaurs there as a test. Me, I can't see the diff.

Every society has taboos. And you pay the price for breaking them. I cannot believe Derbyshire was innocent of this. But the liberal regime specializes in a particular form of lying about what is perhaps its premier moral issue, race. Just as Obama types can be socialists not by direct confiscation but by Lilliputian regulation, so the media can be propagandists and inquisitors, by instructing us in what we all must know and care about (the tragic death of poor little Tray-von) and punishing those heretics, like Derbyshire, who tell us what we must not.


PS. A more bracing response can be found here, as Jack Donovan replies to all the folks horrified and offended by what Derbyshire wrote. This, my friends, is prose. Were you to feed it to the "I Write Like" analyzer, it would not be HP Lovecraft.

*He is apparently too much, but "mainstream" MSNBC pays lifelong race huckster Al Sharpton to be a regular commentator...

**That was a great magazine --I even subscribed-- until Mike Kelly died in Iraq in 03. After that it fell into line with the rest of the monotones.

A Ta-Nehisi is a Ta-Nehisi is a Ta-Nehisi

Unlike my usual and restrained self, I got into a silly comment-fest about "Ta-Nehisi" Coates' name. He's a writer who called for John Derbyshire to be fired as a raciss. (Which he was.) Zzzzz. Another commentor of African extraction named Funke made elitist and classist comments about my FB avatar's clothing. Jack Donovan defended me. It was epic.

Truth is, I have long been both amused and disimpressed with fantastical Black names. Invoking my utterly Eurocentric and class privilege, I tend to assume that people without real names are not real people, having the cheap fake-gold jewelry knockoff version of onomastics. Sue me. (If this were Europe, someone actually could.)

Silly White Boomer names also make me roll my eyes, but that seems to me just shallow class faddishness, not some morally sacrosanct attempt to overcome historical adversity through hyper-naming. (Although there is silly Facebook White liberal who call himself  Michael Equality Smith or something...) You can call it The Kwaanzaa Effect: pseudo-African pretense.

One of my illiberal non-libertarian impulses is to make a law that Americans have to have a Western first name. Your family name is your family name and none of my business. But please don't expect me to call you Kwame or Laquishanonda (or Cinnamon or Apple for that matter) without an internal giggle.