The snake in the garden

When did things start to go wrong?

That's a common interest for a certain type of mind.

I remember my old Russian Orthodox hero, Alexander Schmemann, tracing the eventual separation of Latin and Greek churches back to the condemnation of Berengarius of Tours in the 10th century. He was required to sign a profession of faith which held the Eucharist to be Christ's Body and Blood non solum mystice sed etiam vere. Non only a symbol, but a reality as well.

For Fr. S, for whom reality and symbol were inseparable, this Western way of dividing things up was at the heart of dividing up the Church.

My first boyfriend, Jeff D, was a passionate thinker, although I came to believe that his thinking was mostly a rationalization of his passions. He had decided at one point that the snake-in-the-garden du jour for the modern world's problems, "the smoking gun" as he put it, was romantic love. I don't even remember why.

Politicos on the Right have variety of points at which The Fall took place: The Sixties, The New Deal, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and for the serious Right, Abraham Lincoln. The French Revolution, The Enlightenment, The Reformation. For the Left it was the lost opportunity at the sexistracist Founding, or, popularly, either Jamestown, the Pilgrims, or back to Christopher Columbus.

And of course for feminists, it is the arrival of the Patriarchy into the paradise of the Mother.

Adam in conflict with Lilith

Compared to which fantasy, the Genesis story of Adam and Eve sounds like documented anthropology.

Pretty well any date or event in history (or pre-history if you're a Gnostic) can be somebody's Snake in the Garden.

I have my own suspects, of course, but even as I point them out, I am aware that the case is circumstantial. Not untrue, but circumstantial.

Long ago, at the beginnings of Western Civilization, in the 500's BC, Parmenides' prose poem On Nature laid out the contrasting ways of Truth vs Opinion. The world of Truth is unchanging and certain. In the world of Opinion, change and uncertainty define it.

Trouble is, it's the changing and uncertain phenomena which touch us most directly and about which we have to make decisions and act. Likelihood of error of much higher in this realm of passion and contingency and flaw, but so is the requirement for trying, and the concrete disasters or achievements involved.

They don't call it the human dilemma for nothin'.

Diagnosis

One of my FB friends, a fellow therapist of the very liberal persuasion, whose nickname for me is Cheney-Lite, thinks I have become "cranky and obsessed."

B, who is very tolerant of me and only very occasionally tickles the political stuff, sometimes says I have Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Details on McNaughton's The Forgotten Man 

Nolo contendere.

PS. Both on this blog and on FB, I let off a lot of steam so that I can be pleasant and civilized and amusing in person. Whether I am successful in that, I leave to those who encounter me in person.

It would be PC illusion

to think that no one notices when a Jewish mayor of Chicago tells a Christian business they are not welcome.

Sunday Sunday

Today in San Francisco we have the Marathon



and the Dore Alley Fair.

A line from an old post of mine needed some expansion.

 Feminism can only occur in societies where the men allow it.


Men in such societies must have achieved a double and very contradictory status. They must have been strong enough to create a stable society, and this always includes a massive outpouring of male energy, (brains, sweat and blood),  including a foundation of force of arms. And yet they must be weak enough to fall for feminism's thinly disguised  hatred of masculinity, marketed as a plea for simple justice

Feminism can only occur in societies where
men's strength, courage and skill have made it possible
and where men's misguided honor allows it to happen to them.

***
Saw a YouTube video of a large man beating a smaller teenage boy who had picked a fight with the man's son. The female newscaster condemned the "violent, macho" behavior. In our world, women assume the right, in public and private, to be the arbiters of what is acceptable male behavior. And no men challenge them on this. Let men try to assume a similar role in regard to women --a role they once had and lost-- and the screaming would begin. Who are you to define us!?


When movements for social change are driven by progressivism, they are zero sum games. Win-lose. Inevitably, if the dominant group concedes anything of substance, it will eventually take the place of the subaltern group. A little over fifty years ago, homos in England could be arrested just for being homos. Now people are arrested there simply for offending them. All in a single lifetime.


Voltaire's line: If you want to know who your rulers are, find out who you cannot criticize.

What will the West be like a lifetime from now?

**
I wasted an hour yesterday doing YouTube comments. Mea maxima culpa. When I replied bluntly but factually to a young Black man's obscenity-laced tirade about Whites, another White man criticized me for using the phrase "you people." (Which I did not, in fact. I wrote the shorthand "ur people".) He completely ignored the savagery of the young savage and wanted only to prove his ethical worth by trying to restrain his very restrained fellow Leukophore. White Lent: The meek members of the resurrection in their alabaster chambers, wearing mind-forged manacles. (Apologies to Dickenson and Blake).

***

The "you people" game. If a member of a Formerly Dominant Group uses that kind of speech, implying that "you" are not "us" and therefore somehow "other" and excluded, it is big racist and oppressive sin. But if a member of a Newly Dominant Victim Group wants to read you the riot act and distinguish their group from "you" Whites or males or straights, etc. that is perfectly fine.

***

Had another dream last night related to Covington's Northwest Republic novels. I think the link is that even though I would have no place in that country besides a coffin, he is angry at a lot of the same things that I get angry about.

He ramps up the current regime's multicultural-feminist softish tyranny into a nightmarish extreme, as a justification for the extremism of his own response. But if you take just the British example above, you wonder, if things could get so crazy in just fifty years, what will the next fifty be like? The Liberal sense of righteousness is so profound that they could easily justify all sorts of horrors. Look at what they justify already.

Demographics for Whites are grim, and for White conservatives*, who are no more than half the Caucasian population, even more so. That is Covington's basic point: the threat of biological disappearance. It happened to the AmerIndians, whose numbers (1% of the US population) are so small as to be insignificant. And where they have some moral capital as victims, Whites have zero, as history's oppressors. Where I am pessimistic, he is apocalyptic...but therefore hopeful, because after the apocalypse, the good guys always win.



*Mr. Covington is no conservative. In face, he considers White conservatives to be even more dangerous to his worldview and hopes than Jews. They appear to be on your side, but in the end care only about money, and in any case have proven impotent against the progressive tide. In his view, and the view of the alternative Right or New Right or whatever, just Liberals Lite who will stab in the back any John Derbyshire who tells an inconvenient truth.

**


>**

Grownups

A local fella. Woof.

PS. Next day. Guess who I just saw on the street, with his BF and some friends? I at least got a momentary glance from him. I was cool. He's tall. Tall as me, if not a bit more. 

Ah, sweet memories

Two of my most unpleasant working years were spent teaching high school in Brooklyn, right after I graduated from Columbia. This video reminded me of one day...

One of the boys in the front row was pulling off stuff whenever my back was turned and laughed when I reprimanded him. Not for the first time. I told him that next time it would not be funny. I turned back to the board and he made a fart noise.

All I remember next is that he and I were in the back of the classroom, up against the back wall and he was on the floor, with his hands covering his head  and I was standing over him.

Honest to God, I have no memory of how we both got there.

High school teaching. Like living in a Kafka novel. I guess that day, like the guy in the video, I'd just had enough.

Like this teacher!

Moral systems

Morality or ethics, not a subject in which I feel expert. Or in many ways, interest. Moralism is a trait I find tremendously irritating. And baffling.

The moral/ethical system I know most about, of course, is Catholic. And it's a fusion of Biblical material with natural law theory. Grace and nature schmoozing it out together. And then applying it to the vagaries and variances of history and contingency.

It has become apparent to me that preserving the system is paramount, if Catholicism is to have any ethics at all. So people who expect to have their exceptions made into principles are barking up the wrong tree.

But I know of no ethical system which can adequately deal with the vagaries and variances of history and contingency. Sometimes life slips out of the categories of mind.

Italian Catholicism, with its Mediterranean hedonism, Romanita, and general disinterest in actual perfection, had a gift for making clear moral statements but then not having a nervous breakdown when life did not comply. There's a fine line between reality-based compassion and agnostic antinomianism. The "Roman solution" for difficult moral problems was one thing on paper (strict) and another in practice (Say Three Hail Mary's and try not to do it again.) As well, public and private sins were treated differently. And moral failings far more tolerable than offenses against authority or doctrine.

AngloSaxons and the Irish, etc. have a different attitude. No exceptions. Which puts an impossible burden on principles and laws.

Anyway, things like contraception, homosexuality, euthanasia are examples of places where life slips out beyond the categories of mind. For a coherent Catholic ethical system, these cannot be condoned without the whole edifice unravelling. But that doesn't mean they are always actually immoral. There are other values that can override the ethical guidelines.

With the Italian style, you adjust and move on. With the moralistic passions of the Northerners, this is hypocrisy, so you agitate to change the guidelines.
Or you force yourself into doing things, or not doing things, to match the guidelines even if the outcome in particular cases is stupid, cruel or soul-killing.

I think my choices are pretty clear. I respect the system --hey, I'm a Five-- but I long ago decided that trying to live within all the guidelines was not possible.

More misogyny

Paraphrasing a novel I read this summer:

“The Arabs have a proverb: ‘There is danger to him who snatcheth the tiger’s cub, but more to him who snatcheth delusion from a woman.’” answered Rob.
“Point taken,” said the older man.
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” asked Veronica archly from the back seat.
“No disrespect, but women do have a nasty habit of shooting the messenger,” said Rob.
“Do you really want to say that to a girl sitting behind you with an M-16?” asked Veronica?"
“We need to keep an eye out as we drive through here,” said the older man. “I think they’ve got some...

When men speak critically of women as a group. How do women usually react?
They take it personally, or on behalf of their female tribe and hit back. Engage for a fight, not infrequently with implied threats.

Women who make critical or cutting comments about men as a group. How do men usually react? Silence. Eyerolling. Disengagement.



What does this say about  male/female difference?

Affirmative action for doctors?

If you can mandate racial hires for firemen, why not for doctors?

Oh, that wouldn't make you feel confident? Too risky when your life is at stake?

Here's a report with actual examples from the test that these guys can't pass.

Quote:

Judge Garaufis promptly rules that two of every five new firefighters hired must be black and one Hispanic — as opposed to the old, racist system, which required that five of every five be minimally competent/not retarded (clearly privileging whites).

Any wonder why the otherwise saintly and humanitarian Ex Cathedra has lost every last drop of sympathy for (or guilt about) NAMS?

*Non-Asian Minorities. A new acronym I just learned. I like to share.

****

Hu Nu?

African migrants rioting in China?

Why does a country of 1 billion need migrants...from anywhere...
much less Africa?

VDH on Obama/Holder's "Post-Racial" America

Best line from the piece:

When the president announced that the son he never had might have resembled Trayvon, one wondered what would have been the reaction had Bill Clinton weighed in right in the midst of the O. J. trial, lamenting that the second daughter he never had might have looked like the slain Nicole. 

Upping your game

From the guru of Game, or the art of picking up women, some more weighty thoughts about the rejected truths covered over by the lies of our regime:

Men and women are radically different along many important psychological and physical dimensions. 

Not all men are created equal. 

Some men really are worth more than others. 

Some cultures really are better than others. 

Some people can handle the task of building and maintaining prosperous civilization better than other people 

Trust is a perishable quantity vital to an orderly, wealth-generating society. It does not grow with persuasion, coercion, sloganeering, or after-school specials. It is organically emergent and intimately tied to relatedness: cultural, moral and, yes, biological. 

There is no such thing as a proposition nation, only propositions that can be affirmed or refuted. 

High-minded ideals must fall when they are proven unworkable, or millions will die, soul or body, in service to their continued justification 

The gradual feminization of the culture, the workplace, academia, government, media outlets and even family life has not been an unalloyed good. Quite the opposite; the observed evidence better fits the theory that elevating the female disposition and particular talents to sainthood in all facets of life has taken us down a dystopian road, as we can see in the rise of single momhood, sky-high safety net deficit spending, limp-wristed SWPLs, male cocooning and dropping out, and stagnating technological innovation. 

Privilege is a good thing. Men build nations so that they may codify their privilege and enjoy it, and pass it on to their posterity. Those who rail against this privilege should be shunned and invited to leave and build their own nations more suited to their tastes. 

God may be dead, but his copybook headings hold illimitable dominion over all. 

The ego is the greatest enemy man has ever faced.

Stray thought

I read somewhere today. Forget who wrote it.

Feminism taught women that it was dignified to spend their lives working for a boss, a stranger who gave them a check in return for their service to his company but that it was shameful to help and support the man who loved and married them and who was father to their children.

Why I purposely disuse PC lingo

When a totalitarian society controls the language, controls the words that people use in speech, and punishes them for using any word or terminology other than the prescribed  ones,  eventually  the  whole  population  will  be  so  afraid  that they’ll  start  using  the politically correct terms in their very thoughts, to make sure they don’t blurt out some word that will make them lose their jobs or get them arrested for hatespeech. The state ends up controlling not just their behavior and their speech, but shaping and controlling their very thoughts. Any questioning of the politically correct orthodoxy becomes literally unthinkable, because we don’t know how. We don’t have the words for it anymore.

--From a disreputable source

Clausewitz updated

The famous military strategist's often quoted line is that "war is the continuation of politics by other means." I wonder if he got it umgekehrt and really "politics is the continuation of war by other means"?

The "LGBT" "take-no-prisoners war for complete and utter societal acceptance at any price because anyone who disagrees with our current agenda is a contemptible Nazi" continues.

I hear that the Mayor of Boston promises to prevent the Chick-fil-A fast food chain from befouling his fair city with their evil discriminatory attitudes because they support anti-gay-marriage organizations. Diversity is apparently not a strength but a blasphemy when it comes to ideas. Welcome to 2012 America.

For the crime of rejecting a boycott of this business as a useful form of cultural dialogue, an Evangelical minister has now been outed, with self-serving protestations of pain and regret, by a fellow Christian "friend" for the sake of "authenticity and transparency". I wonder if said friend will be paid in thirty pieces of chicken.

The wrathful victimist energy in liberal Protected Groups really knows no bounds and, like egalitarian progressivism itself, has no internal limiting factor. It is war. In the end, the victims grow more and more totalitarian. And I am sure they cannot see it at all. Talk about enantiodromia.

Not the only pessimist am I

Listen to this letter:

There are many other evils in our country which are growing...and threaten to bring punishment on our land, more immediately than the oppression of the blacks. That sacred regard for truth in which you and I were educated, and which is certainly taught and enjoyed from on high seems to be vanishing from among us. A general dereliction of education and government. A general debauchery as well as dissipation, produced by pestilential philosophical principles of Epicurus infinitely more than by shows and theatrical entertainments....

President John Adams
1801

Country music

has rhythms and counterpoints and fugues and harmonies and chords and turns of phrase that I really like

Aaron Tippin
now at 55.

That "men in their 50's" thing keeps workin for me.

Sorry if it's TMI, but the dude makes me growl.

An earlier version of him which I flattered myself that,
when in my best shape, I slightly resembled.

Versus

Some days just perusing the usual web outlets I read is enough to make me dream of secession. No human society is without craziness and injustice and such. It's a matter of what kinds of craziness and injustice and such you'd prefer. All-White Europe was not a paradise; no place on Earth can be.

Constrained vs Unconstrained visions. Looking for A Better Way To Manage The Human Condition is not at all the same thing as Utopia. Utopia, of course, means No Place in Greek, and for good reason.

Some years ago an Anglican bishop wrote The Cruelty of Heresy, arguing that the two paradigmatic swerves away from Christological orthodoxy --Adoptionism and Docetism-- were deeply inimical to human nature. In the first case, Jesus becomes the Christ because of his virtue and in the second the spiritual Christ uses the historical man Jesus only as a mask and a temporary vehicle because he is a mere human. The Adoptionist message is that salvation must be earned by perfection and the Docetist message is that humanity is unredeemable and should be fled. Both, according to His Grace, dead ends.

Sorta like Utopia.

Usually starts out assuming human perfectibility and then when the inevitable disappointment sets in, a bloodbath: after all, it can't be The Vision which is flawed, so you have to get rid of The Flawed People who stand in the way of its Perfect Realization.

***

It is one of the wierdnesses of my brain and character that although I am almost always looking for a way to connect with The Classical Tradition, I keep getting drawn to The Dark Side.

One harmless example is that while I maintain great respect for Catholic theological and sacramental dogma, --all predicated on belief in a powerful, benevolent and rational Creator--I am also very impressed with and sympathetic to Gnosticism, which finds the world a nightmare created by a deluded, irritable and passion-driven Demiurge.

A more unsettling example is that while I am unthinkable to myself apart from my homoeros, I cannot seem to get the post-American Jew/fag/melanin-free libertarian/fascist/socialist fantasy republic of Covington's novels out of my head.

Which leads me to believe I may be a Five with a Six wing, a compulsive schema-investigator with a dose of anxious and conflicted attachment issues. Or a bargain basement Walt Whitman. Or just bloody-minded.

On the other hand, my capacity to sympathetically inhabit opposite attitudes makes me a decent therapist.

***

I have always been attracted to dragons (and vampires, but never zombies). It was only in the last few years that it dawned on me that dragons are composites of the high and low, a reconciliation of opposites: the winged predator of the skies and the scaly ground-dwelling reptile. My ill-fated second tattoo project --a casualty of the economy-- was composed of an eagle and a two-headed serpent in combat, mingled with a 13-starred version of the constellation Draco.

Tellingly symptomatic. Maybe the Dragon is an image of an integration I do not have. Dragons often guard a treasure. But eagles and snakes are merely enemies.

 Crude outline draft of the image

Envisaged placement



Variations on the theme :)

**

Important linguistic update

In her typically snippy (and funny) way, Ms. Kathy Shaidle's article in Takimag, called "4+3 Be What?" alerts those of us who want to remain Socially Conscious And Aware that there is a new nuance for us to learn:

Has the always entertaining Toronto District School Board outdone itself with its newly uncovered “Africentric Approach to Teaching Mathematics, Science, and Technology”? 

Some of you are tsk-tsking, “You mean Afrocentric!” with an almost audible sniff. 

Shows what you know. 

Progressives delight in constantly and arbitrarily reengineering the English language. This rigged game of musical chairs ensures that we reactionary racist rubes always land on our rhetorical butts. 

So when black Torontonians and their liberal enablers started clamoring for “Africentric” schools a few years back, the local paper was obliged to run a helpful sidebar explaining why the right word wasn’t “Afrocentric” anymore: 

“[I]t’s African-centered education, and there is no “o” in the word Africa,” said Dr. Patrick Kakembo, director of the African Canadian Services in Nova Scotia. “Why should it be Afro? That’s a hair-do.”

Now you know.

Rare perspective on Islam

It's an enormous new 5-star hotel that dominates the skyline and dwarfs the mosque that contains the Kaaba. Pics of it evoke Big Ben-Bellagio-Stalinism.

One culturally insensitive lout suggested Sauron's Tower in Mordor, from Lord of the Rings.

Truly bizarre.

What a similar arrangement might look like in Rome, with the Westin Times Square Hotel looming over St Peter's tomb...

Separated at birth?

Mermaid from Harry Potter & Goblet of Fire

Carrot Top

whose net worth, by the way, is....

Life imitating songs

When I started listening to country music, Chris Cagle was on the rise. And why not? Great voice, great songs, --What A Beautiful Day, Chicks Dig It--great look.

Great look.

Now is that one helluva handsome man or what?

Enter Lady Fortune and Fate...alcohol and a bad girlfriend...what a bitch.

In 2012....

Ouch.

NSFW

Warning. Foul and intemperate language. No pictures.

Re the Colorado shooting*, from the Great and Powerful O:

"My daughters go to the movies," Obama told supporters at a previously scheduled campaign event in Fort Myers, Florida. "What if Malia and Sasha had been at the theater as so many kids do each day?"

What is it with this twat? Government is not his real and imagined family writ large, but an entirely different beast. His daughters or the sons he never had. He needs therapy. And a new fuckin' job!

And as for the liberal MSM types who want to associate this guy with the Tea Party...

Commentor Cassanda Lite at Legal Insurrection says it all: (HT 2 GayPatriot).

Fascinating that a man shouting “Allahu akbar” as he mows down 35 people on an army base isn’t motivated by Islam…but a guy who has the same name as hundreds of others—and says nothing as he fires—is obviously a Tea Party zealot.

*While White guys do their occasional mass shooting, Black guys --gee, that could be the son O never had!--do what they do every day.  He should be shot. They should be roasted.

--

Morning insensitivity

The Denver theatre shooting.

While we have regular occurrences of crimes by groups of "youths" or "teenagers" or "young men" and it is the protocol in the MSM to give perpetrator ages and genders but leave out race or ethnicity in certain*, ahem, cases, HuffPo makes it clear...and am I projecting their sense of relief and righteousness here?...that the shooter is "a white American male." No punches pulled. No racial sensitivity.

Not surprising. Either who the shooter was going to be, or that they'd clarify his racial status. Maybe he'll turn out to be a "white Hispanic", but prolly not.

Will Michael Moore make another film, "Bowling at Aurora"?

Blacks seem to mirror the traditional warfare and violence patterns of tribal peoples, who carry on low-level but constant violence against their enemies. In the societies of the Noble (or not) Savages, as many as 1/3 of the population dies in unremitting gang-style warfare.

Whites seem to carry out in miniature their own modern European penchant for long and wide periods of peace punctuated by catastrophic wars. Although huge numbers die in these occasional incidents, a far tinier percent of the population is ever at risk for violent death.

Sorta like the current Muslim jihad vs a Tim McVeigh.

Just sayin'.

*"Certain", implying a minority, is not quite right because the majority of crimes are disproportionately carried out by Blacks and Latinos. Ironically, it is only because everyone knows this that we are not allowed to mention it. And we thought the Victorians were irrational prudes.

July morning varia

South American flick centered on a married Peruvian fisherman and his secret artist boyfriend. They make love in a cave by the sea, rolling around in the sand. Nice visuals. In real life, not so much. Sand. Crevices. Ouch. Sorta like that very sexy image of  Burt Lancaster and Deborah Carr in the surf in From Here To Eternity. Nice idea, but cold water and seaweed and sand...

The 2009 movie, btw, Undertow/Contracorriente, deserved its numerous awards. No cartoons. Full of human characters, family, tradition and community, faith, friendship, irreconcilable passions, loss, fidelity and infidelity, courage. Complex, beautiful, moving. One reviewer called it "Orpheus on Brokeback Mountain".

Cool/warm but sunny SF day. Feels like summer.

Listened to a podcast by two supposedly smart and articulate traditionalist guys. Gay marriage came up and they got, well, inarticulate. Not from anger; they're pretty laissez-faire when it comes to private life and individuals. But they seemed unable to clarify why they reject samesex matrimony. Strange.

For me, it does not actually respect the specificity of a man making a lifebond with another man. And it is part of the nominalism of post-modernity, where things have no reality or nature but are just names or slogans to achieve social goals. A man cannot have a husband for the same reason that a woman cannot be a father. Color me essentialist. Gender/sex is a fundamental biological and metaphysical given, not an optional "performance". Accepting gay marriage --like the T in LGBT--is part of the larger urge to make genders --especially maleness--irrelevant.

And it is also part of the compulsive minority-appeasement that has our fading culture in its grip. The more I think about it, the stranger it becomes. 

Restating a theme

A Black version of one of Michelangelo's slave statues, finished.


_

Sublime or ridiculous?

With apologies to Bernini and St Teresa

We have changed in ways that invited us to let go of who we thought we were. Surrendering to the Spirit, we awakened to new understandings that touched our deepest core. 

A great example of the kind of high falutin' but low aimin' lingo that women are especially good at, the above creepily erotic hypersentences are from a long auto-panegyric on how American Catholic nuns stuck in the 60's and 70's imagined themselves to be re-discoverers of the lost Gospel of Jesus but instead just became leftwing feminist Democrat social workers in pantsuits who never met a liberal Zeitgeist du jour they did not love.

Was that unkind?

More from Sister Bloviata.

--

IQ vs EQ

The article I mentioned about how Blacks perpetuate "racism". I commented to the author that although he makes a fine argument, it is useless because it is entirely rational and the issues --especially race-- are not rational.

He answered me with a rational reply. Oh, well.

It took me a long time to realize that rational or evidence-based argument is mostly a waste of time. (Consider Anthropogenic Global Warming, for instance.) An ex of mine used to drive me to weary distraction in arguments until I realized that our arguing was for him nothing more than a fistfight with words. Truth or accuracy had nothing to do with it. It was all about winning. Hence, he's an ex.

I read an article in a Jewish publication about the sources of anti-Semitism, a topic which intrigues me. In an equally off-base way, the writer decided to try undoing all the various negative view of Jews by reasonable argument. It was a disappointing effort which wound up in the not unexpected position that there is no reason to dislike Jews. (On his grounds, there is little reason to dislike any human group...) A triumph of naivete over intellect and self-service over brave curiosity.

Cartoon by Kliban

Cognitive therapy works on some conditions but not all. It's a wise clinician who knows what model of healing to apply to the particular patient.

On the other hand, there's the apparently intellectual speaker with a big (if predictable) vocabulary who is actually doing little more than emotional manipulation. Women are especially good at this in one on one encounters. Men do it in public, as orators.

Unseasonable thoughts

Minorities may* deserve protection, but not privilege.

We find ourselves in the odd position of increasing rule by minority-as-victim.

It is a flaw in the Constitution that allows tiny and vocal minorities to attack the cultural traditions of the majority: removing crosses as public monuments, forcing marriage to make gender irrelevant, fining Christian photographers for declining to work at a lesbian wedding, etc. Were it not for the First Amendment, there's no doubt that we'd have Euro-Canadian style "hate speech" laws which would only serve the group sensibilities of Sacred Minority Groups. Just ask the charming head of the US Civil Rights Commission, Black Female Mary Frances Berry:

"Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them."

My first conscious anti-Jewish feeling came at around age 12, when the local chapter of the ACLU, all of whose officers and reps had Jewish names, forced the town I lived in to take down the Christmas creche in the village square.

Sane and/or religious Jews, I would think, would have asked to put up a Menorah there during Hannukah rather than robbing the majority of a cherished holiday image. But the ACLU style is scorched earth, pretty well always to do to "majority/oppressor" culture what the Taliban did to those Buddha statues: desecrate and destroy. And then act the surprised victim of "prejudice" when people quite naturally resent the hell out them.

A news item today discussed the rising in anti-gay sentiment in Ukraine, in the face of a more activist gay push. Who should be surprised? If the Ukrainians look where the LGBT push eventually goes, why not nip it in the bud?

*I wrote may because the mere fact of being a minority is not a moral condition, despite the reflexive stance of liberals to such language. Any more than being the mother of an illegitimate child, a so-called "single Mom", makes you worthy of anything...except perhaps disapproval for a very stupid mistake that is likely to blight both your life and your child's. And you can bet your butt that when Whites become a racial minority in our own country at mid-century, there will be no moral capital assigned to us. We'll always be "the historically majority Whites." Ask Mary Frances Berry and her kind. It goes without saying that in Ex Cathedra's world illegal ...repeat, illegal...alien ...repeat alien...Latino invaders...repeat invaders... have no claim at all to a moral position.

Leaving the plantation

A Black man asks his own people to take a look at the ways they perpetuate anti-Black feeling. He will not be thanked, I suspect.

Of course, the likelihood that they will (or can?*) follow his libertarian-inspired suggestion is nil.

"Civil Rights Leader" and Social Justice Loving "Reverend"
Jesse Shakedown Jackson
has a few justice troubles of his own.
Of Rev. Sharpton, the less said the better.

Victimhood is power. Why give it up?

Shelby Steele well described the devil's bargain struck between Blacks and Whites in America, where Whites get a (temporary and retractable) absolution from racial guilt by granting Blacks unlimited license for their behavior and deference to their feelings and opinions. The results are all around us.


*Apposite remark, on another topic, by Jonah Goldberg:

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

I’ve always liked that quote, but I think it misleads. That two plus two equals four is not a conservative truth or a liberal truth. It’s simply the truth. (Moynihan himself recognized this when he even more famously said that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.)

Regardless, it’s true that culture is more important than politics. You could impose Sweden’s laws on the Middle East tomorrow, but you’d be well-advised not to hold your breath waiting for the Saudis to turn into the Swedes of the Arabian Peninsula.

Liberty (or) Equality (or) Fraternity

July 14th is Bastille Day, when the French mark their 1789 revolution. Last week, with her typical wit and snark, Ms. Ann Coulter reminded us remaining Murricans that July 4th was a time to remember that we are not French.

When I was a student at Columbia U in the glory days of the 60's, it was popular to poopoo the American revolution for being a grubby and unvisionary mercantile affair whose eventuating government was compromise-ridden and pedestrian. The French one, de l'autre côté, was a brilliant attempt at utopia. A real revolution. And the prototype of other real revolutions who eat their children and always seem to bring in monomaniacal tyrants who drench the world in blood.
Napoleon, anyone?


Well, I'll take grubby, compromised and pedestrian over universal pretentions, piles of severed heads and rivers of blood eventuating in Napoleon and the Bourbons. Just my national prejudice, I guess.

Racing

I hit my peak number of hits in late April, close to 15K a month, but now declining over the last coupla months to near 12K. I am aware that I have been commenting on race a lot more. I wonder if that has anything to do with it. Being realistic about race makes even conservatives very very nervous. Can you spell John Derbyshire? Or maybe the pix of men that consistently get the highest hits have been burned out, so to speak.

Liberalism, on most issues, is an unreal trance which requires its believers to see the world as the ideology thinks it should be rather than how it is. Liberal racial ideology --multiculturalism and the race-oppression narrative-- is certainly an unreal trance. And it is not innocuous, but rather designed to dismantle everything that has given Whites our power. Not to create equality but to replace us with UnWhite peoples. This is racial realism.

To the relentless legislative and social education program obsessed with dysfunctional and never-improving victim groups, we now have the spectre of White demographic minority in America. Yet the POCs continue the drum of racism, legacies, oppression, etc. etc. It is a war we are losing.

I wish the multiculti dream were true and we could have a rainbow happyland. But facts indicate otherwise. >And once you notice this, it's hard not to be very aware of it.

Rolling models

I remember a class in high school....religion, I think, with our socialist priest teaching...where as part of our instruction in "social justice", the world was reduced to a village of 1000 people.  The usual: 40 people had most of the wealth and used most of the energy, etc.

There's a basic distortion between that model and reality. A tiny matter of scale. But it served its guilt-making purpose.

I am aware of the limit and tendentiousness of these kinds of models as I note that in a contemporary USA of 100 people, 13 of them take up (and drain) hugely disproportionate amounts of energy and money and psychic space and Sturm und Drang, while returning....what? 

Jooz

David P Goldman as Spengler has been a trenchant commentator about Western decline.

He is not responsible for headlines, but this piece makes a strange connection between Hungarian nationalism, dislike of Jews, and birth-rate decline. The suggestion is that anti-Semitism leads to ethnic disappearance.

For all their contributions to the West, there is a type of Jew whose sense of entitlement, from a combination of theology, history and victimhood, wants to make everything about them, as the lynchpins of the world.

When other people do that, in an unfriendly way, then other people are evil.

Those who hate life hate the Jews?
A victim identity has lots of short-term benefits in the morally senile West but in the end does nobody good.


There's a witty saying that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. Constant reminding of past bad blood eventually produces not regret at the deed, but the opposite: regret that the program was not completed.  A woman whose husband cheated on her once in their marriage, who constantly brings this up to him as a way to get him to prove his reform and his love for her will succeed only in getting him to wish he had done it more often or had actually left her for the other woman.

In the US context, Canadian Kathy Shaidle has a refrain: Americans should have picked their own cotton.

Pussyfooting

Lee Harris now posts his articles on a website that has no comment function, nor any contact information.

So, re his article castigating Chicago headman Rahm Emmanuel for refusing to condemn gang murder as wicked and instead ascribing the behavior to wrong values. He says this is moral pussyfooting.

There is another constant element here which the esteemed Mr Lee himself pussyfoots about. Can you guess what that might be?


____

Following the culture

The Episcopal Church has finally caught up with the progressive attitudes of the International Mr. Leather Contest.


It is, however, in line with their only theological-moral-political value.

Unless, of course, you disagree in the wrong direction.

---

Despite it all

Ex Cathedra can still be moved by innocence and play, tear up actually.

Dancing Matt's 2008 video, seen by 43 million people on YouTube, has a 2012 update.

Still makes me smile and get watery.




Sweet.

Without condoning the impulse

I can understand it.

A few months back, after reading the proposed constitution for a fantasied post-American White ethnostate, --a surprising mix of libertarianism, parliamentary democracy and national socialism-- I skimmed through the richly (overly?) detailed novels by the same writer. These described the lurching ups and downs of the revolution which leads to the existence and survival of such a country. And described the America from which the revolutionaries wished to separate themselves: not a pretty place. In fact, it is recognizably contemporary America ramped up to a nightmarishly dark version of its logical outcome. The violent rejection of America in the name of the values and the founding people of America was a bit of a shock. Oddly compelling in some ways, the books were also full of raw hatred and raw violence.

The Northwest Republic is a land created by ruthless ethnic cleansing, for which no apology is given but whose terribleness is frankly acknowledged as a one-time necessity. To the author, this is a basic matter of biological racial survival. Not only in America, but over the whole planet, the White populations are indeed shrinking fast. Along with any non-European descended people (including the Jews), homos of both sexes are eradicated without mercy. (I should note that once the borders of this new country in the American northwest are settled by treaty, all these folks are given time and opportunity to leave unmolested on their own. After that, only those foolish or arrogant enough to stay are erased.)

Sometimes I come across phenomena which make me "get" the why of such a fantasy.

It is a commonplace of the art of dream interpretation that sometimes, and I repeat sometimes, a dream allows us to enact primitive emotions and wishes that we could not allow ourselves to contemplate in our waking social world. Many years ago my life was upended by the vengefulness of a former friend. My only retaliation was in my dreams. And these included a telephone booth (remember those?), a baseball bat and his skull. Very satisfying connection, that was.

Despite my relative ease with violent language and fantasy, I am a very civilized guy. Or perhaps it is because of that familiarity. The "H8ful" language which our moral and intellectual superiors are so bent on banning and erasing is a highly evolved substitute for the direct bodily harm of sticks and stones. I can think of only one time in the last twenty years when I actually used unjoking physical force against another man. But the urge to attack does not surprise me. We are tribal and territorial animals, not God-controlled angels.

What provoked these thoughts was an article (HT to Bookworm) by an Israeli-American feminist professor about legal measures that might be instituted to force American males to support unwed women whose child they are carrying...absent, of course, any say in the behavior of said woman or the fate of her (not their) child, before or after birth. Preglimony.

To me, the levels of racial and gender insanity get so strange that I, a tribal and territorial animal and no God-controlled angel holding a university job in a perfectly fair world of universal love, can understand what I can't condone.

Transgressing again

I just read Anders Breivik's final statement to the Norwegian court. A little bumpy, but basically pretty clear: he believes he was acting against the despotic political caste who have been engineering the ruin of his native land and his fellow native Norwegians and their culture by means of mass third world immigration and enforced multicultural ideology.

A trenchant point: "...we fought for Tibetan rights and the Tibetan indigenous people, but in Norway it is not permitted to say that Norwegians have as much right to a homeland as the Tibetans, and that our rights are in fact equally important."

It may be shocking that I did this. After all, he admits bombing and gunning down scores of people.

Then I think of all the people who wear Che Guevara shirts or speak respectfully of Mao...or Mohammed.

When it comes to deaths, Breivik is a bush-league piker.

Who are the real H8ers?

This passage from a review of Summoning the Gods by Collin Cleary:

This mindset is, in fact, the essence of modernity. In a real sense modern people do not regard the things of this world as possessing any intrinsic being or nature. They are all pure potential, waiting for us to put our stamp upon them. Trees are potential pencils, a mighty river (to use Heidegger’s famous example) is a potential power source, and the men of today are, with proper re-education, the new and improved men of tomorrow. For modern people, therefore, things have no real nature of their own—their nature is always something that has yet to emerge, with our assistance. And so modernity always orients itself toward the future, toward a promise of perfection to come. 

Reminds me of a remark by a teacher of mine, Thomas Julian Talley, a liturgist, that the modern world had taken the three-decker universe's spatial metaphor of Hell Below, Heaven Above and made it temporal: Hell is the Past, Heaven is the Future.

From Ex Cathedra 2007:

I have also thought of the phenomenon of "liberal jaaliya". Jaaliya is the Muslim term for the times of ignorance, prior to a tribe's or nation's embrace of Islam, pre-enlightenment. For most liberals I know, Western history, prior to 1965, is largely a saga of evil, a "jaaliya". The New Dispensation of the oikophobic* progressive demands distancing oneself from it. Hence all the breast-beating and kowtowing and apologizing and scolding, etc. It is designed to show that even if a liberal looks like a bad old-time Westerner, s/he is converted, illuminated, and pure. 

And those who represent or embody "home and inheritance" --the white male American Christian businessmen, soldiers and consumers-- are The Enemy. Osama and his ilk are not really taken seriously as a danger or, less, an evil to be fought. As I have often said, hang out with liberals and listen for what really makes them angry. It is never the murderous thuggery of Muslim jihadis. It is alway George Bush, right-wing Christians, Republicans, and Corporate America. 

What they hate is the representation of their own demonized past.

 

*Roger Scruton's oikophobia: "rejection of home and inheritance, the disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’"

Reality based?

Reviewing a philosophy book about whether nations have a right to exclude others...

If I were to attempt my own analysis of what Profs. Wellman and Cole are pleased to call “racism,” I would begin by pointing out that Homo sapiens evolved for many thousands of years in small kinship-based hunter-gatherer bands. Survival under such circumstances depended on cooperation within the group, even extending to a willingness of individuals to sacrifice themselves for the group. 

On the other hand, survival also depended on success in competition with other hunter-gatherer bands. Relations between such bands, therefore, fluctuated between deep suspicion and murderous hatred. Any mistake in one’s perception of group boundaries was likely to be punished with death. 

Over the ages, humans became adapted to this state of affairs through natural selection. They developed a deep sense of the distinction between “our people” and “outsiders.” A dual pattern of behavior developed, involving cooperation and altruism within the group and suspicion or hostility toward those outside. This evolutionary adaptation is still visible in its rawest form among man’s nearest evolutionary relatives, African chimpanzees, which unhesitatingly kill intruders found within the territory of their troop. 

We have inherited all of this. But because of our higher cognitive development, the raw tribal instinct is flexible and educable to some extent: men genetically programmed for loyalty to a band of not more than a hundred kinsmen can be taught loyalty to a larger nation. Such education, however, is an entirely different matter from the eradication of all sense of group distinctions recommended by “antiracists” such as Prof. Cole. Group loyalties of some sort are as natural to man as economic self-interest, and attempting to abolish them through exhortation and punishment is about as likely to succeed as the Soviet attempt to make people selfless through enforced collectivization. 

A vast scientific literature exists to back up the extremely brief sketch I have just given. It has been produced by students of genetics, animal behavior, childhood development, evolutionary psychology, and even sociology. None of it was produced by philosophy departments. A quick look at our authors’ references makes clear that most of their reading is devoted to the work of other contemporary academic philosophers. Most of this seems to consist of armchair speculation as to what a perfectly fair world of universal love would look like. The work under review is, therefore, likely to reinforce the very worst prejudices against the authors’ own discipline. Political and moral philosophy would find a firmer basis in the careful study of human nature.

Ben Franklin

was a pretty upbeat guy. But his words at the Constitutional convention resonate with the story of his reply to the woman.

In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.

Speech to the Constitutional Convention (1787-06-28)

My own private enantiodromia

Working with progressive dykes and socialist homos, etc. back in the AIDS days, I was subjected to the unholy trinity of race-sex-class analysis of everything. I used to think that it was very lopsided because it reduced individuals to their group.

Although I still make at least notional space for individuals and subgroups, I have to say that the lefty lesboz have finally succeeded with at least a part of my mind, which now sees in terms of groups, and the ideologies of race-sex-class.

Thanks, ladies.

Except that, of course, despite my homo-eros, true to my pathological male and middle-class and melanin-deprived condition, I have become a partisan of patriarchy, white dominance and wealth-creators. I am now your conscious enemy.

Unintended outcome, I'm sure.

IV July MMXII

Mixed feelings today about this day.

Reminding myself of the biases of my age and character and hoping that my gloomier assessments are wrong.

Thinking of that old story of the woman who met Ben Franklin outside the State House in Philadelphia after they had cobbled together a Constitution, more than a decade after the Declaration of Independence.

So, Mr Franklin, what kind of government have you given us?

A republic, madam, if you can keep it.

This stuff still makes my hair stand on end and brings tears to my eyes.





______________

Swinging

Privilege. A bad thing, of course. We all know that, don't we? It's unfair. It means that individuals get to benefit from membership in a group when they, as individuals, have not earned these benefits. White privilege and male privilege are burned over territory in that regard.

Thanks to jpnill, I have now discovered the evils of Christian privilege. And that particular moral horror is explained to us by one Dr. Lewis Z. Schlosser. His profile at Roman Catholic Seton Hall University tell us that he does work in dismantling it.

Breathe, Ex Cathedra. Breathe.

Dr. Schlosser is a Jew. Being paid by a Catholic school to dismantle Christian privilege.

I don't know who to want to hang first, him or the ball-less administrators who support his efforts at bringing them down.

Another exhibit in the Whites As The Most Foolish People On Earth trend.

Could I support a fund drive to set up a program for dismantling Jewish privilege at the University of Tel-Aviv?

Does this provoke my Chomsky-Zinn reaction?

Ex Cathedra is a fan of privilege. It's an unavoidable and essential part of any healthy society and culture. Individuals benefit from their membership in a group which, as a group, has secured these privileges*. And privilege, if dismantled for any group, does not disappear. It migrates to another group.
I am not going to write more because, after starting out contemplating a group hanging, my mind and mood are not improving and this post would only get worse.


*Think of it as reverse reparations. A lot of Blacks who have never experienced slavery think that they are owed monetary and other kinds of reparations for their membership in a group which, as a group, has this complaint.

Meaning is use

Unfortunately, sometimes.

Tolerance used to mean putting up with something you'd rather not put up with, sufferance, forebearance.

The primary meaning in dictionaries nowadays is more akin to what used to be called acceptance and even embrace:

1. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one's own; freedom from bigotry.

2. a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward opinions and practices that differ from one's own.

3. interest in and concern for ideas, opinions, practices, etc., foreign to one's own; a liberal, undogmatic viewpoint.

Uberliberal supergay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson prayed thusly, in the space between the old and new meanings, before the Obama inauguration:

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

I am still thinking of the Orwellian atmosphere of my gay YouTube visit yesterday, where refusal to embrace and celebrate gaydom, where polite disagreement about it or admission of discomfort about it, was framed as poisonous evil that must be unmasked and punished.

Just the same attitude that these folks would project onto the Inquisition, they themselves embody, with exactly the same sense of unfettered entitlement.

Every victim is a tyrant in training.

PS. My problems with Christian morality --as opposed to Christian dogma-- are well known. All this endless forgiving is one of them. But here, if you change the language, it might mean being conscious enough and distanced enough from your own resentment to try to avoid becoming an exact replica of what you supposedly cannot stand, all the while denying what you are doing.

I made the mistake

of wandering through gay YouTube land.

The video title btw is his, not mine.

Now my stomach feels queasy.

My impressions: airlessly claustrophobic, same old same old same old, queens for days, and add to that an invincible sense of victimist privilege.

They work themselves into a froth of righteousness; any withholding of approval, approbation or agreement is condemned as "bigotry, ignorance and hate" and held to be indefensible and intolerable.

And the more civilly expressed, the more demonic is the difference considered to be. Gone underground. Hatred masked as "tolerance."

When I joked that in my post-American thought experiment, the LGBTQ city-state would turn out to be "Stalinism with wheelchair access", I was right.

Where's my Maalox?

Geometry

was the only form of higher mathematics I ever enjoyed.

Enantiodromia again

Anti-racism. Sounds very ethical. High-minded. Not just "not-racist" but "anti-racist." Moral passion. Ultrasensitivity. The less evidence for racism there is, the more does the anti-racist find it. Malleus racistificarum.

White supremacy. The embodiment of evil. Same as Nazi. Unthinkable. Beyond the pale...as it were.

Thing is, when anti-racism is the value, the outcome of any racial conflict is already decided...just as with White supremacy. When anti-racism is the stance, the peeps of color can never be negatively judged, not really. In the end, the White side must be in the wrong.

So if White supremacist implies racism against non-Whites, how can anti-racist not imply racism against Whites?

Take the latest info from the Detroit schools, which are 98% Black. Educational disaster. Only 6% passed the math exam, 3% science. 1.8% are college ready. A cause for "concern". But if we are to avoid racism, we cannot think that the disaster has anything to do with the demographic.

State officials are concerned that the results show the gap between white and minority students either remaining flat or widening – at a time when they’re pushing to see those gaps close. 

“We have shameful* gaps in achievement for various student populations not only in test scores, but also in graduation, college access and success, and student suspensions and expulsions,” State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said. “We cannot simply accept these as how things are. We need to end this disparity in education and we need to do this together as a state.” 

The widening of the gaps mean Michigan must maintain its rigorous high school standards and invest more in helping teachers improve their practice through a stronger statewide teacher evaluation system...

It has to be lack of money, or some kind of pedagogical flaw, or not trying hard enough or some kind of legacy of racism...We...society, or America, or leukophores...must be responsible. Like the 90% Black city itself, which has become the Mogadishu of North America. It cannot be about the people who live there. We must have failed. It can't be them. It has to be us.

Doesn't it?


PS. Interesting word choice. Shameful. Who is supposed to be ashamed? What's your guess? 

[Nei] Negli occhi tuoi

One of the great songs of the 80s.

"In Your Eyes"

love I get so lost, sometimes

days pass and this emptiness fills my heart

when I want to run away

I drive off in my car

but whichever way I go

I come back to the place you are

all my instincts, they return

and the grand facade, so soon will burn

without a noise, without my pride

I reach out from the inside

in your eyes

the light the heat

in your eyes

I am complete

in your eyes

I see the doorway to a thousand churches

in your eyes

the resolution of all the fruitless searches

in your eyes

I see the light and the heat

in your eyes

oh, I want to be that complete

I want to touch the light

the heat I see in your eyes

love, I don't like to see so much pain

so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away

I get so tired of working so hard for our survival

I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

and all my instincts, they return

and the grand facade, so soon will burn

without a noise, without my pride

I reach out from the inside

in your eyes

the light the heat

in your eyes

I am complete

in your eyes

I see the doorway to a thousand churches

in your eyes

the resolution of all the fruitless searches

in your eyes

I see the light and the heat

in your eyes

oh, I want to be that complete

I want to touch the light,

the heat I see in your eyes

in your eyes in your eyes

in your eyes in your eyes

in your eyes in your eyes