Monday, October 08, 2012
It's a good thing
that Ex Cathedra, although a White Male Oppressor, has no power in this world.
Otherwise there'd be a forest of gallows as far as the eye could see.
Despite my respect for the military, it is no accident that both SNAFU and FUBAR have their origins there.
It is true, as my grandmother used to say in her own version of Murphy's Law, that "all human things, given time, go badly." And regardless of who is in charge or what your politics or religion is, there is no protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
But the guilt-driven egalitarianism of a post-Sixties America unhinged from its Founding Fathers' sense of realism*, a groundless, pathetically suicidal and stupid ethic which provokes compulsive moral submission to minorities --the more alien, the more dysfunctional and the more hostile the better-- is one of the most foolish and contemptible ideas in all of human history.
*Realism which is now considered racism, sexism, classism, etc.
----
Otherwise there'd be a forest of gallows as far as the eye could see.
Despite my respect for the military, it is no accident that both SNAFU and FUBAR have their origins there.
It is true, as my grandmother used to say in her own version of Murphy's Law, that "all human things, given time, go badly." And regardless of who is in charge or what your politics or religion is, there is no protection from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, from the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
But the guilt-driven egalitarianism of a post-Sixties America unhinged from its Founding Fathers' sense of realism*, a groundless, pathetically suicidal and stupid ethic which provokes compulsive moral submission to minorities --the more alien, the more dysfunctional and the more hostile the better-- is one of the most foolish and contemptible ideas in all of human history.
*Realism which is now considered racism, sexism, classism, etc.
----
Escaping from human nature
and the human condition is what liberalism is all about.
Just a slomo version of all the utopianisms that try to immanentize the eschaton*, or in plainer English, build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
It always ends in blood and tears.
*I cannot forego the opportunity to point out the bluntly incoherent reading of Gnosticism made popular by Eric Voegelin. If the world is, as Gnostics believe, inherently disordered and tragic --note the adverb-- then a program of utopian reform is the last thing Gnostics would undertake. For Gnosticism, the world is hopelessly unfixable. It was created broken and cannot be repaired. Voegelin's list of so-called Gnostic projects of bringing heaven to earth is a cheap lie.
---
Just a slomo version of all the utopianisms that try to immanentize the eschaton*, or in plainer English, build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
It always ends in blood and tears.
*I cannot forego the opportunity to point out the bluntly incoherent reading of Gnosticism made popular by Eric Voegelin. If the world is, as Gnostics believe, inherently disordered and tragic --note the adverb-- then a program of utopian reform is the last thing Gnostics would undertake. For Gnosticism, the world is hopelessly unfixable. It was created broken and cannot be repaired. Voegelin's list of so-called Gnostic projects of bringing heaven to earth is a cheap lie.
---
Moral insanity
As I was thinking on Columbus Day of the murder-suicide of Western --aka White-- culture and civilization that we are currently enjoying, the term "moral insanity" came to mind. I had heard it somewhere --in Tom and Viv, or Sherlock Holmes?--but was not sure what it meant. Certainly seemed an apt description of the liberal regime.
But I discovered that it is not apt. It was used in the 19th and early 20th century to describe a kind of emotional or behavioral mania without corresponding intellectual impairment, without delusions or hallucinations. Not, therefore, applicable.
It is also interesting to see what a very different set of connotations the word moral carried in that context.
---
But I discovered that it is not apt. It was used in the 19th and early 20th century to describe a kind of emotional or behavioral mania without corresponding intellectual impairment, without delusions or hallucinations. Not, therefore, applicable.
It is also interesting to see what a very different set of connotations the word moral carried in that context.
---
Conquering Peoples Day
From an 1898 school history book:
an image of utter un-pc-ness.
Although Columbus Day is still a legal holiday, the heart has gone out of it. Because the heart and will has gone out of the civilization whose founding it commemorates.
My reflections in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2011.
If you are White American and you do not celebrate this day, you are consenting to the fraudulent multicultural project of your own demise and subjection and erasure.
--
Sunday, October 07, 2012
Lepanto
Today, in 1571, a Christian fleet, gathered together by the Dominican Pope Pius V, routed the fleet of the Muslim Turks as it attempted once more to invade the West, then known as Christendom. Rather than apologize, the Pope instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory.
I notice that while Westerners, even foolish Popes like John Paul II, engage in breast-beating over the Crusades, no Muslims ever apologize for their imperialist and colonialist wars against us, which both preceded and followed the Crusades, including well over a thousand years of piracy and slaving in the Mediterranean, a problem requiring Thomas Jefferson to send the Marines in "to the shores of Tripoli."
They are our enemies, but unlike us now, they are not fools.
---
I notice that while Westerners, even foolish Popes like John Paul II, engage in breast-beating over the Crusades, no Muslims ever apologize for their imperialist and colonialist wars against us, which both preceded and followed the Crusades, including well over a thousand years of piracy and slaving in the Mediterranean, a problem requiring Thomas Jefferson to send the Marines in "to the shores of Tripoli."
They are our enemies, but unlike us now, they are not fools.
---
Multicult vs human rights
If you're in favor of both universal human rights and multiculturalism*, you're gonna have even more trouble than people who are in favor of both liberty and equality. Very uneasy companions.
Ukraine is catching heat from the other White people for not cozying up to full expression for the LGBT community. Very backward of them.
Malawi's decision to decline to de-criminalize homosexuality is noted without outrage. Even the tolerant head of state who pardoned two men who were to be jailed for fourteen years for attempting marriage said that same-sex activity was still "a crime against our culture."
The story is in the BAR.
Backward cultures vs universal human rights. Are Ukrainians evil but Malawis just "other"? What's a multiculturalist human rights LGBTQ activist to do?
As I have said before, given how the LGBT agenda plays out over time --one minute you are getting the state out of the bedroom and the next minute, as in France, you are erasing the categories of husband, wife, father and mother in order to be inclusive-- who can blame places like Ukraine or Malawi from not signing on for that ride?
And after all, if it's against their culture, who's the imperialist who's gonna gainsay them?
The trouble with Progressives is that progressing is all they know how to do. It's never enough.
---
*And like all liberal lingo, these are code words which never really mean what they appear to mean.
Ukraine is catching heat from the other White people for not cozying up to full expression for the LGBT community. Very backward of them.
Malawi's decision to decline to de-criminalize homosexuality is noted without outrage. Even the tolerant head of state who pardoned two men who were to be jailed for fourteen years for attempting marriage said that same-sex activity was still "a crime against our culture."
The story is in the BAR.
Backward cultures vs universal human rights. Are Ukrainians evil but Malawis just "other"? What's a multiculturalist human rights LGBTQ activist to do?
As I have said before, given how the LGBT agenda plays out over time --one minute you are getting the state out of the bedroom and the next minute, as in France, you are erasing the categories of husband, wife, father and mother in order to be inclusive-- who can blame places like Ukraine or Malawi from not signing on for that ride?
And after all, if it's against their culture, who's the imperialist who's gonna gainsay them?
The trouble with Progressives is that progressing is all they know how to do. It's never enough.
---
Saturday, October 06, 2012
First Church of the Foolish White People
In the wake of the recent SF spat twixt Episcopal bishop Andrus and Catholic archbishop Cordileone, I was perusing some Episcopalian blogs.
Mother of God, what a mess. Both the originating church in England and here in the New World.
Years ago, before I gave up on belonging to any kind of church community --and while I was still a liberal--, I gave the Episcopalians a serious shot. Via the local and very quirky St Gregory of Nyssa parish.
I liked the music and the vitality of the liturgy there, although the preaching was repetitively self-referential. The Parting of the Ways came one Sunday after coffee hour when I discovered that all the chalices from the Eucharist were stuck in the kitchen --leftover consecrated wine still in them-- next to the sink with the other dirty dishes. Homo and fallen priest though I be, it was too much for my Catholic soul. No matter how much they dressed up and created a highly ritualized liturgy, these people were rank liberal Protestants. As I came to believe, Unitarians in drag. Even the Gnostic bishopess of Palo Alto treated the sacred mysteries with more reverence.
In retrospect, I also realized that despite their constant and annoying proclamations of welcome, --we had to wear name tags so we could receive Communion by name--my experience of them was pretty interpersonally frosty. Admitting my own introvert limitations, I still found it very hard to make recognizable human connections with them. There was an in group and I was out of it.
A conservative thought about religious reform. If, as in England under the Tudors, you have the State and the State Church rupturously re-design an ancestral religion to suit their current cultural, political and theological wisdom, why is there any reason not to keep doing it ad infinitum? The sometimes slow and sometimes swift re-arrangement not only of worship but of doctrine and priesthood --reducing the clergy to civil servants really--, once begun, why should it ever stop?
Reading those blogs, the answer seems pretty clear.
---
Mother of God, what a mess. Both the originating church in England and here in the New World.
Years ago, before I gave up on belonging to any kind of church community --and while I was still a liberal--, I gave the Episcopalians a serious shot. Via the local and very quirky St Gregory of Nyssa parish.
I liked the music and the vitality of the liturgy there, although the preaching was repetitively self-referential. The Parting of the Ways came one Sunday after coffee hour when I discovered that all the chalices from the Eucharist were stuck in the kitchen --leftover consecrated wine still in them-- next to the sink with the other dirty dishes. Homo and fallen priest though I be, it was too much for my Catholic soul. No matter how much they dressed up and created a highly ritualized liturgy, these people were rank liberal Protestants. As I came to believe, Unitarians in drag. Even the Gnostic bishopess of Palo Alto treated the sacred mysteries with more reverence.
In retrospect, I also realized that despite their constant and annoying proclamations of welcome, --we had to wear name tags so we could receive Communion by name--my experience of them was pretty interpersonally frosty. Admitting my own introvert limitations, I still found it very hard to make recognizable human connections with them. There was an in group and I was out of it.
A conservative thought about religious reform. If, as in England under the Tudors, you have the State and the State Church rupturously re-design an ancestral religion to suit their current cultural, political and theological wisdom, why is there any reason not to keep doing it ad infinitum? The sometimes slow and sometimes swift re-arrangement not only of worship but of doctrine and priesthood --reducing the clergy to civil servants really--, once begun, why should it ever stop?
Reading those blogs, the answer seems pretty clear.
---
Differing on difference
One of the regular moves of the lovers of diversity and difference is to assume beforehand that all the differences they discover will be benign. Which, in effect, empties them of real difference.
All of human history, in the eyes of these folks --almost always foolish Whites--, has been one big misunderstanding, which they are going to clear up for us.
Aren't we lucky?
---
All of human history, in the eyes of these folks --almost always foolish Whites--, has been one big misunderstanding, which they are going to clear up for us.
Aren't we lucky?
---
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