The usual devolution

Three Catholic women who live so deeply enmeshed in the Democrat worldview that they don't even know how distant they are from the religion they claim.

[As Ex Cathedra's readers may know, it's precisely because he knows how distant he is that he is, well, Mr. Ex Cathedra and not Friar Ex Cathedra anymore. Part of what I find so offensive about these three girls --and their numbers are legion-- is that their attitude is so disrespectful. If Roman Catholicism isn't anything, it isn't a make-it-up-as-you-go-along kinda faith.] 

First, Caroline Kennedy, who tells the DNC "as a Catholic woman", that she is totally on board with whatever the Democrat feminist line is about. Genetic drift.
After all, epic scumbag Ted was her uncle. (Funny how they're all "separation of church and state" only when the religious don't buy their line...)

Second, some HuffPo writer who, despite her outrage that the Church expects its public personnel to show some allegiance to Catholicism rather than New Age eco-feminism and lefty government programs, --can you believe it?--wants to stay Catholic. Because...

So, what makes the Social Justice Catholic Church different from any other inclusive and reasonable church, like the Unitarian Church, for example? Two thousand years' worth of rituals and a treasure trove of accessories, that's what.

Really. I'm no star example, but if this is the result of Vatican II Catholicism fifty years later...Really stunning. I'm sure those Carthusian monks who had their bowels ripped out and died in their own shit under Henry VIII will be relieved to know it was all about ceremonies and "accessories."

And finally, Sr. Simone Whatever, who has been driving around the country in a bus, telling Paul Ryan what the federal budget should look like and gets to tell the DNC about it, suddenly, when asked about abortion, apes the feckless Obama and lies barefaced that it's "above her pay grade."

The first two broads are probably invincibly ignorant herd-ewes.

But the nun is just a fraud.

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Fearful asymmetry

Four Marines --who had just been in the same Long Beach gay bar as their victim-- beat another man unconscious. The bartender came out to help him.

His boyfriend stood by and watched, unmoving.

Shameful and sad. All of it. It is the utterly dishonorable* habit of men in groups to attack a weaker man. But the boyfriend's paralysis is fearful.

I hope to God I never find myself in any situation like that. And if I do, that I do not shame myself by inaction.




Despite my affection for the Chad Allen film series about gay private eye Donald Strachey, there is one scene that has always bothered me.

In the presence of his ex-seminarian do-gooder boyfriend Tim, --whom he has just rescued--Strachey is fighting with some gangsters and losing, his life imminently at risk. Tim finds a gun but cannot bring himself to use it. Can't even fire a warning shot into the air. Yet Don not only excuses him, but validates his cowardice.

Both Tim's paralysis and Don's excuse for it don't wash.

Fearful asymmetry.



*Men in groups are hunters by nature. This kind of behavior has a primal evolutionary root.  But these are cases where Katherine Hepburn's retort to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, when he pleads that "it's just human nature", is very true:

Nature, Mr. Allnut,
is what we are put in this world to rise above



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Transgressive cinema

My warmhearted but righteous friend Bill (not B: he's coldhearted and morally lax) mentioned DW Griffith's "racist" 1915 film Birth of A Nation. I asked if he had seen it and of course he hadn't. I have. Just this past year.

And yesterday I watched Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremburg rallies.

Gosh, what's next? Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom?

Birth of a Nation was originally called The Clansman, after the novel. It is the story of the Civil War and especially of Reconstruction and the origins of the Klan, from a White Southerner's point of view. Its portrayal of Blacks is first of slaves, of course, but then, after the War, of savagely ignorant incompetents and vilely destructive tyrants given power by the vengeful North. If anything, it makes the consequent Jim Crow regime understandable.

Such portrayal is universally condemned as "racist". However, if the results of Black rule in places like Detroit are any indication, it might be re-considered as more of a documentary than fiction.

As for Reifenstahl's piece, parts of it are quite stirring. You see the masses of young German men --with numerous shots of individuals and small groups-- full of energy and pride. The background of World War I and Germany's suffering under the Treaty of Versailles is assumed and the contrast is powerful. For a while, even Hitler looks compelling. The intense adoration of the crowds, with the massive sets and rituals, seems to pervade him physically and he really does seem like a savior rather than the madman of the later years.

His speeches, however, are pretty simple: all about youth and pride and unity and  loyalty and the Volk and Deutschland. Over and over. And over. And when the theme of Hitler = the Party = Germany, all that Fuhrer worship, begins, I start to roll my eyes.

For a man of 21st century attention span, both movies are far too long.

As for Pasolini's Salo, I've already seen it. Ages ago on VCR. It is as deeply creepy and revolting as advertised. I doubt if I managed to watch the whole thing.

I do have my limits.

Circus

I know that I am biased about this, of course, but after watching this Reason TV piece, the DNC seems to me quite like an insane asylum.

Everyone is joyously and firmly in favor of any woman's freedom to kill the unborn child in her womb, but when it comes to transfat, big sodas, cigarettes, light bulbs, joining a union, etc. they are joyously and firmly against freedom.

And this is not Onion TV.

God, but I hate these people

Michelle Antoinette.


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Time bomb ticking

When any traditionally successful group or institution adopts liberalism as its functional creed, it is only a matter of time before it will collapse.

Its very success becomes the ground for its guilt, and the hungry and vengeful victim classes will gather to devour it, as it shows its ethical virtue by cooperating with them in its own demise.

Example Number One: Whites, who have now become The Race That Dare Not Speak Its Name.

Inquiring minds

already know the answer:

Raise taxes, increase spending, expand government programs, make more rules,

Isn't doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result
the definition of either stupidity or insanity?

Unintended outcomes

Saw a YouTube video against the death penalty. Narrator had a breathy Brit voice. Made me want to shoot him.

__

Stupid Christian tricks

Helping young Black males by addressing "White privilege" in the churches.

I don't recall Jesus dismantling Hebrew privilege during his ministry. As a matter of fact, he seemed to take it for granted. During all his moments of famously open table fellowship with sinners, none of those sinners were Gentiles. Jesus healed them but never ate with them. (If I am wrong about this, chapter and verse would be appreciated.)

The deluded rev "shares his heart for" the young Black male. (I have to say, some of the jargon of evangelical Christianity really puts me off. "Christian walk", "my walk with the Lord", the Lord "laid a burden on my heart for" and my favorite: "My Bible says..."

What crap.

I hope he is consistent and confronts his boyz with their Black Male Privilege. The game never ends.

As Ex Cathedra would point out to this fool, group privilege is both natural and unavoidable. If you give up yours, it will not go away; you will squander what your ancestors created for you and it will migrate to some other group who did not earn it.

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Tuesday morning in September

The first morning in months I have had to put on a robe to warm up.

Alexis de Tocqueville's astonishingly prescient 1841 description of contemporary America. 

Southern California is a good, and therefore bad, example.*

*I am in favor of banning naps in the library. Reason: this is code for keeping homeless people from living there. My first visit to the SF public library was a shock. Full of smelly and dirty homeless people. The staff, being all Trotskyites, would or could not expel them. The liberal is morally disarmed, etc.

While I'm quoting, here's CS Lewis in 1948:

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live
under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."

As I have noted, liberal progressivism has no internal limiting principle, no point at which it can say, This is enough. It is the mirror image in government of what it accuses capitalism of in commerce. As one wag said of them, Societal bliss is always just one more regulation away.
Speaking of tyrants of the robber baron type, I suspect that if Henry VIII is not in hell, he will be in purgatory for a very long time. The story, with details, of how savagely he treated a group of Carthusian monks, the most reclusive of Catholic orders,  for refusing to recognize his marriage to Anne Bolyn and his usurpation of government of the Church is truly appalling. Those he did not condemn to be hung drawn and quartered, he let die of thirst and starvation, in their own filth, chained to the wall, in prison.

Ben Stein, who used to make sense, now seems to be going the way of all flesh. He writes:  Now, I know Chris Matthews. He is a very pleasant, smart, articulate man.

I have mentioned that when liberals get freaked, they threaten to emigrate and when conservatives get freaked, they threaten to secede. On a local level, it is happening, around Atlanta, where White areas whose high taxes support an unproductive Black area form themselves into separate towns.

This reminds me of one of the shocking thoughts I had this past year, as life under Obama and Holder sunk in, that while the standard narrative is that Whites have kept Blacks from advancing, in reality Whites keep Blacks from drowning.

I watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban over the weekend. Still enjoy it very much, although Professor Lupin's professorial nostrums and Serius Black's blather about how memory keeps the dead alive were little bits of moralism and wishful thinking that the story could do without.

Now, as summer fades and the West declines, I'm off to the gym.