Author: VD

They’re not thinking anywhere else either:

One subject I’d like to be done with, for now, is bumper stickers — we’ve devoted a lot of time to it in this column. But I’d like to bring up one more — brought to my attention by a reader. The sticker says, “Don’t Pray in My School. I Won’t Think in Your Church.” Is that the most pretentious and arrogant sticker of all time? Of all time? Quite possibly.

The message may be intended to be pretentious and arrogant, but as is so often the case with militant atheists, the arrogance is unmerited. The prayer in schools issue was always a manufactured one and is now irrelevant; nine months of collective learning is a technologically outmoded relic of the nineteenth century even without the useless PC propaganda that now passes for “education”.

Since atheists are demonstrably no more prone to think for themselves than any other group of people, there’s no reason to fear them thinking in church, or anywhere else, for that matter. There are few things more ironic than the mindless infidel who thinks himself a fearless freethinker because he successfully parrots the logical and factual absurdities of those to whom he has delegated his own doxastic responsibilities.

As for the juvenile lionizing of all things European that so bothers Mr. Nordlinger, there are two contrasting aspects to it. The first is that there truly are plenty of things to be embarrassed about when one sees Americans on display in Europe. One need not be a pretentious East Coast Euro-wannabee to be appalled by the appearance and behavior of one’s fellow Americans. Many of them wandering around the continent in summertime are fat, loud, obnoxious, and poorly dressed. Their children are often grotesque and ludicrously undisciplined. I certainly didn’t mind at all being taken for an Italian one evening in Amsterdam when two obese American teens were doing backwards somersaults over the back of the couch upon which their parents were sitting, while the two Italian children of a similar age were sitting politely and quietly drinking wine with their own parents. When the older girl rolled her eyes after one particularly buffoonish landing and mouthed “Americani” at me, I can’t honestly say that I felt any burning need to stand up and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in order to stand in solidarity with my countrymen.

All that being said, Europeans can not only rival Americans for insularity and hostility towards the wider world, they’re quite visibly more inbred. You can literally see it in some of the smaller towns. Also, the idea that most Europeans speak English is simply false and those who possess it actually betray their 0wn lack of familiarity with the continent. Comparing the wealthy, educated, and well-traveled European elite with the American boobeoisie simply is not a fair or reasonable comparison, indeed, across most of Europe, it’s the German tourists who are considered the most annoying, with Americans coming in a distant second. Most younger Europeans tend to think of America as a much livelier, exciting, and dynamic place than the Old World; while the cultural disdain of their elders is real, so too is the younger generation’s envy.

Seldom has a party still in power looked more headed for extinction than the British Labour Party. And a very well-deserved extinction it would be:

Endangered in England’s largest cities, losers in London, out of power in Scotland and sharing it with the nationalists in Wales, wiped out in the south, on the run in the north-west marginals, under fire in the West Midlands, all but bankrupt and with a collapsing membership: what it to become of Labour?

This is how, if they are not careful, parties die. Extinction is never the result of a single event, rather it happens more slowly, over several decades. A grouping whose leaders and policies once appeared as a fixed point on the landscape, gradually lose definition until virtually no one thinks it is any longer worth paying attention.

The party is left abandoned, and historians with the benefit of hindsight insist that it was always going to happen.

The Tories could assure themselves of two generations in power if they did three simple things.

1. Embrace Scottish independence and encourage further Welsh devolution towards the same end.

2. Embrace Euroskepticism, abjure the Lisbon Treaty and give the nation the referendum that Labor promised and denied it.

3. Announce the end of immigration from all non-EU nations and cease renewing visas or granting nationalization to non-EU citizens.

This isn’t likely, of course, since most of the Tory politicians are every bit as enthusiastic about Brussels as the Labourites, since they’re feeding from the same trough. The only question is whether a Cameron-led Conservative party has more in common with Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill, and there’s every indication that it’s the former. Don’t skip past the comments, the hatred for Labour and the treacherous Scot at its head is really quite remarkable.

Sen. Obama: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”

Now, the man has been running on a “hey, vote for the black guy for once” theme since the beginning of the Democratic primaries. So, I’m kind of curious about what those past traditions might be… slavery and peanut butter? Don’t get me wrong, peanut butter beats anything that McCain has on offer, but still.

Since religious persecution by the secular authorities has such a long and successful track record of eliminating religion from a culture, a British journalist advocates having a go at stamping it out in England:

[R]eligious people and their views should not be officially recognised in groups. Religion should not be allowed a public space or public representation. This is hard for those of us who used to love the muddled Anglican compromise; it means the disestablishment of our national church – if it doesn’t self-destruct first…. There must be no more religious schools – personally I would leave those that exist alone. There must be no public recognition of religious associations as representatives of anything or anybody: not on campuses, not in student unions, not in government consultations or in parliament.

So-called religious community leaders, or umbrella groups of religious bodies, must of course be free to associate as they like in private, in a free country, but publicly they must be ignored. Publicly they must not teach or promote illegal prejudices. Forced into the private sphere, denied the oxygen of publicity, power and influence, highly politicised religious groups will wither on the vine.

As I pointed out in TIA, this is the connecting point between atheism and totalitarianism that so many atheists are afraid to admit. But I’m not outraged, quite the opposite in fact, as it would be very, very good for Christianity to see it abolished by the secular authorities in the West. Only then would it revert to the flame-forged form that competes so favorably with Islam and every other religion; not even lifelong Anglicans can stomach the increasingly apostate state church any longer.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Perhaps this explication of the current state of what passes for “law” in America might help some of you understand why I oppose the concept of “equality” so remorselessly:

“If I had one message to give you today, it is that it is not your job to weigh the parties’ rights as you might inclined to do as having been private practitioners. Your job is not to become concerned about the constitutional rights of the man that you’re violating as you grant a restraining order. Throw him out on the street, give him the clothes on his back and tell him, see ya around. Your job is to be the wall between the two people that are fighting each other and that’s how you can rationalize it. Because that’s what the statute says. The statute says there is something called domestic violence and it says that it is an evil in our society.
– Judge Richard Russell, Ocean City, New Jersey

The most ominous thing about the linked article is that this judge is actually responsible for training new judges, which is the context in which he made the statement quoted above. But if Judge Russell thinks domestic violence is an evil in our society, then he clearly has no idea what will happen once men realize that their rights are no longer recognized by the legal system and even the pretense of the rule of law has been abandoned. Domestic violence will be vastly preferred to an equalitarian totalitarianism that can only lead to a complete societal breakdown.

At this point, any man who elects to get married in New Jersey or even live with a woman has to be either completely ignorant or insane. However, there appears to be some effort to reign in the madness before it spirals completely out of control.

Her Bad Mother boldly ignores it at Mamapop:

[W]e know that mom-blogging – WOMAN-blogging – is still radical because there is still so much animosity, so much hate toward it, so much deprecation of it, so much dismissal of it, so much effort put into its marginalization. What is radical about it is that we push on, demanding to be heard, and demanding recognition of our worth as mothers, women, writers, business-people, innovators, people, against the ignorance of those who would keep us down.

Oh, get over yourself, you narcissistic, brainless, lactating cow. While I’m delighted to recognize the woman for successfully doing what all too few women are accomplishing these days – to her credit she has accomplished the one thing that the human race actually requires of her for its survival – but F-minus for accurate perception of reality. Such drama-queening! Such bathos! This is a Chris Rock moment:

Women, y’all exaggerate everything. You turn it into some Dynasty shit, like: ”She’s trying to destroy me!” What the fuck are you talking about? You wrap up bags at J.C. Penney’s!

So, we are informed that these radical mommybloggers are DEMANDING to be heard, DEMANDING to be recognized. Well, guess what? They’ve got three options in today’s blogosphere. Write something intelligent, write something entertaining, or post naked pictures. And clearly, in an undefined number of these cases, options one and two are out.

No one marginalizes the chick-bloggers and mommy-bloggers; they marginalize themselves. Hate and animosity? There is none, readers ignore you because they could not possibly care less about nothing, which just happens to be what you have to say. Ignorance? Hardly, when it’s the knowledge of your posts that breeds contempt! Do you seriously want to know why you’re not taken seriously by me or anyone of either gender with even half a brain? Sweet Saint Darwin of the Galapagos Islands, then read what you write! The economy is failing, the Obama is at the Gates, the real estate sector is being nationalized, the nation is teetering on the precipice of what appear to be Interesting Times all round, and this woman is entirely caught up in babbling about her vulnerabilities, her breast-feeding, her tears, and her fears? In precisely what lower circle of Hell does she think anyone except her and those in very similar circumstances to her give the most infinitesimal damn about any of those things?

Now, I fully support the right of everyone to blog about whatever they want. Let a million blogs bloom and all that. It’s not as if anyone except a few hard-core nerds in Estonia and Finland cared about my brilliant performance as a commander in Alterac Valley and hardly anyone even understands what I’m talking about when I worry about what looks suspiciously like Wave Three of Three getting under way. The salient point is that I understand that this blog exists for me and me alone. I have no right to demand that anyone read it or recognize it or pay any attention to it whatsoever, and no one has any right to demand that I do it any differently than I do. Everyone knows most male bloggers aren’t taken seriously either, the difference is that male bloggers don’t often cry about how they’re being marginalized and oppressed and persecuted and near-raped and genitally mutilated and OH THE HUMANITY I CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE, WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE CREATE A FEDERAL DEPARTMENT OF BLOG EQUITY TO HELP THESE POOR HOMOGAMETIC BLOGGERS!!!!!

Now, since this post appears likely to strike a few estrobloggers with inspiration of the pulse-elevating variety, perhaps it would behoove me to remind them of Rule #1:

1. Have at least half a brain and demonstrate that it actually functions by not writing egregiously stupid stuff.

Science-fetishizing materialists deny the testimony of thousands of direct eyewitnesses throughout the course of history. No doubt they will continue to do so:

“I’m seeing spirals of light behind people,” she reports. “Those are the people’s guardian angels. We’ve all got one. They are usually about three paces behind us. And then I’m also seeing the other angels, too, the ones that I call the helpers and teachers. They are white and beautiful. All angels have a human appearance, but that’s just for us, so we are not terrified.”

Now, I readily admit the possibility that Lorna Byrne is lying. After all, she presumably has a solid financial motivation to do so, having just received a book contract in excess of $100,000. It’s also possible that she is insane, although that’s not a particularly credible possibility given the fact that she apparently doesn’t manifest any of the usual signs of mental illness. The third possibility is even less believable, as she can’t possibly have mistaken ordinary visual and auditory artifacts for supernatural sights and sounds for the majority of her 54 years. The fourth possibility, of course, is that she is simply reporting what she has seen and heard with reasonable accuracy.

While one can attempt to reach a logical conclusion with regards to selecting between the four possibilities, it is important to recognize that one can claim to have done nothing more than that, reached a logical conclusion. The ironic thing here is that many so-called rational materialists stake out a fundamentally irrational position with regards to the supernatural; the only evidence they will accept – personal experience – is precisely the evidence they reject when it is provided by others.

Given the present inability to predict, understand, or cure mental illness, to say nothing of the large quantities of testimonial evidence in support of the supernatural, it is highly illogical to conclude that every single individual eyewitness is insane, especially in the complete absence of any information about the general mental stability of the eyewitness. Moreover, just a single example of empirical evidence, such as the Sarejevo shrapnel-detection mentioned by the Dublin therapist, is sufficient to jettison the materialist model should the testimony remained unimpeached.

The reach of science is not unlimited. I have read that cosmologists believe that in one hundred billion years, all signs of the 400 billion other galaxies in the universe will be undetectable to observers on the Earth; sans the testimony of the historical record, there would be no scientific evidence that these other galaxies ever existed. In other words, we know that there is a reasonable probability that future science will be forced to deny what present science insists is material. Given the testimony of Lorna Byrne and many others, given the spiritual model derived from the Biblical description of our fallen, silent planet, and given the obvious past and future limitations of science, it is far more rational to conclude that science is simply unable to detect the supernatural at present than to conclude from this inability that the supernatural does not exist.

While there are historical frauds on the supernatural side, there are no shortage of historical scientific frauds to counterbalance them. But the incredible number of baseless charges of deceit, error, and madness required to sustain the materialist model show how fundamentally weak it is when weighed against the known past and future limitations of the scientific method, to say nothing of the scientific consensus. Placing one’s faith in nothing more than the present state of technology, an intrinsically dynamic entity, is beyond illogical. It is wholly nonsensical. The reason Richard Dawkins and his fetish flock so hate the oft-heard quote from Hamlet is that they suspect, in their heart of hearts, that it is probably true.

As usual, Kathryn Jean has no idea about the latest thing that has her panties in a bunch:

Mitt Romney — is an example of someone who came to the wisdom of conservatism through practical experience. He saw its reasonableness in the face of liberal overreach. We should want to embrace such conversions. We should want to encourage people to get Right. Or we can fervently close the door to them and their contributions and fresh blood. What a good move for a movement that needs re-energization and recruits.

Now, Mitt Romney is a fine man, but he would be a terrible choice by the McCain campaign because he simply isn’t a potentially effective Republican leader. et me see if I can clock down slow enough to put this in terms that even a Catholic schoolgirl can understand.

1. Nominees for president and vice-president are leadership positions in the Republican Party, which is dependent upon conservative and evangelical Chistian votes.
2. There are many people in the Republican party who are not leaders.
3. A disinclination to embrace as leaders those whose commitments to conservative are recent, partial, or otherwise doubtful is perfectly reasonable on the part of conservatives. Likewise for evangelicals.
4. These reasonable disinclinations are reinforced by the actions of so-called conservative leaders who have led in a distinctly non-conservative manner over the last 20 years.
5. A rejection of Mitt Romney as a presidential or vice-presidential candidate is not tantamount to kicking him out of the Republican Party or the broad conservative movement.

In general, there is something distinctly problematic about an outsider who wants to come in and lead. It seldom ends well, as the Germans learned after embracing an Austrian outsider. One of the reasons for the disastrous state in which conservatism finds itself, particularly the conservative media, is that so many of its self-appointed leaders are not really conservative and hail from very different social, ethnic, and religious backgrounds than the great mass of conservative America. Can it really be considered any great surprise that irreligious Ivy Leaguers, naturalized aliens and secular New York City Jews have failed to provide successful intellectual leadership for religious conservatives from the heartland?

Until American conservatives refuse to permit non-conservatives and foreigners to act as their leaders, they will continue to be little more than a speed bump for the trans-nationalist American liberals who are already in a position to dominate American politics for the next generation.

Kevin Myers confesses:

I am not innocent in all this. The people of Ireland remained in ignorance of the reality of Africa because of cowardly journalists like me. When I went to Ethiopia just over 20 years ago, I saw many things I never reported — such as the menacing effect of gangs of young men with Kalashnikovs everywhere, while women did all the work. In the very middle of starvation and death, men spent their time drinking the local hooch in the boonabate shebeens. Alongside the boonabates were shanty-brothels, to which drinkers would casually repair, to briefly relieve themselves in the scarred orifice of some wretched prostitute (whom God preserve and protect). I saw all this and did not report it, nor the anger of the Irish aid workers at the sexual incontinence and fecklessness of Ethiopian men. Why? Because I wanted to write much-acclaimed, tear-jerkingly purple prose about wide-eyed, fly-infested children — not cold, unpopular and even “racist” accusations about African male culpability.

It’s a brave mea culpa, and while I understand Dreher’s Christian compulsion, I disagree with him about the utility of it, especially if government organizations are involved. Leave Africa to the Africans. It’s their problem, so let them sort it out. What is more racist than to insist that an entire continent of human beings are totally incapable of addressing their own problems?

It seems Broadway is gay… there has got to be a book in this for the Littlest Chickenhawk:

MUSICAL theater in New York is being dominated by a certain type of man. He’s in the Public Theater’s revival of “Hair,” which began performances at the Delacorte Theater on Tuesday, and he’s headlining “[title of show]” and “In the Heights.” He’s in recent closures like “Passing Strange” and in soon-to-open work like “Billy Elliot.” Frankly, he’s everywhere. “He” is a lead character defined by vulnerability, confusion and sincerity.

And NYT shareholders wonder why their stock is diving towards zero. No doubt we can look forward to similarly ground-breaking stories about how child-bearing rates are surprisingly low in San Francisco, California and electronic dance pop is popular in Sydney, Austrialia.

I did, however, quite enjoy the reporter’s complete misreading of the socionomic implications of economic hard times. Hard times create hard men, it’s historically been the decadence of wealth and power that produces Peak Gay.