Christian revival in the heart of secularism

A Christian in France suggests one might be in the works:

On a recent Sunday, my family and I only showed up 10 minutes early for Mass. That meant we had to sit in fold-out chairs in the spillover room, where the Mass is relayed on a large TV screen. During the service, my toddler had to go to the bathroom. To get there, we had to step over a dozen people sitting in hallways and corners. This is business as usual for my church in Paris, France.

I point this out because one of the most familiar tropes in social commentary today is the loss of Christian faith in Europe in general, and France in particular. The Wall Street Journal recently fretted about the sale of “Europe’s empty churches.”

Could it be, instead, that France is in the early stages of a Christian revival?

Yes, churches in the French countryside are desperately empty. There are no young people there. But then, there are no young people in the French countryside, period. France is a modern country with an advanced economy, and that means its countryside has emptied, and that means that churches built in an era when the country’s sociological makeup was quite different go empty. In the cities — which is where people are, and where cultural trends gain escape velocity — the story is quite different.

But back to our parish. Is our pastor some outlier with megawatt
charisma? In terms of flair, he would win no public speaking contests.
But there is something that sets him apart from many of the Catholic
priests my parents’ generation grew up listening to: he is
unapologetically orthodox.

It may seem strange to suggest this at a time when liberalism in the mainstream churches and secularism without appear dominant. The Anglicans have made women bishops, the Pope is a demi-socialist, and everyone expects the Supreme Court to declare, ex nihilo, that the abominable parody known as “gay marriage” was magically written into the U.S. Constitution in hitherto undetected invisible ink.

But consider the logic of the situation. First, as with a market at its peak, there is no one left to buy into the mainstream denominations’ liberal quasi-Christianity. The pews, as they say, are already empty. The 60’s-era notion that being more tolerant, more accepting, more accommodating of the world would strengthen the Christian Church and bring in more believers had precisely the opposite effect. After all, if the Church is not only in the world, but of it, what purpose does it have?

At the same time that its intellectual bankruptcy has resulted in the undeniable material failure of inclusive, liberal, and tolerant Churchianity, the material and spiritual failures of secularism are being more apparent as well. People are beginning to realize that asserting a belief in nothing is not going to save them from either the fires of Hell or the bullets of a resurgent Islam.

Add to that the fact that the apparent wealth of the longest credit boom in world history has turned out to be mostly illusionary, and what we are seeing is the potential for a perfect storm of a return to the faith of an intensity that may be unprecedented. For decades, only prophets saw the danger. For years, only extremists were willing to speak out. But now, one has to have one’s head lodged firmly in the sand, or in one’s posterior, to fail to recognize four things:

  1. The failure of liberal Christian heresy
  2. The spiritual and material failures of secularism
  3. The danger of the third great wave of Islamic aggression
  4. The peril of the Christian West

Now, none of this means a revival is inevitable. It is not. But God works in mysterious ways and in His own time. He appears to enjoy waiting until the moment is dire, and then, using the most unlikely of sources. We cannot make it happen, but we can raise our voices and pray that He will make it happen, and that He use us as His weapons against those who have proclaimed themselves His enemies.

We are all sinful, corrupt, and fallen. I do not exempt myself from that, being worse than many, if not most, in those regards. But even I can see that something is stirring, something appears to be rumbling under the ground to which the flimsy secular chains that cover the inert corpse of Christendom are attached.

I know that there are those who believe that we are living in a permanently post-Christian era. But I suggest it is far too soon to count out a faith that began with nothing more than eleven frightened men. If Christians do not serve and worship a Living God, then Christianity should, by all reason and logic, continue to dwindle and fade. But if that does not happen, if there is, instead, a great revival, that will be meaningful evidence to the contrary.

Burning down the house

Brad Torgersen has some thoughts on the reaction to the announcement of the forthcoming SAD PUPPIES 3. To put it in perspective, keep in mind that he is one of the liberal moderates of the Evil Legion of Evil:

It’s remarkable how fast word travels on the intarwebz these days. No sooner had I posted the (rather tame) announcement that SAD PUPPIES was coming back for a third go-around, than some people began carping about it. Which is to be expected. SAD PUPPIES breaks the rules. RULE #1: thou shalt not publicly campaign. Even though campaigning (in this award) has been done for many decades. RULE #2: thou shalt not publicly point out blind spots or biases in the voting body. Even though behind-closed-doors rage about these biases and blind spots has also been going on for decades — just not always about the same biases and blind spots. And lastly, RULE #3: thou shalt not publicly criticize Worldcon or “fandom” proper. Even though “fandom” (as an actual, coherent label for a specific body of people) hasn’t been applicable since the 1970s, nor has Worldcon actually represented the largest gathering of the largest body of consumer fans.

So . . . some personal opinions. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.

I could care less about Rule 1 and Rule 2, since these are endlessly violated anyway. Rules which are perpetually broken behind the curtain, are not actually rules. And if SAD PUPPIES is to be damned for breaking them, fine. At least we’re honest about what we’re doing. I don’t have much patience for people who aim an accusatory finger at us, then do precisely what we’re doing, just sneaky-like. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy, even when it dresses up in its Sunday best and has good table manners.

Rule 3 deserves a larger thought bubble. Because (as I have stated many times in the last few years) “fandom” does not really represent FANDOM anymore.

You can understand my difficult position as the Legion’s Supreme Dark Lord, trying to maintain even a modicum of evil order at our monthly staff meetings.

VOX DAY, SUPREME DARK LORD: Welcome, my black knights, my devious and subtle dark ladies. The circle is joined. Tell me, what evil hath thou wrought?

TOM KRATMAN: GRAND STRATEGIKON: Sir! Another 64 crossbeams, 97 posts, and 468 iron nails have been prepared and added to the warehouse, sir! Four more excruciators have been trained and are good to go, sir!

LARRY CORREIA, INTERNATIONAL LORD OF HATE: Bloody hell, Tom! How many crosses do you think we need? We haven’t even crucified anyone yet!

KRATMAN: I just like to be prepaaaaared, sir!

DAY: So how many pinkshirts can we crucify? Give me a daily average.

KRATMAN: All of them!

SARAH HOYT, BEAUTIFUL BUT EVIL SPACE PRINCESS, All of them?

KRATMAN: All of them! We’re cocked, locked and ready to rock!

HOYT (whispers to Correia): Kate’s going to be pissed. She had her heart set on impaling McCreepy.

DAY: Stand down, Tom. Good work. Anyone else?

JOHN WRIGHT, LIVING BRAIN, KING IN YELLOW, AND SPEAKER TO MORLOCKS: I have erected, at great personal expense, a ninety-one foot tall idol
of radioactive black marble to your likeness in the caves of Logan County,
West Virginia, where I and a coterie of degenerate hillbillies,
drug-maddened Saponi and Shawnee shaman, blood-drinking devil dogs,
together with an inhuman living fungi from Pluto make hideous sacrifices
and perform acts of unspeakable abomination to adore our idol of Vox
Day, impiously dreaming of the return of the Elder Star-gods from Hyades
in Taurus. For we adore Vox Day! Crowned with Five Divine Cobras of Might! His Buttocks Sit Atop the Thunder-Winged Garuda Bird!

DAY: All I asked for was the latest draft of Somewither, John.

WRIGHT: Oh, yes. Let me see. Ah, here it is.

BRAD TORGERSEN, SOFT AND CUDDLY TOKEN LIBERAL: Hey, Larry, what’s this?

CORREIA: Dammit, Brad, put down-

TORGERSEN: AH HA HA HA HA HA!

CORREIA: The flamethrower….

Homeschool or be poor

The cognitive elite are abandoning the public schools:

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation.

The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade were eligible under the federal program for free and reduced-price lunches in the 2012-2013 school year. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers.

 Jartstar observes: This will accelerate home schooling and private schooling. In a generation or before most of the major city public schools in the US will be like most of the rest of the 3rd World, poor, dangerous, and offering little education. There will be pockets of good public schools in select communities and neighborhoods. The real collapse will be when enough people take their kids out to kill the funding by stopping bonds.

I tend to suspect the influx of uneducated foreign children has encouraged more than a few parents to pull their children out of the public schools as well. Ironically, there is no state with an education system more segregated than Democrat-run New York.

Rules of war, and the violations therein

Bill Whittle writes a poignant explanation of the challenge facing a 2GW military that finds itself in a 4GW war:

War is hell, and soldiers have to live there. It is an unbearable burden; unbearable in the sense that not a single man and woman who has been fully exposed to war has ever come back home. Someone else comes back home. Sometimes, it is a better person. Sometimes a worse one. But they are different, all changed in the horror and crucible of war.

And so from the beginning of war, there exists between soldiers a bond that cannot be described. There is the obvious connection of a soldier to his comrades, but there is too a strong sense of respect and kinship with the soldier on the other side of No Man’s Land, shivering in cold wet places just the same, under orders and doing his job, too — just wanting to get the thing over with and go home.

Surrender is a mercy in such a place. The idea that certain death may be avoided, that one might be willing to simply give up fighting and still survive, is mercy of the deepest blue. Surrendering enemy soldiers are often greeted with a warmth and understanding that friendly civilians do not receive, for they have shared in the misery and hardship of war in ways that we comfortable and safe civilians can never know.

Surrender, in war, is perhaps the ultimate of Sanctuaries. It is a way out when hope and rescue have fled the field. Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.

And so, when groups of un-uniformed enemy soldiers waving white flags suddenly drop and open fire on unsuspecting, generous and honorable Americans, then the masters of these men have made a terrible bargain. They have destroyed the Sanctuary of Surrender, and eliminated for their own men a deep and abiding refuge in the nightmare of the battlefield.

They have done this to their own men. Not us. We have known of the brutality of the Iraqi army regarding prisoners from at least as far back as those taken and beaten during the first Gulf War, and as far as improvements over the intervening years, we might perhaps call Jessica Lynch to tell us of any newfound magnanimity on the part of the Ba’athists.

False surrender as a weapon of ambush is an abomination. When it is repeated, it is obvious that is not an aberration; it is policy. It is, like the abandonment of the uniform, a tactic to gain a short-term advantage that leads to long-term hardship and misery for their own troops. It is a Devil’s bargain, and they have had the Devil to pay for it — as have we.

They violate the Sanctuary of the Uniform. They violate the Sanctuary of Surrender. And the most reprehensible of all is the violation of the Sanctuary of Mercy.

What Whittle fails to understand is that the Eastern enemy the Western militaries are engaging have NEVER respected the rules of Westphalian war. As William S. Lind notes, uniforms are an aspect of 1GW order.

As long as Western armies insist on attempting to fight a 4GW war with 2GW tactics, they are going to be at a significant disadvantage, and one that likely outweights their various advantages. When the rules change, the players have to change with the rules.

Note that few, if any, Western armies have ever succeeded in causing an Eastern foe to modify its non-Westphalian tactics in imitation of the Western army.

However, Whittle needs to be corrected about this historically erroneous statement: “Honorable surrender has never been treated with shame by any American unit I have ever heard of.”

One incident of which I am aware is when the 45th Division of the US Army killed between 30 and 50 prisoners of war after the liberation of Dachau. It appears they mistook Hungarian Waffen-SS troops who had retreated to the camp with the SS-Totenkopf guards, not that killing the camp guards would have been acceptable under the principle of Sanctuary anyway.

The incident was buried by Gen. George Patton.

Maybe they’re just not very good

In which we are supposed to be very concerned that there are insufficient numbers of people of color nominated for awards given in Hollywood:

For only the second time in nearly two decades, the 20 Academy Awards acting nominations went to a group made up entirely of white actors and actresses. Among the notable snubs was David Oyelowo, who received praise for his turn as the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

In 2011, the 20 nominees also were entirely white. Before that, one has to go back to 1998 for an all-white acting group.

The all-white nominees list comes at a time when Hollywood is fielding criticism for not doing enough to promote diversity in filmmaking. And just last month, Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal and producer Scott Rudin were apologizing for leaked emails that appeared to be racially insensitive. Rudin was nominated this morning for producing best picture nominee The Grand Budapest Hotel.

What I find amusing about this is that while we’re informed that if right-wing writers aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of their lack of talent, but if Africans or women aren’t nominated for awards, this is an indication of racism and sexism.

Meanwhile, none of the science fiction SJWs celebrated the fact that a Hispanic man and a Indian were nominated for Hugo Awards last year. In fact, some of them are still openly decrying those nominations. The racists.

Another thing that is modestly amusing is the way in which the SJWs don’t understand the way in which a relative nonentity being given an affirmative action award when very young, then winning nothing afterwards, will be used as evidence against their accomplishments in the future. See the Sports Guy’s dissection of Wes Unsfeld’s MVP award in his rookie year, followed by a subsequent lack of honors, in The Book of Basketball for details.

Boom!

The Euro dropped from 1.20 to .85 against the Swiss Franc last night. That was nearly a 30 percent move overnight! It’s now down to 1.16 against the US Dollar. This is the result of the Swiss central bank giving up its attempt to peg the Franc at 1.20.

These wild currency swings are great if you can time them correctly, but it’s also a good way to lose your shirt. As usual, I was too early and missed out on the big move. Be careful out there.

This kind of monetary volatility is a strong indicator that deflation is defeating the central banks. They simply can’t print enough borrowers.

Graphic design needed

A message from Castalia House’s art director.

As Castalia House continues to grow we need another graphic design
professional to help with cover typography and pre-press needs. Ideally
the candidate will have a strong background in graphic design with a
love of composition, type, and an understanding of the pre-press process
including ICC color profiles, color conversion from RGB to CMYK for the
press, and how to read and understand provided print specs and
templates. A typical project will include the typography for a cover
design with both the artistic cover type over a provided illustration
for an eBook cover, and then prepping select covers for printing
including laying out the body copy on the cover, designing the spine and
back cover based upon the font illustration, and all pre-press work to
create a make-ready file for the printer based upon a template. The
designer will need to have industry standard software and be able to
provide an X-1a compliant pdf for print.

The work and pay is
based upon the project and an online portfolio for evaluation of your
work is a must. Please email books AT castaliahouse DOT com with COVERS
in the subject, provide a link to your work, and include your rates for
the work specified above. Not all books will require print layout. If you want to help the Blue SFF revolution
and work with a talented and very dedicated team of professionals, this
is your opportunity.

See, THAT is why they hate you

A Jewish woman in Britain worried about anti-semitism in the UK inadvertently demonstrates one reason many decent individuals in Britain are increasingly inclined to dislike the Jews in their midst:

There may
be only 260,000 of us in the UK but if we don’t lead, how can the rest of
society follow?

It’s just so hard to imagine why so many of the 64 million people in the UK might not want this woman living among them and so graciously deigning to lead them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most of them would now like to punch her in the face.

“If we don’t lead, how can the rest of
society follow?” How indeed. Pat Buchanan asked a pertinent question in his article on Unz: “Muslims in the banlieues wonder why insulting the Prophet is a protected freedom in France, while denying the Holocaust can get you a prison term.”

Speaking of the Islamic banlieues, across the English Channel the failure of French diversity and multiculturalism is highlighted by the reaction in them to the ridiculous “unity” march meant to defend the tottering status quo:

The sense of marginalization did not disappear with the massive solidarity march across Paris on Sunday, which drew more than one million people and 40 presidents and prime ministers to Mr. Hollande’s side. For some banlieue residents, it seemed an almost surreal display that had nothing to do with them.

In Vaulx-en-Velin, the only Charlie reference to be seen was a sign for the Charlie Chaplin cultural center across the street from City Hall, which is topped with a drawing of a flag of its sister city, the West Bank town of Beit Sahour.

Residents there ridiculed the “I am Charlie” marches. Some said the terrorist attacks had been staged. While many strongly condemned the attackers for the murders, others insisted the cartoonists had gotten what they deserved….

“I totally feel cut off from France,” said Karim Yahiaoui, 15, who added that he had not left this suburb more than twice in the past year. Over the past few decades, the Muslim community in Vaulx-en-Velin has become increasingly insular. “Many people only believe their own values now, not those of the republic,” said Anne Dufaud, director of the Mission, a nonprofit organization. She has worked in the community for 20 years. When Mr. Hollande led a moment of silence across France last Thursday for the victims of the attacks, two students and a teacher at a local high school, who declined to be identified, said many students refused to stand.

Patrick Kahn, a manager at the International League Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in Lyon, who operates a weekly tolerance program in the schools of Vaulx-en-Velin, said simply, “The integration policy failed.”

Integration has failed. Diversity has failed. Multiculturalism has failed. What options does that leave?

How to hunt trolls

In light of the conclusion of the successful hunting of one of the Internet’s more notorious trolls, a few people have asked me to explain how to go about doing the same. Here are some of the observations I have made along the way.

  1. Stay calm. The troll’s primary objective is to upset you. Trolls feed off attention and negative emotion, so it’s important to control your own reactions and deny them both. Staying calm serves two positive purposes, as it prevents you from establishing an emotional relationship with them as well as forcing them to increase their efforts in order to achieve the desired effect, thereby increasing the likelihood they will make a mistake or cross a line.
  2. Be patient. A security expert has told me that no one can regularly comment without giving away their true identity within one year. Remember, the troll is in it for the attention, so hiding even the smallest significant aspects of his identity places him fundamentally at conflict with his own instincts and desires.
  3. Directly inform the troll that he is banned from visiting your site and from commenting under all current and future identities, and that if he persists in his activity, he is engaged in illegal trespassing and cyberstalking. It is vital to put them on notice. For some reason, many people who are capable of understanding that physical trespassing is not only illegal, but can permit them to be legally shot in some places tend to find it hard to grasp that online trespassing is illegal. The fact that you CAN access a site does not automatically give you permission to do so any more than the fact that you CAN physically access someone’s lawn gives you permission to walk on it.
  4. Don’t delete the troll’s comments. It took me a long time to learn this; even though I saved them in a separate text file, I sometimes got lazy or couldn’t be bothered. It’s best to have them there, in the blog, where they can be easily produced as evidence or mined for investigative purposes.
  5. Don’t permit the readers to engage with the troll. They may mean well, but their reactions to the troll are usually a bigger problem than the troll’s comments are. Set a policy of “Comments responding to a troll will be deleted” and delete them on sight. Commenters cannot shut down a troll because he seeks their negative attention; them saying “shut up” and “go away” is something he desires, so their effort on your behalf are counterproductive. Don’t let them feed him.
  6. Look for the troll’s other identities. Trolls always have sockpuppets, and often they are less careful when using them. Yama had over 30. Even a cursory glance at the mined comments shows that NTA has at least three. And often, the sockpuppet identity is the troll’s primary identity on other sites. Yama did not use Yama here at all, he primarily used Will leFey, Dan Picaro, Luscinia, and Alauda. But once I was able to link him to the Yamamanama and Yama the Spacefish identities, I was able to learn considerably more information about him and those around him.
  7. Identify their literary tics. We all have them and they are nearly as reliable as fingerprints. Once you develop some skill at this, you’ll be able to recognize a troll under a new identity within two or three posts. It doesn’t hurt that they always gravitate towards the same bugaboos no matter what identity they present.
  8. Join forces with the troll’s other targets. You are probably not his first or only target. Comparing notes will almost always prove informative and multiple complainants make it impossible for the troll to claim it is a “he said, she said” situation or to blame everything on you once you bring the situation to the attention of third parties.
  9. Once you have the troll’s IP address, research the cyberstalking laws in their legal jurisdiction. Most communities consider cyberstalking to be a felony and penalties tend to be steeper than you probably expect. Jail sentences of up to 5 years and fines in the five digits are common.
  10. Don’t bother with threats and warnings. The troll habitually makes empty threats himself, so he’s not going to take yours seriously.
  11. Don’t pay undue attention to the troll’s assertions. Given that he is on your site under a false identity, why would you believe anything he says? Observe how trolls are very quick to claim entirely factual statements made by you and others are lies; this is psychological projection on their part.
  12. Don’t bother contacting his friends, employer, and family except to gather more information. They already know something is off about the troll and are accustomed to turning a blind eye to his activities. They will be very reluctant to cooperate in any way and may even try to put you off the trail. For example, Yama’s friend Emma lied to me about knowing him when I contacted her, and if she hadn’t overdone the fake sympathy I might have even bought it. Don’t be upset with them, after all, they know him and they don’t know you. Just don’t expect assistance from them or to be able to use them to put any pressure on him. Again, you’re not dealing with a normal individual here. Never forget that.
  13. Expect the troll to try to spin the situation as you harassing him as the net tightens. This is actually a very good sign of progress. It means that he is frightened and that his confidence has been shaken. Trolls like to think of themselves as the cunning masters of the situation, so the switch to helpless victim role marks a significant change. It also confirms that you are dealing with a genuinely aberrant psychology, as no normal individual would ever reach the same conclusion.
  14. Don’t contact the police until you have prepared a succinct summary of the troll’s activity on your site, dating back to the documented beginning, and organizing the various evidence in detail to be available upon request. The summary that I sent to the Marshfield police was only two pages long, but included a description of what additional information I could provide. If possible, provide multiple summaries, from as many of the troll’s other targets as possible. These summaries will not only articulate the complaint, but will save the police a considerable amount of time in substantiating it. Th easier you make it for them to do their job, the sooner they are likely to do it. The detective who addressed Yama’s case specifically commented on how useful the summaries were to his investigation.
  15. Before you call the relevant police department, check their website and see if they have an officer or a department specializing in online crimes. Most do. Those are the only officers to whom you should talk, as their colleagues tend to regard computers as akin to magic and beyond their ability to address.
  16. Be prepared to press charges, but be open to the possibility of other desirable outcomes. The objective should not be vengeance, but simply to end the trolling. For the most part, trolls are disturbed and damaged individuals; the primary reason they have the time to wage their bizarre campaigns is because they are not normally functioning adults with responsibilities.
  17. Above all, don’t be afraid. The troll is targeting you because he hates the fact that other people think you matter and he feels he does not in comparison. He’s trying to bring you down to his level, to enmesh you in his petty hatred and fear. Don’t permit him to do that. Remember that people snipe from cover because they are too psychologically weak to dare engaging in open and direct confrontation.

UPDATE: Yama surfaced here. Several people spotted him and it’s been reported.