Tag: society

The benefits of immigration

So much for the idea of shiny, sexy, secular post-Christianity in Britain:

Women who do not wear headscarves are being threatened with violence and even death by Islamic extremists intent on imposing sharia law on parts of Britain, it was claimed today. Other targets of the ‘Talibanesque thugs’, being investigated by police in the Tower Hamlets area of London, include homosexuals.

Stickers have been plastered on public walls stating: ‘Gay free zone. Verily Allah is severe in punishment’.

The enthusiastic embrace of the importation of non-Christian religionists by secular multiculturalists hoping to reduce the cultural influence of Christianity is without question going to be considered one of the most disastrous policies in the history of the West. I wonder how long it will be before the first British government official is assassinated by a Sharia-seeking radical. I, for one, will find it tremendously amusing when feminist professors begin wearing headscarfs for fear of their students.

The secular community in government, media, and academia decided to ally itself with Islam against Christianity some time ago. I wonder how many of them are beginning to rethink the wisdom of that decision.

2037

I thought Paul Ryan’s comments were interesting, in that we finally have a politician who is, unlike all the mainstream economists, actually looking at debt levels instead of GDP and the money supply.

“We’re on a debt crisis path. We are on a path where the government goes from 20 percent of GDP, to 40 percent then 60 percent of GDP. We’re on a path where our debt goes from about 68 percent of GDP to 800 percent of GDP over the three-generation window,” Ryan said.

“I asked CBO to run the model going out and they told me that their computer simulation crashes in 2037 because CBO can’t conceive of any way in which the economy can continue past the year 2037 because of debt burdens,” said Ryan.

I also found the CBO simulation crash of 2037 to be fascinating, given that I have predicted 2033 to be the date by which the United States will have either disintegrated or lost its national sovereignty. What Ryan, like Sean Hannity yesterday, leaves out is that government debt is only part of the equation and a relatively small part at that. The combined Federal/State & Local debt has increased from 16% of the total to 22.5% since 2005. If private debt continues to decline, from 31.5% to 27% for financials and 28% to 24.3% for households, then government debt will have to increase in order to prevent the economy from shrinking.

This is why I said that there is no easy way out of it. The Ryan plan isn’t awful, but it isn’t sufficient either.

They aren’t smart enough

I’m down with Steyn on his condemnation of the would-be speech police:

When I wrote over the weekend about the trial of Australia’s most prominent columnist for expressing his opinions, I did not expect it to be quite so immediately relevant to the United States. But perhaps what’s most disturbing about Lindsey Graham’s dismal defense of his inclinations to censorship is the lack of even the slightest attempt to underpin his position with any kind of principle. He all but literally wraps himself in the flag, and, once you pry him out of the folds of Old Glory, what you’re left with is a member of the governing class far too comfortable with the idea that he and his colleagues should determine the bounds of public discourse.

I’m sick of that. I’m sick of it in Canada, sick of it in Britain, in Australia, in Europe, and I’m now sick of it in America – in part because, as Senator Graham has demonstrated in his fatuous defense, guys like him aren’t smart enough to set the rules for what the rest of us are allowed to think.

The irony, of course, is that Sen. Graham (R-SC), is talking about throwing out the First Amendment in order to defend non-Americans who wish to establish Sharia in the United States from criticism by Americans. That should be more than enough to deny him the Republican nomination in his next electoral campaign. It is time to restore the Constitutional rights of free speech and free association to Americans. I propose establishing the following principles:

a) Any private employer can hire or fire any employee for any reason.
b) No public employer may deny employment or fire any employee for any expressed opinion about anything.

If you are a private employer, then it is your business and only your business if you want to employ nothing but black lesbian Marxists or Holocaust-denying Scottish neo-Nazis. But if you are a public employer, then you have absolutely no right to favor one socio-political perspective over another. Free association and free speech. It doesn’t get anymore fundamentally American than that.

The secular inquisition

In which Enlightenment secularism is once more proven to be a false dawn:

I never thought I’d have an opportunity to see a real-life heresy trial in 21st-century Australia, but that’s exactly what’s been going on this week in Melbourne’s Federal Court. Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has been dragged before a judge and accused of thought crimes against the high church of political correctness. He’s being prosecuted and persecuted for the lese-majesty of challenging the cult of victimhood that dominates racial discourse in Australia.

The plaintiffs in this case claim to be aggrieved by several Bolt newspaper columns that cast doubt upon the authenticity of their Aboriginality…. These Aboriginal leaders seek not only an apology, but also a court order that would prevent Bolt from ever expressing similar views again.

It is remarkable to repeatedly see demonstrated how little value the modern secularists place on the Christian humanistic values to which they claim to more committed than the theists who first established them.

Mailvox: on optimism

SN wonders why I am such a cheerful prophet of doom:

As Christendom falls in England and the march of the Sodomites continues unabated, it is easy to feel glum. In spite of Christianity maintaining some sort of respectability within philosophical circles, its status as a position of social and moral respectability is experiencing a precipitous decline. Hollywood, the media and the elite universities of western civilization are anti-Christian. Not to rely solely on personal anecdote, but I just had the unpleasant experience of applying to do a research PhD in Theology at [top university], only to discover while researching potential supervisors that more than half of the Theology faculty are atheists. Given Lewis’ social ostracism among the dons of his day, I suppose I should not have been surprised.

More to the point, does the decline of Christianity in the west ever get you down? We talk of Christianity’s growth among Africans and Chinese and cyclical periods of persecution that inspire a resurgence of the Church, but all evidence appears to indicate that things are going to get pretty rough. We’re heading into a Depression, the secular state is on the rise and totalitarianism lies on the horizon, if it is not here already.

How do you rise above it all, is what I am asking? What practical advice could you share with the average Christian who is trying to educate him/herself as much as possible about their Christian heritage, and as a result, is more aware of how bad the situation actually is?

You always seem clear eyed about the situation, yet optimistic. I look around, expecting to see jack boots come marching round the corner any second. Is that madness or informed paranoia?

First, it is informed paranoia. The jackboots are coming, just as they have done since they were hobnailed sandals. As to why that doesn’t get me down, well, the truth is that from time to time it does. But that probably does not show much because the emotion that the ongoing collapse of civilization primarily inspires in me is one of irritation that humanity can’t seem to learn the most elementary lessons from its own history. It’s hard to feel too sorry for an individual, a society, or a species that repeatedly insists on smashing its face into a brick wall with so little regard for what happened the last time it did that.

In other words, I see it more as comedic farce than tragedy because I don’t expect anything better from the mass of humanity or its arrogant, short-sighted, self-styled ruling elite. It is impossible to read history and reach any other conclusion. When I was a child, I read the Bible and marveled at the way the Israelites would willfully put themselves into danger by ignoring God’s commands, end up suffering through tremendous hardship, cry out to God and get rescued, then go on to repeat the process within a generation or three. I thought the Israelites were a remarkably stupid people and assumed that God made them His chosen people in much the same way we regard a child as being “special” today.

But the more history I read, the more I saw that the Israelites’ behavior is the normal pattern of human behavior. Man stands on the shoulders of giants and thinks himself tall, only to learn otherwise when he strides boldly forward. Perhaps that makes you cry, but it tends to make me laugh, even if it does sound a little hollow and sardonic even to me. But how can you not laugh, as atheists and pagans blithely assemble the infrastructure of the old slaughterhouse and call it progress, never imagining for a second that they will not only be its victims again, but will find themselves crying out to God for rescue from the destiny they so ardently desired.

As for the root of my optimism, it is three-fold. First is that in the grand historical scheme, I see the some of the darker elements prophesied in the Bible unfolding. This reinforces my confidence, (not that it was necessary) that this is only the first level of the game of life. The second is that I tend to live day-to-day. We can plan for tomorrow, but we can’t actually know what it will bring. And the third is that I do my best to find joy where it can be found, even if it is the bitter joy of seeing that one’s cynical take on events has once more been proven correct.

There is nothing new under the sun. We, and the generation before us, have enjoyed the lazy days of economic summer. And while it is a little hard to see the leaves turning brown and dying as winter approaches, we can steel ourselves by knowing that it is not the first one and that what our ancestors survived, we, too, can hope to survive. The prince of this world may be preparing his horsemen for another terrible ride, but God is still God and God is still good.

The shadows grow ever longer, but never forget that somewhere beyond the shadows there is light.

The land of rape and sunnis

I don’t know why anyone would be expected to intervene and attempt stopping a rapist when they’re not even permitted to defend themselves and their own property.

Gary Gunstone stalked the woman through the streets of Bideford, North Devon, just after midnight as she walked to her parents home after visiting her boyfriend. The 15-stone brute dragged her to the ground and raped her in full view of passing drivers….

‘One bizarre feature of this case is that a couple of times cars went by as he was raping her on the side of the road. He was prepared to rape her right on the pavement without any apparent concern for being detected. He made no attempt to hide what he was doing. It was just something he wanted to do there and then and he did it. It is every woman’s nightmare to be attacked in a public place by a complete stranger but you always think of it happening in some remote area, not on a pavement with cars going by. It is very unusual. Unfortunately none of the cars that passed has stopped and so he was able to go as far as he wanted to go.’

What can possibly be considered bizarre about passers-by declining to get involved in the situation, considering that their two options were a) getting hurt, and b) getting arrested? I don’t know why anyone in England should be either upset or surprised by this, as this is exactly the progressive, secular, post-Christian England that the Laborite voters in the U.K. apparently sought after the Thatcher era. It is obvious that a society where men are not permitted to defend themselves is a society where men do not defend women either. And if that society only punishes attempted rape with a sentence of 12 months, then it is one that has every reason to expect more rape attempts.

At this rate of secular progress, another 50 years will see men openly raping women in public and not even being arrested for it. Although it might earn the woman a few lashes….

Abusive social workers vs pedophile priests

I somehow doubt we’ll ever hear anywhere nearly as much about this, and the rampant child abuse being committed on a daily basis by teachers and other public school personnel, as we do about the behavior of pedophile priests from six decades ago. But give The New York Times credit for going against left-liberal orthodoxy and publishing the results of its investigation:

A New York Times investigation over the past year has found widespread problems in the more than 2,000 state-run homes. In hundreds of cases reviewed by The Times, employees who sexually abused, beat or taunted residents were rarely fired, even after repeated offenses, and in many cases, were simply transferred to other group homes run by the state. And, despite a state law requiring that incidents in which a crime may have been committed be reported to law enforcement, such referrals are rare: State records show that of some 13,000 allegations of abuse in 2009 within state-operated and licensed homes, fewer than 5 percent were referred to law enforcement.

Note that in the United States, 10,667 people made allegations of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002 against 4,392 priests. This represented around 4 percent of the 109,694 priests who were ordained and active during that time. Given that there were 13,000 allegations of abuse in one state representing one-fifteenth of the U.S. population in 2009 alone, this indicates that state social workers are 951 times more likely to abuse a disabled person under their supervision than a Catholic priest was to sexually abuse a child.

This doesn’t excuse what the pedophile priests did nor does it excuse the diabolical decision of the Vatican to permit homosexuals to join the priesthood in the first place. They eminently deserve whatever punishment they receive, in both this world and the next. But it puts the scale of their evil deeds into the proper statistical perspective. And while one could argue that physical beatings and psychological abuse are not as bad as sexual abuse and should be omitted from the comparison, one also has to keep in mind that none of the crimes committed by the priests rose to the lethal level either.

It also shows the tremendous hypocrisy of those who simultaneously claim that there is no truth to religion and yet attempt to hold religious individuals to a higher standard than they hold anyone else. Social workers and schoolteachers commit far more abuse, sexual and otherwise, than religious leaders, especially if religious leaders who are openly in direct violation of their religious standards are omitted from the equation as logic dictates they must be. (Why should we be surprised that a man who rejects the Church’s stand on homosexuality should also reject the Church’s stand on the sexual abuse of children or anything else?) But it is quite clear from the reaction of the state agency to the crimes of its agents that the Catholic Church’s reaction to the crimes committed by its priests was an entirely normal bureaucratic one. It can, and should, be condemned by Christians who believe in a higher standard for Christian leaders. Secular individuals, who don’t believe in any such standards, have no such grounds for similar condemnation, especially when they show so little interest in the far more common crimes committed by secular agents of the state.

The cost of post-Christianity

It is foolish to expect logical consistency from government, much less the media. But note the intrinsic contradiction between what influential members of the British public still believe their government to be and what their government actually proclaims that it is:

Item One: The state-sponsored Equality and Human Rights Commission intervened [in the case of the Johns family being denied foster parent status on the grounds of their Christianity] and argued that it was the duty of the state to protect vulnerable children from becoming “infected” with Judeo-Christian values of sexual morality. The rest is history, and in a startling judgment, the High Court held last Monday that the United Kingdom is a secular state and that Christianity as part of the law is “mere rhetoric.”

Item Two: Prof Simms comes down on the side of the latter [the pro-Libyan intervention position], citing Palmerston: “Our duty – our vocation – is not to enslave, but to set free… we stand at the head of moral, social, and political civilisation… when we see people battling against difficulties and struggling against obstacles in the pursuit of their rights, we may be permitted… if occasion require, to lend them a helping hand.”

Lord Palmerston was twice the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the second time from June 1859 to October 1865. At that time, the United Kingdom was an unequivocally Christian monarchy and Christianity was an integral aspect of its moral, social, and political civilization. Now, according to the High Court, the United Kingdom is Christian in rhetorical name only despite the fact that neither the laws nor the unwritten English constitution have changed. So, the only conclusion is that the United Kingdom no longer stands at the head of moral, social, and political civilization, but has been reduced to following the lead of the totalitarian pagan rulers of Continental Europe.

Britain can’t intervene in Libya because it has neither the ability nor the moral justification for doing so. On what basis would they intervene anyhohw, the inability of Libyans to democratically select their government? That would be ludicrous, considering that the British people have been repeatedly denied the referendum on the sacrifice of their national sovereignty to the European Union that they have been repeatedly promised. Political freedom is a predominantly Christian phenomenon and there is no evidence that it can survive paganism, which naturally gravitates towards totalitarian rule.

Consider the warning of one of the counsels involved:

It is important for Americans to understand these developments, so they can learn from the British experience. The first lesson is the speed and success of the secular ideology in replacing Judeo-Christian freedoms. In 1997, the United Kingdom was a more stable country than the United States; an evolving state with a millennium of religious liberty. If someone had told me then that within little more than a decade, stable Christian households would be deemed unsuitable to foster children, or that Crosses would be banned, or that hate-speech laws would be used to crush the very ideas of dissent, I would not have believed it. I would have been labeled an alarmist if I had expressed views to that avail.

The second factor to recognize is that the terms liberal, diversity, and tolerance are descriptors for a political program which logic and law alone cannot explain. Thirdly, the secular movement is but a variant of the utopian ambitions that have inspired man from the beginning of time. However, the endgame of such programs is always the same

Paul Diamond is exactly correct. The endgame of secular utopianism is always the same. It ends in the gulag, the guillotine, and the gas chamber. But the key point to remember is that however it ends, it always ends, because the Gates of Hell cannot and will not prevail.

Responding to a bully

The same brief clip has been uploaded over and over on the Web: A scrawny bully sucker punches a larger chunkier boy multiple times, as other kids look on, some taunting. Then suddenly, with the speed and agility of an alligator, the victim responds, flipping the kid and bodyslamming him. “There’ll be reprisals from other kids in the school and he still has to go to school somewhere,” Casey’s father told the Daily Telegraph. “He’s not a violent kid, it’s the first time he’s lashed out and I don’t want him to be victimized over that.” Casey’s father added, “He’s always been taught never to hit. Apparently other people’s parents don’t teach their kids that.”

There are some lessons worth noting here. First, smaller people can be bullies too, if they believe they can get away with it. This includes girls and women. And such bullies will continue to provoke and attack as long as the larger victim indicates his unwillingness to defend himself. This is why it is important to react strongly enough to inflict real pain on a woman or child the first time they hit you, as it will teach them an important lesson about your unwillingness to accept physical attack without the risk of serious injury. If a man submits to the physical bullying until it reaches the point at which he snaps, he’s a lot more likely to do more damage than he intends. In this case, the little bully was fortunate that he didn’t get his leg broken or his skull cracked on the concrete, not that he wouldn’t have merited it if he had.

And you never know who is going to decide to test you for one reason or another. A boy once inexplicably elected to kick me in the balls because I relayed his mother’s request that he go upstairs for dinner. It didn’t hurt, but I reacted strongly in order to communicate to him that attacking an adult man without provocation was an insanely stupid thing to do. Some people just need to learn life’s lessons in a physical manner. Don’t hesitate to instruct them in a calm, but thorough manner.

Second, I have reluctantly been convinced that people, and perhaps more importantly, the police, are much more accepting of locks and throws utilized in self-defense than they are of punches and kicks, despite the fact that locks and throws are potentially more damaging and lethal. So, if a bully throws a punch, instead of just trying to block it, step forward, grab the wrist, then step back and turn with your other hand placed behind the puncher’s elbow. This will use his momentum to face-plant him on the ground if you’re in the open or smash his head into the wall if you have your back to one and it will happen before anyone realizes what is taking place. If you’re dealing with more than one opponent and need a fast incapacitation, pull the punching arm straight to lock it and smash your forearm through the elbow. Even if you don’t break the arm, the guy isn’t going to be throwing any punches with it for a minute or two.

Third, learn to finish. Don’t step back when your opponent is down but not incapacitated or submissive, kick him in the face or in the sides. Once is sufficient, any more will have people thinking you’re trying to kill the guy and leaping in to stop you.

And finally, refusing to teach your kid to fight, or worse, teaching him to not defend himself, doesn’t mean that he won’t have to do so. In fact, it actually makes it much more likely that he’ll be targeted by bullies. Bullies, of both the physical and psychological varieties, are much more often cowards than real fighters, so they seek soft targets. Make it clear that you are not a soft target and there is a very good chance that you’ll never have a bully or a predator attempt to bother you in any way.

The divorce domino

I often find myself thinking that it would really behoove the chattering class to consider getting out of the large coastal cities before making grand, sweeping conclusions about modern society. It often appears to escape the mid-witted would-be intellectuals there that as large and influential as those cities might be, they only represent a small portion of the American population.

On Thanksgiving 2008, Dana Adam Shapiro, a few years removed from his Oscar nomination for directing the documentary “Murderball,” visited his childhood home in Boston to find that a good friend of his was divorcing. The friend had been married for three years and, like Shapiro, was in his mid-30s. (Shapiro is now 37.) This was the fourth divorce that Shapiro heard about just that month. In fact, after absorbing the news, he sat down to make a list of all the couples he knew, under the age of 40, whose marriages had already broken up. He came up with 14 names.

I am older than Shapiro. I am married. If I make a list of all the couples that I know whose marriages broke up before the age of 40, I can come up with a grand total of three. (I’m assuming the writer meant “couples” rather than “names of individuals in broken couples” here.) I can stretch that to seven if I include couples that I don’t know very well. That represents less than 10 percent of the married couples under 44 that I know. Regardless of whether I look at the Shoreview Bible Study, which has only seen one divorce out of 15+ couples, or simply look at the marriages of our closest friends, where six couples out of six remain married, it seems absurd to present what is a potentially useful documentary on why married couples who break up do so as if the number of couples doing so is unbelievably high.

This is not to say that all of those marriages are equally happy, that any of them are immune to the possibility of breakup, or that there is nothing to be learned from looking at the fate of failed marriages. I cannot sit and view the relationships of others as a “smug married” not when both my parents and Spacebunny’s parents are divorced. But we can either learn from the negative examples of others or repeat them, and I am optimistic that Spacebunny and I are intelligent and observant enough to successfully manage the former. And since I wouldn’t conclude, from the basis of my personal experience, that divorce is very unusual and rare, so why would someone from the opposite end of the spectrum do so?

There is some reason to believe that Shapiro’s perception of marriage is a warped one caused by his choice of the wrong friends. As with obesity, divorce appears to be somewhat contagious. If those you consider your peers divorce over what is not infrequently either blatant narcissism or petty issues, it is much easier for you to justify doing so. Whereas on the other hand, if you see your peers sticking together in spite of him being a fundamental pain in the ass or her being an irritating bitch, divorce over lesser quotidian offenses is all but unthinkable.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know that grass is just grass, wherever you go. Unless you’re married to a genuine psycho bitch, a frigid woman, or an unfaithful one, the woman you know is always better than the one you don’t.

It’s not hard to see the common thread in the three examples of failed marriages provided. “It’s all about me.” If your feelings for someone else are predominantly shaped by how they feel about you or what they provide for you, you probably shouldn’t get married. You’re not fit for it.