Tag: society

Christmas is Christ’s Mass

Atheists, seculars, and anti-Christian Jews can try to take the Christ out of Christmas, but they will always fail. And since they’re going to try, we should simply stop recognizing their parasitical celebration of the hollowed-out, lifeless “festival of lights” with which they wish to replace it.

Cinemas should ban all Christmas adverts after refusing to screen a commercial featuring the Lord’s Prayer because of its religious content, the Church of England has said.

The Church is threatening to take legal action against Digital Cinema Media (DCM), which handles adverts for cinema giants Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, after it barred an advert featuring the Archbishop of Canterbury encouraging prayer.

DCM told the Church the advert risked “upsetting or offending audiences” and pointed to its policy document barring commercials that advertised “any religion, faith or equivalent systems of belief” or “any part” of any such religion or faith.

Rev Arun Arora, the Church of England’s director of communications, told the Telegraph: “If they want to be consistent on not carrying any ads that have any connection with religious belief, I’d like them to cancel all ads linked to Christmas as a Christian festival.

“If they’d like to apply it consistently, ban every ad that mentions Christmas.” 

What most Christians haven’t realized, much less accepted, yet is that religious multiculturalism doesn’t work any better than the ethnic version. Freedom of religion only works so long as there is a tolerant religion that is sufficiently dominant; it ceases to function as soon as the minority religions become influential enough to challenge its cultural dominance and impose their own, less tolerant perspective.

Since the First Amendment has been dishonestly interpreted in a broadly expansive manner that does little more than attack Christianity, it is now time for Christians to cease respecting the concept of freedom of religion and become every bit as intolerant of other religions and anti-religious philosophies as those religions are of Christianity.

In this regard, perhaps a list should be created of all corporations that refuse to respect the Christian aspect of Christmas, so that Christians can refuse to do business with them during the Christmas season.

The anti-nationalist enemy

Even the mainstream Right is beginning to recognize that things have irretrievably changed and there is no going back to a sane and reasonably unified America:

A globalized faux cosmopolitanism — simultaneously tribalist and anti-national — seems to have taken much greater hold in the current administration (and perhaps even among some of its supposed political opponents). Yet the Left’s allegiance to the comfortable pieties of the Sixties seems part of the reason for its many failures.

This worldview sees a rural good ol’ boy clinging to his guns and his religion as the greatest foe of “progress.” Thus, it is woefully unprepared to confront the reality of black-robed fanatics beheading religious minorities, enslaving villages, and setting fire to the Middle East. Because of its limited moral imagination, it also struggles to persuade a heterogeneous body politic. Early proponents of Great Society welfare policies might not have foreseen how, too often, well-intentioned government dictates could destroy communities, tear apart families, and destroy the foundation of economic opportunity. Experience has — or should have — disabused us of this naïveté. And say what you will about the dangers of central planning, the technocrats of the past were at least able to do things like put a man on the Moon. The mandarins of today struggle to get a health-care website up and running. Outside the narrowly political realm, as the Far Left claims a resurgent voice in cultural affairs, we have increasingly seen how radical progressive politics are a cultural dead end: Rather than a spirit of creativity, exploration, and accomplishment, radical leftism gives us only the petty tyranny of a Maoist struggle session.

The fact that the globalist Left fails to understand its enemy is a feature, not a bug. We know them. They don’t know us. That means we will win, but only if we show up everywhere they are and refuse to continue to concede any ground, intellectual or otherwise.

That means NOT adopting their social justice ideals or their rhetoric. And that may be the hardest thing for many of us, conditioned as we are to avoid speaking our true thoughts and expressing our true feelings out of a misguided sense of imposed decency.

For the love of all that is good, and holy, and true, if we lose, we lose, but let us at least not lose due to a foolish sense of etiquette.

Decalifornication

Glenn Reynolds advises preemptively decalifornicating the low-tax destination states being invaded by high-tax migrants:

The world is in the grip of a vast migration. Seeking a better life for themselves and their families, people are abandoning their benighted homelands and moving to places that offer them more opportunity. But are they bringing their homelands’ problems with them?

No, I’m not talking about Mexicans coming to the United States, or Middle Easterners and Africans flooding into Europe. I’m talking about Americans moving from blue states to red states….

There are two things that might get in the way here. One is that high-tax, high-benefit states might lower their taxes and reduce their benefits. That does happen, though it’s difficult: Politicians extract a lot of power from high taxes (and from selectively reducing high taxes for favored constituencies) and high benefits are an effective way of buying votes. Generally, the situation has to be absolutely desperate (think Greece) before they’ll change.

The other thing that might happen is that the migrants from high tax states might bring their political attitudes with them, moving to new, low-tax states for the economic opportunity but then supporting the same policies that ruined the states they left. This seems quite plausible, alas, and I’ve heard Coloradans lament that the flow of Californians to their state involved a lot of people doing just that. (I suppose that migrants from lower-benefits states to higher-benefits states might support change the other way, but people who live on the dole seem to have pretty similar voting patterns regardless of location, which is why the dole is so popular with certain politicians).

If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.

What I find encouraging about this is the way it shows how the Right is increasingly understanding that it has been routinely defeated for decades in a multi-generational cultural war, and is finally beginning to develop tacticians and strategists who think in multi-generational terms.

Generation X is far less susceptible to being influenced by Boomer rhetoric and our thinkers, under the influence of the few older mavericks who were able to successfully resist the siren song of social justice, are beginning to develop defensive strategies and even some basic counteroffensives.

An America in decline

The results of this poll are hardly surprising:

Americans are “fed up” with politics, suspect the wealthy are getting an unfair edge, and think the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll that lays bare the depth and breadth of the discontents propelling outsider candidates in the Republican presidential field.

The survey shows that 72 percent of Americans think their country isn’t as great as it once was—a central theme of front-runner Donald Trump’s campaign. More than a third prefer a presidential candidate without experience in public office.

America isn’t as great as it once was. Among other things, it isn’t as smart as it once was. That is because it is no longer a predominantly European nation; based on U.S. demographic changes, my estimate (and it is a generous, conservative one), is that the average IQ in America declined from 100.6 in 1960 to 98.3 in 2010. Based on the increased rate of immigration since 2010, the average IQ has probably declined further to around 98.1, for a net decline of 2.5 points.

It certainly explains a lot about the dumbing down of everything from television to computer games.

This 2.5-point decline is consistent with the size of IQ declines observed in other nations, such as the United Kingdom and Denmark, which have reported declining IQs as a result of immigration. Immigration does not intrinsically “strengthen” a nation, it totally depends upon a) who the immigrants are, and b) how they subsequently behave. In the case of the post-1965 USA, it has indubitably been weakened by it.

The simple fact of the matter is that post-1965 immigration has made America stupider and quite literally below its historical average. And based on the current youth demographics, we can expect the average American IQ to further decline to below 96.5 by 2050.

So much for the inevitability of human progress. It is probably not a coincidence that the concept became popular during the period of European expansion.

Karma

It’s wise to always mind your tongue and be certain that you mean what you say. Fate sometimes has a cruel way of forcing one to confront one’s own words in unexpected ways:

“That young men succeed in suicide more often than girls isn’t really the point. Indeed, the more callous among us would say that it was quite nice for young men finally to find something that they’re better at than girls….

 “The last time I suggested that suicides should be left to get on with it, I received a small number of letters from people whose sons had killed themselves. All of them demanded an apology. I’d advise them this time to save their stamps because, you see, I don’t care. I don’t care because most nights of the week I still dream of my dad, who I saw waste away almost to nothing, eaten alive by the tumours that were his retirement gift for working with asbestos. Every day, as his legs went, as his sight went, my dad would declare that tomorrow he would be taking the dog out; he clung to life like a dog playing tug-of-war for the biggest, juiciest raw steak in the world.

“To ask me to feel sympathy with suicides after witnessing this is, I suggest, just as unfeeling and ignorant as my callousness must appear to you – like asking a starving African to sympathise with an anorexic. In a society still beset with the most vicious social deprivation and rampant cruelty to the very young, the very old and the very weak, the voluntary exits of a few hundred able-bodied young men each year are best dealt with as private tragedies rather than a public concern. Let them go.
– Julie Burchill, 16 October, 1999

This week writer Julie Burchill felt the full force of that hurt when her son, Jack, committed suicide aged just 29. Ms Burchill 55, announced the news on her Facebook page yesterday in an emotional tribute in which she blamed herself for failing him.
– 1 July 2015

It might be tempting to feel a sense of schadenfreude at Ms Burchill experiencing the full force of the pain that she derided and dismissed so cruelly in others. But it’s much better to learn from her example rather than repeat it.

They are the SAME war

David Brooks manages to completely miss the point in the process of recommending that conservatives simply wave a white flag in the cultural war and dedicate themselves to performing good works deemed socially acceptable:

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.

We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements. Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.

Social conservatives could be the people who help reweave the sinews of society. They already subscribe to a faith built on selfless love. They can serve as examples of commitment. They are equipped with a vocabulary to distinguish right from wrong, what dignifies and what demeans. They already, but in private, tithe to the poor and nurture the lonely.

The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other. Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life.

This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham; more Salvation Army than Moral Majority. It’s doing purposefully in public what social conservatives already do in private.

I don’t expect social conservatives to change their positions on sex, and of course fights about the definition of marriage are meant as efforts to reweave society. But the sexual revolution will not be undone anytime soon. The more practical struggle is to repair a society rendered atomized, unforgiving and inhospitable. Social conservatives are well equipped to repair this fabric, and to serve as messengers of love, dignity, commitment, communion and grace.

As Jartstar commented, Brooks wants Christians to clean up the social wreckage being caused by people who reject Christianity, but neither prevent them from causing more damage nor even teach them how to stop harming themselves and others.

Now, granted, there is a certain ironic propriety to telling people who already well accustomed to losing battles to engage in another equally hopeless one. But the fact is that conservatives didn’t have to lose those battles, they simply chose not to fight them. We could end the gay marriage battle by the end of the week if we wanted; ISIS has demonstrated that it requires little more than rooftops and gravity. That’s simply not how we prefer to operate.

Regardless, we have options that range from winning the cultural war through extreme barbarism on the one side to abject surrender on the other. And that is why everyone, even our short-sighted opponents, should hope that the civilized cultural warriors win, because if they don’t, history strongly suggests that the uncivilized cultural warriors will. The pendulum always swings back, and the further it swings one way, the harder it swings back on its return.

David Brooks fails to understand that the problems he laments can only be fixed by rejecting the ruling left-liberalism he supports and embracing a conservative philosophical outlook. But in any case, the answer is simple: no.

Rod Dreher’s response is more genteel, as you might expect, but similar:

 I don’t believe my friend David understands the inseparable connection between Christian sexual morality and the familial and social instability David rightly decries. Family and social breakdown is inextricably linked to the abandonment of Christian sexual ideals — specifically, the idea that sexual passion should be limited to expression within the bounds of marriage. Chastity — which is not “no sex,” but rather the right ordering of the God-given sexual instinct — is a Christian virtue. It is not the most important Christian virtue, but it is not one that can be discarded, either.

So brave

I want to see the beautiful Godfrey Elfwick on the cover of Vanity Fair. His courage shames us. And there is NO PLACE in society for the cisracist.

And can you believe this ignorant attack on the NAACP officer and transblack woman, Rachel Dolezal?

angelica ‏@lady_angelica
@voxday Caitlyn never falsely portrayed and lied about her transgender identity though. She didn’t make up black fathers and sons and shit.

I denounce her cisracism! Who is she to question Rachel’s truth? If Rachel felt her father was black, then he was. So ignorant! Race is just a social construct.

Why kids hate nerds

Vanity is seldom popular, but it is considerably less bearable for the average person in those who are more intelligent than the norm than in those who are more beautiful than the norm. At least with the physically vain, one has only to look at them. With the intellectually vain, one is far too often subjected to lectures in which the primary purpose is not to educate, inform, or discuss, but merely to demonstrate the knowledge and intellectual superiority of the lecturer.

I know a lot of people who were nerds in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being popular. Being smart seems to make you unpopular.

Why? To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn’t make you an outcast in elementary school. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?

The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don’t smart kids make themselves popular? If they’re so smart, why don’t they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smart kids are unpopular because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them popular. I wish. If the other kids in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the schools I went to, being smart just didn’t matter much. Kids didn’t admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in popularity, why are smart kids so consistently unpopular? The answer, I think, is that they don’t really want to be popular.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unpopular in school makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn’t want to be popular would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn’t want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be popular.

But in fact I didn’t, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart.

I would go so far as to say that most smart people are considerably more vain about their intelligence than most beautiful people are vain about their beauty. And because intelligence is less easily perceived than beauty, they tend to go further out of their way to ensure that others know about it. In fact, one could even go so far as to suggest that the primary purpose of “nerd culture” is to foster nerd vanity by publicly staking an implied claim of superior intelligence that otherwise might go unremarked.

The vanity theme is supported by the observation that modestly smart people are far bitchier and hateful to those of genuinely high intelligence than the pretty girls are to the beautiful girls. As we’ve so often seen here, there is no one nastier on the subject of intelligence, or more dubious about the validity of IQ, than the +1 SD midwit whose illusions of intellectual superiority have been shattered.

The highly intelligent don’t want to be smart. It’s merely a simple fact of life, to be utilized or navigated as necessary. We are entirely accustomed to meeting with blank, uncomprehending faces practically every time we open our mouths without consciously dialing down our thoughts. (The befuddled response of the File 770 commenters to my simple reference to Aristotelian rhetoric is a good case in point.) The fact that we might occasionally use our intelligence to torment annoying midwits should be no more surprising than a beautiful girl using her looks to outshine a less attractive, self-appointed rival who has been relentlessly talking about her behind her back.

Should we, as adults, be beyond this things? Perhaps, but it’s readily observable that we are not. I daresay that even inside a Buddhist monastery, the same hierarchical social patterns can be readily observed.

I have to admit, I never got into nerd culture outside of its overlap with games. I didn’t join any of the defensive little nerd posses in school, although it is interesting to look back and observe that my three best friends from first grade were all National Merit scholars or semifinalists who went to RPI, Stanford, and Bucknell. Like tends to attract like. To this day, I still prefer to eat alone so that I can read while I’m eating. But I don’t dislike nerds either, except when they get intellectually insecure and start posturing and pontificating in defense of their easily wounded vanity.

It’s rather amusing, really. Any time I see someone going on and on about my supposed obsession with intelligence, I know exactly where to place him. The highly intelligent are much more inclined to shrug and say “so he’s smart, BFD, who isn’t?”

The benefits of abolishing high school

It wouldn’t just help those on the bottom, but quite a few of those on top as well:

[A]bolishing high school would not just benefit those who are at the bottom of its hierarchies. Part of the shared legacy of high school is bemused stories about people who were treated as demigods at seventeen and never recovered. A doctor I hang out with tells me that former classmates who were more socially successful in high school than he was seem baffled that he, a quiet youth who made little impression, could be more professionally successful, as though the qualities that made them popular should have effortlessly floated them through life. It’s easy to laugh, but there is a real human cost.

I think we see some of the human flotsam and jetsam that is the result of high school shipwrecks floating through here from time to time. From the overconfident midwit who has never recovered from the experience of being the smartest guy in a room with a 115 IQ to the deluded ex-cheerleader who is now fifty pounds overweight but still thinks she’s as attractive to men as she was when she could fit into her little skirts to the bitter omega who can’t accept a compliment at face value for fear that it is another cruel trick intended to humiliate him, the psychological scars of the high school experience are often visible to complete strangers on the Internet.

I tend to include myself in that mix, although perhaps wrongly since my psychological idiosyncracies tend to trace back deeper, which is to say, back to elementary school. My suspicion is that being constantly pushed around and marginalized by one’s intellectual and athletic inferiors, and thereby simultaneously finding oneself at the bottom of some social hierarchies and at the top of others at a very young age, tends to leave one permanently unable to take any of them very seriously or place much value upon them, for good or for ill. When one is both king and beggar, how can one find one’s identity in either state?

For a while, I thought it was strength of character or innate stoicism that enabled me to so easily walk away from various attachments and obligations without looking back. But eventually, it became clear that it was not a positive attribute, it was simply that I was lacking something normal, in much the same way sociopaths lack empathy, autistics lack social cognizance, and atheists lack an intuition of the supernatural. Specifically what it is, I don’t know, but one might describe it as lack of set bonding.

So, I don’t think the abolition of high school would have made much difference to me, but I do think it would greatly benefit those who are either oppressed by the social hierarchy or crippled by too much success too soon in it. And, of course, ending the intellectual lobotomization of entire generations by maleducated, intellectually sub-standard propagandists of the State would be a desirable outcome too.

You had ONE job!

Far too many women of my generation were let down by their mothers failing to teach them the one basic skill they actually need in life:

My mother hadn’t felt the need to give me a recipe—she knew that I
had watched her, and before her my Nani, make the same pot of sauce
nearly weekly in my previous 17 years. So many times I smelled the meat,
browning in olive oil before the garlic and onions were added,
intensifying the distinctive aroma of Nani’s kitchen, which lingered
even years after her last pot had been simmered. Yet I didn’t know how
to cook.

But what did my mom expect? Both she and my late Nani had always
praised and encouraged my good grades and scholarly instincts, and
neither had encouraged me to do anything in the kitchen other that set
the table. Nani never taught me to forage for burdock or can tomatoes
because “you won’t need to,” she said. Cooking was something else the
modern young woman wouldn’t have cause to do either, it seemed. So, I
focused on my career.

What had stuck with me from those hours in the kitchen watching my
mom and Nani cook weekly Sunday dinners or nightly from-scratch meals
was not the recipes for beef bracciole or manicotti, but the
conversation. “Go to college,” I was always told, “have your own money
and don’t rely on a man.”

Let’s not make the same mistake with our daughters and sentence them to a lifetime of bad food, obesity, and culinary frigidity. There is nothing more important than for a young girl to be taught how to be a good wife and mother. Nothing. Because nothing less than civilization and the continued existence of the human race depends upon it.

Don’t raise your daughters to be dead ends.