I’m Interested in the True, not Alternatives

Several people have tried to convince me that authoritarianism is not the right word to describe a form of government (whether in the home or over a country) in which the head creates a real obligation of submission for his body when he gives a command. My reading on the etymology of authoritarian is that it used to mean someone is in charge, and those under him are obliged to obey him, but that Communists (somewhat ironically) habitually used the word authoritarian as a synonym for totalitarian; which is a different thing.

Gee, I am so surprised to find that Communists told lies to subvert common knowledge…

Nevertheless, leave your suggestions in the comments.

The Big One of 1968

At the end of October I wrote that it’s not too late to stay frosty in response to a Pat Buchanan article stating that 2018 is not as violent as 1968:

According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”

No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.

But Victor Davis Hanson has an admonishment:[1]

But maybe the ’60s, not the silent majority, won out after all. The world a half-century later looks a lot more like 1968 and what followed than what preceded it.

Most of the political and cultural agenda from that turbulent period — both the advances and the regressions — has long been institutionalized. The military draft, for good or bad, has remained defunct. There is greater transparency in politics, fewer smoke-filled rooms. Disabled children, once ostracized and/or dismissively labeled “retarded,” are now far better integrated into society and treated more ethically as special-needs kids. The rights of women, minorities and the LGBT community are now widely accepted.

Yet lifestyles have been radically altered — and often not for the good. Before the late ’60s, most Americans married before having children; afterward, not so much. One-parent households are now far more common.

Other legacies of the ’60s include couples marrying later and having fewer children. A half-century later, these social inheritances often mean prolonged adolescence, older parents, delayed or nonexistent homeownership, and more emphasis on leisure time than on household chores.

It’s a viewpoint against which it is hard to argue. I think they’re both correct and perhaps from the future’s long view 2018s troubles will be recognized as aftershocks from The Big One of 1968.

There are, I’m sure, some lessons to be drawn from examining the 1960s.

One might be that the path to political victory MUST be via one of the two parties; that–because of the gendered nature of our political system–all third party efforts are made with as much vanity and nonsense as the so-called “non-binary genders” of transsexual activists. The Hard Left took over politics not with a Socialist Party, nor by routing Republicans, but by taking over the Democratic party.

Another more important is less a lesson than an observable truth: The so-called Right in America actually stands for nothing but Liberalism. It must stand for something. Larry Kummer writes in, The Left Pushes America down a slippery slope:

The Left drives America down a slippery slow to an unknown future. Radical social changes are coming ever faster, experiments powered by government power, done without our consent. We can still get off this path.

How? We might wonder. LK gives his prescription in his comments:

Hence awakening a desire for liberty and for self-government is necessary.

Yeah, that makes sense: What the Right needs to do is to be better Leftists. Then we will stop the Left…

Larry Kummer is not alone in his thinking. I was right there with him until I got smacked around by the writings of Zippy Catholic. I trust everyone sees the problem, but just in case: To be Right–and not Left–is to be overtly for authority; to take joy in being yoked together, each under the other–in, into, and of–a powerful structure. That is what has been capitulated.

Please leave your own suggested lessons in the comments.

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[1] HT: Nathan Rinne

(Edited to add the link Dalrock’s post, which I had intended from the start of this post.)

Taking Electrons Captive in Babylon

(CC: I meant to publish this tomorrow, but–what the heck–it’s out there now.)

A month ago Moose Norseman and I had a brief back and forth in the comments of his post It’s Less Difficult Than You Think on the merits of YouTube and other recent technological innovations. I wrote, “YouTube is the best education platform ever invented after the television. It can and is misused, but it really is phenomenal.” I think this is undeniable. Like all tools: It is good when used for good and bad when used for evil[1].

It would be good if we all had around us in the flesh Christian mentors on every topic from automotive repair to Zoroastrianism’s influence on early Christianity. But we don’t. By all means, I encourage everyone and myself to build those relationships, but in the meantime God has blessed us with an incredibly fertile landscape of powerful education technology. We Christians should husband it into gardens of Christ’s glory and put it and ourselves to service for others.

⁴ “Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: ⁵ Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. ⁶ Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. ⁷ But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

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[1]Which is not the same thing as being neutral. Nothing is neutral. Everything evil is a corruption of something that should be good.

 

 

Pep Talk

Tomorrow, for the first time since 2004, I’m going to vote. In 2000 and 2004 I voted for the Libertarian candidate because that political system pleased my white high-IQ sensibilities even though it (by it I mean I) was ignorant and and unworkable.

Sarah Palin was a deal-breaker for me. She was a logical conclusion of women’s suffrage, but as I said I was ignorant until I realized we were about to elect a female to be vice president; which is like the internship for president. I have principles, but I also have fundamentals. I’d vote for a socialist man before I’d vote for a female. So I didn’t vote and the habit took.

Democracy is a terrible way to choose leaders who are several steps removed from yourself, but it is the way we do it.

I mean, I gotta live here, you know. Robert Francis O’Rourke is a twerp, and hates the white working class.

“Running Out” is not “Ran Out”

If, like me, you frequent The Drudge Report, then perhaps you too have sometimes concluded that the acts of radicals are the norm and that America is all but official done. Pat Buchanan administers a corrective:

According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,” “During an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”

No, 2018 is not 1968, at least not yet.

It’s not too late to stay frosty.

The Movements are Subject to the Spirits

Transcribed (as best I could) from the audiobook  “Resolute Determination: Napoleon and the French Empire”, by Prof. Donald M.G. Sutherland and from Recorded Books.

The (ed: French) Church was reconstructed as a largely royalist church. The church had split in the early years of the (ed: French) Revolution, and in the schism there is a pro-revolutionary and an anti-revolutionary faction. Because of vicissitudes of revolutionary politics, the pro-revolutionary church was purged and largely destroyed in what’s called the Dechristianization Campaign.

When the church was reordered in 1802 the personnel they had to draw on were clergy who had gone underground, or who had been expelled; indeed as far away as Baltimore or Quebec. They came back, but they came back often bitter, highly politicized, and royalist. Napoleon was well-aware of how potentially dangerous this could be and thus the necessity of subjecting the church to political tutelage.

The Church was a church in crisis almost from the beginning. There had been no creation of clerics for an entire decade; perhaps close to a generation. It was very hard to get seminaries up and running again. The clergy was aging, and the clergy of the restoration church–the Concordat Church–was much smaller than the old regime church had been.

The result was Catholicism itself changed. That kind of Catholicism was a traditionalist Catholicism with a spectacular (what historians of the Church call) “Feminization of Catholicism”[1] in the 19th Century that survived Napoleon’s fall in 1815. There’s a spectacular growth of female religious orders; hospitals, teaching orders, even some contemplative orders. There were probably more female nuns in the 19th Century than there had been in the golden age of the church in the 13th Century. There was also the revival of poor-relief and a Christianization of poor-relief institutions, medical care, and education for small children.

Priests themselves began to change their recruitment patterns. In the old regime priests had been highly educated, middle class, endowed by their fathers to study in the seminary, largely urban. In the course of the 19th Century, and under Napoleon, a ruralization of the Catholic clergy began. Thus, the clergy acquired a lot of peasant attitudes; dislike of towns, superstition, emotionalism. There’s a huge cult of saints and a very emotional kind of Catholicism emerges in the course of the 19th Century; what historians call a “Feminized Piety”.

Popular piety was very difficult to control because the church was so small and the clergy was aging. Popular piety was always a suspicious matter to the clergy, but in the early part of the empire and beyond there’s nothing they could do about ordinary people reviving suppressed feast days, for taking initiatives in the liturgy, for the laity insisting that the clergy authenticate relics which the clergy resisted, or miracle cures that curates were expected to authenticate and things of that sort; where the clergy simply felt overwhelmed by the revival of piety among the laity.

The civil code which we referred to earlier, also had some interesting developments; especially with regard to the status of women. As we have seen, it authorized divorce, and introduced a double-standard in divorce which made it easier for a man to divorce his wife than vice-versa. On the other hand, divorce was extremely rare under this period and becoming more rare as time went on. The overwhelming number of plaintiffs in divorce cases were not men, in fact, but women who were suing for divorce in order to complain about their husbands who deserted them and the purpose was to reclaim the property that they had brought to the marriage in the marriage contract.

That last paragraph is somewhat confusing out of context. What Sutherland said is that even though women did not have the right to divorce, they were still suing for divorce (asking a judge to make the divorce); and women did this more often than men who actually had the right to divorce.

He goes on to say that the response of society under the “liberty” provided by the Revolution and Napoleon was for marriage to be delayed, and also that France was one of the first countries in Europe to adopt the use of birth control despite the fact that birth control was banned by the Catholic Church; including the Concordat Church.

What Enlightenment and revolution promised was relief from harsh rulers and injustice. What it delivered was a dictator and disorder in families and churches. If Sutherland’s account is correct: The fascinating part is that Traditionalists were not even a speedbump to Liberalism. In fact women from the now disordered families and churches remade Traditionalism in their own image. It is still with us.

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[1] Emphasis not in original.

 

Choose the Battlefield Wisely

The answer–the right warfare against Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Feminists, Democrats–is to put Christ first. The wrong answer is to put anything else first. I said that these groups are against:

1. Christians
2. Whites
3. Men
4. America (in combination of 1-3)

and that is true. But there are several reasons not to put energy into pro-white movements, or even pro-male movements. The first and most important reason is that Christ is king and lord of all. We are to serve Him in all things we do, and (amazingly, I think) Christ has provided ways for us to serve Him first in all things we do.

The second reason is that we should never let the enemy choose the terrain of the battles; especially when our combatants are so outnumbered. That is when choice of terrain is most vital for victory. So we rightly should counter invasions on whiteness or manhood with counterattacks from Christ; not because we don’t care about whites or men, but because we need to attack from a position of strength. Nothing is stronger than Christ, whose victory is assured. Not only that, but they neither believe nor understand their own motivations and their own spiritual state–or even nature. This makes an attack launched from a Christ-centered force powerful because it is their weak spot.

So what does this look like in practice? That means to put Christians first for Christian reasons. This is something we have taken for granted. The strength of early America wasn’t “Americanism”. The goodness and truth of the founding documents, to the extent that they are good and true,  don’t make appeal to their own goodness, but to the goodness of God and His natural order. The rights of freedom of speech[1], association, etc. are not predicated on either blood or soil, but on the belief that they are God-given.

So, for example: We should counter pagan attacks on Hobby Lobby, Chick-Fil-A, Catholic hospitals, bakers, and florists not on the defensive grounds of freedom of speech, nor freedom of association, nor freedom of religion, nor the whiteness of the staff; but on the counter-offensive terms that they are brothers and sisters in Christ who are upholding the God-ordained natural order. We don’t “pray those poor people are ok” (though we do pray for them), we make it our business to help them be victorious even at our own cost, and that we offer up those sacrifices for Christ’s glory. We do not offer them for freedom of speech or even religion.

This doesn’t mean we “forget” that we are American, our political traditions, or forget our ethnicity. It means we put them into submission into their rightful place, and by so doing make them worthy. It means we volunteer to suffer in the earthly and unworthy things–whether it is money, glory, status, or even blood–as Christ volunteered to suffer all those things for us so that we could inherit eternal riches and glory, and that we do so for the same reasons.

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[1] I do believe these freedoms are real, God-given, and should be protected by a just and wise government. Perhaps I’ll write about that in another post.

Stop Being Distracted

Taken (only slightly edited) from several comments on Dalrock’s post, “First They Came for the Bald Men”.

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The movement of which Antifa, commies, Democrats, etc. all belong isn’t anymore essentially Left than its opponents are Nazis. The essence of the movement to which these groups belong–what they have in common–is a hatred of three things:

1) Christianity
2) Men
3) Whites

The order of hatred depends on with which faction of the movement one deals, but the three are essential. For example: Feminism hates men first, then Christianity, then whites. Black Lives Matter orders it Whites, Christianity, then men, I think. Sometimes, as in the case of Antifa, more than one plank is of equal weight. Antifa hates America as a whole because it recognizes that America is fundamentally a work of white Christian men.

It’s not autonomous vs. totalitarian, nor is it globalists vs. nationalists, nor is it politically correct speech vs. free speech. They are not FOR anything in particular. They exist to be AGAINST things. Specifically, they are against

1) Christianity
2) Men
3) Whites

Some are fine–and even for–capitalism in China, India, wherever–as long as the benefits are not for Christian white men. They love to welcome Muslim mid-easterners, but the Christian mid-easterners are served right to be killed and exiled. There is no rhyme or reason to these affiliated groups except what they are against. Leftism has nothing to do with this movement.

They don’t know or care what Left means.
They don’t know or care what Nazi means.
They don’t know or care what Globalism means.
They don’t know or care what Right means.
They don’t know or care what Fascist means.
They don’t know or care what Nationalism means.
They don’t know or care what Communist means.

The words, to them, contain no meaning whatsoever. Those things are just words that dead white oppressors made up to separate the real people of color from each other and their belongings. They appropriate and use these terms as various forms of subversive weaponry: dog whistles, cloaks, and diversions.

Most people, people who describe themselves as Conservative, or even merely “normal” just don’t accept what they actually see. And the self-styled Conservative press are trained to look for ideological underpinnings and try to perceive the “end game”. There aren’t any. It’s just envy and hatred. The average American refuses to believe that and so they theorize imaginary ideologies and end games for BLM, Antifa, Feminists, and so forth.

Envy and hate aren’t ideological points. They are of the spiritual realm. It’s a spiritual war; not an ideological war, nor an ethnic war.

Making Good Use of Your Possessions

I’ve received some inquiries on the Caldo status. We’re hours away from Houston and rather enjoying the late summer rains. But here’s two bits of info around Harvey that some of you might appreciate.

First, the Home School Legal Defense Association is accepting donations to help specifically homeschool families who have suffered from hurricane Harvey. HSLDA does good work in general, and I trust them to use donations with prudence.

Second,

How We Laughed!

Tonight, on a Very Special Episode of “Ow My Balls”.

After explaining to my two youngest who Antifa are, and how they have been given almost no resistance from any police department, we watched this video. It must have been four times.

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Ow My Balls is a fictional TV show from the futuristic movie Idiocracy.