Cornwall Park, Auckland.
Some boring things. The theme has changed, and the entire posts are now available again. Superscripts should now be working and
Blockquotes should include text in the place, which matters for footnotes, and the quotes should look better.
I have deleted Alcest’s blog, because it is now defunct. Which is unfortunate. I have also taken Joseph of Jackson, Lena S and Butterfly Flower’s blogs down, because they are now marked private.
But before some quotage, a panorama.
One of the things that my Dad and I were making bleak jokes about while we were up in Auckland is if we would be jailed. Him, for praying for men who desire other men — and running self help groups (trying to explain to your eighty plus old dad about how to set a web site up and make sure it is not trolled — I now have that T-shirt. Because the Bible will become considered hate speech. Christians are the favourite subject of the fifteen minutes of hate, and being Christian gets you lumped in the groups that the left will throw under the bus.
Gay is the new black. Blacks are very religious, and anti-gay. Blacks are going under the bus. Still won’t be as evil as Christian white males, though. There is a big spectrum full of victim/oppressor groups and they have a certain order:
Lesbian
Gay male
Bisexual
Female
Non-white
Non-Christian
Democrat
Handicapped
Transgender
Obese/Overweight
Republican
Male
ChristianYou have that right. The hierarchy of who outweighs who in the Leftist Order of Designated Victims is as rigid as the hierarchy of an 18th century manor house. It is, however, much more flexible, in that groups can be promoted or demoted within the hierarchy as circumstances demand. But whatever the hierarchy is at any given moment is inflexible and rigidly enforced.
One had better know one’s place, or the consequences will be very severe indeed.
Religious freedom now "about the degree to which society should tolerate, and the law permit, speech and activity that might be offensive"
— Elizabeth Tenety (@ETenety) January 16, 2014
Sometimes you just know a meme when you see it. Do your thing, internet. #pope #face @Pontifex pic.twitter.com/zxiTrQH8yT
— Elizabeth Tenety (@ETenety) January 15, 2014
My reaction? Well, I don’t like being pushed around. I consider the correct response is to relentlessly mock the left: not their hypocrisies, and consider anybody who belongs to the left as lacking wisdom, taste, judgment, and anything resembling gonads or a backbone.
The best examples are in the academy: The English faculty are deliberately stupid. The idea of the classists: ‘Humanus sum, nihil humanum a me aleinum puto’; Sapare aude — the entire idea that you look elsewhere and use other nations, other times, other literature to contrast the difficulties in our time and in our place — does not fit the narrative, and is being trashed.
The UCLA coup represents the characteristic academic traits of our time: narcissism, an obsession with victimhood, and a relentless determination to reduce the stunning complexity of the past to the shallow categories of identity and class politics. Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. Course catalogs today babble monotonously of group identity. UCLA’s undergraduates can take courses in Women of Color in the U.S.; Women and Gender in the Caribbean; Chicana Feminism; Studies in Queer Literatures and Cultures; and Feminist and Queer Theory.
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies.
And this has results: I have ee cummings, pound and baxter on my selves (and like them) but modern poets do not speak. Interestingly, music has not quite gone there — it has to be performed and most amateur orchestras (and most orchestras and chois are amateurs) play because they love music, and play what they like. The modern novel does not speak: science fiction (the stuff from the gutter, like the thriller and the historical novel does. The academy ruins all that it touches, rather tan preserves it.
The divvying up of the humanities has not stopped at subdividing what once was universal, but has led a generation or two of artists to produce work that is not only steeped in monotone preaching, but is often utterly incomprehensible to the public. And this disease has gone so far as to almost kill off entire realms of aesthetics.
Poetry, for example. Since the invention of their art, poets have aspired to speak to and for their fellow men and women. The great ambition of Homer, Milton, Shelley, and others, was to write things that would be memorable because they were understood, and because they were true. That was immortality for poets. And they succeeded. As Dana Gioia observes, it was not so long ago that poetry was as popular an art form as novels are today. From Longfellow to James Whitcomb Riley, American poets were published and read widely, and were celebrated by the average reader. Today, poetry is sneered at by the average reader—with the exception of rap and Cowboy Poetry, whose enduring popularity is ignored by the art’s elite. That elite goes about producing art that is to be read and appreciated only by other poets, in a sophisticated and unintelligible grammar that is rooted in postmodernist assumptions that reject the notion of universal humanity. Without a universal humanity, what can a poet seek to express? Only his or her gender, class, ethnicity—or him- or herself. The result is a poetry that makes no serious effort to express the universal—that is satisfied with personal narratives, dull pseudo-insights, safe, politically correct platitudes attacking the same old enemies on behalf of the same old causes, or drearily vulgar efforts at transgression in the Bukowski mode that are as hackneyed as Miley Cyrus shaking her unimpressive butt. Readers ignore poetry because poetry deserves to be ignored—or, to be more precise, because the leaders who represent the art to the public are of such low quality that they essentially ask the public to ignore them.
One of the things that you can always do is trump them with the hierarchy. This story is illuminating: the implication that black == unenlightened does, however have the stench of Jim Crow or apartheid.
I can remember the conundrum liberals found themselves in when I was part of the ELCA – specifically 2002-2006 when the church was openly discussing ordaining homosexual pastors and blessing same sex marriages (they of course finally did so in 2009). At one district pastor’s gathering, we discussed the ramifications of making this decision. People got up and cried because their son was gay, and they were a member of a church who wouldn’t allow him to be a pastor, people cried because Jesus is love, and love = gay rights. I distinctly remember three African pastors (2 from Nigeria and one from Tanzania) getting up and basically saying, “Are you guys f***inc crazy? The Bible is clear and God won’t be mocked.”
The liberal silence was deafening. They didn’t know how to respond – they couldn’t with vitriol (that weapon for only for the Caucasian horde). So they remained silent…and some subtly suggested that the African pastors just needed a bit of enlightenment. Those were fun times.
Well, while we are keeping the snark level up, I have not quoted Zippy for a while. This is unfortunate, and needs to be corrected.
The first step is acknowledging that, objectively, cads are in fact garbage-collecting trashy pervs only a step or two above a pedophile. Forget about marketing: let’s just tell the objective truth about the product.
But Zippy, that would be hate speech… besides the womenz need their lovin’ on their terms… The cad now provides a service. Just like the sex worker does. Morality has left the building, and we are left in the ruins.
We do not need to be there, and here I need to have a diversion. I have been accused by various people (generally islamic, leftist, nationalist or all three) of being a Jew. Which I am not: however, I do see the attractiveness of this way of life. even though the filial duty my lads owe to their (chinese) father in law does lead to problems. It’s far better to live correctly and ignore the law than obey the law and go to destruction.
The Chinese, in short, have no reasons to dislike or fear the Jews, and a number of reasons to admire them simply because Jews display traits that Chinese admire among themselves. A Jew visiting China, though, senses an affinity with Chinese people, more than can be explained by the commonality of traits. There is a common attitude towards life, and especially toward adversity.
A Chinese friend explained it to me this way: If you suffer a setback, even if through no fault of your own, and even if through the malicious acts of malevolent people, you must not feel sorry for yourself or blame others for your troubles. It is you who must take responsibility for overcoming them. You are required to redouble your efforts and work all the harder. Perseverance in the face of adversity is something Jews understand very well. Through two millennia of exile in the West, Jews maintained an autonomous high culture while succeeding at the highest level within Western culture, often despite persecution.
Civilizations fail when they become despondent, when they lose confidence in their history and their future, when their citizens cease to feel pride in and draw inspiration from their culture. Somehow, for thousands of years, Jews and Chinese kept their confidence in their civilization and preserved it through war and foreign conquest. Surely that helps explain their present success. The confidence to redouble one’s efforts in the face of adversity, even malevolence, cannot be explained by simple stubbornness. The grit required to excel even when the game is rigged against you is not only a cultural trait, but the trait of a culture, that is, a personal characteristic that draws on a culture’s self-confidence.
It may seem odd to compare the largest of peoples with one of the world’s smallest, but Chinese and Jews have something in common that helps explain their success and longevity. That is the ability to rise above ethnic conflicts.
Tribal warfare is the bane of human society. During the 40,000 years before the dawn of civilization, some anthropologists estimate, two-fifths of males who survived infancy died in warfare. The great empires of the Near East and the West failed because they enslaved the peoples they conquered rather than integrate them. European Christianity offered a compromise: the ethnicities that occupied Europe after the collapse of the Roman Empire would join a universal Church in the spirit, but keep their ethnic nature in the flesh. Ultimately the flesh overwhelmed the spirit, and ethnocentric nationalism provoked the terrible wars of the 20th century.
Chinese civilization offered a different model: it integrated innumerable ethnic minorities into a unified culture centered on a written language and literary tradition, and offered the opportunity for advancement to everyone who came under the umbrella of this culture. Unlike Rome, it did not enslave subject populations to work giant estates, but emphasized the extended family as the fundamental unit of society.
So let us obey the law to a limit. And then let us disobey, for God does trump the state.
