SAM writes:

This article by Junot Diaz was recently published in The New Yorker, which is supposed to be a highbrow magazine and a cultural bellwether. The article is a symptom of how rapidly the culture is coming apart, of how our flagship institutions are collapsing right in front of our eyes as a consequence of egalitarianism. I was never a fan of The New Yorker, but I could not have imagined something like this being published even five years ago.

 The article is poorly written, poorly reasoned, and laden with cheap vulgarity and street slang. I don’t recommend that anyone waste their time reading it, so here is a representative sampling of Diaz’s elegant prose just in case anyone wonders just how bad the article might be:

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STEVE DOWTY writes:

It’s an indication of how far Western civilization has fallen that the phrase “divorced gay bishop” not only shows up in a Google search, but elicits no surprise, provokes no outrage, and seems oddly comforting to so many people. The “bishop” involved himself stated that he takes comfort in the fact that he and his “husband” faced the same problems any married couple face…and his abject failure to behave in a manner even distantly approximating decent makes him “jes’ folks,” as good as you and me and even better for being less judgmental. The fact that millions of people accept such claptrap without batting an eye is utterly terrifying.

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A READER writes:

I just got my notice to enroll for health care benefits from my employer, Aerotek. My weekly premium went from $29 a week to $116 a week. How do I afford a $6,000 annual health care bill when I only take home $24,000? It’s like I am being asked to pay for a second apartment but never live in it.

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BUCK writes:

The reaction to the Sterling Affair may be the most obscene and hypocritical, one-man, race-baiting hate fest of our day. Mr. Sterling is the new white face of evil. Sounds to me as if, in the particular instance, the “old fool” was haplessly trying to protect his misplaced manhood, which at his age should be based on something important. He has been paying out huge sums of money for years in order to balance the “books” on his character. The hypocrisy of the many who have benefited from his business savvy – taken his money – is to me, the obscenity. The mainstream revelations of this pathetic “old fool’s” weakness and lack of character is cringe worthy, but the punishment being meted out by a long list of appeasers and blood suckers, in this obscene full court press is Carthaginian. Mr. Sterling has been a well-known quantity for decades. It seems to me that the intensity of this opportunist outrage is a measure of the mix of hypocrisy, complicity and guilt of many who served themselves well in his sphere. They epitomize the unprincipled exception. Race-baiting is reaching into the stratosphere. It seems to be defying gravity.

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ALAN writes:

May I add the following regarding the list of mass transit accidents in my previous post?

It is a hallmark of cool, sophisticated Americans to boast about their talent for “multi-tasking,” i.e., their alleged ability to do two or more things at once.  At least two and possibly three of those transit accidents were caused by people engaged in “multi-tasking:”  Sending text messages or chattering at the same time they were being paid to operate a bus or train.

It is less significant that some people will do those things than that public transportation agencies or companies will permit them to do them. This, of course, is not a technical or scientific problem.  It is a moral problem, and what is obviously lacking is the will to enforce even minimal rules of common sense, safety, and accountability.  This is yet another sparkling example of the collapse of authority and hatred of responsibility whose consequences we see around us wherever we look.

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YOU probably thought it not possible for anyone to write another page-turner about why women are less professionally successful than men  — and what they can do about it. But the subject is a bottomless well to the media’s purveyors of nonsense, who want nothing more than to make the progressive enslavement of women to money and power seem cool and exciting. Two powerful (and very confident) journalists now explain their theory that women achieve less success than men in the professional world, not because women have other important things to do, not because women are (thankfully) less competitive than men, not because women have duties to their families, not because they don’t particularly want to climb to the top, but because — ta-da! — they lack confidence. Women’s leadership conferences, the dramatic reallocation of public resources to boost feminist equality, non-stop celebration of female achievements and pervasive, bare-breasted Amazons with bulging biceps might seem to you, dear deluded reader, to be expressions of female confidence, but Katty Kay and Claire Shipman say women are actually suffering from poor self-esteem. Kay and Shipman wish that men were less successful. They want men to do worse than women. They want more for women and less for men. For them, life is a grade-school competition between the sexes and women should be confident enough to be the Super-Dooper Number One Winners.

I agree with Katty and Claire that women are suffering from a lack of confidence. Here is my advice: Be confident. Be confident enough to resist the allures of these feminist hucksters. Be confident enough to separate yourself from friends who believe in this superb nonsense. Be confident enough to be a nobody from nowhere. Be confident enough to assert that ambition is ever an ugly quality. Be confident enough to step away from the herd and be alone. Be confident and self-assured enough to say that all this materialistic play for power is utterly beneath you.

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WE live in a world of staggering deceptions. While the crude and offensive millionaire Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, one of many basketball teams which have elevated individual blacks to stardom and wealth, receives national condemnation and lifelong ostracism for stating that he did not want his crude girlfriend to associate with black people, proving that America is perfectly capable of outrage and believes fanatically in the moral superiority of non-whites, blacks who murder whites are sent to air-conditioned hotels for respite with almost no public indignation over their crimes. One of the latest victims is Judy Salamon, who was executed on the streets of East Oakland while on a neighborhood watch patrol. Salamon took action against crime in her neighborhood and for this she lost her life.

The idiocy of charging Sterling with racism is exposed by simply looking at photos of the Clippers.

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IN AN interesting post at her blog Reclaiming Beauty, from which the above photograph of daisies near Niagara Falls is taken, Kidist Paulos Asrat quotes a previous entry at VFR in which she explains her experience as an Ethiopian immigrant to Canada and how her relatives became leftists once they had emigrated:

I grew up mostly in England and France (that was the nature of the exile my family had to take to avoid the massacre of the Communist dictator). My best friends growing up were French and English (I have a great love for England—especially Kent, where I went to boarding school). (more…)

THE Quebec provincial government is now paying for In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) treatments for women providing gestational services to homosexual men. Surrogacy is not legally recognized in Quebec but it still takes place and a radio host has claimed that it’s “discriminatory” for the government not to pay for treatments for surrogate mothers acting in concert with homosexual men. He was apparently the first to win subsidies for a surrogate, who is expecting twins. The Quebec government now spends $67 million annually on IVF treatments. Taxpayers will be directly subsidizing the commercial market in children for homosexuals.

Regarding the growing fertility industry in this country, the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network writes of the consequences for children and women drawn into contractual arrangements: (more…)

PAUL WESTON, chairman of the Liberty GB Party in England, whom some readers may recall as a commenter at View from the Right, was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of racial and religious harassment in connection with a campaign speech in which he quoted Winston Churchill’s words on Islam. It is permissible to denigrate Christianity publicly, for surely one cannot imagine an arrest for comparable statements about Christianity, but it is criminal to criticize Islam. Such is the inversion of values in multicultural Britain, which is really anti-cultural Britain. Weston has been released on bail. According to The Daily Mail:

The passage from the book, written by the wartime Prime Minister and first published in 1899, focuses on Churchill’s observations about Islam while serving during the Anglo-Egyptian reconquest of the Sudan.

Mr Weston told his audience: ‘Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.

‘Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. (more…)

HERE is an interview conducted last year by an Army public affairs officer with Cpt. Kelly Hasselman, who achieved some fame as the head of a “Female Engagement Team” in Afghanistan. Hasselman, who was from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, is now dead, and there is reason to believe she committed suicide on April 19th. Where is the Public Affairs Office now? Where are the news outlets that broadcast this interview and have yet to report her death? (more…)

PETER ZITKO writes:

I couldn’t agree with you more. What a sad day it was for the Church Sunday, two heretics and destroyers of the Catholic Church “canonized” and now worthy of veneration as declared by Francis.

How could these men possibly be in heaven, for what they have done to the Church? Walk into any Novus Ordo Church today, and you will witness the abomination of desolation taking place.

What an absolute mockery the Vatican II church has become by claiming to be Catholic. And to make matters worse, millions of Catholics have fallen into deception by actually believing that these men are now worthy of veneration.

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S. from India writes:

India is facing a terrifying influx of Muslims from Bangladesh. How much of our crime is a direct result of this, no one dares ask, but the news items that give away names do give away this fact. The socialist intelligentia, press, political parties are all maintaining a conspiracy of silence.

A friend posted this on Facebook. Japan, which has relatively few Muslims, makes for a compelling study:

“Another thing that helps the Japanese keep Muslim immigration to their shores to a minimum is the Japanese attitude toward the employee and employment. Migrant workers are perceived negatively in Japan, because they take the place of Japanese workers.

The fact that the public and the officials are united in their attitude against Muslim immigration has created a sort of iron wall around Japan that Muslims lack both the permission and the capability to overcome. (more…)

  TWO DAYS ago, a reader reported that a friend, a female graduate of The Citadel and an Army captain, had committed suicide. I have not been able to find further confirmation of this story, which was also reported on another website, so for the time being, pending more evidence, I am going to remove it. [UPDATE: The original entry has been reposted as it was. There is good reason to believe it is true. A reader who knew the deceased Cpt. Kelly Hasselman reports that a memorial service is scheduled for tomorrow at The Citadel, the South Carolina military academy.]

  FRENCH politicians bring serial polygamy to a whole new level. Top political figures are now weirdly part of the same extended harem. It truly is creepy and redefines the concept of nepotism. Perhaps someday in the not-too-distant future, France will have a president with an entire cabinet of former wives. Should be exciting. At Galliawatch, Tiberge writes: Wow! What a piece of juicy gossip lies within the readers' comments at Le Salon Beige. First, the cover ofL'Express shows a happy François Hollande surrounded by his harem, from the left: Ségolène Royal, Julie Gayet and the rejected Valérie Trierweiler. But who is missing? That's what we learn from the obliging readers. It's Anne Hidalgo, newly elected mayor of Paris, who has a daughter by the very busy and productive president! Louis XV could not have done better, though I still prefer Madame de Pompadour. Le Salon Beige also asks a pertinent question that should occur to any good Socialist: Is this not homophobic behavior? Yes, it is, and furthermore, where is the racial mixture? François Hollande is just an old racist fuddy-duddy, unless the Spanish blood of Anne Hidalgo saves him from perdition. But Spanish blood is still white. So… Where is SOS-Racism when you need them?

IN an essay on Jorge Bergoglio’s recent conversation with an Argentine woman regarding divorce and the sacraments, in which he is reported to have blithely denied Church teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, the Rev. Anthony Cekada writes that it was the sort of calculated move that has characterized His Holy Humbleness’s utterly false reign:

Looking back over the catalogue of Bergoglian messes, we can see a pattern emerge.

Bergoglio sows the seeds of change through what at first appears to be chaos. But far from being misrepresented in the secular media, he manipulates it to his ends with a peasant-like cunning.

In a few short months, therefore, Francis has positioned himself as “the people’s pope” and become a world-wide object of adoration, thanks to self-aggrandizing gestures designed to showcase his “humility,” “compassion,” “simplicity,” contempt for “small-minded rules,” indifference towards sexual immorality, and moralizing on social issues dear to the left (immigration, income disparity, unemployment and “climate change.”)

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      WHO were the multitudes who cheered on the canonizations in Rome today of John XXIII and John Paul II? Atila Sinke Guimarães at Tradition in Act describes the "middle-of-the road majority" that celebrated this blasphemous demagoguery, which was a flagrant, illegitimate effort to glorify Vatican II and was in effect in homage to every religion but Catholicity because of the revolutionary ecumenism of John Paul II: The entire world, including its Freemasons leaders, its Jewish inspirers, its almost unanimous media and its characteristics stars, are thoroughly pleased. The great multitude of Catholics, who love the modern world, are thankful to have the conciliar Church “canonize” these two Popes who ended the “old” Catholic militancy and replaced it with a “more human” face. This new Church tolerates their bad morals and relativist beliefs. So, they are going to Rome in great exhilaration to express their approval of these Popes and the transformation of the Church into a joyful institution consonant with the World Youth Days. This cheering majority of hedonist Catholics does not want to submit to any hierarchy and seeks approval for whatever kind of moral behavior they adopt – divorce, free-love, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, etc. They are going to Rome because John XXIII and John Paul II are symbols of this mentality.