March 9, 2012
KRISTOR writes:
March 9, 2012
ALAN writes:
In an essay about small communities and local culture, Wendell Berry wrote of how it was once common for people in farming communities in Kentucky to visit each other and talk in the evening: Read More »
March 9, 2012
ALEX M. writes:
I very much enjoy reading your website and the discussions you have with your commenters.
I felt compelled to pass along the following news item that appeared in yesterday’s morning paper. The article (actually the second photograph shown) was on the front page of the National Post (a national newspaper here in Canada). Read More »
March 9, 2012
ANOTHER pilot in the British Royal Air Force responds below to the two previous posts, here and here, on Flt. Lt. Kirsty Stewart, the first woman to join the elite Red Arrows aerobatics team. Stewart was reassigned recently due to stress.
The pilot, who prefers to remain anonymous, writes:
I do not usually contribute to these sorts of discussions online but feel that I must take issue with both your post on Kirsty and the contributions by Mr McCulloch. Read More »
March 8, 2012
KIRSTY STEWART, a pilot with the elite British Red Arrows, has received enormous acclaim since she became the first woman pilot to join the famous Royal Air Force aerobatic flying team in 2009. When she was reassigned to ground duty due to stress recently, she was the object of universally sympathetic treatment in the British press. The reports could not have been more understanding.
However, when I raised the point that it is no surprise that a woman should find high-risk flying and the accidental death of two colleages stressful, I received nasty mail from other British pilots, one of whom had many unkind things to say about domestic women and neither of whom seem to be aware of the widespread praise and sympathy for Stewart. If they were aware of it, why would they be concerned about one obscure blogger’s dissenting comments?
I omitted the one pilot’s more scathing insults. In short, he believes housewives are “parasites.”
Of course, if there had never been a long tradition of devoted mothers and wives in Great Britain (parasites to varying degrees) and if that tradition had not looked unkindly upon women performing aggressive and risky tasks such as flying fighter jets, it’s fair to assume the Royal Air Force would never have come into existence in the first place. Britain would have remained in the Bronze Age. It is precisely because the world needs empathetic mothers and wives that women should not be flying fighter planes, or at least the world should not celebrate it when they do. And that’s true even if Kirsty Stewart is a better pilot than 90 percent of the pilots who have ever flown.
In that entry, Henry McCulloch, a former fighter pilot, writes:
What neither Rivett nor Bosworth can see – and those who rule their country now want to make damned sure they never do see it – is that putting Kirsty Stewart in the Red Arrows is not some grand gesture of British patriotism, but a profoundly subversive social message. Whether she meant to be or not, Kirsty Stewart was being used as a tool of Britain’s cultural Marxists, doing her bit to upend normal social understandings in once-Great Britain.
He also quotes from Taylor Caldwell, who many years ago saw that when society puts women in men’s jobs, it brings glitter and drama to a few and drudgery and single motherhood to the many. That’s exactly what has come to pass in feminist Britain, where the illegitimacy rate is roughly 50 percent. While elite women bask in praise for breaking barriers, ordinary women struggle with the confusion of sex roles and work in subordinate dead-end jobs in uninspiring bureaucracies. For every woman pilot testing the limits, there are millions of feminism-created drones. Read More »
March 8, 2012
AT HETEROSEPARATIST.COM, Mantronikk, a blogger who says he rejects all hatred for and from homosexual activists, defines his terms. Heteroseparatist:
a: A person who wishes to separate [himself] from homosexual acts and stand apart from those who engage in such acts.
b: A person who rejects homofascism, homosexuality, and homophobia.
c: A person, entity, or organization that respectfully declines to associate with any or all divisions of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender community, but does not hate, fear, or persecute people that are GLBT.
d: A person who quietly shuns people and environments that are anti-hetero. Read More »
March 8, 2012
SUNNY at the cutting-edge show, Sunny TV, provides trenchant commentary on Sandra Fluke and world news. Sunny speculates that Miss Fluke is voluntarily sterile and has no need for contraception.
March 8, 2012
LAST WEEK, the story of Barbara Johnson, a lesbian denied Communion by a priest, was plastered on the front page of the Washington Post. Read the back story by Thomas Peters at CatholicVote.org. Johnson is a self-professed Buddhist and longtime lesbian activist. Johnson told the priest, “[Y]ou will pay dearly on the day of judgment for judging me.”
March 8, 2012
TRADITIONALISTS are often accused of seeking to resurrect the past. The implication is that they are in need of a psychological crutch, that they are not manly or courageous enough to face the uncertain future. There are many problems with this charge. For one, traditionalists don’t honor all things past. For instance, they rarely speak of resurrecting polygamy or slavery.
The constant references to the past traditionalists often make should not be confused with wholesale approval of everything foregone. The real aim is not the past itself, but truth and the good. It is the attainment of God’s kingdom on earth, a project which can never be fully achieved.
Nostalgia, in this sense, is reverence for what our predecessors got right. Everyone must look to the ideal. Everyone does look to the ideal. The difference between a traditionalist and a liberal is that the liberal looks to some ill-defined possibility that is a radical departure from everything that ever existed while the traditionalist adheres to what has already been done. The liberal is the escapist. He seeks emancipation from life itself. The traditionalist is the realist, provided he is always instilled with some degree of disillusionment with everything human, with everything in this world, and provided he keeps in mind what his predecessors got wrong and the necessity of change. This detachment is essential to judgment of the past.
As Donald Davidson wrote in his 1957 book Still Rebels, Still Yankees:
‘You cannot turn the clock back!’ is the commonest taunt of our day. It always emerges as the clinching argument that any modernist offers any traditionalist when the question is: ‘What shall we do now?’ But it is not really an argument. It is a taunt intended to discredit the traditionalist by stigmatizing him a traitor to an idea of progress that is assumed as utterly valid and generally accepted. Read More »
March 8, 2012
PAUL writes:
I agree you were not mocking the Marines in your discussion of the photo of a Marine embracing a man. Marines are doing themselves in by sitting back and not resigning en masse. I am afraid we are approaching the point where many traditionalists are going to have to sacrifice to a large degree in a similar or more severe fashion. If I were to see two men kissing at my workplace, I would expect myself to file a complaint even if it meant I would end up on the street. If nothing were done about it, I would expect to resign in protest. It appears to me that we are in danger of heading back to the catacombs. Read More »
March 8, 2012
SARAH S. writes:
I am puzzled by the apparent truth in what some housewives of my acquaintance claim — that their husbands want to help them with the laundry, the dish washing, the folding of clothes, sweeping and mopping, etc. when they arrive home from work. I say this is apparently true, because these men do participate in housework on a daily basis. Why on earth would they do that if they didn’t want to? My husband, on the other hand, wants to come home to a tidy house, a decent meal, and children who are pleasant to be around. Read More »
March 8, 2012
IF YOU support the continued existence of this site, and especially if you are are not among the small number of readers who have donated before, please consider donating here. Your contributions will be greatly appreciated. Without your support, I may have to start selling pizza kits, which would violate my deepest convictions.
That reminds me. People spend billions for pizza and so little for spiritual food. It is one of life’s great mysteries. I guess this is because spiritual food seems to just arise and come into existence on its own, rather than to be the product of labor in the coal mines of the soul.
March 7, 2012
KILROY M. writes:
I took this photo in Broadway, Sydney. These posters are appearing everywhere. You can see them in every Courthouse and Police Station too. Apparently violence against transgendered people is now the next hip campaign for the managerial state. I wonder, the elites are going to get awfully depressed when they run out of exotic causes to champion.
Laura writes:
In all totalitarian societies, the security forces lose the sense of basic right and wrong. That’s what we see here. Truly disgusting. The forces of law are defending and advertising sexual perversion. There is no refuge – none – for those who do not wish to be complicit in this.
I assume the woman police officer in the poster is not a deliberate touch of irony. But she is every bit as “transgendered” as the other two.
March 7, 2012
THE FIRST woman ever to join the Red Arrows, the elite British aerobatics team, has been reassigned to ground duty as a result of stress. According to The Daily Mail, 33-year-old Flt. Lt. Kirsty Stewart was traumatized by the accidental deaths of two other pilots. As a result of her unexpected reassignment, the Red Arrows’s famous “Diamond Nine” flight formation will be abandoned this year. Eight planes would not create the requisite visual balance.
Stewart joined the Red Arrows in 2009. It is no surprise that a woman would find daredevil flying and the deaths of coworkers traumatic. One also cannot discount the possibility that there were other factors. The article does not mention whether she has children.
Stewart is one small actor in the ongoing pseudo-reality show of the coed military, which denies basic, common sense distinctions of sex. You will not likely find anyone in the mainstream media saying that Stewart’s acceptance into the Red Arrows caused an enormous waste of public dollars. Nor will anyone likely suggest that Stewart had misplaced ambitions and that these were wrongly indulged. At least two potential male candidates were denied the chance to see their dreams of high-risk flying satisfied. The boys who fantasize about flying jet planes are legion. The number of girls who want to be real fighter pilots is tiny. The issues of wasted money and men turned down for the Red Arrows are relatively trivial. What is not trivial is the ultimate purpose that women “firsts” like Stewart serve. Masculinity and femininity are the world’s oldest checks on centralized power. The public relations effort exemplified by Stewart is now relentlessly advanced by government and big business, and it is a deadly serious game that protects the interests of those in power. Read More »
March 6, 2012
MANY PEOPLE think that a great hostess is born, not made. There is some truth to this as some women are more extroverted than others. But even charming extroverts can make lousy, insensitive hostesses.
The art of hospitality must be learned. It takes years of practice, which is why many women today give up in frustration and brag about throwing things together, as if they did not really care.
At Home Living, Lydia Sherman offers simple guidelines for how to entertain guests well.
A woman, by the way, should always entertain her own family first. The rest of the world comes in a distant second.
March 6, 2012
ACCORDING to a recent piece in WorldNet Daily, homeschooling parents in Alberta who include instruction in traditional morality in their school day will be in violation of the Alberta Human Rights Act. Specifically, they will not be permitted to teach that homosexuality is immoral. WND reports: Read More »
