KRISTOR writes:

Coincidentally, I am reading a book by René Guénon, The Symbolism of the Cross, one of his metaphysical works. It is the first time I have had the pleasure of reading Guénon. I am completely staggered with amazement. He is, without exaggeration, one of the most brilliant and learned men I have ever encountered. I can’t wait to start in on his other books. I’m learning a ton. I will say, however, that the book is challenging. A reader with no background in Greek metaphysics, particularly Neo-Platonism, might find it to be nothing but portentous sounding gibberish. 

Many of Guénon’s books have appeared in English for the first time only in the last few years. Sophia Perennis has a Collected Works which I am now determined to own. My first volume of the set is already dog-eared, and heavily annotated, and I’m only halfway through. Read More »

ROGER G. writes:

You never should have posted that “Sexual Fluidity, cont.” entry and Andrej Pejic photo. It was nearly too much for me, and you know how sentimental some of your readers are. It probably killed them.

Fortunately, I was able to reach the picture of my nephew in his hockey uniform and stare at it for a half hour, so I’m all right. Read More »

A READER writes:

Your recent post, “Rape and Race,” has produced quite a few negative reactions from people who have been offended at what they feel was implied racism on your part. Their reaction, as far as I can tell, may not have been your intent. However, I feel that they are somewhat justified in their response due to the ambiguous nature of the post. Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Regarding male (or “male”) model, Andrej Pejic – the photograph of him that you reproduced today is creepy and disturbing. I reacted to it with visceral loathing. My guess is that, whatever sexual neurosis Pejic is acting out, he is also aiming precisely at the effect of being creepy and disturbing. If such a person had manifested himself in a public place in 1950, he probably would have been arrested and, if not charged with indecency, then placed under psychiatric detention pending a cure. Nowadays he enjoys a “career” and is a “celebrity.” Our afflicted society produces these grotesques one after another and in droves, a sign of how profound the cultural malaise is.  Read More »

HERE are some strong objections at other sites to what I and others have written here in the last few days. They concern the recent posts on men’s rights, which you can find here and here, and on black rape statistics.

At the Spearhead and In Male Fide, I am accused of a lack of understanding of what men face today. I have not read these posts in their entirety. In fact, I have not read references to me at either of these sites since they stooped to calling me names.

Two female bloggers take strong exception to my post on black rape. In a long entry about false rape accusations against black men during the Jim Crow era, accusations which she says were a result of white female hysteria over sexual relations between their husbands and black women, Alte at Traditional Catholicism says, “Hundreds of black men died that way, and many still do, to promote the cause of White Womanhood.” Read More »

Andrej Pejic

THE 19-YEAR-OLD Australian model Andrej Pejic, who is a boy, is an extreme example of what is everywhere in the modern world: the role-playing of one sex as the other. Judging from this brief description of his life, Pejic did not grow up with his father. Fatherlessness, which is becoming more common by the day, is fertile ground for sexual confusion.

IN HIS latest article at The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau examines the work of the French thinker René Guénon, who coined the term “mystic socialism” to describe nineteenth century strains of  Protestantism which continue to infuse modern-day liberalism with sentimental moralism. “Humanitarianism, pacifism, anti-alcoholism, and vegetarianism [are] ideas that are at root sentimental,” wrote Guénon, who died in 1951 and stands among those who consider the Renaissance and Reformation to be the “starting point of the modern crisis.”

IN AN interview at National Review Online, W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and one of the authors of its latest report, “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” makes this point:

So, we are witnessing a striking reversal in American life where highly educated Americans are more likely to be connected to the religious and moral sources of a strong marriage culture than their fellow citizens from middle America.

This gives the false impression that America’s elites are embracing traditional values. The truth is, a college education has simply become more common. As was discussed in this previous entry, the bourgeois middle class is now “highly educated.” Meanwhile our true elites remain enemies of bourgeois America and the traditional family, as is abundantly apparent from the constant celebration of feminism and sexual liberation in mainstream culture and academia. Our intelligentsia constantly prod the less fortunate toward radical liberation for the sheer adolescent thrill of it all. Read More »

ONE of the great things about Christmastime is that folk music is everywhere. At other times of the year, folk music is never popular music. At Christmas, the mainstream embraces vintage hymns and songs, and these are continually reinterpreted.

Here is a less familiar hymn, the Shaker song “Hail the Memorable Morn,” with beautiful call-and-response refrains by all-female and all-male sections. It was composed in Watervliet, New York in the 1830s. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

It has long been established that the rate of rape committed by U.S. blacks is approximately an order of magnitude higher than the rate of rape committed by other races. Below is a study showing that the racial rape differential is international, which in turn suggests that the astronomically high rate of rape by blacks is caused not by social, cultural, or economic factors, but by racial factors. And this should be no surprise. Every study has shown that blacks have much lower IQ, much shorter time horizons, much higher impulsivity and violence, much higher sociopathic indicators, much higher testosterone levels, and much higher sex drive than other races. It’s only to be expected that black men would commit rape far more than men of other races. This does not mean of course that all black men or most black men are rapists; it means that within the black population there is a rape-prone sub-population that commits rape at an extremely high rate.

Is it racist, i.e., is it morally wrong, to say this? The argument that it is morally wrong is based on the idea that such findings as high black rape rates could be used to bring back the invidious discrimination against blacks that our society outlawed in the 1960s. But to say that important truths must be silenced because they might be used in a wrongful way is unacceptable. Of course, wrongful acts against any group must not be allowed; but that is a completely different question from the question, what is truth? If all negative information about blacks must be suppressed, then even the below AP article on rape in South Africa could not have been published. [cont.] Read More »

KAREN I. writes:

I saw a broken man yesterday, and I can’t forget it. I am going to share this with you because your blog addresses the issues that lead to what I saw yesterday. 

My neighbor is just 33 and he thinks his life is over. I did not even know he was going through hell for months now, but I suppose the signs were there. He was too proud to tell anyone but he can’t hide the situation any longer. Yesterday, we spoke for the first time in a long time and I learned of his plight.  Read More »

A MICHIGAN school district has spent $45,000 to supply “Smart Phones” to all its third graders. The Kalamazoo Gazette reports:

The expectation is that children will be able to do many of their assignments on their devices, including homework. One advantage is that teachers will be able to create more individualized worksheets and homework assignments based on each child’s ability, so that advanced students are provided more challenges and struggling students are given work that will boost their skills.

But the real advantage of the [phone] program is that it makes schoolwork fun and engaging, which means children spend more time on their schoolwork, officials say. Read More »

A CONGRESSIONAL panel has recommended that the Defense Department open up all combat units to women. According to Air Force Times:

A five-page analysis prepared for the commission concluded that women do not lack the physical ability to perform combat roles; gender integration will not negatively affect unit cohesion; and women are not more likely than men to develop mental health problems.

IN  the previous entry, Josh F. writes,”What exactly is a man’s incentive to join a collective of hopelessness?” That’s exactly what the men’s rights movement is, a collective of hopelessness, and other commenters in that thread amply illustrate this. See the rest of Josh’s excellent observations at the end of the discussion.

Also, Jesse Powell writes: “Why is it the men’s rights supporters love to talk about the destruction of Western civilization and how great this destruction is? Why do they positively celebrate the decline in marriage calling it “the marriage strike”? I suspect men’s rights supporters know their condemnation of marriage and their refusal to fulfill their obligations as men is destructive to society and so they embrace and glorify the destruction of society in order to legitimize and glorify their own anti-social behaviors.”

Read More »

REX writes: 

I have a question regarding your position on the Men’s Rights Movement.

The way I see it, you have repeatedly rejected the MRM because, fundamentally, you see it as representing the same type of divisive ‘gender particularism’ which exists in the feminist movement. In your view, the MRM is flawed because it goes against your basic view of sex relations, which is one of reciprocity, cooperation, and mutual appreciation of complementary characteristics. Read More »

Young women offer berries to visitors to their traditional wooden house, in a rural area along the Sheksna River, near the town of Kirillov, in 1909.

SERGEI MIKHAILOVICH PROKUDIN-GORSKII, an innovator in color photography, documented pre-Revolutionary Russia from 1909 to 1915. In thousands of vivid photographs, Prokudin-Gorski captured a world on the eve of World War I and the Revolution. He recorded monasteries, children at play, women in peasant dress, machine rooms in factories, mines, dams, wildflowers in bloom and views of cities and villages. He traveled throughout an empire that stretched 7,000 miles from West to East in a railcar with its own darkroom provided by Tsar Nicholas II. Half of his collection was confiscated by authorities before he fled to France in 1918 and the rest are owned by the Library of Congress, which offers easy access to them online. They provide a fascinating look at a lost world. Read More »

A NEW report, “When Marriages Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” by the National Marriage Project has received widespread publicity in the news. The basic finding of the report is that marriage is deteriorating in the moderately-educated middle class. Among the college educated, the report states, family life is fairly stable and healthy. I recommend Jesse Powell’s interesting analysis of these findings in this thread.

There are several important factors to keep in mind that suggest the nation’s elite are not as conservative or stable as the report suggests:

• Many of those in the middle class who would have remained in the moderately-educated category in the recent past are now in the highly-educated category. The number of those earning college degrees has grown dramatically. To compare the highly-educated now with the highly-educated of three or four decades ago is to compare two entirely different groups. If one defines middle class as those without college degrees then the definition of what is middle class has changed dramatically.

• Those in the “highly-educated category” are seeing higher rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing. Read More »

ALAN writes:

In the 1950s, a life-size Nativity scene was displayed outside the Soldiers Memorial building in downtown St. Louis.  The mayor sent out Christmas cards bearing a likeness of that scene and the words “Merry Christmas.”  Lights in the tall Civil Courts building formed a cruciform pattern when viewed from a distance.  Christmas trees were everywhere downtown and always called “Christmas trees,”  not “holiday trees.”  Americans had not yet been softened up and dumbed down enough to accept idiotic neologisms like “holiday tree,” as they do today.   

Collier’s magazine, Dec. 1955:  “Christmas in St. Louis has a tone all its own.  The whole town resounds with carols.” 

Today the whole city surrenders to political correctness.  Read More »