IN A FEW DAYS, the midsummer meadows of New England will outlive their prime. The milkweed and the goldenrod, the Queen Anne’s lace and the thistle are already beginning to flag and fade. The scent of grass and mineral that rises from the hidden, exhaling earth is not as forceful as it was weeks ago. There is not much time to spare.

I am not from New England and do not live in New England. I have no vested interest in making the assertion that the New England meadow is unsurpassed in splendor. It’s the simple truth and you don’t have to be the owner of a New England meadow or an investor in meadows to believe it. The angle of northern light, the meterological conditions, the legacy of spare Puritan and agricultural architecture, the lassitude of rural economies, the supporting role of lake and mountain, and, last but not least, the character of rural New Englanders who allow meadows the requisite freedom to do their thing – all these add to the immediate impact of the New England weed-strewn, unmowed meadow.

I do not drink a bottle of wine all at once and I prefer not to look at a meadow “in the face,” so to speak. I like to see it from the corner of the eye, to avoid the full-blown arresting encounter and disabling intoxication. This was not always the case. When I was young and stupid, I gazed at meadows without shame. Did I ever lie in a meadow? That is something I will never reveal. If I said yes, I’d be open to the charge of hedonism. If I said no, you would say, “You see, she is joyless.”

“Waste is of the essence of the scheme,” Robert Frost said. Meadows elicit thoughts of wastefulness and of the arguable decadence of beauty. What use is the experience of the summer meadow? Will we retain it in winter? What will these glorious snapshots of hay and weed do for us in the long run? Why must the butterflies flit the way they do, the same way they did last year and the year before? Couldn’t they spare those of us who live in the world of earnest toil, the world of non-flitting, the suggestion that all is essentially good, that the nectar can indeed be drunk again and again?

The meadow is a philosophical problem waiting to be solved. Only the insensible, the weak-minded and the grief-stricken watch the New England meadow fade without an answer.

Read More »

IN THE entry on Alan Roebuck’s essay on the culture war, Jesse Powell offers a fascinating mathematical argument for why social renewal is inevitable.

Daniel Mitsui

THERE HAVE been many important comments added today, including Alan Roebuck’s response to the argument that the culture war has been lost and ongoing additions to the debate about the men’s rights movement. I recommend all of the discussions posted since yesterday. The continuing discussion of false rape allegations and jury nullification is important. In that entry, Jesse Powell writes:

By no means is the time for debate over, it has only just begun! I see my giving actual statistics on how many women are raped per year and how many men are in prison for rape has gotten under MRA skins. The reason why I brought up those facts is because it seemed to me there was a lot of hyperbole being thrown around about the system viciously going after large numbers of men indiscriminately and I wanted to bring the conversation back into some kind of reality by showing that the number of men in prison compared to the number of rapes that occur is not so large and may even be smaller than it should be. Basically, what 200,000 women being raped a year and 170,000 men in prison for rape means is that the average punishment inflicted upon a man for raping a woman is about 10 months in jail. Is this too high? My inclination is to say it is too low. There may not be any way to improve this potential injustice against women but it does illustrate the point that the hyperbole being thrown around about unjust and extreme victimization of men for no good reason is not supported by the facts.

Sure, you can say the women lie to the surveyors and say they were raped when they weren’t. Also, a fact MRAs conveniently ignore, is that it is just as possible that women fail to report rapes to the surveyors that did occur. The good thing about using the National Crime Victimization Survey as a source is that the women have no incentive to lie to the surveyor one way or another. In the study I cited by Kanin the women who lied about rape always had one motivation or another to do so. The woman gains no benefit by lying to the surveyor and so surveys should be one of the most reliable ways to gain accurate information. Read More »

STEPHEN writes in this entry about false rape accusations:

While Paul Elam’s suggested response [of jury nullification] is easily recognized as being over-the-top, to simply dismiss it without considering why he would suggest it is matter of ignoring the elephant in the room.

Elam’s idea, while I (mostly) disagree with it, did not simply spring from the mind of some deranged misogynist. It was born of a growing frustration. It is a symptom of the continuing systemic disenfranchisement of men in this society, wherein men are increasingly seen as evil sexual predators, allowing for the suspension their rights in favor of “protecting” their female victims and where women are increasingly seen as victims, again allowing for the suspension of the rights of men so as to favor women. Read More »

JOSH writes:

I’ve been a long time reader of Lawrence Auster and have had the pleasure of lurking your site for six months or so after he made your writing known to me.

At root of both the “feminist” movement and its modern mirror, the men’s rights movements, is radical homosexuality (devout dykism), i.e., radical sexual autonomy. Radical sexual autonomy is the biological “goal” of liberalism and the easiest way for a “default elite” to stay in power after convincing a populace to deny Supremacy. A populace in a state of anti-Supremacy and willing to embrace homosexuality is a self-annihilating populace. Read More »

ASHER writes:

There is a sophisticated line of reasoning I’ve been exploring for a few years involving the notions of legitimacy and demarcation of authority, both moral and legal. Moral authority is inextricable from cultural interpretation and imposition and different cultures impose different moral schemes. Legal authority interacts with moral authority and they continuously interact to shape and conform to each other for the the long-term. Moral claims are only legitimately asserted where the claimants have standing to assert authority, which only exists where all parties co-exist within the same moral universe. 

The problem with the Manhattan Declaration (discussed here last week)  is that it is attempting to impose where it no longer has any moral authority, and this is because the West has decisively split into two distinct moral universes, the leftist and the Christian. The Left seceded from the Western Christian moral universe many, many decades ago. Alan Roebuck call your office. Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

Paul Elam has now gone public in his call for jury nullification in rape trials. He has written a new article titled “On Jury Nullification and Rape” and posted it as the headline at the Men’s News Daily site. Read More »

GAIL AGGEN writes:

I read Lillibeth’s post about the Victorians, and their dreadful habit of dying all the time, last night. I got several good laughs out of that.

My nineteenth century grandmother was as big around as a barrel, always wore a full corset, and could outwork anybody in about a third of the time, with the power and determination of a Panzer tank. Read More »

I RECOMMEND a few of the ongoing discussions here from this week. This entry includes insights from male and female commenters on how men can deal with feminists in their personal lives and how to handle women in general and remain in charge.

This discussion about the men’s movement is long, heated and interesting. Two entries, here and here, consider Christianity and the culture war.

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

Our daughter has finally got fed up with the expensive museum plaques which claim that boys were not allowed to cook and girls were not allowed to shoot before the 20th century enlightenment. We went to one historical museum where a plaque said, and I quote, 

Women’s clothes in particular were so restrictive it limited their activities and in many cases tightly laced corsets created internal and breathing problems for them. No wonder they took to the streets to demand the right to vote and to wear more practical clothing than what the Victorian-era societal norms dictated at the time!  Read More »

LAURA GRACE ROBINS, at her site Full of Grace, Seasoned with Salt, writes:

To be noble the man must be manly. To be noble the woman must be womanly. Independently of the virtues required equally of both sexes, such as truth, uprightness, candor, fidelity, honor, we look in man for somewhat more of wisdom, of vigor, of courage, from natural endowment, combined with enlarged action and experience. In woman we look more especially for greater purity, modesty, patience, grace, sweetness, tenderness, refinement, as the consequences of a finer organization, in a protected and sheltered position. That state of society will always be the most rational, the soundest, the happiest, where each sex conscientiously discharges its own duties, without intruding on those of the other.”

Read More »

THE MANHATTAN DECLARATION is a manifesto calling upon Christians to unite in fighting the culture war. Signed by prominent Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christians last November, it advocates organized action and rebellion against abortion, the erosion of marriage and the decline of religious liberty. Alan Roebuck has a provocative piece at The Intellectual Conservative in which he urges this kind of cultural activism by Christians of all denominations, whom he contends are by and large guilty of passivity.

Mr. Roebuck writes:

Is evangelism necessary for cultural renewal? Certainly. Is it sufficient? Not a chance. And the belief that it is — widespread within Protestantism — is weakening conservatism, as it discourages many protestant conservatives from challenging the Left’s control of American culture. Belief in the sufficiency of Christian evangelism must be opposed.

I will not argue here for the necessity of Christian evangelism for the cultural renewal at which conservative activism aims. Most conservatives understand that we need Christianity for America to flourish. My main point is one most leaders of conservative Protestantism don’t seem to acknowledge: In order to renew American society it is not enough that many people have saving faith in Jesus Christ. Nor does it suffice for them to have correct views of God, man and society that result from a proper Christian catechism. And it isn’t enough even that they vote for the more conservative candidates and ballot propositions. No, cultural renewal requires organization and action for the specific purpose of cultural renewal. And this won’t happen spontaneously. Read More »

IN THE previous post, I wrote:

I was in a restaurant the other day and there was a little sign on the table that listed all the medical ill effects of dehydration. It said that if your water intake drops slightly, you are likely to become confused and unable to function mentally. The water industry has done a great job of convincing people that constant water consumption makes you smarter, thinner and more energetic.

 Lawrence Auster writes:

Think of it — every moment of our lives, we’re that close to a breakdown in our mental functioning! Only constant vigilance and nonstop water drinking can protect us.

But then what happened to the liberal idea that the universe is safe and nothing bad can happen to us? Oh, I’ve got it. The universe is safe when it comes to crime and predation, because man is naturally good, especially nonwhite men, and therefore every time a white woman is raped or murdered, no matter how reckless her own behavior or how crime infested the neighborhood where she went jogging alone, it comes as a “shock.” So the human universe is naturally safe. But the civilized universe is dangerous, because it doesn’t naturally provide us with a constant supply of fluids and therefore we must be attentive to that need every moment of our lives, or else suffer a mental breakdown.  Read More »

A COMMENTER at VFR has a hilarious take on the four women awarded “Sailor of the Year”Awards by the namby-pamby U.S. Navy and on the decadent practice of grown adults carrying water bottles with them everywhere, just like babies with their ba-bas. This country is run by adults who are not yet weaned. Do these sailors carry pacifiers and blankies too?

Patrick H. writes:

Three of the women have water bottles right by their feet, ready to give them their “constant supply of fluids,” no doubt. Probably the fourth woman has a bottle next to her but not visible. Remarkable, really, whether or not the bottles were put there for them or they put them there themselves. These women appear to have had the staggering demand placed on them of sitting in some chairs and then standing up for a while. In the open air! With the sun beating down on them with staggering stunning solar power! And perhaps they were even asked to speak … and we know how utterly dehydrating that activity is. But none of this matters. It could have been a cloudy day, no speech required, no standing, no sitting, nothing. None of it matters. The bottles would have been there anyway. The supply of fluids must be constant. Constant.

It does raise odd Freudian questions about suckling at the maternal teat, doesn’t it? Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

Paul Elam, the editor-in-chief of Men’s News Daily, the largest news-oriented site of the men’s rights movement, has proclaimed, “Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.”

Read More »

HEADY G. writes:

So, I have been reading your blog like crazy lately. It’s distractingly good. I am a male in my mid-twenties and it’s amazing how much of your blog’s truth I see in my everyday life. 

I live in L.A., such a hip, liberal, and “forward thinking” city it is. I hear and see people aching for a lot of these principles and values your visitors share. I was with my actor friends one night, men and women. The men discussed how much they wanted a woman who valued her traditional femininity and the girl discussed her longing for a strong man. It sounded like grandparents in the Midwest as opposed to twenty- and thirty-somethings in Hollywood. And what I mainly noticed is that they wanted a return to tradition, family, and a sense of rightness. But they didn’t even see it. It was a longing they couldn’t put into words. It was a call of nature God gave to us all. Our call to be men and women in harmony. Read More »

READER N. writes:

You may find this article in First Things interesting. It is a discussion of the current movie The Kids Are Alright in which children of a pair of lesbians locate the man who is their “father” via semen donation. Read More »

IN THIS previous entry, Fitzgerald argues that men suffer in subtle and little-recognized ways from women who are criticial or demanding. Male fortitude is not simply self-generated. His point is similar to one I have made before: that gentleness is one of the most important forces for the good.

A recent New York Times article makes a similar argument. Men are more sensitive than is commonly believed. Gee, they even seem to need love. Could it be that men are human beings after all? Unmarried men, a major study has concluded, are more affected by unhappy romantic relationships than women:

According to the report by Robin W. Simon, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University, and Anne E. Barrett, a sociologist at Florida State University, “It appears that young men benefit more than women from support, and that they are more harmed than women by strain in ongoing romantic relationships.”

For women, whether they’re in a relationship at all — no matter how awful — is what counts.

This is startling and troubling news. It violates one of the core concepts of feminism: that men have everything, and way too much of it. This isn’t the only unsettling insight here. The authors of the study were peeved at evidence that, despite the strides of feminism, young women still want boyfriends:

“It’s a little bit pathetic,” Ms. Simon allowed. “Even though there’s been so much social change in this area, women’s self-worth is still so much tied up with having a boyfriend. It’s unfortunate.”

 Truly pathetic. Why can’t women care less about love and more about money and power?

Read More »