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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

  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.

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.

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. (more…)

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.

(more…)

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: (more…)

NEW DATA from the Department of Education shows that black students are disciplined much more often than other students.  According to The New York Times, “Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions.” (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

I like James P.’s “pillage” description of the left — that the X’s need “equality” with the Y’s; therefore the Y’s must be attacked and pillaged, etc.

But I think he is leaving out a big part of the picture. He seems to visualize a left consisting only of hard-core activists who use equality as a pretext in order to pillage their targets. He misses the more moderate type of liberals, not activists but regular citizens, for whom equality is not a pretext, who really do believe in equality and think that equality is the highest moral good and who are not thinking in terms of pillage. (more…)

  YOUR SUPPORT of this website would be greatly appreciated. Please contribute here. Thank you.

N.W. writes:

I found the picture of a homosexual in a Marine Corps uniform kissing another man disgusting and reprehensible.

However, as a serving member of the United States Marine Corps, I must take issue with the somewhat flip title of your blog post, “The Girly Marines.” (more…)

AT VFR, the reader Thomas S. writes:

When I was a liberal, I chose what I wanted to believe.

I was the center of reality, deserving of attention. (more…)

CRANBERRY writes:

How fitting is Guido Reni’s painting of Joseph fleeing the wife of Potiphar, given the current state of femininity and feminism. Here we have a woman with no mastery of her own desires, no chastity, who attempts to corrupt a young and innocent foreigner to pass an afternoon’s amusement. Her desire turns to rage when he rejects her, and her immediate impulse (again, showing lack of self-control or honesty) is to accuse him of rape. (more…)

  THESE WORDS by Julian Savulescu, the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, are worth reading again. Savulescu was defending the article by two ethicists who made the case for infanticide of newborns with disabilities such as mental retardation. What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society. Of course, the exact opposite is true. The freedom of liberal academics to offend normal human sensibilities is almost limitless. Savulescu is upset that those who object should exercise their freedom of speech.