life issues

Perhaps We’ve Just Been Living Wrong?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Scott Presler opines that for the GOP to have long term success, it is going to have to become the natalist party – that is, the party in favor of family formation. This is true. Attentive readers of the Mirrors series have probably figured out that Queen Caelestine is pro-natalist; always trying to get people married and wanting everyone making babies at a rapid clip. This is, of course, a bit of my philosophy being inserted in a small way to the narrative. But I don’t think we’ve really thought much about how this would come about.

It seems to me that our problem here stems from our too-long adolescence and too-long education.

Remember that back in the day, a girl and a boy getting married at 16 or 17 wasn’t at all unusual…with the young couple then either working on the family farm/business or striking out on their own. It is a bit of a shock to the modern mind to think of that – in fact, we probably think of it as tragic. But the bottom line is that we become physically capable of bearing children at a pretty young age: and if one wishes to argue against biology, that is fine – but the reality is that our physical being is ready for childbearing a lot younger than we find acceptable in the modern world.

Right after I read Presler’s Tweet the Rush song Subdivisions came on the playlist and the refrain just leaped out at me:

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

All of us, I think, can remember back to our middle and high school years and remember how out of sorts and out of place we felt. That sensation is what Neil Peart was writing about in the song. But what, really, was the problem? That we were 16 or 17 years old and felt we had no proper place in the world. That we didn’t know what our lives were for or what we would do. By that time we had already been in school ten or eleven years, had at least a year or two left to go…and then the prospect, pushed massively by society, that we would do at least four more years of school after that and then start our career…and don’t get married! You’re “too young”. You’ve got plenty of time for that! Get your education. Get your job! And, hey, the old morals are gone so just find someone to have sex with…its ok. Nobody will judge you.

Except yourself, of course. The mind rebels against what is wrong even if that mind can’t articulate it.

I conclude – and this literally just flashed in my head earlier today – that the increasing alienation of youth since, say, World War Two is based upon this lifestyle of 12-16 years of education followed by career and then marriage and children if convenient. The final result of this is kids who are saying they are non-binary or what have you: we’re so long down this path of essentially denying biology – denying our own humanity – that the latest generation is rejecting the very idea of biology and what it means to be a human being – what it means to be male or female. We’re getting here – and it is likely to get much worse – because we have tried to craft a lifestyle which is not adjusted to humanity. We’re trying to be cool so we aren’t cast out…but what we’re not trying to be is human. And even the adults who get through this to become functional members of society are still awash in divorce, anti-depressants and pathetically going to fertility clinics at 35 in a desperate bid to push out a kid before the clock expires.

We forgot that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. We’ve been going about it backwards – trying to rework humanity to fit a certain sort of society when sanity lies in making society conform to human needs.

Laying aside the animal need for food, water, shelter and clothing, the primary thing a human needs is community. We are a social species. We literally cannot survive as a species without others of our kind around…and even individual survival is gravely threatened when we are on our own (break your leg on a hike with friends and you’ll probably make it – break your leg hiking alone and there’s a good chance you’re going to die). Biology commands – and we Believers hold that God also commands – that we engage in sexual relations. Anyone who remembers being 15 knows this – the urge was persistent and insistent. It was so strong that all of us did wonder for a bit just why there was a moral code against rampant sexual activity. But especially as we aged, we understood the wisdom of confining sex to a committed relationship. But I think we get it wrong – backwards – when we say, “hold off on that urge until you’re 25! Gotta get that education and career, first!”. We’re also kinda stupid – the sex urge will not be repressed for that long. I do believe that if we really want to fix what is wrong, we’re going to have to really think about what we want.

I do think we spend too much time on education. Don’t know about you, but high school was mostly pointless for me. They weren’t teaching me anything new – and in the things I was actually interested, I was rapidly far in advance of what the school was teaching. It might very well be that adding high school to the education mix for 90 percent of us is a waste of time. And if high school is pointless for most of us, college even more so.

Plus when we take a kid of 14 and say, “hey, just 8 more years and you’re done with school”, we’re telling someone who wants to get rolling on life right now that they’ll have to wait. That they have to stay in leading strings for years longer and then, if the behave, they’ll be allowed to start doing the Adult things.

I’m not saying there isn’t a need for higher education – but what I am saying is that almost nobody needs it and, in truth, it has long become counter-productive. First off, on account of it being dumbed down. In order to keep up the fiction of Education – Career – Marriage we’ve routinely lowered the standards for higher education to the point that a mediocre 12 year old from a century ago knew more than doctoral students at Ivy League universities today. You can only keep the fiction going, after all, if it is for everyone. But, of course, everyone isn’t suited to higher education – and nor should they be. A healthy society has a certain number of artists and thinkers…but usually less than 1 percent. And they are only able to create art and thought because almost everyone else is busy making things happen.

And after community, the next thing a human needs is to be needed. We are built to contribute – to do something useful for ourselves and our community. It is, as I’ve noted, the only way we can survive. Except for short periods and baring physically debilitating accidents, we can’t even feed ourselves without the assistance of others.

How useful does a 20 year old in college feel? And there’s your answer to why the purple hair, nose ring and a sudden assertion that they are a different gender. They are doing nothing. They aren’t really learning anything – save for spoon-fed Marxist drivel. Small wonder they get a little kooky…like a junior league Nero or Caligula…the real difference being that Rome in ancient days could only carry the freight on a few of them at a time…while our overly wealthy society affords millions nominating their horse to the Senate. And here’s the real kicker – almost all 20 year olds in college are incapable of higher education. It is supposed to be for the 1 percent – maybe the top 5 percent if you’re being really generous in giving out passing grades. These poor kids are uselessly doing something they are entirely unsuited for. Lunacy does result. BLM/Antifa riots, as well – not for nothing did fascists, Communists and Nazis find their most ardent spirits among 20th century college students…a collection of increasingly mis-educated kids unsuited for higher thought but who were also being quit useless…and here comes The Cause to give their existence a point.

As Chesterton pointed out, we have to begin all over again at the start. If a house is built so that it knocks a man’s head off as he comes through the door, it is built wrong. You can’t reform it – you have to tear it down and build it again. Properly.

There was a little joke meme I saw the other day which went along the lines of “me who had my kids at 18 and 20 watching from the beach as my 40 year old career-first friend deals with her 4 year old”. Lot of truth in that. It really comes down to how we will spend the best years of lives.

Do you remember being 20? My goodness, the energy. As I was in the Navy at the time this manifested itself in my ability to spend weeks at sea in a four hours on, four hours off rotation, hit the beach in a liberty port, party with the shipmates for 24 hours straight and then immediately go back to sea. We all had it. We were inexhaustible and indestructible. We could eat and drink all we wanted and it just fueled our ability to do more and more and more.

Do you remember being 35? You had stayed out until just a shade after midnight the night before and had that third drink and now, bleary eyed and exhausted, you faced the grim task of going to work and, dang it, why does my back hurt?

Question: which you was better suited to chasing around after a rambunctious 2 year old? Which of you could better deal with screaming kids, household chores and putting in a 50 hour week at work without complete mental and physical collapse?

Life is for youth, boys and girls. And we’ve been doing it all wrong. What we should have been doing is giving our kids 8 years of basic education, siphoning off the cream of the crop for higher education and sending the rest to trade school while positively encouraging early marriage and children. This is much more in line with human needs than our current model – and given our advances in production and medicine, it doesn’t preclude anything. Suppose at 45 you decide to move off from the construction job that paid for your house and raised your kids, now moved out, and take a stab at a college degree? You can do it. Nothing to stop you. And zero chance of regrets – you’ve already done the most important part of living. You took a man or woman’s place in the world. You already proved who and what you are.

I am open to dispute here – I don’t know if I’m completely right. I only know for certain that we’ve been doing it wrong. And if we want a healthy society, we are going to have to change how we’re doing it.

Never Tolerate the Intolerant

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Alexander Kerensky could have had Lenin shot.

In the history books, there is a certain inevitability about Lenin but when the situation on the ground is examined closely, it is clear that right up until Lenin’s coup he could easily had been disposed of. The Bolsheviks were, indeed, gaining support in Russia after Lenin’s return from exile but that support was concentrated in St Petersburg and Moscow and even in those two power centers their power didn’t amount to majority power. Lenin was not some all-powerful person.

And Kerensky, last head of Russia’s Provisional Government knew what Lenin was up to and, indeed, was urged by people from Right to Left to move against Lenin. But Kerensky was not a ruthless man. His politics, in spite of his later association with the Conservative Hoover Institute, were Left. And he was a true believer! While not himself a Marxist he, like most Left people, had bought the Marxist notion that the ills of society are due to the leadership of the society – that the bad isn’t just part of human nature but is created and fostered by wicked people in power. Kerensky was absolutely convinced that once Tsarism was swept away the natural goodness of the people would shine forth and a just social order would emerge.

And, so, he was simply not a man who believed that he could or should shoot someone. All glory to him for standing by his convictions – but his failure to shoot one, single man, Lenin, ensured the overthrow of Kerensky’s government and the start of a system in Russia which eventually murdered tens of millions. The October Revolution wasn’t a revolution – it was a coup where Lenin and a small number of his followers shoved Kerensky and his people out of their offices in St Petersburg and started to govern. It succeeded because Kerensky’s lack of ruthlessness against the Bolsheviks convinced everyone from Left to Right and he wasn’t the man to stand against the Bolsheviks when they made their move. A bullet in September, a hero’s funeral for Lenin, and the Bolsheviks then fade into history as they squabble endlessly over what to do.

It really is a pity that it came out that way.

And I bring this up because it shows that while tolerance is a good thing – a necessary thing in any free society – as in all things human there are limits. Specifically, one must not tolerate the intolerant.

Lenin was saying from the get-go that his goal was total power for himself and his Bolsheviks and that once they got power they were going to smash everyone else. Hitler said the same sort of things. Mao as well. It has been dogma on the Right that we must extend tolerance to people expressing any idea because if we want to be free we must tolerate everything. This, as it turns out, has been incorrect – and it is wrong on both moral and practical grounds.

On the practical side of it, tolerance of the intolerant merely allowed people like Lenin and Hitler to plot and plan their takeover. It is like allowing an enemy army to arm and train itself in plain sight while you make no effort to hinder it. Just amazingly stupid and I’m rather surprised that we all bought it to one degree or another. But on the moral side of it, it is also wrong to tolerate the intolerant. Look at the mountains of corpses which resulted from people not killing Lenin, Hitler and Mao. Sure, we saved three bullets, but we lost more than a hundred million lives. That book doesn’t balance out.

To be part of a pluralist society the first requirement must be that you pledge to never end pluralism. That there is no individual, race or class which you say is a problem that needs to be destroyed. The assertion must be that everyone who is willing to tolerate is tolerated – but anyone who says that a person, class or race is evil, that person has to go. The Communist saying the Capitalists are evil must be destroyed. The Nazis saying the Jews. The Klansman saying the blacks…the CRT professor saying that white people are inherently racist.

“But Mark (you may say), aren’t you, by saying we must destroy the intolerant, becoming a person who says that an individual, class or race must be destroyed?”

No, I am not. I am not Hitler brooding in his Vienna flophouse about how the Jews kept him out of art school. I am not Lenin raving in Switzerland that he, and he alone, knows what to do and so everyone else must obey or be destroyed. I don’t care what anyone believes – but when a mad dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot it.

If we allow these people to live in our society then we are continually at risk of their gaining power and starting to kill their targets. To me, it is not worth the risk. I do believe that the bullet for Lenin is justified. And all anyone has to do to avoid the bullet is say, “hey, I don’t like that group, but as long as they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone”. We’re not talking a very high bar here for participation in our society – you just can’t be a bloodthirsty maniac raving that if just this one group is destroyed, everything will be great.

It is very important that we learn philosophy and thus develop our theories about why things should be and what we should do. This sort of thing is invaluable in making certain that our actions are based upon thought as far as possible. But we must remember that outside the hard sciences, what we theorize isn’t always a hard and fast rule. In general I as a male will never hit a woman – this is because even though I’m not a particularly large man, I am still a lot stronger physically than almost all women and so it would be simply unfair and cruel for me to hit someone who can’t effectively hit back. On the other hand, if a girl is coming at me with a baseball bat, I’m clocking her.

Our philosophy of freedom places a premium on not censoring thought and speech. We have learned over time that in order to possibly get a good result, people must be able to think and say what they wish because in the free exchange of ideas and facts, we are more likely to find the correct solution – or at least the less bad solution – than when we carefully control thought and speech with a mind towards obtaining a pre-determined choice. That is our theory and, most of the time, it is applicable. But our theory must not interfere with our practical choices. Our theory that the police should try to de-escalate a situation falls flat on its face when there’s a knife-wielding maniac loose.

So, too, with our politics. Broadly tolerant – right up to the time when we find someone who is saying that some person, class or race must be restricted or destroyed in order for good things to happen. That person should be shot at the earliest opportunity…and without even a twinge of guilt that we in some way violated our principal of tolerance. We didn’t – we enforced it in the most efficient manner possible.

As we all know, we’re rather backs to the wall at the moment in politics – mostly because we tolerated the intolerant and, as per usual, now that these intolerant people have gained power, they are seeking to destroy their enemies. But as we seek to gain the power we need to reform our nation back to a sane Republic, we must not lose sight of the necessity of intolerance of the intolerant. We must, that is, do the things necessary to ensure that those who hate individuals, classes and races, are removed permanently from any ability to influence our society.

Our Grim New World

Mark Noonan25 Comments

So, it turns out the bald guy in a dress that Team Pudding Brain hired to look after nuclear waste is a weirdo who steals women’s luggage.

Who could have guessed!?!?!?!?

Saw an ad for a clothing store or maker – didn’t look to closely at that aspect of it – which was lauding assisted suicide in Canada. It is really bad up there – basically, if you’re a depressed teenager or a soldier suffering from PTSD, killing yourself is offered early on. Part of this is driven by bureaucratic cost-saving: each dollar spent on treatment is one less dollar in the health budge for pay and benefits, after all. But it is also the Culture of Death writ large – and they are trying very hard to bring this to the United States. It is, of course, already here in various States and localities…but if we ever get single-payer, offing yourself will quickly become part of the basic plan.

It must be kept in mind that forgetting about God doesn’t make you a happy pagan doing blow off a hooker’s a**…it makes you eventually into a miserable, greedy, narcissist who hates everyone who can’t bring immediate comfort. That is the thing about God. Or, more accurately, what God cannot be – He cannot be your salvation in sin. Only your salvation out of sin. If you live in sin – and I mean really wallow in it, like our Leftists do – then you find that all you have is sin. God is good – He is Joy, Hope, Charity, Courage…all that. If you reject God then you reject what God has to give…and what’s left? Sorrow. Despair. Greed. Cowardice.

I know that various Saints have told us they have seen visions of Hell and most of them accord with the popular vision of fiery pits and, of course, Our Lord used words about burning to describe Hell. But I think it may be a bit different front that. The damned will, indeed, burn. But they’ll also freeze. They won’t be able to move. Or see. Or remember joyful things. All these things are good and all good things come from God…and if you are completely absent from God, you can’t possibly have the least good thing. All those who have completely separated themselves from God have is what God isn’t – hate, fear, loneliness, crushing cold, burning fire. It is very sad to contemplate – and more sad to contemplate those who are still alive and day by day are separating themselves from God. Damnation isn’t easy to obtain – salvation is easy, damnation is hard. You just have to ask for salvation, but you’ve got to work at being damned. And all these people with their assisted suicide, abortion, tolerance of objective evil, their thievery and lies…day by day building hell for themselves.

But that need not concern us directly: as far as salvation or damnation, each person is ultimately on their own: you will ask God for it, or you won’t. But it seems to me that we do approach a breaking point. Another thing I saw recently was this head of marketing for some fancy clothing line and the images this person uses are clearly of a sexually abusive nature towards children. It has caused some controversy…but not a lot of people dropping their contracts with the clothes maker. Lets not get silly here, right? Sure, Nike (or whatever) had to drop Kanye like a bad habit…but he said Bad Words. How can you compare that to gross images of abused children? Kidding aside, we’re seeing our Ruling Class clearly out to normalize sexual activities with minors. Partially this is to get ahead of possible indictments…but it is mostly, in my view, the final progression from the Sexual Revolution. Once disconnect sex from marriage and children – once, that is, stop having it for what it is – and you’ve pretty much removed any argument against any sort of sex. One commentator asserted that in ten years Disney will have a movie featuring and adult-chlld relationship and I won’t bet against that. The only taboo left is against forcible sex…and that will be a high hill to climb, but the Left will gamely do so…because its the last step in normalizing adult-child relationships. Remember, they don’t have to square the circle: they’ll just assert that normal male to female sex even with consent is always rape but anything else, consensual or otherwise, is just part of a person’s sexual identity. Think I’m kidding? They’re already on the assertion that you can’t have free speech if people are able to speak freely.

Depressing, huh? But I’m really not depressed. Concerned! Very much so. But mostly because I know that the collapse and reaction on such things tend to be exceptionally violent. I’d rather we didn’t have that – but with Congressional GOP getting ready to sell us out on amnesty and Ukraine aid, I don’t think we have in place a mechanism to even put the breaks on the Culture War at the federal level. Betting is that the weirdo luggage thief won’t see jail time – probably won’t even have security clearance pulled. The Ruling Class can’t risk having their first non-binary (or whatever) in that position come a cropper, right? Desantis fights against it. Abbott a bit, as well…but this is hardly enough to really turn the tide. And we’re running out of time to turn it!

On the plus side, I am starting to see even a few on the Left realize that it has all gone too far – San Francisco is ok in its place, but when you try to shove it into Omaha, it can get very dicey. We’ll see, I guess!

What Do We Really Know?

Mark Noonan32 Comments

A Twitter friend went into the way back machine and reminded me of the Nuclear Freeze movement of the 1980s. I guess you’d have to be at least 50 to have any memory of it at all: so, a lot of the youngsters in the world wouldn’t know what it was about. Of course, you could Google it – but if you did that, you almost certainly won’t find out about it.

Oh, you’d read a lot about it. And what you read would be almost invariably praising it to the skies. But what you probably won’t read about it is that it was nothing more than a Soviet front organization. We were about to build and deploy a type of nuclear weapon the USSR (a) couldn’t build and (b) couldn’t defend against. Our having these weapons while the USSR didn’t would put us in the driver’s seat – the USSR would essentially be forced to throw in the towel on Cold War competition. So, the USSR did the one thing it was actually good at: call forth the Useful Idiots of the West to ensure the USA shot itself in the foot.

I remember it, now, very well. Especially one of the leading voices of it: Dr Helen Caldicott. She was just about everywhere during the time. Highly in demand for your Soviet inspired peace march and conferences around the world. And she was an Authority on it! She knew was she was talking about! After all, she’s a doctor.

Well, a pediatrician…who never had any experience dealing with either nuclear power or weapons…but she fit the bill: someone who seemed oh, so nice and had Smart credentials and how can you argue against her? You can’t hug your kid with nuclear arms!

The drivel almost worked – huge pressure was placed on Reagan and Thatcher to ditch the new weapons. But, they didn’t…and then the weapons (along with other Reagan tactics) did precisely what they were supposed to do: force the Soviets to the table at a disadvantage and eventually unravel their Empire in Europe (the fall of the USSR was really just a bonus that nobody could foresee).

But that isn’t our issue for the moment – the real issue is that a pack of ridiculous lies nearly sunk Reagan’s USSR policy and even though the lies failed at that, they still managed to implant into the public mind that nuclear power is somehow extra dangerous and that the only safe thing to do with nuclear power is have nothing to do with it. By this time in our history, almost all our electricity production should come from nuclear power. A whole series of plants all across America should be humming with cheap, clean nuclear energy providing far more than our greatest need. We’re not because of people like Caldicott got themselves fooled and then managed to fool enough other people.

And, heck, I have to admit – back there in the late 80s and early 90s, I was wary of nuclear power. I still figured we should go for it, but I had this mental image of it being extra dangerous and we had to take extra care around it…and this was after I got out of the Navy, when I had literally stood next to an operating nuclear power plant aboard a submarine. How could I have been so stupid?

Of course it had to be operated properly – but so does any device. Operate a solar plant incorrectly and you’ll cause a lot of problems. We got into our minds, though, that nuke was Super Dangerous! Thousands of years must pass before it is clean! For goodness sake, at no point did people stop living in Hiroshima. A few days after the bomb went off and all the bodies were cleared away, the people were already starting to rebuild. It is a city of nearly 1.2 million people: far larger than it was when bombed in 1945. Here’s the photo of the iconic dome of Hiroshima. Tell me, what immediately leaps out here?

That is doesn’t quite look like the wasteland of 1945…the trees really take away from the whole End of the World vibe we’re supposed to get here.

Obviously, nuclear weapons are very destructive and nuclear power is something that you have to be careful with…but there is clearly a bit of a mental psychosis in the popular imagination about it which is not supported by things we can easily observe. Things we can know just by knowing them. I doesn’t take special knowledge or insight to know that Hiroshima is a thriving city…but we, in a sense, don’t know it…and so we fear nuclear power and think that using a nuclear weapon is unthinkable.

And then you start to ponder: what else are we refusing to know? How much of what we “know” are lies?

You can do this yourself: just take some subject and think about it. Think about what you know but then take the crucial step: pretend you don’t know it and think about it for a bit. Does what you “know” match up with what you think? Like this:

One of the things you’ll find asserted – in books, movies, documentaries, everywhere – is that the Anglo-American alliance could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the USSR. This is an article of faith. It is true and may not be questioned. If you do, you’re an idiot. I mean, think about it – at least 5 million German and Axis soldiers fell against the USSR. If the USSR hadn’t killed them, then they would have all been turned against us and we never could have won!

Makes sense, right? I mean, that is a lot of dead Krauts and it would have taken us a powerful long time to off them, ourselves. But when examined, it simply falls apart.

At the end of the war, more than 21 million Americans and Brits were in the armed forces. This does not count British Empire forces: even excluding Britain’s Indian Army, this probably worked out to two or three million more. But lets just go with the Yanks and the Limeys.

By 1945, the Brits were at maximum strength: 5 million was about what their population could sustain in the field. The USA could still call up three or four million more than we had, though that would be pushing it. The Germans, if they strained every nerve to the breaking point, could maybe get 10 million into uniform. Starting to see something here? Just the Anglo-Americans, alone, vastly outnumbered the Germans. Throw in the Italians and minor Axis allies and you still have a big advantage for the Anglo-Americans. When you add in that the UK/USA had vastly more economic capacity than the entire Axis (including Japan) and had open access to all the resources in the world what you conclude is that regardless of how any particular engagement went, the only question on defeating Germany was how long it was going to take? Having the USSR in got the job done in 1945, rather than 1946 or 1947. That’s it. Good thing, of course; but certainly far different from “we must be thankful because without the USSR we couldn’t have won the war.”

And who likely floated the idea that we had to have the USSR? The USSR – and their useful idiots in the United States. Starting with those who gave away the store at Yalta in order to get Russia into a war against Japan we had already won.

That is just one mental exercise which, once concluded, lays to rest a myth which is believed really for no other reason than it has been repeated over and over again. But I think we all have to start doing this – start thinking entirely fresh. Roll it around in your. They say this happened: well, does it make sense that it would happen, or happen that way? They say we must do this: why? They say we have retain this policy or alliance: are we sure?

Last night I posted a Tweet where I asserted that the US government must keep no secrets. That a Republic must do her business in the open for all the citizens to see as it is done. Very smart people said we can’t have that – even George Washington believed in keeping diplomatic secrets! Well, sure: if Washington was President today, I’d probably trust him to keep some things confidential. But we’ve got Pudding Brain and his merry band of morons running the show: you really want them to be able to keep what they’re doing secret from you?

But I came to this conclusion by a bit of a winding intellectual road and it just flashed in my mind that secrets are for con artists You don’t keep secret honest dealings – you keep a con secret because if your con gets out into the open, enough people will see it in time to warn your mark off. Heck, even God doesn’t really keep secrets from us – He’s got some Mysteries, but He has shown them to us: we just can’t fully understand God. Go figure. But secrets are just not good – and in government, they are downright bad. And so, the whole FBI/CIA/NSA “National Security” apparatus, in my view, has to be ditched. It is keeping secrets mostly to hide its incompetence. But I only got to this view by thinking anew about everything – by taking nothing for granted. I got here by thinking – and we really do have only two ways to live:

  1. By thought that has been thought out.
  2. By thought that hasn’t been thought out.

For nigh to a century, we’ve been going on “not thought out”. I think we need to change that. We need to find out what we really know.

Hey, Conservatives: Stop Believing MSM Lies, Ok?

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Some people on the right, foolishly accepting MSM framing, are horrified by a proposed anti-abortion law in South Carolina. The MSM is framing it as a ban on so much as talking about abortion – but I read the bill and while it does ban someone from, say, maintaining a website which instructs you on how to perform an abortion, I don’t see anything in there that I object to. After all, abortion is to be illegal, right? And as an illegal act, shouldn’t it be illegal to tell someone how to do the illegal act? I’m a pretty strong 1A guy here but if there was a website telling people how to set IED’s for the police, I think I’d have an objection to it being allowed to continue.

Of course, I’m no lawyer – so maybe there are aspects of this I’m missing. If so, then those in the know should be telling us their objections on that level…not just accepting MSM framing and running with it. I mean, for crying out loud, we all know the MSM lies all the time about everything. And on the abortion issue they are currently working overtime to spread fear among urban and suburban white women on the subject of abortion. If you click the linked article, you’ll see a series of links within it with frightening headlines about women losing their right to privacy – so, you know, the whole point here is fear-mongering. The MSM wants the reader to be afraid that those inbred, hill-ape, Christo-fascist morons are trying to impose theocracy. The bill doesn’t do that. What is does do, aside from making abortion illegal and defining an abortion, is make it illegal to prosecute the mother for obtaining an abortion, illegal to coerce a woman into an abortion, illegal to transport a minor across State lines to obtain an abortion, makes abortion legal to save the life of the mother and codifies the legality of contraception.

Not exactly Theocracy stuff.

But people on our side ran with it. Why? Can’t look into souls, of course, but I suspect that many are actually pro-choice but don’t want to come out and say it lest they lose Conservative audience share. Also, of course, quite a few of these people have liberal friends and they want to be sure such friends know they’re not like “those people”. You know – not like you and me.

And this is just one of many examples – couple days ago I saw that Hugh Hewitt was saying we had to codify same sex marriage and legalized birth control on the Federal level to prove we’re not going to ban SSM and birth control. So, we’re to play into DNC fear-mongering because…why? To stop something that isn’t happening? Or does Hugh and those like him just want something to separate from “those people”? Look, you inbred hicks, you got your abortion ban in some States, now you’d better sign on to a federal law imposing SSM even though the Constitution gives no warrant to the Federal government on the issue.

No. No, no, no and f*** no. Please, stop it: stop ratifying liberalism. We’re Conservatives, dammit. No, we don’t have a particular interest in banning SSM but this doesn’t mean we’re suddenly ok with it, nor that we’ve come around to approving the idea of the judicial activism which created it. SSM was (we hope) the last fling of leftwing judicial activism. Don’t put our stamp of approval on it.

And in the name of all that is decent in the world, stop believing the MSM. At all. Best if you simply stop consuming it – even if this costs you a gig or two. No amount of money is worth being associated with liars. But if you feel you must consume and participate, then at least have the common sense to know they’re lying and go to the original source to see what is happening before you comment. Yes, this might upset your liberal friends and some people might think you’re an inbred redneck…but that’s ok: the people who hate you for being actually Conservative are stupid and not worth caring about.

The Triumph of Life

Mark Noonan115 Comments

Rather says it all in one picture.

And it was posted today on Twitter and it is the perfect response to the Leftist shrieks since Friday.

For goodness sake, just a little bit of common sense and some self control and your chances of having an unwanted pregnancy drop to near zero. And yet 63 million abortions have been performed in the United States…which shows that in our modern society responsibility is rejected. A pro-choice Righty I know on Twitter posted an article from a British newspaper about a woman with a 50 year old Down’s Syndrome child who states she wishes she had aborted: the comment on it was, “why don’t you pro-lifers think about this?”. As if we don’t. As if we hadn’t already worked that into the calculation. We are none of us promised an easy trip from the cradle to the grave – life, at times, can be very painful. And at the end of it, you die. Even those of us with strong faith don’t like that thing coming down the pike – because for all our faith, we don’t know. We’re not allowed certainty. But in doubt or in faith, we’re going to die. It is a bit of suffering we all must endure – so why do people think they can opt out of suffering? It is part of life. It is how you deal with it that reveals what sort of person you are. My parents could have institutionalized my autistic brother – that was the recommendation of the medical professionals. But, they couldn’t – as flawed as my parents were, they just couldn’t see consigning their child to a faceless, uncaring institution just so life would be a little easier for them at home. This is what humans are supposed to do – to reach out in pity and mercy when things are bad…not run and hide.

And, so, the picture – the smug, wealthy Westerner who holds all the right positions and is always in favor of The Current Thing…demanding not a moment of suffering. Zero sacrifice…all the while literally sitting on the backs of a horde of suffering people who provide the comforts the Westerner believes are a birthright. It really is sickening.

There’s another part of it, too: the people, allegedly on the Right, most of them, warning us that now we’ve won, we’re doomed! Doomed, they say! We’ve awakened the Sleeping Giant! Now instead of a Red Wave in November it will turn Blue as a surge of people rush to the polls to affirm their support for abortion, which is wildly popular and only opposed by a few inbred, hick morons. Never saw such amazing stupidity.

First of all, it is the gas prices, stupid. Yesterday, the lady in front of me at the grocery checkout put back several items after she was rung up because it ended up being more than she could afford. She wasn’t buying steak and lobster – her cart was nothing but common staples. And she had to make a hard and fast choice of which common items she would do without for a week. That is the reality – that is the working and middle classes being crushed and that is what will be on the mind in November.

But, absent that, was anyone paying attention? Over a 50 year period the Pro-Life movement worked for this moment – with massive social and political opposition from the most powerful people and institutions in America. And with their own supposedly pro-life leaders in politics stabbing them in the back every time they could (we still haven’t defunded Planned Parenthood, after all). They triumphed over it all because, at the end of the day, they were the more powerful political coalition. Make no mistake about it, if America really was a majority Pro-Choice nation, Roe would never go down…because there wouldn’t have been the GOP votes to put into the Supreme Court the necessary Justices to do so. Meanwhile, what of the Pro-Choice movement? Didn’t they fight? No, they didn’t – they coasted, coddled by a Ruling Class and MSM which never challenged them…so the point where most Americans still don’t know that the abortion laws of France and Sweden are vastly more restrictive than Roe…in fact, more restrictive than the Alabama law which was the instrument of Roe’s downfall.

Now the fight shifts to the States and Democrats are going to be asked if there are any legitimate restrictions on abortion – and they’ll have to dodge, because instead of fighting for 50 years like the Pro-Life movement, they coasted on Roe and their ability to say they were just defending “a woman’s right to choose”. Now they’re going to have to defend slaughtering a child in the birth canal…and they (and the world) will find out that while there probably isn’t a majority in favor of a nationwide ban on abortion, there is even a small number willing to fight for abortion on demand to the moment of birth.

We’re going to win, my friends. We were always going to win. It was never going to be easy. It might take even another century before we have a Culture of Life codified into American law – but we’re going to win. We’ll have setbacks and will suffer a lot on the way, but we’re used to that and are ok with it. We’re just going to keep rolling along, standing firm on the ideal that a human life is precious, regardless of condition.

The End of Roe

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Seriously: God be praised, I never thought I’d live to see this.

We will get some extra insanity now that Roe is gone, but I do believe that, long-term, ending Roe will lance the abscess – the poison in American politics, which stems from defending the indefensible: Roe.

There is no honest way to defend Roe, after all. You can’t tell the truth and be in favor of it – and you can’t find a merciful or just reason for defending abortion to birth. But Democrats went on an defended it, and poisoned American politics, possibly fatally. There is no way to say that abortion is covered under the US Constitution. It just isn’t in there, not even by implication. It is an elective medical procedure; its like saying breast implants are a Constitutional right, leaving aside any moral question.

For the past 50 years, Democrats have mounted a desperate, rear-guard defense of Roe which has caused them to become egregious liars as well as becoming cruel and stupid. I don’t know what made them die on the Roe hill, but it wrecked American politics. There is no honest way to defend Roe, after all. You can’t tell the truth and be in favor of it – and you can’t find a merciful or just reason for defending abortion to birth. But Democrats went on and defended it, and poisoned American politics, possibly fatally.

But, maybe not. Now that it is over and reasonable people can work at the State level for the abortion laws they think best, just perhaps Democrats will feel unbound to lies and so able to speak truth…and to cease being cruel, because they no longer have to defend barbarism.

It Is the Moral Collapse, Stupid

Mark Noonan27 Comments

This one has some staying power. The most recent massacre, I mean. We might be talking about this all the way to, you know, like next Monday.

And I know that sounds dismissive of tragedy but it isn’t really: it is dismissive of the official response to tragedy. A little earlier today I saw that the Yankees and Rays will forgo their game broadcast and will, instead, broadcast several hours of DNC gun control propaganda. They didn’t call it that, but that doesn’t change what it is. As I read the Yankee’s statement is just became blazingly clear what they could actually do to bring an end to this:

Fire the next top flight player who gets a girl pregnant and doesn’t marry her.

Because that is what this all is: what is wrong with our society is entirely the result of society deciding not to enforce standards. Sure, one ball player not doing the right thing didn’t cause this all to happen, but thousands of professional sports stars over decades acting like pigs in the off season played a huge role. They taught the young men of America – and especially poor, young men – that it doesn’t matter what you do as long as you can deliver the goods. That only your ability to make money matters…everything else will be covered up, paid off and forced to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Years ago I wrote about Mick Jagger and his life and I pointed out that his persona, especially as young, was an act. He was a middle class kid. Nice, respectable life. His mother was a Tory. He did very well in school and had he not become a rock star, probably would have had a long and successful career in some square employment. But the persona, crafted to sell records, was of a wild, party man. A street tough telling it like it is via his music. Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll! But it was, indeed, all an act. A very successful act: Jagger is worth about $500 million. And I considered Mick Jagger, and many like him, and wondered how many people took it at face value and decided to live that life – live the act, that is. But by actually doing it and not having an army of people to keep things squared away and hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up all mistakes?

Given the popularity and endurance of the Rolling Stones, it was probably several million people around the world who wanted to be like Mick. Or like any one of scores of other famous rock acts…which were (and are) acts. Make believe. Those few in the business who really lived that life – Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Keith Moon, etc – ended up dead at very young ages. Because living that life is suicidal. Neil Young sang about it being better to burn out than fade away – but he sang that in 1979 and he’s 76 now and very much fading away rather than burning out.

Let me quickly think of the people I know – friends and family – who are six feet under because they went along with all that: George, Todd, Rob, Pat, Jeff, Alex…that’s just top of the head. How many people can think of that many in a few seconds? Then we can add those who are simply a mess: a good dozen that I can easily think of. And then there’s their kids! Also a mess – though some of them have managed to rise above.

Certainly the sudden massacre of 19 kids in school is a shock – but in the grand scheme of things, in this War Against Decency we’ve been waging for 70 years, it hardly counts as a skirmish. More than 100,000 people died of drug overdose in the United States last year. That about 5,200 school shootings. And they passed almost unnoticed. Not dramatic enough. Can’t make a good DNC political point about it. And, heck, I actually saw pictures of NYC billboards which are telling drug addicts not to feel shame, but just use the drugs properly. But dead is dead – whether from a bullet or drugs. Or any other of the social ills which are causing people to die (I think I read that 28 people were murdered in Chicago last weekend…and not too long ago an adorable little girl was gunned down in a McDonald’s drive through…but, hey, she was black and so was the shooter and it was over gangland crap so nobody gonna do a major news story about that).

We can change and we will change. This cannot endure. Bad as it is – and looks to get worse – the strength to cure this will be summoned. The longer we wait, the more brutal the reaction. But it has to be. Civilization is necessary in order for 90% of us to live. When our backs are really against the wall, you’ll be surprised what people are capable of. But until then, I’m going to keep pointing out what is wrong and who contributed to it.

So that when retribution comes, the right targets will feel the heat.

We Wanted This Culture of Death

Mark Noonan15 Comments

In the aftermath of the latest school massacre, the Democrats have brought up what they always bring up – gun control. You know the usual: universal background checks, things like that. Nobody, as far as I can tell, has even asked whether the shooter would have passed the background check (my bet: he would have). It is all so patently ridiculous – performative theater, though Democrats are looking here to goose their base for November. Don’t know if it will work – they tried it with Roe but the bottom line is that people care far more about what it costs to fill the tank than a theoretical end to abortion.

But people were killed, does that make a difference? Perhaps, but probably not. I think that we’ve become rather numb to this, and that is sad in itself. But it is what we asked for.

Earlier today, I came across a Tweet which said that it may be that the cops didn’t charge into the building but instead isolated it before moving. I don’t know if that is 100% accurate but I think that would be in keeping with normal police procedure. You don’t know what’s out there and until you’ve got some intel, any move you make might make things worse. But the point of the Tweet was that the cops should have just charged in supreme disregard for their own lives. To which, you answer: yeah. But.

And the “but” is that by what standard should a cop selflessly sacrifice himself? I mean, I know the standard. John 15:13, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” But there’s a problem here – that’s a Christian standard. It is, to be sure, shared to some extent by other faiths, but the highest expression of it is Christian. To go to certain death for the benefit of others is something Christ did, and all Christians are supposed to follow the example of Christ as far as they are able. But this standard isn’t shared by people with no faith – and keep in mind that “no faith” runs from the most irritating atheist you’ve ever met all the way up to the weekly Church-goer who lives the other six days of the week as a practical pagan. The chances that any particular person – let alone any particular cop – will be a Christian hero are rather small these days. I’d guess that its about one in four Americans who actually take a stab at living a Christian life these days.

And as I said, this is what we wanted. Not like we specifically voted on it, but we passed in silence as it happened. I mean that as a people, of course: some of us objected vigorously and we were told to shut up. But a school shooting is a bum defecating on the street is a child being sex trafficked is a starlet being used as a sex toy is an activist getting rich off tragedy is a corporation turning a blind eye to his Chinese supplier’s slave laborers is a twelve year old being told he’s genderfluid by his teacher and so on. You get the picture. The shootings gather more notice because they are dramatic (and the Democrats hope to wring political advantage out of each corpse), but the rest of it is just going on right in front of us…and in the course of a year causes vastly more deaths than all the gun violence combined.

As I’ve said before, there is a cure for this. It is the same cure used the last time barbarians inundated the West: extreme violence. What we call cruelty these days because, not being Christian (or any sort of faith, really), we have lost sight of what real cruelty is. Civilization is not innate to humanity. The normal course of humanity is to grab whatever it can with no thought to others or the future. To be a person who cares about others and takes a thought for the morrow is a learned quality. We, as a people, learned it over a thousand year period and via the lash, the branding iron, the headsman’s axe and the gallows. We were forced, by those who wanted civilization, to knuckle under to required norms of behavior. And we became so used to this that we forgot that our custom of being decent was force reduced to routine and hiding it’s claws. We began to believe that decency was the norm and that we could release our instincts and everything would work out not just as well as we had it, but much better.

We believed this because people can be very, very stupid.

So, we’re now getting to the point where we’ll have to choose and I believe we will choose incorrectly. That is, we will refuse to apply the violence necessary to restore decent behavior. And because we make this choice, we’ll then find a small group of people who will make it for us and so we’ll get the same result. Civilization will not completely die – it can’t. People will want to eat in safety. Right now, they don’t see how large the threat is but a day will come when they do, and then those who threaten the safety will find things starting to go very badly for them.

But, meanwhile, we’ll just keep going on – stepping around the sh** on the sidewalk as we walk from one mass shooting to another.

Is Evil Banal, or Fun?

Mark Noonan2 Comments

A Twitter friend of mine put up the famous Hannah Arendt quote about evil:

Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

That is the quote written in relation to the trial of Eichmann. To Arendt, Eichmann seemed such a zero. Just this nobody of a man who, using first-rate bureaucratic methods, sent millions to their deaths. I’ve never fully accepted that view. I think that Arendt – and many others – wanted a simple explanation which also denigrated the evildoers. So, Eichmann wasn’t thinking – had he paused for a moment to think about what he was doing, he would have stopped. So the theory goes. And it might have been true, to a certain extent. It all depends on what the person thinks about.

I don’t believe in the mindless human being. Even the simplest among us are still capable of thought. Absent some serious physical malfunction in the brain, every human being can figure things out. Some obviously better than others, but everyone can. It is how we survive given how incapable we are of surviving on sheer physical strength. At some point in his life, Eichmann thought about things – perhaps he was stupid, but he still thought about them and came to the conclusion that having Jews and other “subhumans” around was bad for people. Real people, in his mind, being only Germans. His actions then flowed from that as did all of the Nazis.

While in Hitler’s mind massacre may have always been in the cards, for most Nazis it wasn’t. Hans Frank spoke of the innocence he and his fellow Nazis had when the rose to power – claiming that had you told them in 1933 about 1945, they wouldn’t have believed it. For most of them, this was perhaps true.

But even in those supposed days of Frank’s innocence in 1933, he was ordering people arrested and putting his well trained legal mind to work providing quasi-legal justification for the actions. And that gets me to my view of why evil happens. It is fun. I take Chesterton’s view of evil:

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.

I think Ms. Arednt was denying the cat. And I think this denial is because people who don’t believe in any real God still want to believe that there is objective right and wrong. That anyone who thinks will, you see, end up thinking as they do. Arednt, of course, was a secular, Socialist German Jew. Not much room for God in that worldview. But she had to figure out how the Nazis could happen. On the other hand, I doubt she spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the Communists could happen. But that isn’t what detains us here. I think Chesterton had it right. So right, in fact, that I used his insight in the upcoming Book VII of the Mirrors series. Set about twelve years after Book V: Kings and Queen (which I’ll be releasing next month), two of the main characters discuss how one of them used to be one of the bad guys (I’ve blanked out the names so there isn’t any spoiler here):

As they rode along, **** found himself right next to ****. For the first time, he didn’t feel angry about that.

“Thanks, again, for helping me,” **** said.

“You’re welcome, once again,” **** replied.They rode along again for a few minutes.

“You were with them, ****. What was it like?”

“Them?”

“The enemy. What was it like?”

“It was glorious,” **** said to ****’ surprise. **** noticed the look on ****’ face.

“You won’t have read him here, but there was a very wise man who wrote poetry and books back in my home world: he pointed out that there is an exquisite pleasure to be had in skinning a cat.”

“Cat?”

“Small animal. But, mainly, he wasn’t trying to horrify people: he was pointing out that in doing evil, there is great pleasure to be had. It is false pleasure and it leads to genuine death, but it is pleasure. If it wasn’t there, people would be evil far less often, if at all. It is in all of us, ****. Me. You. Even your mother. The capacity to do evil is there.”

“This I know from the priests,” **** said. “But what was it like while you were in it?”

“As I said, glorious. I had power and no limits and I could do as I wished and no one would ever call me to account. I took what I wanted and anyone who even looked crossways at me got the axe. It was fun, ****. It is like the most heady wine you’ve ever had and the more you have, the more you want. And the further you go down, the harder it is to come back.

That, I think, is the best explanation for evil. Not bad; evil. There’s a difference. A man who kills another because he caught him with his wife has done bad, but not evil. But the action of shoving a Jew into a gas chamber is no different in kind (though massively different in degree) than robbing a man of his wallet or forcing a woman into sex: it is the fun of being able to do something to someone who either cannot or dares not resist. Solzhenitsyn noted this as well: how it was clear that some interrogators, faced with a determined prisoner, just let themselves go and felt like real men when they had beaten a defenseless person to a pulp.

And as my character notes, the more you do it, the worse you get and the harder it is to crawl back. A Nazi scharfuhrer who beat up a Jew in Nuremberg in 1933 was probably just the sturmbannfuhrer to command an Einsatzcommando in 1941. And though there are plenty of stories of Nazi executioners having psychological problems, its not like they stopped killing…nor are there many recorded cases of Nazis even going easy on the people they had at their mercy. Indeed, it just seemed to get worse as time went on.

And I think it became almost a competition to see how utterly rotten you could be. A sort of game: “what if I did this to them?”. And then the fun of really going to town on those who finally had enough. Plenty of cases like this in Nazi Germany, and in Stalin’s camps. But, also, in our run of the mill criminals. They don’t start off being the most horrific things they did. Usually started small and then got hideous as time went on. And the key to that is to understand that the “rush” as it were gets harder to achieve. You forced the Jewish lawyer to clean the latrine with a toothbrush and that was a kick…but, once you’ve done that a few times, the rush fades. What else can we do to him? What else can you do to the man you’re robbing? What else can you do to the woman who’s house you broke into? On and on like that – and as noted, the further you go the worse and the harder to stop.

But it isn’t just the evil of physical brutality: there is also emotional evil. The ability to get people to lie on command. To make them say things which sh** all over their own beliefs. This is where our Social Justice Warriors get their fix. The mental torment they put people through is the point. You’ve seen it – like when some impeccably Liberal person is dragged through the mud because they have one opinion which is now decreed to be outside the Party Line. The author of the Harry Potter books is a prime example of this – good for her that she’s rich enough to survive it, but the bottom line is that because she refused to subscribe 100% to the Trans agenda (her objection was that it erased biological women), she was subjected to massive invective…and even though it didn’t get her, it still was very pleasant for those doing it…because it scared everyone on the Left who didn’t have her resources to toe the line. Imagine that – you’re a complete nobody of a purple haired xir…and now people are afraid to cross you because they’ll face social ruin if they do. That is a massive boost to the ego.

And I think this is why punishments used to be so savage. Or, at least, part of the reason. It was a mix of trying to beat civilization into people and to let evil people know that while there is a great pleasure to be had in evil, the end result is to be hung, drawn and quartered. If you’re not entirely familiar with that process, look it up: it was quite grisly. And these days we read about how the people cheered when it happened and we’re all supposed to feel that those cheering were more evil than the condemned. But, it wasn’t so: what the people were cheering was a complete rat-bastard who thought it was fun to do evil getting what he deserved.

Anyways, that is how I view the matter. That in order to stop evil, you have to take away the pleasure those who engage in it feel. That you have, in your turn, to make things so miserable for them that they’ll, possibly, at last understand why what they did was bad.