Disenthralling again

I probably had gone 18-24 hours without disenthrallment, and was going into a giddy mania.

Or something like that.

Then Paul Kingsnorth’s latest Substack post rescued me.

If we can convince ourselves that we live in ‘liberal democracies’, for example, we can tell a comforting story that such horrors as slavery, forced labour, colonialism and the mass destruction of nature for profit are either things of the past or are being steadily wiped out by ‘progress’. We don’t have to look at the reality: that our entire way of life is dependent on these things continuing – though usually at a convenient distance. What George Orwell wrote in 1942 of the British empire and its critics remains true of today’s empire, the ‘global economy’, and of the elite classes who shill for it:

We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that these coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.

The Machine, in short, is a creature of the cities, and the cities are the creation of the Machine.

… The city provides opportunities for wealth that the village never could, but it treats its poor and marginalised with a contempt that the village would regard with incomprehension.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Great Wen

City: an impermanent collection of structures for making money. (Paul Kingsnorth)

‌I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias; H/T Paul Kingsnorth)

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Rebuttable and Irrebuttable

The good from the past abides

Whatever troubles the present can be fixed (we are told). The future is everything. It also has the advantage of not existing – it has no track record to defend. Whatever we may think of the past, be it blame or praise, it can make the singular claim to have actually happened. The past not only took place but cumulatively is gathered in what we experience as the present. As William Faulkner famously noted, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
…
Human beings matter greatly, and I think it is right that we confess ourselves to be the crown of God’s creation. Nevertheless, we do not exist apart from creation. St. Maximus called us the “microcosm” of creation (“the whole world in miniature”). But this is also to say that we cannot be truly human without at the same time being everything else. In the Creation story, human beings are created last of all, and that seems to be true even when science is the story-teller. To be truly and fully human, it is right that we know the story of the past (or some of them), and recognize that we are utterly indebted to them and that we exist only as the current temporary bearers of their lives and sacrifices.
… The present so-called “culture wars,” regardless of whether the voices are from the Left or the Right, are anxious and shrill, driven by their own inherent insecurity (and the inherent insecurity of modernity itself). Those who live a larger, deeper existence, understand that the past cannot be destroyed. It abides. That which is good within it abides, even if it is interrupted for a season of madness.

Living Large – And Long – Glory to God for All Things

Our season of madness

The women talked about the West’s LGBT ideology as deeply offensive to Africans. The first woman said, “We are at the point where you cannot get development aid, water aid, or any kind of aid from NGOs unless you affirm LGBT. What kind of message do you think that sends to us about what the West cares about?”
The second woman said, “China is making lots of inroads in Africa. We can see it all the time. The Chinese come and build things, and give us things, and they never tell us we have to change to suit their ideology. The Americans and the Europeans demand that we do. The Chinese leave us alone.”
I asked the woman to clarify. Is she saying that the West is pushing Africa into China’s arms because Western elites have made LGBT rights into a global crusade?
Yes, absolutely, she said.
I was reminded of something a semi-retired professor in Budapest told me this past summer, when I was there. I asked him if he wasn’t worried by the Orban government’s plans to allow the Chinese to build a campus of Fudan University there? Not at all, he said. He has spent most of his career teaching in Western universities, and have seen them take a totalitarian turn with wokeness. He said he would be much more worried if a prestigious Western university tried to open a campus in Hungary.
“Fudan University is a great university,” he said. “And the Chinese will respect Hungarian culture. They won’t force us to be woke.”

Rod Dreher, The West And The Rest

One of the journalists at the table said he just returned from vacation in the south of France. In the town of St-Raphael, he had been present for the annual ceremony on August 15 to commemorate the Allies landing there to begin the liberation of Provence. “Let me read to you what the woman from the US consulate said,” he remarked, pulling out his phone.
“No, you’re not going where I think you’re going,” I said nervously.
“I think you know what’s coming,” he said, snickering.
Sure enough, he read from what I suppose were his notes on the speech. According to this journalist, the consulate representative said that just as American troops fought Nazis there in 1944, today we all must fight for the liberation of LGBT people. The Italian was amazed that the US diplomat even shoehorned LGBT into a speech commemorating a World War II invasion. I haven’t been able to find a transcript or video of that speech, but this messaging is consistent with the recent “Emma” recruiting video from the US Army, in which a young female soldier likens her military service today to going to Pride marches with her two moms as a girl. It’s all about fighting for freedom.

‌Why America Is Losing In Africa

One of the hardest things for me to internalize is that I’m largely powerless to affect such madness, and I always have been because I’m just one person and I’ve never been fluent in the slogans, nostrums and mêmes that communication seems to require these days.

Moreover, I’m now a septagenarian dinosaur. I was writing something the other day about emotional, psychologically manipulative preaching designed to flood the Evangelical altars at “the Altar Call.” Then it dawned on my that I haven’t seen an altar call in decades. I’m fairly sure (now that I mention it) that they’re just not done any more. However it is that Evangelicals view “getting saved” or “getting born again” these days isn’t as it used to be, and I simply haven’t got a clue what it is today. (All I can predict is that Evangelicals will insist that it’s biblical and this is how it’s always been done.)

Oh, I guess I digressed. That’s because I have nothing to say about the madness. If you can’t see that it’s mad, I’ll never be able to show you.

Irrebuttable

These unheard, moderate minorities carry an almost unassailable authority in liberal politics because of the very simple fact that liberals tend to frame their policies in terms of race. If those same objects of your concern turn around and tell you to please stop what you’re doing, what you’ve created is perhaps the most powerful rebuttal in liberal politics.

Jay Caspian Kang, ‌When the ‘Silent Majority’ Isn’t White

Dervish Saint?!

Not a Hagiography I would have expected: ‌Holy New Martyr Alexander the Dervish

Republicans talk incessantly about other people’s violence. The rioters who burned buildings after George Floyd’s death. The criminals who make Chicago a murder capital. Immigrants who supposedly terrorize their host nation (they don’t).
Criminal violence is a problem, but the kind of violence Republicans are now flirting with or sometimes outright endorsing is political—and therefore on a completely different plane of threat.

Mona Charen, The Party of Violence. By “Republicans,” Charen includes jackasses like Congressman Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina:

Cawthorn’s work experience before serving in Congress consisted of a stint at Chick-fil-A and a part-time job in a congressional office. He dropped out of college after a single semester in which his grades were mostly Ds. But he was apparently active in that one semester: More than 150 of his classmates signed a letter accusing Cawthorn of being a sexual predator. One woman told the Washington Post that he drove her to a rural area only to become enraged when she rebuffed his sexual advances. He drove back at speeds of up to 80 miles an hour.

Averted gaze

There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they came from, or what religion they practice, or the color of their skin. And I did that,” he adds. “I helped destroy people. For 17 years.”

Janet Reitman, ‌I Helped Destroy People, quoting Terry Arbury.

I suspect that pointing out FBI wrongdoing is about 99% useless. I think people already strongly suspect it, but are more than willing to look the other way if they think that wrongdoing is protecting us from terrorism in our land — and if they personally aren’t on a no-fly list.

Is cancel culture getting a new name?

I skipped reading The New Puritans at first because I didn’t really want to read any more about cancel culture. But people I trusted recommended it, so I relented and spent a rather long time (interrupted) reading through it.

It’s interesting to read a center-left writer who has awakened and smelled the coffee. Ann Applebaum writes well, and she points out a few things about the cancel culture of the Right. But I think I spotted her looking over her shoulder a few times to guard against herself getting canceled for writing about cancel culture, which she is wont to call “modern mob justice.”

Rebuttable

In 2019 Disney’s CEO [said] that it would be “very difficult” for Disney to film movies in any state in the United States that restricts abortion access. But the company’s respect for women’s rights did not prohibit it from filming “Mulan” in Xinjiang, where Chinese authorities have embarked on a program of systemic rape — part of an effort to dissolve ancient family and communal bonds, and transform Uighurs into what Beijing regards as full-fledged, non-Muslim Chinese. Not only that: In the credits of “Mulan,” Disney gave “special thanks” to those same authorities.
Then there was the Ancient One, a character in Disney’s 2016 hit “Dr. Strange.” The Ancient One was supposed to be a Tibetan monk, but this upset Beijing, which, no doubt, worried audiences might think Disney was saying something good about another Tibetan monk: the Dalai Lama. So Disney made the monk white. Progressives, in the United States, howled that Disney had replaced an Asian character with a white one. So Disney did what it had to do to assuage the progressives: It made the monk a woman. This did the trick. White-woman-washing the Ancient One was good for China and Disney. Not so much for Tibet.

Vivek Ramaswamy, ‌Stakeholder Capitalism Is a Trojan Horse for China.

Rebuttable presumption: whenever a big corporation starts bragging about BLM or LGBT or other progressive obsessions, they’re buying social credit to distract us from their buddying-up with foreign tyrants.

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Reaping what we’ve sown

The universal brotherhood of man is a real thing, but human beings are limited in their capacity to love and understand one another; we need a hierarchy of loves based on mutual understanding and presence (inseparable from history and culture) that we might best love one another …

We live in a world where various powers have callously disregarded the values of blood or soil. The history of colonialism is mostly one of displacement and stolen land, followed by the imposition of a political imaginary that interpolated blood into foreign political categories, creating the “tribalism” that sickens governments around the world. The recent history of economic development has provided many benefits to people at the cost that they displace themselves from their families or their land for the sake of a “good job.” Various wars have created our current refugee crisis, where people often have no hope of returning to their land or reuniting with their family members whose bones are sinking into that land. Extractive economies — most tragically, the drug economy — allow people in power to enjoy the fruits of the land while those who work that land suffer various kinds of violence.

…

Because the Gospel must be preached to all nations, because we as Christians have a trans-national identity that ultimately trumps any other identity, and because no man who wants to feed his family should be denied the opportunity to seek the employment necessary to do so, movement around the world should be free.

The fact that any man should be forced to travel halfway across the world to do so, disrupting his relationship with blood and soil, is a travesty of the natural order. The reality that Western nations fear men doing so only demonstrates that we have built our political order on a house of cards. We quake at the possibility that the conditions we have sown in other places through our economic practices and warmongering might come to us through migration. We are hysterical at the possibility of reaping what we have sown.

Matthew Loftus, Pro-Blood, Pro-Soil, Pro-Nation, Pro-Christianity, at Mere Orthodoxy.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees cause-and-effect between our economic and foreign policies and the migrants coming to our shores (Europe’s, too).

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The Lord is King, be the peoples never so impatient; He that sitteth upon the Cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.

(Psalm 98:1, Adapted from the Miles Coverdale Translation, from A Psalter for Prayer)

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Blue-Collar Lifeworks

H/T Kevin D. Williamson (possible paywall). See also Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft.

That is all.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

The Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College

Because of the forces first unleashed by [the] liberal project vested in the nation, we can’t simply rely on laissez-faire as a secret recipe for strengthening our families and communities.

I mean, do we really think today that leaving the field more open to Google and Facebook and Amazon and Pornhub is going to lead to a revival of the homely virtues portrayed in a Normal Rockwell painting?

I live in the state of Indiana, and I can tell you: our government tried to protect our religious liberty, and it was the corporations that came in and threatened our economic destruction. And that should be fought ….

Patrick Deneen at the National Conservatism Conference (starting at 15:34).

It occurred to me few days ago, before I listened to Deneen’s talk, that preening progressive corporate bullies are the Left Coasts’ answer to the Electoral College.

Granted: flyover country has, by the Founders’ design, disproportionate political power, via the Electoral College and the United States Senate.

But the coasts have disproportionate economic power by draining young brains from the rest of the country.

And what sorts of things do they do with their disproportionate economic power, including the opinion-molding power of Hollywood?

They build single-party states like California (with the nation’s highest poverty rate despite huge economic output) and cities like San Francisco, “‘entertainment machines’ for the young, rich, and mostly childless,” designed (in effect) by Richard Florida, where normal families can’t afford to live (“the median home value is at least six times the national average”), procreation has largely ceased, and homeless addicts litter the sidewalks with their paraphernalia, their bodily wastes, and themselves — collateral damage of our economic hubris.

Not that there’s no collateral damage elsewhere, of course. A lesson of 2016, I think, is that there’s lots of it, and it’s electorally consequential. If Donald Trump is the answer, we’re asking the wrong question, but he’s at least partly a consequence of collateral damage in the economy, which almost no other candidate in either party even noticed.

They also sell cultural fads that, to borrow a tired liberal trope, are “on the wrong side of history” because they’re the fruits of insane ideologies that humanity will not long endure.

For instance, transexual “girls” shattering athletic records, walking away with gold medals, and at least in microcosm making mockery of the goals of Title IX.

Or take “from ‘Bake my cake! to ‘Wax my balls!‘” Yeah, it’s British Columbia, but the legal regime down here is all ready to accommodate a monster like “Jessica,” thanks to creative re-purposing of laws against sex discrimination, sold to courts and regulators by the best lawyers and lobbyists money can buy.

In this light, I’m particularly disinclined to apologize for the Electoral College and Senate to progressives who want all the power, economic and electoral.

Indeed, I’m flat-out grateful that we prole breeders can keep the progressives from undue dominion, forcing the nation to think a bit longer before rushing over a cliff, by going to the polls.

I can even, for a moment, understand the “paybacks are hell” thrill of “owning the libs.”

Somebody, though, really, really needs to come up with a better approach than tit-for-tat.

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You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

I highly recommend blot.im as a crazy-easy alternative to Twitter (if you’re just looking to get your stuff “out there” and not pick fights).

How Conservatives are deviant

1

Conservatives React Differently to Disgusting Pictures

Differently that who? Differently than normal people? Isn’t “normalcy” an invidiously discriminatory concept?

No! That kink of question brands me an enemy of the people — not Donald Trump’s people, but the ones who really matter:

In social science and popular writing about social science, liberal views are always the norm and conservative views are always deviations from that norm, deviations in need of explanation. Liberal views don’t need to be explained — after all, they’re so obviously correct.

Alan Jacobs.

2

They aren’t smearing Tulsi Gabbard as a Kremlin asset because they don’t want her to be president … [T]hey fear … allowing her anti-interventionist ideas to take hold within the mainstream consciousness of a nation whose nonstop military interventionism is the glue that holds the empire together.

…

Let’s stop allowing the mass psychosis of these paranoid cold war feeding frenzies to be the new normal, please. If we keep going this way it’s only going to get worse for everyone.

Caitlyn Johnstone. I don’t know whether there really is a concerted effort to brand Gabbard a Kremlin asset or if this is just a tempest in blogger Johnstone’s teapot. But I love her illustrations:

Screen Shot 2019-02-05 at 8.54.44 AM

That one was an animated GIF. This one really captures the mentality of some of these people:

Screen Shot 2019-02-05 at 8.50.36 AM

3

Our politicians reliably fetishize two constituents of American life: the middle class and small business. The Democrats used to talk a bit more about the poor before they became the Harvard party — poor people are lousy donors, as it turns out — and the Republicans used to be a lot warmer toward Big Business before the GOP became a right-wing farmer-labor party and Big Business came to mean Howard Schultz, Mark Zuckerberg, and Lloyd Blankfein.

Kevin D. Williamson. That’s a pretty good snapshot of our current stage of political realignment.

The rest of the column is in praise of Big Business, debunking Small Is Beautiful mythology.

I can’t deny Williamson’s numbers, but I deny that numbers tell a plausibly “whole story”. The reflexive premise that they do is part of what is deeply wrong with movement conservatism (for lack of a better term; “conservatism” without adjectival modifiers is totally useless). Here’s another part of the story: a community that works to live (and pray) rather than living to work.

4

As the Epiphany season draws to a close, one is forced to conclude that the “woke” Episcopal Church of 2019 stands firmly with Team Herod.

Kari Jenson Gold

5

If bigotry is repugnant, why not demand the resignation of Vice President Pence for his ugly views on homosexuality? And while they’re at it, why not insist that Pence’s wife Karen resign her position at a school that discriminates against gays and lesbians?

…

Pence has long been criticized as being hostile toward LGBTQ issues. He has linked same-sex couples to a “societal collapse” and even once seemed to support conversion therapy, which is a form of torture.

Richard Cohen.

The second paragraph is the entirety of Cohen’s evidence that Pence has ugly views on homosexuality. Read it slowly and shudder.

Cohen needs no evidence, as all the bien pensants agree with him.

I was not thinking of this sort of thing — at least not consciously — when I signaled several days in a row my incredulity at the calls for Virginia’s Governor to resign over a 35-year-old yearbook picture. Perhaps it was in the back of my mind, though: The callout culture is really toxic, and orthodox Christianity is now worse than faux pas.

Further, although I though I do not consider Cohen’s question bona fide, a sufficient answer were it bona fide would be that the voters knew when voting for him that Mike Pence triggers people like Cohen, and that his alleged sexual atavism is the ostensible reason, whereas the Governor’s secret was, well, secret.

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Trading Lenin for Bezos

Of Amazon’s decision to expand in New York and suburban D.C.:

I used to be suspicious of the phrase “costal elites,” but it seems more apt every day. And as those elites congregate with one another, and concentrate their wealth in ever-smaller enclaves, and increasingly see the 95% of the American landmass between the coasts as material (human and natural) to be exploited for their economic purposes, they also complain ever more vociferously that the American political system — with its “undemocratic” institutions like the Senate — prevent them from exercising even more complete domination over places they will never see and people they will never know.

Alan Jacobs

Remembers this when you hear our Lords and Masters blathering about them “winning the popular vote” or saying we deplorables have too much political power.

Don’t ever let them take away the Senate as currently constituted to reflect a federalist polity.

[I]n our last election, “Drain the swamp!” was the mantra of the Trump supporters. But did anyone really expect that the man we elected, a swamp creature if ever there were one, would be able to do this? And what, exactly, does one do with a drained swamp anyway? Probably sell it to developers who would build overpriced, poorly made, beige and boring condos, nicely accessorized with a strip mall complete with a Dunkin Donuts and a Vape shop. In other words, just a different kind of swamp. The Democrats prefer the fevered swamp of coercive governmental power, whereas the Republicans prefer the fetid swamp of corporate greed. So all we have really done is trade Lenin for Bezos.

Larry Chapp via Rod Dreher.

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Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.