98 percent of Catholic women, I am told by all of you, use birth control to determine the size and timing of their families. So again its a women's health issue.
Precisely why heretics like her need to be excommunicated immediately, preferably Becket style:
Surely you've heard the news: the Church is up in arms over a new mandate that would force them to purchase insurance coverage for a variety of illicit and objectionable crap.
What's the end game here? Probably nothing. The Church's fecklessness on the issue of contraception has purchased widespread heresy on the part of the laity and a culture of dissent among its lower clergy. There'll be no fighting in the streets, as Bill Donohue promises, and if there is, it will be American Catholics burning their own churches.
I remember briefly obsessing about flag-burning once during my college years; I seem to recall a flag-burning Constitutional amendment came within a vote or two in the Senate of being sent to the states. I also remember vacillating wildly about the issue. I haven't given it much thought since then, mainly because no one else has, but now I see it's back in the news. What are we reactionaries to make of it? (Note that by flag desecration I mean any act directed toward a flag which is aimed at sullying it, such as burning it in protest, cutting or tearing it, trampling it, or smearing it with foul substances; the burning of a flag in accordance with protocols for its proper retirement are not of interest here).
First, let's orient the discussion toward its proper object. There is no sense complaining that such a ban would run afoul of anyone's rights. There is no natural right to do it that I can discern, and whether or not there ought to be a civil right to that effect is precisely what's at issue here. At best, one could make a case that banning flag desecration would run afoul of other people's natural rights. But that only gets us so far: justice itself entails the restriction of rights when the crime is of sufficient gravity to justify it. Thus the murderer loses his freedom of movement when he is imprisoned, while lesser crimes are punished with proportional restrictions or impositions; in other words, it doesn't go beyond "the means must be suited to the ends"; it says nothing about the character of the end. So the proper question ought to be, "Is the desecration of the flag a grave enough matter to justify legal enforcement of its prohibition?"
Probably so, although there's certainly room for debate about the extent or form of the prohibition. A flag is an existential representation of a group of people, an expression of their self-consciousness as a people and not merely a mass of alienated persons. In a sense, then, to desecrate the flag is to consciously attack the deliberate self-expression of a united people. Insofar as social unity is a good thing, and thus a thing to which people have a right, they also have a right to demand that the symbols through which this unity is expressed be protected, and thus a right to forbid the desecration of those symbols. There is a reason, after all, that it's called flag desecration -- that is, de-sacralization, or the removal of a thing's sacred character -- and not merely flag destruction.
To the modern, people's objection to the desecration of the national flag is incomprehensible: it's just a variegated bit of fabric, after all. But in registering this objection, he betrays nothing but the autistic insensibility of his soul to the importance of representations in organizing man's social life; he also exposes himself as a materialist (and, consequently, exposes the vacuity of the idea of "values" in a materialist ontology, despite his objection that it need not lead to nihilism). He may acknowledge the fact that flag-burners themselves don't feel as if they're just burning a colorful strip of cloth, but in doing so he will probably say that the flag is nothing more than a receptacle for the projections of collective consciousness. But in saying this, he has given the game away. The flag is an expression of the people's self-consciousness, and this is what endows it with value; that it would still serve this purpose even if the flag had a different shape, color, or content changes nothing. It's true that any given flag is an arbitrary design; but it's true only in the sense that any given man has made an arbitrary choice of wife -- it is not then follow that his wife doesn't matter or that he has no duties toward her. Haecceity matters.
Conversely, another commonly-heard objection is that the flag is, indeed, a symbol -- but a symbol of freedom. Thus, the logic goes, prohibiting the kind of freedom of expression that allows a flag to be burned would be an insult to the flag, not a protection of it. (This is the logic hinted at in Michael Douglas' final speech in The American President). But this is very little more than propositional nationalism, that is, the idea of America not as a nation but as some sort of nebulous ideal; we might also call it universalized nationalism. As such, it is runs afoul of the same absurdities as propositional nationalism does: it means that "American" corresponds not to national citizenship but to adherence to some ideal. We know this is false, though, or at least that no one takes it seriously, because there are plenty of Americans who don't believe in that ideal and plenty of non-Americans who do. Clearly, "American" is not an ideology but a nationality: it relates to identity, concrete, particular, and historical. To be American is not (necessarily or exclusively) to be a democrat or a libertarian or a capitalist but to be a citizen of the United States, subject to the authority of its government and sharing in a common culture, heritage, and network of traditions as those who also share this identity. A second response to this conflation of the flag-as-freedom is that it's obviously self-contradicting: if the flag is a symbol of freedom, why do protestors burn it and not some other symbol? Because they hate freedom? Why, then, do they insist on the freedom to burn the flag? Protestors themselves never think they're burning the flag as an expression of hatred for freedom but as an expression of hatred for the political expression of the people, that is, of this or that government (usually because of this or that action they disapprove of). In short, the modern can oppose a prohibition on flag desecration only by emptying both the flag and the act of burning it of symbolic content -- in other words, stripping both the object and the protest of meaning. (I suppose that is basically modernity in a nutshell: the intentional destruction of meaning for the sake of enthroning a subsequently meaningless freedom).
A final objection is that prohibiting flag desecration is unnecessary, either because it won't stop people from desecrating them or because it rarely ever happens. The latter is probably the best possible objection: that there are simply more pressing issues at hand. This may be true, but note that it is an argument related to the circumstances of the present time. It says nothing about whether or not such a law would be good in principle. As for the former objection, it is not necessary at all that the law actually suceed in stopping anyone from burning the flag: it is enough for it to serve as an expression of the common will, that this particular symbol has meaning and value and will be protected.
So the flag is a concrete symbol of a concrete people, an expression of themselves as a common people; and insofar as communal self-expression is a good, it follows that destruction of communal self-expression is an evil, and thus that the people are within their rights to demand that it not be permitted.
What form, then, should the prohibition take? Should flag desecration be a misdemeanor or a felony? Should it be punished with a fine (if so, how much?), imprisonment (if so, for how long?), or both? Should police seek to actively prevent, even with physical violence if necessary, the desecration of the flag, or should it only be punished after the fact? These are valid questions and require a good deal of reflection (especially on ethical first principles); they are certainly beyond the scope of this post, which is only intended to establish the validity in principle of the right of a people to insist that their national symbols be protected. I will say that the importance of protecting those symbols increases as national unity weakens, so that in times of crisis, it may well be more important to protect the flag in times of peace.
Bear in mind I say this as someone who has only a very generalized affection for his country -- there are a few nations in the world today quite as deserving of punishment and reprimand as this one.
Don't like it? Tough, you dumb bigot fundie bastard:
May I suggest your readers take some time to read about the Student Non-Discrimination Act. Under the benign language of “non-discrimination,” the federal government will be able to force schools to accept the behavior of flamboyant, gender-nonconforming kids as normal. So, if a school administrator disciplines a boy who is wearing eyeliner and swishing around in a skirt, he will be fired, and the kid will be able to camp it up in school. The U.S. is bankrupt, our white middle class is shrinking, and yet our Congress wastes its time with legislation like this. Can you imagine Congress sponsoring legislation like this during the Depression, or the 1950s – or even the 1960s?
Just like we Christian types of been saying since, you know, forever, there is no end in sight to the "equal rights crusade," and any leftist who says otherwise is simply a liar.
I know I shouldn't be at this point, but every so often I'm amazed at the extent to which Christians (especially Catholics) will delude themselves in order to fit in as good Americans.
Modern America requires Christians to profess falsehood: that their religion is essentially false and therefore unworthy of being entertained on the public stage. The atheist/agnostic will say, of course, that it requires no such thing, that it simply requires them to profess that while they may believe their religion to be true, they cannot know their religion is true, and thus they have no right to act in accordance with their belief by demanding that the state establish and protect their religion. Usually, the rationale is epistemic weakness.
(Peter Drucker made this argument. It's about 75% of the reason I disowned him. It never even occurred to him to question whether or not it was actually true).
But Christians can know their religion is true: they inherited it directly from God Himself. He came down from Heaven in the form of a man and told us of our obligations to Him. If you don't believe that, you aren't a Christian at all. So to say they can't profess belief in the fundamental reality of their religion is to say their religion is false: that a central claim it makes is false. And to require them to act according to this belief is to require them to jettison their faith entirely.
Thus the visceral horror to which, for instance, otherwise good Catholics react when a fellow Catholic (like myself) says, "The state ought to formally establish Catholicism" (or at least "mere Christianity"). Chritsianity may be true, they say, but we only believe it's true, and other people don't believe it!
Well, those people are wrong. That's all. And there is no right to falsehood and error.
Anyway, when did "belief" come to mean something less than fact? Belief is the adherence of the intellect and will to a perceived truth. We all believe the sky is blue, for instance. Because it's blue.
"But what if they take control and outlaw your religion because they believe it's false!"
They do that all the time, though. Why should we unilaterally disarm? (Not that we're talking about outlawing competing religions; such confusion over the historical norm of religious establishment is woefully common nowadays).
And who cares, anyway? We preach Christianity because it's true, not because the state graciously permits us to do so without harrassment. If the state decides to martyr us for not playing along, well, we will be glorified in Heaven and God will avenge our blood. If you don't believe that, you're not a Christian, either. You're just a liar, going to church every week to set a good example for the kids or to keep up appearances (or something). Your real religion is comfort, and you will be stripped of every last speck of it when your soul is dropped into Hell.
Suppose the state came along and said, "You may believe the sky is blue, but you have no way of knowing for sure. And meanwhile, there's plenty of people who think it's green or orange, and some people don't think the sky exists at all. So you better mind your manners and tolerate this diversity of belief."
We'd think that person was insane -- evil, in fact.
That is the net effect of modern separation of church and state, though. The sky is blue; far-and-away the vast majority of us know it; but don't dare speak of it, you bigot.
The tipping point for economic collapse is coming up quickly, perhaps as early as next year. We've been through this sort of mess once before, but the America of 2012 is a vastly different nation than was the America of 1929. Let's take a few moments to examine these differences.
First, while we're heading for depression, the coming one will be markedly more severe. GDP contracted a total of 30% in four years; the necessary correction to bring GDP in line with our present levels of economic output will be more on the order of 50%.
This time, public distrust, suspicion, and contempt of the American government is at an all-time high.
This time, our ethnic minorities are considerably more numerous, more radicalized, and more violent, to the point that they are constantly shooting people over sneakers, getting arrested for losing their minds in fast-food restaurants, and stabbing their coworkers with screwdrivers.
This time, virtually no one is a farmer or even knows how to farm (back then, virtually everyone was capable of at least subsistence farming).
This time, society is in thrall to an ideology that regards pain and suffering as the worst possible evil and suicide as a perfectly valid means of avoiding such.
This time, dependence on the government is already at a record high and there will be no money left to help out the poor.
This time, there are clear villains -- the financial-political complex.
This time, the American identity as such is considerably weakened after decades of propositional-nation nonsense, mass immigration, and political correctness.
This time, we share our porous southern border with a violent narco-state (in fairness, this isn't much worse than the violent atheistic despotism we shared it with back in the 20's).
All of this is reason to suspect, to quote Newsweek's Mark Thomas, that this time, "there will be violence."
I absolutely detest American elections and everything about them, not least of all the hysteria. Each successive election is said to be even more important than the last -- the stakes are higher this time! the future of the republic hinges on this pivotal moment! -- yet this is the exact opposite of the truth: each successive election (regardless of who wins) further cements the leftist consensus and witnesses the further organizational, intellectual, spiritual, and moral collapse of the right.
So vilely leftist has modern political discourse become that the chief criticism of Ron Paul circulating among ostensibly right-wing "thinkers" is that he isn't sufficiently left-wing. Check out Jonah Goldberg's criticisms of Paul not being antiracist enough. (Goldberg... how I detest the man. Henceforth, his name shall ne'er be written again on this blog: he shall be known only as Dagon -- in the Lovecraftian, not the Amoritic, sense).
Look, there's plenty not to like about Paul's politics, but this isn't it. Why in the world should the right be enforcing the left's strictures, especially when we all know and complain about their obvious bogosity? I'm no fan of white nationalim (which I regard as dangerously misguided, especially given that the majority of reactionaries' enemies are white -- and almost certainly a majority of whites are reactionaries' enemies), but surely we can acknowledge that particularist loyalty, properly constrained, is generally a good? Must we indulge the left's inquisitorial impulse? Must we adopt their irrational value system? Must we embrace their puritanical spirit?
Break out your barf bags; this election's going to be especially nauseating.
I spend a lot of time beating up on liberals, I know. Let's take a moment to remember that the modern "right" aren't our friends, either.
Remember Jonah Goldberg having the temerity to draw a connection between de Maistre and the Nazis? Or his and Norman Podhoretz's celebrations of sodomy? Or his and Ross Douthat's celebration of feminism? (Jonah Goldberg... what a shitbag).
Don't forget the endorsement of the abolition of marriage from Fox News, for Heaven's sake! Or their silence concerning (or even mild support of) the forced homosexualizaiton of the Armed Forces.
Let's also not forget the warmongering chickenhawkery, or the emotive revolutionary bluster we hear from "conservatives" any time some policy is enacted that they dislike (forgetting, always, the Biblical admonition to submit to authority). Their revolutionary impulse easily matches that of the left, which I suppose stands to reason; but the left is at least honest about its revolutionary ambitions, as history has amply demonstrated.
These are the people who, in the interests of fighting the really important battles of making sure we get payroll tax cuts that offer people like me a whopping $8 a biweekly paycheck, have agreed to shut up about our ongoing abortion holocaust, or at least agree to do nothing really serious to put an end to it. And who cheer, in the interests of supporting the troops, the taxpayer-subsidized glorification of sodomy.
To Hell with them.
Let us grant, for a moment, the left's prejudices regarding separation of church and state, and say that natural law is no basis for civil law. Can we still fashion a useful argument against gay "marriage"? The left, generally, says no: that there's no reason to oppose it outside of religious fundamentalism.
To the contrary, given even a modest appreciation for the purpose of law, even when you discard all religious context, there's still no good reason to endorse gay "marriage." Here's the five-step argument:
1. Laws are promulgated to serve the public interest.
2. The care and disposition of children is a matter of public interest.
3. Heterosexual unions have an innate tendency to produce children.
4. Therefore, society has an interest in heterosexual unions, and is within its rights to attach its impetus to them by way of marriage.
5. Homosexual unions have no innate tendency to produce children and therefore are not in the public interest. QED.
To this, the leftist may object, "But not all married couples have children." So? What is endorsed is the capacity for producing children. Not all people who get engineering degrees go on to practice engineering, either; no one imagines we ought to retroactively revoke engineering degrees financed in part with government student aid for that reason.
Or the leftist (betraying his nominalist prejudices) might argue, "But not all heterosexual couples are even fertile." Sure, but how is the state going to figure this out without running afoul of privacy protections (e.g., inquiring about the state of your uterus) or else making an arbitrary judgment (e.g., couples who are 33% fertile may marry but those who are 32% fertile may not). Hands off my body, dude!
Think of it this way. Why do we have a drinking age? To keep alcohol from falling into the hands of those who are not sufficiently mature to accept the responsibility of alcohol consumption. But how is the state going to assess maturity? Are they going to make you show up for a class, take a battery of psychological tests to assess your affective and cognitive maturity levels, make you wait 6-8 weeks while a group of grad students in psychometrics score them, report the results to the state, and then issue an endorsement to your driver's license to let you purchase alcohol? That'd be insane. We use age as a proxy, as there's a decent correlation between age and maturity. Likewise, there's a pretty decent relation of sex to fertility: in fact, sexual complementarity is a necessary (if insufficient) condition for procreation.
Ultimately, this comes down to: what is the reason for gay "marriage"? If there's no valid social reason for heterosexual marriage, the proper response is not to redefine marriage but to abolish it altogether. Promoting happiness or endorsing love or whatever is no compelling public interest: the state has no business legislating on anything as insubstantial as the whims of the human heart. Even if it were the case, as leftists say, that there were no good reason to oppose gay "marriage," there absence of a reason to oppose something is not itself a reason to support it.
Of course, there is no reason to support gay "marriage." The push for it is just the typical leftist scrabbling for limited resources by wedge minorities in the sunset of Western civilization.
How best to understand Nazism? I don't incline toward the modern tendency to diagnose it as a purely political phenomenon. For one thing, it clearly wasn't: the intellectual rationalizations for Nazism came later, and as Peter Drucker demonstrates in the introduction to The End of Economic Man, no one took them seriously, anyway. There was something else going on.
(There is good reason to disbelieve most of the received wisdom about the Nazis, anyway: Robert Locke once aptly demonstrated that they could barely be called nationalists, while Lothrop Stoddard, in The Rising Tide of Color, revealed that Nazi racial mythologies, such as the description of Germans as racially purely Nordic, were at best deeply confused and incoherent and more likely an intentional propagandistic lie. How much of the modern misunderstanding of the Nazis is due to their own internal inconsistency and incoherence and how much of it is due to the deliberate obfuscation of communists with the complicity of their Western academic fellow-travelers is anyone's guess).
Of course it's not possible to separate Nazism from politics entirely; it was, after all, still at least a superficially political movement. I think Nazism is best understood as a reaction both within and against leftism (not merely political leftism but existential/transcendental leftism): within leftism because Nazism embraces the left's (anti)metaphysics, theology, and ethics; against leftism because Nazism objected to some of the logical conclusions of these positions, such as its individualism. This, of course, is an impossible tension to sustain psychologically, attacking one's own foundations as it did -- it's practically the equivalent of suicide.
The average leftist tendency is to declare on the basis of a few superficial observations that Nazism is right-wing; the usual symptoms are presumed to be its nationalism, its racism, and its anti-Semitism. There is, as I mentioned, good reason to doubt its supposed nationalism [see the above link for Robert Locke], but even so, people forget that nationalism is a leftist invention and that it was abandoned as such only with the rise of communist influence on the international left. With regard to its racism, it is also incoherent as such, and at any rate, racism is neither essential nor particular to the right, as witnessed by the fact that virtually all white Westerners prior to the 1950s and 1960s was committed to racism, at least in theory. Much the same is true of anti-Semitism; given the Jews' traditional association with communism, a meme of at least partial truth that predates the Nazis by several decades, it's just as reasonable to assume that Nazi anti-Semitism is distinctly bound up with its anticommunism. Given that communism is not, or at least was not then, the whole of leftism, that the Nazis were anti-Semitic really proves nothing. Really, the closest relationship that can be assumed between Nazism and conservatism is that both are antiliberal: but this alone means very literal, for Nazism doesn't go far beyond antiliberalism where conservatism had once constructed a vast theological and philosophical tradition which Nazis and leftists alike reject.
(It's worth noting the usual modern pseudoconservative objection to the characterization of Nazis as right-wing is equally stupid; they would tell us that the Nazis were pro-big government and that this is completely incompatible with genuine conservatism. This is as much part of the deplorable modern tendency to reduce quite sophisticated metaphysical movements to mere political superficialities -- sophistries, really. A large and powerful, even centralized, even absolutist, government is no way inconsistent with conservativism; it's when this government is divorced from metaphysical and transcendental considerations that it ceases to be a meaningfully right-wing institution. The conservatism = small government notion is a relatively recent innovation in the history of political thought, invented more or less completely by people who aren't really right-wing at all but merely leftists of the American Revolution tradition).
So Nazism is metaphysically leftist, but hates the left: therefore it hates (and wants to kill) itself, and endeavored to do exactly that. This hews rather nicely to Locke's interpretation of Nazism as basically a suicidal war-cult, and to Drucker's analysis of the publicly-advertised irrationality of the Nazi regime (e.g., "National-Socialist bread prices!") and the internal tension of the people subjected to its rule. It also explains why the communists so violently hated the Nazis despite their transcendental (or rather antitranscendental) common ground: Nazism was a very real perversion of leftism, a thing of the left but not in it. It explains the completely irrational and quite suicidal errors that cost the Nazis the war despite innumerable advantages: the Nazis were nothing if not irrational and suicidal.
Is it possible that Nazism is actually something like the logical conclusion of leftism, even without being fully leftist itself? I think so; leftism is purely critical and unconstructive: it follows that, having criticized everything else into oblivion, it would eventually have to criticize and thus destroy itself. (We can see glimmers of this in postmodern thought -- leftists fed up with leftism!) And this, I fear, is largely where the "alt-right" is going: not toward religious traditionalism of the sort that alone furnishes a basis for a sound and stable society, but toward a reactive, insane, and ultimately suicidal anti-leftist leftism.
Making sense of the coming catastrophe.
Recent Comments