Readings lately
Violent Femmes
Some young women appear to be broken in large numbers. You'll remember this quote from 1984, which you've been told repeatedly is proof of Orwell's sexism, and can have no grain of truth in it:
“He disliked nearly all women and especially the young and pretty ones who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party the swallowers of slogans the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”
From an evolutionary point of view, women must have an important role in shaping the mores of any culture: they are stationary and communal, while the men are solitary and dispersed. They have an incentive to get with the program, and become enforcers of the new program. The quicker you become an enforcer, the safer you are against being enforced against.
So there are reasons for Winston, the doomed protagonist of 1984 to feel the way he does about women. Of course, you are supposed to dismiss his assertion as bigoted. For most of us, our response is twofold:
- Decry such sexist (!) ideas. Assert that women are not one ounce more likely than men to fall victim to faddish ideologies, and,
- Carefully and silently ensure that no aspect of your life is under the power of groups of women with strong ideological beliefs.
From "Violent Femmes":
The young women of the West are not okay. They are bawling and screeching. They are locking arms and ripping papers. The best—or at least the most credentialed—minds of their generation are proudly displaying various ways of being destroyed by madness. They’ve been trending this way for a while, but the Jewish state broke them.
And this is a powerful point that reminds me of something:
Young women today grow up with dreams of leadership. We’ve socialized them this way. Kara Jesella argues in Quillette that the ideal feminist persona evolved from the midcentury ideal of female self-actualization to “the queer Palestinian terrorist.” Our culture no longer tells girls to be all that they can be—in fact, we are afraid to tell them that they are girls. They have been taught that to perform outrageous political stunts is the highest spiritual value—and they are acting accordingly.
There is a hole in the American female psyche. The theater of the political absurd has supplanted meaning, reason, and human relationships. Young women yearn for the violent and the mysterious. As with their sisters who ran away from home ten years ago to become “ISIS brides,” these women have embraced a radical vision of political, emotional, and spiritual revolution. Let’s hope they figure out the dead end journey they are on before they go past the point of safe return.
What I'm reminded of is the diagnosis about waves of terrorism emerging from the middle east. Apparently, Egypt created a "lost generation" of young men, college-educated, but without work that used their skills. They became resentful, underworked, unemployed...and out of this grew the black hole of islamic extremism.
Could it be that young western women are experiencing something like this? Over and over, they are told they are leaders...they are all "stunning and brave." But in fact the world probably has too many would-be leaders already. And each has a social media microphone. We'll all hectored and hen-pecked. The road to health is to tune-out.
And the old dream must still exist in these young women. They must still want to be a mother, one day...right? But they'll put it off too long, and then who will they be? Icarus, who shot for the moon but fell to earth. Some will use the pain of that error to build a great character. But most of them? I don't know...perhaps some might become bitter.
And what will that do. The bitter Egyptian men of the 1970s turned to terrorism often enough that even I heard about it. Women tend to turn their rage inward. But we are all connected. We'll all suffer.
From another article:
The future feels bleak when American flags are being torn down on campuses, and American women mindlessly claiming their alliance with Hamas (who would have no problem gang raping them and chopping off their limbs) are circulating.
There is an epidemic of young women racing to support murderous ideology in the West. This is a problem of prosperity. The women do not have enough work to do. They've become narcissists that young men are shying away from. Traditionaly, the men becalmed their storms. But now they rage with the only friend that will never leave them: their phones. And a deadly sisterhood is born to fret and rage over us all.
Ukraine disaster
I knew it would end this way. Over the last two years I've been unpopular with my liberal friends for saying it's madness to poke the bear, to go to war with Russia when Russia has a legitimate grievence. Because if the invasion of Ukraine was merely the "whim" of a dictator, then sure, resistence is correct. But if instead, it's the end result of decades of a creeping loss of sovreignty to a nation that already lost much, the story is different. In that case, the bulk of the Russian people will agree with their leader, even if they don't like him.
And that is what this was.
But nobody reads any more. Nobody knows the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and no one can see the folly of the West. They prefer simply binaries of bully and oppressor, colonialist and colonized. Well, that vast overhang of ignorance has produced it's usual fruit yet again: a crop of dead young men, whose lives ended for nothing.
Will our ignorant populations learn? Will they recognize their shame and culpability for this outcome? Never. They'll move on and ask "who hurt you?" if you insist on talking about it.
But even as I say this, I know the bulwark of my own unconscious ignorance and pleasure-in-ignorance is at least as vast as the one shared with the many millions. The appalling scandal of it out in the world only mirrors what you have, yourself.
I decry both the inner and the outer. What a shame. I must do better.
From this article:
In February 2022, the U.S. refused to negotiate with Russia over NATO’s pledge to induct Ukraine. Washington insisted that the promise remained inviolate as the transatlantic alliance drew Kiev ever closer militarily. Leaving Ukraine territorially whole but politically nonaligned was just too high a price to pay for peace in the Biden administration’s view. So the U.S. launched an expensive and increasingly bitter proxy war against Russia with outright victory as the goal.
Almost two years have passed. Ukraine has been ravaged. Territory has been lost. Cities have been bombed. Millions of people have been displaced. Many Ukrainians have fled abroad.
The West’s highly touted Wunderwaffe failed to deliver victory. Ukraine’s military has suffered staggering though officially unacknowledged losses. As the flow of volunteers ebbed, Kiev revived the ancient British practice of impressment, snatching young and old men alike off the streets for military service.
Satanic Idols
It's been bad. It's getting worse. Now look where we are. We're all ready to accept that Satanism is "just another religion."
Does anybody still think this is openminded?
It's the black hole of an empty mind.
Here is a great article about it from the Spectator (paywalled):
...
On the other hand, there exists a burgeoning class of young, objective-minded conservatives who are outraged by the old guard’s failure to actually conserve anything. Disdainful of the prior generations’ continual ceding of every facet and aspect of American culture to Marxists, Satanists, and the LGBT stormtroopers, this new generation of conservatives declares that if America is to be conserved, it must be fought for. Notably, this new class of conservatives recognizes that morality is objective, not a malleable abstraction to be reshaped by whatever political party or ideological fad is dominant that year.
Christians, too, have been divided by the question of how to respond to such things as the fad of Satanic idols. There is an argument to be made that Cassidy broke the law of the land in destroying the demonic effigy, but a stronger argument is that God’s laws are supreme over the laws of man. The entire history of Christianity bears witness to this fact, particularly in the lengthy catalog of martyrs revered and lionized by Christians of almost every denomination. Saints Peter and Paul were executed by Rome for choosing their faith instead of the emperor’s laws. Saint Maximilian Kolbe and Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed by the Nazis for choosing Christ over Adolf Hitler. Even today, Christians are martyred in China, India, and across Africa because they refuse to place a regime before God.
Evil is pervading and corrupting the West — from pornography and 1,000 different stripes of sexual deviancy to contraception and the horrors of the abortion chamber. Consent-based libertarian ethics will not stem the tide. Moral relativism is what has led to the domination of America by perverse, radical agendas; clinging to that methodology will only result in the death of the nation’s soul. The quaint idea of saying, “I have my morality, which is different than yours, so let’s create a neutral space so that ne’er the twain shall meet,” has been tried and has failed. It has failed because the leftist ideology takes no quarter. If a vacuum is created, leftism will fill it and still maintain an appetite for expansion.