Why feminism is evil 2

Most people will be aware of the feminist insistence that we in the West live in a "rape culture". You might think that this would make feminists angry at men who rape or molest women. But that's not quite true. Sweden and Germany have recently experienced a wave of rape, molestation and sexual harassment of women in public swimming pools, at train stations, and at music concerts, sometimes by large groups of men, but feminists are not really up in arms about this. Why? Because the attackers are not white men, but immigrants from North Africa and the Middle-East. In fact, a Swedish feminist politician, Barbro Sörman, has tweeted that it is worse when Swedish men rape than when immigrant men do, because Swedish men do it as an "active choice".

What feminism is directed at is not so much opposing men but more pointedly at the defeat of one's own men. White feminists are seeking the defeat of white men (if you believe I am overstating this you need to read the twitter feeds of some prominent feminists - they do not hide their intentions, they nearly always specify white men as the group they are trying to bring down).

One purpose of this is, I believe, to disrupt the normal processes of heterosexual bonding between men and women. A person who no longer sees goodness or worthiness in the opposite sex is far less likely to feel the deeper and more enduring kind of love for a member of the opposite sex and is therefore less likely to make a commitment to marriage or family.

The constant feminist denigration of men as hostile attackers of women is one way of disrupting this bonding between men and women. It severs the natural sense of a larger loyalty between the men and women of a society, the sense of men and women united together for the benefit of a family, community or nation.

There is another aspect of the way that heterosexuality works that feminism disrupts. Young men and women usually have a sense of the finer qualities of the opposite sex that draws out admiration and love. It is not that a young man suddenly finds the unique qualities of just one woman something to love - if that were the case he might just as easily fall in love with a man. Instead, he sees something fine within womanhood, and he looks for a woman who embodies these qualities. Sometimes, young men and women idealise the better qualities of the opposite sex as part of this process.

Traditionally men would perceive a kind of delicacy of beauty and goodness in women ("loveliness") that might be felt as something transcendent (hence much Western art and culture).

How can young women come to a sense of a transcendent ideal of manhood if they are brought up on the idea of men as a hostile, violent enemy to women? And if men have a sense of women as the ideological, political enemy, then the feminine ideal is likely to be lost as well. And with it part of the bonding process.

(I know that red pillers might point out that this allows men to recognise more clearly the flaws within female nature, which is no doubt true, but what a traditional society is focused on is strengthening the path to family formation and encouraging the loves and commitments associated with family life.)

A healthy society would not allow men and women to be set apart into hostile camps, as we can see happening under the influence of feminism. It would allow the discussion of issues relating to men and women, but would not permit the institutionalisation of feminism as a state backed political movement. It would promote culture that displayed the higher expressions of manhood and womanhood, as an aid to the bonding process between men and women, alongside realistic portrayals of marriage and family life - but would not allow culture to be dominated by expressions of gender war. It would encourage a communal identity, giving a common identity and purpose to the men and women of a society. It might, as well, encourage small, mutual courtesies between men and women, as expressions of good will between the sexes.

We have to learn from what has gone wrong in the West, and one lesson is that feminism cannot be given free rein to disrupt the relations between the sexes. What kind of future is there, as this hardening into oppositional forces continues?

You know the haka, but the Icelandic Viking Clap?

Most people will have heard of the Maori haka but I had never before seen the Icelandic Viking Clap. After their team lost in the quarter finals of the 2016 Euro tournament, a mass gathering of Icelandic fans performed the Viking Clap - it must have been stirring to have taken part:

A richer sense of belonging

I'm not sure what to make of this. Ian Tuttle is a young National Review writer, who, as you might expect, is generally an "establicon" in his politics (aka a right-liberal). His column on Brexit, though, is surprisingly good:

Liberal cosmopolitanism, regnant since the end of the Cold War, has bought completely into its own rightness. It is entirely devoted to an increasingly borderless political future carefully managed by technocrats and tempered by “compassion” and “tolerance” — all of which aims at the maximal amount of material prosperity. It sees no other alternative than that we will all, eventually, be “citizens of the world,” and assumes that everyone will be happier that way.

It’s not unreasonable to think otherwise. Anti-EU movements and renewed nationalism in the United States are on the rise precisely because they offer alternatives to this self-assured order. It’s not clear whether a United Kingdom withdrawn from the EU will be better off. But it’s entirely defensible to think that it might be. Likewise, it’s not unreasonable to prefer loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history. Or to prefer local rule to government outsourced to distant bureaucracies. Or to prefer a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market. There are alternatives to a transnational super-state that are not fascism.

The inability of our political leaders to envision political futures other than the one to which they are wedded has facilitated the polarization, and the unresponsiveness, of our politics. That people are now looking for alternatives is, in fact, entirely reasonable.

This is not what you'd generally expect from a right-liberal. Right-liberals want a liberal society to be regulated by the market rather than by bureaucracy. Tuttle is making a criticism of both options in his post, as leaving out too much.

Perhaps there are some on the establishment right who see that the world order being created is a heavily bureaucratic, stifling one and so prefer the national option to be preserved and who can see that "market participation" is not a sufficient argument for preserving national existence (markets, after all, can easily be transnational).

Tuttle therefore makes an argument for local (i.e. national) loyalties and government. Tuttle is a right-liberal so I do not believe he supports ethnonationalism, but his argument for local loyalties does at least overlap with an argument for ties of ethnicity ("loyalties rooted in close-knit interactions among people who share a particular space and a particular history"..."a richer sense of belonging than interaction in a common market").

So now Christians can't mingle?

A court in California has approved a settlement of a discrimination case brought by two homosexual men against a Christian dating site. The owner of the dating site, Christian Mingle, has agreed that the site will no longer ask users to click either "man seeking woman" or "woman seeking man". The website will now only ask users to click on whether they are male or female, not which sex they are seeking.

The case demonstrates clearly how liberal claims to tolerance and neutrality simply don't work in practice. Christians and homosexuals aren't left each to their own under the terms of liberalism - Christians are being required to cease being orthodox Christians.

You can see as well what a liberal society is going to require from its citizens. The future liberal citizen, in order to function in the public square, will have to hold to no substantive identity or moral code, but be committed to neutral attitudes and functions, such as market activity and consumption. There is a process by which individuals are squeezed toward this outcome, because that is what is required of them by the rules of the society they live in.

A future "Christian" for instance, to avoid social marginalisation, is going to have to believe that all forms of sexual expression are equally worthy/valid, which then becomes a positive belief that sexuality is contentless in the moral sense, merely whatever the individual makes of it. Christians are going to have to move toward the "empty world" assumptions that liberalism is based on.

And it won't stop with sexuality. Surely it will only take a transsexual to complain about people being given the options of "male" and "female" at a dating site and this too will be considered discriminatory.

Christians should stop trying to fit in with liberalism, and recognise how incompatible liberalism is with a belief in anything substantive.

P.S. I've just read another news item on this story. It includes a statement from the homosexual men's lawyers which illustrates the kind of mentality that fits within a liberal society:

“I am gratified that we were able to work with Spark to help ensure that people can fully participate in all the diverse market places that make our country so special, regardless of their sexual orientation,” Vineet Dubey, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys, said in a statement to the Journal.

Liberal America is special because people "can fully participate in all the diverse market places"? I don't think so, but it might be true that participating in diverse market places is one of the few things that fits in well with the liberal framework of society, i.e. that is sufficiently contentless.

The power of sexual surrender 2

This is the second part of my review of Marie Robinson's The Power of Sexual Surrender (part 1 here).

Chapter 4 begins with the observation that sexual frigidity in women is often connected to what Marie Robinson calls "personality distortions" in which there is a misunderstanding of reality and in which blame for one's own failures is externalised.

Robinson then goes on to explain different types of frigidity. She includes women who are able to orgasm normally, but who are psychologically unable to build relationships with men and who therefore usually live promiscuously.

Chapter 5 is an attempt to explain why frigidity should have become such an issue. Part of Marie Robinson's argument is an historical one. She argues that prior to industrialisation most men and women worked together as part of a cooperative effort based in the family home. Industrialisation sent the men off to work elsewhere, the children off to school; and outsourced much of the productive work traditionally undertaken by women, meaning that the family home was no longer the centre of all life as it had once been, meaning that a wife was no longer at the centre of all life as she had once been, no longer as profoundly needed in her social role:

As a woman she was profoundly needed, and as a woman reared to respond to this need she had no single occasion to question her worth or her abilities. And then one by one, slowly but surely, her responsibilities and her duties were removed from her; her close and equal working relationship with her husband was destroyed; her importance to her children was diminished sadly.

It's a reasonable argument. It is certainly true that feminism took off as a mass movement after the Industrial Revolution, though it seems to have been accepted most quickly in frontier/homestead states in Australia and the U.S. where women's work at home was still crucially important. An alternative argument is that it was only when the Industrial Revolution had created a significant economic surplus that some women turned more confidently against men, who formerly played a more critical and necessary role as their providers.

How did women react to their new situation? Not well, according to Marie Robinson:

Very slowly, too, but everywhere, women woke as if from a centuries-old dream of peace and happiness to find themselves dispossessed. Gone was their central place in the family home, gone their economic importance, gone their close working partnership with their mate, their functions of teacher and moral guide to the children. The child himself was gone, to school, as the husband had gone to the mill or factory.

Yes, she was dispossessed, dispossessed of all those things that for centuries had defined her womanhood for her, that had supported her ego, given her the certain knowledge that being a woman, however hard, was a wonderous and most desirable thing. She felt her womanhood itself devalued, the things it represented unwanted.

And then she reacted. She reacted violently and with rage at this depreciation of her feminine attributes, of her skills, of her functions. Unhappily this reaction was precisely the wrong one, the one from which no solution of a happy kind for her could be attained.

Here’s what she did. Looking about, she thought she spied a villain in the piece. Who was it? None other than her partner through the centuries, man. It was he who had deserted her, who was responsible for her loss of self-respect as a woman, a mother, an equal socially and mentally and morally. He despised women. Very well, she would show him. She would simply stop being a woman. She would enter the lists and compete with him on his own level. To hell with being a women. She would be a man.

In response Marie Robinson writes:

...in so far as the feminist movement pitted itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this movement started ever since.

Marie Robinson next argues that one reaction of Victorian era women to their loss of traditional role was, in a kind of revenge move, to deny their sexuality. This then meant that twentieth century women inherited a toxic culture from their nineteenth century foremothers:

This, then, is the heritage of woman today: On the one hand, from Victorian woman, a profound belief that she is and should be non-sexual, frigid, by natural law. On the other hand, from the feminists, that man is Woman’s natural enemy, that she should drop her femininity altogether, oppose man, supersede him, become him.

The feminist view became the dominant one after WWI:

The flapper of the 1920’s represented the unintended flower of the feminist philosophy of life, its definition of what constituted womanhood. As we know, the flapper was a caricature of woman, a cheap and shoddy imitation of the opposite sex, a second-class man. Happily, she did not survive as a conscious national ideal, but the philosophy that created her did survive. The depreciation of the goals of femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing and rearing, cooking, the virtues of patience, lovingness, givingness in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male achievement has been substituted for the life of female achievement. The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too. It has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact, to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she learns elsewhere counteracts it with any great effectiveness.

Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken, the individual woman who wishes to become a real woman must change this direction. This she can do only by taking thought, long thought. For among the women around her she will not necessarily find too much support for her wish to be entirely feminine.

For one hundred and fifty years now women have blamed their problems on the outside world. They have used the very real difliculties created by revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking within for the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing and self-pity. If the results had been different, if this attitude had brought them happiness and fulfillment, if feminism and Victorianism had made them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their new place in industry, the game might have been worth the candle. But it hasn't been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency—-all that results when the woman in any society deserts her true function.

Would you have expected this to have been written in 1958? It is a reminder of the influence of the long first-wave of feminism in the West. Even in 1958, Marie Robinson believed that many women had been brought up to see men as a hostile enemy and to resent a feminine role in society. Little wonder that second-wave feminism loomed on the horizon.

Crossing the bridge to womanhood

I have just finished reading an impressive book. It was published in 1958 and written by a female psychiatrist, Marie Robinson (Nyswander).

Called The Power of Sexual Surrender it is a book that sets out to explain frigidity in women and in doing so discusses the specific ways that some women fail to arrive at a mature womanhood.

It is not the perfect book. It is overly "scientistic" at times; its Freudian framework is questionable; and a few of its claims now seem either dated or wrong.

Its great strength, though, is that it deals unflinchingly with the specific ways that psychological and emotional immaturity in women is expressed in relationships with men. It comes across as extraordinarily "red pill" for 1958. It is one of the most quotable books that I have ever read.

I don't think I'm going to be able to review the book adequately in a single post, so I'll set the scene with this post and leave the meatiest part of the book for next time.

I'll begin by quoting this:

women today have, beyond the shadow of any doubt, achieved complete equality with men.

In 1958 not only did Marie Robinson not feel oppressed, she felt that she was living in a society where she was completely equal with men. Not how 1958 is usually portrayed.

She then notes that the Victorian era view that women were asexual had been overcome, but that something like 40% of women were unable to benefit from this in terms of enjoying marital love because of some degree of frigidity.

Marie Robinson does not use the term frigidity as we usually do. For her, the frigid woman has "learned to fear physical love." She writes:

The reasons for her fear are hidden from her, are locked in her unconscious mind. Consciously she may wish, above all things, to achieve real closeness with her husband, to give and receive the greatest of all mutual joys between man and woman, sexual gratification. But she has not the capacity to receive this joy.

There is a lesson here for men. It is possible for a woman to consciously strive to be open to physical love, to read books about how to achieve it, to go and see someone like Marie Robinson to discuss her problem, whilst the real, underlying reasons for her problem don't come to the surface.

According to Marie Robinson, frigidity in a woman is the result of something going wrong in a girl's development, which then leaves her immature:

When all goes well in the development of the young girl, both her personality and her sexual passions will flower, she will achieve a beautiful and integrated maturity. But if, as so often happens, thwarting or blighting experiences take place, the development of her personality and her sexuality will be frozen at their sources, and maturity will remain a never-never land whose very existence she will come to doubt.

If she wishes to resume her growth she must...insist, deep within herself, on achieving that true and passional relatedness with her man for which there is neither simulacrum nor substitute in woman’s journey through life.

In chapter 3 of her book, Marie Robinson begins to challenge her readers. Even in 1958, she had female clients who had been raised to have a negative view of both men and womanhood. She tells the story of a successful female lawyer who came to see her:

Her father had died when she was an infant and her mother had been a militant leader of the movement for women’s “rights.” The whole emphasis in her early upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing, and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man, whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (a la Russe) where they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her mother put it, than a man is. Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. For years she sedulously avoided men entirely. Gradually, though her grown-up experiences, she learned of other values, but by the time the right man came along it was too late to have children.

Marie Robinson felt that she had to oppose the "defensive and self-destructive" feminist view with a portrait of what a more normally developed woman is like:

Deep inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her husband makes the world safe for her. This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband who is good for her...Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness” in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this characteristic the hallmark, the sine qua non, of the truly feminine character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine altruism.” The finest flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving the very best of herself to her husband and to her children. She never resents this need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of it and delights in it. It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her equilibrum, to hold onto her joie de vivre despite whatever may befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life is going to make on her—and they will be considerable. When a woman does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life's continuous small misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself with self-pity.

I will only say of this that I have known women who had this quality of giving themselves to others who, just as Marie Robinson describes it, were also more secure in themselves than other women, more active and more resilient.

Marie Robinson's fully natured woman is also definitely a sexual person who enjoys the sexual relationship with her husband but who is not attracted to infidelity:

One woman put it this way to me: “I like other men; if they’re attractive,” she said. “Their attractiveness does honor to the sex my husband belongs to.”

She has a lot more to say about her ideal of womanhood, but I'll leave it there for now. The best parts of the book are yet to come. If you'd like to read it yourself, there is a free pdf here.

Who is the most privileged in America?

From Happy Acres, a graph showing income by race in the U.S:

I don't want to get into an oppression Olympics with Asians - the data is interesting because it undercuts the SJW "white privilege" narrative.

Explaining the Orlando reaction

I wrote a post recently on the reaction of homosexuals to the Orlando massacre. Despite the gunman being a Muslim linked to ISIS, the initial reaction of many homosexuals was to express hostility toward white Christians.

Over at The Orthosphere, Richard Cocks has a post addressing this phenomenon. At one point in his post he writes:

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, most of my students think that the greater horror they can “tolerate” the better people they are...

This reminded me of Lawrence Auster's First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in a Liberal Society. This Law (he was writing about a decade ago) he defined as follows:

The more troublesome, unassimilable, or dangerous a designated minority or non-Western group actually is, the more favorably it is treated. This undeserved favorable treatment of a troublesome or misbehaving group can take numerous forms, including celebrating the group, giving the group greater rights and privileges, covering up the group’s crimes and dysfunctions, attacking the group’s critics as racists, and blaming the group’s bad behavior on white racism.

It's possible that what Richard Cocks observed amongst his students goes some way to explaining Auster's Law. If you believe that the worse the behaviour you can tolerate the better a person you are, then the more dangerously a minority group behaves the more you will deflect blame from the group, preferring to target the majority instead. This is what homosexual liberals did after Orlando: they proved their commitment to tolerance (meaning a willingness to tolerate the "other") by stridently attacking the mainstream.

Why would a liberal society develop along these lines? It flows logically from liberal first principles.

If you think there is nothing of inherent worth external to the individual, then what matters is the act of autonomous will in self-determining one's own subjective, self-created values. The important thing is the freedom to self-determine (the choices themselves don't really matter, rather it is the unencumbered act of choosing that brings value).

But if this is a value for me then it must be so for others too. So there must be a system within which I get to have my autonomous choice respected, whilst at the same time I respect the choices of others. This then generates a liberal morality, despite the liberal starting point of believing that there is nothing of objective value existing as part of the nature of things.

The liberal morality is based on the idea of non-interference in autonomous choice making, and this makes qualities such as respect, openness, non-discrimination, non-judgementalism and tolerance key moral terms in a liberal society. Therefore, the more tolerant you are, by the standards of a liberal morality, the better a person you are.

Of course, if you are thought to violate the principles of tolerance, then you won't be tolerated but instead attacked for bigotry, discrimination, racism, sexism, homophobia and so on. And it is easy to violate the principles of liberal tolerance, because once you assert that there is any objective truth for people to be guided by, or non-liberal institutions or traditions for people to love and identify with, then you are violating liberal first principles (particularly if you assert any of these as public, rather than as merely private, goods.)

I know this gets complex in the end. Liberals end up supporting a less tolerant religion rather than a more tolerant one in the name of tolerance. But there is a kind of logic to it, if you accept the liberal starting point. If being tolerant is what makes you a good person morally, then you demonstrate this by being willing to tolerate in your society the most challenging "other" group and explaining their wrongdoing on the faults of your own society or tradition.

Australian elections: who to vote for

I've never experienced an election campaign that has so failed to ignite any interest amongst the electorate. None of my work colleagues have spoken about it once, nor is it featuring on social media. It's a terrible situation in the sense that there is nobody rocking the boat at all. The left-liberal vs right-liberal cosy, comfortable orthodoxy is very much alive and well in Australia. Real political interest lies overseas.

So who might a traditionalist vote for in these elections? I'm happy for readers to discuss this in the comments. In my seat, there is no-one at all to vote for in the House of Representatives, so that is a non-issue. In the Senate there is at least some choice. Here in Victoria, I think the best option might be to vote for Georgia Nicholls of the Sustainable Australia Party. They have been running some well produced TV ads, arguing the case for lower immigration. They are by no means a traditionalist party, but at least we can support them in their aim of lowering immigration from 200,000 per year back to 70,000. Here is a video they have produced:



South Australian readers might like to consider voting for Senator Cory Bernardi.

Why feminism is evil 1

A thought. I'm sure most men have experienced in their lives a strong feeling of desire for a woman, such that he wished to possess that woman in mind, body and soul. In sex a man sometimes feels this instinct to possess. The counterpoint for a woman is to give herself, to yield, to belong. But to do this she must see the man as worthy of her. And, more than this, in giving way she makes herself vulnerable and therefore there must be trust.

Does feminism promote trust between men and women? I don't think so. Feminism urges women to believe that we live in a rape culture; that domestic violence is widespread amongst all social classes, with men always being the perpetrators; that men go out to work to keep women down; that women must be independent of men; that men and women are locked in a political contest for power and status; that women are oppressed on all measures for the benefit of men and so on.

How can young women raised in these beliefs trust men? And if women cannot trust men, then how can they "let go" in relationship with a man? One part of the relationship dynamic between men and women is then lost. One aspect of the feminine is then lost.

Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies on modern politics

Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies has given an interview in which he clearly steps outside the usual narrative:

In the past you have called Britain “pretty morally vacuous”. Are there discussions that as a society we’re just not having?
That’s exactly it. We have such intellectually inadequate leaders that you just wince. Cameron, Brown and Blair must be the least qualified men to govern a country that we’ve had in 200 years. When you look at a politician, the first question you should ask is, does this man love his people? Will this man put his country first? That’s not the only quality we want, but the really successful politicians of our time – Putin, Salmond – are people who actually do put their countries first.

Benedict Cumberbatch was among nearly 300 arts figures who have publicly backed remaining in the EU. Why should people listen to what actors have to say?.
They shouldn't necessarily. Every actor has a right to his opinion; they [Cumberbatch & co] are, of course, completely wrong. Their generation has been brought up without a sense of national identity. They have lived protected in the world. The world is at a more dangerous time now than it’s been since I was doing my Cambridge entrance exams in Cuba week. We have a desperately inadequate American president and he has allowed the wolves to get strong, and now the wolves are gathering.

Hat tip: Traditional Britain Group

A Frenchman thanks the English

There's an interesting post up at Gallia Watch. A French businessman and Paris councillor, Charles Beigbeder, has praised the Brexit result. Here is an abridged version of what he had to say (he begins by serving it up to the EU elite):

Cursed be the promoters of undifferentiated cultures and standardization of life styles. They will be forced to accept the praise of uniqueness that leads a people to refuse being blended into an amorphous mass in which it will feel the loss of its identity to the benefit of a multiculturalist destroyer;

Cursed be the believers in the progress of history, for whom European nations will sooner or later be led to dissolve into an ever more vast melting pot, mixing together peoples and cultures. At last they will understand that the economy cannot be the primary foundation of social ties, and that if there exists a European identity, there is not, as of today, a European nation or people;

Cursed be the no-borders ideologues who wish to knock down the borders of nation-States. They will learn that in times of migratory turbulence such as the one Europe is currently experiencing, it is better for a sovereign State to control its borders, lest the country become a sieve;

And blessed today are Her Majesty's subjects, who have given to all of Europe a tremendous lesson in democracy…This proud and subtle people, rooted in its traditions and enamored of freedom, has not finished surprising us.

Englishmen, thank you!

Charles Beigbeder

Petition to stop the demonisation of Australian men

There is a domestic violence campaign running in Australia at the moment which, despite all evidence to the contrary, continues to portray men alone as the perpetrators of violence. There is a petition running at change.org which asks the Australian government to run these campaigns more fairly, in a way that does not single out and demonise men. It's worth supporting. Link below.

https://www.change.org/p/australian-government-stop-the-demonisation-of-men

Trump on Brexit

I hope to write a few posts in coming days on the Brexit win. I thought, though, that I would begin with Donald Trump. His reaction to the winning vote is further evidence, I believe, that he is not just another right-liberal Republican. Read it and see if you agree:

The people of the United Kingdom have exercised the sacred right of all free peoples.

They have declared their independence from the European Union, and have voted to reassert control over their own politics, borders and economy.

A Trump Administration pledges to strengthen our ties with a free and independent Britain, deepening our bonds in commerce, culture and mutual defense.

The whole world is more peaceful and stable when our two countries – and our two peoples – are united together, as they will be under a Trump Administration.

Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first.

They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.

I hope America is watching, it will soon be time to believe in America again.

He also posted the following messages on Twitter:

On the national issue, at least, Trump is pulling political debate back in the right direction. It seems to me that there are two fields of politics. There is the field you operate in at a more purist level, where you try to articulate your politics in a logical and principled way and clearly distinguish your politics from the competition. Then there is the field where you don't necessarily expect your own purist vision to be fully implemented, but instead you join in a struggle to pull things in society your own way.

The two fields don't run counter to each other. The more that you try to build up a stronger, purer principled movement, the more weight you have in drawing things your own way. And the more you succeed in bringing the centre toward your own politics, the more success you are likely to have in building your more purist movement.

So we shouldn't look at Trump just through purist eyes, but at what his effect on the larger political climate is likely to be. I might be wrong, but I think he will shake it up, open it up, in a good way. I think he will unsettle the right-liberal hold over the Republican Party, open up debate on the national issue, and even perhaps (as suggested above) reconfigure international alliances in an interesting way.

In the meantime, our task remains the same - to develop a principled political movement that can be one part of those forces pulling the larger political culture in our direction.

What Western man was doing in the 1240s

This is the interior of Sainte Chapelle, a chapel built in the 1240s for the kings of France:

Here's another view:

\