Better to have borders

You've probably seen footage of the demonstrations at U.S. airports following President Trump's temporary restriction on immigration from certain Middle-Eastern nations.

In San Francisco the demonstrators chanted for open borders and the end of nations (to be exact, their chant was "No borders. No nations.")

You might remember that it was revealed during the election campaign, via a leaked email, that Hillary Clinton likewise has dreams of open borders. She gave a speech for a Brazilian bank in which she said:

My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders

Trump's response was this:

Hillary Clinton's radical call for open borders, meaning anyone in the world can enter the United States without any limit at all, would end the United States as we know it today.

Trump is right to insist on border controls and to try to halt the shift away from nations (a shift that is underway in neighbouring Canada, where the PM, Justin Trudeau, has declared his country to be a "postnational state").

I truly hope that America does not go the same way and that Trump stands firm, despite the political pressure being raised against him.

Sounds mad but it is liberal morality at work

The British Medical Association has issued new inclusive speech guidelines for its staff. One of the new recommendations is that the term "expectant mothers" be dropped in favour of "pregnant people".

It sounds crazy, doesn't it? You would think that pregnancy was inextricably linked to women, but liberals want us to use a gender neutral expression instead.

It's important to understand why liberals think this is a reasonable thing, in fact a moral thing, to do. We have to understand liberals to defeat them.

Liberals believe that the overriding good is that we get to autonomously define our own selves. We are to live our lives according to our own unique, self-chosen, self-determined schema.

Therefore, those aspects of life that are predetermined have to be made not to matter. This includes our sex. Being a man or a woman is not supposed to matter in a liberal society.

This is one part of the explanation for a liberal organisation to prefer a gender neutral term like "pregnant people".

And what does "inclusiveness" mean for a liberal? The moral equation for liberals is the idea that each individual should be able to define their own life schema as they wish, as long as it does not interfere with others doing the same thing. Therefore, liberals think that a good person is someone who proves their commitment to non-interference by being inclusive, non-bigoted, non-discriminatory, tolerant, open, supportive of diversity and so on.

So, a liberal will take seriously the idea that something immoral has taken place if someone is excluded from some possible life choice on the basis of a quality like their sex, race, sexuality etc.

Hence the British Medical Association not wanting to exclude those identifying as men from the process of pregnancy.

There is much more of the same in the BMA document:

Gender neutral language avoids stereotyping people according to their sex...You should avoid references to a person’s gender except where it is relevant in a discussion...if you aren’t sure whether someone identifies as male or female, keep your language neutral until you know what terms they prefer to use...You should also respect a woman’s preference to be referred to using the title ‘Ms’. A new gender neutral title ‘Mx’ is now being widely used by the Government and many businesses in the UK and should be included as a title option in any application or monitoring forms.

Liberalism has to be attacked at its roots. The antidote to liberalism is the belief that human life should seek to be ordered toward what is objectively good. Having an equal respect and tolerance for all behaviours and choices is not what makes you a good person. A good person is able to discriminate between what is higher and lower, and a successful community is able to find a way to harmonise what has been called the "tripartite order of existence," namely the natural/biological, the social and the spiritual within a positive moral framework..

Next Melbourne Traditionalist meeting

We have another meeting of the Melbourne Traditionalists coming up soon. We have a meal and a drink together, discuss the politics of the day, and get to catch up with a group of like-minded people. Most people enjoy the experience and come back for more. It is also an important step along the way of building up an alternative politics here in Australia. If you broadly agree with the politics of this site, I'd encourage you to come along. Just contact me at swerting@bigpond.com for the details.

Seattle baby books

Rebecca (Blonde in the belly of the beast) is a conservative who lives in ultra-liberal Seattle. She was in a bookshop there and noticed some books for babies/toddlers. Look at the titles:

Here is the first page of the alphabet book:

Babies/toddlers are being challenged to be political activists.

These books are being advertised for children aged 0 to 3 years. I have no problem with parents wanting to educate their children with their own values, but isn't it charmless to be pushing adult political concepts onto such young children? Here for instance is the "L" page of the book:

Does a one-year-old child really need to be trying to grapple with this kind of thing? Or with this:

Or this:

I am sometimes struck by the thought that modern day liberalism is in certain respects more radical than older style communism. Would babies have been raised with this kind of reading material in, say, 1960s East Germany? I know that children in the old East Germany were put into a "socialist scouts" (Junge Pioniere) from the age of six, but were they really brought up to read about LGBTQ issues as toddlers or confronted with masked Zapatistas?

Anyway, seeing how these liberals are raising their children reminded me of a post by my fellow Australian traditionalist, Mark Moncrieff, titled "The end of any consensus". He expressed the view that "Over time it has become harder to see those who disagree as merely having a difference of opinion." There is more than a difference of opinion that separates me from these Seattle liberals. Their world view has reached a point that it is wholly alien to my own.

What is allowed in a liberal system?

I get to keep up with what my liberal friends are thinking through social media. There was one social media post by a friend of mine (white, heterosexual, male) which recently caught my attention. The gist of it was as follows:

1. Donald Trump has withdrawn taxpayer funding for charities promoting abortion.
2. This will affect the health of poor women overseas and is therefore immoral.
3. This is a case of Christian men deliberately attacking poor women.
4. Religion is used by men to uphold the patriarchy in order to oppress poor women.

It ended with this: "The only way forward is to ensure we leave behind the shackles of enslavement promoted by religion and the religious. Faith is one thing. Religion is enslavement."

Now this is interesting, as it is another step along the liberal path that the West has been treading for many generations. As it happens, James Kalb has just written an article about this very feature of liberalism. He explains:

Social issues are messy. They have to do with basic human connections, orientations, and aspects of identity. These include family, cultural community, religion, and relations between the sexes. So they have to do with basic and very complicated aspects of life that people feel strongly about.

That causes problems for people who run things today. Their ideal of reason and principle of legitimacy means they want to handle everything through supposedly rational, neutral, and transparent institutions like global markets and expert bureaucracies. But personal loyalties, ultimate commitments, and ideas about how best to live can’t be sold, traded, bureaucratized, or turned over to experts. So from the standpoint of liberal institutions they are unmanageable and incomprehensible. They mess things up.

The result is that our rulers refuse to deal with them on their own terms but insist on treating them as private hobbies or consumption choices that shouldn’t be allowed to affect anything.

As an example of treating things as "private hobbies" consider the issue of how white liberals deal with their own ethnic ancestry. It is considered permissible for a white liberal to identify positively with their own ancestry (English, Scottish, German or whatever) as long as this remains at the reduced level of a private sentiment. What is not permitted is for him to defend the continuing existence of his ancestry as part of public policy.

And so with religion. It makes sense for my friend, under the terms of liberalism, to think that a private faith is acceptable, whereas organised religion is not. The first keeps things private and individual, the second can potentially have influence in society.

The problem, of course, is that many of our deepest loyalties, loves and attachments are exercised as part of a community - they cannot be reduced to the individual level. You can only exercise your role as a father within a family; your wider kinship identity within an ethny; your membership of a religious tradition within a church and so on.

These identities and attachments cannot be defended within a liberal system. And so the liberal individual tends to substitute them with lifestyle activities: the liberal individual turns instead to food, shopping, career, sex, entertainments and so on. He may even, to satisfy a need, become a spectator to the traditions of others that he does not allow for himself.

James Kalb goes on to point out that this aspect of liberalism can be traced all the way back to the seventeenth century:

Liberal theory, like liberal practice, wants to keep things simple, comprehensible, and manageable. The social issues are complicated, and the idea of a social contract—which has been basic to liberal theory since Hobbes and Locke—is a way of avoiding them. Instead of basing society on inherited or transcendent loyalties or some conception of the good life, social contract theory tells us to put such things aside and view society as a collection of equal individuals who think they can advance their own goals by establishing a legal order based on neutral standards of equality and personal choice.

The approach sounds good to a lot of people but it has consequences that aren’t pleasing. If we’re all equal independent individuals with our own idiosyncratic goals, then informal authorities like cultural tradition vanish, and the social order is no more than the legal and commercial order. Anything else that becomes influential enough to be worth noticing, like informal expectations regarding behavior, is illegitimate and oppressive if it doesn’t directly support the liberal order. That’s why both Mrs. Clinton and international human rights conventions tell us that if religious and cultural patterns don’t line up with liberal ideals, for example with regard to feminism and abortion, we—meaning those in power—must change them.

I'll finish with another good excerpt from Kalb's article:

The project of creating a society in which arrangements like family, religion, and ethnic ties and culture don’t matter is based on the idea that those things have no legitimate or rational function. Swede or Somali, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, man, woman, or other, however we identify, whatever our preferred pronouns or domestic arrangements, we are all equally consumers, employees, and functionaries in a global society that recognizes only markets and neutral expert bureaucracies as authoritative institutions. That’s where the serious business of life goes on, and everything else should be recognized as freely chosen hobbies, indulgences, fantasies, or personal consumption choices.

That’s the view, but it makes no sense, because sex, religion, and communal membership are ineradicably at the center of people’s understanding of themselves and their connection to others.

Slogans from the march

I couldn't help but notice some of the placards from the women's march against Donald Trump. For instance, some women chose to go with this:

The future is female? That's an interesting slogan given that the left claims to support equality. Are things equal if the future is female?

And don't feminists claim that sex distinctions are just social constructs that will be made not to matter? If so, how can the future be female? Won't the concept of "male" and "female" no longer matter by then? In fact, won't leftist women have abolished the "gender binary" - I thought that, according to leftists, we would all be choosing our own sex by then?

And what about feminist claims that they are not hostile to men? A lot of women shy away from feminism because they perceive it to be antagonistic to men. Feminists will then defensively deny such hostility. But what are we to conclude when feminists carry banners proclaiming that "the future is female"? They are telling their own sons that the future is not for them. Why would the mothers of sons sign on to this?

The second banner I noticed was this one:

So the left has reached the point of carrying round banners saying that "White lives matter too much". It is derived from the "Black lives matter" movement, which itself is based on the claim that American whites, because of racism, don't think that black lives matter and therefore are too ready to shoot black people. I saw a graph which points out the flaws of this theory very clearly:

You can see that white on black crime is easily the smallest subset of the crime statistics - it is mostly black Americans who are killing other black Americans.

Who would high school age Americans have voted for?

50,000 American high school students aged 14 to 18 were polled about who they would have voted for in the recent election. The results show that younger white Americans are very much on the right. For instance, if young white American females had decided the election result the electoral map would look like this:

37% of white girls aged 14 to 18 would have voted for Trump compared to 16% for Clinton (the rest choosing other candidates or not voting). Only 5% thought that America was heading in the right direction compared to 59% who thought it was heading in the wrong direction.

The results for white American high school boys were even more decisive:

It's nearly all red and I can't see any blue at all. 57% of the white American high school boys would have voted for Trump compared to only 9% for Hillary Clinton. 62% of the boys thought that America was headed in the wrong direction, compared to only 9% who thought it was going the right way.

It has to be said that the liberal education system still has some time to work on these young people before the next election. Even so, it's heartening that the young have moved so decisively against the Democrats.

So you want to be a white feminist?

White feminists are in for a shock. For some time the left has been developing an "intersectional politics" which tries to draw all the "oppressions" together: those of sex, race, sexuality and so on. As part of this leftist culture, if you belong to what is tagged as a "privileged" group you lose moral status. Your role is to submissively listen to and to clear a way for the more oppressed group.

This is a big problem for white heterosexual men who have no moral status at all on the left. Their role is to shut up, to listen and to learn from others.

But even white feminist women are starting to be affected by all this. After all, they might be women but they are still white. And therefore "privileged oppressors".

So what does a white feminist do if she wants to be a leader? Well, she can promise "people of colour" that she will shut up all those other white feminists, thereby proving herself to be an "enlightened" leftist worthy of leadership.

That is the strategy pursued by Sally Boynton Brown, the Executive Director of the Democratic Party in Idaho. She is one of seven candidates vying to become the head of the Democratic National Convention. She said the following as part of her selection pitch:

Black lives matter and it makes me sad that we’re even having that conversation and that tells me that white leaders in our party have failed. We have to accept there is prejudice that exists within our own party and we have to be able to have these conversations. We cannot sweep that under the rug. We cannot continue to hide it. We cannot smash voices down when they are trying to scream, “Listen to me, you don’t get it.”

I’m a white woman. I don’t get it. I am pleased and honored to be here today to have the conversation. I am so excited that we’re here. And I am listening. Because that’s my job. My job is to listen to the issues. [Applause]

My job is to listen and be a voice and my job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt (laughter/applause). My job is to shut other white people down when they want to say, ‘Oh, no, i’m not prejudiced. I’m a Democrat. I’m accepting.” My job is to make sure that they get that they have privilege and until we shut our mouths and we listen to those people who don’t and we lift our people up...

This is not just rhetoric. This is life or death...I need schooling and I depend on you and the people around our community to do that so that I can go school the other white people. [ laughter ]

The problem with this strategy? If you lower yourself in moral status this much, then you lose the credibility to lead. If white people are privileged and "don't get it" and can't get it and have to be permanently "schooled" by people of colour - then why wouldn't you just give leadership to people of colour? Why bother with Sally Boynton Brown? Because she is willing to lower her status to the point of saying, "I don't get it"? Because she is willing to use her influence to "shut other white people down"? It's a fragile and desperate way to pitch yourself as still relevant.

And that's the thing. White women who choose to join the left as feminists are going to find not only that a considerable amount of self-effacement will be necessary, but, worse, that they will become increasingly irrelevant within the movement. Even when they are there to make up numbers they will be told to "constantly check their privilege".

Sally Boynton Brown

Perth traditionalists

I'm pleased to announce that there is now a group of Perth traditionalists who meet regularly. They are looking to grow in numbers, so if you are an interested Perth reader please get in touch. You can do so through the following email address:

Carlos199@tutanota.com

Canadian feminists help man who hits woman - because he is left-wing

You have to shake your head at this kind of thing. Across the West we have had feminist campaigns calling for an end to violence against women. Such violence, we are told, is a product of masculinity itself so that men must give up on traditional masculine norms.

But during one of the women's marches in Canada against Trump all this was put to the test. And both feminist men and women failed miserably.

A female journalist from the libertarian Rebel Media was trying to conduct an interview at the event when she was suddenly struck by one of the decidedly unmasculine male feminists there. So the first fail: becoming unmasculine did not stop this feminist man from hitting a woman.

Worse, the feminist women ushered the male perpetrator to safety and then hindered the female victim from pursuing him. Where was all the feminist indignation about male violence against women? Does it not count if the woman is not a leftist? How seriously are we meant to take them if this is the best that they can do?

Here is the video:

Women marchers "fight patriarchy" by supporting Islam?

Linda Sarsour is a Palestinian Muslim American and co-chair of the recent women's march on Washington. She is also, it has emerged, a supporter of sharia law.

So try and wrap your head around this: the feminist movement of today wants to unite Muslim women who support sharia with feminists "fighting the patriarchy".

And just to add to the fun, Linda Sarsour is tetchy with the role of white women in the women's movement:

It wasn't that long ago that American feminists were organising topless slutwalks. Now they are pushing, as a symbol of "We the people," a woman wearing a hijab:

Has the "Muslim woman in a hijab" become a symbol of the "value bearing other" for liberals now? If so, this is going to clash mightily with the "absolute individual autonomy to do whatever I like with my body" aspect of feminism.

And what will white feminists in America do when they realise that a racial politics is being played out against them and not just against white men? When it becomes clear that they too are a target of this kind of politics?

I'll finish with a photo that would have perplexed the feminists of the 1980s. It is a photo from the women's march showing an "emotional moment" when white women had hijabs tied on them by Muslim women:

Making men the enemy

One of the reasons both women and men often refuse to identify as feminists is because they have a sense that feminists hate men.

When feminists are on the defensive they will often deny that they have animosity toward men. They will claim that they just want an equality that will benefit men too.

But sometimes they let the cat out of the bag. For instance, a feminist writer for Slate magazine, L.V. Anderson, was very upset with white women after Trump's election. A majority of white women voted for Trump, thereby ensuring his victory. Here is L.V. Anderson's response to these women:

...white women decided they didn’t want to vote on the side of “everyone else.” They wanted to vote on the side of white men...The shocking results of the election prove that most white women don’t consider themselves part of the coalition of nonwhite, nonstraight, nonmale voters who were supposed to carry Clinton to a comfortable victory. Most white women still identify more with white men than they do with black women, Latina women, Muslim women, transwomen, and every other woman...White women sold out their fellow women, their country, and themselves last night. Most white women don’t want to be part of an intersectional feminist sisterhood...

According to L.V. Anderson, politics is all about a coalition of "everyone else" pitted against white men. White men are the enemy. She believes that white women should also be pitted against white men. Her vision of politics is one in which women as a class act against men as a class.

Little wonder that people think that feminists see men as the enemy. And here is the thing. L.V. Anderson wants white women to help defeat their own sons, husbands, brothers and fathers. She can't understand why some white women wouldn't sign on to this agenda. She truly believes that a white mother should pit herself against her own sons.

It is a monstrous belief.

There are some good signs that younger, political white women are beginning to reject this kind of politics, but more on that later.

Trudeau's post-nation

Justin Trudeau is the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and Canada's current Prime Minister. A reader alerted me to something he said in an interview with the New York Times late last year. It illustrates perfectly where the logic of liberal principles leads us to:

Trudeau’s most radical argument is that Canada is becoming a new kind of state, defined not by its European history but by the multiplicity of its identities from all over the world. His embrace of a pan-cultural heritage makes him an avatar of his father’s vision. "There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada," he claimed. "There are shared values — openness, respect, compassion, willingness to work hard, to be there for each other, to search for equality and justice. Those qualities are what make us the first postnational state."

This is where liberal civic nationalism leads to: to the "postnational state". In other words, a liberal civic nationalism cannot uphold a national identity at all.

Let's go through the steps to get to this end point. The Western nations were initially based on a shared ethnicity, i.e. some combination of a shared history, language, culture, race, religion and so on. There was, at least, a mainstream ethnicity from which was derived that nation's core identity - a sense of "peoplehood".

Unfortunately, the logic of liberal first principles disallowed this kind of national identity. Liberals believe that the highest good is individual autonomy, by which they mean a liberty of the individual to self-determine their own identity and values. Therefore, liberals see predetermined identities in a very negative light: they are described as chains or fetters on the individual. And, of course, the traditional national identities were predetermined - they were based on things we do not get to choose, but that are inherited. Therefore, our ethnicity had to be made "not to matter" in terms of what we might choose to do or to be as an individual. You could not "discriminate" in public policy in any way based on a person's ethny, even if it were to uphold something as important as a national identity. There was no way, in terms of liberal principle, to uphold the traditional national identities.

And so liberals chose instead to implement a "civic nationalism". This type of national identity was based on citizenship, with shared values derived from liberalism itself (equality, openness, tolerance, non-discrimination etc.).

But this was never going to be a stable form of national identity. Anyone from around the world can become a citizen under this model, which means that over time the nation will become increasingly diverse. The deep form of identity and belonging that was fostered under the traditional model will gradually decline.

What you are eventually left with is a group of diverse people inhabiting the same state, which Justin Trudeau admits is a "postnational state" without a core identity.

Goodbye nation and hello to competition for power, money, status and resources amongst a variety of groups.

A French school where nobody feels French

A short video which doesn't need much explanation:



This is the future of France unless a patriotic politician like Marine Le Pen is voted into power. She is polling at 25% for the first round of voting, the highest of any of the presidential candidates, but the more difficult task for her will be to win in the second round of voting (she has polled as high as 43% for the second round). So it looks difficult, but not impossible for her to succeed.

Left turns mercenary

Not entirely sure what to make of this but the Washington Times is reporting that newspaper adverts have been placed in more than 20 American cities offering leftists up to $2500 to agitate at Donald Trump's inauguration.

If so, it means that some serious money is being put into building an opposition to Donald Trump. In other words, this is not spontaneous grassroots activism, but is being organised and funded professionally by a part of the elite who feel that their political and economic interests don't align with Trump.

Update: a reader alerted me to the fact that this sort of thing was also happening during the election itself. There is another Washington Times story from October 2016 which has the details.

The gist of it is that Project Veritas caught figures linked to the Democrat Party (and to George Soros) on tape admitting that they paid people to disrupt Trump rallies and were successful in having a Chicago rally shut down after they initiated violence. Part of their strategy was to try to deliberately provoke Trump supporters into retaliation. From the newspaper story:

Two top Democratic strategists have exited the presidential campaign after explosive undercover videos showed them discussing voter fraud and their roles in planting paid agitators at campaign events for Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Robert Creamer, founder of Democracy Advocates and the husband of Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat, stepped down from the campaign Tuesday, a day after Scott Foval was fired from his post as national field director of Americans United for Change.

And how about this:

Another activist, Zulema Rodriguez, told the Project Veritas investigators, “I just had a call today with the campaign and the DNC. Every day at 1 o’clock.”

She also took credit for being involved with two anti-Trump events in March: the Chicago rally and another in Arizona in which anti-Trump protesters blocked a highway.

Federal Election Commission records unearthed by Project Veritas show that Ms. Rodriguez was paid nearly $2,000 on Feb. 29 by the Hillary for America campaign.

In conversations with Project Veritas reporters, Mr. Foval described his operation as “bird dogging,” meaning that he places hired protesters in key positions at Republican campaign events, often in front of rallies or lines.

He said he has training centers in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Colorado and Minneapolis, and that trainees include the mentally ill and homeless people.

Here is the Project Veritas video:



It's interesting because I always thought that the leftist radicals/agitators were doing the work of the wealthy globalists, but I thought they were doing it naively and foolishly - I hadn't realised they were actually being paid to do it. The connection between the two groups is much closer than I originally thought.

It makes me wonder what other groups are getting funded by globalist hedge fund managers, e.g. is antifa being funded/organised in this way?

Why not to support the march

I've already written one post on the upcoming women's march to protest Donald Trump's inauguration. There are some leftist white women who have been put off the march because of demands that if they want to attend they have to "check their privilege constantly".

This is not the only indication, though, that the average woman might like to think again before supporting the march. The organisers of the march have released their demands, one of which is the following:

...there is a global migration crisis. We believe migration is a human right and that no human being is illegal.

They want open borders. They want a situation in which anyone in the world could fly into a country and, as a right, be accepted as a citizen of that country.

Think of the implications of this. It would mean:

• those belonging to wealthier nations would face a massive influx of economic migrants from around the world and lose any semblance of their former identity and culture.
• there would a levelling downward in wealth, as economic migrants would gravitate to a wealthier nation until the strains of this migration made that country as poor as the rest. Any country showing the way by establishing good governance and a good work ethic would be drawn back down rather than being able to set a long-term standard for other nations to emulate.
• the possibility of a failed state, no longer able to provide for law and order or for welfare to all of those crowding in

It's not a positive vision of the future and it does not deserve to be supported.

Impressive!

Below is a video from a young woman living in Seattle in the U.S. (a city known for its liberal culture). It's her first go at a YouTube video and she does a terrific job. It's longish but it won't disappoint.



What is most significant about the video? I have a theory about this that I'd like to try to explain. If you were to look at the traditional family of the 1950s it would look good in comparison to the dysfunction we see around ourselves today. However, in one crucial respect it was still deeply flawed.

The baby boomer family was built around what is sometimes called the "feminine imperative" - which, to my understanding, means the female sexual strategy of wanting to obtain resources from men. The imperative itself is a natural one, as natural as men wanting sex in a relationship. However, if a culture is built solely around this imperative, then men are likely to become too domesticated - too focused on the task of serving their wives, to try to keep their wives happy through compliance with their wives' truncated view of men's purposes.

Men should really have a dual focus, both a domestic and a civilisational one. They should be protectors not only of their family, but also of the larger tradition they belong to. This means devoting some time and resources to non-family institutions that are designed to protect the tradition: fraternities, churches, cultural associations, political parties, service organisations and so on.

For some women, a husband investing not only in her but also these other institutions will be very confronting. It will run against her instincts and could be deeply resented. Nonetheless, it is actually in her interests, and those of her children, if the men of her society do take care of the larger tradition.

The men of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s often served their families well. But they felt little responsibility for their culture, country and tradition. One half of their masculine focus was missing. And we are paying for that today.

And this is one reason why I find the video significant. It is possible that the level of civilisational crisis is strong enough that some women now recognise that men should be paying attention to it as part of their masculine role in society. The young woman in the video does not simply issue a "man up" message: she is aware that the frame of society is a feminist one that does not encourage men to act in a wholly masculine way.

If we ever do manage to restore a community of our own, I don't think that we should seek to return to the family life of the 1950s. It was a model in which the feminine imperative was too dominant. The older men of the community have to make sure, for the sake of the whole community, that men are able to operate within a masculine frame. If a man's whole life is dedicated to his wife, then he is doing things wrong. It can be difficult for individual men, when women have the threat point of divorce, to do the right thing, which is why it is so important that it becomes a community norm.

Liberal churches bless abortion mega-centre as sacred space

I wish I could say this was fake news, but it appears to be real. An abortion mega-clinic in Washington D.C. was recently opened with an interfaith blessing ceremony:

Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and secular leaders gathered inside Planned Parenthood Metro Washington’s new Carol Whitehill Moses health center on Tuesday to perform a blessing of the space.

The event, co-hosted by the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, included interfaith blessings, prayers, and testimonies about why it was important ― politically and spiritually ― for women to have autonomy over their own bodies.

These churches have become secularised to the point that they are accepting the liberal value of autonomy as the overriding good. To underline this point one of the female ministers made a piece of visual art during the ceremony which she called "Liberation for Blessed Choice":

Another participant, Dr Willie Parker, thought that women made "sacred decisions" at the clinic.

Here's a picture of the female drumming troupe which opened the ceremony:

A short YouTube clip of proceedings:

White women are the new white men

It's not enough for the left to take aim at white men. Now it's the turn of white women. Case in point: the women's march on Washington (against Donald Trump). There are white women who are dropping out of the march because they are being told by black women that they should be constantly checking their privilege, talking less and listening more, drowning themselves in black poetry, and confronting their exploitation of other women.

From the New York Times:

But the tone of the discussion, particularly online, can become so raw that some would-be marchers feel they are no longer welcome.

Ms. Willis, the South Carolina wedding minister, had been looking forward to the salve of rallying with people who share her values, a rarity in her home state...

But then she read a post by ShiShi Rose, a 27-year-old blogger from Brooklyn.

“Now is the time for you to be listening more, talking less,” Ms. Rose wrote. “You should be reading our books and understanding the roots of racism and white supremacy. Listening to our speeches. You should be drowning yourselves in our poetry.”

It rubbed Ms. Willis the wrong way.

“How do you know that I’m not reading black poetry?” she asked in an interview...“The last thing that is going to make me endeared to you, to know you and love you more, is if you are sitting there wagging your finger at me.”

Ms. Rose said in an interview that the intention of the post was not to weed people out but rather to make them understand that they had a lot of learning to do.

“I needed them to understand that they don’t just get to join the march and not check their privilege constantly,” she said.

That phrase — check your privilege — exasperates Ms. Willis. She asked a reporter: “Can you please tell me what that means?”

That must be fun - checking your privilege constantly. Interestingly, the only specific evidence for white women's privilege given in the article is that white women earn more than black or Hispanic women. What isn't mentioned is that Asian-American women earn a lot more than white women do - and yet Asian-American women get to be part of the "oppressed" group rather than the privileged group:

Nor is it mentioned that life expectancy for black American women is going up but for white American women it is declining (the upward trend shown in the graph is for mortality):

White women should know that in the future envisaged by the "rainbow coalition" they will occupy a low moral status, one in which they will be expected to always defensively justify themselves as white women; to focus on making amends for their supposed privilege; and to deconstruct their own identity and culture to make way for that of others.

Much better for men and women to make a culture together they can be proud of and positively identify with.

Swedish patriotic women video - what do you think?

I found this video produced by the Swedish Democratic Youth. There is much to like in it: it is positive, upbeat and unapologetic. I'm less certain about the way it tries to meld the traditional and the modern (traditional values with a kind of modern single girl look). It is possibly a smart move for an electoral party, but I think that over time a patriotic culture is likely to look for something deeper than a breezy liberated lifestyle ethos (but again, maybe it's smart to appeal to young single women this way).

German liberals' horror family

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) is a leading German newspaper, described as "centre-right" or "liberal-conservative". It is owned by a foundation that is run by a group of CEO's, company owners and corporate lawyers. It is liberal in the larger sense of supporting the liberal order that currently dominates all Western countries.

Last year a weekly magazine of this newspaper took aim at the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the patriotic party in Germany. In attacking the AfD, the magazine ran a story titled "How the AfD would like to live". To illustrate the wickedness of how the AfD would like to live, the following illustration was published:

The intention was to communicate the idea that something is deeply wrong with the AfD, that anyone who wants to live this way must be a person to be avoided or opposed.

Which goes to show how deep the division is right now between liberal Westerners and the rest of us. Because I can't see anything too horrifying about what is portrayed in the illustration. You can argue about the details, but it seems to show a mostly functional family with a masculine father, a feminine mother and enough children to keep things going for the next generation.

So why does the FAZ think we will be repulsed by the picture? I wonder if it has to do with the liberal rejection of a meaningful order that is already created for us and its replacement with the idea that it is the sovereign individual who autonomously creates value through his own choices and acts of self-determination.

In the picture, everyone is plugging into that pre-existing meaningful order: dad is clearly masculine and protective, mum is attractively feminine, and they are raising their own children within the framework of the traditional family rather than making up their own kind of family.

Or maybe liberals are horrified by the idea that this is clearly an independent kind of family. There are roles, hierarchies, commitments and loyalties that bind this family together, in contrast to the alternative in which there is only a vertical relationship between the individual and the state.

Or maybe the family is just too German for German liberals to handle. The family looks stereotypically German; they have a dachshund; and one of the boys is wearing lederhose. But, again, unless you are a globalist liberal, why would you think there was anything wrong with that?

So proud of these boys

Below is a video of three American boys/young men arguing with their school teacher about the pay gap between men and women. It's long (14 minutes) but well worth watching. The boys do a great job of staying calm and making clear arguments. The teacher (an older male) does not impress: he is not only poorly informed, he doesn't care for facts and is slow to grasp the arguments the boys make. The one school girl who tries to back up the teacher is also poorly informed on the issue. Enjoy!

Culture In Which All Truth Is Relative Suddenly Concerned About Fake News

From a satirical website called The Babylon Bee:

Culture In Which All Truth Is Relative Suddenly Concerned About Fake News

I found this one amusing:

Drugged-Up Clubber Suddenly Realizes She’s In Church Worship Service

And this one had a point to it:

Woman Unsure Why She Needs Jesus After Preacher Spends 30 Minutes Telling Her How Amazing She Is

Why can't liberals perceive threats? Or future loss?

If you are a traditionalist you are likely to wonder at the inability of liberals to perceive threats or to predict future loss. They often just don't see it. The liberal mind seems to be fixated on openness and change, which they assume will lead to progress.

Researchers have noticed this when studying the reactions of liberals and conservatives to negative stimuli. The liberals don't react as much as the conservatives do:

Are conservatives ‘hardwired’ to perceive threats?

Research with emotion-generating images suggest that liberals and conservatives are hardwired to see the world differently.

...“Conservatives are fond of saying that ‘liberals just don’t get it,’ and liberals are convinced that conservatives magnify threats"

And this:

the target article...summarizes a wide swath of literature showing that conservatives are more attuned to threats in their environments than liberals are.

And also this:

“That some people are more attuned to potential threats, more sensitive to sources of contagion, and more desirous of in-group protections is known intuitively and amply demonstrated by a large research literature,” and this variation in heightened negativity bias is significantly correlated with conservatism.

So it is recognised in the research that conservatives are better at recognising potential threats than are liberals. Therefore, liberals see us as magnifying threats whilst we see liberals as being clueless about the risks to one's own group from hostile or self-interested outsiders, or to a decline in the culture and institutions of society, or even to the longer term dissolution of the group itself.

Enter Stefan Kuzmany, a liberal journalist from Berlin. In October of last year he wrote an article for Der Spiegel, criticising the Alternative für Deutschland (Afd), a patriotic party:

No coalition is possible with the AfD. Because they live in a displaced reality.

It must be terrible to live in these conditions: foreign bands rule the big cities, sell drugs, grope children in public pools, stalk women on their nightly walks, subvert and destroy the local culture, and whoever says something against it has to fear state repression and loss of job. The politicians don't care about the concerns of the people, the bigwigs live high on the hog, while a controlled media deceives the masses and keeps things quiet until the project of the ultimate disenfranchisement and final eradication of the Germans through mass immigration is completed.

It is no wonder that people become angry on account of this very threatening situation, go onto the streets and feel called to do something themselves to help save the fatherland....

It seems - and here lies the problem with the "concerned citizens"... they apparently live in a different country than the majority of Germans. If you heard the talk of the AfD co-chairwoman Frauke Petry on the Day of German Unity you would think you had entered a bizarre parallel universe...

Germany must, says Petry, literally be reconquered: "We must give back pride and identity to the people. We must therefore turn back the spirit of the times (the Zeitgeist).

A minority of the losers of modernisation would therefore like to set back the clocks in Germany...

Best to pity them, as prisoners of their irrational horror image of the demise of the homeland, as prisoners of their fear.

I've quoted this at length because it shows an aspect of the liberal mindset. According to Stefan Kuzmany there is no real threat. It is all in the imagination, it is "a bizarre parallel universe". To recognise a threat is to have fear. Modernisation is, for him, necessarily a good thing, even if there are losers from it.

Equally, of course, I wonder at his take on the situation. If you add a million young Middle-Eastern men to Germany's population each year, then it just seems logical that the existing German population (those who are ethnically German) will form an ever declining part of the population, until the point is reached that they won't form a distinct people. They will no longer have a sense of living in a homeland of their own. Somehow the logic of this just cannot penetrate Stefan Kuzmany's liberal mind. He cannot perceive a real threat, a future loss.

Anyway, reality caught up with Stefan Kuzmany at Christmas, when a refugee drove a truck into a group of revellers in Berlin, killing twelve and injuring 56. How did Stefan Kuzmany respond? He explained his reaction as follows:

There must be something wrong with me. It's probably something with my head -- or my heart. The mass-circulation Bild newspaper, which acts as a barometer of German public sentiment, says on its front page that I should feel "Fear!" But I can feel no fear.

Anis Amri, the suspected attacker -- who is believed to have murdered a truck driver and 12 people at the Christmas market at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, and injured many more on Monday night -- is still at large and is presumed to be armed. Even that triggers no emotions in me, except the sincere hope that he will soon be caught and locked up for the rest of his miserable days. But fear? Maybe I'd be afraid if I had the bad luck of running into him.

Perhaps I'm no longer normal. I think it's terrible that 12 people had to die at the Christmas market, each of them too early and each one a senseless death. But even though the attack took place in Berlin, the city where I have lived for almost 15 years, the horror still feels abstract to me, as if it had all happened in a faraway country. It would be different, of course, if it had happened to someone I know personally, a friend or a family member.

A few days before the attack, my wife and I were saying that we should stop by that Christmas market after work, with our son. I shudder when I think that we too could have been standing there when the truck slammed into the crowd. But I don't think about it for long. We weren't there. What's the point of imagining that we were? I have other things to do.

Is that cold? Maybe. But it's just the way it is.

This is what the Berlin terrorist has achieved. He has made me indifferent. He evokes no feelings in me...I have no room in my thoughts for him and his ilk.

...If someone wants to drive a truck into a crowd, there is nothing to stop him from finding a truck and a mass of people. The only thing we could do is shut everything down completely: no more Christmas markets, no more public events at all and we'd best all stay at home and lock our doors. The result of this is that we would have an increasingly closed society rather than the open one that we enjoy today.

Something isn't quite right with me...

Maybe I'll go out later and drink some Glühwein. Go ahead and call me crazy. But maybe it's just the world that has gone crazy.

Kuzmany refuses to feel fear. And so he feels indifference. He closes off his mind and emotions to a part of reality that he doesn't wish to recognise. It could have been him, his wife and his child who died in the terror attack. But he won't think about it. It's not to be thought about. The problem is not, he thinks, with his "open" society (open to all, including terrorists), but that the world has gone crazy. It is the world that has failed - reality hasn't lived up to his ideals.

Merkel mockery