Roberto Fiori on Italy's fertility campaign

I posted recently about the efforts of the Italian Government to raise fertility rates (Feminists hate Fertility Day).

A leading Italian nationalist, Roberto Fiori, supports the aim of raising fertility rates but has offered a good criticism of the government's strategy:

The president of Alliance for Peace and Freedom, Roberto Fiore, who is also the chairman of the Italian nationalist party, Forza Nuova, is not very impressed by the campaign.

-The campaign is too little too late. More than that it examines the issue at a medical level or nearly zoological level, he says to europa-terra-nostra.com.

The veteran nationalist, and father of eleven, believes that the state needs to tackle this from another angle.

— For a decent campaign we need the involvement of the state with serious and strong help to young couples and investment in children. But let’s not forget that the highest birth growth in the world is Gaza where there is no welfare, but just the will to preserve a people. So a campaign has to hit the heart of people with the idea of preservation of civilization and tradition, says Fiore.

Eltham Resistance

Last month I was sorry to report that a retirement village in my suburb of Melbourne (Eltham) had been bought by a Catholic agency and was going to used to house refugees alongside the elderly residents. It's a similar pattern to what is happening in places like Sweden and Germany.

There are some important updates to this story. I had a conversation with a councillor who told me that the refugees will not be just from Syria but from a range of places. There is a council election happening right now and unfortunately the choice seems to be between left-leaning candidates who want a Middle-Eastern refugee intake and right-leaning candidates who want to build units for Chinese investors. If I learn of any independent candidates I'll publicise this in a further post.

There is some resistance to the plans. A petition is up at Change.org which I'd encourage Victorian readers to sign (see here). There will also be a demonstration outside the local MP's office (Jenny Macklin) from 10.00am to 11.00am on Saturday 1st October (149 Burgundy St Heidelberg).

I'll repeat again the obvious. The current refugee system is irrational. The sensible option is to offer to resettle asylum seekers in countries which are the most similar in living standards and culture to those they are leaving. This would give no incentive to those who are economic migrants and it would be the least disruptive in terms of culture and identity to the host nation. The scheme could be funded from a pool paid into by the wealthier nations.

Hopefully the resistance in Eltham will grow over coming weeks.

ANZ goes SJW

ANZ is one of the big banks here in Australia. It is also a captured institution, being dedicated now to SJW causes, especially feminism. For example, it has decided to pay its female employees more than its male ones ($500 extra super a year) and it has spent a bucket load of money on an advertising campaign in which children are used to illustrate the evils of the "wage gap".

Here is one of the ads:



The ads seem to be annoying people more than inspiring them (at the time of writing the ad had 400 likes on Facebook and 4000 dislikes). And people are right to be annoyed for the following reasons:

1. The wage gap is a myth (see more below).

2. In a healthy society, men would earn more over a lifetime than women (on average). That's partly because women find men with resources attractive, giving men an added incentive to work for money rather than for life satisfaction or for work/life balance; partly because many men have a provider instinct and wish to work on behalf of their families; and partly because many women choose to prioritise time with their children when their children are young and so cut back hours, or choose more flexible work options.

3. It is hardly significant if married women with children earn less than their husbands over the course of a lifetime because their husband's pay goes to supporting their families anyway. It is in the interests of a woman if she has a husband with a well-paid job. In other words, the ANZ model assumes that husbands and wives are set against each other, rather than pooling resources.

4. It is destructive to set the men and women of a society against each other, to needlessly cultivate a sense of grievance in women, and an injured defensiveness in men. It is abusive for the ANZ to poison the feelings of young children in this way.

5. It is a bias in itself to believe that earnings is the true measure of a good life; i.e. that the measure of man is money. It is a fact that women report being less happy now than they were some decades ago, in spite of higher earnings.

As for the wage gap, economists have crunched the numbers and found that when hours worked in similar professions are compared, then earnings are much the same. In fact, young women are increasingly earning more money than young men:

according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).

I don't bank with the ANZ, but if I did I would most certainly choose to take my business elsewhere.

Next Melbourne Trads meeting

The next Melbourne Traditionalists meeting is coming up soon (October 3rd). The quality of the last one was great, but our aim is to continue growing, so if you'd like to meet up with some like-minded people then contact Mark Moncrieff or myself for the details. Mark M can be contacted via his website here or you can drop me a line via my email address: swerting(at)bigpond.com.

Shriver strikes back

The American writer Lionel Shriver gave a speech to the Brisbane Writers Festival which was strongly critical of the idea of "cultural appropriation." Her arguments against cultural appropriation are devastating, and if you're interested I recommend you read the whole thing. Here is a taste of what she said:

The author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University who for the record is white, defines cultural appropriation as “taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorised use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

What strikes me about that definition is that “without permission” bit. However are we fiction writers to seek “permission” to use a character from another race or culture, or to employ the vernacular of a group to which we don’t belong? Do we set up a stand on the corner and approach passers-by with a clipboard, getting signatures that grant limited rights to employ an Indonesian character in Chapter Twelve, the way political volunteers get a candidate on the ballot?

I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad

It's difficult not to agree with Lionel Shriver. The concept of cultural appropriation is full of holes and unworkable in any consistent and principled way. Nonetheless, I doubt it will be a passing fad as Lionel Shriver hopes. That's because it serves a purpose within contemporary liberalism.

Think of it this way. For liberalism to work as a system then the choices that each individual makes should not impede the self-determining choices of every other individual. That's not really possible, but one option liberals have to make the system appear to work is to have everyone limit the sphere of their choices to individual lifestyle matters such as career, travel and consumption. At that level, liberalism can (mostly) work as a system, albeit at the cost of making individual life more trivial than it once was.

That's' the kind of liberalism that Lionel Shriver represents. In her Brisbane speech, she wrote of identity that:

we should be seeking to push beyond the constraining categories into which we have been arbitrarily dropped by birth. If we embrace narrow group-based identities too fiercely, we cling to the very cages in which others would seek to trap us. We pigeonhole ourselves. We limit our own notion of who we are...

That's the older liberal-speak we are so used to. It's an ideological view, in which the good in life is thought to be a self-defining autonomy. Therefore, identities that we inherit (into which we are "arbitrarily dropped by birth") are thought of in negative terms as limiting the individual (as being "cages").

What then defines us in a liberal society? Lionel Shriver answered that in a column some years ago. She believes that liberal moderns answer the question of "What is life for?" differently than people did in the past:

baby boomers and their offspring have shifted emphasis from the communal to the individual, from the future to the present, from virtue to personal satisfaction. Increasingly secular, we pledge allegiance to lower-case gods of our private devising. We are less concerned with leading a good life than the good life. We are less likely than our predecessors to ask ourselves whether we serve a greater social purpose; we are more likely to ask if we are happy. We shun values such as self-sacrifice and duty as the pitfalls of suckers. We give little thought to the perpetuation of lineage, culture or nation; we take our heritage for granted. We are ahistorical. We measure the value of our lives within the brackets of our own births and deaths, and don't especially care what happens once we're dead. As we age - oh, so reluctantly! - we are apt to look back on our pasts and ask not 'Did I serve family, God and country?' but 'Did I ever get to Cuba, or run a marathon? Did I take up landscape painting? Was I fat?' We will assess the success of our lives in accordance not with whether they were righteous, but with whether they were interesting and fun.

If that package sounds like one big moral step backwards, the Be Here Now mentality that has converted from 60s catchphrase to entrenched gestalt has its upside. There has to be some value to living for today, since at any given time today is all you've got...Furthermore, prosperity may naturally lead any well-off citizenry to the final frontier: the self, whose borders are as narrow or infinite as we make them.

She goes on to quote a friend of hers, Gabriella, regarding the choice not to have children:

Having children in my 20s would have spelled the end of everything I had spent my life working towards and was about to really enjoy: the ability to spend my money the way I wanted, travel where I wanted, choose my partners, live as I wished."

So that is the mindset that liberalism is gradually pushing people toward: not being bound to anything, but being a "freewheeling individual" making little lifestyle choices ("spend my money the way I wanted, travel where I wanted").

That, then, is one way to make liberalism work as a system. But it's not likely to appeal to all liberals. After all, it is considerably apolitical - it's all about consumerism and lifestyle. What if you're a liberal with a more radical political agenda? What if you're an activist type? You'll then be looking for a different way to make liberalism work as a system, i.e. of answering the question of how everyone can equally make self-determining choices.

The answer that activist liberals give has become increasingly familiar. They assert that some groups of people have "privilege" (i.e. they get to have things their way more than others do) and that therefore the demands of underprivileged groups should take precedence over those of more privileged groups. There is no longer a belief that everyone can have untrammelled choice (as this leads to a system based on an apolitical lifestyle consumerism); instead, there is a ranking (the oppression Olympics) of who should get to have things their way based on which groups are judged to be most marginalised (e.g. men should give way to women who should give way to blacks etc.)

The concept of cultural appropriation is an outgrowth of this approach. People who choose the "privilege" approach to making liberalism work will become sensitive to ways in which they might be marginalised/oppressed/dominated, not only because it feeds into a sense of grievance and wrong, but because it is also the basis of their own right over others. And so you end up with an overly sensitive belief that someone else is exploiting your culture, alongside a blindness to the way in which you yourself might be "culturally appropriating" the mainstream culture.

As a traditionalist, I fear Lionel Shriver's approach to liberalism more than I do the newer, privilege ranking one. Her way is empty and futureless (as she admits in the second column I linked to) but people can amuse themselves with it if there are no other options. The newer, activist approach to liberalism is more confronting and difficult to live by, particularly if you are a white male. It's more likely to push people away from liberal modernity altogether, to shake up the whole liberal edifice.

The look says it all

Think what you like of Milo, I would love to have this effect on feminists - the look is priceless:

Hawthorn supporters attacked in CBD

A small group of Hawthorn supporters were walking along Swanstson Street in the city after their loss to the Western Bulldogs when they were suddenly attacked by a larger group of Somalis and Sudanese. One was knocked out and then kicked in the head. You can hear the young Australian men complaining that they no longer feel they can walk around their own city because of the chance of being attacked.

The assault happened near the steps of the Anglican Cathedral, St Paul's, which has chosen to fly a banner from its spire which reads "Let's fully welcome refugees". I looked up some of the material the church has distributed in support of this policy and nowhere is there any disclosure of some of the negative effects of open borders, including a loss of safety on the streets.

An Australian knight

This is a rare non-political post. I found out yesterday that an Australian had won a prestigious knight's tournament in France (Tournoi de L’Ordre de Saint Suzanne). Phillip Leitch works at Kryal Castle just outside Ballarat here in Victoria. I felt some patriotic pride to think that an Australian should win this title, given that we missed the entire medieval era. Here is the winning knight:

A Clarissa rethink?

Some years ago I wrote a series of posts (here and here) about a liberal academic blogger called Clarissa. She followed the liberal script in an orthodox way, believing that inherited identities are oppressive and should be thrown off in favour of self-defined ones:

modernity is destroying old certitudes, identities and ways of being. Modernity is liberating in the sense that we are a lot less tied to collective identities ascribed to us at birth. Gender identities, normative sexualities, class origins, religious backgrounds still exist, of course. Nevertheless, they are nowhere as binding as they used to be before the advent of modernity...A society that strictly prescribes its collective identities offers people a great degree of freedom from the irksome necessity to make their own decisions. At birth, you are handed a set of norms that you are supposed to observe as a representative of your gender, social class, religious denomination, etc. You accumulate enough of these collective allegiances and you can guarantee that pretty much every aspect of your life will be defined for you

It's a clear message: liberal modernity is a good thing because rather than our identity already being defined for us, it is now self-defined.

I have argued against this view numerous times at this site. If our identity can't be based on predetermined qualities like our membership of an ethny, or our sex, but only on things that we can define for ourselves, then our identity becomes more shallow - it is based on lifestyle choices rather than on deeper aspects of our created nature.

I took a look at Clarissa's site again this morning and I was surprised that she now has a more ambivalent attitude toward the modernist project. In a review of a novel by Philip Roth she writes:

If you cut off your roots in search of freedom, will you find it or will you wither and die? Now that we have shed our oppressive, restrictive familial and cultural bonds, has fluidity given us anything in return? Or are we, like the novel’s protagonist, floating around in limbo, incapable of making a connection with anybody?

This still has a liberal bias in that she describes the ties of family and culture as being oppressive, but at least she is questioning the quality of the "freedom" the individual has, once he or she has been reduced to an atomised existence.

More gains for the AfD

More good news from Germany. The Alternative for Germany party has made a breakthrough in Berlin, gaining 13% of the vote. That's a terrific result in what is one of the most left leaning parts of the country.

Angela Merkel's CDU slumped to only 19% of the vote and is likely to be dumped from Berlin's coalition government:

A year before a national election, the result is set to raise pressure on Merkel and deepen rifts in her conservative camp, with more sniping expected from her CSU allies in Bavaria.

The CSU's Bavarian finance minister Markus Soeder was quick to call it the "second massive wake-up call" in two weeks.

"A long-term and massive loss in trust among traditional voters threatens the conservative bloc," he told the Bild daily, adding Merkel's right-left national coalition had to win back support by changing course on its immigration policy.

Why would traditional voters continue to support Merkel's CDU when she is committed to open borders and globalisation? How can traditional Germany survive such a policy?

Apex & Moomba

I was chuffed to be mentioned in a John Derbyshire column at Vdare last month. The column was about the closure of a festival in the American Midwest because of black violence. John Derbyshire rejected the idea that such violence could be explained by the lingering effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws on the black population. He noted that the Moomba Festival here in Melbourne had been similarly affected by black gang violence (the Apex gang), despite the fact that the members of the gang are from families which have only recently migrated here from Africa. The pattern is the same in both Australia and America, so blaming slavery or Jim Crow laws doesn't seem all that plausible.

American readers might not be aware that the emergence of the Apex gang is big news here in Melbourne. The gang often makes it to the front page of the papers, as it is something we haven't seen much of before (we have had organised crime gangs, but they were mostly involved in trafficking drugs, and they committed violence against rival gangs rather than against members of the public). The Apex gang has carried out violent carjackings and home invasions, which the public here aren't used to.

Typical of news reports  (this one appeared just two days after John Derbyshire's column was published) is this Herald Sun front page story:

EXCLUSIVE: POLICE are bracing for a new wave of youth crime to sweep the state with the imminent release of dozens of notorious Apex gangsters from custody.

Up to 30 Apex members and associates - some considered leaders of the feared outfit - are now due to be released.

The worst Apex offenders were last year and earlier this year sent to youth detention and adult prisons for serious violent crimes including home invasions and carjackings.

But most were sentenced in children’s courts meaning their lockup terms ran over months rather than years and are now due to be freed into the community.

One is suspected of being a founding member of Apex.

The member has been involved in car-jackings and armed robberies in the southeastern suburbs and is regarded as influential among younger associates.

Senior police have told the Sunday Herald Sun they mark the release dates of jailed juveniles in their calendars in anticipation of a crime spike.

More recently a female offshoot of Apex has formed, called the "Aces". There is a video of members of this gang attacking a house somewhere in Melbourne:

Guys & dolls

Dalrock has found an interesting video about a woman, Kristen Jarvis, who has decided to manufacture dolls for boys. It's interesting because it shows the conflict within liberal moderns when it comes to the topic of our biological sex.

On the one hand, Kristen Jarvis is a very orthodox liberal. She complains that society says "be anything" but that people are still guided in some ways by being male or female. It is that basic liberal complaint that we cannot be wholly self-defining if our unchosen biological sex still matters. She believes that if boys were to play with dolls they would become more feminine and nurturing.

But liberal moderns live in the same world as the rest of us in which sex distinctions do matter: they are hardwired into human biology and are a part of our core identity and our heterosexual instincts. And so throughout the video you see glaring "unprincipled exceptions" in which these liberals don't follow the principle of erasing sex distinctions at all.

For instance, Kristen Jarvis had a very highly paid job as a lawyer, but admits in the video that she felt sadness and anxiety in not being with her children, and so she quit her job to be supported by her husband. Her maternal instincts won out. She didn't want to be away from her children and so she hired her sister to run the doll-making company. But this sister is one of the most feminine looking women you are likely to see - there is a mismatch between the purpose of her job (making manhood/womanhood not matter) and the effort she goes to in order to appear attractively feminine.

It's also interesting to observe the part where the sisters go to a preschool in order to test out the dolls on the boys. The best they manage is to get some of the boys to use the dolls for a rough sports game; one of the boys is pictured looking ill-at-ease with the doll; and one other looks glaringly offended at being offered the doll and rejects it altogether. The sisters admit that they have hurdles to overcome.

Distribution piece

Here's the latest pamphlet that I'm distributing in my local area. It's not meant to appeal to the masses, rather it's aimed at those with a genuine interest in politics:

Melbourne Traditionalists

It isn’t publicised much, but all Western societies are run along the lines of just one ideology, namely liberalism. Both sides of politics are committed to this ideology, even if they differ a little on how best to implement it.

So what is liberalism? It’s the idea that the overriding good in society is the autonomy of the individual. That’s a nice sounding principle, but it is important to think about what it commits people, as a matter of logic, to believe about society.

Autonomy is the idea that what matters is a freedom of the individual to define themselves according to their own choices. It often goes along with the idea that there is nothing that is objectively good outside the individual, but that value is created in the act of choosing, no matter what that choice is.

So what’s wrong this this? Well, if what matters is that there is nothing to limit how I self-determine or self-define, then the things that I cannot self-determine must be oppressions that I must abandon in order to be free. To be more exact, the things that I cannot self-determine must be made not to matter.

What is not allowed to matter in a society based on a liberal ideology? First, it will be thought wrong for a person’s ethnicity to matter, as that is something they don’t get to choose for themselves. In a non-liberal society, a person’s ethnicity matters a great deal, as it is part of what defines an individual (it is a significant part of their identity) and as it forms the communal tradition that individuals feel a close sense of belonging to. Therefore, people in a non-liberal community will, logically, work to preserve their own ethnic tradition.

Liberals, on the other hand, focus on the idea that they should demonstrate that their own ethnicity does not matter and does not influence their preferences or loyalties. Some liberals openly state that they identify only with themselves as individuals rather than with any community sharing a common language, history, culture and so on.

Nor do we get to determine our own sex, i.e. the fact of being a man or a woman. Therefore, this too has to be made not to matter in a liberal society. So, rather than celebrating the differences between men and women, and encouraging men to cultivate their better masculine qualities and women their better feminine qualities, a liberal society will be focused on ensuring that our sex has no bearing on what we choose to do. Most societies are not fussed, for instance, if more women than men choose to be nurses, or more men than women choose to be tradies, but this is something that those committed to liberalism see as a flaw in society to be overcome – otherwise our sex still continues to matter.

Liberalism also generates its own moral outlook. Liberals can’t easily accept the idea that there are standards of character for individuals to try and live up to. This would be limiting to an individual’s freedom to self-determine. So in this sense liberalism is libertine – there is nothing that is objectively right or wrong.

However, for liberalism to work as a system, what one person chooses can’t restrict what another person chooses. This means, first, that there is pressure to limit the range of choices to purely individual matters (e.g. career, holidays etc.). Second, it means that liberals emphasise a morality of non-interference, so that we end up being judged as good or bad people by a limited set of qualities, such as how tolerant, open, inclusive, non-discriminatory and non-judgemental we are. This morality of non-interference is sometimes policed to the point that it becomes absurdly intrusive.

If you are not committed to a liberal ideology, then you are likely to be dismayed at the way that Western societies are developing. Things that matter a great deal to the individual are being made not to matter – they are being, in liberal terms, gradually “deconstructed”. So what then are we to do? The first thing is to reject liberalism outright, at the level of first principle, as this is the source of liberal moral claims. The second thing is to recognise that, for the time being, the institutions of society are liberal, including the major political parties, and that it is a waste of time to passively expect help from that direction. Third, we need to continue to build up resources of our own so that we can assert an alternative to liberalism.

The final descent of EPL

In 2006 a bestselling book appeared called Eat Pray Love:

At 32 years old, Elizabeth Gilbert was educated, had a home, a husband, and a successful career as a writer. She was, however, unhappy in her marriage and initiated a divorce. She then embarked on a rebound relationship that did not work out, leaving her devastated and alone. After finalizing her difficult divorce, she spent the next year traveling the world.

She spent four months in Italy, eating and enjoying life ("Eat"). She spent three months in India, finding her spirituality ("Pray"). She ended the year in Bali, Indonesia, looking for "balance" of the two and fell in love with a Brazilian businessman ("Love").

The book was a kind of divorce fantasy, in which Elizabeth Gilbert left her decent husband to have adventures before finally happily remarrying.

But the reality of Elizabeth Gilbert's life has not matched the fantasy. She has not only divorced her second husband, she has gone off men altogether and now has a female partner.

Is this a divorce story for women to buy into? Isn't it yet another example of the failure of the sexual revolution to improve the lives of women?

Traditional Western societies emphasised the ordering of our sexual and emotional impulses to the good of marriage and family life. That was not only good for society and for children but it was also the best way to preserve our individual capacity for a trusting and loving relationship (to pair bond). For centuries, marriage was opposed by those who believed in "free love" - which meant following your emotional and sexual impulses around from person to person, rather than ordering them toward upholding marriage. But the evidence that is now accruing from the sexual revolution is that this "liberation" ( or disordering) of our sexual and emotional impulses doesn't lead to growth and development but to large numbers of jaded middle-aged people who lose a sense of love and admiration for the opposite sex.

It has also led to a lack of prudence in relationships. For instance, there is now a belief that relationships involve an open-ended pursuit of a person who fulfils all our needs. One of the best known dating coaches, Even Marc Katz, has criticised this attitude amongst his female clients:

So it should be no surprise that Eat, Pray, Love has been on my mind recently. Not just because all of my clients feel inspired by it, but because of its billboard campaign for the movie, which reads:

“You Don’t Need a Man. You Need a Champion.”

You hold out for your hero.

We’ll hold out for our Supermodel/Top Chef/Rhodes Scholar.

And all of us will end up alone because there’s nobody that fits the bill. The end!

Not a very happy ending, is it?

Yes, I’m teasing about the billboard, but although my example may be a bit hyperbolic, it’s not that far from the truth.

Men really DO want the Supermodel/Top Chef/Rhodes Scholar.

Women really DO want a hero and a champion.

And yet, in order to find happiness, we both must relax our fantasies a little bit.

Not because they don’t feel great. They do.

The reason to relax your fantasies is because they’re unrealistic, and they almost invariably lead to disappointment.

...The message of this blog post isn’t about settling. It’s not about being with a man you can barely tolerate. It’s about the expectation of what a man is capable of delivering.

...Listen, as a dating coach, my job is to help you find happiness in your love life.

Because of this role, I have a unique access to your inner world. You might even say that I often understand you better than your own boyfriend.

Which is why it’s very easy for me to observe that your expectations of men are RARELY met.

...I usually hear something like this:

“I don’t know, Evan. I just don’t feel INSPIRED by him.”

Come again?

“I want to feel that thing in the pit of my stomach. To get nervous when he calls. To admire him and think about him all the time when we’re not together.”

You realize that every time you’ve had that feeling, it’s never worked out, right?

“Yes, but I can’t help how I feel.”

Fair enough.

Just know that, percentage-wise, the number of men who are cute, smart, kind, tall, funny, generous, ambitious, successful, and family-oriented is minuscule.

Now you want to add in “inspirational?”

You know how many men are left?

That’s okay. Neither do I.

The message of this blog post isn’t about settling. It’s not about being with a man you can barely tolerate.

It’s about the expectation of what a man is capable of delivering.

There are millions upon millions of decent looking, thoughtful, bright, solid men who want to marry you, cherish you, build a family, and create a life together.

If only you would love them and accept them.

Believe me, nobody wants you to achieve your dreams more than I do.

But if you’re holding out for a hero, yet no guy ever fits the bill (and also sticks around!), it may be time to act like Bill, who finally gave up on his Angelina Jolie fantasy and is thrilled to have found YOU.

This is how a man finds love. By accepting all that you are, imperfections included.

You need to do the same with him.

The emphasis is no longer on the idea that "I need to cultivate these moral qualities in myself in order to be a good husband/wife/father/mother" but instead on a flight of fantasy in which some other person is so perfect that they will inspire us to live perpetually in a state of "falling in love" (and intuit our needs, keep us feeling spiritually fulfilled, give us higher social status than anyone else etc.)

As women move from man to man, and as they become older and more jaded, they are likely to experience a decline in what men are willing to offer them and a decline in their own ability to pair bond. There most likely won't be personal growth and development but a psychological closing of doors.

A chilling reminder

The Islamic group ISIS has issued a chilling call for its followers to carry out acts of terror in Australia:

Light the ground beneath them aflame and scorch them with terror. Kill them on the streets of Brunswick, Broadmeadows, Bankstown, and Bondi. Kill them at the MCG, the SCG, the Opera House, and even in their backyards,” the article reads.

“Stab them, shoot them, poison them, and run them down with your vehicles. Kill them wherever you find them until the hollowness of their arrogance is filled with terror and they find themselves on their knees with their backs broken under the weight of regret for having waged a war against the believers, and by Allah’s will, and then through your sacrifices, this Ummah will be victorious.

Could the message be any clearer? There are people in the world who wish us harm. There are people in the world who wish to conquer us. Therefore, it is not a great idea to take up, as your moral cause in life, mass Islamic immigration into the West. That only provides a larger population for the security services to monitor and a greater likelihood of lone wolf attackers emerging.

The liberal elite in the West has decided to champion mass Islamic immigration. They seem to believe that it can be used to break up the established loyalties and identities that exist in the West, to clear a path for a more purely individualistic society organised "rationally" around the market and the state bureaucracy.

As part of this mindset, the liberal elite believes that we should never discriminate on the basis of inherited identities and loyalties and that embracing those who are most "other" to us is a grand moral gesture.

The liberal elite is wrong. It makes sense to prefer a relatively homogeneous society in which people share a close sense of belonging and identity. This creates a high level of social trust, a high level of commitment to the institutions of society, a willingness to sacrifice for the common good, an appreciation of the history and culture to which the individual is so closely connected, a willingness to look to the future good of society, a sense of being anchored (of having roots) within a particular tradition, and a higher sense of one's own tradition as a transcendent good that connects us to one source of meaning in life.

If we continue down the liberal path, not only will we be more greatly exposed to those who wish us harm, but we will eventually come to live more selfishly and shallowly - we will seek as lone individuals to maximise our comfort and physical pleasure within a market and bureaucratic system.

Liberalism dominates right now, so the aim is to contribute to a counterculture. There are certainly Westerners who have a sense of the hollowness of modernity, and it is this group that we need to bring together to more effectively challenge the current liberal orthodoxy.

Something for Italian feminists to consider

I posted recently about the Italian Government's fertility campaign. Leftists in that country have been in uproar about a postcard put out by the government warning that "Beauty is forever, but fertility isn't". One Italian feminist declared the postcard to be one of the most offensive things she had ever seen.

A few days later the Daily Mail posted a story about a BBC presenter, Tessa Dunlop, who at age 41 lost her unborn son during pregnancy and who is now grieving her incomplete family (she has a 7-year-old daughter). She writes:

We need to drop the old-fashioned taboos surrounding fertility and admit that many of the babies born to ‘older’ women in particular are accompanied by a painful back story. Some only have a painful story.

Fewer celebrity ‘miracle’ births and more honesty about the pitfalls of middle age that are so cruelly exclusive to women would help everyone.

Societally, it might even force us to work out a way of better supporting girls during that precious decade – somewhere between 24 and 34 years of age – when both emotionally and biologically they are best equipped to give birth.

Where is the prudence of those Italian feminists? A 41-year-old woman is laying out her grief and wisely calling on society to respect the critical decade in which a woman is best able to have children - but when a government does try to do the right thing it is shouted down by young feminist women who fear maternity above all things.

Good luck AfD

There is a regional election in Germany tomorrow (in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). The good news is that the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party is polling exceptionally well at 23%, which is ahead of Angela Merkel's CDU. I really do hope the poll numbers are translated into votes, as the AfD is leading the opposition to Merkel's open border immigration policy.

Of course there is a lot of opposition to the AfD from the left. One well-known German band, Jennifer Rostock, even released a song attacking the AfD in the lead up to the election. Oddly, the refrain to their song goes "But only the most stupid calves vote for their own butcher" - which would seem to apply more to Germans voting for parties like the CDU and SPD which are intent on using immigration to abolish the existence of an ethnically German population.

Anyway, just to show that there does exist resistance in Germany, a "reply song" has been released. I've published it below and translated some of the lyrics underneath:



I've translated these lyrics roughly, without the rhyme:

Only the most stupid calves destroy their homeland themselves

Of Cologne and Nice and Paris, they don't want to hear about it,
They don't want to let themselves be disturbed anymore by terrorists
At the end of this multiculti dream
There awaits for us the loss of public space

Where CDU and Greens cancel all differences
where illegals reach our territory daily
where everyone loudly in unison bawls "we'll manage it"
The only thing that helps, there's just one thing: get rid of the old parties

Therefore comes the directive
We're voting Alternative (for Germany)

Do you want a future for your family and your country
vote the AfD
Instead of relying on others, take it in hand yourself
vote the AfD

If you are for free expression for every man and woman
so that Jennifer Rostock can go on singing nonsense
On Sunday, call out to everyone, the whole of Germany must see it,
We're going to vote the AfD.

Feminists hate Fertility Day

The birth rate in Italy is abysmal (1.4 children per woman). The Italian Government has opted to encourage Italians to have children and has even declared a national Fertility Day. That's a healthy sign that the Italian Government wishes to see the Italian people continue into the future. But the campaign has hit a hurdle: Italian feminists and leftists are in shock and outrage at the campaign and they seem to have succeeded in derailing it.

I'll use Giulia Blasi, a radio host and writer, as an example. She complains that:

Beatrice Lorenzin, Italy’s Minister of Health, has approved and promoted a campaign that treats all women as little more than walking incubators, people who should hurry up and have children for the sake of the country.

...The initiative, slated for September 22nd, was promoted through a series of “postcards” that are among the most offensive things I’ve ever seen.

So what is so offensive to her? It's this:

The poster reads "Beauty has no age. Fertility does." Clearly, Giulia Blasi has been raised to view motherhood as something of an existential threat if she finds this one of the most offensive things she has ever seen.

Giulia also finds the following defence of motherhood from the Italian Government so bad that there is "no comment needed":

Motherhood, on the other hand, helps develop creative intelligence and is an extraordinary opportunity for growth. The ingenious organization necessary to make a mum’s day work, the flexibility required by unexpected events, the responsibility and choices involved in childcare, the energy employed daily by a mother are skills and potential yet to be explored in order to facilitate their use upon returning to work.

It's a pity that motherhood has to be defended in terms of developing work skills, rather than as a fulfilment of a woman's feminine nature, but at least the Government is recognising the value of motherhood.

So how does Giulia Blasi believe her government should approach the fertility issue? She thinks the government approach to fertility should be to:

1. Make abortion easier. She is concerned that a woman has to wait seven days for an abortion and that doctors are allowed to be conscientious objectors and not perform abortion procedures.

2. Provide IVF for homosexuals.

3. Support women in jobs, for example, by providing cheaper childcare (which really sends the message to women that what has value are careers, with children being a potential hindrance to the "true aim" of a woman's life).

4. Give easier access to Italian citizenship for immigrant families.

Is it not revealing that what first occurs to her, in considering the issue of babies, is to make abortion even easier than it already is in Italy? She has a visceral reaction against fertility, babies and motherhood - her main concern is how to stop these things. She has joined the great liberal death wish.

I do congratulate the Italian Government for its fertility campaign, and it's likely that it will have a positive effect - if it can overcome the leftist/feminist hurdle. But there are some big picture concerns for any government tackling this issue:

1. In a liberal society what matters is the freedom to be an autonomous individual. This is not a good foundation for encouraging a commitment to parenthood. I don't think anyone who wants to maximise their individual autonomy would logically choose to be a parent. We become parents to fulfil our masculine and feminine natures to be fathers and mothers; to create a loving family circle, a home; and to perpetuate our personal, familial and national lineage (i.e. to reproduce). We don't have children in order to be autonomous.

2. Young people are more likely to marry and be in a position to have children when men have access to work; when there is a moral culture that limits casual relationships; when the divorce rate is low; and when trust and goodwill between the sexes is high. In feminist/liberal societies, these supports for fertility are not always present.

3. The arrangement by which both men and women are expected to work full-time, with both then sharing the domestic work in the evenings and on weekends, is more onerous than family life needs to be. It is one factor encouraging people to either limit the number of children they have, or to avoid having children altogether. It's easier in some ways for people on welfare to have children, as they have more time to give to children.

Governments really do need to change course in a significant way if the fertility issue is to be overcome.

So women are oppressed?

I had an interesting conversation with a new employee at work earlier this week. She told me that for many years she has been able to work part-time (three days a week). When I probed why she chose to work part-time, she breezily replied "Life is too short to work full-time". I then said "Yes, if you are able to afford to do so." Her response? "Oh, my husband works full-time so affording the days off has never been an issue."

I don't blame her at all for choosing a lifestyle with a nice work/life balance. But the conversation did make me think of all those feminists who look on men like her husband as patriarchal oppressors earning more than their wives. The reality in many cases is so different: this woman's husband does not have the luxury of thinking that life is too short to spend all his week at the office. That is where he will be and in doing so he is enabling his wife to live more enjoyably. But he gets little kudos from society for his sacrifices - instead he will be portrayed as a privileged male.

It is a case of reality being turned on its head. His wife is privileged and he is bearing a burden for her sake. But how often is this kind of situation openly acknowledged?