Category Archives: Cultural

Affirmative dissent

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This is a comment on a post with a self-explanatory title, The Looming Danger for Dissident Professors. It’s essentially why sites like this are necessary just to remind ourselves that it isn’t us who are nuts.

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote “All sheep and no shepherd, everyone is the same, everyone wants to be the same — anyone who is different goes voluntarily to the Madhouse.”

Notwithstanding all of the purported liberal views, what exists today in academia is nothing but textbook fascism. Everyone is the same. Everyone wants to be the same. And anyone who differs from the mob is inherently “crazy & dangerous.” “Dangerous” because they believe that anyone engaging in “cognitive aggression” (i.e. expressing & defending a dissident viewpoint) will inevitably progress from the use of words to the use of automatic weapons — unless stopped. Hence the overwhelming effort to silence dissent and the repeated references to “safety.”

This is why I keep coming back to the Behavioral Intervention Teams and the increasing influence of the Psychologists in Education. This is where this stuff is coming from and the more I study it, the more truly terrifying it becomes — and I say this as someone who does not frighten easily, someone who comes from a commercial fishing background.

In order to brainwash someone, you must first isolate the person from all other support networks and anything that confirms the legitimacy of the views/values which you wish to eliminate. “Gaslighting” ceases to work when the subject of it is able to obtain independent confirmation that he/she/it isn’t imagining things. In the play, the gas lights really were dimming because the husband was using the gaslights upstairs (which dropped the pressure in the lines) — it took the police detective confirming that he also saw the lights dimming for her to believe what she saw happening with her own eyes. Likewise, psychological “gaslighting” falls apart when the subject is able to obtain independent confirmation of what he/she/it believes to be true.

Professor Abrams is thus dangerous because he essentially confirmed that the gaslights are dimming. People can’t be told that they’re imagining things anymore because they now have an academic citation defending their perception of reality.

And his willingness to persist in the defense of his views notwithstanding the overwhelming gauntlet of opposition he is enduring — well, there is a reason why I consider Behavioral Intervention Teams to be both scary and dangerous.

The article itself is worth the read. We are not as far gone here in Australia, but things always happen here after a delay.

Further evidence of The Rise of Anti-Christian Sentiment in the West

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Received today from Professor Augusto Zimmermann in WA.

Dear Friend,

I would like to call your attention to a very serious matter.

As you know, I am organising in Perth a major conference on religious freedom entitled ‘Religious Freedom at the Crossroads – The Rise of Anti-Christian Sentiment in the West’

To be held at Sheridan College between 14-15 June 2019, our list of speakers/moderators includes some our finest legal minds in Australia – Neville Rochow QC, Christopher Brohier, John Gilmour QC, Martyn Isles, and many otherms.

Our keynote speaker is none other than a leading American constitutional lawyer, the Distinguished Emeritus Professor William Wagner of Western Michigan University, Thomas Cooley Law School.

And yet, our historical legal-academic conference on religious freedom has been arbitrarily CENSORED by Facebook.

As seen attached, Facebook arbitrarily refuses to allow us to post any information about the forthcoming religious freedom conference.

Facebook simply claims that our religious freedom conference has VIOLATED COMMUNITY STANDARDS.

This is absolutely appalling and it objectively constitutes an egregious instance of censorship of ideas on social media.

Perhaps the PM’s idea of combating ‘right-wing extremism’ on social media has already started to produce its unintended consequences…

Religious freedom is most definitely at the crossroads and Facebook has just proven the point.

I guess this only reveals a DESPERATE NEED to hold a legal conference of this nature in Australia.

May I please ask you a favour?

Religious freedom is DEFINITELY at stake in Australia. Please consider heavily PROMOTING THIS EVENT and AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

Below are the relevant details about this important conference that has been ARBITRARILY CENSORED BY FACEBOOK.

I am proud to have gathered a ‘dream team’ of leading lawyers and legal academics in the field.

Thank you very much in anticipation for you kind attention.

Warm regards,

Prof Augusto Zimmermann

An absence of love recession

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To accompany my post on The Lie of the Century there is now this complementary post: The Happiness Recession which has this sub-head:

Today’s young adults are replacing church and marriage with friendships. But there’s one thing for which they have no substitute.

Here’s the core of the story.

The United States is in the middle of a “sex recession.” Nowhere has this sex recession proved more consequential than among young adults, especially young men. Some academics and journalists have now begun grumbling about what they are calling a “moral panic” about the decline in young-adult sex. Before the 2018 data came out, the Daily suggested that the decline in sex was modest, and the sociologist Daniel Carlson claimed that the amount of sex one has “is a weak predictor of how satisfied you are with your sex life.” More important than frequency, the argument went, is the quality of your sexual relationship.

Being from a time before the Sexual Revolution I can see plain as day what has gone wrong. Once, a date, every date, even at 13 or 14, was an interview towards a lifetime together in a single monogamous marriage that included children of one’s own. At 13-14 it was just a trial run, but never involved actual sexual activity. Sexual relations in virtually all instances only came with real genuine commitment on both sides.

And then, after the pill became common, and with the publication of the Just Do It Playboy Philosophy, everyone just did it, so why, exactly get married. And then feminist philosophy that filled women with resentment because boys treated girls like, pardon the expression, but like girls and not boys. So here we are, and as the video below shows, there is not the slightest clue what has gone wrong, because the issue is not a “sex” recession, but an “absence of love” recession.

How to fix it is an unknown, but stories like this take us farther away while The Lie of the Century explains the problem but does not tell us what to do.

The lie of the century

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The Secret to Lasting Love Is Sexual Inequality.

Countless women today face the exact same problem [ie finding a man to marry and have children with]: They’re successful in life but not in love. And their quandary is bigger than they realize, for if and when these women do find a husband, it will not be the end of their struggle. Finding a man to marry today is only half the battle.

The other half is keeping him.

Although “keeping him” isn’t really the right phrase since men aren’t the ones leaving their marriages in droves. Women are: 70 percent of divorces are initiated by wives. Ergo, even when women do marry, they have no idea how to stay married.

There is more than one culprit for the sad state of gender relations, but feminism is at the top of the list. It was feminism that taught women that they can, and should, have sex like a man: with no strings attached. It was feminism that told women to “never depend on a man” and to resent husbands and children for holding women back. It was feminism that encouraged women to make work, not family, the center of their universe. It was feminism that belittled all things feminine.

Most importantly, it was feminism that taught Americans to believe the sexes are “equal.” Not equal in value—equal as in the same. If parents and society would get out of the way, feminists claim, the sexes would become interchangeable: Women and girls would make the same choices boys and men do, and men and boys would make the same choices women and girls do. After all, all those differences you see between the sexes are purely a result of social conditioning. Biology has nothing to do with it.

It was the lie of the century.

Now read the rest to the end. As for the author:

Suzanne Venker is an author, columnist, and relationship coach known as The Feminist “Fixer.” A wife of 20 years and mother of two, she liberates women from the equality narrative and inspires them to feel secure in their femininity and courageous about finding lasting love. Her most recent book, “The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage,” helps bossy women learn how to become better wives. You can find Suzanne at TheFeministFixer.com

Survival against the odds

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I am as resolute in my defence of Taiwan’s sovereignty and independence as I am of Israel’s although I naturally have a deeper emotional tie to the Zionist state. Yet some Jews especially on the left, have become anti-Israeli and have religiously sided with her enemies. So I bring this to your attention: The Left’s Favorite Dirty Word, which tells part of the story and is a review of a book that tells even more of it. These are the first two paras:

Zionism was not always a dirty word for leftists. Communists and socialists alike supported the creation of Israel in 1948, denouncing the neofeudal Arab regimes that tried to destroy the new Jewish state. At the same time, some leftist thinkers, many of them Jews, were ambivalent about Zionism, even in the wake of the Holocaust.

In her new book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield provides a stunningly cogent account of how Jewish nationalism has troubled leftist thought from the foundation of Israel until today. Like The Cruel Radiance, Linfield’s earlier book on photography and politics, The Lions’ Den is compulsively readable and nearly always persuasive. She says correctly, “there is no other issue, either foreign or domestic, that is debated in such rancid tones” as the sinfulness of Zionism and Israel.

It will all be different in a thousand years, but in the meantime everything is contested with some parts surviving, going on into the future, while other parts disappear and are gone. Politics – which is much much more than voting every so often but is actually hard graft with real struggle in real time with not just actual lives but the fate of entire ways of life always on the line – determines which fate any particular entity will follow. Being anti-semitic and anti-Israeli gives some people meaning in their lives. It is a worry, though, how many Jews are part of this as well.

Repulsive ingratitude

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From Tucker Carlson: Ilhan Omar ‘Repays Her Adopted Country’ by Attacking It as ‘Hateful and Racist’. This is part of what Carlson said:

“Ilhan Omar’s country collapsed as a child. She lived for years in Kenya in that refugee camp. She may have died there without outside help. But help came, from where? From here, America. And this country didn’t just welcome Ilhan Omar to America, we paid to relocate her family and many others from a foreign continent purely for the sake of being good people, for altruism. Because no country in history has been as generous as we are. To places we have no ties to and no obligation to, we have been kind anyway because that’s who we are. Despite her humble and foreign birth, Omar has been elected to our national law-making body. And good for her. So how does she repay her adopted country, the one that may literally have saved her life? She attacks it as hateful and racist, and for that she is applauded by the Democratic Party because they view this country as hateful and racist too.”

This is what she preferred.

“When you’re a kid and you’re raised in an all-black, all- Muslim environment, nobody really talks to you about your identity. You just are. There is freedom in knowing that you are accepted as your full self. So the notion that there is a conflict with your identity in society was hard at the age of 12.”

And she’s an anti-semite as well.

They look just like us because they were just like us

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From Ace of Spades

They Shall Not Grow Old is a remarkable documentary on the experiences of trench soldiers during World War I. It takes no stance on the causes of the war, the running of the war, or its closure. It is focused, laser like, on what the individual soldier went through from the run up to the war to going home.

Directed by Peter Jackson, who has a particular interest in the war based on his family’s history (his grandfather served in an English regiment) that had extended to collecting paraphernalia of the war from uniforms to infantry weapons to actual artillery. When the Imperial War Museum reached out to him about doing something for the armistice’s 100th anniversary, Jackson jumped in with both feet. Using footage solely from the IWM’s archives, he had his team of special effects technicians clean up the 100 year old images, colorize them, and provide a third dimension. The technical effects really are remarkable. Clear, bright images of a world long lost to time, the soldiers look as present today as they must have in newsreels back then. Over all of these images lay the voices of actual soldiers recounting their stories in snippets (recorded in the 50s).

The movie’s story follows a generic path through the war. It’s really the story of every English infantryman from the heady days of excitement that lead to war breaking out, through the early days of movement, to settling into trench life, a battle (which is accomplished visually through contemporary illustrated images), and the wind-down of war and going home. We never learn a single soldier’s name, and we rarely see the same soldier’s face twice. This, to me, had the makings of creating distance between audience and subject. It’s my problem with Battleship Potemkin. However, in They Shall Not Grow Old, the use of the voices of the soldiers themselves is what bridges that gap. We begin to recognize voices, and hear the pain, joy, elation, and reflections on the mundane from the men who experienced it themselves. Matched with that is the extremely respectful tone that the movie takes.

One scene has stayed with me more than any other in the months since I’ve seen the movie. We see some soldiers hiding down a slope from a raging battle above. They are waiting for the call to move up and contribute. As they wait, they talk, they smoke, and they look directly at the camera. In some of them, it seems as though they know they are about to die, which, we know, they are.

Jackson did a great thing by bringing this film to screen. They Shall Not Grow Old is a great achievement in special effects, but also in making a century old war immediate and emotional in a way that I’ve never seen before. There are World War I movies that I love (Paths of Glory in particular), but none of what I’ve seen has made the experiences of the individual soldier so understandable in such vivid terms as what Jackson has accomplished.

The movie is available to stream now, and I highly recommend it.

Herodotus was right once again

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Bust of Herodotus

My favourite book of all time is Herodotus’s Histories. The first ever book of history, it tells the story of the war between the Greeks and the Persians in the fifth century BC for the survival of Western Civilisation before it had even commenced its journey. A storyteller who travelled everywhere to gather personal accounts of what others had witnessed, but with so much ancillary information and irrelevant tales about everything under the sun – including about the first people ever to have sailed around Africa which you know was true because they had observed that the sun eventually was no longer to their south but at some stage was found to their north. Lots and lots and lots like that, including some of the most astute philosophical, political and historical reflections you will ever read. Amazing book, but I can imagine not to everyone’s tastes. It’s also a reminder that you should get your reading in early since as you get older, you don’t have the patience you had when you were young.

Ah but this is merely prelude to: Nile shipwreck discovery proves Herodotus right – after 2,469 years.

In the fifth century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt and wrote of unusual river boats on the Nile. Twenty-three lines of his Historia, the ancient world’s first great narrative history, are devoted to the intricate description of the construction of a “baris”.

For centuries, scholars have argued over his account because there was no archaeological evidence that such ships ever existed. Now there is. A “fabulously preserved” wreck in the waters around the sunken port city of Thonis-Heracleion has revealed just how accurate the historian was.

“It wasn’t until we discovered this wreck that we realised Herodotus was right,” said Dr Damian Robinson, director of Oxford University’s centre for maritime archaeology, which is publishing the excavation’s findings. “What Herodotus described was what we were looking at.”

Known as The Father of Lies (as well as the Father of History) because of his many fantastical tales, but appears that this one has turned out to be true. As for the book itself, it tells the story of the preservation of Western Civilisation that might have been snuffed out before it had even begun.

More like the Dark Ages

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With education the way it is, neither the cartoon nor this story will any longer have meaning and resonance: Venezuela returns to ‘Middle Ages’ during power outages.

“We make lamps that burn gasoline, or oil, or kerosene — any type of fuel,” explained Lizbeth Morin, 30.

“We’ve returned to the Middle Ages.”

They have gasoline, oil and kerosene so hardly mediaeval. It is instead late nineteenth century, time travellers back about 150 years, but that is insane enough since they brought it on themselves. Unenlightened self-delusion in the form of Democratic Socialism – that is, in the form of politically-sanctioned theft. Could happen anywhere.

Any politician who will not say the words, “capitalism and the free market are good – socialism is bad”, should never be elected. If they will not say these words, they are themselves mediaeval, wishing to return us to the days of an aristocracy and their dependent serfs.