The Task Before Us

The task before conservatives, is not to conserve. Whatever we thought we were conserving, it has already been lost. Our task is to rebuild.

Observe, for instance, the Rule of Law. It may be obvious to conservatives that as far as the law is concerned, the task is to preserve the influence of the common law tradition, while holding the line on the only sensible method of interpreting constitutional and statutory law: to decipher, based on the text and the historical time in which the text was written, its original meaning, and to regard this meaning as the law’s only binding sense. But in fact, this understanding of the law was already lost 50 years ago when the court made abortion legal.

When the great Justice Antonin Scalia restored true interpretation to the court, he was not conserving anything. He was rebuilding.

We must do the same.

As we rebuild, we must remember that what was lost can never be recaptured as it was. We can never go back. A man cannot return to his mother’s womb to be born again, and at the entrance to paradise lost there stands and angel barring our return with a flaming sword.

What we rebuild, we build new. But if we build rightly, and well, we can perhaps breath into the nostrils of this new thing the life of the lost, so that it is animated by the same life-giving spirit.

Illiteracy and Indecency at CNN

This article featured on CNN is, in so many ways, a perfect example of our decline.

It hardly deserves mention that although it is a news site and not a Playboy magazine, it discusses in shameless detail the most intimate details of female sexual pleasure. Any mask of decency dissolved long ago in the acid bath of modern culture.

The article is adorned with a gallery-style listicle "10 Reasons to Have Sex Tonight" that features 3 gay couples (out of 10), a tenfold overrepresentation of the 3% of the population they comprise. And, the gallery has only one image with a baby, reminding us that "sex can also make a baby. And that can be good for you," a perfunctory if not grudging mention of the essential element of sex, i.e. procreation. The other 10 reasons are predictably selfish: better memory, lower stress, burning calories, et cetera. As if modern man is so encumbered by practicality and self restraint that he must be convinced by medical science to have sex. The propagandizing surrounding sex continues apace.

It is not just the moral decline on full display here, but also the linguistic decline. The author contrasts "intercourse", penetrative sex, with "outercourse", non penetrative sex. He appears to think that he is being cleaver by contrasting "inter-" and "outer-" as if they opposites. But of course, they are not. "Inter-" does not mean "inner" it means "between". It only accidentally resembles "inner" and is no more related to "inner" than the verb "inter", i.e. to bury, is to "intercourse". The opposite of "intercourse" would be "intracourse" which would have to be a neologism for masturbation, though obviously not for the mutual masturbation the author is so earnestly and graphically advocating. 

This man is older than I am by a decade or two, and he has a Ph.D. to my M.S., but did no one teach him basic Latin and Greek roots? Or basic decency? Apparently not.

 

 

 

Civilizational Retirement

The problem with democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders, and indeed everyone who believes that a large welfare state is a moral imperative of western countries, is that they take for granted the wealth that makes socialist programs possible. That staggering wealth was produced by industrial and post-industrial capitalist economies. Once socialism is adopted, it will be a few short generations before that wealth is spent.

This pattern is natural. Humans work all their adult lives, scrimping and saving and sweating and bleeding, and if they are successful they can have a nice comfortable retirement. Socialism springs from the same impulse: just as the old seek comfort in their twilight years, so old, successful civilizations seek retirement, and encourage in their population lifestyles suited to a slow, cushy decline. Witness the advocacy for small families, career women, and all around the disinterest in producing enough children to forestall population decline. 

Socialism is civilizational retirement. And western societies are ready for it. They have allowed the vitality to seep from Christendom; it's bones have grown frail, it's eyes dull, it's womb barren.

The socialist fantasy is that this scenario is sustainable. But it isn't. Retirement is only ever a prelude. Those who advocate socialism are advocating for the death of civilization.

 

 

The Self-Dhimmitization of the West

Under Muslim rule through the ages, non Muslims were afforded the status of dhimmi, a euphemism that literally means "protected people" but in actuality has meant second class citizen. Native populations were dhimmitized forcefully by the violent subjugation at the hands of their Muslim conquerors.

Now, the people of the west are self-dhimmitizing, as they actively will the transformation of their countries into Muslim lands, not by the sword, but by immigration. Look at Piers Morgan, attacking Tommy Robinson, while demanding that Robinson put down the Koran and show it respect:

Robinson attempts to make the point that while not all Muslims are bad people, Islam itself is a bad ideology, and he has the quotes, from the Koran, to back up that claim. Piers Morgan, already a dhimmi by willing submission, is clearly as ignorant as a stump, but considers it his sacred duty, nevertheless, to defend Islam and it's prophet and holy book, not by facts and argument, but by shouting down one of the few people willing to tell the truth.

Tommy Robinson is seeking a peaceful solution to the escalating violence in the west, and Piers Morgan, and those like him, are already so inured to their new masters, that they insist on defending the indefensible until Britain is ruled by a Caliphate.