I swear, this is going to make one of the best running gags of all time.
Right out of the gate, we have this entry from NYC, no less.
BREAKING: Hundreds of pro-Palestine protesters have taken over the Brooklyn Museum. They reportedly broke through barricades and assaulted staff.pic.twitter.com/Dbmb3O6PbK
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 31, 2024
So Trump has been convicted of ... what? Seriously, I have no idea what the crimes were. Falsifying records in his payoff to his mistress is a misdemeanor in NY and the statute of limitations for that is 2 years. If it was in pursuit of a Federal election law, NY has no standing to rule on that and the DoJ didn't lift a finger. So what was the crime?
Oh, who cares? This is all great fun. It will allow us to do what we do best, scream at each other like demented toddlers. On the right, people are howling that the Rubicon has now been well and truly crossed. Well, that's partially true. Like the late-stage Roman emperors who killed the families of their rivals when they took power, all elections will now be bloody, at least in a legal sense. As much as I despise Trump, I now truly hope he wins so we get an absolute courtroom pogrom against the Democrats. It would be glorious to watch.
In the meantime, our national debt is a catastrophic $35T, we're pouring billions into the doomed UKR, our elite universities have gone insane with racial hatred, we're butchering and poisoning little girls by the thousands, our birth rate is about 1.65, our young people aren't getting married and even if they did, they can't afford houses, mayors and DAs of major cities are letting violent criminals run wild, we've got 100K+ dying a year of drug ODs, homelessness is rampant in blue cities, black kids are coming out of high school illiterate and on and on and on.
Trump's conviction isn't the Rubicon, or if it is, we've been crossing back and forth over it again and again.
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| I have no idea where we are on this map of our Rubiconery. |
Yes, I know, the videos below aren't colorful reef fish, but I'm drinking my morning coffee, about to pack and leave Grand Cayman, working on my laptop, so bear with me.
Diving yesterday, I had an epiphany. What if the real reason reef fish and other things in life are beautiful is simple joy? What if rainbows, reef fish, hummingbirds and flowers are gifts from God intended to bring pleasure? Their beauty is gratuitous, an unnecessary gift to us, given out of pure love.
I feel like secular evolutionary biologists take all the joy out of what we see by reducing everything to competitive advantage. What if that's only partially true and the beauty is not, in fact, necessary at all? I would bet that ChatGPT and I could generate a world model where there is very little beauty, but still has a highly-efficient ecosystem.
It's like there's a conversation going on like this.
God: Dude! Check out this stingray! I made it super graceful and elegant! Isn't it cool?
Evolutionary biologist: The stingray has evolved to be like this so it could KILL and EAT and MATE and DIE!
KILL EAT MATE DIE!
KILL EAT MATE DIE!God: (face-palms) Sigh.
I think that from now on, I'll see beauty in nature and say, "Thanks, Hombre Grande!"
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| God, listening to a secular, evolutionary biologist. |
Dig this tidbit from Twitter.
We're stuck in a mouldy flat with our 11 children and one toilet - the council has done nothing to help us https://t.co/zq8dEY2rFv pic.twitter.com/UB2gbcFuR0
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) May 26, 2024
England, as has almost all of Europe, has imported a highly fecund, alien and incompatible people into their countries. All of their countries are democracies. The Muslims are having more babies than the Euros, Muslim babies who will end up as Muslim voters. That means the women of Europe have three choices.
If they don't choose #1, there is simply no way to avoid barefootery in the kitchen growing great with child.
The Europeans don't realize it yet, but they are facing the eternal problem of the Jews, save for the Jews in Israel. For millennia, Jews have lived as minorities everywhere. Each year brought a small, but non-zero chance that a pogrom of one kind or another would take place. This comes with the territory when you're a minority.
Taking the Euro case, it's entirely possible that the first instantiation of an Islamic republic in, say, England would be benign. But every year would spin the extremist revolver cylinder and you are mathematically guaranteed that eventually the chamber will contain a bullet.
BANG, your culture and way of life are dead.
Dig the video below. The froggies, in their froggy progressive wisdom, decided that women needed career opportunities in the police force. They did that because almost none of their decision makers have ever been in a fight.
Women in the police and military works in theory and theory is all you have when you have no experience. Anyone who has a problem with this is a bigot.
The underlying ideas that led these two ladies to getting roughed up by a "migrant" who has definitely seen plenty of violence are the same ideas that led to the policy makers importing the "migrants" in the first place. It's all kissy-kissy love-love as far as the eye can see and anyone who didn't think bringing in every 3rd world blood feud made sense was a bigot.
The French police seem to be in trouble with fake asylum seeker. Army will probably be needed soon. pic.twitter.com/23LpKvFuAL
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) May 27, 2024
There is more to overcome. Because the progressives have taken over the education industry and indoctrinated our children into hating the West, you get the scene below. If you want to deport the Muslims, you'll need to start by helping our kids become patriotic again and our men pugnacious.
Shameful Princeton students rush to stop a MEMORIAL DAY parade after spotting American flags coming towards them.
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 26, 2024
Hundreds of activists charged onto the road and sat down while shouting “Free Palestine” at the parade marchers who were honoring fallen service members & veterans. pic.twitter.com/dSQWK0J4YD
The way out is to educate the "educated." Confront them with these facts and demand they come up with a solution. There's only one, very simple, set of choices: get rid of the Muslims while you still can or abandon your ideas of careers for women and get them married and pregnant right away or put on the hijab.
Those three choices boil down to one, really. Do you want to round up and deport Muslims or do you want to bail out on feminism?
Everything else is just window dressing.
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| Winning? |
We're in Grand Cayman for a week, making sure the fish are still here. They are.
I did a wall dive followed by a shallow reef dive yesterday and the reef dive had some fun swim-throughs. The tunnels were single-file affairs and I ended up behind a young lady who was wearing a bikini. That made it awkward for filming as I felt like I was working for Larry Flint's Hustler magazine. No thanks.
After the guided portion was through, I was able to swim around and get some decent, moonless footage.
I've done island trips in Hawaii and the Caribbean probably 20-30 times now and I finally figured out the obvious.
Every time I come to one of these places, I get the feeling I'm being skinned when we go shopping for groceries. I always wonder what the locals do. I keep thinking that I'm trying to cook like I do at home when I should be trying to do what the island residents do. My worries were unjustified.
For all intents and purposes, the islands make nothing. Everything is shipped in by boat. Everyone, local and tourist alike, is buying food made elsewhere. Here on Grand Cayman, there are tiny spots in the grocery stores that sell local produce, but it looks like something that came out of my garden. It's amateur hour farming.
No, the locals are eating frozen pizzas and canned tuna brought in on freighters, just like the tourists. That means I might as well just cook like I do at home, albeit using low-budget ingredients like chicken and pork.
There is a local dish I'm going to try - callaloo. It's a cross between spinach and collards and looks like a ditch weed, which it probably is. They also grow scotch bonnet peppers and okra, but that's about it. On Maui, it's all about the pineapples, here, it's callaloo and peppers. Everything else is the same as what I would buy in San Diego, only with a 50% shipping-related markup.
I actually feel a ton better now that I figured out that little secret. We can shop and cook, relaxing the in the knowledge that all of us are getting skinned in just the same way.
Meanwhile, there are some great roadside jerk chicken places.
Dig this image.
She's a poster child for do-gooders.
That's a screen cap from the World Food Program's video describing how they are working to send supplies to Hamas as it tries to kill as many Jews as possible. The WFP doesn't understand this, they think they are feeding children. That's because the WFP doesn't live in the real world.
This is war. It needs to end quickly. Giving food to Hamas only extends the war. Meanwhile, Cindy McCain, WFP chief, is telling both sides to eat their vegetables and clean their rooms before they go outside to play.
The people of Gaza want to exterminate the Jews. That's why they elected Hamas. That's what every single poll of the population says. That's why they cheered their boys going across the border to rape, murder and torture Jews.
None of that even exists for Cindy. One can just see her five years from now, if Hamas is allowed to survive and carry out their plans, calmly explaining how WFP is sending food trucks into Israel to feed the children orphaned by Hamas' genocide of the Jewish adults. The sight of massive abattoirs, filled with Jewish corpses wouldn't phase her in the least.
It's absolutely baffling. It's the same thing I see when our Church leaders talk about sweetness and love while young women are being poisoned and butchered by the gender maniacs. There's a total disconnect from reality.
This is just more of the same we see in all the blue cities. For the right people, the consequences of their actions should be minimized as much as possible. Shoplifting? Make it a misdemeanor. Assault? No cash bail. Paraglide into a music festival to gang rape Jews? The WFP will make sure your family gets fed.
These are the behaviors of permissive parents taken to a whole new level.
Diversity, equity and inclusion is doomed by its own construction. If everyone is grouped by immutable characteristics and spoils transferred from one group to another on that basis, it's inevitable that conflicts will arise between the groups and those conflicts will be resolved through power struggles, either violent, political or legal.
Witness Hamtramck, MI.
Two Hamtramck, Michigan, commissioners were fired from their positions after they flew a Pride flag on city property.
The Hamtramck City Council on Tuesday voted to remove Russ Gordon and Cathy Stackpoole from the Hamtramck Human Relations Commission.
The Council sent Fox News Digital a statement saying that the commissioners had defied the “rule of law.”
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| Hamas flags are fine. LGBTQWERTY flags are not. |
Thanks to their political power, it's Muslims 1, LGBTQWERTY 0 in Hamtramck.
The Council voted to ban Pride flags, among others, due to opposition from religious groups who disagree with the ideology represented by the symbol...
The entirety of the Hamtramck City Council is Muslim, and approximately 40% of residents were born in foreign countries.
No word yet on how the leaders of the Secular Left plans to intervene in this one to make sure both sides are "Inclusive." That's probably because they don't realize these conflicts were destined to happen from the start or that they're happening at all.
Elsewhere, the #MeToo movement got absolutely body-slammed by Muslim rape gangs in England. Here's a partial rogue's gallery of the gang of gang-rapists from Rotherham where more than 1500 young women were groomed and then gang-raped over a period of 10 years while the politicians, press and police looked the other way.
Muslims 1500, women 0.
In the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, the liberty doesn't extend to women who don't want to be raped by migrants. The Secular Left is seeing to that.
In France women have had enough of being raped by migrants. The sign reads:
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) May 20, 2024
"Foreign rapists, deport."
Two socialists intervene to take their banner off of them. pic.twitter.com/TsXMtHqXRp
French migrants 100 200 500 many, French women 0.
As far as I can tell, when it comes to the hierarchy of intersectionality, the most important diversity of which we must be equitably inclusive is race. Yes, I realize that Muslim isn't a race, but that's too fine a distinction for the Secular Left. Islam is a religion with real ideas and rules and customs and stuff, but that seems too complicated the SLs. Instead, they're seen as people of color.
When it comes to PoC vs. LGBTQWERTY, the PoC win. When it comes to PoC vs. women, the PoC win again.
Just what happens when different shades of the PoC come into conflict, as they are in NYC and Chicago as the "migrants" take lodging, jobs and handouts from the blacks, is still up for grabs. From the looks of it, the "migrants" are going to win that one.
If, as I maintain, Catholicism is the best existing hypothesis for the nature of reality, binding physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, cosmology, ethics, morality, salvation and meaning into a single, consistent whole, then there are elements of it that you can deny without harm, given the proper time frame.
Standing on the top of a 5-story building, you cannot deny gravity for more than a few seconds if you jump off the top onto the street below.
Standing in your apartment bedroom with a woman, man or non-binary furry, you can deny that God has created your body for a purpose that does not involve simply giving in to every candidate orgasm that comes your way for a long time, years even, before you smack onto the ground with a resounding SPLAT!
Hmm.
... is a quote from G. K. Chesterton.
Dig this.
This is Aayden Gallagher. He’s a boy who thinks he’s a girl and just came in 1st place in the women’s 200m Oregon State Championship.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 19, 2024
Listen to the audience’s loud BOOs as they announce him as the winner!
People are sick of this madness! pic.twitter.com/wke0CTHFl6
Online, people are losing their minds over this as well they should. However, most of the anger is misplaced. Yes, he was a middling athlete in the boy's division who "transitioned" into a girl and then stomped his competition, stealing victory from a deserving girl. However, he didn't offer the chance to change his sex to himself. That was done to him. He was promised a happy and rewarding life as a girl and now his rejection by other girls and women is not just public, it has gone viral online.
His life has been utterly destroyed by the sexual degeneracy of the Secular Left. He didn't go into his doctor's office and ask the physician to inject him with poisonous levels of feminine hormones. He didn't ask a surgeon to cut off his hangers.
Likewise, his parents didn't invent this. They didn't come up with the idea that their boy could "transition" into a girl. Ten or fifteen years ago, it wouldn't have been an option because the parents of gay young men had no idea that changing your sex was a possibility.
The parents are guilty of weakness, but we all have those. The Chesterton quote I used for the title of this post isn't a judgment, it's a statement of fact. The parents may feel they've been tolerant, but in actuality, they were weak and allowed sadistic perverts to convince them their son would be happier after some Island of Dr. Moreau action.
It's easy to blame the kid and scream that he's a glory-stealing swine. It's easy to blame the parents for perpetrating this fraud upon the fastest high school girls in Oregon. Those are all misplaced. If the boy had never existed, if his family had never existed, this would still be happening. The people that destroyed this family need to be held to account.
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| Let the trials begin. |
So I posed yesterday's problem - use Spencer Klavan's summary of classic Greek philosophy to analyze an essay on the failures of the Sexual Revolution - to #ChatGPT and got some stunning replies.
ChatGPT is not intelligent in the human sense. It doesn't know what it's saying. However, you couldn't tell from its replies. It did a spectacular job analyzing the essay given Spencer's excellent work. It took only one round to get it to go in the direction I wanted and then it hit line drive after line drive. Here was my original prompt.
I want you to analyze one essay in terms of another. First, I will give you the essay the establishes ground truth, written by Spencer Klavan with great wisdom. Afterwards, I will give you an essay written by an unhappy young lady trying to understand what is happening to her. Then I want you to analyze the young lady's essay given the truth of Spencer's.
The first response was good, but it missed the foundational key. I gave it a nudge in the right direction with my next prompt.
Reroll. The sexual revolution denied the existence of any of these structures. Instead, it posited that each person defined themselves independent of anyone else. The one constant was the biological urge to mate, which the sexual revolution separated from the purpose of mating - the creation and nurturing of new life.
It's replies were outstanding.
Analysis of the Young Lady's Essay in Light of Klavan's Essay
Denial of Intrinsic Structures:
Klavan: Aristotle’s philosophy asserts that form and matter are intrinsically linked, and human beings have inherent purposes embedded within their nature.
Young Lady: The sexual revolution denied these intrinsic structures, suggesting that individuals define themselves independently of any inherent purpose or natural order. This led to a society that dismissed traditional values and norms regarding sexuality and relationships.
Separation of Biological Urge and Purpose:
Klavan: Human desires and actions, including the biological urge to mate, are purposeful and integrated into a larger framework that includes the creation and nurturing of life.
Young Lady: The sexual revolution separated the biological urge to mate from its natural purpose, which is the creation and nurturing of new life. By focusing solely on the physical act of sex without its relational and procreative purposes, the revolution undermined the holistic view of human sexuality.
Misalignment with Natural Purposes:
Klavan: Ignoring the natural purposes embedded in our physical forms leads to a misunderstanding of human nature, resulting in negative consequences.
Young Lady: The sexual revolution’s dismissal of the procreative and relational purposes of sex led to widespread societal issues, such as decreased reproduction rates and increased personal dissatisfaction. This misalignment with human nature has left many people feeling lost and unfulfilled.
Impact on Human Relationships:
Klavan: Aristotle’s view integrates the physical and metaphysical, suggesting that human consciousness and physicality are intertwined and that relationships are part of our natural design.
Young Lady: The sexual revolution’s emphasis on individual freedom and self-definition at the expense of relational bonds eroded the foundation of human relationships. The resulting lack of support and respect for both sexes contributed to the current state of societal disarray and personal misery.
Failure to Acknowledge Human Complexity:
Klavan: Human beings are a complex union of body and soul, and our desires and actions are rooted in this purposeful design.
Young Lady: The sexual revolution oversimplified human sexuality by reducing it to mere physical gratification, ignoring the deeper emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. This failure to acknowledge human complexity has led to a generation struggling with the consequences of broken relationships and unfulfilled lives.
Consequences of Ignoring Traditional Values:
Klavan: Aristotle’s balanced approach respects both the material and spiritual aspects of human existence, offering a framework for ethical living.
Young Lady: The rejection of traditional values and the emphasis on absolute freedom without responsibility has resulted in societal breakdown. The young lady’s reflections reveal a longing for a return to values that honor chastity, marriage, and mutual respect, recognizing their role in fostering human flourishing.
Search for a New Equilibrium:
Klavan: Advocates for a balanced understanding of human nature that integrates our physical and metaphysical aspects.
Young Lady: Calls for a reevaluation of societal norms and a return to an integrated understanding of sexuality that respects both the biological urge and its procreative and relational purposes. This echoes Aristotle's call for living in accordance with our true nature and purposes.
In conclusion, the young lady’s essay highlights the failures of the sexual revolution in its denial of intrinsic structures and purposes in human nature. By separating the biological urge to mate from its natural purposes, the revolution created a societal framework that is misaligned with human nature, leading to widespread dissatisfaction and societal breakdown. Applying the insights from Klavan's exposition of Aristotle, we see that the path forward requires a reintegration of these elements, honoring both the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence and aligning societal norms with our natural purposes.
It's not actually intelligent, but with nudging from someone who is decently well-read and has spent some time pondering these topics on his own, it can produce very good results.
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| All your tradwives are belong to us. |
Recently, I read an excellent essay by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright called Losing the Sexual Revolution. She's a woman in despair, looking at the fallen Jenga tower of modern romance and relationships. Here's a tidbit.
It is finally official. We have lost the sexual revolution...
Watching all the peoples, around the globe, who bought into Feminism and Free Love stop reproducing is one of the greatest proofs of the existence of the Powers of Darkness I have ever seen.
I look at the result, the lack of support for men, the misery of women, the unhappiness of children, and I throw up my hands and admit defeat.
I surrender.
But I find myself left wondering, what now?
How do we go back to a society that honors chastity and marriage?
How do we go forward to a society that honors these things and has respect for both sexes? ...
I remember the outrage and arrogance with which all of we college women objected to the very idea that we could not make up our own minds, that we did not have the “freedom” to carry on with a professor or whomever we wanted.
We believed we had total what is now called agency.
What the sexual revolution did was treat sex as if it were separable from the rest of our lives. By blowing up traditional mores, it forced each person to develop a theory of life on their own, from scratch. It was a materialist revolution, one that thought that our physical nature, which includes orgasms, was all there was.
I also finished an excellent book, How to Save the West by Spencer Klavan recently. I listened to it on Audible and it was so good, I bought the hardbound version so I could go back and read certain passages and mull them over. The pertinent one for this post is given at the bottom of the blog post, but here is the payoff bit.
So the materialists are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We do not have fears and desires and loves only because our bodies produce certain chemicals. It is just as true, and more essential, to say that our bodies produce those chemicals because their natural purpose is to live a conscious life. "If the eye were an animal, its soul would be sight," wrote Aristotle. "The eye is the matter of sight; if it loses its sight, then it is no longer an eye.... So too an animal is the soul and the body," and thus "the soul is not separable from the body."
Orgasms, as wonderful as they are, are produced by the body for a purpose. They aren't simply there. When the connection between matter, soul and purpose was blown up, all kinds of downstream effects got started, one of which was the birth dearth.
Countries all over the developed world are now experiencing birthrates well below replacement rates. The US now has a birth rate of 1.65 or so where replacement is about 2.05. Japan, Korea and China have already begun to see their populations fall.
All over the world, governments are panicking about the effect this will have on social programs. Lots of old people getting benefits with few young people paying taxes spell disaster for government budgets. As a result, plenty of countries have tinkered with their tax codes and benefits trying to get more babies. None of it has worked because none of them are addressing the real problem.
When we discarded a holistic view of the world where the things we did had purpose and objective moral value, we made having babies a strictly material decision. The sexual revolution and it's allied materialistic worldview blew up the idea that continuing your family line was important. It also destroyed the connection between sex and relationships. The collapse in our birth rates is due to purposelessness, not tax codes.
Materialists cannot provide the general population with either purpose or a system of values. All they can do is what they did - atomize society. As a result we now have young women lamenting the loss of romantic love and family.
If only someone had told us there was a purpose to our bodies and the ways men and women relate through sex.
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| BOOM. "I'll just leave this little pamphlet here describing my Theology of the Body. You may read it at your leisure ..." |
I gave only the payoff above, but here's a longer selection that does a better job spelling out what I'm trying to say.
It is not that Aristotle denied the existence of realities which are more than physical. Rather, he rejected the notion that such realities are in any sense "out there." He believed there was no special plane where the good, the true, and the beautiful floated in pure perfection. The world into which Socrates gazed was not some realm beyond, where Plotinus might hope to escape and leave his body behind. For Aristotle there is only this world, in which, though everything is made of matter, there are certain truths about matter that are not material.
Take, for instance, a circle: we may draw a circle in ink, or carve one out of bronze. It is a circle just the same—the shape exists independently of its material. But you have never seen, nor can you even imagine, an immaterial circle--a circle made of nothing. When you try to picture one, you may find yourself visualizing a plain black circle against a white background. But then all you have done is picture one version of a circle by drawing it in black ink on imaginary paper in your head. "Thoughts are not images, but they never take place without images," writes Aristotle in his study of the soul. Things like circles are not bound by space and time, but neither are they beyond space and time. They are distinct from matter, but they exist within matter wherever we find or think of them.
Take this idea further. Imagine a sculptor who carves two sculptures of the same man: one out of bronze, and another out of marble. The matter—in Greek the hule, or "stuff"—is different. But the shape—the morphe—is the same. This is what forms were like for Aristotle: less "ideas" with independent existence in a far-off world than "shapes" into which stuff is carved.
From there Aristotle worked out a system of four "causes" (aitiai), or ways of explaining why things are what they are. The "stuff" itself is one cause: the material cause. Without a hunk of bronze or marble there could be no sculpture. But there could be no sculpture without a plan for its shape, either. This is the formal cause: the bronze is molded in a particular way, and no other way, because of the outline the sculptor has in his mind for it. That means the sculptor's art itself is another kind of cause—the efficient cause, the force that acts on the stuff to shape it into a form. But why does the sculptor choose to do so at all? That is the last cause, the "final" cause. The sculpture is being made for a reason—to decorate a temple or to celebrate the glory of man. This is its telos, its purpose or reason for being.
Speaking very roughly, we are also like that sculpture. We are neither a lump of inert stuff, nor a magical ghost floating through space inside a meat sack. We are blood and bone and sinew, given shape by an organizing principle; we are matter arranged in just such a way that it is self-aware. That consciousness, what Jerome called the divine spark, is neither accidental by-product of our physical existence nor a dreamlike self which deigns to operate a body of which it has no need. Instead, consciousness is the very thing that our bodies exist to do.
So the materialists are looking through the wrong end of the telescope. We do not have fears and desires and loves only because our bodies produce certain chemicals. It is just as true, and more essential, to say that our bodies produce those chemicals because their natural purpose is to live a conscious life. "If the eye were an animal, its soul would be sight," wrote Aristotle. "The eye is the matter of sight; if it loses its sight, then it is no longer an eye.... So too an animal is the soul and the body," and thus "the soul is not separable from the body."
The gulf between red and blue is growing every day. Dig this charming exchange between a UC Davis professor and a student.
NEW: The pro-Palestine protester who told @bourne_beth2345 “put a gun in your mouth you piece of sh*t” has been identified as @ucdavis Professor Seeta Chaganti.
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 13, 2024
I wonder what @ucdavis thinks of their professor telling people to kiII themselves and behaving like this. pic.twitter.com/HdEzkC67a0
I looked up dear, little Seeta and found this.
Seeta Chaganti joined the faculty of the UC Davis English department in 2001. She specializes in Old and Middle English poetry and its intersections with material culture. Her first book was The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Her second book, Strange Footing (Chicago, 2018) argues that to medieval audiences, poetic form was a multimedia experience shaped by encounters with dance. In this work, she proposes a new method of reenacting medieval dance that draws upon experiences of watching contemporary dance. Her current project, tentatively entitled "Carceral Angels: An Abolitionist History of the Sheriff," traces a long history of the shrieval office from pre-Conquest England to modern America. It argues that the earliest days of English law forged the triangulation of violence, whiteness, and property that obstructs liberation in Anglophone modernity.
Chaganti has served as a Trustee of the New Chaucer Society and a Councillor of the Medieval Academy of America. She is currently an Executive Board Member of Race before Race and a member of Medievalists of Color.
Emphasis mine.
The earliest days of English law forged something involving whiteness? How can you define whiteness in a country that is 100% white?
If you think that's lunacy, dig this: Dance, Institution, Abolition.
Antiracist commitments—in medieval studies and elsewhere—are incomplete without a commitment to abolitionist principles. These principles involve the dismantling of police, prisons, and many other institutions fostering the interests of carcerality, property protection, and racial capitalism. This essay encourages scholars of medieval dance to explore abolitionist horizons because, it argues, the study of medieval dance requires the development of three capacities also integral to the abolitionist project: 1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks. These characteristics could help scholars of dance confront medieval studies and mobilize it to make not just the field but also the world a place of freedom, thriving, and mutual care.
Again, if the place is 100% white, the whole antiracist thing becomes, err, problematic.
So she's convinced that her delusional fantasies about medieval England are real and she's telling a student to blow her brains out because the student is filming her during a protest. That's some serious psychotic sociopath action right there. Well done, Seeta!
Meanwhile, in Dixie, order is being at least partially restored to the mental institutions that masquerade as our universities.
The board of trustees at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, voted unanimously on Monday in favor of disbanding its diversity, equity, and inclusion program and diverting the millions of dollars in funding toward campus security, according to a report.
The UNC trustees’ decision to redirect $2.3 million in DEI funding came amid tumultuous anti-Israel protests on campus and growing backlash against DEI nationwide, the Raleigh News & Observer reported on Monday.
David Boliek, chairman of the UNC board, told the outlet that he believes "there’s administrative bloat in the university," adding that "any cuts in administration and diverting of dollars to rubber-meets-the-road efforts like public safety and teaching is important."
It's a pretty safe bet that the money spent on teaching won't go to medieval dance instructors howling about the whiteness of Chaucer and his pals.
So we've all got a choice to make. We can live in states whose universities are peopled by psychotic race-obsessed sociopaths or ones that are on the road to racial colorblindness and order.
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| I wish I was in the land of cotton, rational thought is not forgotten ... |
I just got back from a sprint to Seattle. It was grueling, painful and beautiful.
Our oldest son lives in Seattle. A few years back, we brought him a Korean Mastiff puppy he had acquired from someone in the family. Korean Mastiffs are huge and even as a pup, the brute was too large to take on a plane, so wife kitteh and I drove him up there. It was a total grind without much sleep. Puppies don't let you sleep, after all.
Fast forward to today, and the dog, now full-grown had taken ill. For the last year or so, oldest son kitteh has been run ragged by his sick dog. He did everything he could for it, but working full time and taking care of a chronically ill dog proved to be too much for him. He didn't have the heart to put the dog down for a moderate illness and he couldn't bring himself to take him to the pound. When the opportunity came up to return the monstrous beast to his original family, we jumped at it.
Or rather, I jumped at it. Oldest son kitteh was too exhausted to jump at anything. I flew up there on Friday night and on Saturday morning, we were on the road in a rented Ford SUV. Driving with an unhappy and exhausted son and a huge, sick dog may have it's own pleasures, but whatever those may be escapes me. We made it to Sacramento the first night and I had arranged a hotel not in zombieland and not filled with roaches that still accepted large dogs.
Success!
Well, until the dog woke up at 0215. At that point, being a morning person, I was awake. I knew that I wasn't going back to sleep and this was as much energy as we were going to have all day, so by 0245, we were wheels rolling heading south.
If you had asked me 6 months ago to plan a perfect weekend, it would have involved Gulf oysters in Alabama. It wouldn't have, in a million years, involved driving a sick dog and a heartsick young man down I-5 at 0330.
It was one of the happiest moments of my life. While the dog slept in the back and son kitteh slept in the passenger seat, I grinded it out. As I watched the sky in the east grow light, some 3 hours into the trip that morning, I knew I was doing what God wanted me to do.
I was the jigsaw puzzle piece that fit. It felt like that. I was giving love to a dog who was going to have a chance at a healthy life. I was allowing a son to have some peace and rest in his life after the trip. Wife kitteh was tearful with love for the sacrifice I had made without complaint.
But it wasn't a sacrifice. It was joy. It was the joy of doing what the Big Man wanted me to do in that particular moment. Now, at home, drinking a hazy double IPA while I type, I'm probably not doing what God wants me to do, but in that one, shining, exhausting, grinding moment, I was.
Lose yourself in Him and you will find joy. In surrendering yourself and forgoing your own pleasures for others, you find total fulfillment.
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| I need to learn how to take photos as I drive. The AI image doesn't do justice to the view I had. |
Here within the Catican Compound, we feed half the birds in Tierrasanta with our array of birdfeeders. Our favorite is a tall tube feeder with multiple perches going up the sides. It's wonderful when the finches encrust it, nomming and cheeping.
It's a mess when the doves go at it. In the video below, watch all the seeds sprayed out of the feeder as the doves lurch and stumble their way through lunch, the little swine.
The doves waste so much of the food that we have the fill the thing at least twice a day. We've tried a feeder that has a mesh screen around it, but the little birds didn't like it because, while it kept out the doves, being inside the screen made the finches feel trapped and vulnerable.
Outside of your family, with what living thing have you had the longest relationship?
For me, it's a cast iron plant. Yes, I am that pathetic. I've had this character in my life for 43 years, having rescued it from certain death outside a friend's dorm room. It's lived in a pot the whole time. It got root-bound ages ago, but I never planted it in the ground until yesterday.
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| 43 years and I haven't bothered to give it a name. |
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| It was horribly root bound because while I kept it alive, I never got around to re-planting it in a bigger pot. |
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| Finally! It's in the ground and can spread and thrive. I need to go through my filing cabinets and find the to-do list from 40 years ago and check off "Put cast iron plant in the ground." |
Yes, life here at the Catican Compound is one hair-raising thrill after another.
Intro for Newbies:
I'm a Catholic who goes to Mass every week. I live in San Diego, one of the wimpiest dioceses in the Church. Sitting through each week's sermon, I've identified 3 types.
- God is love
- Forgive others
- Care for the less fortunate
I lump all these together under the category of kissy-kissy love-love. There's no edge to any of them. It's all flaccid sweetness all the time. It makes me want to vomit.
We had another kissy-kissy love-love sermon in church today. It was all good though, because it was 1st Communion for a bunch of kids. The deacon did a really nice job.
Still, I sat and ruminated while he talked to the kids at the first grade level.
It's not the love, it's the lack of villains. I just turned on a Jordan Peterson podcast to hear while I spread some bark in the garden when this idea hit me and I had to knock out a quick blog post.
The kissy-kissy love-love stuff all assumes there are no villains. In all of our lives, there are real villains. The drug dealers who sold to my brothers, the LGBTQWERTY influencers who preyed on my daughter, Muslim gangs who groomed thousands of little, British girls and then gang-raped them, etc.
It's not that kissy-kissy love-love doesn't have a place, it's that it only describes a small portion of the real world. Real villains call for real men to fight them. The adventure of life for men is battling villainy and protecting our women and children. As Jordan has said many times, that's the call to men demanding manhood from them. It's why I find the kissy-kiss love-love stuff so infuriatingly saccharine.
Huge swaths of my life have been torn to pieces by true villainy. I've fought it as best I can, failing sometimes, succeeding others. Kissy-kissy love-love never worked against true villainy. It was never even vaguely applicable.
I love stories of adventure. I love the Arthurian legends. Knights in shining armor fighting for beautiful damsels calls to me. As Andrew Klavan might say, it is the archetypal masculine story, the one we all want to live out in real life. The villains exist and so do the damsels. The call to adventure is there. I'd just like a little acknowledgement of the existence of villains by the Church.
One of the tiny damsels in my children's liturgy group came up to me after Mass and gave me a drawing she had made just for me during Mass. I was so touched that I teared up. Little Annabelle got to the old man.
God bless the little Annabelles out there. There are real villains out there who want to do them harm. They are the ones real men would lay down their lives to protect. There's adventure in that.
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| Cat would approve. |
Something dawned on me yesterday that I need to write down so I remember it. That's why I'm inflicting it on you. It's all about my needs, man. I don't care about anyone but me!
Hmm. I said the quiet part out loud again, didn't I? Oh well.
I rant all the time about the "God is love, love is love, kissy-kissy love-love" emphasis within the Catholic Church. It's a justification for cowardice, passivity and surrender to the modern culture. If you don't stand up for what you believe, no one can ever attack you. Just go with "kissy-kissy love-love" and you'll be safe and your tummy won't hurt.
If your wife or daughter is being raped right in front of you, should you "let go and let God?" Should you pray? Should you wait for the Holy Spirit to change the heart of the rapist? Should you softly talk about how God is love?
I doubt that even the squishiest of progressive Catholics would say that. They'd all say that you should physically intervene immediately.
OK, so we've now established an act and a time frame under which aggression is necessary and morally right. What if the rape is going to happen 10 minutes from now? What if, instead of a rape, it's one of those random punches to the head so popular in NYC right now?
Where do aggressive, protective responses stop and the kissy-kissy love-love begin? Under what conditions do you revert to your preferred state of passivity and surrender?
The example illustrates that morality is a hybrid of love and aggression. Love without aggression, which is what we have now, is a recipe for losing.
I was at an aquarium a long time ago and they had a tank with a school of neon tetras and a single, larger fish. The neons maintained a minimum distance from the big guy. It was like the larger fish had a force field around it which repelled the neons. In reality, the tiny brains of the neons were executing a simple program.
If (distanceToFish > min) then doNothing();
That's the program we're running. So long as your wife isn't being raped, we can execute our default behavior which is doing nothing. "Let go and let God" is pretty similar to "Do nothing."
My life is spotted with tragedies which arose from moral collapse. Both of my brothers died as drug addicts. I have a special, err, love for people who advocate for legalized drugs, for the entertainers who glorified it and the people who sell drugs. My daughter's trans disaster has been well-documented here.
Those are concrete examples of lives being destroyed over a period of time a wee bit longer than my rape example above. Still, the results were just as devastating. Like the neon tetras who did nothing so long as the big fish wasn't a threat, we did nothing until my brothers were addicted and my daughter was injecting testosterone into her thigh. By then it was too late.
This is my problem with the kissy-kissy love-love thing. It can't cope with people who are committed to doing evil. It absolves you of any responsibility to actively, aggressively fight evil. If you let go and let God and the evil still happens, it's God's fault. You can go limp, let evil crush those around you all while feeling morally justified.
Abstract
With the growing acceptance of transgender individuals, the number of gender affirmation surgeries has increased. Transgender individuals face elevated depression rates, leading to an increase in suicide ideation and attempts. This study evaluates the risk of suicide or self-harm associated with gender affirmation procedures...
Results
Individuals who underwent gender-affirming surgery had a 12.12-fold higher suicide attempt risk than those who did not (3.47% vs. 0.29%, RR 95% CI 9.20-15.96, p < 0.0001). Compared to the tubal ligation/vasectomy controls, the risk was 5.03-fold higher before propensity matching and remained significant at 4.71-fold after matching (3.50% vs. 0.74%, RR 95% CI 2.46-9.024, p < 0.0001) for the gender affirmation patients with similar results with the pharyngitis controls.
Conclusion
Gender-affirming surgery is significantly associated with elevated suicide attempt risks, underlining the necessity for comprehensive post-procedure psychiatric support.
Emphasis mine.
So when you cut off the body parts of emotionally confused young people, they get super-dee-duper unhappy? No freaking kidding. Color me shocked.
I know that my blog posts often focus on the Catholic Church's response to these kinds of things, but I can't think of another organization who has a vested interest in Truth and who will collapse without it. Sorry, the scientists won't fail without the truth.
See: Lysenkoism, profitability for researchers of.
In addition to not understanding that we're at war and losing badly in a 3-way fight with the Secular Left and the Muslims, we presume that everyone around us is restrained by Christian morality. They aren't. I found this paper via Libs of TikTok who had this pithy summary. "Everything about gender ideology is a lie."
Even she isn't drawing the right conclusion. It's not just the gender perverts that are lying, it's everyone.
See: Covid masking, completely understood uselessness of.
See: Trump-Russian collusion, impossibility of due to Russian reliance of petroleum exports.
See and see and see.
These aren't isolated instances, they are a pile of dead songbirds in an anthracite mine.
Get it through your heads: the Secular Left isn't constrained by your moral code. Lying is not only acceptable, it's admirable if it gets you what you want. Dig this from the new CEO of NPR.
NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on the truth:
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 17, 2024
“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Reposting this because the original poster deleted the video. pic.twitter.com/h9kqJWV3p3
On this blog, I've pulled threads on education and race and come face-to-face with the fact that blacks are coming out of high schools illiterate in cities where systemic racism is an impossibility because the place is run top to bottom by blacks. Global Warming Climate Change may or may not be happening, but if it's CO2 driving it, you aren't going to stop it because China, India, Russia, Africa, Indonesia and plenty of other places simply aren't going to go green. Lie after lie after lie.
I recently listened to a podcast by a therapist who focuses on trans issues. Interviewing the woman who broke the WPATH Files, where the World Professional Association for Transgender Health was shown to have been saying that informed consent was impossible to each other, but telling everyone else that informed consent was what everyone achieved. It was all a lie because the kids simply couldn't comprehend what the risks were.
Then I found out that there is massive overlap between WPATH and the Endocrine Society leadership members. That's why we get headlines like this.
Endocrine Society alarmed at criminalization of transgender medicine
The Endocrine Society condemns the directive by Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordering the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate any reported instances of Texas children receiving gender-affirming care as “child abuse.” This policy rejects evidence-based transgender medical care and will restrict access to care for teenagers experiencing gender incongruence or dysphoria.
For the longest time, I couldn't understand how the Endocrine Society got hornswoggled by the charlatans at WPATH. Now it's completely obvious. They're the same pack of charlatans. Everyone is lying. Everyone.
... is the wrong question. The right question is why did you think they wouldn't lie? The answer is that you assumed that everyone implicitly clings to Christian morality. Lying is wrong. Care for the less fortunate. Don't steal. And on and on.
That is not their moral basis. For all intents and purposes they don't have one. The closest thing would be paganism. All bets are off.
Go back and watch the NPR chick. Why shouldn't she lie? Lying gets her what she wants and that's all that matters. Objective morality is a myth for the superstitious Bible-clingers.
This is what happens when you're losing the war. We control less and less territory and the Secular Left controls more and more. You can no longer count on any portion of your culture being maintained as it had been in the past.
... will be the topic of future posts. I'm actually fairly optimistic. It's just when I find out things like the WPATH - Endocrine Society thing, I think of my daughter and how my diocese couldn't be bothered to even whisper a syllable of support. Instead, it wet its pants being radically inclusive.
Not to worry. The Truth is a powerful force. It's a weapon WPATH and NPR don't possess.
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| "So that's what happens when you knock the pagans' idol into the fire. Who knew?" thought Cat who knew all along. |
See if you can derive the production process implicit in this video.
School faculty at Fordham University is linking arms to guard the encampment.
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 1, 2024
Just look at them. It really says it all.
pic.twitter.com/XSK8URopEc
Here's what I've got.
End product: radicalized students who are protesting in favor of a genocidal, antisemitic group who recently committed atrocities on a massive scale.
Somehow, the students got to the point where paragliding into a music festival to gang rape women and murder men is acceptable* because the victims were Jews. What led to this?
We don't have any data suggesting that the American adult population has a large number of Nazis in it. Our entertainment industry isn't issuing revivals of the 1930s German classics like Die Rothschilds. Whatever the current Teletubbies clone is, meant to stupify toddlers, the sweet, little characters aren't goosestepping around the screen giving stiff-armed salutes. Our little league teams aren't named after Luftwaffe aces and, in our soccer leagues, the girls aren't wearing Hamas armbands.
Hmm. It had to come from somewhere else. Who else has both the access and authority required to indoctrinate our kids into a culture of deranged racial hatred? Watch that video again, carefully. There might be a clue in it.
Across the right, movers and shakers are sharing videos of cops thumping protestors, handcuffing protestors, putting protestors into perp conga lines and other delightfully satisfying cinematic moments where the spoiled, lefty kids finally get a spanking. Yay! Spank them harder, boys in blue! Ha ha ha!
Arresting the kids is the cultural hygiene equivalent of eating cotton candy. Or maybe it's the equivalent of killing individual ants. Maybe it's killing individual ants who are feasting on cotton candy. Whatever it is, it's practically empty of value and almost pointless.
It's not the kids we should be arresting, it's the teachers. Until we do that, bug-eyed, racist college students are the ultimate renewable resource.
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| Get rid of these and there will be another pack of them infesting our colleges next year. |
Sorry, Ohioan. I couldn't get a fan boat for love nor money. I did get this image, though.
Meanwhile, as BobbyLee and the General rescue Maxine "Max" Gams, Cat has decided he has had quite enough of the Man with the Golden Cat's henchmen, thank you very much. He's swatted a switch and released poison gas, gas that is, of course, harmless to cats.
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| Good Lord, why can't they just die quietly? These people are intolerable. |
