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Why I Prefer To Travel When It’s Cold

Travels

In all my travels around Britishland, I’d never been to the little town of Cheddar, whence the eponymous cheese is derived. So yesterday, as it was warm and not raining, I decided to rectify that with a little day trip to check the place out.

The route from Free Market Towers encompasses, as one would imagine, scenes of indescribable pastoral beauty: rolling hills, freshly-harvested fields or else emerald-green expanses populated by sheep and/or cattle, stone walls, the occasional stately home à la FM Towers, and occasionally an actual castle or two. (More on that topic anon.) Here’s an example, one of hundreds, of a church in an otherwise unknown little town:

On and on I went (no main roads on my travels, no sir), until the scenery suddenly changed: into a gorge I swept, with towering cliffs and tight corners on the twisty little road:

…but here’s why I prefer to travel when it’s either late autumn or even winter.

You see, because it’s the summer school holidays Over Here, about a zillion people had had the same idea as I, with the subsequent dolorous result:

That was only one of about a dozen car parks scattered along the road that wound through the gorge — and almost everyone had walked the mile or two down the road into Cheddar itself. If you can imagine the Boardwalk on the Jersey Shores over a midsummer weekend, you’ll get the picture. I couldn’t stop to buy cheese — in fact, I couldn’t even stop to get a picture of the mayhem, so crowded was the place.

So in foul humor I retraced my steps out of Cheddar and back, more or less, along the same way I’d come.

Because you see, en route I had been rather taken with a tiny little village named Norton St. Philip, which had not one, but two interesting pubs on its narrow streets. I picked the George:

…because a.) there was lots of parking and b.) because Observant Readers will note the presence of the “Wadworth” brewery sign, which meant the wondrous beverage 6X (which I sorely needed after the disappointment of Cheddar). I discovered reason c.), by the way, as I walked into the place:

So: heritage, hangings, history and 6X all in one place — like I was going to pass up that little combination — and the George wasn’t crowded either, so I could sit in undisturbed peace and quiet and enjoy my lunch of lamb’s liver with bacon and mashed potato, all washed down by a glass of refreshing 6X.

Heaven.

And on the topic of heaven, here’s a view of the church at Norton St. Philip, just below the pub and across the village green (and it’s even more beautiful than my humble pic suggests):

I’ll be back — but only when it’s colder. The George has this huge fireplace in the pub, you see, and rooms with bathrooms, so I won’t need to stay sober to drive home. Hell, I might just call The George home and never leave Norton St. Philip…

Back Home

General, Travels

…at Free Market Towers, where little has changed, of course. There may be a new servant or two, but I haven’t seen them yet — no doubt, I’ll make their acquaintance at the next flogging.

Speaking of which, a friend sent me a genuine hippo-hide sjambok as a present, which of course I’m going to pass on to the Free Markets.

The servants are not going to enjoy this…

Men Only

Men & Women

I was sitting in a bar last night in Bath, trying out a pint or so of Bath’s local bitter (Gem; not too bad, but not 6X), when I became aware of loud young male voices, and lots of cursing, with what can only be called “violent language” — you know, “The next time I see him, I’m going to fuck him up”, that kind of thing.

I was only a little perturbed, because there were quite a few older women in the place, and they were visibly discomfited by both the volume and the language. Now ordinarily I would have got up and gone over to the lads and reminded them of their manners, and asked them to turn down both the volume and their fucking language because there were ladies in the house, but suddenly I realized that I was in the wrong, not them; and what was happening was the fault of modern society. Here’s why.

You see, young men are essentially wild animals, and when they’re in the company of other young men they become still more so — ’twas ever thus, and there will always be male posturing and bad behavior. Note the following little fracas between a group of adolescent male lions, rough-housing and doing essentially what the young men in the bar in Bath were doing.

Now according to the photographer, after a while they simmered down, and wandered away as though nothing had happened (which it hadn’t), and no doubt went off to kill a zebra or find a lioness to mate with — you know, guy stuff.

And this is why we need men-only bars.

Men-only bars provide an environment for young men to be themselves — i.e. to act like assholes — and basically blow off the adolescent testosterone steam building up behind their ears. It’s loud, and rude, and antisocial, but older men look at that, shrug and ignore it because they too were once young men and so they understand what’s happening: essentially, a harmless activity. Of course there may be the occasional fight, because that’s what young men do, and the only way to deal with it is for the older men to toss them out of the bar and let the young idiots finish it off where little or no damage will ensue.

But then came feminism, where men-only bars were regarded as Bastions Of Male Patriarchy or some such silliness, and bars were opened up to women, changing the dynamics of the social setting and denying to young men what was once an accepted outlet for adolescent behavior.

I’m not interested in arguments that “young men should learn to behave” — a typical  female approach when they encounter a situation they don’t like, which is to change the rules thereof and by doing so, altering someone else’s behavior but not their own. The plain fact of the matter is that this will never change, and taking away a place where young men can misbehave simply means they’re going to do it elsewhere — e.g. frat houses in college — where there is no elder-male supervision. And we’ve all seen how that works out.

In the larger sense of things, this is also an argument for an all-male armed services — at least, the part at the sharp end — where the violent nature of young men can be channeled into a worthwhile activity like killing Commies, Nazis and other assorted filth — and I hate to say it, but adding G.I. Janes to the mix is going to make that worthwhile activity less efficient.

I am likewise unmoved by the whines of feministicals who want to get involved in male behavior — “Piss off and leave us alone,” is my typical response — and I really think that we as a society have become dysfunctional because of the enforced mixing of the sexes in areas outside of relationships and mating.

I don’t know how to reverse this foolishness, or if it’s even possible. But I’d like to see men-only bars and pubs reappear as a starting-point.

Speed Bump

Culture, Politics

Via Insty, I was reading this article which talks about how the First Amendment is designed to protect unpopular speech, and everyone’s speech in general, when this little sentence stopped me in my tracks (with my emphasis on the part which did so):

For White and Czjetanovic, being white nationalists has no impact on their ability to do their jobs. Had they held other jobs in which their white nationalism would directly affect their job performance, perhaps the internet mob would be justified in its quest to take heads (white nationalists shouldn’t be teaching WWII history to impressionable middle school students, for example).

Here’s where this little thing falls apart. We conservatives have been aghast at how “impressionable middle school students” have, for decades now, been taught by Frankfurt-School socialists, who have been busy with their little Gramscian plan of inculcating Marxist principles and Weltanschauung into our kids — and now I’m supposed to bristle at the thought of white nationalists teaching in middle-school classrooms?

The author (Bethany Daniel) has done precisely what she argues against in her article: she’s conflated white supremacists with Western Civ devotees (like myself). Frankly, if a white nationalist teacher kept herself in check and kept the racist shit to herself while extolling the value of Western Civilization when teaching history to middleschoolers, I’d rather see that than some vapid socialist twerpette interpreting WWII as a struggle between the patriotic proletariat of the glorious Soviet Union and the oppressive capitalist systems of the West.

The difference is that socialists are quite unapologetic about their propagandizing — even while teaching impressionable middle school students — while we Western Civ boosters have to be constantly on the defensive about our position lest we offend someone in the Perpetually Offended Set because racism.

Screw that. Given that bias is inevitable in any teaching system, the goal should be to stop not just white nationalists from teaching, but Marxists as well. Sadly, the education hierarchy in the West is only doing half the job.