Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Opinions (reprinted from August 14, 2007)

Deep Thoughts

One of the many epithets hurled my way is that I’m an opinionated man.

Guilty as charged.

I’ve often thrown around statements like “the best cheese ever made” and “the world’s greatest beer/brandy” (Wadworth’s 6X and Richelieu, respectively), and I would have thought it obvious that these were a.) opinions and b.) made after many years of careful (and in the case of booze, not-so-careful) sampling and experimentation.

What I never say, however, when it comes to these matters, is that people who don’t share my tastes are idiots or fools or whatever.  (Sometimes, I find their opinion inconceivable—e.g. if someone were to prefer the horrible Californian brandy over the wonderful South African stuff—but the expression “there’s no accounting for tastes” works perfectly to describe my mental shrug at so strange a position.)

I also make it plain, very plain, when I prefer one thing over another because of prejudice.  I don’t like Glocks, for example, because I think that black plastic guns are ugly (note:  opinion—yours may differ), Glocks don’t fit my hand very well (note:  physiological difference from your hand), and Gaston Glock supports the horrible idea of “ballistic fingerprinting” (note: my difference of position vs. Glock’s).  I don’t like Glock’s spongy DA trigger pull, but then I don’t like any DA semi-auto pistol (note:  generic dislike not specific to Glock), because I think that if you want to shoot DA, a revolver should suffice.

Thus I can see no reason why I should ever buy a Glock for myself.

BUT:

I have often recommended Glocks to prospective gun buyers, if the gun seems to fit their criteria, and especially if they tell me that the Glock fits their hand well.  I have never said that Glocks are unreliable, or inaccurate—in fact, I’ve often noted the precise opposite.  I have never called Glock owners “idiots” (although I have on occasion teased people about their choice—and, it should be noted, they have teased me right back).

It’s just my opinion.  And yes, some of it is based on freely-admitted prejudice, because I think that John Moses Browning’s design of the 1911 is the absolute zenith of pistolmaking, and why try to improve on perfection?

Most of the time, such statements are made tongue-in-cheek.  Like the last one.

What really pisses me off is when people insult me because of my opinion.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I mention that I dislike runny cheese, and in fact prefer older, firmer, even crumbly cheese.  I don’t like runny cheese because, to be blunt, it reminds me of the consistency of snot.  Nothing wrong, there: it’s a simple preference of taste and texture, backed up with a personal rationale.

What I don’t expect is for some dickhead to say that because I don’t like runny cheese, my taste buds are immature or inoperable, and that therefore I’m not a real cheese-lover.

Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  But that’s the kind of bullshit that’s aimed at me almost every time I express a strong opinion:  at some point, someone is going to accuse me of some shortcoming, simply because my strong dislike happens to be his strong preference.

This doesn’t matter whether I’m talking about beer, cheese, cars, cricket or (gawd help me) literature.  Even my musical taste has come under attack when, say, I opine that while Rush are excellent musicians on an individual basis, their music leaves me cold, and Geddy Lee’s voice makes me want to eat the barrel of a Ruger Blackhawk.  Note that I have not, ever, called Rush fans a bunch of immature poseurs—and I’m not doing so now, because that’s just what we writers call an analogy—but others behave very differently towards me.  Using the same example:  because I don’t like Rush, there Must Be Something Wrong With Me, And All That Needs To Happen Is For Me To Experience This Song, And I’ll Change My Opinion—and every time I express a strong dislike of something, the same tiresome nostrum is shoved down my throat whether it’s beer, science fiction, football or any of the other (many) flashpoints of difference on this website where others hold equally-reasoned, and as passionate opinions as mine.

All bets are off when it comes to the Rolling Stones, however:  their music is awful, their playing dreadful, and their fans are, like the Stones themselves, a bunch of middle-class streetfighting wannabes.

And if the previous sentence made your blood boil, welcome to my world.

Note that all the above have to do with personal taste—in other words, it affects society not a whit that someone else may be bored to tears by The Three Musketeers or The Mayor of Casterbridge but is enthralled by When Planets Collide and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

Society is likewise unaffected, nay improved, by the fact that people’s tastes run to beers not Boddington’s Ale, but to lagers, porters, beers with a fruity flavor or those which need a squeeze of lime to make them palatable.

There is one opinion, however, which does not lend itself to a multitude of options, and that’s the political one.

Society is seldom improved by the wholesale introduction of, say, socialism into the polity.  Although some very minor aspects of same may not be too awful, it is simply lunatic to suppose that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has the slightest chance of working in the grand scheme of unalterable human nature.  Socialism requires endless self-sacrifice and altruism, and the submission of the self to the whole.  Ditto radical libertarianism, whose fierce adherence to “the primacy of the individual” requires success parameters that all members of society be innately virtuous, resourceful, reasonable and possess an IQ greater than 120.

Both sets of requirements are hopelessly unrealistic.

Little bits of both philosophies are not a bad thing, and each acts as a counterweight to the other.  But no government is just as bad as too much government, because both allow too much leeway for the powerful to screw up the lives of the not-so powerful.  History has proved that the best recipe for the success of the society is a political system which has as little government as possible, with a people as empowered as possible—once again, each acting as a check on the other’s baser instincts and behavior (mob rule, of course, being as bad as a centralized totalitarian system).

And a small government with an empowered populace is: ta-da!  our Constitutional, representative republic.

Now, we may argue about the details of said republic (and O! how do we argue), and of late, our government has become far too big for my liking.  Just remember, however, that the most vile situation to live in is one of constant revolution, with first one extreme philosophy and then the other contrary one holding the higher ground.  Allowing government to grow until too big for its boots, and then beating it back with sticks (okay, voting), seems to me to be preferable to the alternative, even though the prognosis right now is gloomy.

There have been rays of sunshine—the Assault Weapon Ban non-renewal, the immigration amnesty nonsense, and so on—where We The People gave Them The Gummint a bloody nose (not bloody enough for most, including me, but hey).

But the plain fact of the matter is that unlike my opinions on beer, cheese and literature, which are mine and where others may comfortably differ (without resorting to insult), when it comes to the realm of politics, there is no argument, because history, and the millions of people from other political systems who are trying to come here, tell us so.

Argument in that vein is not only pointless, it’s counter-productive.

The Dying Of The Light

Behind Enemy Lines, Politics

[This should have appeared over a week ago, but I screwed up the posting date thingy, sorry.  It’s still relevant, and now updated.]

From the Diplomad, talking about the revolting French:

France is in real trouble. I mean REAL trouble.  That once great country, in fact, is dying.  It, along with most of the rest of Europe, has a worthless leadership class that, as we saw at the WWI commemorations, sees nationalism as a bad thing. That leadership argues that true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction.  To object, for example, to the importation of hundreds-of-thousands of poor, illiterate and often violent migrants from some of the most failed countries on earth, many espousing an ideology of hatred for all that France and Western Civilization represent, makes you a vile racist and a deplorable, one who should not be heard, a “far right” pariah.  In other words, Citizen, fermé la bouche and let your betters decide for you.  Nothing to see, keep moving. Leadership should be left to the professionals;  do not attempt decision-making at home . . .

Before any of us start to crow at the Frogs’ expense, however, look carefully at the words “true patriotism means going along with the elite’s efforts to kill the sense, the very idea of nation;  it means allowing one’s culture, traditions, and history to be wiped away, and rewritten to justify the on-going social, economic and political destruction”  and try to deny that this is precisely what our own “leadership” class — political, academia and corporate — is doing to the United States.  [Hint:  you’ll fail]

Now go and buy some more ammo.

(Some of you may wonder why I haven’t suggested also buying a hi-viz jacket as used by the French protesters.  That’s because we Murkins don’t do hi-viz — we do camo.)

The Old In-And-Out

Essays

…and I don’t mean the California-based greaseburger chain, either.  Apparently, we Westerners aren’t doing enough bonking, and according to the New York Post, this means The End Of Civilization As We Know It.

This should be a golden age for sex — if not the swinging-from-the-chandelier kind, then at least the regular, reliable fun type. The economy is booming, and America, and the world, are safer than ever. Young people can find willing mates just by swiping on their phones.
It’s a cushy, luxurious time. So why aren’t we naked and rolling around in bed to celebrate?

As always, I’m going to start off by asking the usual questions:  how do we know that people are having less sex — given that when asked about their sex lives, most people lie like Clintons anyway — and if we are making fewer beasts-with-two-backs, so what?

But let’s grant the writer’s hypothesis as truthful, and explore the issue.

The the Usual Suspects can be trotted out:  Internet porn, Netflix, Tinder, Fecesbook followings, constant checking of phones et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  In other words, Westerners are finding things to do with their spare time other than to have sex.  There may be some truth to all of this:  Chinese peasants seem to have no problem procreating (within State-mandated limits, of course), nor do Nigerian tribesmen or Indian farmers.  In fact, go to any Third World area where there is no electricity and people are breeding like rabbits.  But as the article later suggests, it’s not all about reproduction:

A sexless society is a dying one, and not only for the obvious reason that sex produces babies to replenish the population.
Sex serves as a bonding agent between people in relationships, and when they stop having it, or have it a lot less, that affects the kind of connections they are forming. That loss of intimacy is a big problem.

Here’s my theory about all this.  It’s not one thing that’s causing this problem, it’s a multitude of things, and the arrival of mass entertainment as explained above is just one of them.

The danger to (Western) civilization is not a lack of shagging, but said civilization’s decades-long undermining by academia and other counter-culture hippies.  This is coupled with the wholesale immigration of hordes of people who (if the population growth stats are to be believed) do not have a no-bonking issue — rather, the reverse — but who have few if any ties to said Western civilization.  So the culture is being undermined, and replaced with one that is more, shall we say, primitive.  (Go on: challenge  that statement:  I dare you.)  In a hundred years’ time, when all vestiges of Anglo-Saxon / Judeo-Christian culture have disappeared and the United States looks and behaves more like, well, Central America, there will be no articles written about how sex is disappearing, I guarantee you.

As for the “sex-as-bonding” hypothesis, when we as a society have an easy-come-easy-go [sic] attitude towards relationships (including marriage, through no-fault divorce), commitment does not and cannot take place with only sex as the bonding agent.  Here’s where I can easily point a finger at today’s hook-up culture, made all the easier by applications such as Tinder;  if sex is seen as pure recreation long before a couple is married, its value as a bonding agent has been irreparably undermined.

Another problem:  find me a young married couple today (not living on a farm) where only one of the couple is working.  I’ll save you the trouble:  you won’t.  The plain fact is that even without the feministical Career-Girl Have-It-All-Baby influence, it is no longer easy, or even possible, to have a single wage-earner support a family — and I’m not talking about wealthy Wall Street financiers’ families (who typically don’t have large families anyway);  I’m talking about ordinary folk, to whom having more than one or two children means financial catastrophe unless both partners are working (and sometimes, even then).  When both partners are working their asses off, and have easy access to entertainment through their cell phones, it’s no great leap to understand why sex takes a back seat.  Add to that the fact that when a couple does finally have young children and / or babies, sex falls off a cliff, as any fule kno.

Let’s also address the other great issue:  people aren’t going to want to procreate (which is the primal instinct which drives the desire for sex) when the future is unknown, or uncertain.  I defy you again to find me any group of young people who have not experienced a layoff, or a company shutting down or being merged out of existence, or having a career suddenly disappear when their function is replaced by automation or foreign-based workers.  Once again, I’ll save you the trouble:  you won’t, because everyone under the age of forty has had one of the above happen to them, and probably more than once withal.

I also know that the Welfare State makes it easy for single parents to have multiple children, but I would argue that the Welfare State is not a feature of Western civilization, even though that’s where it’s most often found.  (Imagine, for example, the Founding Fathers seeing some modern urban ghetto, and their likely reaction upon learning how that lifestyle is subsidized, and you’ll get my point.)

I have no solution to this because as far as I can see, there is none.  At best, if a solution does exist, it’s going to be a.) incredibly difficult and time-consuming to implement, and b.) so unpopular (for a variety of reasons) that its chances of success are infinitesimally small.

I have no idea, for example, how to lower the cost of living to, say, 1950s-era levels where a family of four can live in a reasonably-modest dwelling, own one or two inexpensive cars, have enough to eat, and afford to give the kids a decent education — all on one salary, at a stable place of employment.  In order to get there, we’d have to make drastic changes to our national way of life, changes that I’m pretty sure that nobody would want to make.  I also have no clue how to instill the values of long-term commitment (from, say the early 1900s) into a generation which would resist that change mightily.  Those kinds of changes might make common sense if the goal were to improve our current society’s laissez-faire / “whatever”  attitude to, well, just about everything, but I just don’t see the Me-me-me Generation wanting to turn back the clock.  Good grief, most of them can’t tell time on a dial clock anyway, so what are the chances?

But should we somehow reach that state, I can guarantee that everyone would be having sex, and a lot of it.

The generation which produced the Baby Boom is all the historical evidence I need.

No Shit, She-Lock

Grooming, Mocking Furriners, Modernism

You have to be utterly self-absorbed and narcissistic to post something like this:

Apparently some things are too much, even for the French, and I can see why.  Fucking hell, I’ve seen more demure clothing on the midnight shift during Fleet Week.  From now on, every new edition of the dictionary will feature this woman’s picture under “Trashy”, and rightly so.

And of course, every bloody barracks-room lawyer is going to whine that the Louvre’s rules (note the capitalization, idiot) technically allow any outfits, even one like hers inside the building.  Yeah, fine, and I’m quite aware that the museum isn’t a church too.

But:  let’s hear it for the Louvre guard who didn’t want the priceless works of art inside his building sullied by this whore I mean “influencer”.  (Oh yeah, she has X thousand “followers” and groupies, so that excuses everything.  Not.)

Of course, she is Australian so it’s understandable that she would have no class, manners or sense of decorum, but that just makes me all the more satisfied that someone would actually step up and say, “Non!”

There should be more of that.  A lot more.

Killing The Monster

Entertainment

I see that singer Michael Bublé has decided to quit singing and the limelight.  I can quite understand why.  At a time when his beloved son was close to death from cancer, Bublé found himself in a blizzard of “well-meaning” Press attention, with articles sensitively entitled “Michael’s Torment“, “Michael Looks Depressed As He Leaves Hospital” and the always-popular “Will Michael Bublé Ever Be Able To Sing Again?”  (“No” being the eventual answer to this question, as it happens.)

Under those circumstances, Bublé discovered that while his fame sold albums and made him rich, the price he had to pay was the complete loss of privacy and even dignity.  For attention-whores like the Kardashians and their ilk, this celebrity and attention might have been accepted, even welcomed;  for him, facing that most awful and personal of tragedies, the scouring of his anguish and its parade in the tabloids must have been torture — and his desire to quit the spotlight both literally and figuratively is both understandable and even laudable.

And good for him, say I.  His wealth is secure, his family likewise;  but should his young son ever get nailed by cancer again — a horrible possibility — I can only hope that he and his wife can deal with whatever happens in solitude and isolation.  I don’t even want to hear about it, for that matter.  Whatever happens, Michael Bublé deserves his privacy, and I can only hope that the Media Vultures leave him alone from now on.

I for one will refuse to read anything about him and his family ever again.  I can’t escape the future headlines, should they occur, but I don’t have to reward the Jackals Of The Press by reading about the details.  He deserves the anonymity he craves, and I’m happy to grant it to him.

Michael, I wish lasting happiness, health and peace to you and your family;  and thank you for sharing your magnificent talent with us while you did.