Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

My Property, My Rules… Or Not?

Culture, Politics

Here’s an article which got me thinking.

Investigation finds Facebook is STILL letting housing advertisers exclude by race, religion, and even disability.
Facebook allows advertisers to discriminate by race in housing ads, allowing advertisers to filter out certain ethnic groups from seeing their ad… [and] advertisers could still discriminate by race, as well as other categories such as mothers of high school children, people who require wheelchair access ramps, and even expats from Argentina.

My initial reaction: so fucking what? If I’m advertising for a room mate, isn’t it my right (under the Constitution, First Amendment, freedom of association etc.) to decide with whom I want to associate?

I’m sick of the negative implication that’s been applied to the word “discrimination”, by the way. If one is said to have discriminating tastes, that’s okay; but if I don’t want to rent my house to college students (reason: noisy, drunken all-night parties etc.), adherents of Santeria (reason: animal sacrifices in the basement) or cripples (reason: no handicapped access or facilities) then all of a sudden, according to government, I’m discriminating in a bad way?

I thought that the essence of “private property” (the protection of which is one of government’s few legitimate functions) is that one may use it as one wishes. So if I don’t want to share a house with a Catholic, vegan or [gasp!] a Chinese woman, isn’t that my right?

I know, I know; discrimination against people of other races, religions and cultures etc. is supposed to be wrong — and it is, when practiced by government or public entities. Government can’t say that only Protestants can apply for a government job, and cab drivers can’t refuse service to a blind person with a guide dog (because of their anti-animal religion) because the cab service is a government-licensed activity.

But as an individual, I’m supposed to be able to practice any kind of discrimination as long as it doesn’t actually harm other people. And no, not wanting to share your living space with a Black gang member is not causing him harm — except that according to the modern liberal mindset, it is.

These groups are protected under the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it a federal offense to publish ads that indicate a preference for or discriminate against people based on race, color, religion, gender, handicap, family status or national origin.

What bullshit.

The only blessing I can see arising from all this nonsense is that I don’t have a Facebook account and am unlikely to ever have one. (So in that regard we can both breathe a sigh of relief.)

Update: Uh huh. Never saw this one coming:

Facebook could soon lock you out of your account unless you’re willing to upload a ‘clear’ selfie to verify your identity

No Foundation

Culture, Essays

I don’t know if y’all have read this article (found via Insty, thankee Glenn) entitled “The Primal Scream of Identity Politics“, but really, you should.

The deeper question raised is not the instrumental concern of Lilla and others—how liberalism can retool itself in order to win more elections. Rather, it’s the elemental one: How has the question of “identity” come to be emotional and political ground zero for so many in America, and elsewhere in the Western world?

I found Mary Eberstat’s answer to be truly interesting and, unusually for the Weekly Standard, right on the money.

One of the greatest sins perpetrated by statism and its greatest exponent, Marxism, is the dissolution of the family structure. Let’s be perfectly honest, here: for about as long as mankind has walked upright (and probably even before), the basic family unit (father, mother, offspring) and extended unit (grandparents, uncles and aunts etc.) were always held sacred. “Honor thy father and mother” is one of the basic principles of society, regardless of religion, and of course parental care and concern for one’s children is deeply embedded in our genetic code for very good reasons, among them being the one identified by Eberstat: it is the basic building-block of our individual identity; hence family names like Johnson (son of John) or the Icelandic Gudrunsdottir (daughter of Gudrun). It’s also the principle behind the concept of not bringing shame on the family name (even though the latter has been horribly abused by primitive societies like Islamic ones).

But if your mother has been the neighborhood’s Miss Margarine-Legs and each of your siblings shares your mother but has a different father who is anyway notable for his absence, where’s the honor going to appear? Nowhere, if I may answer the rhetorical question.

And of course, Man is a social animal — hence pejorative terms like “sociopath” or “antisocial” for the outliers who aren’t. The need for “belonging” (and its concomitant identity) is elemental, so if the historical primary identity (a member of a family) is gone, the rootless soul will always feel the need to find another — hence the appeal of criminal gangs in inner-city children of single mothers, to give but one example — and for those who were not pulled into gangs, the growth of cults like eco-centrism and even antifa can provide alternatives, poor organizations though they are. (I haven’t seen any facts on this topic, but I’d wager good money that a representative cross-section of antifa members will have come from broken- or single-parent homes.)

Another of Eberstat’s postulations is the widespread occurrence of mental illness among adolescents and Millennials (and we all know about opioid usage in those groups), and once again, it’s not a facile inference to link the lack of a family unit to that phenomenon.

And always remember: dissolution of the family is a Marxist precept, and we are not Marxists, no matter how much liberal politicians and the media think we are or would like us to be.

So, my Readers who have young children: resist with all your might any efforts to denigrate your parental authority — loudly, if you have to — and at all times, remind your children that family matters above all in the grand scheme of things. Tell your kids never to take sides with their friends against their siblings, insist on respect for you and your spouse from them, and always take their side against anyone or any institution: schools, friends and government (except of course in cases of actual criminality).

This, my friends, is the real “resistance”, and we are doomed if we don’t offer any.

Wanting Equality, Getting Equality

Men & Women

While I hate the idea, I nevertheless applaud this little announcement:

The Pentagon says the country should stick with mandatory registration for a military draft, and it advocates a requirement for women to sign up for the first time in the nation’s history.
The recommendations are contained in a Defense Department report to Congress that serves as a starting point for a commission examining military, national and public service.
Congress ordered the Pentagon report, and the office of the undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness completed it in the early months of the Trump administration.
Currently, only male citizens and residents age 18-25 are required to register, for a pace of about 2 million each year.
Women, whom the government has never ordered to sign up, would add 11 million to the Selective Service System database “in short order,” the report says.

To paraphrase Mencken, equality is the theory that women know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard.

Squares, Cubes And Blocks

Beauty

When I was reading this article about Graham Norton’s beach house, several things struck me. First of all, I marveled at how anyone would want to spend a couple of million for a beach house which overlooks the English Channel — let’s be charitable and say that it can be used as intended for about twelve (non-consecutive) weeks of the year — and for a change, one Daily Mail commenter to the article got it right: it belongs in Malibu, not Kent.

But of course, what struck me the hardest was the house’s extraordinary ugliness.

Now I’ve written before about my distaste if not outright hatred for modernist architecture, so I’m not going to repeat it here. But in this particular case, what amazes me is how little the house is part of the milieu: with only a few modifications, it would fit in quite well with similar structures on the other side of the Channel; only those were the concrete bunkers of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, built to repel an Allied invasion of Festung Europa.

The ugliness isn’t just skin-deep, by the way: it extends to the interior as well.

Now I know that many people like this kind of interior design because it’s “clean” or something. To me, it’s not a design to live in, but meant for display — like those awful Architect’s Digest spreads which look more like museums than homes. I could no more live in such a place than in a hospital room — now there’s “clean” for you.

And yes, here comes the inevitable disclaimer: taste is a personal thing, one man’s ugly is another’s gorgeous, beauty is in the eye etc. etc. Of course it’s personal. I’m not saying that places like this should be blown up and replaced with thatched cottages.

I’m just saying I wouldn’t shed any tears over it.

 

Just… Wrong

Entertainment, Men & Women

I saw an article somewhere about people attending some movie premiere (details not important), but what struck me was how the women dressed. Here’s the lissome Heather Graham (47) standing on the left, next to the cute Molly Quinn (25):

(In case there are people out there who are even more clueless about this stuff than I usually am — I actually had to look these two up — Heather was Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, and Molly was Castle’s daughter in the eponymous TV show — neither factoid of which will be relevant to this post.)

Am I the only one who thinks that they should have swapped outfits? Heather’s little mini is cute, but FFS she’s nearly twice her companion’s age. The longer dress would have suited her much better. Also, her legs are too skinny and not that great — Miss Quinn actually has nicer legs (I know, you need a pitchur):

I know all about the female age bias in Hollyweird, and how Women Of A Certain Age Can’t Get The Good Roles Anymore (Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep to the contrary), and therefore the ladies have to look and dress like young girls rather than the mature women they are. Which means you get women making fools of themselves (“mutton dressed as lamb”, as my mom used to say) and frankly, I think it’s nonsense. Case in point: Sophia Loren, outside her movie roles, never showed off her flesh to excess, despite having one of the greatest female bodies evvah (I know, pitchur, shuddup):

Okay, maybe not that one — but note: no “sideboob” or crotch shots (which seem to be all the rage these days [sigh]).

I seem to have lost my thread. Oh well, let’s just say that actresses need to dress their age. Like the septuagenarian Susan Sarandon:

Oh hell, I give up.

College Degrees Not Worth Much

Seen On Campus

…says this study (found via Insty).

Americans are losing faith in the value of a college degree, with majorities of young adults, men and rural residents saying college isn’t worth the cost, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey shows.

No kidding. With all the PC bullshit happening on college campuses these days, not to mention crap courses like “Feminist Basket Weaving”, it’s not surprising. One finding that got my attention, however, is this one:

Some Americans believe learning a trade offers more security than going to college.

Well, yeah. Depending on the trade, it almost always did, especially when weighed against courses in the Humanities and the debt incurred by getting said degrees. (It’s not true when measured against a degree in, say, electrical engineering, of course.)

Then again, most people are more qualified to learn a trade than they are to attend college in the first place.

And the first warning sign was that government (of the Democrat / Labour Party persuasion) stated that a college degree was desirable for all young people, and put policies into place to support that idiotic idea. Billions of dollars of student debt, high unemployment rates among Millennials, lowered academic standards and staggeringly-high college tuition fees followed swiftly, to the surprise of no one except those government tools.

As seen on these pages but a couple days back, I’ve always advised young people to get a trade first, then go to college — especially if you’re not quite sure what degree you want to get — because as a fallback, a trade like carpentry or plumbing sure as hell beats begging for that barrista job at a coffee shop. And if your goal in life is to own your own business (which it should be), a trade beats the hell out of an MBA as a foundation thereof.

So yeah, it’s not surprising that the value of a college degree is being called to question. Reality will do that to ya.