Tag: Culture Wars

Civilization vs. Barbarians

Deeds, Not Words, Paddy

Elections, Immigration

This post is a continuation of an earlier one in which I talked about my dislike of the Irish as a nation.

Here’s the latest development from the Land of Blarney:

Huge crowds have staged anti-migrant protests in Ireland amid growing anger at the government over an increase in arrivals and asylum claims. 

Ireland has seen anti-migrant anger growing in recent months, over the sheer number of asylum seekers being housed across the nation. Many of them are unable to get accommodation, forcing them to sleep in tents which has further incited anger. 

 And there are pictures:

Needless to say, there were also counter-protests, wherein the above marchers were called…

…yup, the fallback epithet so beloved of the Left when someone disagrees with them.

Here’s the thing.  It’s all very well to have mass marches and so on;  that’s a fine thing, even when the Left does it.  But in the end those are just words.

So here’s a suggestion to the Irish people who are aggrieved (and justifiably so) at this welcoming of the unwelcome by their government.

Don’t burn police cars or smash windows.  Do something positive.

Here’s what we Americans did when faced with a similar (although much larger-scale) action that we didn’t like.  We went to the polls, and voted that government out of power, installing a new government would do what we wanted them to do.

I dare the Irish people to do the same at the new general election.  If they do, well and good.  If they don’t, I’m going to have to believe that more Irish want the country to be flooded with immigrants than don’t want it.

And when “Mahmood” and “Fatima” become the most popular baby names in Ireland, and the muezzin’s calls from the minaret drown out the sounds of the bells of St. Kilda, you’ll just have to fucking deal with it.

Otherwise, STFU.

A Taste Of Nock

Albert J. Nock, Deep Thoughts

I could call this the Quote Of The Day, but I think I’ll just start a category entitled as above, because Albert J. Nock should be required reading in schools, let alone on a small blog like this.  Fat chance of the former happening, however, when you get impious thoughts like this:

“Refrain from using the word Bolshevism, or Fascism, Hitlerism, Marxism, Communism, and you have no troubles getting acceptance for the principle that underlies them all alike — the principle that the State is everything, and the individual nothing.”  — Journal.

Which reminds me:  I need to schedule a meeting with my tax preparer.

That 50s Thing

Culture, Lifestyle

It is no secret among my Readers (especially those of long standing) that when it comes to decades. I have a soft spot for the 1950s.

It happens to be the decade of my birth (1954), and of course my memories of that time are scattered and few, but there’s a feeling about that era that has resonated with me pretty much all my life.

Now I understand that most people have a hankering for earlier times — “I wish I’d lived in the [x] period!” — and it’s brilliantly satirized by Woody Allen in his Midnight In Paris movie, where a modern-day young writer is transported back to what many consider one of the golden ages and places of writing and the arts:  Paris of the 1930s, where Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others of that ilk are the celebrities du jour, and the many soirees at Gertrude Stein’s apartment host them plus other luminaries such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso and Luis Buñel.  Of course, to our young protagonist, this seems to be the best time to be alive and writing, or being creative in any field.  Then he meets a young woman — a struggling fashion designer — and when the two of them are magically transported back to fin-de-siècle Paris, she astonishes him by saying that she, a creature of the 1930s, would want to live in that time and not the 1930s, because she would perhaps be more successfu lback then rather than in the age of Coco Chanel.

So I’m aware of that longing, and I understand its pitfalls when it comes to talking about the 1950s as my beau ideal.  Indeed, several Readers have taken me to task, outlining the many evils and perils of the 1950s — the relatively poor medicines available  (compared to our modern ones), endemic racism, Puritanical social mores and so on.

And yes, I know that the technology, such as it was, was certainly inferior to ours today, whether it be telephones, cars, medicine or whatever. Nobody would want to go back to that, for sure.

But that’s not the root of my nostalgia.

Let’s just look at a few images of 50s-as-golden-age art to illustrate my point:

Note the simplicity of life thus portrayed:  a family hunting outing, a picnic for two, and a family picnic.

I’ve written about the 1950s over the years, and here are a couple examples thereof:

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.

As a comment to Cappy’s excellent take on returning to the 1950s:

Don’t expect the world to revert to the 1950s ethos. In fact, as Cappy points out, modern society is being taught that the 1950s were a bad time because racism / McCarthyism / Cold War nuclear holocaust / oppressed women etc. What’s being omitted from the indoctrination is its purpose, which is to undermine what made the 1950s great:  patriotism, a sense of honor, hard work, deferred gratification, strong family ties, Judeo-Christian morality, modest living and so on.

And:

I’m often teased by my friends (and on occasion by my Readers) for being so unashamedly old-fashioned about life, and the things and people with which we associate ourselves. To this teasing I am entirely inured, and about my attitude I am utterly unrepentant. I am a conservative man, and that’s because I believe that in our own past, and in the history of civilization, there is much worth conserving. Certainly, that is true of our recent history (the 1950s), as much or more as it is true of earlier decades and even centuries.

So yes:  go ahead and laugh at my nostalgia, mock my preference for times gone by, and point out all the things that were wrong with the 1950s.

With all that said, though, I still insist that there was a whole about the 1950s that wasn’t shit:  the culture, the fact that the lines between right and wrong were a lot less blurred, and the roles of the man and woman a lot better defined — and we were all the better for it.

I won’t even talk about the cars…

Not much wrong there, either.

3 Modern Things

3 Inexplicable Things

…that would have caused my old Dad’s brow to furrow with amazement:

1.) Bottled water.
“WTF?”  Selling ordinary water?  In bottles?  And charging how much?”  That’s not to say he was unfamiliar with the concept — he’d been to France, and after getting the runs from drinking Parisian tap water, he did what the Frogs did and drank Perrier.
But the idea of a society which did have clean and potable water out of the tap (e.g. the U.S. and the U.K.), but still sold bottled water would have been as alien to him as people not being able to drive a stick shift.  So:

2.) All auto, all the time.
Back when I were a yoot and my old man was still alive (early 1970s), you couldn’t take your driving test in a car with automatic transmission.  Which meant you had to know how to take off on an incline without rolling backwards, as well as being able to row through the gears when parallel parking (another required activity).  Once again, he was perfectly comfortable driving his various Mercedes (all auto), he just wouldn’t now be able to understand why almost nobody in the current generation can’t perform so simple an activity.  Of course, that’s not all the modern yoot can’t handle:

3.) No manners, no discipline and no beatings.
The lack of manners in today’s society and the indiscipline not just in kids but in everyone would have driven him crazy.  Tardiness, ingratitude, disrespect not just for one’s elders but for everyone… all this makes me want to reach for the sjambok.  My dad would have been worse.  And all this is because children’s (okay, boys’) backsides have somehow become sacred objects that one may no longer use as a disciplinary receptacle for the above whip.  As I always say, it’s not the punishment  per se  but the fear of punishment that keeps youthful psychopaths on the straight and narrow.  And all this has disappeared from homes, the schools and the court system because OMG the chiiiiildren!  And the children have responded in true Lord Of The Flies fashion, and we are shocked and saddened by all of it because we are morons and can’t understand the root causes of the above.

What a load of bollocks.  All of it.

Not Alone

Clothing, Grooming

Seems as though I’m not the only one out there who is looking askance at the current “dressing down” (or as I refer to it, “prole drift”) of society.  The redoubtable Laura Perrins of TCW* Magazine has an even more jaundiced view than I:

Never trust a politician without a tie

I’d post an excerpt, but her entire article is just too delightful for words, so go there now.

And while she uses Oily Little Shit Tony Blair as her exemplar of the Untrustworthy Politician genre, there are several Over Here, too.  Like this fucking asshole:

Q.E.D.

*stands for The Conservative Woman — and has nothing to do with the Brits’ version of our Stupid Party.