.يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Obligatory American St Patrick’s Day post With a tip of my black Milan-weave to the real Irish on their holy day of obligation venerating the man who brought them into the Catholic Church. (Just like SS. Anthony and Rocco weren’t Italian, St Pat wasn’t Irish.) As far as I know I have no Irish in me but of course I’m in shades of green (dark, more like olive) as a tribute to America’s first big Catholic immigrant group; the American holiday, which among young drinkers seems to have merged with Mardi Gras so lots of green plastic bead necklaces, celebrates their runaway success as Americans. Culturally a mixed bag: I won’t parrot the accusation of Jansenism as it wasn’t true but the Thomas Day factor, definitely (weird: low-church Catholics, which Modernism of course made much worse). Still, there and here after persecution (we will have the Mass at all costs), with Catholic emancipation in Britain, they resurrected, rebuilt, a whole church, producing generations of pious Irish the last of whom are still around, now old. Could you or I do that?
Drink a round to Ireland, boys, I’m home again Drink a round to Jesus Christ who died for Irish men.
How not to treat ideas. The philosophical school I consider most sensible sees ideas as the means by which human beings gain understanding of reality. Ideas are what helps us navigate reality so we can live successfully. Which is why so much effort has been spent on developing, criticizing and analyzing ideas throughout human history, especially in the academy, not just in the sciences but in matters of public concern. But in the modern age a good many thinkers have come to believe that ideas are actually expressions of passions or interests, brought about so as to promote the satisfaction of desires. Or, in other words, that they are simply ideology.
Common sense about the HHS fight with the church. Is A’s liberty to X restricted if A’s boss refuses to pay for X? Especially when X is cheap and readily available? And when A can choose another employer? And when A’s government could provide X directly without using force against a voluntary association? No, no, no, and no.
Regardless of what the justices say, university officials will give up their firstborns before they let go of their beloved racial preferences.
Interesting fact I learned here about the worst offender with presidential executive orders:
Aren’t all Presidential Executive Orders outside the boundaries of the Constitution? (President Obama wrote 111 EOs; GW Bush 291; Bill Clinton 366; Ronald Reagan 380.)
How a government treats its own people is not a particularly reliable guide to its treatment of its neighbors and other countries in general.
The president’s religion shouldn’t matter, to ensure freedom for the church, nor even his personality, but that said I’d rather see a macho prez photographed at traditional (such as Orthodox) services than an agnostic snob like ours. (My candidate Ron Paul’s a casually churchgoing Protestant.)
Most of the time the GCs disobeyed Rome by latinizing themselves. Actually very little was ever mandated by Rome other than celibacy outside Eastern Europe and the Middle East for Eastern Catholics. Rome certainly encouraged others or turned their head the other way, but most of the Latinization was voluntary adoption with strong encouragement from Latin religious orders in the area. I like or don’t mind latinizations when they’re old and don’t take over.
When asked about the possibility of writing a book outlining the most significant blunders of statesmen, Hoover replied, “I am going to tell you what should be the first chapter... When Roosevelt put America in to help Russia as Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941. We should have let those two bastards annihilate themselves.”
Why would the rulers of today’s world care about public Christianity, heterosexual marriage, and freedom from infanticide in one small European backwater? Because they always fear a return of the ancien régime, no matter how inconspicuous it may appear. And given the Hungarian government’s two-thirds majority, it apparently represents the views of their countrymen.
While Hungarians have a tortured historical relationship with their neighbors, they resemble them in many ways. There are many – perhaps a majority of – Slovaks, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, and others who would agree with the constitution’s social provisions. Therein lies the danger for the moral munchkins in Brussels and Washington. Eastern European national identities are supposed to be slowly eroded through EU membership. But what if Hungary succeeds in saving herself culturally and demographically and her neighbors follow her lead?
Same reason the Modernist munchkins went beyond the Thomas Day factor and quickly and thoroughly suppressed the old Mass and even architectural reminders of it 40 years ago.
Envy looking west. From Takimag. Unemployment is falling in the US, where wealth creators such as Mark Zuckerberg are generally applauded rather than denounced. I don’t think anyone in Congress has as yet approached Zuckerberg to help him push through legislation favorable to Facebook. This is the simple difference between the old and new continents. Obama and those who voted to lift the debt limit should be stars in the eyes of the Brussels gang, but they are disliked for not having lifted it enough. Far removed from the Brussels power gangs, young Europeans often praise Ron Paul. They agree with his calls to halt the endless wars and to legalize drugs. Europe takes Uncle Sam for granted and refuses to share in military expenditures. Europe’s two most important military powers, Britain and France, no longer have the capabilities to execute an overseas military operation. Argentina could invade the Falklands tomorrow, and Britain would have to ask Uncle Sam for a carrier, as their last one was recently decommissioned. They’re planning to build more ski-jump carriers (if they can afford it), which only makes sense when you’re literally an island and have people to defend in the Falklands. (Geography notwithstanding, the British have the only real claim to the place; they live there and the Argentines don’t.)
‘Super’ Tuesday Romney seems to have the nomination, and, in my opinion, the election (regular readers know: economic depression + white guilt only gets you one win = adios, Big Zero Obama), but we didn’t do half bad despite not winning any primaries so far. I don’t dislike him for the reasons the chattering class does (‘he’s so white’, conventionally handsome, personally old-fashioned and successful; the president’s religion shouldn’t matter unless you can prove it won’t obey the Constitution) but because he’s only pro-war, pro-state business as usual (so in those senses, he might as well be a robot or an actor).
Results for U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries, 03/06
PA primary, Paul. (Reason for being Republican besides liking borough and county Republican politics.) November, one of these: write in Paul, vote third-party/independent Paul, vote Libertarian Party (which I’ve done on and off since ’92; I might re-up) or stay home as I did for my first time in ’08.
His ambition is to accomplish three things. First advance the libertarian cause and lay the groundwork for an ideological revolution that will profoundly reshape the GOP. Like Moses he knows he is unlikely to live to see the promised land. But he has lead the faithful to it. This is a battle that will be waged over many elections. The next generation is much more libertarian and they will be the future of the Republican Party if Ron Paul is successful. Secondly, in the near term he wants a voice in the platform committee and a speaking slot at the convention. If he has enough delegates he could reasonably expect that. And lastly if there is a brokered convention (still unlikely but not beyond the realm of possibility) he may play a role in naming the GOP nominee.
Take Virginia, a state where the party establishment pretty much rigged the election for Romney by making it as hard as possible for candidates to get on the ballot, and then prohibited write-in candidates, and then topped it off by requiring a loyalty oath from all voters that they would support the nominee of the party in the general election.
That’s wrong. Is it even enforceable? With that coercion, in VA I wouldn’t be a Republican.
... what I like to call the “Confessional Frump look”.
Money quotes:
I suppose girls and women don these things as a sort of modesty uniform, a sartorial placard reading “I am a chaste and modest woman who would not have shoddy, unthinkable affairs with local tradesmen while you are at work.”
Modesty is a good and noble thing, but it is all the sweeter when it is subtle. The virgin who reminds people constantly that she is a virgin is not as modest as the virgin who keep her mouth shut on such a personal subject.
If a man wants back all the beauty, romance and fittingness of the Mass before 1963, he might very well want back all the beauty, romance and fittingness of men’s fashion before 1963. And if he is that interested in men’s fashion before 1963, imagine how he thinks women should dress. The Well Dressed Woman of 1948 was not wearing what Americans call a jumper, people.
You should not be thinking Laura Ingalls Wilder; you should be thinking Veronica Lake.
Eunomia on Israel The US capital is not Tel Aviv. Also, a long side trip to Britain.
The oddity of the relationship. By the way how does the special relationship no longer serve British interests? It’s an interesting, twisted history; they used us; we use them: how British spies seduced (sometimes literally, targeting important people like politicians and publishers, or James Bond was based on true stories) America into WWII; Britain reduced to Airstrip One (the war destroyed the empire, or did it? ...was its HQ’s move to Washington long planned, since WWI?); the neocons’ professed love of the relationship, using it to use the British, sending Airstrip One troops as auxiliaries in their foreign-war misadventures (a kind of British conservative liking it as the empire riding again, which is in a way true). As it stands, because of that last part, the relationship might not be the best thing. (The British being used and not just to harshly judge Americans on game and makeover shows.) But arguably it needs course correction, not scrapping. Better a Britain that’s part of a peaceful (trading with all, but yes, protected by American muscle) Anglosphere (not the way it’s run now) than run by Brussels or Berlin? But is a German-run Continent necessarily bad? Maybe not. (UK = Anglosphere with America; Western Europe = Germany; Eastern = Russia.) But the British historically are independent from Europe, a good thing. (In the political, subsidiarity sense, not the spiritual one of the Protestant break with Catholic Europe. Britain as Liechtenstein?)
Modestinus and traditionalism He, Mark in Spokane and Christopher Ferrara might think I’m compromised and part of the problem, or at least on a rickety bridge, by being a libertarian but:
For better or worse, I have been accused of being a “traditionalist”... My response has always been to say that I am interested in traditionalism, albeit with the concession that to be interested in these sorts of things is to typically become sympathetic to them as well. “Sympathy,” however, is not tantamount to “agreement” or, at least, not “full agreement,” which is something I reserve for a very narrow realm of claims which have been made in human history. But why be interested in traditionalism and not, say, one of the more moderate or even liberal wings of Catholicism? Though this isn’t the post in which to hash out all of the details, I think I can briefly summarize the reasons. First, traditionalism, unlike other camps within Catholicism (or even Orthodoxy), rarely gets a fair hearing in the so-called “mainstream” and therefore represents a more enticing subject to study since it demands some actual legwork and sifting which is typically done in advance within other circles. Second, traditionalism offers certain “high level” claims about the meaning and integrity of Catholic Christianity which are not typically in play within other realms. Whether these “high level” claims are right or wrong are important to figure out, but first one has to find out what they are and why they are being promoted in the first place. Last, the seemingly uncompromising nature of traditionalism offers two possibilities which, in my mind, ought to be enticing to most serious-minded individuals: internal coherency and an alternative to the present state of affairs. Whether these two sub-elements are fully actualized within the context of traditionalism is another matter. But to the extent that they are at least promoted, I find that the traditionalist camp is worth examining.
None of this is to say that I think of myself as a “bridge.” I lack the requisite background and sophistication to mediate between all of the various claims out there, even though it is necessary, to some degree, to make semi-blind choices between contradictory claims from time to time. In other words, some sort of decision-making process or standard has to be adopted at some point lest one remains in stasis forever. And it is here that I probably find the real “value” or “utility” of traditionalism: A decision for or in alignment with traditionalism is the one which, in my mind, carries the lowest costs (or, to put it another way, lowest risks) with respect to abrogating my duties as a Catholic. Does traditionalism always offer the most fashionable path? No. Does it always offer the most convenient path? No. But does it offer a path which, if faithfully followed (which is something I can make no claim to being good at), will be more likely to keep me on “the narrow way which leadeth unto life”? Well, yes.
Some jottings about the news
