Why are women in bars? They do it because it’s empowering to be a man. Why do they want to be men? What’s so disgusting about being a woman? If you are one of the 5% that doesn’t want to enjoy the miracle of birth, you should have every right to do just that, but don’t drag the rest of the natural world down with you. Women earn less than men because they choose to. While men are happy to order pizza and go over the BNR Proposal all night for the big meeting tomorrow, women would rather go to their daughter’s dance recital. Good. That works. Why are you messing with it?
Steve Sailer agrees the world was a better place when real-life Mike Torellos protected women on the streets: Women once made up the heart of the movie-going audience (my mother went to the show most nights in 1940 in St. Paul). Then, crime drove women off the streets after 1965, leaving younger males as the prime ticket buyers. The realization that they could make lots of money off young Baby Boom males’ tastes liberated slightly older male filmmakers in the 1970s (the decade that almost all current critics idolize). Contradicts Gavin McInnes above but McInnes is writing about New York hipsters. I didn’t link to Sailer here because I’m not on board his racialist campaign against Mexican immigrants (his argument here: blockbuster films are stupid because that’s how those people like them; they’re the ones who still go out to the movies so there you go).
Nixon and Obama. For all his failings (mostly an understandable insecurity and he did indeed have enemies; he was anything but stupid) Tricky Dick came from the culture destroyed in the late 1960s that actually accomplished things; Obama is from the spoiled-brat hippy 1960s that gets awards it didn’t earn (like a kid getting a sports trophy just for showing up).
As conservatives, or at least people on the Right, we obviously venerate tradition and conventional morality. However, particularly for those of us under 30 who have never known anything other than this remarkably stupid leftist world we inherited, we have no idea what a traditional conservative society even looks like. It is impossible for us to be reactionary, even if we wanted to be — we would just be making something up. It is one thing to fight in defense of certain institutions and moral codes having lived underneath them — it is another thing to rebuild them entirely once they have been completely destroyed and you have no firsthand knowledge of how they operate. I don’t think such an effort can win. I would love to be proven wrong. The vague temperament that is emerging at Takimag and certain schools in Europe which Richard Spencer calls the Alternative Right values tradition but cannot appeal to it for legitimacy. The legitimacy was stripped long ago by the attack from the left and by the corruption and cowardice of traditional sources of authority. Therefore, almost out of necessity, the Alternative Right gets inspiration from new sources. One is leftist writers whose writings on power, deconstruction, and cultural hegemony can easily be turned against the left wing establishment that rules “our” civilization. Another is right-wing writers who come from outside establishment conservative traditions in both Europe and America and who could serve as the beginnings of a new tradition. And finally, biology, sociobiology, and sociology are important influences. Because I’m barely old enough and thanks to unique circumstances I remember and actually lived through the flickering out of the old way as a kid. But good point: are YFs under 30 (about 15+ years younger than me) pseuds/poseurs? (Some old liberals say that to put down Pope Benedict’s Catholic revival; they know they’re through.) How do you avoid that? There are challenges not just from the left but the well-meaning drawbridge right (‘let’s go back to the feudal system!’) including well-meaning Catholics (Médaille to people like me: come on, John, stop following those Jewish atheist economists and drink the socialist Kool-Aid like a real Catholic. An answer: the state is a Protestant substitute church.) The answer is in the great tradition of Western civilisation, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, of which classical liberalism is a fine flower. True open-mindedness as Kevin DeAnna suggests here, like Blessed Antonio Rosmini’s, which closes on something solid as G.K. Chesterton (a distributist, he was a great man but not necessarily an economist) said.
Speaking of earnest leftists many Christians like, shut up, Bono.
Some jottings about the news
