Modern marriage and more

• Modern marriage. Obviously not religious, and arguably another modern approach so it's part of the problem, but it brings home Roissy's and others' point that when a feminist says "I don't need a man," she really means "I'm married to the state and/or company." (Manosphere critic Bob Wallace and others: women wouldn't last a week without men.) So the carousel is like adulterous affairs (courtly love) historically. Good companion piece to "The working woman's new master." Modernity, going back to the dark satanic mills: breaking up families and an occasion of sin.
• From Bob Wallace:
  • Happiness comes from within, and also without.
  • The hatred of the Father. Or as Maggie McNeill might say, they've tried to replace him (reminds me of how corporations are legally people), necessary since he's necessary in the natural order.
  • The cultural devastation of and by feminism. So many women are unhappy, even crazy, because their instincts tell them one thing (have a real husband and kids) and modernity another (have fun on the carousel and work hard at your career; the state and your circle of women friends will always take care of you).
  • Behind every great fortune there is a crime. You can be a multimillionaire honestly, but probably not a billionaire; that takes crime.
• Hoc est enim Corpus meum. "I sacrifice myself for you." Peter Kreeft: Abortion is the Antichrist’s demonic parody of the Eucharist. That is why it uses the same holy words, “This is my body,” with the blasphemously opposite meaning. Vampires are a folkloric version of this reversal, as I learned from of all things a line in an "X-Files" episode. The flashpoint of all rebellion against God is where he and his material creation meet: who Jesus is, the Eucharist, and sex (the ancient heretics, the Protestants, and the secularists, respectively and sequentially), the last being secularists' big non serviam selling point, from murder ("this is MY body: I sacrifice you for myself") to World War G (the state making you say two men or women can marry) to World War T ("a woman because you say you are").
• From Alternative Right: Why feminism fails in the Third World. Decadence that only a rich country can afford, for a while.
• From the Anti-Gnostic: The rules of social conservatism were not written with high-g atheists in mind, and the Church should consider enabling affordable family formation in her own pews rather than the ballyhooed, well-intended, muddle-headed evangelism. Dreher's religion is arguably escapism as well as egotism: "a spiritual tourist trap" and "a redoubt for aging, white intellectuals."
• Defeatism vs. false flag. I've read that Tolkien was a defeatist, as a Catholic and deep conservative. Not the same as surrendering the public square and doing what the state says, which it seems Dreher is advocating. (I'm not necessarily saying he is.) I'd say a good example of defeatism, the good thing, is something we should be studying as a survival guide: the Ukrainian Catholic Church underground under Communism. Canonize acting Metropolitan Volodymyr (Sterniuk)?
• I have no conscience problem with Pope Benedict's English Novus Ordo (and I've seen it at a liberal parish: Catholic in spite of those people), but Tridentine's better. That said, Novus Ordo neocons before Benedict the Great: s*itting on your cupcake and calling it frosting since 1970. Being an American Catholic in the '70s and '80s with them: "What's wrong with the cupcake?" "Somebody s*at on it." "Are you denying it's a real cupcake?" "No, but –" "Eat the cupcake – obey." "But –" "Why are you leaving the church?"
• Living links, a living tradition. My Sunday Mass has many couples in their 30s with relatively lots of children but also a few living links, people who were adults before Vatican II, born in the '20s through the '40s. That's why our tradition is salvageable; it never died. The old-timers are around to pass it down to us and make sure we "keep it real," do it right. The church, not a cult with the church's trappings, nor just a re-enactment. Credit's due not just to churchmen who put it all on the line such as Archbishop Lefebvre (we got the indult, Ecclesia Dei, and Summorum Pontificum because he sacrificed himself) but the loyal remnant who soldiered on at the early low Novus Ordo (no attempt at music and no funny business; just read it out of the book, Father) in the parishes for 30+ years and kept their old missals, waiting for a better day. By the way, if you don't hear much about Jesus, God's love, or charity to your fellow man, and mostly hear rants against the "new" church, it's probably a cult - run.
• The A-bombs: Truman knew.
• My heritage. Some historical fact (my Southern WASP and Spanish background), some conjecture and Google research (my German-Pennsylvanian roots, which are not Mennonite). That I've been in Pennsylvania on and off for nearly 30 years is a neat coincidence.