COUP FAMILIAR

The 'coup' in Turkey gives every appearance of having been staged for the purposes that are now unfolding in that blighted country. Paul Monk opines:

There is something deeply disturbing about the direction in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are taking Turkey....
The scale and arbitrariness of what is happening are ... akin to Adolf Hitler’s state of emer­gency after the Reichstag fire in 1933, or Joseph Stalin’s reaction to the assassination of Sergei Kirov in 1934, than to the US in the 50s. There is also an analogy with Iran’s 1979-81 Islamic revolution.
In the wake of a coup attempt whose source remains mysterious and that fizzled within hours, Erdogan’s regime began arresting or dismissing from their posts tens of thousands of people: military officers, soldiers, police, schoolteachers, academics, judges and civil servants. The scale and speed of the reaction have been breathtaking and cannot possibly be based on evidence of complicity in the failed coup. They can be based only on lists long prepared of those deemed to be politically and ideologically opposed to the Erdogan regime.

DECORATIVE MASCULINITY!

Classic!

David Thompson brings his wit once again to bear on the ongoing assault against masculinity in the post modern era, also referred to as the 'feminisation of western culture', which is of course an oblique assault on what made the West the West; because of course the 'progressive left' hate the 'imperialistic', 'colonialist', 'hetero-normative', 'patriarchal', 'racist', 'capitalistic' (the last one betrays the origins of these assaults!)West:

He’s Being Rugged, And We Can’t Have That

In the pages of the Guardian, masculinity is once again being piously disdained. This time by Mr Grayson Perry, a part-time transvestite and maker ofunattractive pottery:

The Turner prize-winning artist has turned his sights on the survivalist [Bear Grylls] and his exceptionally rugged version of masculinity, arguing that it isn’t fit for the 21st century. “He celebrates a masculinity that is useless,” Perry said… Perry said that the masculine ideal presented by shows such as The Island, in which Grylls is currently putting a third group of hapless contestants through survivalist hell, is making it harder for men to successfully negotiate modern life. “Men might be good at taking the risk of stabbing someone or driving a car very fast, but when it comes to opening up, men are useless,” Perry told the Radio Times in an interview to promote his new series, All Man.
And then, because we haven’t had one in a while, a classic Guardian sentence:
“Masculinity is a decorative feature that is essentially counter-productive.”
Well, it’s true that rafting skills and urine-drinking may be niche concerns and of obvious practical use only to explorers, hardy outdoors types, and people whose package holidays have gone catastrophically wrong. But – and it’s quite a big one - there’s something to be said for seeing people in unfamiliar and rather trying circumstances achieving more – sometimes much more - than they thought they ever could. Which is both the premise and appeal of Mr Grylls’ various, quite popular TV programmes. However, showing people that they may be much more capable than they previously believed, resulting in a sense of great personal satisfaction, is apparently unimportant, a mere “hangover” from more primitive, less Guardian-friendly times.
Regarding the claim that masculinity is functionally obsolete and is now merely decorative, and at risk of seeming unkind, readers are invited to compare the mugshots of Mr Perry and Mr Grylls, these two contrasting expressions of modern masculinity, and ponder which is likely to attract the more widespread and vigorous sexual attention. Or indeed which of them might be more likely to prevail in a more hazardous physical exchange – say, an attempted mugging. And on the supposed uselessness of archetypal masculine skills, Mr Grylls’ lengthy television career, his extensive property portfolio, and his estimated annual earnings from UK merchandising alone of £3.3 million, rather speaks for itself.

CIVILISATIONAL SUICIDE

Could anyone capture the self-destructive 'genes' within Western society better, more eruditely, than Malcolm Muggeridge:

“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”― Malcolm Muggeridge, 

The ABC, the university's, the Arts, the media all of these compose the destructive barbarians within our society and all feed at the taxpayer trough.

Take away the trough and the problem is halved, at the very least!

RENEWABLES!

South Australia has more “renewable” wind power than anywhere else in Australia. They also have the highest electricity bills, the highest unemployment, the largest number of “failures to pay” and disconnections. Coincidence?[J.N]

NIGHTMARE ON CHAVEZ STREET

Isn't the socialist dream wonderful?......[sarc] 

And after you finish reading this uplifting little tract, think on who the richest family in Venezuela is, to the tune of billions of dollars!

"In 2008] a collective of our snowfield socialists - including the ABC’s Phillip Adams, propagandist John Pilger, the Greens’ Kerry Nettle and Kevin Rudd’s nephew Van Thanh Rudd - begged Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come teach Australians a lesson:

Every country has its own traditions and culture and has to find its own solutions, but what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.
Since then this “source of inspiration and ideas” has been teaching our closet totalitarians lots of lessons, such as how to shoot students, close down critical TV stations, stop inflation by arresting 50 butchers, arrest political opponents , create an energy crisis and foster corruption…

Led by Hugo Chávez, the country’s firebrand former president, the country embarked on a wave of expropriation and redistribution with the charismatic leader offering cut-price fridges, appliances and even new homes to poor Venezuelans.

Chávez wanted to create a socialist paradise, an ideology that has been reinforced by his successor Maduro following his death in 2013."

And yet will those socialistically inclined morons in Australia change their views? 

I think not; because once a lump of concrete has set the only way to unset it is with dynamite or a jackhammer and by that time it is too late for the rest of us

ANTI-HUMAN EMPHASIS

I am particularly irked by the fiction that all who oppose the catastrophism of the 'Climate change' spruikers are in the 'pay of big oil/big coal or some other such euphemisms. 

Aside from the fact that cheap (not so cheap in our South Australian socialist 'paradise') electricity is modern society's lifeblood (think of all the iphone users...many of whom bleat about big coal/oil because they cannot compute that one comes from the other) the actual truth of the matter is that the climate change pushers are the ones making mega bucks from the whole deal.

Take Dr. Ruth Gates as an example:

Last summer, the foundation awarded her and a collaborator in Australia, Madeleine van Oppen, four million dollars to pursue the idea.

It would be a huge shame if this natural ability of corals to survive in a changing world were to stand in the way of a stream of funding that should see her well into comfortable retirement. Since corals seem to be able to adapt to conditions so far encountered, how then to ensure that things go smoothly? Why, jump onto the meme that the forthcoming rapid pace of climate change will outstrip the ability of corals to adapt, of course.

Please. please please....people,  whilst we are to be careful of those who would seek to make money irrespective of the damage it does to the environment, be aware also that those who lie and obfuscate the truth in order to profit from a seemingly unending stream of grant money are in fact doing an often greater damage to the environment, if only because the money is now being spent on political advantage rather than on eco-science and helping really damaged environments.

In fact one of the co-founders of the Greenpeace movement, Patrick Moore has said this about the new emphasis of the movement:

He quit Greenpeace in 1986 after 15 years as a co-founder, saying the organisation had become anti-science and anti-human.

LEGAL PROTECTION

To those who think that one-world government is the way...think again:

The point is that nations serve the same function as laws. If we do away with all laws, we will not have freedom, as the anarchists believe, but tyranny. In the absence of law, the strongest devour the weak. Similarly, if we do away with all nations, or erode their sovereign right to self-determination, we will not have an international community of world citizens, as the globalists believe (or say that they believe), but a globalist tyranny in which the most powerful corporations, financial institutions, and political empires have free rein and free reign.

MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

Bradley Birzer's words on the conflict that threatens to undermine our civilisation even more than it already has been:

"It’s a hard lesson for those of us who think so fondly of Christianity and the Christian tradition to know that even the barbarian pagans knew more and practised marriage better than we. And, yet, if we are to believe the recorders of the ancient West, they most certainly did. The republican Tacitus described the following mores and norms among the Germanic Tribes in his Germania:

The matrimonial bond is, nevertheless, strict and severe among them; nor is there anything in their manners more commendable than this…. This they consider as the firmest bond of union…. That the woman may not think herself excused from exertions of fortitude, or exempt from the casualties of war, she is admonished…. that she comes to her husband as a partner in toils and dangers; to suffer and to dare equally with him, in peace and in war…. [Further] To limit the increase of children, or put to death any of the later progeny is accounted infamous: and good habits have there more influence than good laws elsewhere.

The loss of the institution of the family over the last fifty or so years is a huge blow to the integrity of our civilization. Yet, it is not the blow that so many hysterical religious talking heads seem to think. The attack on marriage is not just an attack on the union of “one man and one woman,” but a vicious attack against every intermediary institution—from the neighborhood associations, to the Knights of Columbus, to the local mom-and-pop stores, to the elementary schools, to our medical doctors. Indeed, the work and predictions of Alexis de Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, and Christopher Dawson have all come to pass.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

Unfortunate truth from Jeremy Sammut:

The breeding ground of the new intolerance is, of course, the universities, through which the Left has long marched and captured since the 1970s. Humanities academics across all fields present themselves as champions of diversity in everything from race to gender. But the vast majority have no time for the kind of diversity that really matters in a democratic society — political diversity.
They also like to think of themselves as pluralistic, and as critical and reflective thinkers open to new and challenging ideas. But in these circles, daring to think for oneself, to question the prevailing groupthink, is a recipe for alienation and marginalisation. The political is personal. Deviation from the charmed circled of allegedly enlightened opinion is punished with non-person status — with social and professional death.

Having experienced this first hand and with friends and colleagues facing the same zeitgeist, I would concur most emphatically,

But the decision we all face at this point is to either whinge, moan and thrash about or to move on and make the best of our circumstances by reconstructing an imaginative/intellectual ecology that thrives on open discussion, polite dissension and most importantly logic. I for one favour the latter irrespective of how spiteful and vindictive the left is towards those who differ from their groupthink
.
There appears to be some movement towards just such a conservative resurgence, a reawakening that I hope, trust and pray is real and not merely the dying spasms of an emaciated warrior.

GUN BARREL POWER

Peter Smith speaks an unpalatable[to the leftist mindset] truth:

The reaction of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Dallas when they became aware that shots were being fired is instructive. They scattered in all directions crying out in fear and panic. The police ran towards the danger. There are two lessons to draw I think.
The first is that untrained unarmed people are no match for a trained gunman. This is so obvious why say it? It’s worth saying because we civilians, but particularly progressives and those intent on feminising society, have to realise that power does come out of the barrel of a gun. A few ruthless bad guys with guns can subjugate and enslave many unarmed people (otherwise called ‘sheep’) without any difficulty at all.
Our safety (the safety of us sheep) in Australia is totally dependent on the police and defence forces. In America it is a little different because many millions of citizens have the capacity to defend themselves. I like the American model better because the resurgence of militant Islam is making the world a more threatening place, but that is by the way.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

What eloquence on such a sombre issue.
Edwin Dyga articulates a fundamental issue at the centre of the of the Wests intellectual suicide:

 Decontextualized calls to mercy without a sense of cultural fortitude or national identity eventually beget the politics of surrender. It leads to what is sometimes described as pathological altruism, a selective moral outrage, willing blindness and the inability to take one’s own side in a conflict of competing group interests, all under the impulse of compassion über alles. 

http://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2016/07-08/weaponising-weaknesses/

A SUICIDAL INDIFFERENCE

There is nothing earth shattering in declaring that public education in the West has sunk to disastrous levels. And the way out of that is not to throw more and more money at the problem because the statistics clearly indicate that money does not equate with quality.

Why is that?

Well it might be as Thomas Sowell opines when he said, 

“The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Thomas Sowell has identified a significant weakness, perhaps a result of the radical feminization of the culture? (Before you recoil in horror I am merely stating that sometimes a virtue overstated can become a vice). 

However I think that Patrick Deneen has nailed the core problem of our civilisation. 

This is a Notre Dame intellectual who having taught at Princeton University and Georgetown University is flabbergasted at the tragic state of learning and is not shy to say so in ways that might cause a few SJW's to head for the nearest 'safe space' and plunge their heads into an available sand bucket (emphasis mine):

My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilisation, a civilisation that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

He explains why this has come about:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

He continues:

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalised and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgemental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

I happen to consider the end goals of those who have accomplished this 'generational intellectual suicide' to be rather more dark than he gives them credit for, but that is another story for another day.

SOCIALIST UTOPIAS

Might this resonate with those who have been seduced by the socialist dream(nightmare):

""How Socialism Harms the Individual," Read explains how the forced transfer of wealth degrades and cripples everyone involved. In addition to being directly harmed, the victim of the transfer becomes less provident and charitable. The beneficiary becomes less self-reliant and capable. And the enforcer of the transfer becomes power-addled and contemptible. Power corrupts and captivity degrades. Read cuts through the weeds of public policy debate, and counsels the reader to renounce any role in the redistribution of wealth "for his own mental and spiritual health."

BENEATH THE MASK

Check out Brendan O'Neill's sobering account of the reactionary backlash taken by Europe's 'elite'  towards those who voted for Brexit. I mentioned in an earlier post that the left-wing makers of our current culture in their image, would not stand idly by and watch the 'little people usurp their power base and I have sadly been proved right...not that it took a genius to see what was coming down the turnpike:

This is as ugly an anti-masses sentiment as I can remember. And the consequences of it are likely to be dire. Ordinary people are effectively being told they're too dumb for politics. And democracy is being treated as a negotiable commodity that can be cast aside if we the stupid people make the wrong decision. This is a species of tyranny. The mask has slipped. Our normally conscientious elite, feeling bruised and aloof after the referendum, has dispensed with its usual platitudes about "respecting all views," and shown that beneath the polite veneer there lurks an ancient fury with the least and the dumbest; with the masses; with the people.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/06/27/elitist-rage-over-brexit