IPSO FACTO

As a life-long believer in education I sadly have arrived at the conclusion that it would be best for the survival of Western culture to allow the University's to follow the path that they have set for themselves without hindrance or trying to save them from themselves as some conservatives  (including me) have been trying to do for too long:

American colleges no longer bother to even pretend that they’re teaching students how to think. Instead, their noble mission is making sure that every last trace of a dissident thought is mercilessly shotgunned out of their students’ brains before unleashing them into a world where they have trouble tying their own shoes without doubling their normal dose of antidepressants.
So let the colleges die. Let the teachers—almost to the last gender-fluid one of them an Armchair Marxist who fetishizes the “working class” from afar—learn what it’s really like to earn a living. [J Goad]

Actually not only do I suggest a hands-off approach to the 'long march', which like any parasite ultimately kills its host, but we should turn our energies instead into building alternative options for education and training. 

Indeed I have acted on the latter in that I have home-schooled my youngest for the past 6 years and when he eventually goes to the university, as he will to follow his dream of medicine, he will be well equipped both intellectually and physically (already has two black belts in different Martial Arts) to counter the lunacy that is the university campus

Perhaps it is not too late to save our civilsation before the inevitable bloodshed that follows a loss of reason and logic.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE WRIT LARGE

Bertrand Russell, not a man I am accustomed to referencing on many occasions as he happens to exemplify much of what I am diametrically opposed to, however to give him his due he was a very astute and intelligent man and he had this to say about the 'social justice warriors' of his day:

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

Of course we are seeing this truism played out in politics, popular culture, in the movies, in fact in every area of  existence ad nauseam these days. There is no stone left upturned by these goose-stepping, young thought-crime commissars where we ordinary (deplorable) citizens might escape their harsh and accusatory gaze. 

Consider as an example the love and tolerance exhibited by a Greens (political party) campaigner and peace loving, virtue signalling, young social justice warrior who occupies a vertiginous position on the hierarchical ladder of victim-hood:

I'm a white, queer, disabled, middle class Italian-Australian woman

These are her claims to being allowed to scold, to badger, to insult, to demean to do anything she damn well wants to because she is special.

The left keep telling us how tolerant they are.
Except, of course, for anyone who disagrees with them, where it would appear that nostalgia for Stalin’s terrors is alive and well in the Australian Greens.
Here is yet another example: Damiya Hayden is a campaign co-coordinator for the Australian Young Greens. This is her in a discussion on Facebook with former Menzies House Managing Editor John Humphreys:

  

 

TRANS-REASON

Given that we are no longer free to observe or look at anything these days without some revisionist, ideological twist of the current trans-idiotic zeitgeist being thrust ignominiously down our throats, I feel I cannot but agree with the precise and pithy comment by the indomitable Mark Steyn:

"Contemporary culture is imprisoned in its own cell, little and grey."

LANGUAGE WARS AND GENESIS

In contemplating the general demise of language in our day and in particular the attack on language by ‘Post-modern academics’ (oxymoron!) one thing is clear. 

This is not a new development. 

History repeats itself over and over and over.

Santayana said it well; “if you do not know your history then you are doomed to repeat it.”

The assault on language is something that is historically common and features predominantly in times of trouble and/or as a developmental stage towards the conquering of something or someone.

I have a small book by George Orwell entitled: “Politics and the English Language’ and it addresses these issues. Incidentally it was written before his classic dystopian novel 1984 and foreshadows the ideas he put forth in ‘fictional’ terms in the thesis of the book.

Consider for example some comfortable English Professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, ‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so’. Probably he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigours which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and ones declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

There is so much more that I would like to quote from this book, particularly given his marvellous control of metaphor and pictorial illustration ("like a cuttlefish squirting ink"; what a marvellously imaginative metaphor for clouding the mental water), but it is probably better to purchase it rather inexpensively via Amazon.

This little volume is also chock full of insight, wisdom and observation about how those in power or those seeking power subvert the language to achieve their own agendas. This was most probably the grounding for his coinage of the term ‘Newspeak’ which is defined by Wikipedia as:

Newspeak is a controlled language, of restricted grammar and limited vocabulary, a linguistic design meant to limit the freedom of thought—personal identity, self-expression, free will—that ideologically threatens the régime of Big Brother and the Party, who thus criminalized such concepts as thoughtcrime, contradictions of Ingsoc orthodoxy.

The subversion of the language is what is happening on a grand scale in the political and academic worlds of the West today. It is in part an attack on Western orthodoxy, a form of cultural Marxism which has morphed from the classic Marxist theory of a clash of class warfare into a clash of victims via the pathway of Gramscian ideology. It could also be the result of a metaphysical exhaustion with relativity and the rise of a will to meaning where some are wanting to believe in something, anything as long as it is not the Judaeo-Christian worldview. Hence the rise in outrageous philosophy's of  identity politics. The denigration of science and the rise of science fiction; i.e that we can choose our sex, race or even species. 

At the centre of it all is the use and abuse of language and it is onto this battlefield that a mild mannered Canadian professor of psychology strolls into You Tube notoriety by declaring unashamedly that he will not bow to the cultural Marxists corruption of the English language regarding preferred pronouns for the transgendered minority on the universities campus.

I wholeheartedly applaud his bold stand. He knows that to control language is to control thought (aka thoughtcrime) and that if these demonic manipulations are allowed to be accepted into the wider community, then we have virtually taken the first step in surrendering our freedoms, freedoms won at so great a cost by the ‘greatest generation’.

Peterson has courageously exhibited the way forward and we the ordinary, everyday ‘normal's’ in society must follow suit. We cannot allow these tiny, unrepresentative minorities to dominate and oppress (in the name of freedom and peace…1984 anyone?) us or our children. 

Remember most of history's murdering maniacs took control with tiny minorities....and then the axe fell. 

Education is one way that we can counteract the leaven of the beast, use any means necessary. The net, Facebook, your phone, vote at every opportunity, get involved in politics local and national, if you have money contribute to conservative causes...stand up and be counted for this is what we have been called to do. The very first mandate given in Genesis was that of the cultural imperative. Do it! 

BRING ON THE BARD

I consider the Huxley and Orwell novels as both the blueprint for our modern ‘culture’ and a prophetic call presenting ways to avoid the (potentially)coming disaster.

In 1984 ‘the past has been abolished’. ‘History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right’. Such dystopian engineering is at work in my own country. By the deliberate decision of pedagogues, hundreds of thousands of children now leave school without knowing a single historical fact about their own country. The historical principles that museums have traditionally used to display art have given way to historical thematic displays-portraits of women from a jumble of eras, say. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It. T Dalrymple, loc 2796)

For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolised resistance to the dehumanising disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man form the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. A few lines are sufficient to make him realise the superficiality of the Brave New World:

Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!

And when Winston Smith wakes in 1984 from a dream about a time before the revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises to his lips, for reasons that eh does not understand: Shakespeare. (loc. 2797)

We need to teach our children Shakespeare!

DECONSTRUCTING MADNESS

The West is collapsing from within like a hot-air balloon whose burner has exploded and we are plummeting towards a harsh reality.

What might that 'burner' have been you ask? 

Might I suggest that foundational worldview of the West; the Judaeo-Christian worldview! 

By moving away from this foundational belief system we have not stopped believing, we have merely shifted our object of belief from a transcendent being to ourselves as the font of all wisdom, benevolence and meaning.

We now view ourselves as god, able to make every decision for ourselves. Able to differentiate good from evil based on our own opinions and desires. We no longer even bother with the concept of 'truth'...whats that (of course that is not new, even Pontius Pilate struggled with that one). We have long been able (with the help of the God given talents of surgeons) to change our exterior appearances to coincide with what is most in vogue amongst the 'important' people, and now we have even convinced ourselves that we can change our biology dependant on what we want it to be.

In short we have moved into a mode of subjective, self-delusional, mass induced madness unparalleled in human history. [Comment in brackets mine]: 

The reason for this existential collapse is that the relativist west has so heavily bought into the belief that reality is merely what we decide it to be. Ours has become a culture of radical subjectivity in which there is no such thing as objective truth. Everything is instead a matter of opinion and individual perception.

Feelings trump facts every time. No-one’s lifestyle is to be considered wrong or inferior to anyone else’s. No judgment is to be permitted, except for the judgment that judgmentalism is wrong. What is right for me is what is right. What I declare something to be is what it is. I feel, therefore I am.(et tu Descartes)

The ostensible aim of all this is to end discrimination, prejudice and social exclusion. This is untrue. The aim is unilaterally to change the entire basis of society from one governed by external moral rules and duties to one in which the only rule that has any authority is the duty to actualise our own inner potential and fulfil our own desires. [M Phillips]

Such delusional thinking must have consequences...watch this space.

 A read of this short article by the former Left-wing (now conservative) journalist Melanie Phillips charts well the deconstruction of humanity that our Western elites have committed our once free and prosperous society to.
It makes for sobering reflection.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/the-deconstruction-of-humanity/

LETS SLAY THE POMO DRAGON

The actual root of our general malaise goes back to the beginning of time, i.e. the Garden of Eden, but the origin of our current dilemma, a.k.a. 'Cultural Marxism' only reaches back a few decades according to the editor of the Washington Free Beacon newspaper Matthew Continetti:

The beginnings of identity politics can be traced to 1973, the year the first volume of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—a book that demolished any pretense of communism’s moral authority—was published in the West. The ideological challenge of socialism was fading, its fighting spirit dwindling. This presented a challenge for the Left: how to carry on the fight against capitalism when its major ideological alternative was no longer viable?

The Left found its answer in an identity politics that grew out of anti-colonialism. Marx’s class struggle was reformulated into an ethno-racial struggle—a ceaseless competition between colonizer and colonized, victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed. Instead of presenting collectivism and central planning as the gateway to the realization of genuine freedom, the new multiculturalist Left turned to unmasking the supposed power relations that subordinated minorities and exploited third world nations.
The original battleground was the American university, where, as Bruce Bawer writes in The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Politics and the Closing of the Liberal Mind,

I find myself in tentative agreement with this opinion.

Many have blamed the 60's for the radical changes that have impacted our societies in the West, however having grown up during the 60's and reached maturity(?) during the 70's I believe that the hard but fruitful ground established for two decades after the war by the veterans was indeed ploughed, prepared, cultivated and disturbed by the anarchy, rebellion and narcissism of the 60's but the actual seeds of our destruction were sown during the late 70's into the 80's.

These were the decades where I first heard and studied about the philosophical changes happening in society, and I happen to agree with Francis Schaeffer's assertion that: "culture flows downstream from the intellectuals," and that the effects of these changes then begin to make their appearance in the arts; 'fine' and otherwise.

This is the period when 'Post Modernism' began to rear its ugly head in academia and eventually in the arts until today when the effects of moral relativity and the social chaos resulting from narcissistic subjectivity has truly hit the fan and the 'victim-hood of the minorities' has become a living dragon-like thing to behold.

I say we walk in the footsteps of St George and slay these dragons...what say you?

THE ROAD TO PERDITION

This from an article by Nick Gillespie:

"More than Elvis and Little Richard, who at least freaked out the older generation, Paul Anka and Neil Sedaka were perceived as bigger threats to the USSR precisely because they represented a complete absence of revolutionary potential. In a society in which everything was about politics and ideology, the most revolutionary act was to simply ignore politics and ideology, if only for a few minutes."

Sounds familiar doesn't it? 

The post-modern left in the West is politicising EVERYTHING. 

You can't go to the footy and not be assaulted by political arm-twisting, you can't go to school these days and avoid ideological influences even the movies are loaded with ideological baggage. Conservative commentators are whingeing about it but no one points to the similarities with the old Soviet Union under communism.

Does this mean that we are a trip and a lurch away from becoming like the commissar ridden Soviet Union? I sure hope not but given that 40% of American youth (probably the same number of Australian youth..or more!)  would rather live under a socialist government I don't see us avoiding it.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-05/40-percent-americans-now-prefer-socialism-capitalism

WINSTON'S WORLD

I really do not know whether the left-wing loons in power or those who believe in the nonsense the left-wing loons dish up, really are stupid or not. I used to scoff at all the conspiracy theorists that abound in our increasingly online world, but the more the West heads towards the cliff-face the more I am becoming a believer.

We live in a world that has been prophesied about, not only by the biblical writers but by those more prescient amongst the left-wing who witnessed the degradation brought about by socialist dictators, were alarmed by the directions that the left in the West was heading and had the courage to write about it. I speak here of course about Huxley and Orwell whose prophetic utterances about the direction the world would take is almost so accurate that I am sure that the two of them would not have imagined that they could have been so exact.

I know from his extended writings that Orwell did not want the world to head in the direction it now has, that his writings were intended as a warning about how we could end up where we are headed if we followed blindly long the path of the socialist utopia. Unfortunately his warnings fell on deaf ears and his books became mere curiosities, works of 'literature' who raison detre was lost in the fog of Post-Modernism's assault on deconstructing all meaning out of texts. The end result is that we now inhabit Winston's World.

Winston Smith worked at 'Minitrue' (the Ministry of Truth in 'newspeak') and his job was to rewrite history. What do we see happening everyday on the news and in the press? People rioting about historical statues and the desire to rewrite history according to the 'rules' of today (the radicals rules of course). Think about these inventions of Orwell's and how they might apply to life today:

Orwell's invented language, Newspeak, satirises hypocrisy and evasion by the state: the Ministry of Love (Miniluv) oversees torture and brainwashing, the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty) oversees shortage and rationing, the Ministry of Peace (Minipax) oversees war and atrocity and the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) oversees propaganda and historical revisionism. [Wikipedia]

What inspired me to write this short piece was reading a political rant in the Washington Times today by Eric Holder the former Attorney General of the United States wherein he stated:

“The president sets a moral tone, and I think in that regard President Trump has not done the job we expect of our leaders,” Mr. Holder said. “The election of Barack Obama did not magically transform us as a people and eradicate bigotry, eradicate neo-Nazis and white nationalists. They were still there, but they didn’t feel empowered in a way that I think they do now.”

He states that America now is not what he wants, that he "wants to go back to the America of Obama", indeed he refers to Trump as that 'Orange man'. Can you imagine what the press during Obama's kingship would have done to anyone who referred to his majesty as that 'black man'?

Obama's reign sent racial disharmony into the stratosphere. Corruption between government and  crony capitalism reached new heights and Obama's assault on the basic liberty's of everyday Americans went into overdrive, and who was the man who wielded the big stick, why Eric Holder of course. Its no wonder he wants to go back to the Obama administration. Consider Holders role in this attack on the constitutions second amendment:

The Left loathes the idea that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms and has engaged in an ugly campaign against it. In his contribution, former House member Bob Barr details the non-legislative, extra-legal means employed by the Obama administration to undermine that right.
One of them was “Operation Fast and Furious,” a gambit undertaken by the Department of Justice to sell firearms to Mexican drug cartel figures with the intention of demonstrating the supposed need for a greater crackdown on arms sales. Some of the weapons involved in this rogue plan were used in the gun battle that cost a border patrol agent his life in 2010. But when Congress investigated and sought information about Fast and Furious, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to turn over documents and was then held in contempt of Congress. That, however, had no impact at all.

Holder's tenure was so corrupt that Tom Fitton, attorney and President of Judicial Watch called Eric Holder: ‘One of the worst attorneys general in history’. Holder was called Obama's 'attack dog', his 'enforcer' and Ben Shapiro likened Holders reign to that of the Mafia kingpins. Now many of these voices could be dismissed as conservatives calling a left-wing radical names but the actual evidence of corruption and failure fly far beyond narrow political divides.

In all reality, what's posted below is the tip of the iceberg concerning Holder's lawlessness.



Holder is nobody's idea of a person of good character and I image that Martin Luther King Jnr. is spinning like a turbine in his grave at what America became under Obama's regime. Thank goodness the limitation of two terms still holds water in America, and thank goodness so many citizens of that country still have the weapons to defend their liberty, because if Obama and his minions like Holder had had the chance I have no doubt that America would have become like Zimbabwe on steroids.

Which is why reading Holders diatribe against Trump made Orwell's novel come to life for me.

ASKED AND ANSWERED

More and more of the seemingly mindless Post-Modern waffle emanating from the universities these days is being revealed as classic Marxism (although I am not sure that many of the unwitting idiots who nowadays proffer such 'wisdom' are actually aware of it). Take this post from a tenured twit as an example:

"A sociology professor at the City University of New York recently argued in an extensive series of tweets that “the white-nuclear family” perpetuates racism. Jessie Daniels, a self-described “expert on race,” began by declaring that, “What I’ve learned is that the white-nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces supporting white supremacy. I mean, if you’re a white person who says they’re engaged in dismantling white supremacy but… you’re forming a white family [and] reproducing white children that ‘you want the best for’ - how is that helping [and] not part of the problem?”
Apparently, the stable family structure is a “fact to be lamented,” and stable white families should be discouraged from existing. " [Toni Airraksinen]

Classic Marxism is antagonistic to what we term the 'nuclear family' for the following reasons:

Marxists argue that the nuclear family performs ideological functions for Capitalism – the family acts as a unit of consumption and teaches passive acceptance of hierarchy. It is also the institution through which the wealthy pass down their private property to their children, thus reproducing class inequality.

According to Engels, the monogamous nuclear family only emerged with Capitalism. Before Capitalism, traditional, tribal societies were classless and they practised a form of ‘primitive communism’ in which there was no private property. In such societies, property was collectively owned, and the family structure reflected this – there were no families as such, but tribal groups existed in a kind of ‘promiscuous horde’ in which there were no restrictions on sexual relationships. [ReviseSociology site]

I hear the unquestioning parroting of these theories all over the place these days and not least in some watered down form or another from within the very walls of the church, which is an indication of how much the world has influenced the church rather than the other way around.

In my humble opinion such transgressions are possible only because the Church has, by and large neglected the life of the mind in favour of the life of the spirit, not that the life of the Spirit is not important, it is essential, but here I speak of the emotionalism inherent in so much of the church today.

It is an age old dilemma, "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem" and whilst I understand the hesitation articulated at the time that this quote was uttered during the third Century AD it was intended as a refutation of the claims the rhetoricians, who set themselves up against the teachings of the church, were making. Interestingly the man who phrased the question was a man schooled in rhetoric and logic himself. He also said that it was the blood of the martyrs who seeded the church...a sobering thought given today's march of Marxism into our society.

We cannot arrive at KNOWING GOD through reason but once we know him reason is the tool we use to gain knowledge about Him and His ways.

Which is the more important wing of a bird....an absurd question...similarly which is more important Faith or Reason? A: neither, they both are.

Recent musings by B Muehlenberg to bolster my observations:

Oct 31, 2017
When I speak of Christians being illiterate, I have far more in mind than just the inability of some to properly read and write – in that they are simply the product of the modern Western education. But I am speaking here of a wider sort of illiteracy, one that is as regrettable as it is widespread.
I refer to historical illiteracy, theological illiteracy, biblical illiteracy, church history illiteracy, etc. Far too many Christians in the West today are woefully ignorant of that which they should not be ignorant. They know little about their own faith, their own Christian culture and history, their own doctrine, and their own Bible.
That is why the church keeps losing. A people divorced from their own heritage and their own belief system will not long stand. Indeed, they will be blown about by every wind of doctrine, by every cultural breeze, and by every latest trend, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul.