"Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.” C. S. Lewis
The sociologist Gunnar Heinsohn pointed out that 1,000 German men had 480 sons while 1,000 Afghan men had 4000 sons. (http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2011/01)
To lose your only son in a distant war is devastating. For your third, fourth, and fifth sons, what else is there for them to do?
But Burnside [Julian] takes the cake. Last night on Twitter he sent out this message: “Let’s face it: the PNG Arrangement is a shabby deal, but at least if might stop Scott ("illegals") Morrison becoming Immi Minister.” There you have it. All the gnashing of teeth, all the railing against Howard, all the moral vanity boils down to partisan point-scoring. The shabby deal is okay – the human suffering is tolerable – if it drives a party political outcome more desirable for the Melbourne QC. Words fail me.
A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about ‘an integral component of “Berliner Strassenkultur”. But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of a public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafes, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism-and one made even more pathetic by the cultural commentators desperate to pass it off as ‘art’. And it sends a signal to predators of less artistic bent: if you’re unwilling to defend the civic space from these coarse provocations, what others will you give into?
It’s strange and unsettling to walk through cities with so much writing on the wall, and yet whose citizens see everything but. Bernie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia is right: once upon a time, you were certainly an ass if you didn’t know where the ‘writing on the wall’ came from. It was part of the accumulated cultural inheritance.....
.....Instead of paintings and oratorios and other great art about the writing on the wall, Europeans have walls covered in writing, and pretend that its art. Today I doubt one in a thousand high-school students would have clue whence the expression derives. And one sign that the writing’s on the wall is when a society no longer knows what “the writing on the wall” means.Do you know? That is the question.
[Lucy] Sullivan claims that the socioeconomic distribution of sole parents benefit invites the conclusion “that many sole parent births were not unintended, and that unmarried motherhood has become something of a profession” among less-skilled women with low wage-earning potential… “By the early 1990s it could be declared with confidence that the social theories and associated polices foisted on society by the Progressive Left in the second half of the 20th century were fallacious and destructive.”Such welfare tragics now make up the bulk of the 51% who prefers a duplicitous, left-wing (progressive?)snake-oil salesman as prime minister rather than a moral, successful family man.
"what’s the opposite of diversity? University."
Compassionate, clinical care is what is needed and the government should put all possible resources into providing this for young, vulnerable women. Abortion solves nothing.
I know a number of women who had abortions and deeply regretted it. I genuinely do not know any woman who has had a baby and regretted it. No matter the circumstances, the initial stress, anxiety fear, stigma or concern, we must support women in their hour of need. That is simply our moral and constitutional duty.
Lucinda Creighton is Ireland’s Minister of State for European Affairs.Listen to the speech: http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/down_with_stifling_groupthink_says_irish_minister
The question the Obama administration, like all progressive organizations, wishes to elide is whether demanding that an extremely intolerant, tyrannical faction be allowed to participate as an equal partner in a "democratic political process" is not a recipe for a speedy drift into tyranny. In fact, arguments for compromise with tyranny made in the name of "peace" and "justice" are the progressives' stock-in-trade in both domestic and foreign policy, as these have been pursued throughout the late modern world.
The League of Nations and the United Nations were progressive ideas, grand moral equivalency schemes foisted upon the West by men who wished to achieve gradually what the world's tyrants wished to achieve immediately, namely "global governance" in the name of collectivist peace. The abolition of property rights, the dilution of national sovereignty, and the establishment of an international technocratic elite that would supersede elected governments and seek peace through compromise of the fundamental principles of individualism and freedom -- these progressive goals lulled the West into a sleepwalk through fascism, and finally built an entire culture of apologetics for the spread of communism.
A NEW LUTHER NEEDED
We need a new Luther. We need another revolutionary protest to reclaim Christianity. The Roman Catholic and Anglican churches are now firmly in the hands of people who are opposed to freedom and progress. Clifford Longley admiringly writes that, ‘Both (Francis and Welby) are outspoken critics of global capitalism and the concessions that governments tend to make to keep it happy, usually at the expense of the poor.’
Read that again, because, in Longley’s weasel phrases, there’s dirty work at the crossroads. Longley, like all his anti-capitalist kind, is guilty of what the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs called reification. He has turned a relationship between people into a ‘thing’. He says governments are nice to capitalism to keep ‘it’ happy.
Capitalism is the free exchange of services voluntarily rendered and received. It is a relationship between people, characterized by freedom. Adding ‘global’ merely indicates that governments have been less than successful at hindering the free exchange of people's services across national boundaries.
A ‘concession’ to capitalism, is a ‘concession’ to freedom. The authoritarian instinct of Longley and Welby and Francis is dressed up as generosity and big-heartedness … in particular a concern for the poor. But when we ask the question, ‘has capitalism (freedom) benefited the poor?’ no-one, with any knowledge of history, no-one except a lunatic or a scoundrel, could answer, without blushing, anything but, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.
This attack on freedom does not help 'the poor' either materially (Socialism makes poor people poorer), or morally. The corrosive, dehumanizing effects of a sprawling ‘welfare’ state is now clear for everyone to see. It strikes at the very thing that makes us moral human beings, namely, responsibility for ourselves and invidual responsibility for others. As Bastiat observed, ‘To man responsibility is all-important. It is his mover and teacher, his rewarder and his avenger. Without it man is no longer a free agent, he is no longer perfectible, no longer a moral being, he learns nothing, he is nothing. He abandons himself to inaction, and becomes a mere unit of the herd.’
Welby and Francis may be ‘outspoken critics of global capitalism’, but Jesus was not. They are not following in his footsteps. I am told (by people who would defend them) that no matter what, they MEAN well. This counts for nothing. The most dreadful acts have been perpetrated, excused and overlooked, by people who mean well.
These ‘outspoken critics’ are enemies of freedom, and should be feared all the more because they are so humble (to an almost theatrical degree), because they are so ‘well meaning’ and because they claim to speak in God’s name.
Get out your hammers and nails and head for the church doors.Read Luthers thesis @ http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/history/95theses.htm
The essence of the servile mind is the readiness to accept external direction in exchange for being relieved of the burden of a set of virtues such as thrift, self‑control, prudence, and indeed civility itself. A national health service trades off thrift and the freedom to spend one’s own money in exchange for a guarantee that medical help will always be ‘costlessly’ available. Accepting this trade‑off, then, comes to be understood as a virtue in itself, to be contrasted with those selfish people prepared to spend their own wealth on better treatment. Obedience here as in other places is wrongly identified with the rule of law. One measure of the moral decline involved in this advance of servility is that corrupt people, ranging from businessmen to legislators, justify a greedy lack of integrity by claiming that they did not break any rules. A casuistical use of the idea that morality is nothing more than abiding by rules comes to be a license for a self‑serving misuse of office and responsibility. (Source: The Servile Mind, p. 337).
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.......Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”