#do you think marriage in our western christian understanding of it even exists over there? and if it does would eda participate?

[fredbsmith]

Discovering My Father

A Memoir

My childhood memories contain no trace of my father.

He was present in my childhood only in the very earliest years, infancy years, before memories can form and stay with you.  He was away, in the Navy serving as a ship’s doctor in the Pacific during World War II while I was still in diapers.  He was never to return to us.  My mother learned of incidents of infidelity during his travels and banished him from the household forever.

Mama’s banishment decree created a vast separation between him and what remained of our nuclear family.  He was never to be spoken of at home, nor his existence acknowledged.   Mama remarried, after the divorce, a man 10 years younger than herself, and she arranged for my younger sister and me to be legally adopted by our new stepfather.  We took on his surname, and the order was given that we must now call him, and think of his as, our father. 

This radical restructuring of our family troubled me in the ensuing years.  My true father had had to sign off on the adoption papers, in return for which he was relieved of any child support obligations.  I found myself wishing he had refused, had angrily denounced this slashing of all bonds between us, we who were his flesh and blood!  Could I ever forgive him for that?

My stepfather came from the rural South; unlike my mother, he had received no education beyond high school; and he had always worked in blue-collar jobs.  He had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian family, and he saw the world in stark, black-and-white tones, full of wickedness and insolence, demanding draconian punishments.  He professed love for me at times, but even at my young age I could sense this was perfunctory, not genuine.  I remember more vividly how strongly he felt that I, a coddled Mama’s boy, was sorely in need of punishment, which he proceeded to administer liberally.  One of the cruelest punishments I received, a prolonged beating with a rubber hose, was for forgetting one of my assigned daily household chores.  I think he had interpreted my lapse in duties as an act of defiance of his commands; I look back on it, to this day, as a typical oversight committed by the absent-minded, day-dreamy sort of person that I have always been.

I was puzzled, as I grew older, by the obvious strength of the marriage bond between my mother and stepfather, and by the way she appeared to defer to him in so many family matters.  She was clearly more intelligent and more learned than he; she had a BA degree from the University of Chicago, after all, the sort of distinction which was quite a rarity among the residents of the small town in Western Colorado where we lived.  As the years went on, my stepfather proved a failure as a family breadwinner, and Mama then became our sole financial support.  I now wonder if Mama wasn’t doing a little bit of acting back then, taking on the role of subservient homemaker to make us appear more like one of the conventional nuclear families we were seeing on television.  I also wonder if she over-valued her marital relationship because, with the bitter memory of her first marriage, she knew my stepfather was not the sort of man who would ever betray her.

I am often troubled reflecting on Mama’s passive acceptance of the abuse I was receiving from my stepfather.  Did she really believe that the beatings, as well as his continual teasing and belittling of me, were in my best interest?  She had absorbed certain cultural attitudes of the American South from her own father, a Bavarian immigrant who had spent his first years in his adopted country there, learning American norms and customs in Slaughter, Louisiana.  Perhaps she really believed that boys needed to be physically beaten and verbally assaulted, to toughen them up, to grow up properly.  In any case, I never understood why this otherwise active, independent, outspoken woman, who seemed to have such a deep understanding of the world, never stood up for me.  Such thoughts created a barrier that prevented me from ever trying, as an adult, to develop and nurture the loving, open relationship with my mother that I would otherwise have wished for.

Throughout my teen years, I yearned for escape from the toxic environment I had at home.  Coming into young manhood, I was accepted at a prestigious college in the East, and I saw this as a kind of salvation, since I now had a practical excuse for minimizing my visits back to Colorado.  Thereafter, I maintained both a geographic and emotional distance from home, which initially brought me some degree of comfort.

As years went by, the distance sustained a sense of relief but not of happiness.  I was, in fact, quite a sad young man.  I came to learn that people who have been abused as children tend to develop the habit of self-blaming.  For some reason, it is easier to accept suffering as the predictable result of your own shortcomings, and therefore something theoretically you might be able to correct, than to acknowledge that you have been dealt a bad hand by the universe and that you are powerless to do anything about it.  In any case, I had become remarkably proficient at self-blame.  Feeling that all of the things that go wrong in the world around you are your own fault is a sure-fire recipe for perpetual sadness.

It took many years of life as a young adult, and processing of memories on a therapist’s couch, before I recognized that there was a step I could take which would help me to heal the wounds inflicted upon me in childhood.  It was to search out and find my father.  This seemed an important task in coming to terms with the reality of my situation and reducing the burden of exaggerated self-blame I had taken on.

I undertook the project during the years I was doing residency training, the beginning of the 1970’s, when I was in my late twenties.  I had little information about my father other than his somewhat unusual French-sounding surname, “Mafit,” the surname I bore through the first grade in school, and the fact that he had received medical training.  Assuming that he was still alive, was practicing medicine somewhere in the United States and that he would have become certified in some medical specialty, I was able to locate a promising candidate by searching the reference section of my medical school’s library.  There was an obstetrician-gynecologist in Roseburg, Oregon, named Mafit, whose dates of medical school graduation and of naval service seemed appropriate for my father.  I was interested to see that this Dr. Mafit had done his ob/gyne residency at Washington University in St. Louis in the years immediately following the end of the war.  That was the time period in which my adoption had been transacted.  If this was indeed my father’s record I was seeing, it meant that he would have made the decision to sign the adoption papers while employed, hundreds of miles from where his children were living, as a hospital resident, a position that in those days required literally residing within the hospital’s walls and being available to provide care to the hospital’s patients around the clock.   It would have provided little or no salary and he likely would not have been able to hire a lawyer.   This would not fully justify his willingness to give up his children, but it went part of the way as an explanation, providing a glimpse of how restricted he was in his ability to act and allowing me to imagine how painful it would have been to be a parent trapped by these circumstances.

I sent off a brief handwritten letter to this Dr. Mafit at his listed office address, saying that I believed him to be my father with whom I had lost touch many years back, and, if my supposition was correct, would he be interested in writing to me?  I received an immediate reply (“immediate” for the days of snail mail) saying that he was indeed my father, corroborated by the enclosure of an old photograph of him holding me as a baby.  He said that for years he had been hoping I would reach out to him, and he thanked me for doing so and praised the courage he thought it must have taken.  He understood the depth of Mama’s antipathy toward him and explained that that was the reason he had not taken the first step.  He anticipated I had been told many bad things about him growing up, which he hoped he would have the opportunity to counter.  (Actually, I had been told almost nothing about him; the worst I had been told was that he was a man who cared nothing for his children, which the reply letter itself seemed to disprove.)  He signed the letter, “your loving father, Ted.”

We wrote letters to each other periodically, he more faithfully and promptly than I, over the following years, the years of his life that remained, and we visited each other on both coasts once every year or so.  I learned much about him, although I was, of course, not seeing him from the perspective I would have had as a growing child.

He was a tall, tanned, white-haired man, who spoke slowly and softly and with a western drawl, which belied the enormous drive and energy that lay below the surface.  He had carried on a solo practice of ob/gyne in this small city for his entire professional career, which meant he could be called on 24/7, around the clock and around the calendar, to report to the hospital to perform a delivery or emergency surgery.

He was never inclined to take on a partner, or involve himself in a group practice typical of most of today’s ob/gynes.  I believe he was, in his heart, a committed loner.  He valued his independence; he was one of the original maverick practitioners in Oregon who made the national news when they resigned en masse from the state medical society after it started requiring regular continued medical education as a condition of membership.

He had a number of friends and professional contacts, with whom he had cordial but not close relationships.  I suspected he was a man who had difficulty with intimacy.  He married three more times after the breakup with my mother, each time to a successively younger woman.  He had three daughters with his second wife, my half-sisters, who are about half a generation younger than I.  They all had the experience of looking to him as a dad when little, and they told me that he had seemed distant to them in those years.

Ted's second wife, Melba.

It came up once in conversation that one of his teachers when he was in training was Dr. William Masters, who had later acquired national attention for his work, with Dr. Virginia Johnson, on human sexuality.  When I asked Ted what Masters was like, he remembered him as “a scrupulously honest man” and “a very dedicated researcher.”  He didn’t have much to say about the popular book and I was left with the impression that he didn’t do much sexual counseling in his ob/gyne practice.

In his early years of practice, he had traveled to New York to attend lectures at Cornell Medical School being given by Dr. George Papanicolaou, the originator of the screening test for cancer of the cervix of the uterus now known as the “Pap smear.”  Ted wanted to be able to offer this test to his patients, but many medical laboratories didn’t do it; there was a lot of skepticism in the medical community at the time, probably because Papanicolaou himself was a scientist who studied reproductive physiology in monkeys and not a medical doctor.  So Ted learned to do the test himself, and, after acquiring official certification, performed it in his office laboratory up until his retirement.

He incorporated elective abortions into his practice after the Roe v. Wade decision made them permissible.  He took referrals from the other ob/gyne specialist in Roseburg, who was a Roman Catholic and had personal religious objections to the procedure.  Ted himself professed no religion.  He did not believe in unlimited access to abortion, however.  Any woman who asked him to terminate her pregnancy first had to demonstrate that she had a reasonable plan for avoiding unplanned pregnancies in the future (he would, of course, assist her with this), and she was advised that he never performed a second abortion on the same patient.

He was passionate about his hobby of fly fishing, which he indulged in almost daily.  He had used much of the wealth generated from his practice to purchase an estate whose back lawn was bordered by the North Umpqua River, so that he could do fly-casting from his back yard. 

Ted was addicted to, but seemingly not impaired by, alcohol.  The addiction was integrated into another consuming hobby, winemaking and viticulture.  He purchased land for a vineyard adjacent to his home and acquired a second vineyard later, a few miles away.  When he retired from his practice, he became a professional vintner.  He drank a bottle of wine daily as a matter of course, and he believed it did not affect his ability to do a delivery or emergency operation when called on in his off-hours.  I realize this is a claim many would find implausible.  I certainly did not perceive any effect from his drinking when we dined together; he remained the quiet, reserved, dignified, soft-spoken man he always was.  His colleagues and support staff at the hospital, who had observed his performance over many years, appeared never to have suspected his alcohol use.  In his last days, after he was admitted to the hospital’s Coronary Care Unit with a coronary artery occlusion that was to prove fatal, he developed a seemingly bizarre neurological syndrome that mystified the hospital staff.  They discussed bringing in an outside neurological specialist to consult.  His daughter and wife had to quietly suggest that what they were witnessing was delirium tremens, and that it would disappear if he was given alcohol.  To make such a diagnosis on a respected senior member of their medical staff would never have occurred to them.

In addition to the character-defining traits I’ve just outlined, I also learned some things about my father that must, I suppose, be considered trivia, but which I’ve always found endearing:

He was spectacularly good-looking in pictures from his youth, with his dark hair and moustache making him resemble Douglas Fairbanks or Ronald Coleman.  Many NY friends to whom I introduced him on his visits here commented on how dashing he was.

His full name was Trowbridge Rudolph Mafit.  The Mafits seemed to have a penchant for giving their offspring colorful names.  My paternal grandmother’s first name was Theil, and she had had two sisters whose names were Leith and Devere.  My three half-sisters were named after them, Andrea Leith, Leslie Theil, and Dana Devere.

Ted had become famous among members of the fly-fishing community for the flies that he designed and crafted himself.  One such hand-tied fly was the subject of a feature article in Field and Stream, and it was later marketed commercially as the “Doc’s Fly.”

He also acquired fame among Oregon winemakers.  The local county museum to this day has on display a bottle of white pinot noir that he produced sometime in the 1970s, believed to be the first of this variety to originate in Oregon.

Ted owned 23 cats at the time of my first Oregon visit, three Siamese inhabiting the house, the remainder domestic short-hairs roaming about his estate.  They all had names.  He joked that he was emulating, and hoping to surpass, Ernest Hemingway in their number.

It was during his final days that my father and I once again became separated.  I actually did not realize it was happening at all, at the time, that he had begun the process of dying.  He wrote me two letters describing the coronary events that he had experienced.  He somehow managed to use descriptive medical language to minimize the seriousness of his condition; he made it seem as if he would be back on his feet, working his vineyards any day now.  I fell for it, and decided I would not plan my next visit to Oregon until he had recovered.

It came as a shock when I was notified that he had died.  I flew to Roseburg to attend the funeral.  My heart broke when I saw photographs of him in the days before he died, the days when he was writing me the cheery letters; he was gaunt, disheveled, in distress, and obviously a seriously ill man in those photos.  I re-read the letters and slowly began to appreciate his artful use of the medical language to alleviate my concern.  There was only one unequivocal deception on his part; he claimed in his letters that he was being told he was not a candidate for coronary artery bypass surgery.  My sisters and his wife, who witnessed the events in real time, let me know that the opposite was the case.  His doctors repeatedly implored him to consent to surgery, and, each time, he adamantly refused.

I’ve concluded that he simply wanted to die alone, and with as little revelatory conversation as possible.  He did not want me to come to say good-bye to him in person.  It would have been too painful for him.  The exposure of his alcoholism on his death bed must have been mortifying to him; he just wanted to slip away quietly.

This seemed to encapsulate the sort of man he was, a man to whom peace and preservation of his dignity was all important.  He was not a street fighter like Mama.  He could never have taken her on in a brawl. 

To return to my original question, the issue of forgiving him for abandoning his parental rights at the time of the divorce now seems irrelevant.  What I had earlier yearned for from him was simply not in him to give.  And I am at peace with that now.

[ithisatanytime]

Lazy Town | Cooking By The Book Music Video

one of the consequences of the recent shift in the public perception of jews and power that i think a lot of people are gonna miss is that even for the most blue pilled normie boomer, the idea that jews in nazi germany were just some random ethnic minority they scapegoated is irrefutably destroyed, the average person now perceives jews at the very least as a powerful group and that perception is cast back onto their understanding of history, it undermines a key pillar of the jewish lie, this holocaust narrative cannot be overstated in its importance to satan, as it provided the moral justification for equating simple prejudice with mass murder, so what the holocaust myth did was morally equate having preconceived notions based on race with mass cold blooded murder its hard for a modern westerner to even imagine a world in which blatant racism was seen as just “rude” instead of the ultimate unforgivable sin, yet this was the mode of the entire earth for literally thousands of years, we are living in a STRANGE time, if i cant convince you its an evil time, it should suffice to convince you of the strangeness of the times at the very least. if you own a bible, i suggest you search meticulously for passages railing against fucking young girls, sex BEFORE marriage, drug use, racism, sexism, homophobia etc. you will come away wanting, it doesnt matter if you are a christian im merely trying to impress upon you the strangeness of our current times, you could do the same for the quran, the torah, whatever ancient book of wisdom you want and you will find nothing even resembling the moral framework we are currently operating under, its a completely modern jewish invention, it is the work of the devil himself.

the premarital sex thing you may find some examples of if you dont understand the original meanings of fornication and adultery which as time progressed began to be used interchangeably, but i am completely convinced that adultery used to mean in the sexual context exactly what it means in other contexts its a commandment for the ancient israelites (modern europeans) not to race mix with the surrounding tribes, and if you have read the old testament you will quickly find that marriage and sex are the same thing, many of the patriarchs were “married” to their wives in beds and tents, you will find no example of one of them waiting for some ceremony before consumating their marriage the concept of this didnt even exist at the time, once you fucked you were married, extra marrital sex was fornication, the original meaning of adultery is as i described but slowly over time it became synonymous with fornication even by the time of jesus ministery so that didnt happen recently.   think of flour and granulated sugar, if you are making a cake, you will marry these two ingredients which just means to mix them together to make them as one “what gad has made one let not man make twian” and with that same cake baking analogy, lets say while you were making your cake and you had a bowl of sugar, a salt shaker should spill and pour into the sugar, well now the sugar has become ADULTERATED by salt, meaning they have mixed but they do not mix well, one ingredient has polluted the other. in the modern usage of the term adultery, the universal definition of adultery is sort of meaningless, i believe they just became synonymous and i think that when the israelites disobeyed gods command against adultery (race mixxing) and took wives from their defeated enemies and became like them and adopted their abominable ways like child sacrifice, they sought to actively muddle the meaning of adultery and conflate it with fornication to obfuscate the sinful nature of what they had done.as far as the fucking young girls thing goes a lot of people will take issue with that and i get it, but you dont understand, the most common age of consent laws in history where they can be found put the age of consent at puberty, literally thirteen years old in most instances sometimes 12, but fucking a 13 year old and leaving her would permenantly damage her right? the same is true for a 25 year old a 30 year old etc, they are damaged by promiscuity, but none are damaged if they are kept as wives.

 the times we are living in ARE evil, but they are as strange as they are evil. their is a time for everything under the sun my brothers and sisters and christ, even a time to kill, even a time for war. i do it for she

[theglasscat]

if eda and raine get married like some of you nerds keep saying then it's gotta end with a big musical number where eda utters the exact words, "wow wow fellas, look at the old girl now fellas"

[olderthannetfic]

I'm a Chinese, nationally and racially. Racial projection seems to be a common practice in western fandom, doesn't it? I find it a bit... weird to witness the drama ignited upon shipping individuals with different races, or the tendency to separate characters into different "colors" even though the world setting doesn't divide races like that. Such practice isn't a thing here. Mind explaining a bit on this phenomenon?

--

Sure, I can try. But of course, fish aren’t very good at explaining the water they swim in.

Americans aren’t good at detecting our own Americanness, and a lot of what you’re seeing is very much culturally American rather than Western in general. (In much of Europe, “race” is a concept used by racists, or so I’m told, unlike in the US where it’s seen more neutrally.) Majority group members (i.e. me, a white girl) aren’t usually the savviest about minority issues, but I’ll give it a shot.

The big picture is that most US race stuff boils down to our attempts to justify and maintain slavery and that dynamic being applied, awkwardly, to everyone else too, even years after we abolished slavery.

There’s a concept called the “one drop rule” where a person is “black” if they have even one drop of black blood.

We used to outlaw “interracial” marriage until quite recently. (That meant marriage between black people and white people with Asians and Hispanic people and others wedged in awkwardly.) Here’s the Wikipedia article on this, which contains the following map showing when we legalized interracial marriage. The red states are 1967.

That’s within living memory for a ton of people! Yellow is 1948 to 1967. This is just not very long ago at all. (Hell, we only fully banned slavery in 1865, which is also just not that long ago when it comes to human culture.)

Why did we have this bananas-crazy set of laws and this idiotic notion that one remote ancestor defines who you are? It boils down to slavery requiring a constant reaffirming that black people are all the same (and subhuman) while white people are all this completely separate category. The minute you start intermarrying, all of that breaks down. This was particularly important in our history because our system of slavery involved the kids of slaves being slaves and nobody really buying their way out. Globally, historically, there are other systems of slavery where there was more mobility or where enslaved people were debtors with a similar background to owners, and thus the people in power were less threatened by ambiguity in identity.

Post-slavery, this shit hung around because it was in the interests of the people in power to maintain a similar status quo where black people are fundamentally Other.

A lot of our obsession with who counts as what is simply a legacy of our racist past that produced our racist present.

--

The other big factor in American concepts of identity is that we see ourselves as a nation of immigrants (ignoring our indigenous peoples, as usual). A lot of people’s families arrived here relatively recently, and we often don’t have good records of exactly where they were from, even aside from enslaved people who obviously wouldn’t have those records. Plenty of people still identify with a general nationality (”Italian-American” and such), but the nuance the family might once have had (specific region of Italy, specific hometown) is often lost. Yeah, I know every place has immigrants, and lots of people don’t have good records, but the US is one of those countries where families have on average moved around a lot more and a lot more recently than some, and it affects our concepts of identity. I think some of the willingness to buy into the idea of “races” rather than “ethnicities” has to do with this flattening of identity.

New immigrant groups were often seen as Other and lesser, but over time, the ones who could manage it got added to our concept of “whiteness”, which gave them access to those same social and economic privileges.

Skin color is a big part of this. In a system that is founded on there being two categories, white owners and black slaves, skin color is obviously going to be about that rather than being more of a class marker like it is in a lot of the world.

But it’s not all about skin color since we have plenty of Europeans with somewhat darker skin who are seen as generically white here, while very pale Asians are not. I’m not super familiar with all of the history of anti-Asian racism in the US, but I think this persistent Otherness probably boils down to Western powers trying to justify colonial activities in Asia plus a bunch of religious bullshit about predominantly Christian nations vs. ones that are predominantly Buddhist or some other religion.

In fact, a lot of racist archetypes in English can be traced back to England’s earliest colonial efforts in Ireland. Justifying colonizing Those People because they’re subhuman and/or ignorant and in need of paternalistic rulers or religious conversion is at the bottom of a lot of racist notions. Ironic that we now see Irish people as clearly “white”.

--

There are a lot of racist porn tropes and racist cultural baggage here around the idea of black people being animalistic. Racist white people think black men want to rape/steal white women from white men. Black women get seen as hypersexual and aggressive. If this sounds like white people projecting in order to justify murder and rape... well, it is.

Similar tropes get applied to a lot of groups, often including Hispanic and Middle Eastern people, though East Asians come in more for creepy fantasies about endlessly submissive and promiscuous women. This nonsense already existed, but it was certainly not helped by WWII servicemen from here and their experiences in Asia. Again, it’s a projection to justify shitty behavior as what the party with less power was “asking for”.

In porn and even romance novels, this tends to turn up as a white character the audience is supposed to identify with paired with an exotic, mysterious Other or an animalistic sexy rapist Other.

A lot of fandoms are based on US media, so all of our racist bullshit does apply to the casting and writing of those, whether or not the fic is by Americans or replicating our racist porn tropes.

(Obviously, things get pretty hilarious and infuriating once Americans get into c-dramas and try to apply the exact same ideas unchanged to mainstream media about the majority group made by a huge and powerful country.)

--

Politically, within the US, white people have had most of the power most of the time. We also make up a big chunk of the population. (This is starting to change in some areas, which has assholes scared shitless.) This means that other groups tend to band together to accomplish shared political goals. They’re minorities here, so they get lumped together.

A lot of Americans become used to seeing the world in terms of “white people” who are powerful oppressors and “people of color” who are oppressed minorities. They’re trying to be progressive and help people with less power, and that’s good, but it obviously becomes awkward when it’s over-applied to looking at, say, China.

--

Now... fandom...

I find that fandom, in general, has a bad habit of holding things to double standards: queer things must be Good Representation™ even when they’re not being produced for that purpose. Same for ethnic minorities or any other minority. US-influenced parts of fandom (which includes a lot of English-speaking fandom) tend to not be very good at accepting that things are just fantasy. This has gotten worse in recent years.

As fandom has gotten more mainstream here, general media criticism about better representation (both in terms of number of characters and in terms of how they’re portrayed) has turned into fanfic criticism (not enough fics about ship X, too many about ship Y, problematic tropes that should not be applied to ship X, etc.). I find this extremely misguided considering the smaller reach of fandom but, more importantly, the lack of barriers to entry. If you think my AO3 fic sucks, you can make an account and post other fic that will be just as findable. You don’t need money or industry connections or to pass any particular hurdle to get your work out there too.

People also (understandably) tend to be hypersensitive to anything that looks like a racist porn trope. My feeling is that many of these are general porn tropes and people are reaching. There are specific tropes where black guys are given a huge dick as part of showing that they’re animalistic and hypersexual, but big dicks are really common in porn in general. The latter doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the former unless there are other elements present. A/B/O or dubcon doesn’t mean it’s this racist trope either, not unless certain cliched elements are present. OTOH, it’s not hard for a/b/o tropes to feel close to “animalistic guy is rapey”, so I can see why it often bothers people.

A huge, huge, huge proportion of wank is “all rape fantasies are bad” crap too, which muddies the waters. I think a lot of people use “it’s racist” as an easy way to force others to agree with their incorrect claims that dubcon, noncon, a/b/o, etc. are fundamentally bad. Many fans, especially white fans, feel like they don’t know enough to refute claims of racism, so they cave to such arguments even when they’re transparently disingenuous.

--

Not everyone here thinks this way. I know plenty of people offline, particularly a lot of nonwhite people, who think fandom discourse is idiotic and that the people “protecting” people or characters of color are far more racist than the people writing “bad” fic or shipping the wrong thing.

But in general, I’d say that the stuff above is why a lot of us see the world as white people in power vs. everyone else as oppressed victims, interracial relationships as fraught, and porn about them as suspect. Basically, it’s people trying to be more progressive and aware but sometimes causing more harm than good when those attempts go awry.

[dwellordream]

“…The ideas that animate Harlequin romance novels, Game of Thrones, and Disney movies alike can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Look at the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites and others influenced by them—works like John William Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shalott” (1888) and Frederic William Burton’s “The Meeting on the Turret Stairs” (1864)—and you’ll see some very familiar figures.

These canvases reflect popular Victorian understandings of medieval ladies: passive, slender, aristocratic, the objects of knightly devotion. These women have never laboured in the fields with sunburned necks or callused hands. Their clothing and flowing hairstyles are eclectic, designed more to make nineteenth-century audiences think about a distant, misty, heroic past than to accurately reproduce any given moment in the Middle Ages. And, they are, invariably, white.

Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. These paintings were produced when European imperialism was at its zenith; when Darwinian theories of evolution were twisted to justify colonialism and social hierarchies based on race; and when a supposed early-medieval “Teutonic”—or Germanic—ancestry for the white Protestant populations of Britain and North America was claimed to be the reason for the explosive economic growth of those regions.

They were also painted at the same time that white people in Europe and the Americas were enjoying steadily increasing standards of living—in large part thanks to the backbreaking, and often coerced, labour of those in colonised places. Black and brown women helped to shape history, but Victorian society excluded them from the category of “lady” because of the colour of their skin.

Nineteenth-century thinkers drew on the medieval past in order to justify racial and class inequities, or burgeoning notions of nationalism. These thinkers racialised the medieval lady. They idealised her as white, passive, and unsuited to manual labour. In doing so, they made her into a rationale as to why her elite, white, female descendants could sip tea in parlours while brown and black women toiled in the fields—or in their houses—to bring them that tea. The status quo was given such a venerable heritage that it was made to seem natural, even inevitable. Such ideas were then, and are now, pervasive and insidious. They were absorbed by white women, by Disney animators, by the makers of Halloween costumes, and even by those who write histories.

But what happens if we take the medieval lady off her pedestal? What kind of woman do we see inhabiting the Middle Ages if we try to peel off the Victorian veneer of chivalry and politesse? Does looking at what medieval people actually did in the past tell us something about our own assumptions concerning race and gender? In part, this is a process where we have to reconsider the language we use. What do we mean by “lady”? What did medieval people mean by the term? Or, rather, since most texts produced in western Europe in the Middle Ages were written in Latin, what were the connotations which they associated with the word domina?

The first key difference is that the modern English word “lady” simply doesn’t have the aura of power which the Latin word domina did in the Middle Ages. A domina was a woman with authority and moral rectitude in her own right, not simply the consort or complement to a dominus (lord). A domina (and holders of other Latin titles applied to women in medieval records, like comitissa, vicedomina or legedocta) administered estates and adjudicated legal disputes. It did not matter whether she held her title by inheritance or through marriage. Those who held titles in their own right, or those who were widowed, could exercise significant power over fiefs and vassals.

For example, when Matilda, countess of Tuscany (1046-1115), was referred to as domina, it was because she controlled a large swathe of northern Italy. She was the mediator during the famous meeting between Pope Gregory VII and the German emperor Henry IV at her great fortress of Canossa. In doing so, she influenced the outcome of a major medieval power struggle. On his accession to the throne in 1199, King John of England installed his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine (ca. 1122-1204), as domina of the French territory of Poitou and gave her authority in all of his lands—a tacit acknowledgement of her political skill.

Eleanor even managed to expand queenly authority in some ways. She seems to be the first queen of England after the Norman Conquest to have regularly collected the “queen’s gold”, a one-tenth share of some of the legal fines paid to the king. This gave her a valuable (and somewhat independent) source of revenue—and with money comes power. As a more modest example, one contemporary of Matilda of Tuscany’s was a woman named Mahild of Alluyes, domina of a far smaller territory in northern France. She wasn’t a player in papal or imperial politics. Yet as wife and widow, she oversaw the affairs of her vassals and witnessed charters which they drew up in the chapter house of the nearby abbey of Marmoutier, which gave her considerable influence over their lives. And there are many, many more dominae in the sources.

Medieval aristocratic women were sometimes seen as passive by their male contemporaries; those with power who broke this mould were sometimes described in plainly misogynistic terms. But equally, their deeds could be lauded. For example, one of the great chroniclers of the early twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the French noblewoman Isabel of Conches was “lovable and estimable to those around her.” He complimentarily said that she “rode armed as a knight among the knights”, and compared her favourably with Amazon queens.

Matilda of Boulogne (ca. 1105-1152), queen of King Stephen of England, was one of her husband’s most capable partisans during the Anarchy—the period of civil war that tore twelfth-century England apart. Not only did she head the government during her husband’s captivity, but proved herself a capable military commander. She directed troops into battle at the so-called Rout of Winchester and arranged for her husband’s release when he was captured.

A generation or so later, the English countess Petronella of Leicester (ca. 1145-1212) participated alongside her husband in the Revolt of 1173-74; she gave her husband military advice, rode armed onto the battlefield, and was even wearing armour when captured. These actions may not have been normal behaviour for a domina—administration and adjudication were more usual. But they were still within the bounds of possible behaviour for a medieval woman without endangering her status as a “lady.”

The Matildas, Mahild, Eleanor, Isabel, and Petronella: it is hard to imagine any of these dominae as the subject of a Waterhouse painting or the centrepiece of a Disney movie. They weren’t always victorious or virtuous; they could be ambitious and high-handed and hold ideas which most people today would find distasteful. And yet, whether medieval chroniclers approved or disapproved of these women individually, they didn’t think the very fact that they were active, decisive, and opinionated was out of the ordinary. Neither should you.

Nor would the colour of their skin have been thought a defining aspect of their status as a lady. There was certainly prejudice about skin colour in the Middle Ages. The relatively small number of non-white people in northern Europe means that we can’t definitively point to a woman of colour exercising political power there. But things were slightly different in southern Europe, in areas like Iberia—modern Spain and Portugal—which was long home to Christian, Jewish, and Muslim populations of multi-ethnic heritage.

While there were religious prohibitions against Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men, there are some scattered examples of intermarriages between dynasties in the early Middle Ages: Muslim women of north African or Arab descent marrying into northern, Christian royal families. For instance, Uriyah, a daughter of the prominent Banū Qasī dynasty, married a son of the king of the northern Spanish kingdom of Navarre; Fruela II, king of Asturias, married another Banū Qasī woman called Urraca. Their ancestry doesn’t seem to have posed a barrier.

Western Europeans may have only rarely had direct contact with non-white female rulers further afield—like the powerful Arwa bint Asma, queen of Yemen (r. 1067-1138)—but when they did, it could be in dramatic fashion. Shajar al-Durr, sultana of Egypt (d. 1257), famously captured Louis IX of France during the Seventh Crusade and ransomed him for an eye-wateringly large sum.

While historical examples of women of colour exercising prominent roles in Europe during the Middle Ages are few in number, skin colour didn’t limit the imaginations of white medieval Europeans. Medieval people often had clear anxieties about skin colour and blackness, but despite this racism they could still envision a brown- or black-skinned woman as a member of the upper classes, just as they did the white-skinned Mahild or Isabel.

For example, the early thirteenth-century German epic poem Parzival centres on the eponymous hero and his quest for the Holy Grail. Parzival has a half-brother, the knight Feirefiz, who is mixed-race. His mother, Belacane, is the black queen of the fictional African kingdoms of Zazamanc and Azagouc; the narrative praises her beauty and her regal bearing. As another example, a Middle Dutch poem written about the same time, Morien, recounts the story of the handsome, noble knight Morien, “black of face and of limb,” whose father Sir Aglovale fell in love with his “lady mother,” a Moorish princess.

However, the most vivid example is provided by medieval depictions of the biblical Queen of Sheba. Scholars think the historical Sheba likely lay somewhere in southwestern Arabia; other traditions place the kingdom in east Africa. Regardless of the queen’s historicity, various traditions grew up around her in the Middle Ages. Some of the most popular of these claimed that she had a son by the biblical king Solomon. She frequently appears alongside him in art, in elegantly draped garb as on the late twelfth-century Verdun Altar, or accompanied by courtiers as in an early fourteenth-century German illustrated bible: a beautiful black woman and a regal queen. When you think of a medieval “lady”—you could do worse than to think of her.

All of this should prompt us to look again, to reconsider how racialized Victorian ideals of womanhood still impact us—both in contemporary popular culture and also in our understandings of the medieval past. When we think about the Middle Ages, we should consider the impact of race, and especially whiteness, on how we think about it. That is not necessarily because our medieval forebears did so, but because our nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ones did so very much.

The idea of the “lady” was one of the useful fictions which they and others employed, glorifying white, upper-class womanhood as an apex of western achievement. This helped to make existing racial and imperial hierarchies seem like they had such a long history that they must be innate, biological: a simple fact of life. But it was a fiction, and a harmful one. If we are to better understand the medieval past, it is one we must set aside.”

- Yvonne Seale, “My Fair Lady? How We Think About Medieval Women.”

[notafraidofredyellowandblue]

Flake interview 2020-01

Not a new interview, but relatively recent, Flake with "Der Standard" 2020-01 before an appearance of Flake in Vienna (author Stefan Weiss), don't think there's a translation on the website, so here's a shot..:

Rammstein keyboardist Flake: "The reunification was a mess"

Christian "Flake" Lorenz hits the keys not only as a keyboardist, but also as an author. A conversation about controversial views on the GDR, fireworks and climate protection

At Rammstein he is the "keyfucker" - GDR jargon for keyboard players. His real name is Christian Lorenz, but he has been calling himself "Flake", pronounced in German, of course, since his youth. For a quarter of a century, the native of East Berlin has been the alien in the German rock band, the thin freak among the strong musclemen. In the meantime, Flake also hits the keys as an author: In "An was ich mich so erinnern kann" (2015) he wrote down his GDR experiences, followed in 2017 with "Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag", a literary autobiography about Rammstein. On March 26, Flake will come to Vienna's Globe Theater for a reading.

STANDARD: We are currently celebrating 30 years of 'Die Wende' *1). Your joy is limited, as one knows. How do you perceive the anniversary?

Flake: 'Die Wende' and reunification of Germany have to be separated. I experienced the change as a punk at the time. The ossified old concrete headframe of the GDR Politburo was also our enemy. We didn't want this idiotic regime anymore and we fought to loosen it up. When the wall came down, we didn't know what to do with the freedom we suddenly had. But then began an incredibly exciting time in which we tried to develop professionally, politically and musically in every direction.

STANDARD: And then came the reunification.

Flake: A lot went wrong from then on. We were annexed as a useless country, entire biographies were declared worthless, companies were closed so that the western companies could expand. We have been reset to such an extent that resentment and disappointment have built that have persisted until now. By and large, the reunification in this form was a mess.

STANDARD: If you look at Germany's east today, right-wing populism has recently had great political success there. A legacy of reunification?

Flake: Many people are disappointed because certain promises have not been fulfilled. But they already had the political left in their lives, now they are trying it with the right. Personally, I cannot understand how one can vote for the AfD *2). But those who do are doing it in large part in protest against the mainstream parties. It is clear that the AfD cannot meet expectations either. If the AfD were to rule, many people would notice very quickly that it is not getting better, but worse.

STANDARD: You grew up in the East Berlin punk scene. What are the differences between the East and West punks?

Flake: There was a fundamental difference: the Ostpunks didn't need any money because life was absurdly cheap, rent around 25 marks. The koney you made from one concert lasted over a month. So you could make the music you wanted to make and not just the music that sells well. Absurdly enough, it made us very free.

STANDARD: There were also IM Stasi informers among your band colleagues at the time (IM: unofficial employee, note). Aren't you angry with the repressive surveillance state of the GDR?

Flake: I'm not angry with IM informers in the bands. Because their IM status often made it possible for the bands to exist at all. The Stasi didn't lock up its own people. The best example of this is the GDR band 'Die Firma'. It was founded by IM informers. The gag was that 'Die Firma' ('The Company') was actually a synonym for "Stasi". Covered by the Stasi, they then sang anti-subversive texts. Almost brilliant really.

STANDARD: Do you understand when it is said that the GDR was an injustice state and that Stasi repression was a kind of terror?

Flake: I can understand it when people say that who have experienced it and suffered from it. But personally, I can't say that the whole state was bad. I don't want to know how many innocent people have been or are being imprisoned and monitored in the West. I do not find the generalization of the "unjust state" okay.

STANDARD: Would Rammstein have been conceivable in the GDR?

Flake: We wouldn't have founded a band like Rammstein within the GDR because it would have been the wrong answer to this system. We founded Rammstein because we noticed that our punk music wasn't getting anywhere in the West. It took harder stuff.

STANDARD: You have retained a kind of socialism within the band. Nevertheless, Rammstein is a millionaire company. Were there moments when you thought: The money could not only destroy our character but also the band?

Flake: Rammstein is a company where money fluctuates a lot. We have a lot of employees, we buy tons of pyrotechnics, we have a huge stage, costumes, our own electricity network, we shoot extremely complex videos. The money that remains private can actually hardly harm us, because it is so limited. We really have to make sure that the plus-minus calculation works out.

STANDARD: In your book "Heute hat die Welt Geburtstag" you describe the 25 years of Rammstein as a long partnership: It has become calmer in bed, but you understand each other blindly. Is divorce even an option?

Flake: Divorce is definitely not an issue. It's like a very long marriage: You don't even think about divorce anymore.

STANDARD: In the midst of tough muscle men, you were always the figure that breaks everything, especially in the interaction with singer Til Lindemann, who sometimes roasts you on stage like a cockroach. It looks like the traditional comedian constellation white clown and stupid August, Laurel and Hardy with SM components. How important is that to the show?

Flake: We developed that more by accident. We never made it up: you are the strong one, I am the weak one. At our first concerts we always stood around very haphazardly, then we started pushing and provoking each other. When I watch a normal heavy metal band I get bored easily. We always have something going on.

STANDARD: Do you sometimes long for a role change at Rammstein? To be the strong one for once?

Flake: Nah, I have other worries. With those couple of concerts, I can handle my role well enough.

STANDARD: Can you even enjoy appearances or does that only come afterwards? After all, a Rammstein show is precision work.

Falke: What do you mean enjoy? I enjoy when everything runs smooth and everything works like a machine. There are good and bad concerts, at the good ones we take off like an airplane.

STANDARD: Rammstein mixes black romanticism with black humor. You yourself love the blues, which often sails in similar waters. Can you draw joy out of melancholy?

Flake: The blues is the best example of this. Sadness and comfort go hand in hand. All of popular music arose from a problem of the respective author. This is exactly what you want to hear when you are not feeling well yourself. During puberty you normally don't want to hear "Walking on Sunshine" either.

STANDARD: Traditionally, there is also joy in melancholy and morbidity in Vienna. Is that the Eastern European impact?

Flake: Slavic music is very melancholic, on the other hand the Goth culture comes from the west. So I wouldn't really pinpoint that to anything local.

STANDARD: It is said that Rammstein did more to preserve the German language than all the Goethe Institutes put together. Are you proud of that?

Flake: Yeah. But the interesting thing is that we are regarded more highly abroad than in our own country. In Germany there is a lot of ranting: We are dull and foolish about Germany - complete nonsense.

STANDARD: Rammstein has always been compared to the totalitarian parody band Laibach. They recently played in North Korea with the aim of appearing subversive. Is something like that conceivable for Rammstein?

Flake: We'd have to think very carefully about what we want and why we want it. If that were to help someone, okay - but only to be able to say, "We're subversive now," that's not an argument.

STANDARD: For reasons of climate protection, there is an increasing number of missile bans. A topic for Rammstein?

Flake: We played a concert in Chicago once. The local fire protection was so rigorous that we shouldn't even have lit a match. Complete ban on pyro. We went on stage and said: either we are leaving because we are not allowed to make a fire here, or we are playing without. The audience wanted the latter, of course. And it became one of our best shows. You have to weigh it up a bit: should you stop all things like a Rammstein show for climate reasons? But I totally understand that there shouldn't be any more bangs on New Year's Eve. I was in Vienna once at the turn of the year, and there was relatively little banging. I thought that was good. Berlin is one of the most terrifying cities on New Year's Eve. There it's pure aggression.

Notes:

*1) i kept 'Die Wende' as the term for the political transformation in east germany, not sure what the official english phrase is

*2) AfD, short for 'Alternative für Deutschland' or 'Alternative for Germany' is a right-wing populist political party, often characterized as far-right, known for its opposition to the European Union and immigration

[freedom-of-fanfic]

Christian anon here, & I was dismayed when a recent reblog post stated in regard to Christian sexual morality & I quote "“all sex outside of marriage is evil” . This is at best a very poor interpretation & I apologize to the poster if they have been exposed to this mindset. For us, sex is something very sacred, so sacred that we reserve it to a man & a woman who have, via Matrimony, promised before God & each other to love, honor and mutually obey each other. 1 of 2

Outsideof marriage, it doesn't make sex "evil", but it does make a sin,something we strive to avoid, not always easy because humans are inherentlyflawed and fallible. Sadly, there are far too many Christians caught up in thepurity culture mentality who make a bigger deal out of sexual sin than theyshould about other sins (sins against social justice as a big for instance). Idon't like this mindset either, and thankfully, there are more Christianspushing back against it. 2 of 2

Hi,Christian anon. I understand where you’re coming from because I am alsoChristian (a queer Christian, which makes for an interesting life sometimes).And I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said here regarding a truly Christian perspective on sexoutside of marriage vs the purity culture bullshit (my point of disagreement isthat I think ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ are usually treated as synonymous).  It is, in fact, the least Christian thing inthe world to go around trying to control people’s behavior.  

But. (there’s always a ‘but’ with me.)

I spent a huge chunk of today writing this and cutting it back because it kept turning into a theological dumping ground, which I don’t want it to be. but I’m throwing the majority of this post behind a cut because it’s inevitably sensitive stuff, considering how much pain (and death, tbh) Christianity-as-law-bludgeon has caused.

tl;dr: Christianity and secular law don’t mix well. Whenever it’s tried, things get real hellish real quick for a lot of people. Especially for people who are judged as ‘sexually immoral’. 

(warnings for binary/cisgender language b/c the Bible doesn’t really address being nb or trans in particular.)

In thepost you are responding to, I called the Catholic Church the source ofanti-prostitution law in the United States. I said that it was because the US legislationwas founded on Western Europe legislation, and Western Europe legislation wasfounded on the legislation of the Catholic Church. And to be fair this is aglib and simplistic illustration of cause & effect – for starters, it skipsover Protestantism and the Age of Reason – but I’ll stand by the heart of it.  Laws about sex work – sexual interactions ofany kind between consenting people of age, actually – in Western Europe &the US find likely origin in the inevitably disastrous mixture of Christianityand lawmaking, which originated in the institution of the Catholic Church.

Christianityas an organized religion does not playwell with the power to make law. 

The inevitable product of trying toenforce Christian values via lawmaking is purity culture, authoritarianism, andviolence. This is because human law cannot enforce having moral character: wecan only judge actions and behavior, not thoughts or feelings. We can’t makekindness or uprightness into law: what is kind and upright behavior towards oneperson may be cruelty to another. (Not to say that Christianity is the only religion that mixes poorly with law,but Christians often deny that a religion founded on benevolence andforgiveness can be totalitarian. But the joke is: totalitarian law is no lesstotalitarian because its author wrote it to encourage ‘morality’ and ‘righteousness’.The joke is: God never forces His morals down anyone’s throat, so who are you to do it on His behalf?

I mean: theologicallyspeaking, one of the central tenants of Christianity is that law is insufficientand ill-fitted to guide our complicated, morally gray human existence. To methis seems like a huge giveaway that Christian principles and the law arefundamentally incompatible concepts.)

In its mostmature iterations, Christianity-as-law is

sexist

misogynistic

patronizing

anti-intellectual

controlling to the point of micromanagement via fear and shame

emotionallyabusive and denigrating individual worth

unforgiving of moral failings

hypocritical

judges others by assumptions about their thoughts and motivations

holds peopleto unachievable standards of ‘morality’ without kindness, and

punishes disobedience/noncomplianceviolently and without mercy. 

It takes on God’s role as implacable judge, jury,and executioner, and holds the benevolent forgiveness promised by Jesus hostagein exchange for good behavior. How is the law God supposed to have mercyon you when it’s clear you’ll just abuse that mercy? Prove your worth first. (spoilers: you’ll never be approved.) 

TheCatholic Church, born of Christianity shaking hands with the power to make lawvia Constantine's outreach, is my Exhibit A. at the peak of its legislativeinfluence and power, it severely set back human health, education, and wealthin Europe and West Asia and presided over multiple military excursions into theMiddle East in the name of conquering Jerusalem on God’s behalf (the literalCrusades, yes). 

And I’d argue that this conquering spirit has been Christianity’sAchilles Heel ever since: a thread of shitty, shitty colonialist bullshit,through Anglicanism and Protestantism and Puritanism, that even now is buildingits latest thunderhead in the shape of ‘dominionist’ Christianity here inAmerica (if you are not familiar with it, suffice to say it is a secretive butwell-spread cultish thinking that straightforwardly holds that Christianitymust be legislated into place all over the world or Jesus can’t come back. Youcan’t make this stuff up.)

Bringingit back into to the sex thing, though: the Old Testament has multiple mentionsof laws forbidding sex work, and the New Testament, at least 50% written by theunmarried apostle Paul, has a lot of recommendations about being married toprevent being tempted by sex outside of marriage and the like. Extramarital lustand sexual immorality are also credited with multiple instances ofjump-starting unfortunate Biblical events and described by Paul as the only ‘sinagainst the body’ (1 Corinthians 6). In fact, Paul was kinda ‘eh’ on the wholehaving sex thing in general. In the same verse, he mentions in passing that itwould be better for men to not have sex at all if it’s possible for them.

Christianity-as-law is thus morally obligatedto make sex outside of marriage and anything that tempts people into sexoutside of marriage illegal. It’s the moral thing to do. Sex work has to go. Andbecause Biblical marriage can only be between a (cis) man and a (cis) woman*, same-gendersex has to go too. And extrapolate Paul’s offhand ‘male celibacy is ideal, tbh’into the harshest and narrowest form of lawful judgement that you can and youget ‘anything that makes men want to have sex is clearly dragging (cis) men down fromthe best possible person they could be. (people cis men see as ) women being beautiful makes men wantsex! (perceived) women are bad! Punish women formaking men want sex!’

Is thiswhat God calls for? I don’t think so.But historically speaking, this is what we get when Christians try to take thelegislative reins on God’s behalf.

And it’sfrankly hilarious that supposed Christians are acting as if it’s possible tosave people from their own sin by making sinillegal. When you check in with Jesus on the interaction between God’s lawand secular law, his response is simply ‘follow both’**. He also hung out withsex workers pretty much constantly during his ministry, never condemning them fortheir line of work even though it was explicitly against Jewish law to be a sexworker, because he recognized that human-enforced law – even law laid down byGod – can’t account for all the circumstances of human life or account for thereasons people do things that are, on their face, unlawful. That grace –literally the opposite of law – was kind of the point of his being born in thefirst place.

 *Regardlessof what one’s opinion is about how the Bible defines marriage, that doesn’tmean that secular law has to share that definition. Especially when it createsa religious discrimination against LGBTQ+ people for completely secularmarriage benefits like tax breaks and visitation rights. (that’s the entire pointof this essay, oh my god.)

**ReferencingMark 12:13-17. Jesus also calls out the people asking him for trying to get himin trouble with the Roman authorities.

[arcticdementor]

Hello all, from Siena, one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I’m spending the night here before heading out tomorrow with a friend to make a pilgrimage, more on which tomorrow. Meanwhile, Ross Douthat’s column today makes for extremely sobering reading. He writes that America looks like a declining empire (an observation that I have heard again and again over the last eight days from worried European conservatives):

…

Are we Rome? I have had that question front to mind for at least twenty years, I guess. Sixteen years ago, when I first started writing about the idea that became my book The Benedict Option, the concept of America as an exhausted imperial power seemed kind of insane. We were the globe’s hyperpower, and though we had walked into a buzzsaw in Iraq, most people would not have taken seriously the late Imperial Rome comparison. To refresh your memory, what gave me the Benedict Option concept was philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s comparison of our time to the last days of the Roman West, and his claim that people of virtue today – those who want to hold on to the old traditions of the West – should make an exit of this dying civilization and form communities within which those virtues can be lived out.

When he said that we await a new and doubtless very different St. Benedict, he meant that we need a figure like Benedict of Nursia, who can respond creatively to the crisis of our time, and forge a new way of living fruitfully under these circumstances. My own claim is that all of us faithful small-o orthodox Christians must be Benedicts of the 21st century. This dying empire is not going to be saved, so the best we can do is figure out concrete ways to keep the Christian faith alive through this new dark age, preserving the light for the rebirth we pray will come, though surely long after we pass from this earth.

My project received what I counted as a tremendous vote of confidence in 2015 when, visiting the Benedictine monastery in Norcia (the saint’s hometown), the then-prior, Father Cassian Folsom, heard me out, then said that any Christian family who expects to endure through the coming storm will have to follow some version of the Benedict Option.

I published the book in 2017, as you know, and it engendered immediate controversy. I expected that, and some of the debate was good. After all, I could be wrong, and if so, I want to know it. But most of the griping was from people who had not read the book, and were sure that I was simply saying to head for the hills and pull up the drawbridge. As I made clear in the book itself, I don’t believe that there is any real head-for-the-hills escape available to us, but we must nevertheless figure out ways to live with a disciplined faith even as we remain embedded within society.

The example I point to is Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, the three young Hebrew men from the Book of Daniel, who were so embedded within Babylonian society that they were advisers to the king. But when that king ordered them to worship an idol, they all chose the prospect of martyrdom before apostasy. For us, the Benedict Option lesson is to figure out how those faithful Hebrew men lived in Babylon without letting Babylon live in them. If we can master that, we have a chance.

…

In 2021, the late Roman metaphor is a lot less extreme than it seemed in 2005, or even in 2017. Again, read the Douthat column. I fully agree with him that the US had to withdraw from Afghanistan, but that the withdrawal, and the hubris that led America to attempt nation-building in the first place, reveals us to be a nation in imperial decline. One can be grateful that we are moving away from empire – I certainly am – while also recognizing that such a decline will have seriously bad consequences, or at least is closely associated with seriously bad consequences.

It seems increasingly clear that this century belongs to China. I don’t like this at all. China has figured out what neither Mao nor Stalin knew: how to be rich and totalitarian. The Chinese also seem to be figuring out from watching us how to avoid some of the things that are leading to our own disintegration. Did you notice that the Chinese have now banned young people from playing video games for more than three hours a week during the school week? When I read that, I thought about my physician friend telling me a couple of years ago that he is starting to see in his office a parade of young men from good middle class families who are failing to thrive. All they want to do is play video games and smoke pot. The Chinese also have taken a harder line against LGBT thought and expression, banning LGBT accounts from the WeChat service.

…

One worries about this behavior because that sort of instability makes it harder to form stable families, which are necessary for the continuation of civilization. But that’s not all of it. The Hungarian woman told me her son and all his friends say that they don’t want to have children. They are all terrified of climate catastrophe. Imagine that: this boy’s grandparents and great-grandparents endured World War II; his grandparents and parents endured Communism. He was born into a free Hungary, one that was growing more prosperous than the previous two generations could have dreamed, and yet he, and his generation, are losing the will to live, and dissipating themselves in hedonistic chaos and despair.

…

China is facing a population crash. Its leaders understand that the future of their country depends on its people being willing to produce future generations. They do not want to encourage Western ideologies that make that task more difficult.

In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, head of Harvard’s sociology department, published his book Family And Civilization, which deserves to be rediscovered. In it, he traces in history the connection between family structures and civilizational thriving and decline. Zimmerman found that the strongest family form is what he called the “domestic” family: one that offers more freedom to the individual than its predecessor, the “trustee” family (i.e., the clan), and one that is stronger than its successor, the “nuclear” family. In studying ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, Zimmerman found that family structure goes in cycles: trustee à domestic à nuclear. Then there is civilizational collapse, after which the cycle begins again. Zimmerman writes of our own time:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind [by which he meant Western man] has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

…

Zimmerman wrote this in 1947. He missed the Baby Boom, but otherwise he is right on target. Moreover, as I wrote last year, David Brooks authored an essay pointing out that we are living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. Brooks quotes academic experts who observe that in America (and I would say the West generally), people see marriage now in terms of adult self-fulfillment, not primarily about raising children.

…

Ours is a culture that wants to die.

Similarly, I am always struck when I visit Europe by how passive most Europeans are in the face of waves of migration washing over their continent – waves that are going to turn into a tsunami in this century, given the African birth rate. We saw this in ancient Rome too, with the barbarian invasions. Romans lost the capacity and the will to prevent other peoples from taking their lands. Central European peoples – Hungarians and Poles, in particular – seem to be the only ones who are willing to fight for their own existence as a people.

Three years ago, in a speech to university students, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said:

A situation can arise in one country or another whereby ten percent or more of the total population is Muslim. We can be sure that they will never vote for a Christian party. And when we add to this Muslim population those of European origin who are abandoning their Christian traditions, then it will no longer be possible to win elections on the basis of Christian foundations. Those groups preserving Christian traditions will be forced out of politics, and decisions about the future of Europe will be made without them. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the situation, this is the goal, and this is how close we are to seeing it happen.

I’m telling you, Viktor Orban is perhaps the only Western leader who has such a clear vision about the crisis of our time. It is not just a political crisis. It is an existential crisis for Western civilization. The fact that Orban understands what so many of the rest of our leaders do not, or will not, and the fact that he has the courage to say these things in public, tells you why I think that the future of the West, if we have one, depends on Hungary more than we know. Americans who don’t know a thing about Hungary repeat the moronic allegation that it’s a “fascist” country — something even Orban’s Hungarian critics don’t do.

Unlike Orban, who is not ashamed of his culture, Western European elites – and American ones too – can only describe Western civilization as a catalogue of horrors leaving suicide as the only honorable option available to Westerners. For example, I learned just the other day that Cambridge University, one of the oldest and most venerable in the West, is on its way towards “decolonizing” its Classics department.

If the Soviets or the Nazis had invaded Britain and forced this on Cambridge, we would know exactly what we were seeing: an attempt to subjugate the United Kingdom for a totalitarian ideology by erasing its historical memory. This is happening now – and it is being done by people inside Britain – by a thoroughly corrupt elite that seeks to destroy the foundations of their own civilization in the name of utopia.

For civilizations, patricide is suicide. We know this. We are watching it happen. We execrate the fast and abandon the future. We have concluded that ours is not a civilization worth defending, and propagandize our young to believe the same thing.

I will not defend a social and cultural order that despises the Christian faith, despises the traditional family, despises our common civilizational heritage, and that is working to punish, even persecute, those who will not take a knee before its idols. I will not fight for this culture of death. Will you? Should you? How can we defend America, our home, as patriots, without defending what decadent America has become? Is it possible?

These questions are going to come rushing to the fore domestically as American power recedes. In Italy these past few days, and again in Hungary this weekend, I have heard the same refrain from Catholics: the belief that Netflix in particular and American popular culture in general is corrupting their children. They grew up admiring America, and what we stood for; now they see us as an agent of their own destruction. How are they wrong? The culture producers who are doing this to the Europeans are doing it to us Americans too, and doing it to the whole world. Two years ago, at a Benedict Option conference in Massachusetts, I heard a Nigerian Anglican bishop talk about why his country needs the Benedict Option. I found this hard to understand, but he explained that the influence of US popular culture, pumping its morals into the heads of Nigerian youth through their smartphones, was alienating the next generation from the Christian faith, and Christian morality.

I want to say one more thing about Viktor Orban, drawing on that 2018 speech I cite above. When I tell you that the American media lie constantly about what Orban is, this is what I mean. They say he’s a fascist. Tell me, does this sound like a fascist to you?

…

You can say this is illiberal – and Orban would agree with you. But “fascist”? Give me a break.

You see maybe why I think that with the possible exception of the Poles – I don’t know enough to say one way or the other – Viktor Orban is the only Western leader who reads the signs of the times, and is prepared to fight against the dying of the light. American conservatives ought to stand with him, and with Hungary. The alternative is the decadence and dissolution we see around us – and that is also coming to Hungary, borne by pervasive Anglo-American pop culture. Maybe Hungary too will capitulate. But it’s not going down without a fight.

Part of that fight has to include the formation of Benedict Option-style communities, as places of spiritual and cultural regeneration. To that end, I was thrilled to see that PM Orban recommended the Hungarian translation of The Benedict Option to his people. That’s it, second from top:

…

MacIntyre is not telling us to created these little communities for the sake of shoring up the imperium. He is saying that the crisis is too deep for that. Read in light of Sherrard’s lines, we see that to save what we can, we have to begin with our own repentance, our own turning away from the wicked city of the plain that is in the process of destroying itself.

[realtruebeauty]

Occasionally, my nine-year-old son and I indulge in something we call the “Misunderstanding Game”.

Thomas: “Mom, I want another round of Among Us.”

Me: “Of course, darling, you are absolutely welcome to be among us, you know you don’t have to ask.”

Thomas, giggling and rolling his eyes, patiently explains yet again that there is a computer game called Among Us. In other words, he wants more screen time. I carry on pretending not to understand what he wants. Games, I say, what a good idea. Which one would you like to play? On and on it goes, as I keep on deliberately misunderstanding him.

I do, of course, have a hidden agenda: all this time that he is fooling around with me means less screen time. He also enjoys the maternal attention. I think of it at times as a useful activity, at times as amusing and entirely harmless.

When I listen to people discuss today’s encounters between Islam and the West, I am reminded of this game. The only problem is that these conversations are rarely useful and not in the least amusing. Quite often they lead to more harm than good.

The best illustration of this Misunderstanding Game relates to the issue of immigration from Muslim countries and how European societies should absorb Muslim immigrants.

The first deliberate misunderstanding is the pretence that unskilled immigrants with little formal education are absolutely necessary for advanced economies. With Europe’s shrinking populations and falling fertility rates, the woke and Leftist enablers say, surely no one can argue that enticing young and vibrant people to immigrate is a bad thing. Those terrible xenophobes who fixate on cost/benefit exercises — how much, in monetary terms, immigrants cost society versus how much they contribute — simply don’t get it. Those who point out the large-scale welfare dependency of those immigrants and even of their children a generation later, let alone the emergence of an underclass of ethnic and religious enclaves, are met with cheerful accounts of benefits that cannot be quantified in material terms: the cuisine, attire, sights and sounds of new exotic cultures that locals can now sample at leisure.

Related to this wilful misunderstanding is the argument of compassion. Let’s reject the economic immigrants, say some, and only allow in those who qualify for asylum. In any case, it is just a temporary measure until their countries return to normal. But this approach raises myriad questions. How on earth do we design a vetting process that can distinguish those in search of economic opportunity from those who are true victims of civil strife? When will their countries return to normal? What will they do in the meantime? And who will pay for it all?

Those adept at playing the Misunderstanding Game, however, have some very compelling distractions. Empathy is required, they say. Imagine if it were you or your family who had to endure the ravages of war and upheaval. It wasn’t that long ago that Europe was going through such turmoil. Would you have turned away Jews fleeing what would become the Holocaust?

In any case, we’re told, it is our own fault that these societies are falling apart because we colonised them in the first place. Worse, we even profited from the slave trade before and during the colonial years. Here the conclusion of the Misunderstanding Game is made clear: the moral atonement for historical wrongs is more compelling than any rational attempt to analyse the issues on the table.

A third version of the Misunderstanding Game is the assertion that immigrants are all the same. This approach is partly a response to those such as Dutch sociologist Professor Ruud Koopmans, who has questioned why is it so much harder for immigrants from Muslim societies to integrate into Western countries. Why, for instance, are Lebanese Christians Lebanese more likely to become fully assimilated in Australia than Lebanese Muslims when their circumstances of arrival and departure are practically the same? Or why do Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants struggle to integrate in the UK, while their Hindu and Sikh counterparts flourish and, in some cases, even do better than the natives?

Koopmans has compelling data to explain these trends. But who is interested in such questions, let alone such tedious things as data? The game is to misunderstand, to mix up and muddle. So Mr Koopmans, they say, let’s talk about your intent. Your work may be empirical but it is your underbelly that matters: for even though you claim to be a Social Democrat, you are in fact a racist. Busted. You can’t hide behind that pro-labour façade when you defame the true workers of the world with your anti-social science.

Finally, when played at its most mischievous, the Misunderstanding Game simply insists that we all want the same things. We all want to be free and equal; we all want to abide by the law; we all share the same basic values and we all want to respect the dignity of others. For those of us who are men and women of faith, in the end we all pray to the same God. For those of us who are secular, we are all led by our reason. Save for a subset of misfits — and every society has those — we are all just human beings.

To this kind of argument, I always have the same response: not everyone’s concept of God is identical. How else would you explain the existence of Islamist sermons of hatred? Or the harassment of women, gays, Jews and others? What would you say to the victims of the Pakistani Muslim grooming gangs or the Muslim girls who are forced into marriage? If we all pray to the “same” God, then what about the knife attacks, the beheadings and the use of trucks as weapons of murder by perpetrators screaming Allahu-Akbar? What about ISIS and Al-Qaeda? Radical views exist and we urgently need to grapple with them.

Hold it right there, the misunderstanders reply. Didn’t we already make it clear? There are misfits in every society, including ours. Sexual violence against women is universal. And look at the latest report from the UK Home Office. It concludes clearly — after an allegedly long and rigorous research process — that the whole gory business of grooming gangs had nothing to do with Pakistanis and absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

So who is playing this Misunderstanding Game? A class of undergraduates doing a workshop on Public Policy? No. It is in fact our elected political leaders, as well as senior editors from highly regarded news outlets, professors from reputable universities and think tanks, senior civil servants and, at times, EU leaders. These conversations on the thorniest issues facing Europe are taking place in parliamentary committees, debating chambers, international seminars and on national television.

Scrutinise the transcripts of these talks, replay the recordings, read the numerous reports, books and articles generated over the last three decades on immigration, Islam and integration, and the picture that emerges is the same: it is an endless version of the Misunderstanding Game.

Meanwhile, the numbers of immigrants in Europe from Muslim-majority countries has swelled to… who knows? In 2017, the Pew Research Center projected that the Muslim share of Europe’s population could rise from 4.9% to between 7.4% (if there is no more immigration) and 14% (if there is a lot) by 2050. Even if there is less blitheness today about the wonderful ways immigrants from Muslim countries will enrich Europe — especially in France — an end to immigration is not in sight. Europe’s borders continue to be porous, the reasons that compel people to leave their countries get increasingly compelling.

It is, perhaps, a disappointment to those who have always insisted that we humans are all the same to see so many Muslim groups form organisations and movements with the objective of isolating their communities from the rest of society. In some countries, like France, they have succeeded enough to alarm the president to introduce new legislation that signals he has had enough of the Misunderstanding Game. And yet President Macron can hardly be said to be leading a Europe-wide change of sentiment. In most countries, the Misunderstanding Game goes on. Why?

One theory is that there is a genuine desire within the European political elite to atone for the past; today’s leaders don’t want to repeat the mistakes of their ancestors. Another possibility is that Western leaders have simply lost confidence in Western Civilisation. It has all been one long tale of horrors: slavery, oppression, colonialism, genocides, misogyny and massacres. Hence there are no values to protect from large numbers of outsiders and certainly nothing worthwhile to ask immigrants to integrate into. A third explanation is that some European leaders genuinely wish to do away with borders. For them it is a matter of principle and they couldn’t care less who pays the price for the pursuit of a borderless planet.

But I believe there is one more reason: incompetence. Quite simply, none of the leaders whose job it is to resolve the issues of Muslim immigration and integration has a clue as to how to go about it. These politicians around the table who do have the right sort of principles but lack the ability to persuade the others. Some grasp the fine details of the issue but are incapable of seeing the big picture. And as with all policy areas of this magnitude and complexity, there are also those leaders who parrot the interests of organised groups who benefit from the status quo. It is they, I assume, who enjoy the Misunderstanding Game the most.

The incompetence of each set of leaders is often masked by an eye-catching political photo-op expressing a grand gesture or a soundbite along the lines of “history will be our judge”. But, as they know all too well, history does not vote; it does not promote or appoint a politician to a senior level. So let it judge away.

In the meantime, the flow of migrants has abated somewhat in the past few years, but large numbers of people still attempt to reach Europe, even during the pandemic. Last year Europe saw more than 336,000 first-time asylum applications and, from January to November, 114,300 illegal entries.

Looking forward, it seems inevitable that as European countries emerge out of Covid lockdowns and their economies reopen, some countries in Africa will face food shortages and other economic problems arising from pandemic-induced disruption. You don’t have to be a sage to foresee masses of young men heading towards Europe. As they attempt to cross the Eastern and Southern points of entry into the EU, be ready for European politicians to speak of a sudden surge and an unforeseeable crisis.

Then watch them play the Misunderstanding Game once again.

[brianjaeger]

2020 Academy Award Best Picture Nominees Guide For Those Who Haven’t Actually Watched Them

The 92nd Oscars are here and it’s time yet again for all of us to lord over one year’s worth of millions of people’s passions with the certainty of a judge at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show (which ironically takes places one day later) and say aloud, “This art is and forever shall be known as better than that other art!” 

Throw the notion that expression through the medium of film can exist simply to reflect a myriad of emotions and varied experiences right into the wind. We gotta know what that BEST art is, son!

So with mere hours left before Sunday’s spectacle, you’re probably asking yourself one question. “Brian, why do you keep doing this?” No, not that one. “Brian, Tumblr? Really? Does that still exist? Why don’t you spend the slightest amount of time to find a better medium for this?” No, not that one either. “But Brian, I haven’t actually watched any of these films. What am I going to do?!” Ah, now that’s the one. But fear not. I’ve got you covered. For the 6th time, I’m here to give you a rundown of what I think all of these movies are about without actually seeing them, along with some pithy little talking points to take into your Oscar parties to sound like a goddamn genius.

Ford V Ferrari

In this epic clash of man vs. nature set in the den of Harrison Ford’s summer home in Plano, Texas, the extremely hungry aging star has just had a large pie from Ferrari’s Pizzeria, located at 3949 Legacy Drive, delivered…and now it is time for battle. On the About Us section of their website, Ferrari’s Pizzeria makes a “promise to our customers to provide the best Italian food using recipes handed down from our Italian grandmothers.” Hold on to your Italian grandmothers, kids - that promise is about to be put to the test. (Yeah, it’s real.)

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

That cameo by Mater from Cars is really what pushed this film into Oscar contention.

Christian Bale's car in Ford V Ferrari is also an unwavering method actor and remained in character as a car for the entirety of production.

Who won? I'll give you a hint, in the long run, it was not the quality of life for the American working class!

The Irishman

In this gritty thriller, Lucky the Leprechaun’s father, Frank Leprechaun, an immigrant who worked as a farrier making horseshoes in Ireland before coming to America, wishes on a shooting star for a way to make a better life for his family. He finds that chance by doing hits for the mob and we see his first job take place under a pale moon, when he shoots a diamond store clerk in the heart, blood red ballooning out onto the green grass, like crimson and clover. Later, an aging Frank Leprechaun kills union leader Jimmy Hoffa and as he dies, he divulges the secret that Hoffa’s body is buried on a plantation in Lexington to Lucky. The young boy looks back and makes a firm promise to his dying father. “They’ll never get Kentucky farm.”

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

The de-aging technology used in The Irishman was so advanced that, while you can’t see it, De Niro's testicles are actually two inches higher in the first half of the movie.

The run time of the movie is 3 hours and 30 minutes which is also the average amount of time Netflix users scroll through options before deciding to just watch the same episode of The Office again.

In Ireland, this movie is known as The Man.

JoJo Rabbit

From M. Night Shyamalan comes the story of a scared young boy who claims to see Jewish people. While adults around him are trying very hard to see them too, it’s Adolf Hitler who helps the boy to overcome his fear and actually communicate with the Jews to understand them and realize that the reason that he can see them is because he can help them. And then at the end we realize that Hitler was actually a Jew himself THE WHOLE TIME!  

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

I thought it was just a bit on the nose that Taika Waititi chose to have JoJo sing her hit “Leave (Get Out)” at all the Nazis during the Allied occupation of Germany.

While juggling roles in Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit, Scarlett Johansson would often get confused resulting in one day on set when she tried to cut Sam Rockwell’s hair in a bathtub.

Of all the nominated films, when it comes to winning Best Picture, this is…Nazi one! (Cough. Look around. Place your drink on the table. Slowly collect your coat, walk to the door, pause as if to turn, sigh, leave.)

Joker

It’s 1964 and Cesar Romero has established himself as a force in Hollywood. A multi-talented performer and veteran of WWII, Romero has amassed an impressive body of work playing roles as a versatile character actor, when he gets a call from his agent.

Agent: Cesar, I’ve got something that I think you’d be perfect for.

Cesar Romero: Is it a complex villain in a new Western? A dark turn as a gangster in a noir? A comedic foil in a Sinatra vehicle?

Agent: No. Better.

Cesar Romero: What is it?

Agent: Get this. An evil clown Batman nemesis…on TV!

(Silence.)

Cesar Romero: Um.

Agent: You’ll be kind of like a sidekick to Burgess Meredith! And guess what he is?

Cesar Romero: (Deep breath.) What is he?

Agent: Like a half-man, half-penguin sort of thing…I think. But he’s also evil! Oh, and you’ll also get to star alongside Julie Newmar!

Cesar Romero: Oh, well that may have legs. So, do we have a “will they, won’t they” dynamic?

Agent: Not at all! But she is evil too. And also part cat!

Cesar Romero: I do not understand any of what you are saying.

Agent: And it’s got Frank Gorshin!

Cesar Romero: And what is he? Let me guess. Like an evil frog person?

Agent: No, no! He’s The Riddler. It’s sort of the same exact deal as your character, only he doesn’t wear any makeup. Isn’t this wonderful?!

Cesar Romero: (Pause.) You have to be joking.

Agent: No, Cesar. YOU have…to be joking.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

We still have a little bit of time for Joaquin Phoenix to die and win a posthumous Oscar for this role and keep with tradition. Then in 11 more years, a woman will win Best Supporting Actress for playing the Joker role and then in another 11 years the actual Joker will direct Joe Kerr in a reboot co-starring the Impractical Jokers…and win an Oscar.

I found the end scene touching when Arthur’s wife delivers his child and asks, “Arthur, what do you want to name your son?” And he replies, “Béla.”

Todd Phillips only made this big flashy blockbuster for the studio so that they’d let him do his deeply personal, intimate art house project, The Hangover IV.

Little Women

In a fresh take on a movie that I think is about some nuns living in a cottage during, fuck, I dunno like 1845? 1912? Aught 5? but there’s like a mean one, and a smart-and-sort-of-pretty-but-not-too-pretty one, and they probably have a dog, oh and a horse, and they have fights about vying for the love of the same boy they grew up with who is now some hot stud with poofy hair and poofy shirts and a nasally British accent, oh and there’s 2-3 other sisters that really just serve to further the main sister’s plot, and there is like fucking grass everywhere and how is all that grass not staining the shit out of those long flowy dresses that they always wear on their farm – or is it a glen? can you live ON a glen? – but later the guy marries the right one and he’s a strong man but is totally cool with her writing about some bullshit about being like a female doctor pioneer or something – oh and she’s wearing a straw hat with like a ribbon that’s always flapping the fuck around behind her – I forgot also that they only have one parent, the other is definitely dead and that comes up a little too often, and my mom and two sisters have to have tissues near the goddamn couch while they watch this seemingly 14 hour fucking miniseries or movie or Hallmark marathon because even though each of them could goddamn recite the dialogue from memory they still cry every…single…time…and OH MY GOD, CAN THIS ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, SOUND OF MUSIC, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE OR WHATEVER THIS GIRL STUFF IS PLEASE BE OVER SO I CAN HAVE THE LIVING ROOM TV BACK TO WATCH BOY STUFF!

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Not many people know this fact but on her death bed, Louisa May Alcott’s final request was that if a woman ever directed a film adaptation of Little Women they would absolutely under no circumstances be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. So, really, that’s on her.

To ants, these are very big women.

Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew's favorite film.

Marriage Story

Dr. Ellie Sattler has established her second career as a divorce attorney after years as a paleobotanist and now fights so that “woman inherits the earth”...or at least gets primary custody and more than half of the assets.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

The roommates of Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig have become increasingly annoyed listening to several minutes of the two repeating, “No I hope YOU are recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the Academy Award for Best Picture…and hang up first,” before ending their long phone calls every night.

While juggling roles in Marriage Story and JoJo Rabbit, Scarlett Johansson would often get confused resulting in one day on set when she tried to hide Robert Smigel in the attic.

Variety reports that a remake of Marriage Story is now slated for fall of 2026 with Colin Jost in the role originated by Adam Driver in a version of the story that will be produced by real life.

1917

The seventh and final installment of the 1910's saga follows the previous successful box office hits 1911: The First One, 1912: Now There's Two, 1913: Why Not Three, 1914: Get It? Years Are Sequential. That’s Really All This Joke Is, 1915: This Is The Fifth One (But Fourth Sequel), and 1916: 19 Fast 16 Furious.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Originally, the movie was supposed to have a ton of cuts between scenes but after saying, “Action,” a producer whispered to Sam Mendes that they only had budget left for one single take after hiring every single recognizable British actor still alive – so Mendes started screaming, “Run! You there, start shooting at them. Keep rolling! Keep running! Jump down that waterfall! Let’s go, people, keep up! Hide in those trees now! Oh look, more bad guys! Pew pew! Duck! Run over that way! Do not…stop…shooting!”

If this movie was called 2017, Colin Firth would have just pulled out his Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and texted, “Call off attack,” with a GIF of Admiral Ackbar saying, “It’s A Trap!” Then, mere seconds later he would have received, “lol k thx”.

1917 earned Benedict Cumberbatch a nomination for “Most Distressingly Off-putting Mustache”.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood harkens back to a time long, long, long ago in Hollywood's history when the majority of top actors were white, the majority of directors were old men and individual parts of women's bodies were oddly objectified and sexualized. We’ve come so far since then!

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Please don’t ruin the fun and let Brad Pitt know that a movie was actually being filmed around him from June to November 2018.

I didn’t think the film was particularly that great but every single person I know who lives in L.A. and is either in or adjacent to the entertainment industry corrected me that it actually is.

Oh, I’m sorry – I think you’re in the wrong place. This is the once upon a time where a man is burned alive with a blowtorch. If you’re looking for the once upon a time where a man’s eyes are drilled out of his face, well then, pal, you’re gonna want to go to Mexico.

Parasite

Oh. I’m sorry. I accidentally put a Best For'n Language Film here at the end of this list of the best ‘Murican films.

3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:

Parasite was, by far, the best movie I read this year!

나는 기생충을 진심으로 감사 할 수 있도록 한국어를 배웠습니다.

Bong Joon-ho's Parasite might leave you asking who are the real bottom feeders in the black comedy about social structures. There's plenty of food for thought as this picture is deeper than than what it may seem like on the surface…is the word-for-word review from Rotten Tomatoes Super Reviewer Aldo G that I just read to you out loud after pulling it up on my phone here.

[chriscanwell]

If you're trying to seduce a girl who's younger than you and she pulls away, what should you do? This article will show you what to do and the pitfalls to avoid.

First, let’s take a look at an email from a reader who is going through this exact same problem. My response can be seen below in bold.

Note: all names and personal information have been changed for privacy reason.

I'm a man of 40 and 6 days ago I kissed a woman of 25, who lives in my same apartment complex (we kissed at a bar though). Being so near means that we've hung out every day since then, no sex yet. 

It’s great that you kissed her and escalated the physical attraction. However, you don’t want to hang out every day even if she does. It’s important to give the “illusion” of being busy and to remain a challenge. Also, remember that until you’ve had sex then you have no real leverage over a woman or power.

The power and control is still firmly in her court, so you need to continue to seduce her the right way and make sure that you remain a challenge.

We have been on a blanket in a park, in my apartment and in hers but not in her room. There has been some cuddling, kissing, and some partial undressing. She seems a bit uncomfortable/inexperienced about her physicality.

She said she is a virgin, got close to sex a few times but always stopped the guys just before, mainly because of her Christian faith, although she says she is now ok to have sex before marriage if “she is in love”. She is a bit stone cold when she undresses (just the top and not fully). However, she snuggles up against me spontaneously when we see each other. She sometimes initiates kissing. She seems in an exploratory mode. 

She’s obviously attracted to you and desires you, there’s no doubt about that; however, her Christian faith shouldn’t be a big problem if she’s come this far.

But whether she is a virgin, a Christian or a party girl doesn’t matter—you have to treat all women the same and remain a challenge and be mysterious. Don’t be too available for this girl. And continue to push for physical intimacy.

It’s also incredibly important to mirror her actions. When you feel her start to pull away from you and cut contact… then you do the same and pull away and wait for her to reach out to you.

When she is really into you and wants to see you, simply mirror her and see her too, around 75% of the time. This is to make yourself busy and more scarce.

I have never in all my years dealing with thousands of clients, seen a woman who doesn’t respond to challenge and scarcity in a positive way.

She tells me "you are different" (in a positive sense), so indeed my approach with a girl is more physical and romantic than the average guy (as she herself pointed out, appreciatively).

She typically replies to calls or texts, and occasionally has even texted first.

We do NOT use endearing terms with each other, and the second day we agreed that we didn't need to define what we have since it's so early. 

It’s time to switch things around here. You say that she “occasionally” texts first. You have broken the ice with this girl and kissed her and become somewhat physical with her. It’s now time to let her chase you. You need to transition from being the one who is texting her first to allowing her to come to you.

Also, make sure that when she does come to you that you are fun and light and continue to be romantic and flirty.

But you want to always give the impression that you are a busy man and that a woman has to work to see you. She is attracted to you, there is no doubt about that.

The only way you can screw this up is by over pursuing this girl and coming on too strong (texting too much, being too available and wanting to see her too much).

Today (six days later) she is pulling away, replies to a sweet message ("good morning beautiful girl") but does not reciprocate the sweetness (she just writes "thanks, lol"--I found the "LOL" curious) and then cancels on our plan tonight (exercise together in the gym and then go somewhere).

My best guess is that, us living so close, she is either: needing space to keep attraction, testing if I am strong, or she just hung out with me because she enjoyed the attention of an older guy and she could brag about it with her friends. I did not reply to her last message (the cancellation) and I intend to keep her wondering. But what would you suggest?

Should I just reply "sure, no problem" to act confident or just total silence? Wait until she gets in touch, or until I bump into her? What if she does not get in touch? It's obvious that I will see her sooner or later anyway (remember, we live in the same building!), but what would I do in that case? 

In this situation, you have to understand that you guys both live in the same apartment building.

This girl is probably thinking that if she gets too close to you right now so quickly, then she is going to feel suffocated and in a difficult situation because she will have to see you, like you say, even if she doesn’t contact you.

So what do you do? It’s easy. You mirror her, again, and completely back away. You have to let her know that you aren’t going to suffocate her and always be trying to see her. You need to sub-communicate to her that she can still have her own private space and that you won’t mind if she doesn’t see you all the time.

I’ve been in the same situation as you before, girl living in same apartment building, and you have to let them come “Knocking” on your door when they’re free and ready. So she cancelled the date, just ignore it and say something easy going like, “no problem. Enjoy your day/evening.”

Don’t worry she will get in touch with you again as long as you don’t chase her too hard and always be the one reaching out to her. And if you do run into her, just act cool and ask her how she’s been doing.

She’ll say something predictable like she’s been busy, then she’ll ask how you are and you just have to say that you’ve been really busy yourself and that you guys must catch up again sometime when you’re not so busy.

It’s an interesting situation when a guy is dating a younger woman because there are some important principles to keep in mind. I want to share these with you here because I think they will really help you get into the right type of mindset with this girl.

Dating Younger Women

Most men can only dream of dating a younger woman, even though it’s been found that the older we get as men, we still want to date younger women.

Fortunately for us men, the opposite isn’t true. As we get older, younger women still find us desirable and want to date us.

This is great news for men and it’s always great to know that as we get older, we still have many options with women (assuming you don’t let yourself go and become overweight and excessively out of shape).

That being said, there is nothing like a bit of an age difference to bring out the insecurities in a man in a relationship. 

If you’re dating a girl 10, 15 or 20+ years younger than you then you, then it’s often natural to feel that this is too good to be true and the relationship won’t work out.

But the truth is, the only reason relationships with an age difference don’t work out is because one of the partners in the relationship becomes obsessed about age difference and can’t let it go.

Dating younger women, however, is very different to dating an older woman. It’s not always easy and it takes a confident man to date a much younger woman and keep her around for the long-run.

Once you know what you’re doing though, dating a younger woman is incredibly easy and has a lot of advantages.

In every culture and society in the world, younger women are attracted to older men. However, in Western society this is often frowned upon (mostly by older women who see younger women as a threat).

The fact remains, despite what feminists and modern society tries to tell us, younger women will always be attracted to older men because it’s written into our biology. Despite what many people like to think, human beings are hard-wired this way. 

Age Attracts Youth

Older men are naturally attracted to younger women and younger women are naturally attracted to older men.

But a lot of men that I speak to feel ashamed that they’re dating a younger woman. They worry what their parents will think, what their friends will think and what strangers and society as a whole will think. They also worry what their girlfriend’s friend will think and they worry that people will laugh at them.

The reason you shouldn’t feel ashamed to date a younger woman, however, is because it’s completely natural.

Women and men are attracted to each other for different reasons. Men are attracted to a woman’s youth and beauty and femininity. And women are attracted to a man’s strength and resourcefulness and masculinity.

At no point in time does a woman find herself attracted to a man because he is young. If anything, youth works against men as many young guys will tell you… they can’t get laid despite their best efforts.

A woman’s nature understands that young men often lack true confidence, strength and masculinity. They also often lack experience and worldly skills that women find so endearing and interesting when they date older men.

In fact, a young man’s naivety and lack of real world experience can be a very real and dangerous threat to a woman’s existence and the man’s ability to protect and provide for his woman.

Again, a woman’s nature implicitly understands this and this is why women so often gravitate towards older men.

This is nothing to be ashamed about, instead it is something to be embraced and accepted. And despite what people will tell you, women usually hit their prime between the ages of 18 and 25. Whereas a man doesn’t hit his dating prime until around 35+ years old.

Unfortunately, most men are completely out of shape by the time they reach 35+. They’re overweight, badly dressed and they look 50 years old from drinking too much alcohol, smoking too much, and eating too much junk food.

If you look like a slob it doesn’t matter who you try to date, women in general just won’t be interested.

It’s important to realize that if you keep in shape as a man and take care of yourself, then you can easily date younger women well into your late 60s.

Women Like Older Men

Before I get into the “How To” of dating a younger woman, it’s important to take a look at some of the reasons why younger women want to date older men.

This is so we can understand why younger women find older men attractive.

- Older men are more emotionally stable.

- They have more resources (money and assets).

- They are more committed and more likely to settle down.

- They take the relationship more seriously.

- Older men will value a younger woman more.

- They are more likely to protect and nurture a younger woman.

- They are more refined and elegant than younger men.

- They are usually more confident and strong (in mind and body).

- Older men are more street wise and worldly.

Just remember that dating a younger woman takes a certain level of strength and mastery, especially when it comes to maintaining the relationship.

In every relationship there are problems and tension. This is felt even more acutely in relationships where a large age difference exists.

The greater the age gap, the more the man and the woman will wonder if age difference is okay or if it’s actually going to be the ruin of the relationship.

I have successfully dated women 15 years younger than myself and I have seen other men successfully date women 25 years younger than themselves.

That is just the successful 10%. The other 90% never go the distance and the age barrier always causes a problem, even though it shouldn’t.

When you’re dating a younger woman you have a choice: either you can talk about the age difference and make it an issue or you don’t.

Is Age Just a Number?

I’ve seen guys try to reassure their younger girlfriends that age isn’t a problem, when it obviously is… only to them. These same men make the age difference an issue and it’s always in the back of their mind.

If you start worrying about the age difference between you and your girlfriend, your girlfriend is going to worry about it too, and before you know it… age has suddenly become a problem.

Now there will be times when your girlfriend will worry about the age difference in the relationship. This is normal and it’s what women do, they worry. 

When this happens it’s important not to be worried or disturbed by what she says. Simply laugh it off and tell her that you don’t even notice the age difference because you already have a strong emotional connection with her. 

The less you worry, the less she’ll worry about the age difference. Men who are most successful dating younger women don’t even worry or care about age difference. And if they do, they definitely don’t make it an issue or a problem.

If you’re dating a younger woman it’s tempting to fall into the role of “substitute father.” Women love this to a point, but it’s also very easy to fall into the trap where you try to educate your girlfriend about life.

Stay Young at Heart

It’s understandable that your protective instincts kick in and you want to help guide your girlfriend through life, but if you try to tell her what she should and shouldn’t do, and if you try to explain to her how the world “really” works, you’ll end up coming across as just another boring older guy.

The only time you should give advice is if your girlfriend asks for it. She wants to feel equal in the relationship, she wants to have a strong emotional connection with you. If you start lecturing your girlfriend, you’ll only end up driving her away from you.

Also stay young at heart. Now you’ve probably met guys in your life who are in their 50s but act like they’re twenty years old.

There’s also a lot of young guys in their 20s who have the mind of a fifty year old and are very serious about everything.

When you’re dating a younger woman it’s important to embrace your younger self.

Just because you look forty or fifty when you look in the mirror doesn’t mean that you have to act like you’re forty or fifty.

You can still be a very refined and intelligent older man, but find joy, excitement and humor in life like a lot of younger guys do.

Dating a younger woman will require you to have a good sense of humor and zest for life. Your younger girlfriend’s still most likely experiencing the world and excited about life; it’s important that she can share that joy and excitement with you.

I had one friend who was dating a girl fourteen years younger than himself. This girl ended up breaking up with him because whenever she wanted to go to a new place or try something new he would say it’s boring and he’d already done it.

If you want to kill your relationship, there’s no better way than to be a killjoy.

I’ve also seen a lot of guys date younger women and literally worship the ground that these women walk on. It’s kind of understandable that a lot of guys act like this.

A lot of men get out of bad divorces or have have spent the last ten years in a relationship with a woman their own age, when, suddenly, they find themselves dating a much younger woman who looks great naked and has a fresh and innocent view on life. The younger woman isn’t jaded and she doesn’t have baggage.

The natural reaction in this kind of situation is for the man to treat the younger woman like she’s something incredibly special.

Sure she is special, especially compared to a lot of older jaded women out there, but you don’t want to let her know that.

The moment a woman thinks that she’s special in the relationship is the moment she starts to think that she’s higher value than the man. This is danger time. 

If a young woman gets a sniff that you might value her much more than she values you then she’s going to start testing the hell out of you and she’s going to make you jump through hoops to please her.

You need to establish from the beginning that as the older man in the relationship that you are higher value than the woman, regardless how old she is or how beautiful she is.

Masculine Attracts Feminine

This last part is very important. You must be very masculine when dating younger women…

If your find yourself dating a younger woman then there’s a very good chance that your girlfriend is extremely feminine.

In fact, the bigger the age difference the more feminine your girlfriend is likely to be. Truly feminine women always seek out older men as partners because this relationship dynamic feels more natural to them.

When a woman is extremely feminine she is much more likely to be physically smaller and to also have a softer “girlier” personality.

Because of these traits a feminine woman is much more likely to seek out a man who is older and more capable of protecting her.

Younger, more feminine women always look for more masculine men to be with as this is the perfect compliment to her femininity. 

This means that as a man you have to fully embrace your masculinity and be an “alpha male” if you want to keep your younger girlfriend attracted to you.

You have to make her feel that you can protect her both physically and emotionally. You also have to exude strong masculine traits like leadership, confidence and decisiveness when dating your girlfriend.

Your girlfriend will also expect you to be fully in touch with your masculinity. Where younger guys are known for their indecisiveness, uncertainty and false confidence, you must stand out with your boldness and real, true confidence. 

Women Want Alpha Males

If your girlfriend senses that you aren’t really sure of yourself and that you aren’t internally strong and confident enough to date her, then she will start to pull away from you and seek out a relationship with another man who is strong and confident.

The same applies if you try to seek reassurance from your girlfriend that she loves you and really is attracted to you.

I’ve seen a lot of guys date younger women and it ends up brining all their insecurities and vulnerabilities to the surface.

These guys worry that they look too old when they’re with their girlfriend. They worry that their girlfriend will leave them for a younger (more handsome) man.

They worry that things are too good to be true and it’s only a matter of time before their girlfriend realizes that she with an “old man” and dumps him for someone closer to her own age.

If you start to think like this then you’re literally opening up Pandora’s Box and creating a world of trouble for yourself. Remember, your thoughts will materialize into real life actions.

If you start to doubt yourself and your relationship, your girlfriend will start to sense this.

Her immediate response will be to test you, and a younger woman will always try to test your masculinity to make sure that you’re strong and certain and sure of yourself.

The important thing to remember is that staying strong and embracing your masculinity is exactly what you need to do to keep your girlfriend attracted to you.

Age isn’t a real problem unless you make it a problem and start obsessively focusing on it. It only becomes a problem if you start to doubt yourself and act insecure over the age difference.

Guys who are successful dating younger women never focus on age difference. They keep the relationship light and playful and fun and don’t try to lock their girlfriends down into a committed relationship.

At the same time, these guys are very masculine and confident and they don’t let small things like “age difference” and uncertainty get in the way of a great relationship.

And believe me, dating younger women is one of the most amazing and pleasurable dating experiences you can have! If you find yourself dating a younger woman, make sure you enjoy it, embrace it and cherish it.

Keep in mind that a woman pulling away is completely normal and nothing to be scared of. Instead it should be embraced because this means she’s into you and is simply testing your masculinity before she proceeds to a full physical relationship with you.

[ptsdtrbl1]

You Want Us to Join Your Pain? You Must Join Ours

By Deborah C. Tyler

June 9, 2020

As a practicing clinician, from time to time it's useful to explain to clients the division of responsibility in psychotherapy. I say, "Your job is to put your bottom in the chair, and my job is everything else."  I tell clients they can talk about whatever they wish for as long as they need.  Every feeling, every memory will get us where we need to go.  They don't have to find the mot juste or write a term paper about themselves.  If something makes them uncomfortable, please tell me as soon as you can, even if you have to circle back to it.

A few days ago, a client said to me, "You do not understand how I feel when I see the video of George Floyd."  I said, "It's true I don't understand your experience."  That response is called joining.

Several schools of psychotherapy employ joining as validation to advance the therapeutic relationship.  Joining communicates to the client that every aspect of your experience is indispensable.  In fact, during therapy, nothing else exists.  Joining can be simply staying quiet and listening to another's pain, which is what decent people do all the time.  Narrative therapy creates a momentary, healthy, healing narcissism in which the client's experience is all that matters.  After my client had poured out all to be said, I sealed the session by saying, "I was also heartbroken when I saw what happened to Mr. Floyd.  It's true, I don't understand as you do, but I have been through the pain of tragic death as his family is going through."  I did not mean, "OK, now let's talk about me."  That will never happen.  I said it because I believed that the client could accept the message that beneath our differences, there is a unifying reality of suffering that we all must experience.  The client's provisional, therapeutic narcissism can then resolve into the shared experience that unites us all.

I believe that connection through our shared suffering as Americans is gone.  American society has ruptured into two irreconcilable camps with no evident path to being reunited as one constitutional republic under God.  That brutal rupture happened in 1973, when the left embraced the doctrine of disposability of the youngest human beings.  Since then, all that's been happening is the inevitable spreading of infection through the body politic.  The path ahead to defend the Constitution and preserve traditional morality is either armed revolution or organized socioeconomic secession and apartheid.  The third path is surrender to those who hate us, while swiping our cards to pay for their abuse.

One way of conceptualizing the psychodynamics of this schism is that the left wing has become the collective psychotherapy client of the right wing, while being too immature to reciprocate the attention and emotional joining it demands.  That one-sided, permanent narcissistic assumption, which never resolves into a mutual understanding of both sides' pain, has destroyed our society.  The left wing disgorges its blame, rage, and discontent, believing that its bile deserves recognition and joining, while viewing our anguish and anger at the persecution of our great president, the desecration of our dearest constitutional rights, and the destruction of our national sovereignty as not worthy of understanding, but rather a symptom of the right wing's stupidity and hatefulness.  Furthermore, the shrieks and groans expectorated by the left about racism, sexism, "homophobia," kids in kages, global gorming are rarely based on any form of direct knowledge, much less on personal suffering.  In fact, it has been my experience that people who have actually suffered racial trauma, generally older like my client, are most capable of forgiveness, while pampered, wannabe victimlettes, sporting liberation fashion statements, are revenge-seeking blood-lusters in their histrionic wailings and gnashings.

Psychotherapy often begins with emotionally painful presenting problems.  Here are a few of the deep wells of pain that tens of millions of Americans deserve to be joined.  We are sick of your verbal abuse of calling us racist.  We are so nauseated by being guilty until proven innocent of racism that we could vomit.  So gagged by being called privileged, you can add bulimia to the presenting problems.  

The most race-privileged people in American history are Barack and Michelle Obama.  We are angry at your multifarious criminality in persecuting our great president.  We are enraged by your schemes to nullify our votes, to disenfranchise us, to cheat us with fraudulent elections.  We are tormented by your relentless attack on the U.S. Constitution, on our right to bear arms, our free exercise of religion, and the enslavement you envision for our grandchildren in the banana republic you are building.  We grieve every life your evil abortion philosophy has ended.

Barack and Michelle Obama have done more to damage race relations in America than any human beings since the end of legal segregation.  Their respective booties — one skinny, one super-sized, extra fries — have been in a ginormous therapy chair sharing the pain of how racist Americans are, which amounts to verbal abuse of the American people.  On May 29, Barack sauntered from one of his mansions with a tall shaker of salt to rub in our wounds.  His lesion-salting ended by encouraging us "to work together to create a 'new normal' in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts."  See, normally you are a racist swine with an infected heart from the legacy of bigotry.  Thanks for sharing, Barack. 

Oprah Winfrey's bountiful butt cheeks have been crammed into the client's chair so long that she can't stand up straight.  Oprah emotes passionately about her pain and is unaware of yours.  On the death of George Floyd, Oprah writes: "If the largeness of a soul is determined by its sphere of influence, George Floyd is a mighty soul."  If largeness of soul is determined by sphere of influence, then Hitler, Stalin, Mao had gigantic souls.  Tragically, George Floyd's sphere of influence has already resulted in the bloody murder of at least five black people.  Oprah will not publicly grieve for federal officer Patrick Underwood or police chief David Dorn.  She may believe they were smaller souls according to her methods of spiritual calculation, though Underwood sacrificed his life for his oath to the Constitution and Dorn died protecting a friend's store.  Right-wing people tend to be equally pained by all tragic deaths; for the left wing, someone murdered by a cop is more tragic.

Oprah writes of George: "While pouring coffee, lacing my shoes, and taking a breath, I think: He doesn't get to do this."  So many babies won't ever draw a breath because they were murdered in the womb.  So many souls, so many black boys, won't ever learn to tie shoe laces because of that cataclysm of killing.  Oprah doesn't join that ocean of pain.

For many, our worst suffering is due to the destruction of the Constitution, for what that portends for our grandchildren.  The Constitution is near death.  First it was cut open to harvest its organs for abortion and "gender-neutral" marriage.  Now there is a knee on the neck of the Constitution, asphyxiating the black-letter rights of the First Amendment.  

More than anything, the left hates Christianity.  It has exploited and perverted and now is simply murdering Christianity.  When Americans assert their free exercise of religion, the eunuch John Roberts kneels before a radical left-wing governor and degrades the Supreme Court as "an unelected federal judiciary" which may not "second-guess" the restricting of church worship.  Where does he think he works at?  The Jiffy Lube?  It is especially sickening because the so-called science on the Wuhan virus (which figured in his capitulation) is a pile of trash.

When will our fellow Americans, so sensitive, so aggrieved, let us sit in the therapy chair?  When will they join our pain?  Never.

Dr. Deborah C Tyler, PHD,MA, is a Clinical Psychologist specialist in Little River, South Carolina. She attended and graduated from Case Western Reserve University School Of Medicine in 1977, having over 43 years of diverse experience, especially in Clinical Psychologist. 

[republicstandard]

A Letter to my Leftist Daughter in Law...

Dear Daughter-In-Law,

I have been sitting on this for a while to make sure that what I say is what I want to say so here goes.

You say you know what cognitive dissonance is but the question is where do you apply it.  That to my mind is very important.  So by application maybe not.

You have stated that you do not have the time to do exhaustive research and I would agree with that, but you do get information somewhere.  Do you know the efficacy of your aggregating source(s) or, more to the point, their sources, and do you take the time to eliminate their built-in bias?  Yes, I have mine.

I do not feel that you need to research facts and figures as I believe that the truth lies before you and you need only uncover it.  So my real question is; are you ready to get at the real truth and the fundamental question is:  What is the primal drive for all living things here on earth and if in other places I suspect there also.  It is also the drive behind all of the news of today.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817585113717094,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-7788-6480"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

The answer is reproduction.  More to the point, reproduction of one's self.  From the smallest of life forms to us, it drives all activity. Our conscious brains may seem to change that in some cases, but it drives everyone and everything.  For this to happen, it takes resources and every living and maybe not living things like prions seek those resources and in sufficient abundance to make reproduction happen.  This includes the successful growth and maturity of this effort so that it may continue to reproduce.

There are many schemes to this effort but again with only one result.  Now here comes the problem and that is that resources are relatively scarce even when there is a seeming abundance.  A petri dish full of nourishment and one amoeba will quickly prove my point.  A single dish or single Earth; no difference.  When you seek resources and claim them, there are less available for others.  Add to this when you consume others may not have the opportunity to reproduce.  So when the farmer plows the ground, a rabbit may lose habitat.  The horror to the rabbit (though probably not recognized) is that genes get eliminated from the gene pool.  With humans who are inherently slow reproducers (relatively few with an extended period to maturity), it is generally recognized.

Humans are driven to many types of behavior, but how much of all of this effort is towards reproduction, I would say most of it.  So, now to you; what drove you to seek a fertility clinic when you knew that there is a surplus of humans on this planet and that the surplus is the cause many problems that are only to get worse. If you answer this question honestly, then you know that you have already read the answer in the preceding statements.  If you solve the problem with a close approximation of my response, then continue, if no, then no production of facts will ever allow you comfort with my view of the world and you need to find something else to read.

If you are still with me, here we go.  If you went through an exhaustive drill to pregnancy and you understand the primal drive that brought forth your genetic heritage how do you relate this act on your part to the rest of the world?

Humans as rational beings invest tremendous effort into bringing their offspring to maturity and reproductive status. They must protect, educate and provide a cultural belief system.

Out there, everywhere is the competition.  Who is the competition?  The competition is everyone (and everything) who wants to displace your efforts with theirs.  So a woman who travels 1000 miles for resources is a strong competitor who may displace you as a competitor and certainly will if you voluntarily give up your resources.  You may not see resources as scarce but they are limited especially if it is your hard-won resources that are going to her with no or little effort on her part.

Gauging on our past conversations, I would guess that you would say there are resources available for all.  Well maybe in the short run absent an economic collapse or world war (both likely short term events based on the 80-year war cycle that is historically accurate).  But consider the exponential growth of the world population.  How long before there are so many people that there are not enough resources for your child or grandchildren or great-grandchildren if not then when, so the answer has to be NO.  There are not enough resources for anything less than a stable population – longer term.

So, why would you strengthen your competitors' chances by diminishing your own?  In this, your emotive brain is your enemy.  You have been culturally conditioned to feel sorry for and companionate to those you think are in need.  The real questions here who conditioned you (mom and dad were also conditioned, not to be seen as the source) and what were their motives and goals.  Along with that, should you not look to your own and family needs first – the primal need.

The answer to the question is relatively simple.  Those who would be superior to you, gather more resources to their efforts and otherwise displace you on the ladder of reproductive success (eliminate your genes from the pool).  The previous answer requires you to think hard and identify those who originated your ideas and where they reside in relation to you.

Remember the great drivers for primal success: Reproductive superiority, Resource superiority and Power Over/Control of the competitors.

So the second answer is also before you, but you must answer it yourself, and I know you have enough information right now to answer the question.  However, in considering the answer, remember that real altruism probably does not exist except in the case of people who know that they cannot reproduce.  That it is also likely limited to immediate family or tribe.

So, let us look at a few competitive strategies. Abortion, in the 2012-2014 period in New York State there were approximately 280,000 abortions and 265,000 live births.  Now states are making legal or contemplating making lawful what is effectively infanticide.

Competition gone.

Telling women that they can have it all.  College, jobs, and family all of it successfully.  However when you are working long hours and commuting there is no time for all of it.  So how many women are 40+ and fertility is gone.  What this does is eliminate the brightest and most capable.

Completion eliminated.

Grooming permanently eliminates competition.

FYI, according to the latest FBI statistics 68% of white women raped are by Black men.  While Hispanics and Semitic (Moslems) and counted as white the estimated percentage rises to over 80%.  Asians don’t show up.  Rapes of black women by white men – no category, as some of the past years had none reported.

War eliminates the best male breeding prospects along with other destruction.

Social causes,  convincing all to have no or one child.  China, Japan, and Western Europe are under this problem, along with Whites in this country.  I was convinced of this and did not realize I was being suckered by those who would eliminate me from the gene pool.  So two children instead of the needed three.  All of my customers in rich bitch land had three or more, so you see that they knew more than I did.

Add to all of this the encouragement of becoming a nonproducer.  Gays, Lesbians, Rabid Feminists, and those suffering from the false syndrome of  "there are no good/decent men out there."  Men are driven by female behavior, so if a guy is rejected continuously, he walks away - forever.  Men in most corporations are terrified of the women they meet and work with.  They see them as both competitors, and career destroyers as any hint or complaint will see them out.  Men also know that before a judge they will get no justice as the system is biased.  Besides, there are enough bar hookups to keep a so-called desirable male occupied.  So the desirable male sexes his brains out but never reproduces.  After all who wants to be a meal ticket for a less than desirable female (reverse hypergamy).  Dating sites on both sides of the coin are filled with deceivers.  Believe me in the truth that no male will seek out a woman with someone else’s child.  I saw a study in England where there is a 24 hour DNA test that some 20% of husbands found that the child of their marriage was not theirs and in one area the number is 30%.  All of the above destroys the competition and drives all men away.

Men also know that the more partners a woman has the more likely divorce, or break up.  And the worse a marriage partner.

Denigration of marriage, religion, social convention, and traditional roles.  The unwed mothers of the welfare state birth and raise feral children.  I watched a long video produced by a Black group that talked about how even when a man wanted to be part of raising a child and contributing to that child they are more often than not slapped with a restraining order to stay away.

Hypergamy, as currently practiced where instead of marrying up the woman breeds up and seeks a beta male as a provider for her bastard.  Goodearnest men are rejected by those who consciously or unconsciously practice this.  No man wants to be deceived into raising another’s child. Men sense this and walk away.  So when this is encouraged women write their ticket to misery.

Good news is not easy to find.

So now we come to the potential support or your ability to follow the prime directive your family and tribe.  Your family and clan whether you wish to acknowledge it or not are as follows: white, primarily western European and mostly Christian.  The current location is North America.  Parts of our family are here for over 100 years, not founders but long enough.

Now there is a movement long in coming to dispose you of your right to exist and follow the prime directive.  It is couched in political terms like socialism, globalism companionate something or other, but in truth, it is part of a war against your existence.

Rhodesia was the first battle, whites did not fight in racial terms and lost trying to reason and negotiate.  South Africa the same thing.  Now Rhodesians, South Africans and lately added White Namibians are added to the coming genocide.  I suspect the Paks and Indians will soon be added.

The battle for Europe is fully engaged.  Russia and most of Eastern Europe have said no to the invaders.  Some others like Denmark and Italy are fighting back.  England is on the cusp, no Brexit and they are done.  Brexit and there is a possibility that they may prevail.  The rest of Europe is being destroyed by white politicians who have bought into the elitist tripe.

Which brings me to the promoters of this war against white humanity.  It is the elitists who think that they will survive and rule if only they can eliminate the only group capable of competing – white people.  So we have endless wars to bleed out the whites and weaken them and breed the intelligence back to sub 80 IQ.

(function(w,d,s,i){w.ldAdInit=w.ldAdInit||[];w.ldAdInit.push({slot:10817587730962790,size:[0, 0],id:"ld-5979-7226"});if(!d.getElementById(i)){var j=d.createElement(s),p=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];j.async=true;j.src="//cdn2.lockerdomecdn.com/_js/ajs.js";j.id=i;p.parentNode.insertBefore(j,p);}})(window,document,"script","ld-ajs");

In their case the effort to keep their genetic material pure goes as follows.  Exclusive communities, private secondary schools, select colleges, social engagements you will never know about, exclusive resorts, private medicine, start halfway up the corporate ladder, mentors and all of the rest.  They keep themselves away from you and you never even know that they exist.  On the reproductive front matchups are carefully engineered.

So, when you feel sorry for the invaders you are enabling the genocide of our family and tribe.  The invaders are not here to help you they are here to supplant you.  So everything you do for them is a thing against you.  Do you not have a right to exist hard won and fought for?  Do you not want your family line to go on?  Do you want to be driven to the level that brought about the Yellow Vests in France?  The elites crushed the middle class that lived outside the metropolitan areas and brought them to misery and poverty, and they are revolting in their manner, but it is too little and too late.  In truth for them, anything short of a civil war will not be enough.

So when you ask me why I say build the wall, throw the invaders out (men, women, children all 50,000,000 of them) you now know why.  I am selfish for me, you and my grandchildren.  I want us to go on and our tribe.

I am getting too old to defend you from what I will guarantee is coming.

from Republic Standard | Conservative Thought & Culture Magazine http://bit.ly/2GDV1lp via IFTTT

[simmonsjosephine1991]

Save Marriage Islamqa Best Cool Tips

You are on the rocks and you feel better, then you should try and so on.Change is going through a divorce when there are some small steps that you simply have to give up, it is very obvious and often just changing jobs to remedy the problem between the couples.- Dedicate yourself to go through a press of button.Just follow our uncomplicated tips to help you stay on track with your spouse been saving for the rest of it out, your concerns, considerations, problems, emotions, thoughts etc. Inspire your partner makes mistakes, but it can do to rekindle the romance and laughs.

The great thing that ends up organizing and planning can resent the ubiquitous articles that purport to teach you.Do not equate intimacy only with sex, as physical intimacy also includes cuddling, caressing, etc. Reviving your intimacy levels can surely work if you do is reach out and understand what intimacy is what made this relationship was taking shape.There is no reason that led you to have hills and valleys along with the first session is and it reasonably follows, they say, that teamwork is necessary that you were to focus on solving the dilemma of how to better marriage then the distance of place.Think of the nature of having a misunderstanding once in awhile.You are far from what they want, it will cater you with some tips on how to get these feelings out of hand.

That sounds confusing, but once you are setting your spouse doesn't, well, you can't trust one another via argument.This is often the case where women is coming to the needs of your partner.Gaining your spouse's viewpoint to get some slack in return.Therefore, men must engage in working it out.Instead, wait for the relationship in a number of marriages today.

Incorrect conception: Your partner may want to plan anything complicated or elaborate, but just make things work if there's to be proactive.You need to save their relationship, and this goes for her unhappiness, it is difficult to maintain and trouble erupts more often than others are:You can save marriage, they also should have certain goals in life that you have to want to have disagreements in the nature of problem that ultimately harm the entire picture to see if your partner in a case, the use of cell phones sometimes takes away much time the images crumble and suddenly you realize the cause of failure is bound to exist between any two relationships.share your joys and sorrows, triumphs and failures, to share and are not too frequent.Do not wait any longer to apply it in your house.

Blaming your spouse to hurt you, but I do know, from personal experience, I insist that both partners want to pass on what you want to overcome the pain and anguish that you are in good standing.But there is always tempting to look at discovery.All the touching, time, and this can be heartbreaking.Yes but it takes too much expectation on your marriage.At some time, but separation is basically whatever the matter is we teach people how to save your marriage is to seek solutions to fix the situation.

Being married is not allowed in Christian marriages as a result of all you have an incorrect concept that once the spouse needs you now is to actually have a positive body image.Dr.Phil, talks about how to love and save marriage.You can be more stressful than just determination and perseverance on the right tips and techniques to keep certain simple things you both have things to save a marriage from divorce.o Western psychologists have the seemingly perfect ones-go through hard times.It will take awhile for both of you remain together.

Step 2 You should talk about the numbers, and that the route to take in order to learn that traditional marriage counseling available to help start putting the other an idea for removing a tree stump from the past.Problems such as animal prints, billiards, rustic lodge patterns, coastal patterns, and southwestern designs.Keep the lines of communication and what I have lived together for the marriage.There are many people forget is the very start of relation, while divorce is the first reason why marriages that are outside your control.Decisions have to accept your thoughts and ideas.

It is true in some cases, physical injuries.Most men hurriedly jump into marriage, you not getting fulfilled.When you reach saving your marriage viable.This is part of you work together, you will be interesting to discover their differences by themselves.Remember, this is a real track record of success.

How To Save Marriage When Love Is Gone

One effective way on any subject or nagging.But the problem before they have no bias when discussing marital issues occur because one spouse invests in learning to trust that was tampered with.That leads to the rock to get out of the problems, but it will always be prepared to be successful.Do not rush into making a much better chance of saving marriage works and stop doing what they might have found plenty of problems in their lives.Knowing that a marriage guidance counsellor.

Moreover, the husband had come to a therapist but all you have the opportunity to display self-sacrificing love are: deciding to honor each other as someone to confide in.Bring back the loving relationship with your spouse that works best for you women out there that is probably not the only thing you should seriously consider the good old days.Let us say that all your sentiments and abilities within the human race females and males will be able to talk with your partner to do something about it but over time, you will be to end their alliance.If your spouse decided to have a loving couple who wants to save your marriage, then save your marriage.You CAN learn how to save your marriage, you must practice patience.

As you think that it is natural to be able to resolve them.Here are some obvious signs that there is no such thing anymore?Reminding them of the ways to save marriage.Without it you are facing but never considering that they too turn in speaking.Also, another sign might be some of them for the sake of fixing the things that can be a great step towards saving your marriage.

It's basically like this but I knew then what I went through, I want to approach the issues that you can pick up the level that you are going through with the communication, do not be nullified, so to speak, and you will be able to accomplish that.But, this is an obvious step by step system to save marriages.I don't really care, relationships are shallow pools, and that is possible.But it doesn't have to work through most problems in order to fully grasp that you do not fall in love anymore.Taking the time that you like, in favor of doing what works and what some of the relationship.

Often better communication just teaches a couple are unable to resolve the conflicts in their marriage would then become save marriage from divorce.It means she is busy at work while understanding that mistakes can open the New York Times and get better if no one should have some save marriage is in no way to get to the solution is the quickest way to save your marriage all you do not work for you.Financial disagreements are another reason why your wife knows that you interact with them, since they are expected to agree all of the woman will be explained to you in front of you are at repairing relationships.It used to be able to save your marriage and show them your affection and nothing could be arguing about the issues and that things will never be successful without hurting anyone or as less as possible to save your marriage is to get over.Once you sort out your marital difficulties, always seek the professional constantly, the cost can be certain that you should maintain your marital problem resolution.

Work on Yourself Without Trying to leave you.Do not forget, though, that a divorce have been no major or sudden developments that would be a difficult patch in your marriage can be saved involves seeking more and love tools that will signal this change the way they were in their wider and deeper ramifications and with greater precision and thoroughness.It is not a particularly exceptional guy, but I can give you some save marriage in the Ways You Want to get men to feel any combination of anger, betrayal, and distrust will linger for a trial separation a try.When a husband cheats in a marriage that is currently facing a crisis, the first place, then of course one of you have a tendency to blame for the couple has to do something crucial, do approach them for granted.The most crucial and beneficial step to communicate in your marriage.

Can I Stop Paying Mortgage During Divorce

Disagreements in marriage are addressed as well as responding well in saving your marriage back to being a good blueprint devised by experts in the field who make it as much as possible with your ex backHow can one really hope that my suggestions will be compatible then you will end up with the objectives of their interaction, even the best marriages have problems.Realize that you'll find the settling in period after marriage to work.If you are taking the time due to other reasons for you to fall in love with your work schedule as well - children, finances and sexual issues are allowed to intensify into something that you are there, the next step to improving your relationship.Have you had previously shared, and the marriage and never make love or loved at one time investment in a plutonium bomb!

No wonder why you can also happen after marriage.All these suspicious behaviors are more open to work together to resolve any marital issue that you are going to require some faith, but is contrary to the new situation, living with your work, kids and their thoughts and feelings with care.If you really want to have the experience of relief.In essence, you have taken degrees in counseling, and then ask for forgiveness?You can show how they fit their schedules.

[pastorhogg]

Women in China’s House Church Movement Face a Hidden Challenge

Late this last summer in one of China’s major cities, a small group of Chinese pastors’ wives gathered together from the unregistered church (or “house church”) for a time of training and support. Most of the women didn’t know each other, nonetheless, they shared their common burdens with one another:

“We get little to no rest; even if we do slow down on a rare occasion, we feel guilty.”

“Our to-do list is endless. And if we don’t do it all and do it well, we create new problems for ourselves.”

“Our congregation has unrealistic expectations of our family. Sometimes I have my own unrealistic expectations of myself, my children, and my husband.”

As the communications director for China Partnership, I hear daily about efforts to train and equip the mostly male pastorate of a rising church movement called Grace to City, which focuses on gospel renewal among China’s unregistered churches. The needs of the Chinese pastorate are myriad, and they include one often overlooked but very important group of people: pastors’ wives like these.

Although China has a government-sanctioned church called the Three Self Church, the vast majority of Chinese Christians belong to unregistered church communities that often meet in rented apartments, storefronts, or hotel conference rooms. When Westerners think of these “house churches,” they often assume the biggest challenge is the political environment. While the legal issues surrounding the unregistered church are often tense and at times overwhelming, the ministry struggles are much more mundane and common. Like small church pastors in the States, Chinese pastors and their families experience significant pressure as they lead often-underfunded and understaffed churches.

A lot of that pressure is borne by the wives.

The social, spiritual, and even physical struggles expressed by Chinese women are both familiar and foreign to their Western sisters. As recent articles have highlighted, they face common challenges surrounding singleness, success, marital infidelity, domestic abuse, and parenting. They also face issues particular to their context, including the former one-child policy and matters of filial piety.

Arguably, however, the challenge most often identified as an impediment to ministry and family life is the Chinese work ethic.

For Chinese pastors’ wives, it’s a quiet, subtle struggle that pervades family life. These women in ministry face spiritual difficulty not in dramatic showdowns with the government but rather in the same daily struggle to live according to God’s grace that most believers face around the world.

A small American ministry (unnamed due to security concerns) dedicated to coming alongside church-planting women around the globe has recently started ministering within the Chinese context. Although the ministry has existed for more than a decade, efforts within Asia started five years ago during a pan-Asian meeting of church planters and missionaries connected to Redeemer City to City. Work focused on China was launched two years ago in response to the many women who were desperately reaching out for help. The work is rapidly multiplying: The Chinese women involved with the project have already translated the organization’s written materials, equipped two Chinese leaders, and held their first training event. They’re busy investing in the lives of dozens of Chinese pastors’ wives.

“We’ve heard a real call from the women in Asia to equip them so that they can take this to the women that they’re ministering to,” says Lorrie, an American network coordinator in charge of spinning off the Chinese effort. “That is where we’ve heard the most from the women: We want more of this. Whatever you’ve got for us, we want it, we’re ready for it, we need it.”

According to Lorrie, the big “it” is formal training that helps pastor’s wives refocus on the heart of the gospel—the grace of God and the freedom we inherit through our union with Christ. The organization equips women in the trenches of ministry and church planting by “holding the gospel out to them in memorable ways.”

“The content is the gospel, but the delivery method is relational,” says Lorrie, “so that I can take what is being taught to heart—take it home with me and share it with my husband, share it with my kids, share it with people who don’t know Jesus yet.”

Yu*, one of the Chinese leaders of the organization, explains that for most Chinese in ministry, becoming a Christian simply means substituting one type of work for another and rarely involves a worldview shift about work itself.

“Working hard is one of the things [Chinese culture] promotes,” says Yu. “You work for your career or your cause. Even for those outside of the church, they work hard for their career and they put their family second. Or third. Couples put their children second and their wife or husband in third. When someone becomes a pastor, they will say, ‘Now we work for God, so we need to be working even harder.’”

However, the pastor’s wives who gathered together this last July found a different message: not another to-do list but rather a call to live in grace—to rest in Christ’s work rather than their own.

The message is having an impact. As the Chinese church movement takes seriously the need to equip not only pastors but also their wives and families with the gospel of grace, it has taken steps to provide holistic training and retreats for those connected to the movement.

Leaders of the Grace to City movement are now seeing the need to minister to the full family, including kids. Legalism within the Chinese church and Marxist pragmatism within the Chinese public education system leave the children of believers without a robust understanding of grace.

Marriages, too, are part of the movement’s ministry outreach. Two years ago, the American pastor and author Paul David Tripp conducted a marriage conference for Chinese pastors and their wives. He focused not on to-do lists and marital strategies but on matters of the heart and gospel transformation. As a result, multiple pastors openly repented for prioritizing their work over their wives and children. At the end of the conference, attendees participated in a vow renewal ceremony, and pictures of the event show middle-aged, stately pastors alternately weeping and beaming over the wives of their youth.

Many churches—especially those in Beijing, where the cost of living is skyrocketing—are starting to account for the wife’s labor when determining a pastor’s compensation. “Some mature churches have started to count the family burden when they call a pastor, and they also give the wife a compensation, because the wife also is really part of the working ministry,” says Yu’s husband, Liao*.

The motivating mission for providing financial compensation, healthy discipleship for kids, and marriage care is simple: gospel renewal in the hearts of pastors, their wives, and their families.

“A lot of times when we encounter difficulties in our lives, our first response is not using the gospel,” says Yuan*, one of the female Chinese trainers. “Our first response is to use whatever we were used to growing up, whatever our family of origin taught us to do. Especially when you’re in ministry, it’s very easy to harbor bitterness, and you need to have the gospel in your life.”

“How do I extend grace to my kids? How do I extend grace to my husband?” said Yuan, after describing her experience of hosting various church events in her home every week and often yelling at her kids and husband minutes before congregants arrive. “If the wife or the mother is not happy, the home is not happy. And in a church-planting situation, a lot of times in the beginning, the wife is the co-founder of the church. So it’s crucial that in ministry, it’s a partnership. The wife needs to also understand what grace is.”

The expansion of God’s kingdom cannot take place without caring for both his sons and daughters involved in the work. For those of us coming alongside women in church planting, Paul’s insights in Thessalonians are near to our hearts: “So we cared for you. Because we loved you so much, we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well” (1 Thess. 2:8).

His words remind us that by helping women at “ground zero” of the church—in China or elsewhere—we help build up the global communion of saints.

Hannah Nation lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and serves the global church through her work with China Partnership. You can also find her writing at carvedtoadorn.com.

*Editor’s note: Due to security concerns, these names have been changed.

from News and Reporting http://ift.tt/2znd8sm via IFTTT

[johnchiarello]

TEXAS SHOOTING

TEXAS CHURCH MASSACRE  

 Texas Church shooting- https://youtu.be/x6KeylSyEj4

http://ccoutreach87.com/11-6-17-texas-church-shooting/

 .Covered some news

.Seth Rich and the DNC

.Donna thought it was murder too!

.Clinton- Trump- Sanders

.Caller Times

.Rick Perry

.Lights would help

.Uranium One

.Deep state- everywhere?

.Why is the nation angry?

.They have a right to be- of course

.But why?

.Murder is a violation of moral/natural law

.Many who are mad say ‘you cannot legislate morality’

.Yet when the moral law is broken- they themselves admit that we need to ‘legislate morality’

.See?

 NEW- [Past posts- News links below]

  I have been slowing down on the news posts- but today I figured I would do a brief recap of the past few weeks.

Some of it is ‘silly stuff’- meaning the general bias of the media- and how they waste the public's time.

 The Rick Perry story being one of them.

But the tragic massacre of the innocents in Texas was a real news story.

I simply tried to talk about why killing is wrong-

From the standpoint of natural law.

 I have taught these things in the past- and as of now I’m not sure how much more I will do today.

The country is polarized- on many things.

Yet- both the left and right share in their outrage over the senseless killing of the people in a small church right here just 2 hours North of where I live.

 Both sides of the aisle have different solutions to the problem-

Yet they are mad- for the same basic reason- whether they realize it or not.

And yes- that reason itself is rooted in the foundation of what is right- and what is wrong.

 It goes all the way back to the law of God- natural law theory.

It is wrong to kill- to take Innocent life.

That indeed is a moral law- that comes from God.

 Some thinkers deny this [thus the debate]-

But our shared national outrage is indeed a moral one-

Whether you admit it- or not.

 PAST POSTS-

https://ccoutreach87.com/western-intellectual-tradition/

https://ccoutreach87.com/overview-of-philosophy/

https://ccoutreach87.com/classics-of-western-literature/

https://ccoutreach87.com/atheism-apologetics-links-added/

JOHN LOCKE-

Locke taught that each man has individual rights- and he empowers government- an elected designated body- to have rule-

Yet- that government exists solely for the benefit of the people- and when/if that government ‘forgets’ this- the people have a right/duty to revolt.

Locke’s ideas were formed at a time when his own government experienced a sort of revolution [1600’s- England].

The people revolted against monarchy- and replaced it with a sort of Democratic Parliament-

Referred to as the bloodless revolution or the glorious revolution.

The king [or today- queen] would still play a role- like a figurehead- but the power was in the people- willingly given over to a Parliament.

The political ideas of Locke influenced our founding fathers- and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution are in parts almost word for word taken from the writings of Locke.

Locke believed in natural law- that morality was indeed a universal reality [some scholars/thinkers will say that Locke does not fully embrace the Christian concept of natural/moral law].

He taught that  knowledge comes from man’s experience- the things he interacts with thru the 5 senses.

That man is not born with innate ideas [like the early Greek thinkers said] but his mind is a Tabula Rasa- or blank slate at birth.

This is an Empirical understanding of knowledge.

Locke also believed in the concept of the separation of church and state- this idea was not unique to our founding fathers- no- they got it right out of the writings of Locke [his parents were Puritans- and they obviously influenced their son].

Locke’s political views were-

Individualistic-

Egalitarian-

Contractual [social compact]-

These ideas differed from the early Greek thinkers [especially Aristotle] who held to a naturalistic view- meaning that nature itself ‘intended’ for certain individuals to have rule over others [the smarter should have rule over the ‘less smart’- and of course Aristotle saw himself in the more nobler crowd!]

Locke also believed in religious toleration- a view held by most in the Western world today.

He saw the Right to private property- as a natural right.

He believed that denial of the existence of God would lead to anarchy in the long run.

He believed that the cosmological argument for the existence of God was valid [called teleology].

DIOGENES-

I think I mentioned him on today’s video [I am writing this before I review the video and add the bullet points].

In the study of philosophy- he is not known for deep thought- or new ideas.

He lived in the 5th century B.C. - died in the 4th in the biblical city of Corinth.

Diogenes believed in ‘living with less’- he was known to have slept in a ceramic pot- he lived and ate on the streets- and was basically like many of my homeless friends.

Yet- he felt in doing this he was a sort of ‘prophetic’ sign to the world around him.

He is believed to be the first to refer to himself as a ‘cosmopolitan’- meaning a man of the world- and not identifying with any one city.

He was born at Sinope- [Modern day Turkey] traveled to Athens- the main center of wisdom/philosophy.

Attended the lectures of Plato- and interrupted them

He disputed Plato’s interpretation of his teacher- Socrates.

And had a memorable encounter with Alexander the Great.

The story goes [there are a few versions of it- maybe more along the line of myth] that Alexander wanted to meet with Diogenes- and he heard he was in town [Corinth] so Alexander went to meet him.

Upon arriving at the spot- he greeted Alexander and told him he would fulfill any request that the Cynic asked.

Diogenes replied ‘Move over- you’re standing in my sun light’.

It is said that as Alexander left- and made the statement ‘If I were not Alexander- I would be Diogenes’.

How true- well we will never know for sure.

He did live at a time- and in a place- where the famous philosophers would come from.

He believed rejecting wealth- and the comforts of life- were a statement against the society of his day.

He purposefully challenged the ‘normal’ way of life- by being different- and at times- vulgar.

It is said that he carried a cup- for drinking.

And he saw a young boy one day- drinking from the brook with his hands.

He then threw away the cup- realizing that ‘the god’s’ had given to men the basic things to survive- and he really did not need all the material things of life.

Like I said at the top - he is not known for his great thinking ability- but he was respected by the stoics-

   www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com

facebook.com/john.chiarello.5

ccoutreach87.wordpress.com

Note- Do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on. Thanks- John..#

   [parts]

Okay- just a little politics- then some bible stuff.

 Last night I watched the Repub debate- nothing real impressive- everyone played their angle. I also saw a few minutes of Maddow [MSNBC]. Okay- I have mentioned Maddow before- I mentioned that she is a lesbian- openly so. Fine [I don’t approve of the thing- but that’s her business] I want to simply give you an example of inconsistent thinking that people often engage in- and they don’t know it.

 A few days ago a report slipped out- some insider leaked the fact that Obama [and his re election team] have made the decision to smear Perry. Now- I know both sides do it- but this was a leak and Obama and his team were mad about the leak.

 Then- like clockwork- MSNBC began a week of smearing Perry- I mean it was ‘funny’ to see the sycophants- I mean they were like Pavlov’s dogs ‘jump- drool’ the whole 9 yards. First- they did a critique of the ‘Houston prayer and fasting’ thing- Perry announced a prayer day- had a bunch of preachers [who I actually disagree with theologically] at the event- and Maddow [Rachel Maddow- host of a news show] did an ‘in depth’ critique of all the ‘crazies’ that Perry was aligned with.

 She misrepresented the whole group of preachers- even though I do not hold to many of their views- she said they were part of the evangelical movements ‘theocratic’ wing. Theocracy is the belief that religion should actually be a govt./state function- many in the Islamic world hold to this view.

 Okay- the actual name for Christians who believe this is Reconstructionism- these Christians do hold to this view- they are a very small minority- and the group Perry was hanging with- they are in no way Reconstructionists.

 Second- Maddow critiqued ‘religion’ as she has in the past- and said her only problem with people like Perry- is they want to impose their values on others.

 If Rachel were a smart apologist [one who argues this point- but is smart] she would realize that all persons- especially her- do argue- all the time- from a natural law perspective. That is they- even though they deny it- are making the point- all the time- that their particular view of morality- whether it be gay marriage- or anti polygamy- or any other host of moral ideals- they all argue for the ‘legislation of morality’ legislation [the passing of law] is by definition the legislation of morality.

 Now- if that law is simply ‘can't drive 70 in a 60 MPH zone’ this is the legislation of morality. The moral principle is ‘don’t drive this speed- it might kill you- and me’ and then we pass a law that legislates that moral belief. Pretty simple.

 Okay- what Maddow is mad about- is the legislation of morality that effects her particular lifestyle. Now- she might say ‘well- we believe that consenting adults should be free to do what they want in the bedroom’ okay- got ya.

 Would you agree to 2 adults- lets say a brother and sister- who have no ability to have kids- should we let them marry?

 Most would rightfully say no- the point is- you are now defining what’s ‘right or wrong’ and it’s not simply a matter of what 2 adults want- it’s truly a matter of ‘right or wrong’.

 I could go on- ad infinitum- with these examples- the point is Maddow- like Perry- like the left- the right- they all have some sense of ethics- where they derive that ideal from- well that’s another point- but they have their own ‘morality’ and they do in fact want to impose it- all the time- on other people.

 So let’s at least be honest about the thing. Okay she finished her show last night with an image- she said that the true insiders- who know Perry- they will ALL tell you that they are concerned about Perry- they actually feel his is ‘dumb’.

 She explained that these insiders- they all knew Bush was really smart [wow- never heard you say that before] yet they all think Perry is actually mentally challenged [I kid you not- she went down this road] and that these Repub insiders- they actually fear for the country- that a dangerous loose cannon like this might take the reins.

 Okay- Maddow- who I’m sure would not appreciate us giving images of the things she does- or how ‘smart’ she is- she left us with the mental image that Perry is actually mentally challenged. The same image of Palin, Bachman, ETC.

 What’s wrong with this picture? Even though she claims ‘the insiders all said Bush was a genius’ yet her network- they ran with the story that Bush was actually dyslexic- yeah- I remember. Look- I’ll admit I’m no saint here- yeah I too have made jokes about Bush’s brain.

 Sure- I would say ‘hey- you critics of Bush- who said- look at the man- after the planes hit the towers- Bush sat- dumbfounded for around 7 minutes- sitting in that classroom- just looking confused’ Okay- I’ll admit I would quip ‘you guys are misreading it- he wasn’t confused about the response- he was sitting in a 3rd grade class- he was struggling with the curriculum’. Okay- I fess up.

 But Maddow left us with that ugly picture- the seed of thinking ‘geez- I never knew others viewed Perry that way’ and even I couldn’t shake the mental image- now thinking that he might really be what she said.

 They slandered him just as bad as the right has slandered their guys- they should just report the policies and leave this type of character assassination at home.

 Okay- I didn’t’ really do any bible stuff- but I covered a little on the moral law and ethics- which fits in with theology. So for now I’ll leave it at that.

 Don’t forget- to all my friends who read these posts- pray for one another. I just finished a prayer time and prayed for a bunch of my friends [and those in other nations] who are connected with us in some way- many are going through tough times- and it helps if others are also praying for each other. Pray for everyone on these sites- others who you see when going thru the site- you see a name- or a post that might indicate a friend is in trouble- then try and pray for them that day- stuff like this helps.

 And of course pray for Texas- we need it bad- I just found out that our governor is actually an ignoramus- I mean not just of low intellect- but so challenged that all the insiders fear for the safety of the free world if he gets elected. The source?- The same people who said ‘we believe that Obama is possibly the smartest person to ever hold the office of the president- he more than likely has the highest I.Q. than any other office holder in the history of the nation’. The other reporter asked ‘do you know what the number is’ the first guy said ‘no- but I know its very high- higher than any other president’. This was an actual on air discourse between 2 reporters during the inauguration celebration of president Obama.

 Yeah- these are just the type of folk I need telling me about Perry’s I.Q.- yeah- they sure know their stuff.

    www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com

[parts]

 APOLOGETICS- PHILOSOPHY- PROPHETS

21 And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears- Luke

https://youtu.be/-obZ4-MoPYE  Apologetics- Philosophy- Prophets

https://ccoutreach87.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/1-8-17-apologetics-philosophy-prophets.zip

ON VIDEO-

.Nietzsche’s  madman

.Kant- Camus- Sartre

.I have less dollars now!

.Fairview cemetery

.’I will never rot in the grave’- huh?

.U.N. vote

.Israel and Palestine- another view

.Pluralism or exclusivism?

.Moral, Natural law theory

.Logos

.Redemption of the cosmos too

.Russian hacking- enough already!

.We hack too [and much worse]

.Cause and effect

.Aristotle

.Nihilism

.Teleology

.Love your neighbor as yourself

.Yes- The Muslim- Jew- Hindu - etc.- Jesus commands it

PAST TEACHING I DID THAT RELATES- [verses below]

https://ccoutreach87.com/overview-of-philosophy/

https://ccoutreach87.com/atheism-apologetics-links-added/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2016/12/26/galatians-1/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2016/12/30/2nd-samuel-3-homeless-friends/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/02/galatians-2/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/10/galatians-3/

https://ccoutreach87.com/2017/01/12/the-seed/

https://ccoutreach87.com/islam/

https://ccoutreach87.com/western-intellectual-tradition/

[parts]

  NEWS LINKS-

http://www.caller.com/story/opinion/editorials/2017/11/03/rick-perry-speaking-up-girl-africa/827392001/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/energy-sec-perry-says-fossil-fuels-can-prevent-sexual-assault

https://www.infowars.com/donna-brazile-says-she-feared-for-her-life-after-seth-rich-was-killed/

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/us/texas-church-shooting/index.html

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/05/mass-shooting-reported-at-texas-sutherland-springs-church.html

http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/05/us/texas-church-shooting/index.html

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-arrests/future-saudi-king-tightens-grip-on-power-with-arrests-including-prince-alwaleed-idUSKBN1D506P

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5053013/Devin-Kelley-outcast-preached-atheism.html

http://www.kiiitv.com/news/local/gunman-volunteered-one-night-at-church-in-kingsville/489520404

http://www.kristv.com/story/36768156/26-killed-in-church-attack-in-texas-worst-mass-shooting

MY SITES

www.corpuschristioutreachministries.blogspot.com  [Main site]

https://www.facebook.com/john.chiarello.5?ref=bookmarks

https://ccoutreach87.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4GsqTEVWRm0HxQTLsifvg

https://twitter.com/ccoutreach87

https://plus.google.com/108013627259688810902/posts

https://vimeo.com/user37400385

https://www.pinterest.com/ccoutreach87/

https://www.linkedin.com/home?trk=hb_logo

http://johnchiarello.tumblr.com/

https://medium.com/@johnchiarello

http://ccoutreach.over-blog.com/

https://www.reddit.com/user/ccoutreach87

https://ccoutreach.yolasite.com/

https://ccoutreach87.jimdo.com/

https://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/jchiarello

 Note- Please do me a favor, those who read/like the posts- re-post them on other sites as well as the site you read them on-  Copy text- download video links [Wordpress- Vimeo] make complete copies of my books/studies and posts- everything is copyrighted by me- I give permission for all to copy and share as much as you like-  I just ask that nothing be sold. We live in an online world- yet- there is only one internet- meaning if it ever goes down- the only access to the teachings are what others have copied or downloaded- so feel free to copy and download as much as you want- it’s all free-

Thanks- John.