Category: Western Civilization is better

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Make This New Year’s Resolution. New Worlds Await You.

I don’t care what your beliefs are (well, I do, but it’s not a necessary component of this comment), read The Bible this year. You will not find a better collection of great literature with more influence on the formation of Western Civilization. Even absent assent to its premise and assertions about the nature of the universe, mankind, and our reason for being, Santayana’s Axiom applies: reading it even as just an historical document is important. One cannot even grasp whence we came (and hence, where we are) without reading it, so if for no other reason, read it for that. (But wait! There’s more. . . 🙂 )

N.B. I use “reading” here to mean more than just “decode those funny lil squiggles into words.” Sadly, that is what many nowadays seem to view as the sum total of literacy. No, really reading something means to comprehend the meanings of the words, wrestle with them, engage in the Great Dialog with whomever wrote the text. This applies to reading anything, yes, even want ads. (Note also that I have borrowed “the Great Dialog” from Mortimer Adler’s introduction to “The Great Books of the Western World,” a collection that does not include The Bible only because, as he said, it was expected that everyone would have one of their own. The study guide–the “Syntopicon”–included with the set does)

Oh, and as a sidebar, and to actually aid in comprehension and the Great Dialog, when reading The Bible, I suggest using the King James Version precisely because of ots archaic language. It will make it more work (for some) to have to actually work through the archaic elements, and working at understanding is the first step to better reading comprehension of the text. Go ahead and give it a try. After a while, as actual accomplishment ensues, the work in and of itself will become enjoyable. Yes, it will take discipline and persistence, but practicing those virtues will also be rewarding.

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Islands of Sanity

Elsewhere on the Interwebs, I saw an otherwise nice lil ole lady stating that as divided and rancorous as the public square has become, she expects she’ll have to “duke it out in real life at some point. . . ” in the real world.

Maybe, maybe not. It mostly depends on the venue, methinks. Here in America’s Third World County™, the irrational, emotionally-derived non-arguments (spewing of lying memes, parroting of angry rhetoric) just does not exist for the most part, at least as I am out and about in the county I have never found it so. As a matter of fact, America’s Third World County™ seems to be such a haven of sanity and safety that when nour state’s so-called “Constitutional Carry” law went into effect, I felt no need to take advantage of it as I went about my daily affairs here in America’s Third World County™. Oh, I put a lil revolver in a holster and–legally, now *heh*–carried the thing concealed inside my waistband for a few days, but since so many other folks are doing the same (or carrying in the open, also lawful), and the general conditions of civilized safety and sanity still prevail here, I just set the lil wheelgun aside for plinking.

Seriously, I am THAT comfy with the civilized deportment of ou citizens. LE guys (and gals *sigh*) still have too much swagger and project far, far too much self-importance (unnecessary here, IMO), and there are a few bad actors around, but realy very few, but still, overall this area is the safest and sanest, the most civilized I have ever lived in, well, at least since I was seven years old, nearly 60 years ago. Oh, we lack some of the amenities and pleasures of big city life, but a trek of less than an hour can afford a trip to a world class museum of art, a middlin’ quality orchestral performance, good craft beers, etc., if desired. Fortunately, no professional sports teams are within what I’d call driving range, which pretty much eliminates the hooliganism I associate with that stupidity.

Yeh, unless I stray too far from America’s Third World County™, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of RW “in your face” confrontations with rancorous loonies. I suspect there are more such enclaves of civilization around, islands of sanity in this mad, mad world, havens of civilization contra the Crazy Years.

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Gone. . . and Mostly Forgotten

A recent article, “A Thoughtless Age,” by David P. Goldman, contemplates what has been lost from our culture.

This paragraph reminded me a bit of extended family gatherings when I was growing up. . . just a bit.

“The last place where literature is read closely by a non-specialist public might be the Orthodox Synagogue, where the Hebrew Bible is examined through the eyes of ancient as well as medieval and modern commentators. It is read not as literature but as family history, and its readers have an existential interest in the result. The Hebrew Bible, to be sure, is not all of literature, but it is the best of it (nothing in Greek or Latin compares to the grandeur of Isaiah). Most of all, it is the continuing concern of a living community which has read it together for thousands of years.”

A bunch of Baptists gathering together, talking family, current events and scripture might not be an Orthodox Synagogue, but it used to be similar. Notsomuch nowadays. . . But real questions about our place in God’s creation were at least on the table, and considered in light of the “great literature” of The Bible, literature that compasses the whole of human experience and as much of divine transcendence as can be contained in the words of men.

“As long as the ambient culture runs from the existential questions brought forth by religion, and as long as the religious public contents itself with the pap of popular culture, we will be shut off from access to the great works of the past.”

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Phractured Frases

Yes, I meant to write that. And I know that the words are “Fractured Phrases”. So, why? Simple. Most people I see and hear botching common words and phrases do so unwittingly. And therein lies a stealth danger to society, especially a society built, as ours once was, on shared cultural memes that cut across multiple imported ethnic and cultural traditions, enabling the kinds of cross-cultural communications that created the Melting Pot Society.

The single largest factors in the destruction of a healthy common culture here in the US are the growth of illiteracy* in the US and the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind. The illiterate among us aren’t limited to those who cannot read at all but include those who simply do not read and those who, when they do read, read only crap and scarcely understand even that. Having not read much at all, they are easy prey for the lies about current events, history and civics that are the toxic stew served up daily by the Hivemind in entertainment (“news” and other crap on TV as well as movies and manufactured “music”) that is designed to misinform and twist values away from those which made America, at one time, a great nation.

But what’s this gripe I have against fractured phrases and words? Simple, really. I see an apparently growing trend toward the subliterate and illiterate who simply do not know the meanings of common words (look for consistent uses of “then” for “than” or “affect” for “effect” in a person’s writing, for a couple of common examples: subliterate tending toward illiterate) or are so lacking in grounding in any broader culture than the simplistic, twisted culture presented by the Hivemind that they botch even simple child’s games.

Really? Yes. I ran across a long, massively stupid, “discussion” on a social media site recently where someone asked why paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper. About one in four answers made any sense at all. No, seriously. A failure of both basic literacy and any sense of a culture beyond the Hivemind. (BTW, rock-paper-scissors has been around for thousands of years. Apparently, it takes a modern American Hivemind-dominated culture to denude it of any coherence.)

Minor examples of a major problem. “Major problem” because these minor examples are much, much less than the tip of the iceberg.

Continue reading “Phractured Frases”

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Never Forget

I’d like to see an electronic billboard playing this 24x7x365(.25) on a jumbo screen across the street from the site of the proposed Jihadist’s Cordoba House Victory Mosque in NYC:

Heck, I’d like to see it playing, along with an appropriate semi-permanent text message*, beside it on all sides of the proposed Jihadist’s Cordoba House Victory Mosque.

*For example, something like this:

Text could be varied by season. For example, during the Islamic new year, which celebrates Mohamed’s hijra (establishment of his warlord power in Medina), it could read,

“Happy Butcher of Medina Celebration, Pigdog Jihadists” or other epigram appropriate to the season that celebrates Mohamed’s massacre of 900 Banu Qurayzah Jewish men, the plundering of their goods, and the rape and enslavement of their women and children.

Update:

“A cult is any group uses psychological coercion to recruit, indoctrinate and retain its members. The group forms an elitist totalitarian society. The group founder leader is self-appointed, dogmatic, messianic, not accountable, has charismatic and narcissistic behavior issues. The group believes ‘the end justifies the means’ in order to solicit funds and recruit people. The group wealth does not benefit its members or society. Islam and their Allah is not a religion but no more than a cult political organization used to control their members to achieve worldwide conquest.”–John Tydlaska Jr. via Facebook.

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Important Essay at Eternity Road

Just go. Read.

A very, very brief snippet:

Culture is more than superficial differences in cuisine, music, dress, or even language, though that hits closer to the mark. It is the unknown, unexamined, unquestioned principles embedded so deeply into our souls that we do not know that they are there, guiding our behavior and our thoughts without us even knowing. America’s cultural roots are deep and ancient, far older than her silly little government and far and away more powerful.

I would submit to you that not only is this true, but it explains why the Mass MEdia Podpeople Hivemind, the Loony Left Moonbat Brigade, politicians *spit* of nearly every stripe and Academia Nut Fruitcakes seek to, at best, subvert that culture and, optimally from their view, ultimately destroy it.

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*See TWC’s Corollary to Santayana’s Axiom

Another thought-provoking comment by Joe Sobran

“…the whole history of Western Civilization is rooted in religion. Unless you understand Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, along with the rise of Islam, you don’t understand the events that shaped the modern world. The issues of the Reformation were still alive when the United States was founded, when slavery was debated, when the Civil War tore the country apart, when Prohibition was adopted, when Joe McCarthy assailed “godless Communism,” when John Kennedy became the first Catholic American president.

“The Christian Right is closer to its own historic roots than most Americans, yet the media and the history textbooks treat it as a marginal, virtually un-American movement. This isn’t “multicultural”; it’s anti-cultural. It refuses to take America’s real origins seriously, adopting the Supreme Court’s shallow and ahistorical interpretation of the separation of church and state.”

Indeed. And that’s why my proposed corollary to Santayana’s Axiom is important in today’s cultural and political debates.

Santayana’s Axiom:

“Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

And for those very, very few who cannot locate third world county’s corollary to Santayana’s Axion in the blog header,

“In a democracy (’rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history are in the majority and dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance.”

I must confess that although I was blessed in my youth with literate parents and grandparents (and aunts and uncles) who were constantly discussing (often times arguing) historical and biblical (extended family gatherings included biblical and theological scholars among its numbers) context of current events at family gatherings, and my early public school years featured much, much more in the way of instruction in history than I’ve seen become the norm in the past 30 years or so, it wasn’t until college that I realized the huge gap in pubschool education that Sobran highlights above. Indeed, it wasn’t until one year in grad school when I was reading (for pleasure reading, not coursework) Jan de Hartog’s novelization of Quaker history, The Peaceable Kingdom, that I began to think seriously about just how large that knowledge gap loomed in public discourse.

But it’s even worse nowadays than I had ever thought in previous decades. Heck, in a time when more Americans can associate Paula Abdul with American Idol than can associate, “…a government of the people, by the people, for the people…” with Lincoln, let along The Gettysburg Address (something we were required to be able to recite from memory when I was a lad), it’s hardly any wonder that almost no one–it seems–is aware of the deep roots our own Constitution has in Christian thought and history.

And no one who is ignorant of The Battle of Tours (also called The Battle of Poitiers, 732), The Battle of Lepanto, The Battle of Vienna and other hugely important turning points in the 1,500-year-long conflict between Western Civilization and Islamic barbarity really has any business opening their mouths concerning today’s war for survival between the tattered remains of Western Civilization and Islam.

Sidebar: Oh, you noticed “Islamic barbarity”? Anyone who’s not read the Koran and familiarized themselves with the history of Islam denuded of Islamic disinformation and self-hating multi-culti lies from surrenderist leftards can feel free to argue with me about that characterization, but expect to be refuted with facts and roundly mocked for cultural and historical illiteracy.

I agree with Perri Nelson that the first task facing us in warding off the collapse of our own country that’s being engendered by leftard traitors and faux “conservative” Dhimmis and dimwits on the putative “Right” is that,

“…we need to be ever vigilant, and do what we can to preserve the ideals that they [The Founders] handed down to us.”

But more–and Perri makes this point many times on his blog–we need to engage everyone we interact with in dialog on the events of the day and we also need to inject historical context into our every interaction concerning current events. To do that, we need to be as fully informed about historical precedents and influences as we can be. With modern barbarians holding power in the White House and Congress, the only means we have left to us to preserve what little remains of the republic bequeathed us by our progenitors is to build up strong walls at the local level and then extend those walls further and further into the public arena.

And that means we need to become ever more aware of the genuine, valuable and significant influence of religious history on our current situation. Absent that awareness, our understanding of where we are will be deeply flawed.

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How to Deal With Islamic Terrorism

Be more terrible than the terrorists. Seriously. It is literally the only thing that has stopped Muslim aggression in the past, so why does The 0! seem to think he can lie to us saying, essentially, all we need to do is beat ourselves over the head and shoulders, wear sackcloth and ashes and cry Woe! for the terrible wrongs we have committed on Muslims by… not submitting to Islam*. Then we can all sit around a campfire singing Kum Ba Yah Allah.

*feh* Although Kipling’s lil tale below does not specifically deal with a response to terrorism (the dead subaltern was after all an active duty soldier in in an area of conflict, not a civilian non-combatant), but it does illustrate the proper method of communicating with brutal savages.

The Grave of the Hundred Head
–Rudyard Kipling

There’s a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There’s a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there’s Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

A Snider squibbed in the jungle,
Somebody laughed and fled,
And the men of the First Shikaris
Picked up their Subaltern dead,
With a big blue mark in his forehead
And the back blown out of his head.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Jemadar Hira Lal,
Took command of the party,
Twenty rifles in all,
Marched them down to the river
As the day was beginning to fall.

They buried the boy by the river,
A blanket over his face–
They wept for their dead Lieutenant,
The men of an alien race–
They made a samadh in his honor,
A mark for his resting-place.

For they swore by the Holy Water,
They swore by the salt they ate,
That the soul of Lieutenant Eshmitt Sahib
Should go to his God in state;
With fifty file of Burman
To open him Heaven’s gate.

The men of the First Shikaris
Marched till the break of day,
Till they came to the rebel village,
The village of Pabengmay–
A jingal covered the clearing,
Calthrops hampered the way.

Subadar Prag Tewarri,
Bidding them load with ball,
Halted a dozen rifles
Under the village wall;
Sent out a flanking-party
With Jemadar Hira Lal.

The men of the First Shikaris
Shouted and smote and slew,
Turning the grinning jingal
On to the howling crew.
The Jemadar’s flanking-party
Butchered the folk who flew.

Long was the morn of slaughter,
Long was the list of slain,
Five score heads were taken,
Five score heads and twain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back to their grave again,

Each man bearing a basket
Red as his palms that day,
Red as the blazing village–
The village of Pabengmay,
And the “drip-drip-drip” from the baskets
Reddened the grass by the way.

They made a pile of their trophies
High as a tall man’s chin,
Head upon head distorted,
Set in a sightless grin,
Anger and pain and terror
Stamped on the smoke-scorched skin.

Subadar Prag Tewarri
Put the head of the Boh
On the top of the mound of triumph,
The head of his son below,
With the sword and the peacock-banner
That the world might behold and know.

Thus the samadh was perfect,
Thus was the lesson plain
Of the wrath of the First Shikaris–
The price of a white man slain;
And the men of the First Shikaris
Went back into camp again.

Then a silence came to the river,
A hush fell over the shore,
And Bohs that were brave departed,
And Sniders squibbed no more;
For the Burmans said
That a kullah’s head
Must be paid for with heads five score.

There’s a widow in sleepy Chester
Who weeps for her only son;
There’s a grave on the Pabeng River,
A grave that the Burmans shun,
And there’s Subadar Prag Tewarri
Who tells how the work was done.

Although, come to think of it, Kipling was a piker. 1,000-to-1 seems about right to me. Personally, I’d check off on a “monument” of radioactive glass in what was once Mecca big enough to see from the moon. Seems about right to me in return for a millennium and a half of Muslim terrorism. But then, I don’t have that kind of decision making power. Unfortunately. And fortunately, I’m not some raghead splodeydope willing to cut short my stay on this veil of tears to take out non-combatants (although, if one is a believer in the word of Mohamed, one MUST be a combatant, so… )

Trackposted to Rosemary’s Thoughts, Nuke Gingrich, Allie is Wired, Woman Honor Thyself, Right Truth, The World According to Carl, DragonLady’s World, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, , Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Continue reading “How to Deal With Islamic Terrorism”

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Not Intentionally Offensive

OK, so I had some time at lunch I didn’t plan on.

[Please note the subjunctive mood.]

Thinking on the differences between a society where Sharia “law” is paramount and a free society where offensive opinions can be openly uttered and even more offensive questions asked, one wonders what would be the reception in each of those societies to someone who would ask an outrageous question such as,

If one were to desire such a thing, how would one say, “Mohamed was the offspring of a diseased dog impregnated by a drunk pig” in Arabic?

Just wondering, that’s all.

Also wondering how long it will take before Janet Napolitano’s deliberately illiterate goon squad will be by to give me a lobotomy for asking such questions…

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Hawaii’s Legislators Are Idiots

So, our 50th State (not 60th or whatever as The 0! would have it) has passed a bill to set aside a day in honor of Islam, because of “the rich religious, scientific, cultural and artistic contributions” that Muslims have made to the world.

Pardon me while I throw the bullshit flag.

Muslims are credited (falsely) with so-called “Arabic” numerals invented by folks in the subcontinent of India hundreds of years before The Butcher of Medina raped his first victim. When were they put into use by the Islamic world in general, instead of being merely a toy for uncreative Muslim “scholars” and superstitious astrologers to use? Not until well after the same system had percolated into the West by other means and started being used for real life applications.

Muslims are (falsely) credited with the creation of algebra. Well, in a sense. We use the Arabic word for it, but that’s all. The mathematical principles of algebra had been known for nearly a millennium before The Butcher of Medina ordered his first mass murder. And what, pray tell, did Muslims use this valuable tool for? Scientific purposes? Nope. It was used hand-in-hand with the soi dissant “Arabic” numerals in astrology–more superstition from a people who have never seen a scientific principle they could grasp.

And so it goes. Every single meaningful, positive “contribution” the Islamic world has made has been something it stole from another culture and squirreled away somewhere doing no one any good whatsoever… until Western minds put it to use.

Now, that said, there was one genuine genius Muslim in the 12th century known for his analytical skills. He wrote extensively on Muslim law, Islamic philosophy (such as it is), art and music (if you can call Muslim noises “music” then you probably think rap is music too). But Averroès one great contribution to the world, THE one upon which his fame truly and genuinely rests, was his attempt to explain the thinking of Aristotle to the Muslim world. That’s right. His one truly great contribution was a commentary on the writings of the quintessential Western Civilization “unbeliever”. But make no mistake: his analysis and commentary on one of Western Civilization’s greatest minds is still worthwhile. Nothing really creative, though. Not a “contribution” that, given Aristotle’s surviving writings, the world could not have come to on its own, but still, a nice enough little thing for an academic to publish.

And what else has Islam “contributed” to the world? In emulation–direct discipleship–of Islam’s self-proclaimed “perfect man”, and in faithful adherence to his teachings, Islam has contributed mass murder, slavery, treachery, rape, pillage, pedophilia, and more, consistently, continually, without end from Mohammed’s first order to his followers to commit mass murder to this day.

Hawaii’s state legislators are idiots.

BTW, with a little homework of your own, you can debunk all of Islam’s “great contributions”–and if you do it yourself, you’ll OWN the knowledge that Islam’s “contributions” to the world are a sham, a big zero with the rim kicked off.

Trackposted to The Pink Flamingo, Rosemary’s Thoughts, Leaning Straight Up, Allie is Wired, The World According to Carl, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.