Category: Social Conservatism

Deconstruct Heidi

I think you’ll agree, after watching this so-called “children’s film”, there must be something worthy of deconstruction if not prosecution as hate speech:

Heidi

We’re finally rid of these bad old days thanks to the great work of the Frankfurt School!

The SPLC and ADL must be alerted to the sewage gushing forth from the Internet into the personal computer media players of children around the world.

Posted by James Bowery on Sunday, August 2, 2009 at 11:03 AM in Social Conservatism
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Abortion: the hidden holocaust

by David Hamilton

More than 6 million babies have been aborted since the Abortion Act 1967 came into force in Britain and around 75 million in the USA! There are 500 abortions every day in England and Wales and the figures show 67% of are carried out before the 10th week, and 89% before the 12th week. There are about 190,000 abortions a year in England and Wales. The official practice is that an abortion can be performed up to 24 weeks and needs the consent of two family doctor’s. The woman can seek a second opinion or go private. It is usual in cases when the child is likely to be disabled or not expected to have a high quality of life.

The debate is between liberals and feminists on rights, but is never on the woman’s duty to our posterity: the needs of our ethnic group are ignored. The two sides argue where the rights lie, couching the argument in rational terms. But what about our natural instincts? What about our emotional bonding with our people and the consequent responsibility for one another and the continuity of our people?

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 04:29 PM in Social Conservatism
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Weathering the storm

By The Narrator

Today we find ourselves in the path of a raging storm that seems determined to bring the rafters down upon us. We must keep in mind, though, that we are not the first generation to face such perplexities.  Nor, we must hope, will we be the last.

The question before us now is how to best contend with this storm. Rash people climb up on the rooftop, shake a fist at the winds, and challenge the storm to a one-on-one battle to the finish. The finish usually means getting blown away, hit by lightning, or struck by a 150mph piece of airborne debris. Then there’s the panic-stricken, who ignored the gathering storm clouds till it‘s all too late, and are too frozen with fear to work out what to do.

The assured man, on the other hand, knows that storms come and go, and prepares to meet them and weather them as best he may.  He watches and stays alert, and when he sees the clouds gathering he batons down the hatches, secures the lose timbers, herds the small animals into the barn, gathers the family into one place, brings the tools into the house and keeps the candles close at hand.  He may not always avoid all tragedy and loss.  But he has the best chance, and the state of mind and spirit to begin again the next day.

This is the kind of man - someone naturally steady, stable, with good character and good instincts, someone who thinks clearly even in harm’s way - that we need in abundance now.  So this is a post about such men, and about the all too obvious, simple lessons in life - the basic truths - which help to make them, and which we are not getting right anymore.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Sunday, April 26, 2009 at 02:28 PM in Social Conservatism
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A religious image

by exPF

It seems that one essential feature influencing the fate of a culture is the canon of stories which it uses to entertain young children. I had previously thought of morality as being the result of dictated principles, when a commentator on this website suggested that morality is also determined largely by story-telling. I think that that is an astute observation - morality plays and stories with moral messages seem to be important.

It also strikes me to what extent children’s minds, say up to the age of 8, are basically marinated in non-stop storytelling. In our capacity as adults we might tend to view storytelling principally as a vehicle for different skills and concepts: the ability to identify numbers, colors, ability to read, or lessons about the animal kingdom. These are things that children typically absorb up to the age of 5. While we may view the stories as a vehicle, children seem to view them as an end in itself. I think children take great delight in storytelling.

Continued...

Posted by Guest Blogger on Friday, March 6, 2009 at 06:55 AM in Social Conservatism
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The suicides of Bridgend

The sky broods over the unexceptional if uninspiring town of Bridgend.

One of the strangest, saddest and most disturbing mysteries for many years is unfolding in the South Wales town of Bridgend.  The discovery at 7.45am yesterday of the body of Jenna Parry, 16, in woods near her home at Cefn Cribbwr, a small village north-west of the town, brings to seventeen the suicides of young people since the beginning of 2007.  All have been by hanging.

The Independent reports

Daniel John, 20, said: “It has been an absolute shock. She was so bubbly and carefree; I can’t imagine why she would take her own life. She loved butterflies and was very girly. She loved pop music and dance music. I last spoke to her yesterday and she seemed normal – perfectly fine. I can’t get my head around why she has done this.”

Lisa Jones, the mother of Jenna’s best friend Jessica, added: “She had everything to live for – this is just so awful. I can’t understand what is going on around here.”

Her thoughts were echoed by Michael Bennett, the 61-year-old security guard who found Jenna’s body. “It was so shocking to find this poor young girl hanging from this tree. I feel shaken to the core by this. Why are youngsters around here doing this? I can’t understand it at all. People of my generation can’t explain it all – what is going on around here?”

Attempts by the South Wales Police to uncover meaningful connections between the suicides have, it seems, come to nothing.  Speculation in the press of a pact or of some on-line Jim Jones artfully leading his trusting victims into the darkness have been firmly discouraged by police and the local Labour MP, Madeleine Moon.  After all, these are not solely angst-ridden teenagers.  The oldest of the seventeen was 26.

“Huge issues” is how the police characterise the driving factor in the majority of cases - a factor given impulsion, perhaps, by the example of others who were sometimes known to later suicides, sometimes not:-

“A number had access to social networking sites but there’s no suggestion that anybody used these sites as a means to take their lives,” said assistant chief constable Dave Morris, who is leading an investigation into the deaths. “I would like to put to bed any suggestion within the media that we are investigating suicide pacts or suicide internet links. They were all young people with big issues. There are a constellation of factors influencing these young people.” These included relationship break-ups, friendship issues and family problems, he said.

Philip Walters, the coroner for Bridgend and Glamorgan Valleys, said he was convinced there was “not one great conspiracy” linking the 17 deaths, although he said there was clear evidence that the first three suicides and two subsequent pairs were linked by the victims knowing each other. “Apart from the three groupings, there are no links that I can see,” he said. “Parts of the media have claimed there is an internet connection but there has been no evidence of that apart from internet tributes after the deaths.”

We are left, then, with a self-sustaining noumenon ... some perfectly deadly, gothic glamour that has come into being in the minds of Bridgend’s most vulnerable and suggestible young people, and easily traverses the spaces between them ... something that trips personality damage or plain depression onward into the will to self-destruction.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 07:37 PM in Social Conservatism
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The still beating heart of England

American traditionalist conservative Larry Auster had this to say a few days ago:

Like Melanie Phillips, Roger Scruton protests the application of Britain’s law prohibiting discrimination against homosexuals to the area of adoption, but, also like Phillips, he has nothing to say against the sexual orientation anti-discrimination law generally, he criticizes it only when it comes to adoption. Adoption is different, he says, because it involves a duty that one voluntarily takes upon oneself to provide for the care of a child; it is about serving another person’s needs, not about pleasing oneself. There is, he insists, no right to adopt a child, and therefore the very idea of having one’s “right” to adopt denied is false.
Ok, I suppose that’s a decent argument. But there are two problems with it. Scruton accepts the banning of discrimination against homosexuals in every area and activity of life except adoption. And, having accepted that totalitarian law for the whole of society, his plea for a single special exception to it stands on weak ground.

Scruton, of course, is one of Britain’s leading “conservatives.” He doesn’t even have Phillips’s excuse, which is that she is a self-described liberal.

Let’s face it, folks. The British, the great people from which our own country was born, are dead, they are finished, they are kaput. And that goes for their “conservatives” too. Before there is any possibility that they can become a decent and strong people again, they must first be melted down and destroyed as they now exist.

Continued...

Posted by Alex Zeka on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 03:51 PM in Social Conservatism
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Glamour and emptiness, organic culture and Nationalism

Stephen LaTulippe has a fine essay at Lewrockwell.com that repays a read.  It draws the battle lines between what he calls a Postmodern and an Organic society.  Here are a few passages:-

He begins with some reflections on the long-running HBO TV series, Sex in the City.

For those who haven’t seen it, Sex and the City tells the story of four thirty-something single women living in New York City. They live a life that, while all too common today, is perhaps unprecedented in human history (especially for women). They are completely deracinated and homogenized, having no discernable family, either nuclear or extended. They have no religious convictions. Their life consists mostly of wandering around Manhattan, eating in chic restaurants, maxing-out their credit cards in fashionable boutiques, and engaging in a bewildering variety of casual sexual relationships.

... In essence, their lives are more akin to that of animals than to anything that could be called genuinely human. They live lives dominated by impulses and sensations rather than by the intellect or the spirit, lives of indulgence rather than of purpose. They reside in the “eternal present,” without regard for the future and without reverence for the past. Even more disturbingly, their lifestyle has a spooky passivity to it, a sense of slavery to their vices. If someone takes them to a swanky Thai restaurant, they’ll eat. If someone hands them a martini, they’ll drink. If a handsome guy appears, they’ll copulate.

That is, in a nutshell, the sum total of their existence. Their post-modernism really isn’t a culture, but an anti-culture. It’s what people do in the absence of authentic culture…it is a downward spiral into the abyss. These women are, admittedly, an extreme example. But the beauty of art lies in its ability to harness archetypes for the purpose of making social and political commentary.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Saturday, November 4, 2006 at 05:19 AM in Social Conservatism
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Solzhenitsyn on saving the nation

I have found myself included in a New Right mailing list which contains much interesting material ... such as this Moscow News interview of the great Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn.

One has the impression that the general population in Russia has caught the West’s disease of advanced liberalism (“total liberalism” the Moscow Times calls it) with such swiftness that large parts of the country’s elite have been left behind ... and are morally and politically resisting.  I hope that is true.

All the interview is worth reading.  But the sections which particularly caught my attention are these:-

MN:  It would be natural to assume that, at the very least, you would include a demographic project among these priorities - something that you have called “saving the nation.” What short-, medium- and long-term actions need to be taken as Russia, the Russian nation in particular, is literally dying out?

AS: Indeed, “saving the nation” - numerically, physically, and morally - is the utmost task for the state. (Consider the 25 million compatriots who were cut off from Russia as a result of the crazy conspiracy in the Belovezhskaya Forest: Our law-makers were in a state of chaos, hysterically and irresponsibly going from one extreme to another and contradicting themselves.) All measures to raise living standards - housing, diet, healthcare, education, morality, etc. - are in effect designed to save the nation. This is an overriding priority.

MN: Clearly, our society is in a moral crisis that manifests itself either in the absence of any moral principles or in the existence of opposing moral principles at the same time. Can Russia escape this collision? What is the state supposed to do in this situation - impose a particular set of moral values? What values?

AS: In their actions, state authorities must stay within the bounds of morality even more responsibly than ordinary citizens. They should set an example, but not forcibly impose any rules. I believe that the only way out is through the conscious, voluntary self-constraint and self-denial of people, especially those shaping public opinion.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, May 12, 2006 at 02:37 AM in Social Conservatism
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Liberalism and the slippery slope

I intended to write a post on the ramifications of sexual liberation (or the sexual “revolution”) in terms of its impact on our mores in the future. This is a subject which is broached quite often although the arguments in favour of greater liberation are never considered in the fullest sense of their real long term consequences.

The legalisation (or intended legalisation in the case of many American states) of Gay “marriage” was a massive step in the relentless march of liberal sexual morality (and this has occurred despite popular resistance to it - as with all the other cherished ideals of the liberal project). The question however is, how much further is this going to go? Have we gone far enough? Have we now permitted absolutely everything under the sun or are there still limits which gnaw away at the concept of the “sovereign” individual (and those limits therefore deserve to be destroyed because the individual is “sovereign”)?

Continued...

Posted by Phil Peterson on Saturday, March 18, 2006 at 09:06 AM in Liberalism & the Left,  Libertarianism,  Marxism & Culture War,  Social Conservatism,  Social liberalism
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The dissolute and the degraded

Speaking after the verdict Miss Baxter’s father Stephen said: “Katie was a lovely, happy girl with her whole life ahead of her.

“Zoe was not homeless. She had a home to go to but chose to associate with other people who led the homeless lifestyle.”

These are the closing paragraphs of a BBC News article reporting the sentencing of the killers of three Nottingham women.  It is not a pretty story, for sure.  But it is one anybody who has had dealings, however brief or tenuous, with the homeless - or rough sleepers - and with addicts can credit all too easily.  For these emiserated souls have crossed the moral Rubicon.  They need not be killers to have done so.  They need not be violent at all, though they will almost certainly know violence.

They cannot, however, be virtuous.  At least, they cannot afford the virtue of ordinary men.  They are “survivors”, and that is all they are.  What Zoe Pennick’s father called “the homeless lifestyle” is an absolute.  The pursuit of the next deal or the next drink rules over everything, is everything.  It so distorts the moral compass that the preservation of human love and friendship, where it obtains, is a miraculous thing.

Continued...

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, February 24, 2006 at 07:31 PM in Social Conservatism
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Another New Orleans comparison

An Australian compares what happened in New Orleans with what happened in our last big flood, which happened right here in my home town of Brisbane in 1974.  And everything he says is true.  The water was over the top of the roofs of great tracts of houses here.  I guess I don’t have to tell you how differently the two situations worked out.

Posted by jonjayray on Thursday, September 29, 2005 at 08:30 AM in Social Conservatism
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The lack of births in affluent societies

It is common nowadays for women to decide against having children. This decision can change later in life but is also sometimes consistently adhered to and put into practice.  Is that good or bad?  It would in general seem mostly to be good—as long as it is a well-informed decision.  It is good in the sense that children deserve better than having a mother that does not want them.

The caveat about the decision being “well-informed”, however, is very important.  Many women who have been long disinclined to be mothers but who do nonetheless for whatever reason become mothers, change their attitudes radically after the birth and become very pro-parenthood.  What happened was that all that they previously knew about babies was dirty diapers, crying, social disruption and an all-round nuisance.  Nobody had effectively communicated to them the great happiness that children also bring.  In conversation, parents tend to stress the negatives of parenthood (it is a form of self-deprecation or politeness) and assume that you know the positives.  But many people nowadays seem NOT to know the positives.

If, therefore, anybody reading this is against children on the grounds of the nuisance that they constitute, you might be wise to talk to some happy mothers and fathers and ask them what it is that they like about having children.  You might hear things that you did not previously realize.

We must at the present time, however, expect that many well-informed women will still not want to have children.  Up until quite recently, parenthood was virtually compulsory for all.  Now that we have both the contraceptive pill and permissiveness, this is no longer so.  In the past, many non-motherly women had children.  They had no real choice about it.  But their daughters do not have to.  So their daughters generally won’t.  So the non-motherly genes will steadily cease to be transmitted and women of that type will die out.  The children of the future will be much more likely to have mothers that want them.  Isn’t that wonderful?

This sifting out process is, of course, causing a temporary downturn in the overall birthrate but the bigger and bigger proportion of female births being of motherly types means that the birthrate will lift again as these females themselves grow up and start to have their own babies.

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, June 28, 2005 at 05:21 AM in Social Conservatism
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Another triumph for choice

Liberal distopians must be delighted with the latest successes to have emerged from their glorious campaign against feminity, marriage, family, self-restraint, self-reliance et al.

Three sisters have each had children while still at school, the youngest at the age of 12.

Jemma, Jade and Natasha Williams, who receive benefits totalling more than £31,000 a year, are raising their babies alone after they became pregnant within three months of each other.

The sisters, aged 12, 14 and 16 when they gave birth, live in Derby with their twice-divorced mother, who holds the education system responsible for their plight ...

Jemma said: “I didn’t tell anyone because I was too scared and didn’t know what to do.  I only told my boyfriend, who was 14 at the time, but I didn’t want to have an abortion.

“He was my first love.  He was great to start with, but he’s got a new girlfriend now” ...

Jade said she had been determined not to do the same, after seeing all the dirty nappies and her sister enduring sleepless nights. But she became pregnant after “a one-night stand”.

She said: “It was just one of those things really. I wasn’t using contraception and I suppose I just thought it wouldn’t happen to me” ...

Natasha said her pregnancy, while unplanned, had pleased her.  “I don’t really want to be anything but a full-time mum,” she said.

The father, 38, came to see the child “from time to time”, but “he’s Asian and still lives with his parents, so they don’t know about me or Amani”.

How, then, do we get out of this mess?

Posted by Guessedworker on Monday, May 23, 2005 at 02:20 AM in Social Conservatism
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Teenage ‘daisy chain’ sex alert

The degradation of sexual mores in Britain in just four decades has been nothing short of astounding. More confirmation in this Times article. The sexual revolution and its consequences.

Continued...

Posted by Phil Peterson on Saturday, April 30, 2005 at 03:59 AM in Social Conservatism
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Foreseeing unforeseen consequences of change

The essay below is excerpted from a longer essay on the issue of homosexual marriage.  It was written by economist “Jane Galt” (Megan McArdle).  See here for the original

Social conservatives of a more moderate stripe are essentially saying that marriage is an ancient institution, which has been carefully selected for throughout human history. It is a bedrock of our society; if it is destroyed, we will all be much worse off. (See what happened to the inner cities between 1960 and 1990 if you do not believe this.) For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

A very common response to this is essentially to mock this as ridiculous. “Why on earth would it make any difference to me whether gay people are getting married? Why would that change my behavior as a heterosexual”

To which social conservatives reply that institutions have a number of complex ways in which they fulfill their roles, and one of the very important ways in which the institution of marriage perpetuates itself is by creating a romantic vision of oneself in marriage that is intrinsically tied into expressing one’s masculinity or femininity in relation to a person of the opposite sex; stepping into an explicitly gendered role. This may not be true of every single marriage, and indeed undoubtedly it is untrue in some cases. But it is true of the culture-wide institution. By changing the explicitly gendered nature of marriage we might be accidentally cutting away something that turns out to be a crucial underpinning.

To which, again, the other side replies “That’s ridiculous! I would never change my willingness to get married based on whether or not gay people were getting married!”

Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. “That’s ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!” This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can’t justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he’s only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity. Similarly, you—highly educated, firmly socialised, upper middle class you—may not be the marginal marriage candidate; it may be some high school dropout in Tuscaloosa. That doesn’t mean that the institution of marriage won’t be weakened in America just the same…

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, April 4, 2005 at 02:12 AM in Social Conservatism
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The Restorationist Rebellion

(Excerpts from an article written by a 17-year-old.  Full article here)

Evil does not shock anyone anymore. The world does not gasp in dismay as Britney Spears discards another article of clothing. People do not recoil in shocked disbelief as an Eminem song pollutes the airwaves. Polite society does not cross to the other side of the street as Madonna walks by. The filth that spews daily from television barely provokes a shrug. Those clinging to morality may be saddened and sickened, but not shocked.

Degeneracy as a form of rebellion is trite today. We have not changed the definition of rebellion in 25 years. My generation tries hard to be edgy and rebellious, but they encounter difficulty when Mom and Dad are being rebellious in the exact same way using the exact same methods. Degenerate rock music is so integrated into the culture that grocery stores play it — can it still be described as revolutionary or counterculture? Men with long hair were a staple of the hippie generation. Today, this look is associated both with aspiring rebels on college campuses and portly middle-aged motorcyclists who grow a braid down their backs to disguise the paucity of hair on top. Look through your parent’s college yearbook at those hopeful little rebels. You will find their duplicates at a high school near you, still idealistically convinced that they can shock a jaded world. Glance through headlines from 1973; talk to a parent and discover that immorality, premarital sex, and partying are assimilated parts of the culture rather than venues of rebellion.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Sunday, April 3, 2005 at 04:18 PM in Social Conservatism
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A conservative case for censorship

I am posting these extracts as points for discussion.  They are not necessarily my views.  The full article is here

At this point it may be useful to depart briefly from the convenience of the word censorship, with all its undertones, and emphasise the positive influence one seeks by referring to ‘quality control’. The term is no euphemism but genuinely approaches the question of constraint from a constructive viewpoint.

Quality control is readily understood in industrial settings where production is involved. Commodities are produced which must meet a minimum standard of quality or be rejected. A good factory will set its own standards and enforce them; others may seek to flood the market with inferior products. If there is any danger to the purchaser, external standards of control may be applied to which the producer must conform or be subject to prosecution. The emphasis throughout is not on rejection of the sub-standard but on preservation and protection of the quality product. In order to achieve this, rigorous rejection of sub-standard products is necessary. Those who speak for censorship as a positive influence are, in effect, seeking quality control of books, films etc. in just this way. It is assumed that there are some prevailing community standards worth preserving. It is assumed that judgements about acceptability are possible even though difficult. Moreover, the responsibility for such discriminations is best left where possible with the producers themselves, be they authors, publishers or film producers.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Tuesday, March 1, 2005 at 08:52 AM in Social Conservatism
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Men are the losers of the sexual revolution

Columnist Jeffrey Hart recently argued that women were the losers of the sexual revolution. He has a point. By making themselves available outside of marriage, women have undermined the institution of marriage. The problem with Hart’s analysis is that he assumes that men want sex and women want marriage. But what if men want marriage, too? Aren’t they also losers of the sexual revolution?

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Monday, February 21, 2005 at 06:43 PM in Social Conservatism
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Divorce:  Is the modern view wrong?

By Nathan Tabor
       
The debate over gay marriage and the entire homosexual agenda was a point of great contention in the 2004 election cycle, as voters in 13 states passed local marriage-protection amendments.  Just this past month, the U.S. Senate reintroduced the Marriage Protection Amendment, which would use the Constitution to define and protect traditional marriage as being the union of one man and one woman.

Of course the radical gay rights activists are livid about this, but they need to face the facts.  As decadent as modern America has become, the average citizen still doesn’t embrace the idea of unelected judicial tyrants tampering with the sanctity of marriage by sanctioning same-sex nuptials.

Continued...

Posted by jonjayray on Wednesday, February 9, 2005 at 10:16 PM in Social Conservatism
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