Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

Louise Perry or My Very Catholic Mother (Born 1924)

Posted: August 21, 2022 by datechguy in culture, Uncategorized
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If she’s good enough to sleep with she’s good enough to marry.

Dominic James Ingemi (1921-1987)

I’ve been saying for many years that the Sexual Revolution is over and men won and the time has come when some young women are figuring it out too.

I’ve also been saying for years that the primary cause of this insanity has been the 60’s generation, unlike every generation before them never growing out of the idea that they were smarter than their parents and thus rejecting literally millennia of trial and error in how to raise kids and maintain a society.

Feminist Bari Weiss (born 1984) is a product of that generation and would have reflexively rejected the advice my very Catholic father (born 1921) and my even more Catholic mother (born 1924) would have given on how woman should carry themselves as being patriarchal tripe from a repressed society (ironically while at the same time referring to them as part of the “Greatest Generation” which is a device used to excuse all generations that follow from reaching their levels of success) however she was so impressed by 30 Year old Louise Perry arguments on the subject that she gave her space on her site to repeat them:

I’m not a religious conservative. I’m a feminist, and I’ve spent my entire professional life working on the issue of male violence against women—first in a rape crisis center, and later as a journalist and a media relations director for a legal campaign against sexual violence.

Ah reality, what lessons it teaches

It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism. It’s an ideology premised on the false belief that the physical and psychological differences between men and women are trivial, and that any restrictions placed on sexual behavior must therefore have been motivated by malice, stupidity or ignorance. 

In the piece Ms Perry goes on to give advice to young women, advice which sounds rather familiar to my nearly 60 year old ears. Here is a smattering of it:

  • Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.
  • Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.
  • Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard.
  • A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behavior. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.
  • The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women between the ages of 13 and 25. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: It’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.
  • Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.

Any of those things could have come right from the lips of either of my parents and she throws in a few more that Mom would have had mom nodding her head in agreement with a caveat or two.

  • Get drunk or high in private and with female friends, rather than in public or in mixed company. (mom would have suggested avoiding getting drunk or high period)
  • Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up. (They would agree but suggest holding off sex period)
  • Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children—not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust. (that’s basically my dad’s advice to me with the sexes reversed Mom would have said wait till you’re married, but should would tolerate, with overt disapproval waiting till a wedding date was set.)

This next paragraph produced a wide grin from me:

None of this advice is groundbreaking. It’s all informed by peer-reviewed research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is what pretty much most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.

The source of said grin is that all of this had already been known thanks to many centuries of experience and reality informed by trial and error, the best type of peer reviewed research there is which was handed to the 60’s generation on a silver platter and tossed away.

Nor did we have to go back to folks born in the 1920’s to hear said advice. Stacy McCain who has been writing and blogging on this subject for a decade is only a couple of years older than me but if Ms. Weiss had read these words from Stacy written in 2015

Pardon the deliberately provocative clickbait headline, but the campus “rape culture” discourse keeps avoiding this issue. There is an obvious connection between (a) claims that sexual assault is an “epidemic” among college and university students; (b) the phenomenon of binge drinking among students, most of whom are below the legal drinking age; and (c) the adamant insistence of feminists that it is “slut-shaming” and “victim blaming” to suggest how (a) and (b) are most likely related.

She would have immediately rejected him as a misogynist and cheered as Twitter banned him for daring to quote feminists in their own words online, yet when the 30 year old Ms. Perry suggests that a woman should not get drunk or high in public or in mixed company it’s a revelation worthy of her site. That of course is the cynic in me for in the 18th Century Ben Franklin wrote

Experience keeps a dear School, but Fools will learn in no other, 

Poor Richard’s Almanack 1743

and the belated relearning of these lessons proves his timeless wisdom once again. There is however more to life than cynicism. The Catholic Church teaches about redemption to understand the the joy and value in it

In the end the fact that Ms. Perry has managed to relearn the lessons her parents and grandparents rejected from history is a commendable thing and the fact that Ms. Weiss is able to see the wisdom of these lessons from her and pass them along to others who need them is even better, something to be celebrated because it’s by relearning these lessons and applying them that we can avoid the costs that three generations have and are paying for the insanity that is modern feminism.

Or as Jesus Christ himself said when the disciples told him that others outside their company where driving out demons in his name:

For whoever is not against us is for us.

Mark 9:40

Review: Season 2 of Capitani

Posted: July 17, 2022 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment
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By John Ruberry

Earlier this month the second season of the Luxembourgish crime drama Capitani began streaming on Netflix. 

In the first season, set in 2019, the titular character, gruff and laconic police detective Luc Capitani (Luc Schiltz) arrives in the fictional small northern Luxembourg of town of Manscheid to investigate the murder of an identical twin teen girl. Similar to British crime series Broadchurch, Luc Capitani is confronted by clannish locals who are harboring secrets. Capitani meets an old flame in Manscheid, Carla Pereira (Brigitte Urhausen)–her presence might have been the real reason for his visit to the village.

The following paragraphs contain a Season One spoiler. 

At the end of Episode 12, after solving the case of the murdered twin, Capitani is arrested for the murder of a drug lord that happened years earlier, a crime in which Pereira is entangled in. At the start of Season Two, after serving eighteen months in prison, he is released due to lack of evidence.

Capitani is now working as a private detective in Luxembourg City. A sex worker, Bianca Petrova (Lydia Indjova), calls him to look into the disappearance of another prostitute. Capitani quicky finds her body in a park. It turns out the sex worker hired Capitani at the request of the owner of what is called here a cabaret, but in reality it is a strip club and a brothel. That proprietor is Valentina Draga (Edita Malovcic). After the murder of another prostitute, the owner of a competing cabaret, Gibbes Koenig (André Jung), reaches out to Draga. Each of them has an ambitious son, respectively Dominik Draga (Adrien Papritz) and Arthur Koenig (Tommy Schlesser), who are seeking to expand their operations.

And business is poor. This is the first television series that I have viewed that has incorporated the COVID-19 pandemic into its plot. The lockdowns have been devastating to the cabarets and those two sons look to narcotics to make up the difference. Drugs in Luxembourg City are sold openly on the streets by Nigerian immigrants–much in the manner that I’ve witnessed on the West Side of Chicago–while under surveillance of two cops, Elsa Ley (Sophie Mousel), who was Capitani’s unofficial partner in Manscheid, and Toni Scholtes (Philippe Thelen). One of those drug dealers, Lucky Onu (Edson Anibal), is in Luxembourg not to peddle narcotics, but to find his sister, Grace (Jennifer Heylen), another sex worker.

Similar to Clint Eastwood’s character in A Fistful Of Dollars, a work that was based on the Akiro Kurosawa film Yojimbo, Capitani works both sides of the brothel competition. And he hasn’t completely broken ties with the Luxembourg Police. There’s a third angle being played, Capitani is regularly speaking with a senior police official, Pascale Cojocaru (Larisa Faber).

If you enjoy Nordic noir movies and television shows–as I do–you’ll like Capitani. There is no Netflix wokism here, the performances are captivating, and the cinematography succeeds by capturing views of beauty and squalor in Luxembourg City. And the plot keeps you guessing enough to make things interesting. Both seasons have twelve episodes, with each entry lasting around 30 minutes.

Both seasons of Capitani are currently streaming on Netflix. It is rated TV-MA for nudity, violence, drug use, obscene language, and sex. You can watch in the original Luxembourgish with subtitles, although there is much English dialogue here, or in dubbed English.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

The Same Old Song and Dance from the 80’s

Posted: July 8, 2022 by datechguy in culture, News/opinion
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It’s the same old story, same old song and dance, my friend

Aerosmith 1974
Bloom County by Berke Breathed Feb 15th 1987 via GoComics.com

I’m old enough to remember the AIDS Epidemic’s beginning.

When it started out there was a full court press by the left and many elites to make sure this disease was not identified with Gay sex.

This was despite the fact that the primary spread of this disease was through gay and bisexual men.

Now the easiest way to stop this disease was of course for

  1. Gay Men not to have gay sex with strangers and multiple partners
  2. Women to not have sex with bisexual men who had multiple partners.
  3. For people of either sex or any sexual orientation not to sell or purchase sex from people
  4. For people of either sex or any sexual orientation to practice monogamy

But of course for the future customers of Jeffrey Epstein’s in government and entertainment and academia this option white effective would not and could not be advanced as it was too close to the Commandments of God and the teaching of Christianity so instead a wise program of

  • Encouraging Gay men, the primary target of the disease to avoid dangerous sexual contacts
  • Promoting monogamy among adults and abstinence among youth to avoid crossover infections
  • Spending money on research to find a way to control or eradicate said disease

This would have saved lives but would not have served the cultural desires of the Hollywood, Academic and Washington elites so instead we had a program of

  • Attacking anyone who suggested that promiscuous gay sex was the primary spreader of the disease
  • Promoting the idea that this disease was a major threat to the general population when it was not
  • Encouraging the use of condoms as a solution to the problem
  • Spending money on research to find a way to control or eradicate said disease

It’s worth noting that it was during this time that the religious began to drift toward the GOP and started to became unwelcome in Democrat circles who began to embrace the Gay agenda bigtime.

Treatments were eventually discovered which meant that AIDS is no longer an automatic death sentence, It’s still a disease that spreads through sexual contact with someone infected that can screw you and your immune system up very badly for the rest of your life but your odds are surviving are pretty high.

Which brings us to the Monkey Pox scare and this from NBC

“Even as Covid-19 restrictions have loosened, for many gay men, an uninvited guest called monkey pox has threatened to spoil long-anticipated festivities.

“Of the 6,924 confirmed monkey pox cases in the global outbreak, the vast majority have occurred among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, or MSM, various health authorities report. Skin-to-skin contact during sex, experts assert, has likely been the primary driver of the virus’s global spread thus far.”

Via Don Surber who like myself is old enough to remember AIDS but was in the newspaper business at the time while I was just getting out of college, he writes:

Here we go again.

It is AIDS 2.0.

Shut the bathhouses down.

Do NOT shut the economy down.

Do NOT require everyone get a vaccine.

Do NOT frighten children by saying anyone can get it.

Now this is solid advice but if the AIDS epidemic was the start of the Democrat’s move toward the Gay agenda today the party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the LGBTQ+-etc etc etc crowd and the odds of this advice being taken by a party that has gone full groomer (it would have been unimaginable that the Democrat party would have embraced drag queen story time in 1987 or even 2007 for that matter) are slightly less than the Red Sox firing Alex Cora and replacing him with me as their interim manager for a few weeks

However we are also in an era where the gatekeepers of the press can be completely bypassed so the odds of Democrats selling shutting down the economy and pushing this as a big public health issue for all is likely pretty small too.

The wild card? If the idea of discouraging anonymous gay sex was not an option of choice in 1987 for the elites any such suggestion today will likely get you banned from social media, labeled a Nazi, a bigot and any other epithet they can come up with at best or the target of physical violence at worse.

As a general rule those who fail to learn the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them, we will find out shortly. I don’t have high hopes.

On the plus side if we don’t learn our lesson Berke Breathed will be able to rerun this Sunday Strip on Feb 11th 2023 and take a day off.

Shades of Steve Martin and a Startling Surprise in this story about the NYT & July 4th

Posted: July 7, 2022 by datechguy in culture
Tags: ,

Always look on the bright side of life

Eric Idle

You know the Hatred of America and the institutions that make it great has become such a standard part of the American left and it’s allies that when I saw this at Instapundit from Sarah Hoyt about the NYT “cancelling” the Declaration of Independence

THEY’RE STILL TRYING TO INSERT ‘HE HAS DENYIED ABORTION’ AND ‘COLLUDED WITH RUSSIA’ INTO THE LIST OF KING GEORGE ABUSES:  NY Times ‘forgot’ to print Declaration of Independence for the first time in 100 years.

I was not in the least surprised. That was until I actually clicked the link and read the NY Post story on the subject. The “excuse” given for this omission in this story was no shock:

New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha explained that Times employees simply forgot to put the Declaration of Independence into print this year. 

She said, “We have a longstanding tradition of printing the Declaration of Independence in the July 4th print edition. Due to a human error, it wasn’t printed this July 4th so was included in the July 5th edition.”

Shades of classic Steve Martin:

It was no “shock” at all, all of these mistakes by the left media only go in one direction, however as unsurprising as the story was in general the second line of the piece was a complete shock to me:

After disgruntled readers voiced concern, the paper printed it on July 5.

Now admit it, If somebody told you the NYT had enough readers who would be “disgruntled” by the omission of the Declaration of Independence in the 4th of July edition of the paper that they would decided to print it on the fifth rather than just leave it out would you have believed it?

I wouldn’t have.

Perhaps there is still hope for America.

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