As a general rule anything John Hawkins writes is worth checking out so when he mentioned that he has a new substack focusing on the culture wars called Cultursidal and asked if I’d mention it I immediately checked it out.
As you might guess there are interesting pieces but what caught my eye the most is this from the “about” page:
Andrew Breitbart was absolutely right when he said that “politics is downstream from culture.” However, Breitbart didn’t go nearly far enough. In one sense or another, almost everything that matters is downstream from culture. That’s because a non-functional culture produces non-functional people. The sort of people who create disastrous, broken lives for themselves and then demand that the rest of the world change to accommodate their bad decisions. Go look at #BlackLivesMatter, ANTIFA, Incels, transsexuals, drag queens, furries, welfare addicts, modern feminists, Nazis, and any number of other groups and you’ll see people who are losers that want to rewrite the rules of the game to make themselves winners. It would be easy to blame society for their problems, but that’s not quite accurate. They largely created their own problems and society is at fault to the extent that it cruelly caters to their delusions instead of pointing them in the right direction.
As both a cultural warrior who has been told more times than he can count by people supposedly on my side who make their living off of public office & power that my concerns over the last three decades that fighting said wars were overstated and as a practicing Catholic who actually believes in the faith and worried about the salvation of individuals this is one of the best summaries of what is going on.
Why bother to achieve in reality when you can redefine achievement? Why bother struggling against sin when you can redefine sin? It’s literally the oldest trick in the book: you will be like gods and the Devil has been taking people with it for decades?
This alone tells me that John gets it and it’s the reason why I’m happy to interrupt this blog long enough to tell you to head on over and check out Culturcidal today and on a regular basis.
But it would seem to me that trashing your customer base in the NYT is a bad idea:
Absent the tape, we don’t know if the “repugnant people” were people who yelled at Hafer on Twitter over his decision, or if they are people who supported Rittenhouse, or if it refers to the “racist, Proud Boy-ish people.” But it does seem as though the Rittenhouse video was much more a function of being scared of the left’s disapproval hurting business (all those Antifa guys love Black Rifle Coffee, ya know) than any other motivation.
Of course while it’s a bad idea it’s not a stupid as trashing St. Michael:
St. Michael the Archangel doesn’t belong on a coffee bag in the first place, but to connect Catholic iconography to racism is beyond the pale. This is Black Rifle Coffee today. pic.twitter.com/AJ9PuxSt4G
Like any business Black Rifle Coffee have the right to market however they wish, but my thought has always been if a company insists they don’t want your business I’m all for obliging them.
Of course as I’m not a coffee guy they don’t have to worry about losing what they never had.
Saw this at Don Surber’s site this morning on the assignation of the president of Haiti:
Why do I get the feeling the Clintons and their fake foundation are entangled in this mess?
Maybe it wasn’t an assassination.
Maybe it was Arkancide.
My best friend at work is a 70 year old Hattian man who is a naturalized citizen. When I asked him about the assassination last week he offered a similar opinion on what happened over there.
My first employer out of college was Raytheon and I worked there with secret clearance for three years during the climax of the cold war (until I opened my comic book store). now I’m thinking that I might want to take that off my resume after this:
The company will then go the way of every company that hires for reasons other than competence. And they deserve it.
As this is a defense contractor as long as the left has power their bottom line is not endangered but I’ll bet a lot of 80 year old Russian spies are wishing they had managed to pull this off 30 years earlier.
My favorite show when I was seven years old was the Richard Greene series The Adventures of Robin Hood which was televised on WMUR about 30 minutes before I had to wake up for school. While they had it on the air I never was late getting up.
I was reminded of the show or rather a particular line I saw this story out of Boston:
Judge William Young has just announced in court that he is withdrawing the Opinion he issued dismissing the case brought by a Boston parents group over the so-called Boston “Zip Code Quota Plan.” For background see our posts:
The key bit:
“This was my opinion, my signature’s on it, I was misled”
“The opinion is wrong, it’s wrong because the facts on which it was based … an opinion I issued under my signature is factually incorrect”
“I’m inclined to withdraw the opinion, I’ve never done that [before in 35 years]”
“I work very hard on my opinions, and this one’s no good.”
The clerk will enter the note: “The opinion entered in this case is withdrawn on the ground the court is satisfied it is factually inaccurate in certain material effects.”
Any judge appointed in Massachusetts over the last 35 years is likely a liberal but a person of that age might not like the idea of their personal honor being tarnished. In the old days even a villains didn’t want to be seen as breaking their word in public.
Give it a few years more and I’m sure the state with only those brought up woke to choose from will not have to worry about this problem again.
One of the things I constantly argue is that things will not change until there are consequences for the left, like this:
Anthony and Barbara Scarpo noted how the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa even named its auditorium “Scarpo Family Theatre” after their huge pledge in 2017, saying they were helping it raise $9 million in total.
But now the parents want their money back — including tuition paid for their two daughters — in outrage at how the school turned its back on Catholicism to go “woke,” their 13-count, 45-page lawsuit claims.
The Scarpos claim they were betrayed by the school suddenly “embracing the new, politically correct, divisive and ‘woke’ culture where gender identity, human sexuality, and pregnancy termination among other ‘hot-button issues,’ took center stage,” the lawsuit said.
I couldn’t help but remember when my oldest had been offered a big scholarship at the Anna Maria College but when we visited it it turned out to be “Catholic” in name and fundraising only (although the president in response to my letter to the bishop claimed otherwise. Which thanks to this story turned into yesterday’s lead post twelve years later.
A lot of catholic institutions make a lot of money off of donors who don’t know that their Catholic identity is only visible when asking them for checks.
The Long Haul COVID-19 Syndrome (LHCS) is an often debilitating syndrome characterized by a multitude of symptoms such as prolonged malaise, headaches, generalized fatigue, sleep difficulties, smell disorder, decreased appetite, painful joints, dyspnea, chest pain and cognitive dysfunction. The incidence of symptoms after COVID-19 varies from as low as 10% to as high as 80%. LHCS is not only seen after the COVID-19 infection but it is being observed in some people that have received vaccines (likely due to monocyte activation by the spike protein from the vaccine). A puzzling feature of the LHCS syndrome is that it is not predicted by initial disease severity; post-COVID-19 frequently affects mild-to-moderate cases and younger adults that did not require respiratory support or intensive care.
The symptom set of LHCS in the majority of cases is very similar to the chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS)/myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, although in LHCS, symptoms tend to improve slowly in the majority of the cases. Furthermore, the similarity between the mast cell activation syndrome and LHCS has been observed, and many consider post-COVID-19 to be a variant of the mast cell activation syndrome. LHCS is highly heterogenous and likely results from a variety of pathogenetic mechanisms. Furthermore, it is likely that delayed treatment (with ivermectin) in the early symptomatic phase will result in a high viral load, which increases the risk and severity of LHCS.
This describes what happened to my wife (who is still out of work since March and things are starting to get tight around here) perfectly. But I note that some people who have gotten this because of the vaccines.
Now I don’t blame the developers, these vaccines were done in a hurry because of the emergency and this was a new disease but it’s one more thing to consider when deciding if you want to get the shot or not.
Having already had COVID I don’t see the need myself, I’ve already got the antibodies.
Martin: You risk your skin catching killers and the juries turn them loose so they can come back and shoot at you again. If you’re honest you’re poor your whole life and in the end you wind up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star.
High Noon 1952
One of the things that my study of history has told me is that radical horrible change usually takes two generations to really have the impact to destroy a society.
For example when you removed prayer from the public schools it wasn’t a big deal for the first few years because all the adults , all the teachers and all the students still knew and remembered the cultural lesions that they entailed.
One generation later things were a lot worse but not completely gone because even though the kids were not being taught the cultural lessons their teachers had been and the adults running the land had been brought up with them so there was still some restraint on disaster.
But by the 2nd generation neither the teachers nor the students they had were exposed to the cultural lessons that the older generation still remembered and that generation that had embraced the rejection of those lesions found themselves wondering why police were required in classrooms, why drug gangs were running rampant in cities and that teens and twenty somethings could not cope in a world so much easier than the one they grew up in.
Generations of kids not brought up with a moral code (and also not brought up with mothers in the house but instead raised by daycare strangers who aren’t teaching any moral code) have led to a society willing to walk away from basic freedoms and responsibilities because they were never given an understanding of them.
Thus we went from a generation that was told they were entitled to a trophy for showing up to being entitled to EVERYTHING.
For generations we treated police officers with respect in our schools, in our culture. Kids dreamed of being police officers to “Serve and Protect”. Now we have labeled police as villains, as evil racists as beyond the pale and we are giving that message to our kids in public schools.
Tell me how many of those kids that you are teaching this to now will decide that law enforcement is a good career option in ten years or in twenty?
Cities defunding police is a bad idea, the left and media targeting police to the point where they are retiring en masse is even worse but when you teach your kids that police officers are bad then it won’t matter how much you fund police, you won’t have people willing to do the job.
And it won’t just be the kids who aren’t taught this running away. Children of police officers who know the truth, who see their fathers and mothers doing an honorable job to protect their communities are watching what’s being done to their parents and will decide that despite pay and incentives it’s not the place for them.
If you think the cities are in bad shape just wait till we have two generation of this funneling though the system and cities desperate for any kind of police presence wave standards that are taken for granted today.
If this isn’t nipped in the bud now this is the future we are creating for our children and grand children, but not of course for those of the elites or the Build Large Mansions squad. They and the backers who are financing this will make sure they have enough for gated communities with well armed security so that they and theirs will not have to suffer the consequences of their actions.
Unexpectedly of course.
Stopping cities from Defunding the Police is important but it isn’t the primary battle, it’s a smoke screen a feint by the left and our enemies who fund them.
Stopping our culture form demonizing the police in the classroom and to our kids is the make or break fight we have to win as a society, because if we don’t we won’t have a society left to protect.
