New book!

I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.

 

The Basic Problem With Libertarianism

The demons, too, maximize their own hedonic profit – as they themselves construe it. Unfortunately for them, they are wrong in their construction of things. They are wrong about where the true hedonic profit truly lies. So, the profit they wrongly seek is of the sort that is earned as one Falls: falling feels like flying, for a little while.

We need not be like the demons. This is one of the things that makes temporal creatures like us superior to the aeviternal angels, some many of whom have Fallen incorrigibly: we can learn, and change our minds. For a little while.

Liberty can work toward the common good only insofar as it be first constrained by a vision of the good *which is in absolute terms itself correct about what is absolutely good,* toward which the idiosyncratic will finds itself inclined, prior to hedonic effects of this or that particular act. Liberty works, i.e., only when free agents think always in terms of a good prior to themselves, subvenient to their being, and therefore utterly suasive, whatsoever the agonies they suffer in obedience thereto.

Liberty unmoored from absolute morality is just chaos. Is, i.e., just evil.

Hi You Pathetic Dickless FBI Weenies

Now that we know that the FBI has been targeting traditionalist Catholics such as we *in our own churches* – and, no doubt, the devout in the temples also of our Evangelical and Orthodox brethren – we can be *absolutely sure* that they have been tracking all of us here.

We all of us here are known to the FBI. They have all our contact info, and all our email traffic. Those utter fools consider us enemies.

So pathetically sad. You infamous impotent weenies of the FBI. How can you live with yourselves?

Probably you compensate for your profound weakness with sadism of some sort. How forsooth could you bear up from one day to the next, otherwise?

So absurd; so sad, your lives, so wicked and so sordid.

May God bless and keep you, and may he make his coruscant light to shine upon you. It can’t give you peace, unless you repent.

Repent, I beg you. Don’t go to Hell.

What Will Happen When There Is Only One Bank?

The campaign of intentional destruction of the West now in the first stages of its culmination in the banking system is quite straightforward:

Blackface Bad, Dragface Good

The  President of [West] Texas A&M has just manfully stepped up to declare in public that drag shows “degrade women and are ‘derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny.’” This has prompted the predictable storm of manufactured gayfake outrage from the Commies, which he must have known would be sure to follow his remarks.

Now, while his courageous act is extraordinarily unusual these days in any figure of prominence, the most remarkable aspect of this turn of events is I think that *it had never before occurred to anyone that, in effect, drag shows treat women the way that the old blackface vaudeville productions treated blacks: with contempt.* This had not even occurred to me, and I wager that I am fairly unusual in my extreme sensitivity to and morose cynical enjoyment of the manifest and absurd contradictions espoused by the Left (whatever the character of its current skin suit).

For white men to make themselves up as black in public performances is bad, horrible, a sin that cannot be forgiven. But for men to make themselves up as women in public performances is totally cool.

So funny.

The Vipers Are Now in Charge

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?

Matthew 3:7

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? For, out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh.

Matthew 12:34

The Pharisees whom both John and his cousin Jesus called a brood of vipers were in first century Palestine the counterparts of what today we would call the Woke Enforcers of Political Correctness. Not of Justice, properly so called. Just of Political Correctness.

Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist

Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”

I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?

One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?

Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:

FFS Are You Kidding Me is the Gedanken Policy Test Writ Small

Every human is from birth imbued with the filter of the Gedanken Policy Test. After all, the Test is that of Reality; so, no real can but apply it, so as to discern which way it should go. Thus no organism subject to selection pressure – i.e., to the Test – can long do without an intimate acquaintance, and indeed agreement, with its dictates.

It is a harsh and implacable Test. It is the Test of conscience. Nobody gets out of it. Nobody is in the end ignorant of this fact; or as well, of his own failures in respect to the Test.

The failure of a policy under the Test is registered in the normal and healthy human by a reaction of disgust thereat. If a policy fails the Test, it almost always is viscerally disgusting to most people. At least, a bit. What right mind, after all, can abide a policy that manifestly fails the Test? Only a mind wholly corrupt, and lost to corruption.

Now, in the natural course of a life these days, the reaction of disgust to this or that perversion – this or that failure of the Test – is likely to have been somewhat attenuated, by considerations of political correctness (which is to say, of expedience), or of confusion, or of divided loyalties (i.e., “I don’t want to valorize x, but if I don’t, I shan’t so readily be able to excuse my own y”).

No matter. The Test is inexorable.

FFS Are You Kidding Me is then where the rubber of social life meets the road of the Test.

Attend to your feelings of disgust. They propose something real.

Iterated Gedanken Policy Tests on Social Power of Virtue End at Monarchy

The Gedanken Policy Test is simple: of 2 societies otherwise completely and exactly alike, and facing exactly the same historical circumstances, which is likely to do better, all things considered: the one that allows x, or the one that does not?

For “allows,” one may substitute with like effect “encourages,” or “promotes,” or “tolerates” or “does not punish.”

When x is singled out this way, the Test almost always generates a finding that in retrospect appears an obvious, and indeed incontrovertible result.

When we iterate the Test on some x, the findings tend toward some optimum of social order. When we iterate the Test on the degree to which any of the virtues are rewarded with social power, the findings tend in the limit to monarchy.

All Slopes Are Slippery

All slopes are slippery. Not so much for geckos and flies, to be sure. But for men, all slopes are more or less slippery, and dangerous.

I was a professional outdoorsman for 8 years. I had before, and have since, spent many months in all sorts of wilderness. And I can tell you from bitter personal experience that all slopes whatever, regardless of their grade, their height or their constituents, are in the limit mortally dangerous, inasmuch as they all offer to the clumsy, incautious, unskilled, foolish, and inattentive or imprudent – aye, and to the canny fit and experienced man who is the opposite of all these things – a chance to fall all the way to their bottoms. A single misstep can spell fatal disaster.

And every man, no matter how virtuous and skilled in the arts of the wilderness, is prone to a misstep now and then. Missed steps come along with walking, even on smooth and level urban pavements. When you traverse the uneven ground of the wilderness, you are bound to take a misstep at least once or twice in every hour, even when you are not yet bushed (to be bushed is to have grown tired from traversing the bush).

On a level plain, this is generally no big deal (although even on the flats, a fall under a heavy pack is no small thing).

On any sort of slope, however, missteps have a horrible and almost inevitable way of compounding. One misstep leads to another insufficiently planned and careful step, which generates a yet worse; and this continues, to worse and worse effects. Time slows as by such procedures it passes – as our powers of attention dilate and intensify under conditions of emergency – and it becomes possible to observe a compounding disaster carefully as it unfolds, and even to predict what the next of its component missteps will be, and the one after that; so that the fall as a whole takes on an inexorable internal logic like that of a Greek tragedy.