Replacing babies with pets stifles a person’s capacity to give and receive love, as it wrongly directs our greatest earthly affections toward ourselves. //
In a recent Fox News piece, sociologist Andrea Laurent-Simpson writes of the emergence of “multispecies families,” explaining that in “child-free families…dogs and cats paw in to fill a longing to nurture” and would-be grandparents “readily shift over to spoiling the granddog as their daughters and sons choose instead to pursue lucrative careers.” But this is neither good nor new.
The ancient historian Plutarch began his life of Pericles with an anecdote about Caesar, who, upon seeing “wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them” asked, “if the women in their country did not bear children.” Plutarch thought this a “princely” rebuke of “those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.”
Another ancient text tells us that there is nothing new under the sun. There is certainly nothing new about treating pets as substitutes for children, though it does seem to be more common of late, a trend that debases us and deforms our pets — literally in some cases. The overbreeding of dogs has, for instance, produced breeds that struggle to breathe or routinely need C-sections to give birth. If these people love dogs, then it is with a selfish and consumerist sort of love.
Of course, we ought to love our pets. But this love must be directed to them as the animals they are, rather than as mere objects for our amusement, or as substitutes for children. I love my dogs and try to take good care of them. They were bred to be loveable, and they are entertaining and affectionate. And they have a place in family life. With the right training and supervision, dogs and kids are great for each other. My daughter really, really loves our dogs. Notably, neither she nor the dogs are confused about who is the human. That sort of disordered affection requires an adult.
Pets may be valuable companions to the lonely and childless, but it is perverse to make this palliative measure into a preference, deliberately rejecting children in favor of a pampered pet. //
But what we need are other persons. We are, in important ways, incomplete and not fully human on our own. As Aristotle long ago noted, man is a social animal, and a man who can live without others must be either a beast or a god — people who don’t need people aren’t really people.
The Christian may add that in exceptional circumstances or vocations a few people may need to rely entirely on animal companionship and the person of God, but there is no good reason to deliberately turn to beasts in place of persons.
Following the ratifying of the US Constitution, John Adams rightly foretold, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” //
As one popular blogger has pointed out, the problem is that what the candidates are accusing each other of is all true. One candidate has bragged about assaulting women and has encouraged violence at campaign rallies. The other candidate has broken federal laws regarding national security and attacked women that claim to have been sexually assaulted by her husband. Many citizens feel that “they’re both gross, so the only sales pitch they really have is the one Prince Humperdink proposed in the “Princess Bride”: ‘Please consider me an alternative to suicide.’”
Many have asked themselves why? How have we gotten to this point, or what has caused us to descend so far? Alexander Pope penned a poem that easily answers these question.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
While we watch the presidential election unfold and decide what we personally will do, we ought to ask ourselves both as families and individuals if or how we have contributed to the degradation of our nation. Have we brought crudeness, violence, anger, dishonesty, foul language, and sexual deviancy into our homes through our music, books, and movies? What have our tv shows taught us and our children? What have we been taught in schools and what have we allowed our children to be taught? Have we allowed ourselves to indulge in crude or foul language? Have we been rude and unkind? Have we endorsed or accepted sexual deviancy as normal? Do we first endure and then pity and then embrace? //
Is there anything that can be done now? A wise man once said:
“No nation ever rises above its homes… We are no better as a people than are our firesides, our homes. The school, the church, and even the nation, I feel confident, stand helpless before weakened and degraded homes. The good home is the rock foundation, the cornerstone of civilization. It must be preserved. It must be strengthened.”
Oh, but what about sex? Well, there’s an app for that. Another byproduct of modernity is the widespread feminist ideal of “sexual liberation” which, in truth, actually made the sexual value of women decrease by leaps and bounds. If Girl A won’t give it up then Girl B probably will, and technology has made finding her easy.
It’s the perfect recipe for bachelorhood. A man can avoid marriage, keep his money, save himself the stress, have more time to accomplish goals, and avoid involving himself in the crushing weight of emotional slavery.
The solution to the problem is easier said than done. We’ll need a complete societal rework of how women and men are raised as well as portrayed. Men not only need to be taught how to treat a woman but how to be treated and what to expect in order to achieve a solid, stable relationship. Women should, likewise, be taught how to treat a man as well as what to expect.
We also need to leave behind the idea that men and women are the same. We’re not. Everything from our brain function to our bodies is built differently. More accurately, we’re built for different tasks. From the way we process information to the way we interact with the physical world, we are two different entities that belong to the same species.
We should be taught to be mutually beneficial to one another in our own capacities as men and women, not fall prey to these modern ideas. Women shouldn’t be taught that in order to be happy, they must be childless go-getting ball-busters and not waste their life and potential on marriage and children where they become subservient to men. It’s a narrative that sells well in youth but breaks down quickly as women get older, desire children, and wish to leave the workplace to do it.
Men want to feel welcome in their own relationships. Right now, they aren’t. They feel like passengers, or maybe even more accurately, chauffeurs. If women want men to marry them, then women will have to become marriage material and that means leaving behind the mainstream pop-philosophy and looking into the idea that maybe the feminists were wrong. So very, very wrong.
The turn language is taking in politics calls to mind that controlling language to control thought was a prime goal of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ //
Orwell’s admonition to think precisely is not an admonition to think narrowly. In fact, a casual perusal of the history of English writing will reveal irrefutably that those who have written most precisely have in fact thought—and read—very broadly. It makes sense. To use words precisely, one must have working knowledge of a number of them at one’s disposal.
This leads us to a somewhat ironic conclusion: The neglect of the language in favor of politics that has taken place in English over the past few decades has led to an impoverishment not only of the language but also of our politics. If we want our politics to improve, we need to reverse the process and start once again to cultivate the language. English needs to be about English.
Orwell said, “In Prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender them.” If those whose business in life is to cultivate the language will not take up the fight, then who will?
When have Democrats EVER given up something truly important to them in order to seal a compromise with their Republican political opponents? It simply never happens!
Compromise and fair dealings are possible between willing parties who share moral values and deal honestly with one another – at least in the non-political realm. For example, compromise on price in commercial transactions is legitimate. //
Whether through barter or monetary exchange, transactions are possible between all kinds of people regardless of “race, color, creed,” etc. The system works well for tangible commodities; compromise is the underlying concept that makes such transactions possible (at some point, both parties have to agree to the exchange). However, in matters of morality and truth, there can be no compromise.
The Left have hijacked the basic concept of compromise in the political realm by inserting the “free radical” (and malarkey) of “moral equivalence” into the equation. Moral equivalence is the Marxist claim that two radically different people/nations/political-ideological systems are taking the same actions and should be judged and treated the same way. The problem is that the concepts of good and evil are purposely not considered. Moral equivalence (also referred to as moral relativity) is a cancer on the body politic. //
Where do you compromise with the pro-abortion crowd in the Democrat Party? At the number of weeks at which a pregnancy can be legally terminated? On what the definition of “health of the mother” means in allowing an abortion? On whether parents have any say in their minor daughter’s decision? No moral equivalence exists in this situation, and those supporting abortion never discuss the moral dilemma involved in ending the life of a human being – mainly because they suppress what their consciences scream at them about the barbarism of abortion.
The bottom line is this: to suggest compromise with such people is to sanction abortion. There is no other way to put it. At what price do conservatives compromise their souls to agree with this evil and immoral practice? //
What’s the bipartisan compromise that enhances conservative principles and morals on any of those topics? We are not going to see anything from the Left other than a demand that we ignore our principles and concerns, and when we “compromise,” we inch American culture leftward just as the Left have planned and executed since the days of Woodrow Wilson and his “progressive amendments”.
Conservatives must remember that, at times, it is easy to believe that the item we think we desire (compromise and the elusive comity that we expect from the Left when we do compromise with them) is worth more than it actually is and underestimate the value of our own positions. //
“Compromise” has been a losing strategy for us for decades. Compromise with the Left has gotten us into the deep hole in which we find the nation today. It’s the reason we’ve been losing the culture war and why the Left have taken over most of our political and cultural institutions. We need to fight back and DEFEAT the Left politically at every turn – on every subject while defending our core moral principles – and forget about the fool’s gold that is “compromise.” It’s our only hope if we wish to preserve the Republic.
Yuval Levin's 'A Time to Build' offers a sobering and incisive explanation for why America no longer trusts its institutions, and what to do about it.
By John Thomas
In his 1975 book, Twilight of Authority, renowned sociologist Robert Nisbet warned of “twilight ages,” periods in western history marked by the “decline and erosion of institutions” and an “[i]ndividualism reveal[ed]…less as achievement and enterprise than as egoism and mere performance.” Nisbet also noted of these twilight ages that “[t]he sense of estrangement from community is strong.”
Former Bush administration staffer and founding editor of National Affairs Yuval Levin borrows Nisbet’s imagery in his new book A Time to Build: From Family to Community, to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream. According to Levin, although at the beginning of the millennium America seemed poised for a vibrant renewal, the past two decades have been more akin to one of Nisbet’s “twilight ages.” This is especially true regarding America’s many floundering institutions.
Douglas Adams, the noted author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” was a prolific writer whose creative work encompassed essays, books, screenplays and television. I can’t say I’m a devoted fan, but I think I read Hitchhiker some years ago. After his death in 2001, an unfinished novel called the “Salmon of Doubt” was published by his estate. I saw a quote from it recently in an essay attempting to explain our sometimes knee-jerk response to the remorseless march of progress.
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” Adams wrote. “1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Sound at all familiar? Do you see yourself anywhere in the taxonomy of that observation? The quote is quite meme-worthy, but like all memes, it’s a generalization that isn’t universally true if it’s true at all. You almost want to overlay a standard distribution curve on it to see what percentage of which cohort embraces the attitudes described. I invite you to click on the comments addressed at our video on electric airplane air racing to see examples of what I’m talking about and you can then surmise who hews to the Adams hierarchy. Dismissiveness ahead of rational analysis is a disease every bit as virulent as wide-eyed Pollyannaism.
By and large, members of my generation were raised in households with two parents, and we were taught how to deescalate and talk things out when problems arose. Today, that no longer seems to be the case.
We have a moral and social failing in our country that has caused an increase in mass shooters, predominantly young men. One has to pause to think about what’s different today from 30 or 40 years ago. It certainly isn’t guns, because it’s harder to get guns today than it was in the past, when you didn’t have to go through nationalized background checks. When I was growing up, you could purchase a firearm with no questions asked, yet we didn’t see so many mass shootings.
America’s young men are struggling with mental health issues or are broken and living in poverty with single mothers struggling to survive. Many of them are clearly crying out for help, and we owe it to them to listen. //
Another important facet of this dialogue is religion. I know we don’t often talk about religion these days, but it instills moral and ethical values that are key to a society’s success. It creates boundaries that inform us of what is good and what is bad.
Many of the greatest thinkers known to man have talked about the importance of morality and ethics for all civilized people, how they are key to a good life and setting boundaries against bad behavior. ///
God and the church are the answer that we are looking for to the ills of society
Plato turned on Homer to make several sophisticated points, and at the end of the “Republic,” he encouraged his readers to defend the poets and present reasons they should not be exiled from the ideal city. In contrast, the woke have rejected Homer, and the rest of the Western canon, because they hate any art that doesn’t reinforce their parochial ideology and cannot stand those who are different from them. In reality, their celebration of diversity is confined to a narrow spectrum.
Far from being genuinely multicultural, the woke are an insular subculture that replicates many of the worst traits of other such subcultures, including an insistence on didactic art. Yet, their overrepresentation in media and education (among other institutions) means that they wield real power, which they can use to mold children to transform society as a whole.
why are so many of us emotionally devastated by the death of a celebrity? Some people even mourn the deaths of celebrities or well-known figures more than they do a close relative or friend. Perhaps our society has become so infatuated with the characters created by these “influential” people that we genuinely feel they’re a part of our lives.
Therein lies the problem.
Many Americans have come to value unknown “influencers” more than their family members because they’ve become conditioned to hold celebrities and people of power to untenable heights as if they were demigods worthy of infinite praise.
As a result, who could dare mourn these loved ones equally to or with more significant pain than the loss of a beloved icon? To put it frankly, what have our loved ones done to impact culture or the world?
People will take off from work, seek counseling, and buy expensive souvenirs all to salute their idol, but what about the everyday idols and heroes within our families? Are they too not worthy of the same praise, if not greater? Should they not be elevated for their direct contribution to our lives and our familial experiences?
Family and community are established organically and over time. The networks that we create through the interpersonal and multifaceted webs should absolutely trump this celebrity worship. Reinforcing these strange relationships only degrades the unique and authentic intimacy tied to personal loss or tragedy.
There must be a deep sense of emptiness within man that we permit the deepest aspects of the human heart to be relegated to absolute strangers. //
Society’s current reversal of these suggests a breakdown of our familial structure, which points to an even more concerning breakdown of our society because the family structure builds strong character. The collapse in this moral character further weakens community structures, and which collectively weakens our once strong nation.
The future of America rests on this.
What conservatives oppose is top-down authority-powered pseudo-progress. The kind that liberals are trying to invent right now in Seattle, as they propose to “re-envision the way we handle public safety” to fix methods of policing that they consider “broken.”
What liberals don’t get is that conservatives don’t oppose progress, we just don’t believe that humans are all that good at making it happen. It seems obvious to us that humans advance by trial and error, in small increments. We try things. Most things we try don’t work, at least not as well as we’d hoped. But a few do. Those we keep. The others we toss over the side. People copy good ideas from each other, and they warn each other about the ideas that went bad. To our minds, this is how progress happens. It bubbles up from the bottom in what the Quality Assurance fraternity calls “continuous improvement.”
What we don’t get is why liberals fail to notice that virtually all of their Great Leaps Forward that are carefully planned by Smart People Wearing Suits, and then executed by government, either waste vast resources without accomplishing anything or waste vast resources while making things worse. //
Law enforcement has a long history in our culture. Our word sheriff is a contraction of the Old English ‘shire reeve’, a local official responsible for property management, supervising peasants, and so on.
Shire reeves were already common in England before the Norman Conquest. What this means for us is that today’s modern police force — the way it’s organized, the way it operates — is something that millions of humans have contributed to, thought about, puzzled over, worked on, and improved via trial and error for a thousand years. This is not a good place for liberals to go looking for improvements by starting over, by “re-envisioning” how we do things, from the top down.
The liberals on the Seattle City Council will not care. They won’t be deterred no matter what we tell them. Liberals never have any respect for the people who came before, who worked the problems, who tried and failed and tried again, to produce the methods we use every day and now take for granted. They always think they are so smart that they can start over and do it better.
The Founding Fathers were incredibly brilliant and visionary people. They were establishing a nation that was almost entirely agrarian. But they knew it would not always be thus.
The aforementioned Jefferson then wisely warned:
“When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.”
And so it became. //
For decades and decades, Democrats could continue to over-government cities into oblivion. Because their prisoners – oops, I mean citizens – were shackled to their metropolises by their jobs.
Well, Democrat victims – are prisoners no more.
Because our fabulous free market – has delivered us the Information Revolution…a successor to the Industrial Revolution. //
Democrats have forced us to work from home. And we have discovered – thanks to the free market Internet and ISPs – we actually can:
“(G)igabit-speed home broadband availability has skyrocketed from 6% to 86% in just over three years. //
Which is leading more and more of us to realize:
“We can work from home. Which means our homes – can be anywhere. We no longer have to remain in the confining confines of Democrat municipal awfulness.”
Oops. Torpedos are turning on their overreaching Democrat launchers – all across the land.
And the next great American migration – is now underway.
We’re About to See Biggest Exodus from Cities in Fifty Years
The Great Exodus Out of America’s Blue Cities
Exodus: The Migration From High Tax To Low Tax States
People Are Fleeing Democrat-Run States in DROVES for Republican-Run Ones
Which leads to pathetic pathetic-ness like this….
‘Come Back So We Can Tax You,’ New York City Begs Departed Residents //
Americans are realizing the free market Internet – allows them to escape America’s huge government Democrat fiefdoms.
Here’s hoping they achieve self-realization – and stop voting for the Democrats from whom they’re fleeing.
There’s a saying that hard times create strong men and that strong men create good times. The saying, however, continues with “good times create weak men, and those weak men create hard times.”
We’re currently experiencing this. //
If we did live in that world then those who create mountains out of molehills would die off by the thousands as their existence solely depended on strong men providing their protection for them.
Oddly enough, their comfort is provided by people whom they profess to hate.
I have no desire to see our civilization slip back into a place where you survive, not thrive. I would rather our first-world lifestyle continue with all the abundance and comfort it provides. The commerce we’ve created and the healthy environment that we raise our children in safety in is a good thing.
However it’s clear that looking at our mainstream culture today, we’ve fallen into a lazy kind of living where we take for granted things that many other countries would still consider miraculous. We’ve seen more human rights advancement than we could have imagined in previous attempts at civilization and yet, so many hate the country that provides it.
We’ve completely lost sight of reality.
I’m not sure how to get this value back with the exception of one thing. A return to the study and worship of God’s word. We joke that we daily fall further from God’s grace but the sad reality is that the drift away from him has been a gradual acceptance of stupidity, shallowness, and even straight-up evil. //
What I propose is a move forward toward God. That the real “progressive” is the one who aims toward bringing our society towards what works. Clearly God works and distancing ourselves from Him doesn’t. So let’s aim for progress.
In their push to tear down the hallmarks of Western Civilization, leftists are now gunning for Beethoven, classical music, and the very idea of 'etiquette.'
We need to kill this idea of cultural appropriation.
Not just a childish prank //
Had Urooj Rahman been a 31-year-old roofer from Wheeling, WV, and firebombed a police car, no one would have said boo about sending him to prison for the rest of his life because the perception among our elites is that a lawyer who is a political terrorist is acting nobly to raise our consciousness and deserves only a mild reprimand that will not damage their passage to a Bill Ayers-esque future. The working class guy? Well, screw him. His life didn’t have much value, and he was probably going to die of a drug overdose anyway. //
This divide, this assumption that some members of society are more worthy of second chances than others and the subtext that the law is really made for the little people, not for members of our ruling class was at the heart of the Tea Party movement. The idea that we and our children are less worthy of mercy or consideration or just catching an even break than someone who has the right degree and right politics it what propelled Trump into the White House. //
Rahman and Mattis are criminals. Their action fits the textbook definition of terrorism. Their act was premeditated. All that letting them off easy will accomplish is to encourage other similarly minded cretins to imitate them and draw upon this precedent as to why there should be few if any, consequences. Pour encouragement les autres, as they say, these two need to be hammered to deter this behavior and to begin to return us to a single standard of justice for all.
The bloody and terrible French Revolution featured attacks on religion, rewriting history, toppling statues, and abandoning tradition. Sound familiar?
Defeating cancel culture becomes easier once understand what it really is.
“Who even is this guy?” one Wisconsin protester asked, staring down at the toppled statue of Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist leader who fought and died for the Union in the Civil War.
It’s a baffling but instructive image. Why would antiracism protesters target Abraham Lincoln, let alone daring 19th-century abolitionists? In being toppled by supposedly antiracist protesters, Heg is accompanied at least by John Greenleaf Whittier and Matthias Baldwin, among the other memorials to worthy causes swept up in this fervor.
The reason is that our iconoclasts of 2020 do not care. This is about leveling each and every institution and rebuilding America from scratch, not making repairs. That’s why the counterproductive destruction of abolitionist monuments is actually useful to observers—it reflects the broader incoherence of the ideology driving this potent wave of iconoclasm.
Critics of academia have for years carefully dismantled the faulty logic underpinning abstract poststructuralist Ivory Tower doctrines like intersectionality and critical race theory. Plainly, they do not make sense, and regularly dissolve when applied to reality. But because they insist on a progressive-or-bigot binary, slowly these ideas intimidated and persuaded people of good faith into submission.
How, for instance, does intersectionality explain video The Federalist captured last week of a white woman in luxury athleisure harassing a working-class black female cop for being a racist? It does not. This is an ideology that classifies all dissent as bigotry and violence, whether the dissenter is black or female or working class.