This morn, a poster did this victory chant:
".....you got your ass kicked in New York City, in Virginia, and on 6Nov12. With this kind of nonsense, may well get it kicked again Nov14, as well as Nov16."
Hard for me to recognize how many don't realize that they are witnessing...and assisting....in the death of this great society.
For my lights, Western Civilization began to die when the French Revolution made its aim replacing religion with reason, mindless of the fact that reason, or science, have no moral basis. As such, the French Revolution became the template for every bloody totalitarian dictatorship in the modern world.
1. But one of my fav thinkers, Camille Paglia, has an insightful take on the matter...." But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.
2. .... pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military servicehardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster,"...
a. .... people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too.
[May I interject that that is the exact distinction between the American Revolution, and the French!
America's Founders believed no such thing, and that is the reason we have checks and balances.]
4. Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten.
"Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says,... does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters.".... Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.
a. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperationas the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.
5. "This PC gender politics thingthe way gender is being taught in the universitiesin a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" ...
6. A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male tradesthe ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).
a. " Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," ......
7. ... iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.
a. there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."
8. .... these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue..... and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.
9. ... "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks.
10. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts.
The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."
The Weekend Interview With Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues - WSJ.com
If only men could, once again, be men.....not some ObamaCare incarnation like 'pajama boy.'
Ahh the Queen of Gish Gallop is back!!
The Gish Gallop, named after creationist Duane Gish, is the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education. Sam Harris describes the technique as "starting 10 fires in 10 minutes."
Gish Gallop - RationalWiki