The New Beginning

Thursday, August 30, 2012

Photos from Holy Virgin Cathedral

Here they are! I really missed out... it doesn't look like many of the Orthodox faithful were in attendance; there probably was enough room for me to be in one of the back corners.

(English translation of the article)

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Aaron Wissner interviews Robert Rapier after ASPO 2011

EB - R Squared Energy Blog.

Gangs of Aleppo by William S. Lind
The Arab Spring succumbs to post-state violence

Michael Vlahos, “Gangs of Aleppo” and the Rise of Alternative Societies

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Very nice!

The links to the various articles covering Metropolitan Hilarion's visit to the SF Bay Area have been updated with photos?

I hope there will be photos of today's liturgy!

Edit. Boo. There is a single photo accompanying the headline, but nothing at the linked pages (yet?). If you want to see the photos you need to go to the Russian version of the website.

Place and Community

James Matthew Wilson, The Problem of Place (Part I in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church)

Place may be a principle of community for settled, agrarian societies, less so for nomadic or hunter-gatherer groups. I do think that having a place does promote stability and enable a community to progress culturally through the division of labor.

Santa Cruz Local Foods is changing hands - Big Changes. It is an example of how we do not accord people with roots and commitment to the "community" a priority over outsiders. Rather, who is able to live in a community is dictated by their ability to acquire and keep property. Those who have more money have more "rights" than those who have less.

Is it correct to point the finger at the tech industry and the government for favoring it? It may generate wealth for the state, but at the cost of community, as people from other states (and even other countries) settle here for jobs for themselves and the public schools for their children, displacing those who were born in the area but not created to work in the industry. The engineers who move here may be just looking out for their own interest, like everyone else, but disliking them for being voluntarily participating in the matrix comes easy.

Perhaps it is natural that the industry grew near certain universities here and on the east coast - but if it were cheap to relocate, what is to prevent what happened here from happening to some small town in, say, Idaho, if the local government decided to subsidize the transfer of companies from here to that state or town?

Some may claim that the freedom to move is integral to American identity and culture. How about, then, the freedom to move and easily retain citizenship? Is that also essential? If so, then maybe there is no hope for American culture, as the inordinate desire to move on the part of many destroys community.

American Conservative: Revolt of the Rich
Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism
Payoff in the Pit of Plutocracy

VDare: Bad News For Immigration Patriots: Cardinal Timothy Dolan's "Close Working Relationship" With Romney

Elias Crim reviews The Hound of Distributism
(Houston Catholic Worker review from earlier this year)

Energy expert says world's oil production has peaked
Peak cheap oil is an incontrovertible fact

Related:
Medievalists.net: Hellenism and the Shaping of the Byzantine Empire - link to the paper
The Amish, Faith, and Community

Don't Worry, Drive on

Don't Worry, There's Plenty of Oil by Richard Heinberg (EB)

Dr. Wilson, Jacobite sympathizer?

The One Over the Water:

Yet a real monarchist must admit that the British executed and exiled their legitimate kings. The Stuarts had defects enough, Heaven knows, but they were royal defects. They had the best of British qualities—courage and intelligence such as nearly conquered the world. Something went badly wrong when the present line of petty German princelings was imported. The German princes were among the stupidest and most repulsive of all the European royals and unfitted to be symbols of a great Empire.

Almost fed up.

Time to start prepping an exit strategy.

Misc:
TAC Alum, now monk at Clear Creek: Rev. Mark Bachmann, O.S.B. (’82)

An excerpt from Liberty: The God that Failed

Over at the Distributist Review: The Logic of Christendom

Angelico Press

The part about traditional Christian polities seems all right. What about the contrast with the American experiment, given at the beginning?

Today, the principles of the “moderate” Enlightenment are what pass for a conservative inheritance to be opposed to the excesses of liberalism, an inheritance “We the People” were supposed to have “secured to ourselves and our posterity” following the American Revolution. These principles include:

• A hypothetical “social compact” or contract as the foundation of the State.

• The origin of political sovereignty in the “consent” of the governed (invariably presumed to have been given by those who happen to be wielding power).

• “Government by the people” according to the “sovereignty of the people,” meaning strict majority rule on all questions, including the most profound moral ones.

• Church-State separation and the non-“interference” of religion in politics.

• The confinement of religion, above all the revealed truths of Christianity, to the realm of “private” opinions and practices one is free to adopt (or to denounce) if it pleases him, but which are to have no controlling effect on law or public policy.

• The unlimited pursuit of gain, including the freedom to buy, sell and advertise anything whatsoever the majority deems permissible by law.

• Total liberty of thought and action, both private and public, within the limits of a merely external “public peace” essentially reduced to the protection of persons and property from invasion by others—in sum, a “free-market society.”

• The dissolubility of marriage, and thus the family, as a mere civil contract founded on a revocable consent.

1. Is the social compact theory applied by those who drafted and ratified the Constitution to each of the states? Or to the federal union of those states? It seems proper and valid to apply it to the latter.

2. Does sovereignty originate in the consent of the ruled? Or does it merely require their consent? (In so far as they desire to live with that group, then their consent is given. But what if they wish to separate themselves from the group?)

3. It is not clear to me if he is referring to democracy or "representative government." Government by the people at what level? And who is qualified to represent the people? What if those who are to be chosen must be qualified to serve in office on some other basis other than the fact of being chosen. How can a decision be made by a group of [relative] equals except by some sort of majority rule?

4. Under the Constitution, Church-State separation applies only at the Federal level.

5. This next point only follows if the previous point applies absolutely.

6. Is this a problem of the Constitution (or the Articles of Confederation) or a problem of American culture, coupled with a certain understanding of the right to property?

7. and 8. Are these formulated or advocated by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

One could make the argument that the American political order has been warped by liberalism. (Or by the few pursuing their private interest, while pretending to be supporters of liberalism, or using liberalism to preserve their power.) Mr. Ferrara equates American conservatism with the upholding of "moderate" Enlightenment principles, but is this really the case? Others, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, have claimed that we are all liberals, and to a point this is undoubtedly true for most of us - our thought processes have been formed within liberalism. But has the Anglo-American political tradition always been 100% liberal?

An opposing view: A Revolution Not Made But Prevented by Russell Kirk

Full trailer for Gwanghae: the Man Who Became the King

Some more videos from the press conference after the jump:

Monday, August 27, 2012

Pest control and cleaning today...

David Hackett Fischer: The French Vision for N America

Dr. David Hackett Fischer - Coffee and Conversation with Dr. Jamie McKown

American Revolution:the American Cause

Sunday, August 26, 2012

Austen: Not Your Generic Romance Novel?

Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Mitchell Kalpakgian

One Version of MGTOW

The latest idiocy of an academic. Innocence Project Biologist: Men Unnecessary (reaction at Dr. Helen's)

Some made the argument from pop sociobiology/evo psych that men are expendable; given the relative number of gametes produced by members of each sex, less men are needed for a population to maintain itself than women. "Sperm are cheap, eggs are expensive." I find this line of argument reductionistic. It's not that men are expendable, but if there is to be war, who can fight? The men are willing to lay down their lives not because they perceive themselves as being worth less, but because they love the group and their families more than they love their own lives. Even if single men are more willing to risk themselves, their inclination to love the group does not entail that they estimate their value to be less. One can risk a certain number of men dying in order to protect the group, so long as other men are able to step in and take care of their families when peace comes. Otherwise, the group may be be better off fleeing somewhere else.

Someone living in a misandric society with little prospect of finding a worthy wife and seeing the emptiness of consumerism may wish to go off the grid, refusing to support through taxes and the like a corrupt system, when that system benefits those who do not deserve it, while taking away from those who are industrious. Why not starve the system which is against your interests and treats you worse than a beast of burden, as an enemy so that it may continue to have power by relying upon the votes of the "oppressed"?

One without the worry of supporting a family has other freedoms, as a man can survive on comparatively little if he embraces a "Spartan" or ascetic lifestyle. Besides, as so many Uhmerican women are not worthy of marriage, being single may be the better option, even if it has its own spiritual difficulties. He may wish to associate with a local monastery, and not needing much in terms of wages, he can work as a farmhand or do some other form of honest work, one that is not ordered to the perpetuating of a system predicated upon infinite growth and consumerism. (I can't see how work on an organic or local farm can provide a living wage for a family.)

Why a monastery? Besides offering laymen the opportunity to participate in its liturgical life and receiving spiritual direction from one of the monks, a monastery may not be plagued by the problems besetting the Church at large which frustrate men. Indeed, the "institutional Church" can be said to be complicit in the destruction of society by endorsing [moderate] feminism in practice, if not in teaching, and statism, refusing to hold immigrants to assimilation (no confidence in Western culture), and participating in the industrial education scam.

While talking about "solidarity," bishops have forgotten about the order of charity. If Christians are called to build up community first amongst themselves then they may need to embrace some sort of voluntary poverty. If it is not possible to do so in a megapolis, then they should consider relocating, along with their extended family, to another place. After all, aren't most Catholics descended from immigrants? American Catholics should consider community as a good of the family and not just economic necessities.

If one is going to be single, it might even be better to be a monk, but that may not be an option as many monasteries do not accept candidates older than a certain age. Besides, a layman may still have some responsibilities of which he does not wish to rid himself yet.

Is the American Church an immigrant Church, one that has adapted to Yankee culture? Does it seek to overwhelm the Protestants with numbers and thereby make the country Catholic? This is a charge lodged against the Church by Protestants favoring immigration restriction. Do American bishops believe that Catholic immigrants can become the leaven of society? Is this the worst sort of "ecclesiastical nationalism"? There are some extremists who who cheer the decay of Protestant ecclesial communities in the United States, as if this is punishment that is deserved. Rarely do they do so because they think they are heralding the impending triumph of the RC Church.

The early Christians may have been more innocent but that didn't prevent them from perishing along with their cities. Why should Americans, who are cooperating, even if only materially, in the destruction of their own society, expect that they and the American [local] churches would be exempt from Divine Judgment?

1. The problem with mainstream libertarianism is its almost total departure from its radical roots. Early classical liberalism was a revolutionary doctrine, which declared war on the most entrenched class interests of its day. Even the most mainstream of classical liberals (like Adam Smith, James Mill and David Ricardo) displayed considerable hostility to the landed oligarchy and the politically connected mercantilists who dominated Britain in the early nineteenth century. And the classical liberal movement included, as well, a large radical wing represented by thinkers like Thomas Hodgskin, who saw the new capitalist system as a bastard fusion of partially free markets and industrialism with the old feudal class system. For Hodgskin, the new industrial capitalists were amalgamating with the old landed aristocracy to form a new ruling class. The capitalist system that was coming into existence was not a free market, but a new class system in which capitalists controlled the state and used it to enforce special privileges for themselves, in exactly the same way that the landed interests had controlled the state for their own interests under the Old Regime.

Misc.
The Next Big Thing: Neomedievalism
The world is fragmenting, badly. Gird yourself for a new Dark Age.

But are those big cities sustainable?