Category: Survival
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Responses to Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option
A tip of the hat to Karl White for sending us to Nine Most Intelligent Takes on Rod Dreher's The Benedict Option. I haven't yet read the book, though it ought to be arriving today. (What sort of 'ought' is that?) Nor have I read the above-linked responses. So I don't know whether they are the…
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The Benedict Option
Rod Dreher interviewed. Related: Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option. Excerpt: Suppose you and yours join a quasi-monastic community out in the middle of nowhere where you live more or less 'off the grid,' home-school your kids, try to keep alive and transmit our Judeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman traditions, all in keeping with that…
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Colonel Jeff Cooper’s Situational Awareness Color Codes
Here is a good article on the topic addressed to law enforcement officers, but useful for the ordinary citizen. Under ORANGE below read 'if possible' for 'if necessary.' Condition White is fine while in your house, assuming your house is well-secured. The minute you step out your door you should move to Condition Yellow,…
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Are There Non-Moral Justifications for Action That Trump Moral Justifications?
A reader offers the following comment on the immediately preceding post on the problem of dirty hands: You write that even if one admits an absolute moral standard there are (hypothetically) situations wherein 'moral considerations are trumped by survival considerations'. Yet surely the latter collapses into the former, for what is the implicit presumption that it…
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How to Keep your Home a ‘Safe Space’ and Issue a Reality-Based ‘Trigger Warning’
Loaded with double-aught buckshot, the instrument of home defense depicted below has the power to separate the soul from the body in a manner most definitive. Just showing this bad boy to a would-be home invader is a most effective way to issue a 'trigger warning' in a reality-based sense of that phrase. But let…
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Rod Dreher on Critics of the Benedict Option
Excerpt: You keep talking about the Benedict Option, but you never say what it is. Give us the formula. I keep telling you that there is no formula! We are going to have to be experimental, because we have never faced a post-Christian culture. The first point is for Christians to wake up and face reality.…
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SCOTUS and Benedict
In the wake of recent events, Rod Dreher renews his call for the Benedict Option: It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the…
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Waiting for St. Benedict. Various Withdrawal Options
Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue ends on this ominous and prescient note: It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which…
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The Ten Commandments as Survival Manual
A recent Richard Fernandez column ends brilliantly: We often forget that the sacred texts of mankind began as practical documents. They were checklists. And we may well rediscover this fact before the end. One can imagine the last two postmoderns crawling towards each other in the ruins of a once great city to die, and…
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Is Your Bug-Out Bag at the Ready?
Do you even have one? Dennis Bradford sent me this, which I recommend that you read. He didn't mention no shootin' ahrn, but then ah reckon Dennis is tad on the librul side . . . .
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Survivalism
Almost anything can be made into a 'religion.' (I am using the term very loosely!) Survivalism, for example. See J. W. Rawles' SurvivalBlog.com for a taste. This post provides some insight into the mentality of a distaff survivalist. It is quite revealing, I think, of both the 'logic' and the propensity for extremism of the…