When Did Sex Begin?

In 1963.  Or at least so we hear from Philip Larkin in his Annus Mirabilis.  It was indeed a remarkable year.  I was but a boy in grade school, but old enough so that I now remember all those wonderful songs and not so wonderful events such as the Profumo scandal in Britain.  What ever happened to sex kitten Christine Keeler, by the way?  Brace yourself.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
Up to then there'd only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for the ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.
So life was never better than
In nineteen sixty-three
(Though just too late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Cesare Pavese, “Passion for Solitude”

Passion for Solitude

TRANSLATED BY GEOFFREY BROCK
 
Cesare_pavese1-417x275I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.
 
Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.
 
All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.
 
The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.
 
Cesare Pavese, "Passion for Solitude" from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950. Copyright © 2002 by Cesare Pavese. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townshend, WA 98368-0271, coppercanyonpress.org. Source: Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002) 
 
………………………
 
Who knows how many women are eating now, women dulled by labor, thought of by Cesare, alone at table, in a dark room, who, like the struggling star is alone, but unlike the star, is enough for himself, body calm and in charge feeling no need for a woman.
 

And Still More Corruption

The PA Catholic Sex Abuse Horror

There ought to be a moratorium on the admission of homosexuals into the seminaries. Granted, the homosexual propensity is not sinful, only the exercise. But given the current level of corruption in the seminaries and in the Church in general, a moratorium on the admission of homosexuals would be a good first step in restoring the seminaries to their task of purely spiritual insemination.

For you liberals, moratoria are by definition temporary.

Maximilian Kolbe

Today is the feast of Maximilian Kolbe.

Although it is a deep and dangerous illusion of the Left to suppose that man is inherently good and that it is merely such contingent and remediable factors as environment, opportunity, upbringing and the like that prevent the good from manifesting itself, there are a few human beings who are nearly angelic in their goodness.  One can only be astonished at the example of Maximilian Kolbe and wonder how such moral heroism is possible. And this even after adjusting for a certain amount of hagiographic embellishment. 

Is there a good naturalistic explanation for Kolbe's self-sacrifice?

Wikipedia:

At the end of July 1941, ten prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS–Hauptsturmführer Karl Fritzsch, the deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out, "My wife! My children!", Kolbe volunteered to take his place.[8]

Maximilian-camps2

Corruption in the Roman Church: What is to be Done?

Rod Dreher continues his relentless exposure of the deep corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. 

In his latest installment, The Cancer of the Cover-Up Mentality, Dreher reports on the unsolved 1969 murder of the young nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik.

In his August 11th entry, The Church's Coming Catastrophe, we find in Update 2  good advice from a priest on what is to be done: 

Continue reading “Corruption in the Roman Church: What is to be Done?”

Phrase of the Day: ‘London to a Brick’

I just now encountered this strange expression in Graham Oppy's review of Owen Anderson's, The Clarity of God's Existence: The Ethics of Belief after the Enlightenment. The phrase occurs in this passage:

On the one hand, given that Anderson insists that he cannot be satisfied with ‘a sound proof that is extremely difficult to understand and that is knowable by only a few’ (123), it seems clear that his ‘program’ is bound to fail: for surely it is London to a brick that, if his ‘program’ could be successfully carried out, it would yield a proof that is ‘extremely difficult to understand and knowable only by a few’.

The phrase, apparently not in use in the U. K., is Australian and New Zealand slang for 'it is certain.' Explanation here.

Are There Reproductive Rights?

I should think so. The right to procreate is one; the right not to procreate is another.  But no one has the right to kill an innocent human being. So no one has the right to kill an innocent human recently born, not even the mother.  Infanticide cannot count as a reproductive right. Now if there can be no right to infanticide, how can there be a right to kill an innocent pre-natal human being? (The 'innocent' is of course redundant but helps underscore the obvious for the inattentive.)

The point is more easily digested if you think of a third trimester fetus. (By the way, contrary to what some conservative zealots think, 'fetus' is not a question-begging or derogatory term. In fact, its emotional neutrality recommends it.) 

The natal -prenatal difference is not a difference that makes a moral difference. Or do you think that a difference in spatial location makes a moral difference?  There is a difference between killing me in my house and killing me outside my house, but that difference in spatial location does not a moral difference make.

You will tell me that there is a temporal difference between the pre-natal and the natal. True. The difference may be a day, a week, a month, a trimester. These temporal differences do not make a moral difference either: they do not justify a difference in treatment.  Compare the temporal difference between the neonate and the two-year-old. That is not a difference that translates into a difference in rights or a difference in the moral gravity of maltreatment.

I invite you to think of the other differences and reflect on whether they make a moral difference. For example, the neonate breathes on its own whereas it did not while in the mother. Is that a difference that makes a moral difference? If it does, then is the right to life of an adult on a ventilator in any way impaired by his having to use such a device to breathe?

You say a woman has a right to do anything she wants with her own body? I'll grant you that if you grant me that the healthy human individual developing within her is not her body. It is not her body nor a part of her body in any sense of 'part' that could justify her doing anything she wants with it.  For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:

Not your body!

So yes, women have reproductive rights. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them, or even that there is a right to an abortion. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Worst Song and Singer Ever?

Yoko Ono. The only thing good about it is that it lasts only 44 seconds. YouTuber comment: "Sounds like a cat, with its nuts trapped in a vice."

Warzone is less awful, but still crap.  

Paul McCartney's comment: Get back, Jojo (Yoko), get back to where you once belonged. Go home.  Wikipedia:

In an interview in Playboy magazine in 1980, Lennon described "Get Back" as "… a better version of 'Lady Madonna'. You know, a potboiler rewrite." Lennon also said that "there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there", saying that McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang "Get back to where you once belonged."[7]

One of the Ways Moral Relativism Defeats Itself

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement quotes an NYT commenter:

One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

Suppose that good and evil are not absolute  but are culturally relative. Why should we recognize this?  And why shouldn't we impose our Western values on benighted jihadis?

For the argument in full dress, see A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others.

The Cautionary Tale of Pippa Bacca

Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them.  Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours. 

Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.

People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony.  Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.

The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.

The Young and the Reckless: The Cautionary Deaths of Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan

To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher  McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:

Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.

“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.

They were often proved right.

[. . .]

Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.

Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement offers astute commentary (bolding added)

Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted….I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen….The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest…people we've met on the continent.”

Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)

[. . .]

The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments. 

[. . .]

Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists….This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.

Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal….But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”

[. . .]

Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.

The Frame Game

Leftists play the Frame Game. For example, they frame the gun issue as if if they want gun control and conservatives don't. This is a piece of utter mendacity and they must know it. Everyone apart from criminals wants gun control. The issue is not whether, but how much and of what kinds.

Another example is the framing of the abortion question as merely a reproductive rights or women's rights or women's health issue. That too is a piece of utter mendacity of the extreme sort that one would expect from Hillary herself.

More later. Think about this 'frame game' business and find more examples.