Not necessarily what you were expecting, huh?

As left-brained, conserva-libertarian suburbanites, one can imagine that womens’ studies and feminism are not our strong suit. However, we’ve had a mad crush on Camille Paglia, our imaginary lesbian Western Classicist girlfriend, for years.


The lede from the Wall St. Journal:

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

Judging by the way social media has been blowing up over the linked article over the weekend, it’s like everybody has just awakened to what she has been saying for over two decades.


Read entire interview at the link.

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Steyn smack

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Well, to be more precise, Steyn's readers' smack.


Here's Mark Steyn opining on the general slouch assumed by the West in the years intervening the Titanic and the Costa Concordia:

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to "finish in style," and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, 'ope'd it wouldn't 'appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of "women and children first" held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it's every man for himself — operative word "man," although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as "men." From a grandmother on the latter:

"I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls."

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent:

"The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they've got it. So what are you complaining about?"

(italics, ours)


Like water seeking it's own level, we get the civilization that we pursue.

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Germany: accomplishing in peace what two world wars could not*

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Via KT

Here's Brit, Nigel Farage, addressing the European Parliament this past week.





That was some epic smack.


For those of you scoring at home: 1) re-opening some old European geo-political wounds, 2) taking a stand for basic Western democratic principles and 3) re-asserting a sense of national sovereignty that the Euro-socialistm model was supposed to kill off... all in just a little over two minutes.

Not too shabby. Not too shabby at all.


* As is the statist model in this country, it's not a sudden revolution rather a long slow slog through this nation's institutions will victory be achieved without a concerted and vigorous pushback.

Your decline of Western civilization update

If you read nothing else today...


J. Christian Adams ties together the mob violence in England with what has been happening here in America over the summer.

We also now know the Mob has visited America in recent days and years.

Consider the Wisconsin State Fair last week. The 911 tapes reveal a nightmare. “We’re outside the Wisconsin State Fair and there’s a white guy being beaten up by about 100 black people,” the panicked caller cries. “They’re jumping on our cars. . . . My mom just got attacked by a black mob.” Multiple eyewitnesses describe white fairgoers being pulled from cars and beaten by the Mob, all black. The evidence establishes a strong presumption that race was a motivating factor in the attacks. This is America?

Like in England, the law is also failing the victims in Wisconsin. “My wife comes home with a fricking black eye, and you guys ain’t doin’ (expletive) about it?” another 911 caller complains. “You need to get the (expletive) riot squad over there and haul them off to jail.”

We know that something similar happened in the town of California, Pennsylvania this year. We know that Darnell Harding, a linebacker for the local college football team, and Toni Whiteleather, a defensive back, were charged with attacking Michael Chambers. Chambers was an innocent bystander who had the misfortune of running into the two athletes just before Harding, the linebacker, said he was going to “hit the first white person he saw.”

As in London, the law has failed Chambers. Prosecutors dropped the state hate crimes charges in June after they failed to subpoena the victim to give evidence for a preliminary hearing. The Obama administration has also failed Chambers, as we shall see.

The law has failed Marty Marshall and his Akron, Ohio, family. On the Fourth of July in 2009, he was watching fireworks in his front yard with his wife and children. A mob of 30 to 50 black teenagers went onto his property and beat up Marshall, his wife, his children and two adult male friends. “This is our world. This is a black world,” they taunted the injured victims. Marshall spent five nights hospitalized in critical care.

Of course there are federal hate crimes laws designed for these violent racially motivated attacks, right? But a law is only as good as the people enforcing it. The Justice Department under Eric Holder has little interest in bringing hate crimes charges to protect white victims. The corrupt dismissal of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, which I brought, made that plain.

The criminal section of the civil rights division has the responsibility to prosecute racially motivated violence. But Mark Kappelhoff, the chief of the criminal section of the civil rights division, is unlikely to act if the victims are white. He was angry that the DOJ enforced the law on behalf of white victims in the voting rights case of United States v. Ike Brown. According to the sworn testimony of former voting section chief Christopher Coates, Kappelhoff complained equal enforcement of the law to protect whites was causing problems with “its relations with civil rights groups.” He placed greater importance on political relations with civil rights groups than ending discrimination against white voters.

Selective application of hate crime laws are just one of the many, many things we hate about hate crime laws.

The longer they are on the books, the more the evidence mounts that whatever good intentions they started with, it's all too apparent they now are being used, not for justice, but rather to curry favor with favored political classes.



Adams finishes with this:

Whatever has fractured, whatever has failed, we need to discover and right it. Law, informed by a reverence for human dignity, has lifted our nation, our civilization, out of the darkness of history. The mayhem and violence we are witnessing provides a glimpse of an uncivilized age beyond our memory, before law ruled.

Perhaps the civilized will outnumber the uncivilized. Or, perhaps the burning and looting provides instead a preview of our future.

Sir Winston Churchill understood this. “Civilization will not last,” he said at the University of Bristol in 1938, “freedom will not survive, peace will not be kept, unless a very large majority of mankind unite together to defend them and show themselves possessed of a constabulary power before which barbaric and atavistic forces will stand in awe.”

That we have a President that contemptuously expelled this great man’s bust from the Oval Office only increases our task.

Can't hit'em where they ain't

The early Christians living in the Roman Empire were very much a leaderless and decentralized movement. Far from being a detriment to the advance of Christianity, however, the nimbleness inherent to the early Christian church proved to be an asset resulting in the spread of Christianity in the face of Roman persecution.

Be it warfare, both ancient and modern, religion or even politics, there are key advantages to achieving your ends via diffusion as your enemy is swinging at air unable to land blows upon a vaporous target.

B-Daddy ties it all together here.

It's all a matter of perspective

As Europe's grasp on Western civilization continues to slip away there are specific instances that become defining moments in illustrating just how far along this process has devolved. KT has the low down on one such instance, here.