~ SO ANYHOW.. after the 7-day block, then a mysterious out-of-the-blue 90-day block (not yet ended, by my calculations), the other day I went to check on the status of my FB page and… it’s disabled. Perma-ban. Enemy Of The Narrative Status: CONFIRMED.
“Just make another account!” Well, you mean after the previous effort to make 3-4 previous accounts which were banned by FaceBook? I only have so much energy in a given day.
“Get off Twitter and get off Facebook now. Because the goalposts are going to move until you’re a Nazi too.”
~ Vox Day ~
~ WELL WELL, and what did Binks go and do this time to get himself re-kicked off FaceBook (14 weeks so far in 2019)? You see, I forgot the new math.
In the simple new math of 2019, there’s only ones and zeros. You are either right-thinking, or you are a Nazzy and racist and white nationalist and all that bad stuff.
Go On And On
Here in Canada, our corrupt globalist government likes an old tactic made new– yell, bluster and stay “on message” until the opposition gives up, forgets, or moves on. That is, just keep repeating the same BS until you win.
As a historian of the 2 world wars (44 years and running with this interest), thse Canucki elite hijinks reminded me of a certain German idea– which, together with Bernays on Madison Avenue– helped shape modern political tricks. But I forgot the new math, when I posted a graphic of said fellow on FaceBook, with one of the phrases often attributed to him (which actually was written by Hitler*, but whatever).
Do you see my terrible, terrible error? There is only One, and Zero. You are either good, or a Nazzy white nationalist bigot Nazzy. Only a certifiable Nazzy would quote an actual Nazi for any reason whatsoever. Silly Binks.
So, teh effing Banhammer falls again. I am cut off from easy access to my friends & acquaintance. I cannot comment on their news, post new items, or even use Messenger. All because FaceBook’s algorithm and merciless computer Nazi-detectors detected that I must be, in fact, a hatespeeching Nazi. Not an academically trained historian drawing a comparison between corrupt political tricks in the 1940s, with similar corrupt tricks & ideology in 2019 Canada.
This is the state of FaceGoogTwitTube in 2019, and I hope their downfall is unpleasant and messy. Sadly, the collapse of Canadian political and social institutions will very likely be unpleasant and messy, even if the softer progressives boot Gauleiter Herr Jüstin Trudeaü out of office in October 2019. Let’s give Neo-Canada another 15 years, shall we?
~ SO I’M BANNED AGAIN– for another month (until May 23) from FaceBook all because I was cranky, and too blunt about muh slims. You know, “Ramadan Enthusiasts”. COFFCOFF.
Anyhow, I just watched a video on the new pro-homosexual EQUALITY UBER ALLES coins for Canada. Yes, “The True North Strong and Free” is becoming a colony of Clown-Land, where everything is bizarre, and nothing is fun.
Ignore the stagnant economy, the border crisis, the collapse of any ethics in Ottawa, the jobs situation, our poor international reputation, the floundering of Canada in the claws of China.. LOOK! GAY COINS! JUSTIN IS BEST GLORIOUS LEADER! FFS.
On the above video, I just commented:
Sadly, we are so far down the road of revolution & unfreedom, most people don’t even recognize it anymore. “Screw who & what you want– but pay your taxes, don’t question your betters, and keep your head down, or else!” Canada is no longer glorious or free, and people like Trudeau & the Canadian elites all the way back to Pearson have gotten us to this sad place.
Wake up. Read up. Pray up. Look after your friends & family. Prepare for terror & disaster, have a good EDC (Every Day Carry, including emergency phone apps).
Watch good vids, and try to wake up people around you. Me, I enjoy videos & articles by Mark Steyn, Vox Day, Joseph Sciambra, Paul Joseph Watson, Acts17Apologetics, Black Pigeon, Jason Bermas, The Amazing Polly. The truth is out there.
Me, I’m not going to handle gay coins, because of the death and suffering that way of life has caused over the past 45 years+ — how many more gay men need to sicken & die before we are allowed to question the sexual revolution’s effects on all of us, society, our kids, and the future?
The herd instinct & fear of being different keep many otherwise good people deep in the cycle of lies, but every little bit helps.
Canada is now Clown-land, people. Evil, demonic psycho-clowns.
~ O CANADA.. the land of the clueless and exploitable. We’re fierce in wars in other places.. fighting for ourselves, or at home? Not so much.
We’re the land of peace and good government, of Do What You’re Told unless you want to be in trouble– where we stop & signal at 3AM traffic stops and apologize when people step on our toes. No, really.
Except.. it makes us suckers. Canadians pay more.. often WAY more.. than they ever should for almost everything– even if it’s produced here, and shipped and sold cheaper elsewhere. Idiot taxes & not-paying-attention-taxes apply.
What’s NOT More Costly?. . Not Much
Books, cars (even cars made here, 10-15%+.. Americans in Hawaii still pay less than Canadians), consumer electronics, cell phones, taxes (42%), prescriptions, food, bus & airfares, clothing, gasoline, tools, hockey tickets, healthcare, internet access & phone plans, alcohol.. we hardly ever ask questions why– even with a 70-80% Trudeau dollar– things can still be cheaper for us on Amazon, eBay, or with cross-border shopping. If you try and cross-border car-shop? The dealers have been told to chase you away, and the paper-work and fees are crushing. Can’t have the Canadians seeking fairness!
The grey-market is growing, but boy-oh-boy do Canadians feel dirty and guilty for avoiding taxes and tariffs. Even immoral, excessive, and illegal taxes.
How bad is it under the tax-loving deficit-spending Trudeau 2.0 regime? The middle class now pays more on taxes than we do on food, clothes, and shelter. The TOTAL tax & hidden expenses burden on Canadians is over 70%. How delightful! In 2019, we’ll all pay an extra $2200– $200 PER MONTH– for fighting carbonization, or some such. Whatever…
Too-Easy Answers
And no, it’s not just the price of doing business in Canada… although many Trudeau 1.0 era (and earlier) tariffs and product-supply “management” on staples such as milk & eggs & wheat & poultry? All adds up to 150-300% prices on such items… we did this to ourselves, as part of protecting our markets from the U.S. behemoth. Plus, it’s a nice monopoly for our own producers, against the public– just like our airline monopoly. Government– 3 times the cost, @ 1/3 the service!
Our infamous socialist “Free health care”? Depending on your income, it costs about $12-35K per person. Since the Chretien “balanced budgets” of the early ’90s, when he downloaded healthcare costs to people and provinces as federal “savings”, it’s not even that good, fast, or effective any more. Innovation? Rationing.. and people who can’t even get a doctor aside from the ER.
Screw Us Over! We Love It!
The insane cost of electricity in Ontario? Because the progressives in the Liberal government don’t know how to science, math, or government very well.
Gas prices in Nova Scotia, an oil & gas producing province? Sky-high, because governments are stupid and, again, the PM Chretien-era agreements basically make us a pipeline to the U.S., with minuscule benefits for the general populace, local economy or workforce or gas-prices. Maybe 2% lower fuel prices, or a cut in provincial gas-taxes? A pay-down on the provincial debt? A provincial rainy-day fund? It is to laugh. AMERICA benefits from OUR exported lower-priced oil and gas.
We just accept it. We’re used to being screwed over on prices by governments & taxation, Canadian retailers & producers, and some American retailers. Everybody basically just bends over, because here it comes again.
Why do we pay so much more? Blind obedience. Idiot tax. Not Paying Attention Tax. Thoughtless compliance with unjust authority, worst practices, corruption, and outdated money-grabbing policies & 14th century duty & customs. Shrug, complain a bit, & then cough up.
So our economy and tax-burden and debt and deficits and future for our kids is circling the shitter… never mind.. as long as we can get a cool picture with our current Prime Minister, Prince Selfie, we’re awesome!
The rapey Viking Bjorn Tried To Remember: Rape THEN Kill.
+ + +
~ ONCE AND FOR all, let’s crush the cornerstones of modern 3rd Wave Feminism, shall we? Repeating a lie does not make it true, even if I wish it was so, or think it should be true.
1 in 4!! Rape Culture!
As Rebel Media reporter & alleged actual woman Lauren Southern notes, there is no anti-woman rape culture in the Western world. Unless you mean criminals, or certain refugees/ immigrants of a generally Muslim & male persuasion, who can be very rapey for various nasty reasons.
Otherwise, the actual non-feminist textbook statistics– on-campus and off campus– don’t show anything like the “1 in 4” mantra– oops.
“From the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a division within DOJ, – Rather than one in five female college students becoming victims of sexual assault, the actual rate is 6.1 per 1,000 students, or 0.61 percent (instead of 1-in-5, the real number is 0.03-in-5). For non-students, the rate of sexual assault is 7.6 per 1,000 people.”
Feminist Barbie says “Math is hard!” That’s in any given year, statistically. Where did 1 in 4 come from? Don’t know, don’t care, it’s wrong.
Life is complicated. The false rape-claims made by a minority of women just hurt everybody. Hook-up culture is a nasty place for everybody. Drunk-sex is about drinking; regret sex is about mistakes; post-hook up abortion may involve both, but we cannot have both the older special snowflake status for women, alongside “I’m a Slut And Proud, and want no consequences for how I live and conduct myself” and not expect complicated reality to intrude.
The 70% PayGap!
Once you actually look at men and women in the modern workplace, there is no actual gender pay gap. More men are willing to sacrifice everything to slave away for decades at work– most women are (or have been) saner than that. Older patterns of higher pay for men were a Victorian invention, to prevent everybody out of diapers in a family from having to slave 14 hours a day in the nearest dark satanic mill. “Here’s an idea: one man, one wage enough for a healthy family!” Yay!
Both Binklings currently work at local fast food joints alongside other teen men, and teen wimmins. All are paid exactly the same minimum wage, equally being eaten away by inflation and taxation, with no benefits. Same with the male and female managers. Gender Pay Gap? Not really, in 2016, possibly unless you live in a third world country making things for WalMart and 1st world shoppers. Don’t know– but Western feminists don’t care about them.
What we do know: many women choose different careers than men, who seek higher paying professions with higher requirements & skills; women tend not to overwork, they want family-time, weekends, flex-time, and maternity-leave; women mostly don’t choose dangerous & labour-intensive work; women are less likely to negotiate for higher pay, promotions, or new jobs– and men are better at the negotiation game.
The alternative? Looks like feminists want women not to be allowed to choose their work; or else, they should get paid exactly the same as men, for work of different or lesser value. I.E. government taking money from men to give to woman because 70%.
Lying Feminist Crapweasels
Yet it gets worse than misinterpretation and bad stats. Much worse.
Don’t let reality trip up a good narrative– it should have been true, right? ‘We All Know’, and lame generalizing tells us, that there IS a feminist pay gap, so just “listen & believe”. Make stuff up for the cause! Ignore those crumbling narratives and tissue-paper cornerstones of our feminist grievance culture! Or as the ever-charming Chanty Binx (no relation) a.k.a “Big Red” might put it (her words, not mine):
Facts Are Hate!
One might think that the countless fact-checks and actual studies and bringing the fembot talking heads up short by disproving their lies and generalizations and misunderstandings might clear things up– but this is a PR and social radical movement, which garners a lot of money, attention, media-attention, books, Sarkeesian-style Patreon loot, publicity, publishing, academic positions and courses, and victimhood goodies. Facts don’t enter into it.
Oddly enough, the corrective facts I’ve presented above are widely available on the internet, but not in academia, politics, or the media. Perhaps this is why the freedom and fact-checking of the internet is so irritating to would-be fascists and totalitarians selling a false narrative?
Next Time with Teh Binks: But, but, #GamerGate!, and Those Male-Mostly STEM Jobs, plus THE PATRIARCHAL!, and finally, The Violent War On Women! ~
~ I JUST GOTTA SAY— Big Brother is a bloody big bother.
The pseudonym ‘Binky The WebElf‘ has existed since about 1996, and is the name I’m known by in Anglican, Catholic, Twitter, FaceBook, and blogging circles. It originally came from silly names I liked to use in video games, and was ‘Binky The Pirate’ for a while in the original Sid Meier ‘Pirates!’.
I knew (and was later proven right) that pseudonymity in the vicious church wars would protect my wife & kids from my getting fired or sent to The Anglican Parish Of Outer Sable Island, 3rd sandbank from the right. Or, some Canadian Jihadi might drop by for a little off the top, because of the many and various things I’ve said about Islam.
Huh? Who-Now?
Binky is my web-name. If I went by the boring non-elf name, people would not recognize it, and why should they?
That’s part of the point. The issues I bring up are the thing I’d like you to ponder; the fine bloggers and authors and commentators who apply real wisdom to our current dangers and opportunities. Me? I’m prideful and self-important enough, and don’t need my face or name plastered on everything for whatever alleged worth that might have. Look at the STUFF, not at the elf.
Enter The ZuckerBorg
Apparently, someone got mad at me recently, and twice over the past month or so reported my name as a “fake name” to FaceBook. DING! Word from FaceBorg: “Please give us your actual name, and cough up a passport, driver’s license, or other real ID to prove it. You know, because celebrities.”
This ‘feature’ has been popping up since 2012-ish, but has gone viral in 2015, because FaceBook– sometime friend and ally of fascists and radicals and terrorists and silencers and big corporate government– is enforcing their arbitary rules. Because, you know, online corporations don’t have enough information about all of us. Coming next: FaceBook digital colonoscopy & DNA+blood samples?
Not Just A Shruggable
In one sense, no big deal– though demands that members of the public report various forms of personal and private ID to a faceless corporation is very scary. But what about other people, to whom pseudonymous communication via Facebook is a matter of life & death? Someone being stalked or death-threatened? A human rights worker or dissident in a dangerous country? A Christian pastor in a Muslim land? Someone who doesn’t want their identity stolen, with all the joy & fun of unravelling that rat’s nest? You can fill in the blanks.
However, I’m also an ill guy living at home, alone much of the time, and FaceBook– despite all the privacy and other issues– is a major part of my chance to reach out, hear back, counsel, preach, build a wide variety of friendships around the world, communicate on matters I consider important or topical or timely. Minus FaceBook, I will be even more lonely, alone, and prone to the Black Dog, and that really sucks. Thanks, Zuckerberg, you heinous power-mad twerp.
So, until FaceBook follows Google’s eminently sensible example of not minding our personal business even more, I guess The Binks is officially off The FaceBook for now*. Feel free to comment below.
Sad elf. ~
Saith Teh Binks
binks-dot-webelf-at-gmail-dot-com
* If this is all the result of some malicious FB snitching (pretty sure it is, but the tattle-tales have their identity protected, so mind your ding-danged business), I forgive you, but you really pissed me and my friends off. God knows your name, and he will not forget.
~ SERIOUSLY? I do respect conscience, opinion, free thought, and having your own ideas– along with having a real clue about what you are experting away on, a decent education, facts, and a properly formed human life, and religious conscience.
Thus, however common it may be, I can not respect thinking that anyone has a divine right to their own notions somehow being true, sensible, or even likely, just because they happen to believe them. Pooling ignorance does not give you truth; nor does repeating something over and over make it true.
Lots of people will look to the allegedly bad old Middle Ages, when “The Pope Told People What To Think”. That’s bad and inaccurate history, yet how is it better when every man and women thinks they ARE the Pope, the final authority, as it were, on everything?
The first question is: what is truth? Then, what is true, and how do I know it? We’ve had at least 25,000+ years of civilization, lots of good thinkers, philosophers, story-tellers, playwrights, and even God’s own Son come down from heaven to earth. We all have built-in BS-detectors, if we care to use them properly, and instincts towards truth and goodness, as well as our other instincts and habits of evil and badness.
Howso Whatnow?
This current chaos will not last, because some of us want to be slaves of some ideology or Glorious Leader, others want to be anarchic and parasitical, and yet “all we like sheep have gone astray, every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.”
Jesus. Remember him? The real one– risen, victorious, glorified, ruling over all things, even times like these. Our choices are narrowing ever more, and I will say this in praise of the Islamic Statists– just like Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao– they know Jesus and his true followers are the most dangerous of their opponents. Because we are alive, believe in truth, and love, and assert– in the face of statism, terrorism, eugenicism, and all the other works of the Devil– that Jesus is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father.
Cue Evil Vicar
There is some truth in what ‘The Evil Vicar’ says, just (since it’s a comedy bit) not in how he says it.
“‘Not particularly religious’? ‘Interested’? ‘Spiritual’? Are you testing me, Satan?
“Steady on, my wife’s entitled to her views.”
“Oh, isn’t she just? Aren’t you all entitled to your half-assed musings on the divine? You’ve thought about eternity for 25 minutes, and think you’ve come to some interesting conclusions?”
In our very serious times, we can live in denial, drown in entertainment, follow the mindless herd and the talking heads, or wake up and get serious (in a lighthearted way, since treating important things with modesty and humour means you recognize their importance).
Serious matters are happening all around us. Will we doze and dream, and idly wonder where we are headed, and why we are in a handcart?
What will we live or die for? What is worth fighting for? What is worth handing down to our children and grandchildren? In a few days, just after we have buried a 25 year old man shot by a terrorist, we will remember other days, and other young people either killed, or passed on, or now grown old, all those who offered their lives on the altar of freedom in two world wars, so that the horrible experiment of a renegade Germany might finally be ended.
There are our days, our fields of rocks, our battles. ~
~ DESPITE PAST better judgement, Binks made the mistake this morning of listening to CBC’s The Current (for you Americans, NPR, but even more left-whinge). Some (liberal) author wrote a (liberal) book bashing (Tory) Canadian journalist and sometime Senator, Mike Duffy. Trash, smash, bash. No mention whatsoever– even in passing– of the Liberal Party senators even more deeply in scandal and iffy cash. Balance? It is to scoff.
Then I remembered the differences between the CBC and a whore: (1) There are certain things even a whore won’t do; and (2) At least with a whore, it’s comparatively honest & straightforward work.
The unspeakably biased Anna Maria Tremonti & her screedy-show is the reason I stopped listening to the tax-funded CBC a decade ago. You have to understand what a big deal this was: I was A CBC-baby, raised on it playing all day long in the house; silence during news; listened to for plays and music. It formed part of my brain, and my politics, and my cultural world: genteel but viciously liberal as the years went on, morphing from reasoned Canadianism to a snarling and tinny megaphone for progressivism during the late 70s and early 80s and onwards.
Heck, even when my spiritual and theological views were traditional, I was still a political progressive due, in part, to the CBC and my upbringing. I was listening in the shower one day to The Current, and the aforesaid paid hack Tremonti, and I literally argued out loud with her point by point– she was wrong, skewed, biased, and clearly doing a hit piece on something I knew about better than she did. From that point on , I listened, and found the same bias, fraud, evangelically secular one-sideness on national and local shows. Enough. Click. And so my political transformation began.
Time to cut the CBC off the federal teat. For actual balance, read Brian Lilley’s CBC Exposed. ~
Binky has had stray thoughts over the past little bit, and the following are them.
As you know, I been ailing, and after my attempt to restart back at the end of January, the teeth– in sailing terms– took me all aback: full stop. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the next disaster.. so far, none. Whew!
The thing is, this blog has been on hiatus so long, it’s dead in the water, visitor-wise. The Binky isn’t sure if there’s still interest in this thing getting going again or not.
Lemme know.
Binks-dot-webelf-at-gmail-dot-com
Goodest Friday
~ JUST WATCHING the last 1/3 of the internationally famous Jesus Movie by The Jesus Movie Project— a huge evangelistic gift to the Christian world, and done in a huge number of languages. Unlike the 1977 Jesus of Nazareth, it sticks to the gospel word for word; unlike Mel Gibson’s overdone but in-parts-excellent Passion Of The Christ, it’s not insanely over-violent and overful of Mel’s spiritual and personal agonies projected onto the big screen.
Good Friday is still there in our ever-more secularizing calendar, even if an inconvenient no-shopping day in some locales for buying Easter goodies and groceries. that is, it’s still there as a reminder of eternity in time; of the founding principles of our Western civilization; as the first part of the spiritual drama to be completed by Pascha, the promised bodily resurrection on the Third day.
Pesky Questions
What saves?– this is the question which abides, even if public religious faith wanes. Who or what shall make all things right? How & when? Politicians and promises? Generals and weapons? Bureaucrats? Malls and sales? Redistributionism? Recycling? Utter personal freedom?
We enjoy many good things, invented or set up or passed on by generations before, so that we have been generally healthy, well off, well educated, and had a rich table of a very great feast and market set before us for our enjoyment.
We forget the ‘why’ of these things, and imagine that we somehow deserve them. They were given that we might pass them on, and ensue future generations might live a better life– because God commands us to be fruitful and multiply; to love our neighbour as ourselves; to leave it better than we found it. That’s part of doing God’s will, on earth as it is in heaven.
The spiritual energizes a person or society or civilization– giving direction and power and determination. Without a spiritual renewal, our societies will lose their way, their energy, their growing principle– cut flowers living a fleeting shadow of a life.
The cross of Jesus remains looming over us as a question, a challenge, a reminder, a provocation.. even if we dwell only in the shadow of the cross. If nature abhors a vacuum, so does supernature. That we feed– rather vampirically– on the leftovers of living faith, on the fumes of the built up moral and spiritual and material reserves handed on by past generations, is no credit to us. ~
Put Away Childish Things
~ JUST BEEN watching various versions of the play Richard 3.0 by William Shakespeare (on YouTube). I’d say that though Ian McKellen does a good job in the severely abridged 1995 movie, Olivier (in the less-abridged 1955 version) still rules them all. Plus, they knew how to make a decent-looking movie then.
Impressively, Shakespeare’s Richard of Gloucester is depicted as a genuinely nasty man. Along with author Alison Weir, I’ve no problem supposing Lord Nasty Rick capable of plots, schemes, and ordering the murder of the young princes in the tower. Heck, a 20th century deposed King of England was a big Nazi-fan, after all.
“Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, Have no delight to pass away the time, Unless to spy my shadow in the sun And descant on mine own deformity: And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, To entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain And hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, To set my brother Clarence and the king In deadly hate the one against the other…”
This is morally serious language. Here are no weasel-words, nor slippery “Mistakes were made, negativity occurred, let’s move on” which leaves the perp unguilty, unhealed, and justice undone, nor seen to be done. Our age is often morally frivolous, where the kind of coffee you drink or how you sort your rubbish is carefully noted, but not whether you have your own offspring slain, or worship God versus Satan (or nothing), or buy products made by modern-day slaves.
Richard is cheerfully black-hearted, and depicted thus that we might not only see ourselves clearly in our sins, negligences and ignorances; most importantly, that we can see the consequencs of evil in the heart of one man as it spreads, infects, corrupts not only other people, but the whole realm, and the very future of the nation.
Our own little evils don’t necessarily kill kings or ruin kingdoms, but they do add to the fog of darkness and inhumanity and little cruelties by which we harm our neighbor, and ignore God. A recovery of self-knowledge comes by calling things what they are, and not what they are not.
In the wider world, Communism may speak of justice, but reeks of envy and resentment; capitalism may depict itself as freedom and wealth-creating, yet materialism and spiritual death and destructive greed is there, too. ~
~ A FRIEND put me onto the PBS series Downton Abbey (2 seasons so far). Hmmmm.
I’m not a student of the Edwardian/ late Victorian era, but then again, neither are the writers of this series. Jane Austen movies are rather more my taste, since those novels were written in the times they depict, and however repetitive her plots, they ring true for time and place. So too with many other Beeb & Masterpiece Theatre costume dramas. Or Patrick O’Brian’s sea-novels.
Downton is rather more.. well, what one clever person thinks the Edwardians were like; and while some critics paint it as hyper-nostalgic ‘snob-pron’, it seems to this watcher rather to be as unreflective and hollow as the Edwardians allegedly were before the Titanic* and the Somme. That is, a soap-opera in posh drag. And don’t get me started on the wince-tastic episodes 6 & 7 of Season 2, here we head into ever lamer plotlines.. what’s next, jumping sharks in the reflecting pond maybe? Shades of plot devices like “Last season was all just a dream”?
Sadly, most of the tropes are soap operatic old reliables– if they were on ‘As The Stomach Turns’ and set in 21st century New York, it would be much less interesting. Such fare does make me want to re-view Upstairs Downstairs and more historically researched and less superficial books, TV, and movies on the period.
Better Than Thou
Were the Edwardians– rich or poor– really such hollow twits and know-nothings, mere ciphers on their way to producing such prodigies as our own fine selves?
It is a very wicked habit of We Better Than Thou moderns to be incapable of thinking or sympathizing with past generations except where they agree with & act like us. We, too, shall pass– and our blindness and prejudices and stupidities will not be celebrated forever, no, not even by those who come soon after.
Horrid Utopitards
In the century of blood just past, how often the utopian Best was the bitter enemy of the actual good.. with predictably disasterous results, over and over and over. Such matters pierce the Binky-heart particularly: the world is full of victims of experts and grand theories and wrong-headed ideology and the more general war on reality.
Never mind that Tsarist Russia was reforming as fast as she could when war broke out, and that the fruit of good government policies were coming ripe when the war and German scheming to weaken Russia caused the great fall into blood under the revolting totalitarian radicals. Reality must be kept over-simplified, and wrongly remembered.
Stuff & Nonsense
Downton does not exactly hearken back to the older & better elements of Western Civ, or Edwardian Victorianism. Too much of the 20th century hate and mocking of the pre-Great war era is so cussedly ingrained in us, we cannot imagine older ways of being, or the good that was in it all, alongside the evil and folly. It’s all corsets and oppression and horrible rich people and bowing servants.
Thus, the various characters who insist on being “free, free, free” (like the Communist-Irish chauffeur who somehow gets the youngest daughter of the family to fall in love with him) get all the sympathy. Anyone insisting on morality, decency, and sanity are depicted as fuddy-duddy hidebound shitewits, because “everthing is changing”. Or somehing. The constant villains? You knowit– evil Victorians.
Verdict? C- at best. But Lord Julian Fellowes is laughing all the way to the bank. ~
* Fellowes’ 4-part Titanic series was a jumbly botch. C-. Stick with A Night to Remember.
~ NOW, BINKS ISN’T calling for a revival of World War I anti-German propaganda, but some basic facts about Germany’s early 20th century record of atrocity needs to be re-remembered aright, for pacifists and anti-Westerners have made generations of hay justifying pro-German apologetics, and how it was all lies to get more soldiers for the meat-grinder of the Western Front.
Let’s recall that Germany was a brand new, rising nation, built on Teutonic supremacy, and militarism. Kaiser Wilhelm II may have been Queen Victoria’s Grandson, but he believed all that had gone before was corrupt and ripe to fall, to be swept away in a new Imperial and German age. In that sense, Kaiser Wilhelm had rather more in common with Lenin than his royal cousins throughout Europe.
A High & Lonely Destiny
In that sense, The Kaiser was a thorough-going social and political radical, and that radicalism would justify Germany’s leading the way in breaking all the bounds of international law, limited warfare, or any roadblock on the high historical Destiny of Germany to conquer and rule the inferior. Such niceties and limits applied only to weaklings, bourgeous fools, and non-Teutonicals.
The grandiose Wilhelm + an energetic military + huge popular support as the leader of the new Germany? = only a matter of time until war broke out, as the Kaiser fiddled with international agreeements, and upset the balance of powers, and armed his nation.
Such A Creative People
A few German inventions and/ or firsts in WWI? Lessee: mass bombardment via zeppelins & bombers against civilians & non-military targets; concentration camps for civilians; unlimited looting; repeated massacres of non-combatants; starvation used as a tactic; constant treaty breaking & violations of neutrality; unrestricted u-boat warfare; chemical weapons.. it’s a long ugly list.
Added to this ugliness was the apologetic attitude toward such atrocities by so-called World War I “pacifists”, who are the forerunners of modern leftists, who never met a radical and bloodthirsty dictator or Islamist terrorist they didn’t like– but for whom Western Civilization sucks and is to blame for everything ever.
Propaganda may exaggerate, but the modern habit of downplaying the truth behind images of the evil Hun in WWI serves neither history nor the facts. ~
~ A CRUCIAL PART OF ‘Answering Islam’ is to recall Christian definitions of God– because that is where we get our first principles, as expressed in the 10 Commandments, or the teachings of Jesus. That’s true whether we believe in God or not.
Say a Moe-Loving Koran-breathing terrorist chops off an infidel’s head, hands, feet, or whatnots? He or she believes God commanded it, through Moe, the One messenger of God, as communicated in the Koran. Compare instead the oft-mentioned bloody massacre of Jews & Muslims in the Crusader conquest of Richard “Lionheart” Plantagenet. Go ahead and show me where Jesus, Paul, Chrysostom or Aquinas teaches such things are the direct express revealed will of God, indeed the heart of the Gospel.
Think Like A Kid
Pesky 4-year old thinking is wiser than it seems. “Don’t break that, son.” “Why?” “Because I’m your Father.” “Why?” “Because I said so.” “Why?” Of course at this point arises the usual ‘See? It’s just arbitrary power, weak crushed by strong, blah blah blah’. Nonsense.
Actually, “Because I Said So” is a perfectly good reason, even if most parents don’t go behind their authority to proper sources for it. Thus: parents are legal guardians, responsible and accountable for children. Behind that, lotsa Biblical and civilizational reasons. Behind that, a commandment “Thou shalt honour thy Father and thy Mother”– that itself depends on God’s authority and self-revelation. But wait– there’s more!
“Because I said so”.. ultimately depends on the nature of God, himself, giver of life, and final authority for all legitimate authority– just as his loving, just, and constant Fatherhood is the model for all earthly fathers. There, parents: because, unworthy as you are, God gave you rule, and responsibility: you are accountable to more than yourself, your wife & kids, or even Social Services agencies.
Wrong-Religionists
That’s why Muhammed’s made-up claim that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all the ‘Abrahaminic faiths’ and revelations of the same God is terribly, terribly wrong. Either the first two are utterly mistaken and wrong about God, or the third is. Muhammed tried to get his authority by saying that his alleged revelation ‘completed’ the Old & New testament. Um– if they are so corrupted, we have to also take Moe’s word that they are still authoritative, and that he has the right to re-interpret them so Really They’re All About Him.
Moe’s version of religion & God amounts to– Trust me, because I said so, and my re-written versions of those other Scriptures which came before me and don’t mention me, and which explicitly forbid false prophets or new gospels prove that my religion is truest and bestest.
The Power Of Logic Compels You
However, if God has forbidden murder (& child-sacrifice), and Muhammed revises that, but claims it’s all the same God, then (a) all religions are arbitrary, or (2) Moe is wrong, or (iii) Jesus & Moses were wrong.
You can’t have it all ways at once, Muslimo-Judaeo-Christiano-Secularism. God is, or isn’t. God reveals himself, or doesn’t. God cannot contradict himself, so one revelation is true, the other not. On these foundations stand our freedoms, human dignity, moral action, and very society & civilization.
Non-Religionists
Secularists are like garbage-pickers living off the built-up moral and spiritual capital of the west, passed on over 4000 years. They pick, but don’t ask where the wreckage and ruins come from, or how & why anybody should be one way versus another.
Dostoyevsky was neither a ninnyhammer nor sour finger-wagger. When he wrote that “If God does not exist, everything is lawful,” he showed how these alternatives work out in The Brothers Karamazov, and in Crime and Punishment for the atheist radical character Raskolnikov.
In a chilling foretaste of the “higher destiny” claims of the Bolsheviks and Soviet Communists, Raskolnikov does what he wants, justifies it to himself, and keeps on killing. If the character is to re-invent morality, or what is lawful for him (or, in the case of a state-sized moral inversion, what is literally “lawful” according to Communist priciples), then everything is lawful, even if his victims or lesser mortals do not embrace his brave new law of the self-made-ultimate.
“If God does not exist, everything is lawful,” or as the old Spanish proverb has it “Take what you want,” says God, “but you will have to pay for it.”
Our choices (individual or corporate) don’t suspend the laws of causality or consequence; don’t actually supersede human nature or right & wrong; don’t erase the existence of God. Despite secular defacer or Muslim ranter, reality is. Part of the calling of Jews, Christians, and liberal Muslims to insist– in the light of God and eternity– that truth abides, revealed in God, written on human nature, and expressed in our lives, work, and built-up moral and material inheritance. ~
Again, More, And ReDo
~ AS MOST OF THE PRE-DEAD Minions will know, The Binks is a promiscuous re-watcher and re-reader of movies & books.
This is, of course, how kids learn language & letters & words, stories, reading, listening, the basic stories of childhood and our foundations. I vividly remember my parents reading The Hobbit to me, marking in red dots the map as Bilbo & Co. travelled from danger into danger.
A few years later, I read & re-read The Hobbit, Asterix, Tintin, later The Lord of the Rings, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan, all the rest.
And I still do it– having added many series including Patrick O’Brian, Nigel Tranter, Edith Pargeter, and many others. Likewise with great movies & TV series.
Why? Lotsa folks figure once is enough, then graze new stuff.
Wherein Binks Tries To Justify His Notion
First, because (re)reading worthwhile stuff is a good thing. Secondly, for the same reason most of us like more than one bite of a good meal. Thirdish, because we are different each time, and see new things, and the book (or movie) echoes in us differently each time we digest it, as we grow older & hopefully wiser down the years.
It’s still a strange part of my memories that some movies which I found amazing or intriguing I only saw once or twice because that’s the way TV was back in the day. Unlike other stories, I couldn’t re-watch and learn & enjoy them– although I’ve found some of the stories & books they were based on.
Teh Binks will be trying to dig up some of those flicks (I’ve been re-watching Teh Muppet Show, most of which I vividly recall) to see what was interesting.. I think there’s a Sinbad in there, Jack The Giant Killer, those Reader’s Digest cartoons like The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince.
Part of recovering and passing civilization and culture on is to learn, recall, and hand on to others the treasures of movie, art, culture, literature, music and whatever else is good, beautiful and true. If the Muslim Brotherhood gets there way, all that will be banned and forbidden and burnt and lost– so enjoy it while you can.
Point– Ho-o-o!
I find it interesting in this regard that some fans of Mark Steyn growl about how he doesn’t continuously and only write about U.S. politics, the Jihad, or the end of civilization and stuff.. you know, those articles on music, broadway, and showtunes. Sorry, but those are the life-giving things, the actual business of culture and soul and civilization.
Miss the point much, O commentators?
If you’ve got any tried-tested-and true must-read or must-see books or films, please add them to the comments below. ~
~ WHERE, O WHERE, YOU wonder– ye few who are still checking in– is that ever-whinging WebElf? Living in the fun-filled Book of Job, and scratching myself with potsherds, thanks for asking.
Toof Diagnosis
Thus, the first tooth problem is roughly 80% better– but there’s still pain.. and so the good dentist who recently pulled tooth #1 did some more probing, x-ray, and tooth-testing this morning.
Wait for it…. even more dentistry to ensue.
It turns out that if you do an un-asked-for root canal, drop a bit of dental file in it, and then leave the bottom 25% of the root unfixed, that not only are you risking tooth abscess, but neighbouring teeth are in danger, too, via inflamed & rotting nerves.
No, I’m not joking.
It’s Like A Party!
The result? A brand new Root Canal to be excavated on Friday for 2+ hours, on the next tooth in line.. which is indeed infected, and threatening a whole new abscess, despite 3 weeks of strong antibiotics. Oh, and more antibiotics to follow this treatment. Ha ha, whee!
What with my general poor health & abiding slow recoveries, so it goes… thank you so VERY much, O Rapacious Botchmeister Dentist Of Evil who started this slow series of dental implosions in my head 4 years ago.
Thank God for the blessings of modern dentistry, anesthesia & pain-control, decent insurances, and an utterly awesome young lady-dentist who knows her stuff, and just how to make it better. A silver amalgam lining to all these clouds. Lord have mercy on my rotting self.
So What, Elf?
Prayers please, and patience.
I do apologize for that burst of bloggy activity a a month ago (perhaps you were right, Hilary, full ITYS Rights to you), and now nothing. I just don’t have it in me with the pain, anti-biotic hangover, fevers, and general exhaustion to spend a lot of energy blogging. A few essays have percolated in my addled noggin, but not much else.
All prayers and notes of encouragement would also be timely, and very welcome.. I’m seriously worn to a nub by stress, pain, tiredness, infection, and waiting around to get better.
A Swift Sunrise 