Really Missing The Point

Annaba, Algeria, late 19th Century.  Why?  Well, read below.

We must be clear that the modernization of the Church on the great anthropological questions comes through Europe. In the West, there is greater sensitivity towards certain issues such as gender or homosexuality than in Asia or Africa. Although in Europe and the United States the Church is in decline, paradoxically the young Churches that are growing in Asia or Africa are the most conservative. Western societies are moving towards a new idea of mankind, and that game is undoubtedly being played in Europe, which is why there are so many European cardinals in this consistory

Piero Schiavazzi, professor of Vatican Geopolitics at Link University in Rome.

Wow, talk about missing the point.

I don't know why the Pope picks the Cardinals that he does, but if this is the reason, it shows a real misappreciation of the evidence.

The church is on the rise in Asia and Africa, where the parishioners are conservative.

It's in decline in Europe, although that decline tends to be misunderstood and to some degree exaggerated, where contemplating "anthropological questions" is the rage.  It really isn't in decline in the US in the way that's asserted, as overall numbers remain steady, but partially due to immigration.  And not noted by Signore Schiavazzi, conservatism is on the rise in younger American Catholics.

Indeed, also in the West, a recent survey showed that amongst Australian Catholic women, younger women were noticeably more conservative than older ones. 

So appoint European Cardinals who are sensitive to the issues where the Church is failing?

Eh?

The old maxim is that nothing succeeds like success, to which we must presume that nothing fails like failure.

All over the globe, and not just in religion, the older generations that advanced the liberalism of the 70s, 80s, and 90s continue to remain in power in significant ways and don't seem to grasp that the failed legacy of that is not something that younger generations, heavily impacted by it, wish to advance further.

The impact of Cardinal appointments is much like that of Supreme Court Justices.  It's difficult to tell what they'll really do and even more difficult to tell what a Pope will do at first.  But if Signore Schiavazzi is correct, this is a bad sign.  Once again, the Papacy will not make major doctrinal changes, because it cannot, but there have been historic periods of Church failure (some involving laxity) that resulted in large departures from the Church.  History, we're told, doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.  A sort of small Counter Reformation of sorts is going on amongst the young, while at higher levels the necessity for that seems to be not only not appreciated, but perhaps not even grasped.

Also not grasped, seemingly, anywhere in the West is that the colonial era is over.  We apparently have never understood that wind the "winds of change" swept colonial powers out of Africa and Asia, it also swept the cultural balance of the world.

Europe's impact on the world was enormous culturally.  Indeed, it triumphed. But that culture was a Christian one, no matter how poorly grasped that was and no matter how poorly expressed.  Much of what we take for granted, indeed liberalism itself, about "modern culture" is Christian, and pretty much exclusively Christian, in origin.  It's no accident that cultural decay has set in, in the West, as the Christian roots have is culture have been strained by a long competing culture, that of consumerism, of which both advanced consumer society and socialism are expressions.

St. Augustine.  He was a Berber.

But Christianity itself, at least Apostolic Christianity in the form of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, has never been a European thing.  Indeed, the fundamental event of European culture was the spread of (Apostolic/Catholic) Christianity within it, which forever changed it. But Christianity didn't come out of Europe, and indeed it took the rise of Islam to cause there to be a temporary hiatus in it having a major African expression.  St. Augustine of Hippo was a Berber, not a European, and the Bishop of Hippo Regius, which is modern Annaba, Algeria.

Of course, all of the Apostles were Jews from the Middle East. The first Pope, Peter, was from modern Israel. St. Paul, who dealt with what Signore Schiavazzi calls a "new idea of mankind", as there are no new ideas really, and dismissed the conduct that we now are re contemplating as, well whatever we're re contemplating, was from Tarsus, in what is modern Turkey and which was then part of the Greco Roman world. Pope Victor I, who died in 199, was a Berber. Pope Miltiades was also a North African, as was Pope Gelasius (who was for strict Catholic orthodoxy). Pope Saint Anicetus was a Syrian as was Pope Sisinnius, Pope Constantine, and Pope Gregory III.

What ended the strong influence of North Africa, of course, was the Islamic conquest of the region, although remnant North African Catholic churches held on until the early 1400s.  Even as Christianity has spread around the world, and conquered almost all of non Arab and non Berber Africa, it's been easy to forget that its not a Eurpean religion.

That mistaken impression is about to end, and it can't end soon enough.  Trying to somehow assume that decaying European culture needs to be accommodated, if that's occurring, is a mistake.  It needs to be reformed, and it will be, and a rising Africa and Asia will be part of that.

I know how.

I have lived in a cramped camper van with my wife and our cat for 8 years. Here's how we make it work.

You never had children, that's how.

The article was from Business Insider, which is on my news feed for some reason, even though I'm not really a fan of it. The headline comes from a blog entitled:

Van Cat Meow

Now, I'll be frank that at my stage of my life, having worked since age 13 and now 60, a life in which I could take my wife in our camp trailer and go annually from Alaska back home, catching the seasons (fish, hunting, etc.) would appeal greatly to me.

It wouldn't appeal to my spouse, so this will be another dream unrealized.

But two young people living as vagabonds with a cat?  Well, it's not for some reason.

Let's be even more frank. This trip is made possible only by the pharmaceutical industry as it's made possible, probably, only due to birth control.  There's something weirdly narcissistic and self focused about it, therefore.

In a prior age, being an adult for most people meant taking on adult things, and that meant for most people, given the nature of nature and what that means, ultimately meant getting married and having children, the second following from the other.  Chemicals made the first possible without the second, which ultimately radically muddled the minds of many as to the true, deep, existential nature of the essential act that goes with that marriage.  In turn, that really gave rise to the "alternative" definitions of everything we have today, as the deep natural nature of that relationship became one for self defined entertainment, although at some level the deeper meaning is never lost.

Also lost, however, that going forward with the true nature of the relationship is deeply adult.

Or, in a former era, for one reason or another, it meant going into adult life on your own, and plenty did it.  But that was a pretty serious affair in and of itself.  People like to say "marriage is hard", which it isn't. Being on your own, as an adult, and as you age, is hard.  Frankly, for most people, it got pretty hard in all sorts of ways by the time a person was in their late 30s.

Traveling by van around Australia?  I'm sure it's fun.  But is also dropping out, in more ways than one, including dropping out of a part of nature while viewing it. The cat?  Probably not a conventional pet the way pets were in prior decades, but a substitute child, that instinct never really gone.

Dropping out, however, also says something about the state of our world.

Some people have always dropped out of the active world, to be sure.  But it's become a sort of post-pandemic pandemic.  Quietly Quitting, Laying Flat, and this. All symptoms of a world we've built that we don't like.

In an earlier era, this very British couple (and I know that one is Australian) probably would have met and farmed.  They seem to be angling for a simple life.

One pretty hard to achieve in our world today.

Related threads:

July 29, 1968. Humanae Vitae

On toleration.

We posted this the other day:

Lex Anteinternet: A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who...: Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to sa...

In it, we noted this:

But in our political purity of the age, we're not doing that.  And that's destructive for the people making the declaration, who could have been helped.

We might, before concluding, stop to ask two questions. Does it really matter, would be the first.

After all, if somebody wants to drink themselves into oblivion, does it matter, if that's their choice?  Or more particularly, if somebody wants to present as a woman, who is a man, what does it really matter to me or anyone else?

Well, it does matter if your view of humanity is that we are our brother's keeper.  Oddly enough, in our contemporary world, it's the political left that claims that we are, while the political right, as exhibited by Jeanette Ward in a common in the last legislative session, feels we are not.  But most decent societies, and all Christian societies, feel that we are.

So there's a duty to the individual to help them live an ordered life. We know that living a disordered one leads to unhappiness.

There's a wider duty, however, to society.  Assaults on individual natures are assaults on nature in general, are destructive to us all.

And, additionally, telling a lie to yourself is one thing. But demanding, even with the force of law, that everyone else adopt the lie is quite another. That's completely destructive to the social structure, as enshrining lies as part of them inevitably leads to decay.

And finally, and more particularly, it's damaging to women in the extreme. Real women, that is.  Women know that they aren't men.  We all know that the biological life of a woman is radically different from a man's in nearly every sense.  Psychologically, it isn't the same either.  Reducing womanhood to appearing to have boobs is the most Hefnereque position of all, and an insult to women in every fashion.

After posting it, an irony occured to us that is another reason the entire transgender fantasy, as society approaches the topic, does damage to society.

It's extremely logically inconsistent.

A consistent drum beat in this are by the progressive left is that "tolerance" and "acceptance" are all that's required here, and that this all is a straight line from earlier civil rights movements, with the most common analogy being it's a straight line to "transgender rights' from 1) civil rights for blacks, or 2) civil rights for women, or 3) civil rights for homosexuals.

Nothing could be further from the truth, as none of those other movements requires suppressing reality and acceptance of self definition.

The civil rights movement that brought political and societal rights on par, almost, with whites in the US very much demonstrates this.  The oppressed class were African Americans, or as Martin Luther King would state at the time, "Negroes".  Skin color is actually a secondary feature of our appearance and an evolutionary adaption to intense sunlight, which means that the entire concept of "race", as we've noted before, is a patently false one. Race really doesn't exist, but ethnicity and culture do, and nobody could rationally argue that African Americans in general have a culture in the country which reflects their long presence in it, and the origin of that presence being rooted in the crime of slavery.

But here's the thing.  You don't sense your self to be black.  Your ancestry either goes back to Africans or it doesn't.  Under the "one drop of blood" silliness of American culture, you are an African American if you are of mixed ancestry, and almost all African Americans are (lots of "white" Southerners are as well), which is a social construct, but it's one based on a reality. Somewhere, and for the rule to apply somewhere relatively recently, you had an African ancestor.

If you don't, and you claim you feel your self black, you will be justifiably socially derided.  And that's because you really haven't endured what African Americans do on a daily basis, and growing up.  

In other words, if you run around claiming to be black, and aren't, you are going to be despised by everybody as a fake.  Indeed, the proposition is so absurd, it was used as a running joke in the movie The Jerk, with Steve Martin, whose obviously not black, giving the lines "I was born a poor black child" in the opening scenes of the movie.  More seriously, Jessica Krug, a professor at George Washington University who claimed to be black, had to resign when it was revealed she wasn't.  In fact, over time, Krug to be an Algerian American, a German American, and an Afro Boricua, when in fact she was a white American of Jewish ancestry.

Nobody tried to justify this on the basis that she "self identified" as black.

And nobody demands that you accept her claim, as she feels herself to be black.

Let's turn, then, to homosexuality.

Whatever a person feels the origins of male or female same gender attraction to be, it is.  That is, nobody really doubts that there are men sexually attracted to men, or women sexually attracted to women. The question may be why, and what that means, but people aren't faced with claims of "I feel myself to be attracted to the same gender".  We know that occurs.  That doesn't actually change the fundamental nature of a person's genetically determined gender, however.  Homosexual men are men.  There's also no doubt about that, and in some odd way, that's the point.  The same is true with homosexual women. They may be attracted to other women, but that doesn't mean they aren't women, they are.  Therefore, when a person reveals themselves, or is revealed by others, to be homosexual, it isn't as if you have to accept that their morphology and nature is different.  It just all remains the same.

Transgender claims, however, are radically different, in that the man claims he's a woman, or vice versa, just like a white person claiming they're black. And that not only doesn't have to be accepted, it can't be.

Indeed, hearkening back to that example, if a white person deeply and sincerely asserted that they were black, when they weren't, it not only would be pointed out, but if it persisted, at a bare minimum the person would be regarded as odd.  For most people, it probably wouldn't be so odd that it would be socially destructive (in some cases it could be), but it would definitely be odd.  But pretending you are a woman, if you are not, is destructive by its very nature.

We've already pointed out why, but the physical and psychological natures of women are radically different, which is the main reason.  It's also, however, deeply offensive to the nature of women, and reduces them to mere attributes, which is insulting in the extreme.

Finally, there's a certain intolerant insistence on tolerance here.  Toleration really means that I put with your nature, no matter what I think of it.  We do that in order to make society work.  For some things it should be obvious that it isn't really toleration that is required, but acceptance, ethnicity being one, but for many things that's not the case.  In American society, for example, there are many religious groups and all should be tolerated, but that doesn't mean in any way shape or form individual acceptance is required.  A person is free and should be free to disagree with the tenants of a religion, and even vehemently disagree with them.

That's toleration.

Toleration here, however, means accepting a person's self definition, no matter how deluded.  We ask that of nothing else.  

Put another way, we don't demand that Christians accept that Mohammed was a prophet, and we don't demand that Muslims accept Christ as the Son of God and part of the Trinitarian God.  We don't demand that blacks accept Jessica Krug as black.  We shouldn't demand that people accept men as women.

Toleration would really mean that if you see a man in a dress, you don't harrass the perseon about it.  It doesn't mean you have to pretend the man is a woman.

A Sorority (Fraternity) lawsuit, and a subject who could be helped.

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say that I must not discuss it.

G. K. Chesterton.

The Gibson Girl, the iconic female figure of the early 1900s created by Charles Dana Gibson. The thing is, you see, she isn't, and wasn't, real.

There's been a story much in the news here, and indeed elsewhere, about a figure who is a guy but who claims he identifies as a girl, or more accurately, a figure who is a man who claims he identified as a woman.

What impresses me about this story isn't that aspect of it, so much as nobody, up until very recently, and after I started this post, has really bothered to dive very deep into the story, particularly from a psychological level.

It seems that they should.

Not that we should be too surprised about this. People rarely do.  During World War Two, for example, in one rural area of Germany a figure held forth as a local open anti-Nazi member of the German nobility. . . except he wasn't a member of the nobility at all.  He was lucky to get away with it, and his anti-Nazi stance was genuine.  But a Junker he was not.  Why did he do that?

Backstories to the public positions people take are very rarely looked at, but really should be.  Some backers of causes that are strongly for them in a virulent way have a personal connection that undermines their position in one fashion or another.  Others just make you wonder.  Why, for instance, would a well-to-do young man with no employment history relocate to a Western state and run for office as a political firebrand on the populist libertarian front?  You'd think voters would ask, but they largely don't.  Why would an ostensible billionaire who has gone down in defeat in an election and who faces a pile of criminal charges be running so aggressively for office again?

We tend to take things at face value.

So too here.

There's some new data out that shows that for the majority of people who claim transgenderism, if left to develop that claim on their own, the claim itself is transitory and youthful.  Most girls, for example, who in their very early teens feel they want to be boys, don't a decade latter.  That's a good reason in and of itself not to allow "transitions" that can't be reversed, and any substantial one can't be reversed.  Indeed, it's criminal to allow it in an existential sense, and ought to be in a legal sense.  But what causes it?

Indeed, as a commentor on the story in Wyo File, which finally did look at some of the backstory, noted:

The strong correlation between trans identity and autism spectrum disorder has been recognized over the last three years by such professional organizations as the National Autism Society, The Institutes of Health, Autism Research Institute, and studies published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Noted was the observation that autistic youths were up to 6 times more likely to identify as trans than a similar non-autistic demographic. The medical field recognizes and treats autism as a disorder, not a normal expression of the spectrum of the human condition. Since it appears that trans gender identity is resultant from ASD, it should also be treated as a disorder rather than celebrated.

That's an interesting observation, to say the least.

Well, we've looked at it before, but in regard to the individual who has been so much in the news, why hasn't anyone looked up until now?

The data is there, or at least was, when this story first developed.  It doesn't appear to be a happy story.

When this news first broke, there was a blog up, and maybe there still is, by the father.  It wasn't on his sons, but his son appeared in the photos.  He already looked different from the rest, having gained a lot of weight even as a child.  But what the blog made clear is that the father was bitterly disillusioned.

Not with the son, but with his former wife.

His wife, he claimed, had left and divorced him, and her Mormon faith was the reason why.

Now, that was never explained.  Mormon's can and do marry outside of their faiths, so there are a lot of roads that could be gone down there. Whatever the story was, from his prospective, the wife had left him and their children for her Mormonism.

Now, that doesn't really make sense.  One of the things most noted about Mormon's is their deep devotion to the children.  It's hard to imagine what the conflict was, but it was at least perceived that way by the former father.

Maybe the topic of the young man had already come up, and now based on the Wyo File story, it seems it definitely had.  Perhaps that was the division.  Or not.  Maybe that had nothing to do with the split.  Again, we don't really know.

I don't really know the definitive Mormon position on transgenderism.  I do know the Catholic one which is that disorders are not sinful, but acting upon them if it's outside of the moral framework, is.  This has typically come up in regard to homosexuality. Being a homosexual isn't sinful, but sex outside of marriage is, and marriage is just between a man and a woman.  I believe the Mormon position is similar, but I can't say that definitively.  If the boy's declared sexual dysmorphia became an issue in the household, with one parent taking the boy's side, and one not (and I don't know if that was the case), I can see where it may ultimately have been fatal to the marriage.

What we do know, and from long, long experience, is that its difficult in the extreme to raise a child in a one parent household and that this is so much the case that when one parent is present but really absent, such as one works all the time, or one is a drug or alcohol addict, it statistically impacts the outlook of the children and often for life.

Daughters, it's been shown, of a checked out woman are much more likely to turn out to be lesbians than daughters where the mother is present. That doesn't mean their relationship is necessarily rosy. But the daughters of what now is so charmingly called "the day drinking moms" who sit there in front of the television at 1:30 in the afternoon getting blotto tend to have no real female role model.*  In contrast, a mother may be a Tiger Mom, or whatever, but if she's there, it makes a huge difference.

In contrast, the son's of men who are not there tend to be more likely to have same sex attraction as well.  The two impulses, one in male and one in females, are not otherwise similar and other aspects go into it. Women who perceive, while young, that men are a threat are more likely to take refuge with other women.  What about men?

Well, I don't know, but one thing that has been pretty clearly demonstrated is that young men who are exclusively around other young men, to the exclusion of females, are more likely to become homosexuals.  English Boy Schools provide a well known example.  

What about transgenderism?

One thing we do know, in spite of recent left wing attempts to scientifically legitimize it, much like was formerly done with eugenics, it has no biological origin.  No set of hormones or the like is going to send you off into a different gender. That means it's purely psychological in origin.

But what's going on with it?

We don't know for sure, but we do know that with females it mostly hits in the very early teens and is gone by the early 20s.  And we also know that young women are getting exposed to piles of gross pornography right now, and that those who are ADHD are more likely to take this direction.  Often it occurs in groups.

Which may mean that its origin is much like lesbianism, except its much more destructive, but also much more transitory.  Girls are seeking refuge outside of their sex as they fear the roles that their sex seems to have.  Once it starts to clear up that the life of adult women isn't something featured on Pornhub, it wanes.

And men?

Well, it would appear autism is an element of it, as the subject is apparently on the spectrum.  That's telling.

It would also appear that early on, he received "support" from elements after he started to reveal his claimed orientation.  For one thing, his school had a "SPEAK" club, standing for Genders and Sexualities Alliance, of which he was a member.**

That's telling not because he was a member, but because it's well known that recruitment of people to anything, particularly anything destructive, tends to take root if done very young. There's a reason that the Nazi Party in Germany eliminated youth organizations and replaced them with the Hitler Youth, or why the Soviet Communist Party had the Young Pioneers.  There's also a reason, although people now turn a blind eye to it, that homosexual men used to fairly notably recruit teenage men.  If you start to dive into debasement, it's really hard to get back out.

Young pioneers... for the struggle in the name of Lenin and Stalin... be prepared! (1951)

So what else is over all going on here?

I don't know, but I suspect that a certain element of refuge, or indeed a large role of refuge, from the male role is at work here as well, in the overall story of transgenderism.  In spite of a protracted effort to undermine it, male roles basically remain unchanged.

We tend, mentally, to still think of the Four things greater than all things are.

When spring-time flushes the desert grass,

Our kafilas wind through the Khyber Pass.

Lean are the camels but fat the frails,

Light are the purses but heavy the bales,

As the snowbound trade of the North comes down

To the market-square of Peshawur town.

 

In a turquoise twilight, crisp and chill,

A kafila camped at the foot of the hill.

Then blue smoke-haze of the cooking rose,

And tent-peg answered to  hammer-nose;

And the picketed ponies, shag and wild,

Strained at their ropes as the feed was piled;

And the bubbling camels beside the load

Sprawled for a furlong adown the road;

And the Persian pussy-cats, brought for sale,

Spat at the dogs from the camel-bale;

And the tribesmen bellowed to hasten the food;

And the camp-fires twinkled by Fort Jumrood;

And there fled on the wings of the gathering dusk

A savour of camels and carpets and musk,

A murmur of voices, a reek of smoke,

To tell us the trade of the Khyber woke.

 

The lid of the flesh-pot chattered high,

The knives were whetted and -- then came I

To Mahbub Ali, the muleteer,

Patching his bridles and counting his gear,

Crammed with the gossip of half a year.

But Mahbub Ali the kindly said,

"Better is speech when the belly is fed."

So we plunged the hand to the mid-wrist deep

In a cinnamon stew of the fat-tailed sheep,

And he who never hath tasted the food,

By Allah! he knoweth not bad from good.

 

We cleansed our beards of the mutton-grease,

We lay on the mats and were filled with peace,

And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south,

With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth.

Four things greater than all things are, --

Women and Horses and Power and War.

We spake of them all, but the last the most,

For I sought a word of a Russian post,

Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword

And a grey-coat guard on the Helmund ford.

Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes

In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.

Quoth he:  "Of the Russians who can say?

When the night is gathering all is grey.

But we look that the gloom of the night shall die

In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.

Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,

But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

That unsought counsel is cursed of God

Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.

 

"His sire was leaky of tongue and pen,

His dam was a clucking Khattack hen;

And the colt bred close to the vice of each,

For he carried the curse of an unstaunched speech.

Therewith madness -- so that he sought

The favour of kings at the Kabul court;

And travelled, in hope of honour, far

To the line where the grey-coat squadrons are.

There have I journeyed too -- but I

Saw naught, said naught, and -- did not die!

He hearked to rumour, and snatched at a breath

Of `this one knoweth', and 'that one saith', --

Legends that ran from mouth to mouth

Of a grey-coat coming, and sack of the South.

These have I also heard -- they pass

With each new spring and the winter grass.

 

"Hot-foot southward, forgotten of God,

Back to the city ran Wali Dad,

Even to Kabul -- in full durbar

The King held talk with his Chief in War.

Into the press of the crowd he broke,

And what he had heard of the coming spoke.

 

"Then Gholam Hyder, the Red Chief, smiled,

As a mother might on a babbling child;

But those who would laugh restrained their breath,

When the face of the King showed dark as death.

Evil it is in full durbar

To cry to a ruler of gathering war!

Slowly he led to a peach-tree small,

That grew by a cleft of the city wall.

And he said to the boy:  `They shall praise thy zeal

So long as the red spurt follows the steel.

And the Russ is upon us even now?

Great is thy prudence -- await them, thou.

Watch from the tree.  Thou art young and strong.

Surely the vigil is not for long.

The Russ is upon us, thy clamour ran?

Surely an hour shall bring their van.

Wait and watch.  When the host is near,

Shout aloud that my men may hear.'

 

"Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

A guard was set that he might not flee --

A score of bayonets ringed the tree.

The peach-bloom fell in showers of snow,

When he shook at his death as he looked below.

By the power of God, Who alone is great,

Till the seventh day he fought with his fate.

Then madness took him, and men declare

He mowed in the branches as ape and bear,

And last as a sloth, ere his body failed,

And he hung like a bat in the forks, and wailed,

And sleep the cord of his hands untied,

And he fell, and was caught on the points and died.

 

"Heart of my heart, is it meet or wise

To warn a King of his enemies?

We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,

But no man knoweth the mind of the King.

Of the grey-coat coming who can say?

When the night is gathering all is grey.

Two things greater than all things are,

The first is Love, and the second War.

And since we know not how War may prove,

Heart of my heart, let us talk of Love!"

Kipling, The Ballad of the King's Jest. 

But those four things are tough things too, resulting in physical and psychological injury and sometimes death, but also, in a proper view that Theophilus might hold, to quite another direction as well.

There's always been men who feared not measuring up to the male ideal or the male role.  This has expressed itself differently in different eras. World War Two saw a surprising number of suicides undertaken by men who were rejected by draft boards.  They couldn't stand the thought of what that meant, in their own minds, and took their own lives.  I've already noted, in other threads, that the Apostolic clergy provided refuge for a certain number of men in former ears for same sex attraction.  

It's been well documented that in prisons certain men who have never demonstrated a transgender inclination before, but who are physical weak and in need of protection, will take on female attributes and become the "female" object of a same-sex relationship.  

In the extremely rough and violent world of Plaints Indians, there were, as is sometimes famously pointed out, men who would declare, at an early age, that they were really drawn to femininity and then would drop out of the male role for the female role.  While moderns like to pretend there's no division of labor by nature in human beings, there very clearly is, and that tellingly reduced those men to cooking, cleaning hides, and the like.  It meant they were exempt from killing other human beings and fighting, a normal part of cultures which exalted warriors.

Lakota warriors.  No doubt, every one of these men had killed other men.

Put another way, Crow Heart Butte in Wyoming, and near where this boy is from, is named that because Washakie killed a Crow chieftain and ate his heart.  Not because they met for tea.

And this raises an interesting point.

The waif like Audrey Hepburn in 1956, who was pretty clearly the model of female beauty for a man who recently promoted Bud Light as a woman.  She's a model, however, of safe female beauty that wouldn't really attract unwanted male attention. By 1956, the other type of female beauty, one more admired by males, was very much in circulation, as Playboy was expanding and the screens were full of Marilyn Monroe.

Men who try to affect a female appearance tend to take on an exaggerated one.  In modern society, if you go out on a city sidewalk on any particular day, you'll find at least a few young women wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and who are healthy muscular, in a female sense.  In offices and in office culture, you'll find most women wearing suitable office attire. You'll never find, however, a woman walking around with a feather boa, or trying to look like Audrey Hepburn, or wearing something like a polka dress.

But in the transgender community, you'll find all of that fairly commonly, although in this particular case that's not being demonstrated.

Indeed, here, in spite of what we're supposed to say, what we really see is a guy who looks like a very large, soft looking guy. 

Actor Robert Conrad, right, in The Killers. Conrad was always a big guy, but definately a guy.

Now, in the male world, you can be overweight, but being soft is pretty difficult.  It no doubt goes back to our earliest origins.  Most likely, our Cro Magnon ancestors didn't get fat, they were too resource poor to pull that off, but softness probably simply couldn't be tolerated.  There wasn't any room for "I don't want to fight that new tribe that just showed up" allowed.  And to a large degree, there still really isn't.

Going back to when I was really young, I can think of some instances of pretty soft teenage boys, but the way that they and everyone else handled it was different.  They were soft, but not so soft that they were unreliable in a pinch. Basically, like a lot of people with different personality traits, they'd learned how to rise to the occasion, and in their cases often frequently, to overcome them.

We don't do that anymore.  We face our failings by "accepting" them, which is not to face them at all.

Now, there's more to this than that, but perhaps not as much as we might think, for no sane man would ever want to be a woman.

Women like to be women, as their DNA provides for it.***  But very few men, if any, would be comfortable with bleeding a great deal on a routine and scheduled basis, being subjected to hormonal storms, or being subject to the numerous medical and physical problems just being a woman entails.  Women's worlds change at least monthly, and in reality more frequently than that.  Over the course of a lifetime, women's reality changed massively, once at puberty, later at childbirth, if they have children, and then again at menopause.  Women live longer, to be sure, but the existential nature of their existence practically means they undergo a deep physical and psychological chrysalis at least twice if not three or more times.  Women mature more quickly than men, but some of them endure such hard physical changes that the impacts are nearly shattering when they occur, and that doesn't even take into account the monthly cyclonic storms they endure.

To be male means having a predictable physical reality that only changes over decades and to some extent never does.  And indeed, transgendered men in fact avoid that.  They aren't going to endure the agony of menstruation for one thing, and they likely don't want to.  Most just keep their dicks and balls and call it good.

Old Man : Hey are all farmers. Farmers talk of nothing but fertiliser and women. I've never shared their enthusiasm for fertiliser. As for women, I became indifferent when I was 83. I am staying here.

Line from The Magnificent Seven.

Two imagines, once expected, and one exaggerated, of 20th Century manhood.  In the top image, a British Tommy holds the line. . . alone.  He's probably going to die.  In the second, the super macho and brooding Sgt. Rock, entertainer of thousands of juvenile males in the second half of the century, leads Easy Company into a charge.

To be a transgender male, in some ways, means dropping out of the expectations without picking up the pain and agony of being a woman.  Male strength remains, and repeated naturally programmed female physical distress does not arrive.  No matter what they may say, for the most part, transgendered men are dropping out of male society.  Men don't want them as lovers, and most of them have physical attributes, even with their pants buttoned up, that make them unattractive even if an unsuspecting male eye was cast on them.

Beyond that, however, they're omitted from the male warband when young.  Nobody is going to ever ask them what they'd do if they're drafted.  And nobody is going to conscript them into a bar fight, which almost every living Western male has had happened or nearly happen.  You aren't going to be asked to defend some woman's  honor.  You aren't going to intervene if somebody threatens your sister, girlfriend or wife.  You aren't, moreover, ever going to hear "go over and ask her to dance", and all that means and what follows.

U.S. teenage pregnancy rates from the mid 1970s to mid 2010s.  Contrary to what might be expected, if this chart went back to the 1950s, the rate would have started off even higher, as the 50s really saw the peak in recent U.S. teen pregnancy rates.  Exactly 0% of these pregnancies were to the transgendered expressing as female.  Some probably originated from the same group acting contrary to their declared expression.

You also, however, are going to usually be safe to women, except as alleged here where the allegations, which are denied, is that you are leering at boobs and getting erections.  This isn't true at all of other men, no matter how friendly they may be.  Some males, including some highly intellectual ones, hold that no real platonic friendship can ever exist between a man and a woman, as the man (not the woman) will always regard a female contemporary as at least a suppressed potential object of affection.****  While it may be misperceived, transgenendered men and homosexual men are usually received well by women, as that threat is generally absent, or at least conceived of being absent.

Highly romanticized illustration of a teenage mother from Street Arabs and Gutter Snipes, The Pathetic and Humorous Side of Young Vagabond Life in the Great Cities, With Records of Work for Their Reclamation 1884.

But none of that is natural, and all of it, in some fashion, is a cry for help.  Even the cry for acceptance is just that.

Over the years, sometimes personally, and sometimes professionally, I've known people who ended up needing help, some well after they'd received it.  I know one lawyer who is a convicted felon, but overcame that for a successful career.  I've met people who were addicted to drugs or alcohol, and overcame that.  Usually if you got down to it, you could see that they didn't take up their afflictions as they really enjoyed them, but because they were attempting to bury something else.  One lawyer I somewhat knew disappeared for about a month before his family found him, in another state, in a hotel room, having crawled into a bottle.  He wasn't there as he enjoyed drinking himself stupid in hotel rooms.

Some people, with more conventional afflictions, are like crashing trains right as you watch them.  And interestingly, if is a more conventional and traditional affliction, like addition to alcohol and sex, or the two combined, its commented about backdoor, but nobody ever says that being in that condition is just a life choice.  Everyone knows its not, and that is a disaster.

And so is this.

As the comment above notes, we help people on the autism spectrum, and we know that they may need help.  It's not regarded as a life choice.  But in 2023, everything sexual, except for pedophilism, is just an expression of individualism.  The ban on sex with children only remains as its so disgusting, as otherwise all the logic that applies to "accepting" every other sexual behavior applies equally to it, save for that its destructive to children.  But it's also destructive to adults, and its been shown that it tends to come on with people who have had multiple sex partners.

Transgenderism is like that.  There's no reason to believe that it is not a mental illness, one associated with other conditions, that can be arrested and addressed.

But in our political purity of the age, we're not doing that.  And that's destructive for the people making the declaration, who could have been helped.

We might, before concluding, stop to ask two questions. Does it really matter, would be the first.

After all, if somebody wants to drink themselves into oblivion, does it matter, if that's their choice?  Or more particularly, if somebody wants to present as a woman, who is a man, what does it really matter to me or anyone else?

Well, it does matter if your view of humanity is that we are our brother's keeper.  Oddly enough, in our contemporary world, it's the political left that claims that we are, while the political right, as exhibited by Jeanette Ward in a common in the last legislative session, feels we are not.  But most decent societies, and all Christian societies, feel that we are.

So there's a duty to the individual to help them live an ordered life. We know that living a disordered one leads to unhappiness.

There's a wider duty, however, to society.  Assaults on individual natures are assaults on nature in general, are destructive to us all.

And, additionally, telling a lie to yourself is one thing. But demanding, even with the force of law, that everyone else adopt the lie is quite another. That's completely destructive to the social structure, as enshrining lies as part of them inevitably leads to decay.

And finally, and more particularly, it's damaging to women in the extreme. Real women, that is.  Women know that they aren't men.  We all know that the biological life of a woman is radically different from a man's in nearly every sense.  Psychologically, it isn't the same either.  Reducing womanhood to appearing to have boobs is the most Hefnereque position of all, and an insult to women in every fashion.

Footnotes:

*I don't know how or why "day drinking", which is very often attributed to women, became cute. But it isn't.

**The existence of such non-academic clubs in schools is ample evidence of the intrusion of really left wing "progressive" values into schools. By and large I"m skeptical when such claims are made, but the recent library controversies over homosexual pornography in public schools shows there's definitely something to it, as do the existence of clubs that exist to effectively demand that inclinations that are poorly understood and fairly recently regarded as mental illnesses be accepted as normal.

***Having said that, there's plenty of evidence that well into the mid 20th Century, at least, plenty of women regretted having been born women, which isn't quite the same thing.

****Whatever hte truth of htat may be, it's pretty clear that it's not true of close relatives.  The "taboo" on incest is clearly ingrained enough into us to translate over to close relationship, such as cousins.

Vincit qui se vincit

It is so easy for those who have made their money under a given system to think that that system must be right and good. Conservatism is for that reason nothing else than a pseudo-philosophy for the prosperous. - 

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Communism and the Conscience of the West, p. 81

This is going to hit California and Baja Mexico:

Coastal Watches/Warnings and Forecast Cone for Storm Center

Forecast Length*	Forecast Track Line	Initial Wind Field
Full Forecast 3 days	On Off	On Off

* If the storm is forecast to dissipate within 3 days, the "Full Forecast" and "3 day" graphic will be identical

Click Here for a 5-day Cone Printer Friendly Graphic

How to use the cone graphic (video):

About this product:

This graphic shows an approximate representation of coastal areas under a hurricane warning (red), hurricane watch (pink), tropical storm warning (blue) and tropical storm watch (yellow). The orange circle indicates the current position of the center of the tropical cyclone. The black line, when selected, and dots show the National Hurricane Center (NHC) forecast track of the center at the times indicated. The dot indicating the forecast center location will be black if the cyclone is forecast to be tropical and will be white with a black outline if the cyclone is forecast to be extratropical. If only an L is displayed, then the system is forecast to be a remnant low. The letter inside the dot indicates the NHC's forecast intensity for that time:

D: Tropical Depression – wind speed less than 39 MPH
S: Tropical Storm – wind speed between 39 MPH and 73 MPH
H: Hurricane – wind speed between 74 MPH and 110 MPH
M: Major Hurricane – wind speed greater than 110 MPH

NHC tropical cyclone forecast tracks can be in error. This forecast uncertainty is conveyed by the track forecast "cone", the solid white and stippled white areas in the graphic. The solid white area depicts the track forecast uncertainty for days 1-3 of the forecast, while the stippled area depicts the uncertainty on days 4-5. Historical data indicate that the entire 5-day path of the center of the tropical cyclone will remain within the cone about 60-70% of the time. To form the cone, a set of imaginary circles are placed along the forecast track at the 12, 24, 36, 48, 72, 96, and 120 h positions, where the size of each circle is set so that it encloses 67% of the previous five years official forecast errors. The cone is then formed by smoothly connecting the area swept out by the set of circles.

It is also important to realize that a tropical cyclone is not a point. Their effects can span many hundreds of miles from the center. The area experiencing hurricane force (one-minute average wind speeds of at least 74 mph) and tropical storm force (one-minute average wind speeds of 39-73 mph) winds can extend well beyond the white areas shown enclosing the most likely track area of the center. The distribution of hurricane and tropical storm force winds in this tropical cyclone can be seen in the Wind History graphic linked above.

Considering the combined forecast uncertainties in track, intensity, and size, the chances that any particular location will experience winds of 34 kt (tropical storm force), 50 kt, or 64 kt (hurricane force) from this tropical cyclone are presented in tabular form for selected locations and forecast positions. This information is also presented in graphical form for the 34 kt, 50 kt, and 64 kt thresholds.

Interestingly, it's going to basically go right over Bakersfield, California, where this lifelong resident of that city is now serving in Congress:

Bakersfield is an oil town, and a rough one.  Kevin McCarthy never worked in the oil patch, but he comes from blue collar roots.  He graduated with a MBA from California State University, Bakersfield, in 1994, but was already in politics by that time.  He's been a member of Congress since 2006.

Kern County is representative of a type of California we hardly think of.  An oil and gas province in a state that we associate originally with agriculture, and then with. . . well itself.  In some ways, McCarthy has been sort of an odd man out in his native state his entire life.  And it must be frustrating, as he's a fourth generation Californian.

That sort of frustration has expressed itself in the nation's politics, on both the left and the right, for some time now.  It's given rise to populism, and that populism has morphed into a form of fascism. Right McCarthy's party is struggling to see if it will be, after the nomination process is over, a conservative party, a populist party, or a fascist party. The fascist is in the lead, but he disregards of the law, a common trait for fascist leaders, may be his undoing.  If it isn't, it risks being the undoing of American democracy.

The fact that "conservatives" no longer apply the broad scope of the word "conserve" may prove to lead to multiple undoings as well.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen hit on something that ought to be obvious to us all, but in fact It's something rarely occurs to anyone.  Liberals, or progressives as they like to think of themselves, decry the rich as evil on the basis that bad things happen due to wealth and therefore that's evil, and the evil must know that it's evil.  In truth, "It is so easy for those who have made their money under a given system to think that that system must be right and good.", and that doesn't apply only to those who make vast amounts of money in something.  Regular workers feel the same way.  Tobacco farmers probably almost never thought to themselves about how their product directly resulted in cancer, and if they did, they must have mentally excused it, for example.

Systems are big, and big systems have to be addressed at a big level.  Germans who worked in factories that were converted to war products as the war went on weren't in the same position as Albert Speer.  But attempting to sanctify your occupation and livelihood (something I'll note that is very common for lawyers to do) doesn't change the reality of things.

This the first tropical storm to hit California like this in 84 years, the last such one being 1939's El Cordonazo.  That storm was not only the last one, it's the only one to have made landfall in California in the 20th Century.  We've had the terrible fires in Maui. We've had terrible fires in Canada all summer long.  The list goes on.

The GOP is loud on the Biden "radical climate agenda".  At least one of our local Congressional representatives, I'd wager, can be guaranteed to come on Twitter or Fox News within the next 30 days and complain about "Biden's radical climate agenda".  The truth is, humans should not dare alter the climate, and just because I make money from things that might doesn't mean that it can't happen.

After this storm hits Bakersfield, McCarthy, along with the other top GOP leaders, should go to Kern County and explain what they're doing.  McCarthy is Catholic (one of our three Congress people was, but long since adopted a Protestant faith, the latter allowing divorce and remarriage, although I don't know that's the reason that he did so).  In Catholic theology, lying about serious matters is a grave sin.

I note that as I feel that most of these people, although not all of them, know better.  If they don't know better, they can be excused, I guess, for not knowing better, but they can't be for willfully blinding themselves to the truth, which certainly can and does occur.

We really don't need Kevin McCarthy blathering about Hunter Biden.  There's no excuse for ignoring the real, and difficult, problems of the day.  You can feed red meat to the dogs, but once that's gone, and they're starving, they'll be coming for you.  

People cheered Mussolini when he marched on Rome.  They then hung around and celebrated his demise 20 years later.  Austrians lined the streets when Hitler visited after the Anschluß, and were pretty glad to see the Nazi go just a few years later.  

People who faced reality and undertook to engage it are better remembered than those who buried their heads in the sand and tried to ignore it.  People don't sing the praises of John C. Calhoun today.  They're not going to sing the praises of Ted Cruz tomorrow.  People remember Lindbergh for what he did heroically, not for being an American Firster before December 7, 1941.

There's an opportunity here to be grasped, but will it be.  Of couse, is there even an audience for it.  The Wyoming GOP has been busy censuring its members for not falling into the fantasy right.  People like to hear that they're beautiful, that smoking won't hurt you, and that you can go ahead and have that fourth beer before you drive home.

Sunday Evening. . . drinking a beer before dinner. . . watching the dog, watch a rabbit. The way life was supposed to be.

 

Something to consider when you see a photo of that buff gal or guy . . .

is are they wealthy or employed in the vapid (i.e., entertainment) industry?

A photo showing a buffed RFK Jr., age 69, brings this up.  I don't know really when it was taken, but people who are logic impaired seem to think this proves his anti vaxing position.

No matter what you think of that, what this proves is that he has piles of time on his hands.

There's a massive difference from being awaked at 3:30 in the morning as United Airlines has cancelled, for the second day in a row, your spouses flight home, and this means you woke up only 30 minutes early, and you go on to get up and fix coffee knowing that everyone you meet today is going to be in a desperate crisis, and you are going to be in crisis central all day long, and then come home and hope that she made it home and isn't stranded somewhere, and to have all of this be normal, than to have all freakin' day to do nothing.

Sure, not everyone who doesn't have to deal with the world all day will look buff. Some will just self-destruct. But part of really looking good, so to speak, is having the time to do it.  And for those in the entertainment industry, well that's their job.

Yeah, a person should take care of themselves.  Many don't. Genes (as the young deaths of some celebrities even show) mean a lot.

But stress, anxiety, injuries and daily living mean a lot too.

Nature worship producing the unnatural.

In the Roman Empire, long before the end, we find nature-worship inevitably producing things that are against nature. Cases like that of Nero have passed into a proverb, when Sadism sat on a throne brazen in the broad daylight. But the truth I mean is something much more subtle and universal than a conventional catalogue of atrocities. What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.

G. W. Chesterton, in St. Francis of Assisi.

Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.

Guardrails on roads aren't put up because if they're not, everyone will drive off the road.  They're put there, so an errant driver doesn't drive off the road and get hurt or killed.

Drinking laws don't exist because, if they don't, everyone will take up drinking at an early age.  They're there because some will, to their detriment, and the laws make it harder.

Controls, of all types, exist as some, but only some, will go over the boundaries into self-destruction, or the destruction of others.

We should have remembered that before we started taking down the guard rails on sexual conduct.

Readers of this blog, if they hit only one or two entries, probably come away with the impression that I'm an arch-conservative or a flaming liberal.

I note that, as readers who only hit this one, are going to think "oh, reactionary conservative".  Not so, my views don't fit easily into a right or left category, and that's because they're all based on a set of guiding principles, one of which is the adherence and belief in science and nature.

Both the left and the right are fully at war with nature right now.  And this is one of the things causing the country to be so massively polarized.

I'm not in the Trumpist right by any means, but lefties who wonder how anyone could be should take stock in this.  Right now, a fair part of the left, and not even the far left, is pretty much invested in normalizing mental illness. We've gone from a state in which an aberrant behavior, but one that didn't otherwise control every aspect of a person's personality, was forced upon society as normal, and forced upon those who bore it as their singular identity, to one in which outright mental illness is now being proclaimed as normal.  There's a pretty big difference between a person experiencing some disordered inclinations, to having those inclinations define them in every way and be celebrated.

There's also a big difference how far down a scale a person goes once they depart from a genetic mean.  Some people, for example, might be excessively materialistic to their personal detriment.  Not too many take that all the way into compulsive theft.  Or, for example, some people might have an inordinate fascination with food.  Calling somebody a glutton is out of style now days, but not too many of those people take it all the way into compulsive overeating.  Some people are inordinately fascinated with themselves, but only a true minority take it into narcissism.  Some people drink more alcohol than they should, but then there are also alcoholics.

Part of what keeps people from going overboard with deeply seated negative personality deviations is societal and legal controls, legal controls being a species of societal ones.  The law will step in if you steal.  Societal pressure, anymore, will step in if you eat too much. You get the point.

Some of our deeply seated natural instincts are the ones that can really get out of control if they are allowed to delve beyond an acceptable mean, and decay into mental illness.  A person has a right to defend themselves, but not to become compulsively violent.  Those who do become psychopaths.  We shouldn't tolerate temping people into being psychopaths, but in fact with do.

As people know that abnormal is in fact not normal, they naturally get up in arms about it at the point where they're told they have to accept it in spite of the evidence their own eyes affords them.  The far right, as personally hypocritical as it is, at least on some social issues doesn't advocate for normalizing mental illness.

The left, in contrast, has at first done everything it could to take down the guardrails. . . we can hardly remember, for example, that Hugh Hefner was once prosecuted for obscenity.  Once that had the predictable results, and the decay really set in, its tried to normalize the decay.

And, as it was only a matter of time, we're just about to go through one more door, maybe, in which a mental illness/deeply destructive compulsion, is about to be regarded as "A Okay".  Inevitably, we're now going through one more door.  Consider this twitter post from the group Gays Against Groomers:

New pedo flag and “orientation” just dropped. Meet the “YAP” community: Youth Attracted Persons.

According to them, they are oppressed, and you are a hateful, fascist bigot if you oppose them.

Normalizing pedophilia was always the goal. They are the next victim class.

And already a Virginia professor is wanting to make sure that the term "minor attracted person" is used rather than pedophile, as the latter term might be regarded as offensive.

That's right.  Since Obergefell, we've gone from altering the normal, universal understanding of marriage, to forced acceptance that there's no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, to chose your own gender, and we're about to go to molesting children being a life choice.

And, take for example, Montana legislator Zachary Raasch.

Never heard of Raasch?  Well, if you are following the news, you've heard of him being proclaimed as a hero for disrupting Montana's legislature.

But not as Raasch, but as the self-proclaimed Zooey Zephyr.

Raasch was a high school wrestler who, at some point, decided he'd rather be a woman, even though that's genetically impossible.  He had himself surgically castrated and a pseudo vagina surgically created and is taking drugs to complete as much of the process as can be.  He's deeply mentally disturbed, as this Twitter post likely demonstrates to anyone who isn't so far gone down this path as to be unable to see.

Rep. Zooey Zephyr

@ZoAndBehold

This is my ideal relationship with a man: one where I'm riding him, and also ready to end his life.

Quote Tweet

SAKON

@sakonlieur

·

Oct 30, 2020

Lose. #原神 #GenshinImpact #Childe #Lumine #rkgk

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1:19 PM · Nov 3, 2020

That's deeply weird.

Raasch is interested in other disturbing things, such as transhumanism.  He's heavily into video gaming.  He's a Manga fan, as the distressing image above shows.  According to one person whose detailed his interests, who is of course only one person, he's  "shows all the classic signs of an autogynephilic—a man who (often spurred by pornography or fetish) becomes sexually aroused by the idea of themselves as a woman."   Raasch's known "relationships" have included at least two other men affecting the trans identity, one of whom was also a "furry".

Raasch has clocked himself in the mantle of a type of crusader, disruptively arguing that not allowing people afflicted with a desire to change their gender will lead to suicide.  Even pro LBGTQ groups assert this argument should not be made as it is counterproductive.  But all of this is instructive.  Starting no later than the 1960s, and perhaps a couple of decades earlier than that, we started taking the fences down.  By the time of Obergefell, we were ready, or at least some were, to knock a stone wall down.  Now it's so far down that a person who is obviously deeply mentally ill is being portrayed as some sort of crusader for civil rights.

And the next step. . . almost taken.

Many have been concerned that the US seems to be sliding towards fascism.  It probably isn't, in literal terms, as fascism properly understood is a corporatist political theory that has no real popularity in the US. What we are sliding towards, however, is on one hand a deeply authoritarian anti-democratic populist right and a deeply anti-natural left.  

Should this get any worse, the left will be more to blame for it than the right.

The left went to war with democracy in the late 1960s and began to advocate for rule by an autocratic court, which it apparently thought it could keep left wing forever, as lawyers were, and are, generally political liberals.  It certainly did keep it left wing for a long time.  Concern over this only developed when the court returned to actually interpreting the law, one really significant actually accomplished during the Trump administration.  Now the left, which was previously perfectly happy to leave the Court completely to itself, is howling with rage over supposed ethics concerns on the Court, something that it didn't care much about previously, and much of which is just a thinly veiled desperate effort to remove justices while the Democrats control the Oval Office and Senate.  At any rate, the left is now deeply dedicated to being wholly at war with human nature, vested in the concept that every human being has a right, basically, to be a god of their own.  Liberal commentators, like Robert Reich, who likely would have thought Raasch nuts up until relatively recently, are all for such fantasies now.

It's well worth remembering that it was the German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese radical left that appeared long before the extreme right in those nations.  German communists, which had its own collection of now benighted individuals who really aren't very admirable in real terms, appeared well before World War One and struggled to seize the country from the less radical Socialist when the German monarchy collapsed in 1918.  The Communists can't be blamed for the Nazis, but fear of Communism certainly contributed to the rise of the Nazis and their electoral success in a major way.  More than a few German voters who voted for the Nazis in 1932 were voting against the Communists.

And the Spanish Communists were headed for a clear usurpation of democracy in Spain before the Spanish right revolted.  The Spanish right was deeply anti-democratic, but the Spanish left wasn't dedicated to it either.

And while the claim that is sometimes made that moral decay in Weimar Germany lead directly to the rise of the Nazis isn't really correct, there's a slight element of truth to that, albeit it's only a piece of a much larger pie.  The Communists of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century were absolute in supporting the libertine.  Marx's dictum that "all wives shall be held in common" was a Communist position, and many early Communists expressed that in their personal lives flagrantly.  Whitaker Chambers notes in Witness than he and his wife became exceptions over time, starting at the point at which she became pregnant, as the expectation was that she'd abort the child, the Communist norm.

It isn't that the Socialist government of Weimar Germany made the country a moral sewer, but it is the case that following the First World War some urban areas of Germany did experience a notable moral decay, if a person can recognize one, that did repel some conservative Germans.  It was not the case that this was a major factor in the Nazis coming to power, but rather just one more thing.

Pre war Naiz poster, swastika removed, showing Hitler being chummy with German children, and therefore appealing to traditional values.  In reality, of course, Hitler never had any children of his own and shacked up with the fairly pathetic Eva Braun until right at the end of the war, marrying her only then.  He wasn't a family values kind of guy, but appealing to traditional Western European values made him seem attractive to some scared elements of German society. . . much the way serial polygamist and generally icky Donald Trump appeals to many legitimately scared Americans now.

And hence why I note it here.  On the right, there's a definite fascination right now with finding a vehicle to return to existential conservative values.  In the more thoughtful camps, this is being expressed in terms of Christian Nationalism. Some are just expressing it in terms of traditional conservatism.  But the populist right is really picking it up as people are shocked by the rapid change in this area and know it to be wrong without thinking deeply on it.  People turned to Trump in the first place, as he basically promised to burn the entire edifice down.

He's promising that again.

Yes, personally he may be morally bankrupt, but then Hitler wasn't a choir boy either.  People, in desperation, will turn to those who seem to be able to get things done.  And in doing that, they'll adopt the conspiracy theories that explain how something so weird could happen.

The left closing a blind eye to the really disturbing events going on here is feeding the right.  It's a rare person who can closely cut between two extremes and not fall into one.  People are being pushed into one here.

And the really mentally ill are being left behind.

This is the second time in recent decades we have done this.  Earlier we decided that people with mental illness, often caused by drugs or alcohol, would be happier if not detained. So we set them out on the streets, where they likely descend further into drugs and alcohol.  Compulsions in this are too can be massively overwhelming.  St. Matt Talbott found that in order to overcome alcoholism he actually had to take routes that avoided taverns, lest he fall into them.

In other words, he put up his own guardrails.

In the area we are referencing here, profound sexual deviance, that's also the case.  Prior to the aftershocks of the Stonewall Riot era, most homosexuals lead pretty normal lives, even if they engaged in the conduct.  The societal guardrails, of which the legal recognition of some of the natural law in the form of laws pertaining to families, men and women, were part of that.  Once that started getting taken down, it left those with pulls, often developed pulls, in other directions to try to stay on the road by themselves.  

Drinking is one thing.  Alcohol is a poison and while the species is long acclimated to it, it's an acquired taste of some degree.  But the biological imperative to reproduce, no matter how much moderns may wish to frustrate it, is wired into us.  The overwhelming majority of human beings will not fall into deviance, but in every society up until this very one, the societal laws, if not the statutory ones, operated to affect guardrails.  Even those people who like to note "but the ancient Greeks" blind their eye to hte fact that no less of a a figure than Plate railed against homosexuality.

Homosexuality, of course, is just one of the deviations, and in contemporary terms it's nearly a garden variety one.  All sorts of other plagues exist in this area, from people addicted to pornography to people who engage in serials conventional affairs. Indeed, the last item is the oldest of the deviations of them all, and probably the one that gets more people killed, even now, than any other.  

Some years ago, on a Catholic Things You Should Know, Fr. Michael O'Loughlin noted being in a group of friends, who were secular friends, in which one of them noted longingly that he wished he could go back and look at women the way he had before he had knowledge, to put it delicately.  There's more than a little to that.  Indeed, it's worth noting how many long married men remarry, and always have, very rapidly after a spouse dies.  It's likely a certain acclimation has something to do with that.  And its been noted that in our modern society, where the rules about monogamy and chastity have broken down, it's become harder for those with serial "partners' to really form a bond.  Indeed, according to psychologist, after men have had eight such partners, their chances of delving down into the below 18 ranks for more dramatically increase.

And the long example of pornography should warn us.  The entire culture is pornofied, but some descend into various types of mental illness due it.  Raasch likely has, although we can't know for sure what caused him to take the deviation that he did.  

But simply asserting that everyone has to accept it as normal makes no more sense than pretnding alcoholism is normal. 

Or, pretending pedophilia is normal.

But the logic is there.  If cutting off your member and having a fake vagina, and taking drugs to affect the appearance of a woman is normal, then pedophilia, which requires a lot less than that, must be too.

But it isn't.  Neither is transgenderism.