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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Can a Bigotted, Hateful Person Change?

There are some who frequent the Tavern that say that a leopard cannot change its spots. And that may well be so in the case of wild cats. But what of people? Can a mad person be cured? Can a Muslim or a leftie ever become sane? Can a feminist ever become a constructive human being?

Enough shrinks drink here to confirm that it is very hard to cure a mad person. Several have made a fine living trying. We are seeing a new breed of ex-feminists starting to actually recognise and acknowledge that not all men are rapists and that some might even be quite nice chaps. 

But the polls continually show that almost half and sometimes over half of the populations of most western countries are as thick as the turds stuck up constipated rectums when it comes to political views. They are 'Lefties'. They have delusions of sanity, just as strong as a feminist's delusion of adequacy.




Some can be otherwise quite nice people, when you avoid talking of anying of moment. It is often quite easy to like a leftie when they are sedate. Or sedated.

But it is hard to discuss things with a leftie. They shout a lot. They throw things. At least they do not behead people in the street.  Feminist lefties of course love being naked in the street, shoving their lady parts 'in ya face', and write on themselves - usually disgusting words. But then women are more verbally gifted, they tell us.

The Tavern bouncer has his work cut out ejecting the rowdies and just keeping the ones who we do let stay, quietly conversing with the sane drinkers. Those sane patrons show great Charity! 

And Hope.

And some lefties sometimes do listen when someone can get a word in edgeways, long enough to have his views change a little as Truth sinks in through the cracks. The road to sanity is long and tough.  It is best tackled with the lubrication of Grace.

Mr Danusha V. Goska dropped by, contrite and full of eagerness to tell of his cure. I don't intend to repeat everything he had to say as it was a LOT !,  but can give a fairly comprehensive account from memory. You may have to read all of what he says in the American Thinker.  

http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/ten_reasons_i_am_no_longer_a_leftist.html

He had a few very sound reasons why he stopped being a leftie and joined the diminished legion of the sane. 

Every one newly sane person helps.


How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. 
 I wore a button saying "Eat the Rich." To me it wasn't a metaphor.
That is deep! But whayhey. What light shines through yonder broken window? 
I voted Republican in the last presidential election.

Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. 
This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. 
It's an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.
 Now starts a long list: milestones along a ten mile road. Starting with the easy first steps as a reverse order, looking back and ending with the most identifyable marker of the Beast within.

10) Huffiness.

In the late 1990s I was reading Anatomy of the Spirit, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.

Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors' meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!

Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said "Yes" or "No."

Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: 
victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. 
We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. 
I did not want to live that way anymore. 
I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God

I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.

I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. 

Rolling his eyes, Prof. X  (see the article, please) went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. 
The disconnect between leftists' announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. 
Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.

Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. 
Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.

Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can't climb stairs.
!!! Er.... duh !
I appreciate Professor X's desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon.
(An example of the insanity of the leftie I alluded to at the start) 
On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.

Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others' pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this -- "Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant." But doctors do this for a reason.
They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. 
In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one's history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.



9) Selective Outrage

I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.

A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. 
"You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture's rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation."

When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, "binders full of women." He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.

Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart's "Daily Show," Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their "war on women."
This has already reached ludicrous proportions with missiles being lobbed onto the most innocuos supportive statements FOR women. 
I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. 
Nothing. Zip. Crickets. 
I'm not saying that that outrage does not exist. I'm saying I never saw it.

The left's selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. 
It's an "I hate" phenomenon, rather than an "I love" phenomenon.



8.) It's the thought that counts

My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: "Think Globally; Screw up Locally." 
In other words, "Love Humanity but Hate People."

It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:
"If you want your dream to be,

Build it slow and surely.

Small beginnings greater ends.

Heartfelt work grows purely."

I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan's San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.

Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that's what we leftists do wrong. That's what we've got to get right.
We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and "tolerance," not for our competence or accomplishments. 
We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.

Peace Corps did not focus on the "small beginnings" necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. 
Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. 
Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. 
Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. 
"Only intolerant oppressors judge others' cultures."

I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people's clothing. 
The sisters did not want to save the world. 
Someone already had
The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, "Don't look for big things, just do small things with great love.
Delousing homeless people's clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.

7) Leftists hate my people.

I'm a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.

Karl Marx promised the workers' paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class -- think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.

Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan's 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.

In the end, though, we didn't show up for the Marxist happily ever after. 
We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. 
Being a Catholic m'self, I often bemoan the propensity of Catholics to be Lefties. We are raised to be compassionate but so easily get swayed by 'end justifies the means' rhetoric of the left, and the pseudo-compassion of taxing the Hell out of other people to pay for our charitable works - and claiming the kudos, of course. 

'Zozchial Justytz' is all the rage in some Catholic parishes, as if there were some alternative. Anti-social injustice somewhere nearby?  I'll say there is and it is usually from the left of politics that feed taxpayers' money into Church coffers. 

It has to stop.

Catholics have no business being socialists.  Socialism is just a sneaky little cousin of Communism. To Catholics I always say, "Try being a Catholic".
Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood -- "Workers of the world, unite!" But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. 
Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn't adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. 
"Property is theft" is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.

Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. 
Leftists turned on us. 
This isn't just ancient history. In 2004, What's the Matter with Kansas? spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what's good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, What's the Matter with America?

Leftists freely label poor whites as "redneck," "white trash," "trailer trash," and "hillbilly." At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. 
President Bill Clinton's advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find."

The left's visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. 
One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. 
The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a "major shock" to discover "the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people." The Reclusive Leftist focuses onVanity Fair journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists "hate-fuck conservative women" and denounces Palin as a "small town hickoid" who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.
Just a reminder here that Mr Goska uses 'Liberal' in that strange American sense.  It is the US way of labelling Lefties / Labourites / Socialists / yea even unto Mao himself. Yes, Mao was a 'Liberal'.
Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. 
Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit.  
In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald's, must accept that he is a recipient of "white privilege" – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.

The left is still looking for its proletariat. 
It supports mass immigration for this reason. 
Harvard's George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called "America’s leading immigration economist." Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America's working poor.

It's more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.



6) I believe in God.

Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition
I had to point out that such attitude is now so endemic that even many middle-of-the-road, and quite nice, ordinary people, seem to hate Christianity with a fervour more fitting for the Plague.  Mrs Beelzebub must be rubbing her claws with glee.
You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a "dead Jew on a stick" or a "zombie" and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented "flying spaghetti monster." 
You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. 
You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. 
You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.

5 & 4) Straw men and "In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs."

It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.

"Truth is that which serves the party." 
The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. 
One of those eggs was objective truth.

Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York's WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn't such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. 
He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, "And you support that?"

Well of course THE CALLER did not support that, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.

On June 16, 2014, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. 
Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington Post's credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a "family friend" of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. 
It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, "making stuff up."
I had to interject there. It was more than that. She was paid by a major News outlet to put propaganda and lies and smears. Let's get that right.  Leftists LIE all the time. Her leader is diabolic - the Princess of Lies.
Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents -- including Muslims -- from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.



2 & 3) It doesn't work.  Other approaches work better.

I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.

Ouch.
I grew up among "Greatest Generation" Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, "As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit." In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends' parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.
Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state's open wound.
I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.
Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. 
They don't know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. 
They don't realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. 
I know they don't know these things because they tell me. 
One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.

My students do know -- because they have been taught this -- that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. 
My students know -- because they have been drilled in this -- that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. 
My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.

As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book White Guilt, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. 
The generous white liberal still gets top billing.

In Dominque La Pierre's 1985 novel City of Joy, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. "In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you."

That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.

After I realized that our approaches don't work, I started reading about other approaches. 
I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue's castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is "My God, he's right."



1) Hate.

If hate were the only reason, I'd stop being a leftist for this reason alone.

Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.
Before that I'd had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.
In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.
If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you'd quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.
One topic thread was entitled "What do you view as disgusting about modern America?" The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.
Those posting messages in this left-wing forum publicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. 

You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn't hold any anti-war rally, because you didn't hate Obama.

I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances -- I had no right-wing friends -- expressed nothing like this. 
My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. 
I'm not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don't know that they were. I'm speaking here, merely, about language.
Some bright spark listening did interject at this point with, "Ah, but... if you had a tenner handy would you bet on it?" There were many heads nodding and an "I would" came from the back somewhere. (Give that man a pint !) 

In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn't work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.

A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as "Bushitler." 

The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it's not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.

I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would -- car exhaust in the garage. 
I suddenly realized that my "eat the rich" lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.

In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn't president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.

I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. 
Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone -- even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health -- meant a great deal to me.

Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, "No, I'm not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody."

"Julie," I said, "You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don't. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something -- capitalism."

"Yes, but I'm very nice about it," she insisted. "I always protest with a smile."


Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I'm sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don't know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.

I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. 
But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I've stumbled upon a left-wing website.

Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being "sex positive," one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. 
Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like "fag," so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like "butt hurt." Leftists taunt right-wingers as "tea baggers." The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.

Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was "prone." Carmichael's misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement
McCreight quoted a prominent atheist's reply to a woman critic. 
"I will make you a rape victim if you don't fuck off... I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I'm going to rape you with my fist."



A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC's Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment's loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won't repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir's comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.

I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I'll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.
I needed to leave the left 
I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.

Poor old Dan slumped over the bar after that long monologue. He really, desperately needed a cool Pint. 

I was pleased to pull one for him and kept pulling the rest of the evening. He had done well. He had given a lot of personal experience.

Another man on the Road Away from Perdition. Always welcome in this Tavern.

Peace.

Pax Dei.

( A small chaser glass to go with your Pint. All photos here are for illustration only. They do not necessarily refer to the passage above or below or to the people discussed. They simply add to the piece. Get you to think. Get it ?) 




Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Is Australia going Mad?

Caution: Disturbing pictures.

One wonders about our 'society'. The talk in the Tavern wanders across many subjects as one can imagine in a pub. But the state of our Nation and the World seems to be dominated by the stupidity and malevolence of many aspects. 

If it isn't the everyday distaste about men, due to the agitprop of feminism, or the parlous state of  dependancy on 'Guvmunt' caused by an almost fatal attraction to socialism and zealous Greenery, it is the fact that we are slowly being infiltrated by the sheer evil of Islam. 

Stupidity we have always had. But rarely did it do as much damage as the 'cultural'  mohammed-come-lately's'. Several screeds were circulating in the bars today, causing spluttering into glasses.


A child bride allegedly married off at 12 was told sharia law “overrides” Australian law, court documents revealed.
In a case that has brought awareness of secret child brides in Australia, the girl’s father and the 26-year-old man she “wed” were charged in February over numerous child sex offences.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/man-marries-off-daughter-12-in-islamic-ceremony-bride-believed-sharia-law-override/story-fni0cx12-1226996078122
Documents that formed part of a successful apprehended violence order application by police at the time against the girl’s “husband” state that the young girl “believed or had been informed that sharia law overrides the Australian law”.
“She stated that together with the accused they had been trying to get him registered as her legal guardian with Centrelink in order to obtain any welfare benefits they could,” the court documents state.
The 'equality' that feminists don't talk about. Illustration only. 
We have not seen such in Sydney.... yet.

The police allege in the AVO document that the 26-year-old man, who was charged with 25 counts of sexual intercourse with a child, admitted to officers on the day he was arrested that he had had sex with the girl daily since the religious ceremony in the living room of the girl’s Hunter Valley home on January 12.

Children being raped is usually sheeted home to 'Men !! (tm). 'All men are rapists', say the Feminazis who control vast amounts of the public purse with which to calumnise decent men. But they are curiously silent about Muslim men. 

Our laws get mangled and imposed on decent people, jailing them for praying outside an abortion clinic, but the charges against such Islamic practices are as rare as hen's teeth.

Here's another:
A Sydney sheikh has been accused of funding a central figure in the Syrian conflict, an Australian-Lebanese dual national with ties to Al Qaeda and who runs a well-armed militia in northern Lebanon.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-30/sydney-sheikh-accused-of-funding-militia-leader-in-syria/5561340
 Who ever heard of a Sydney Sheikh for Heaven's sake? 

Why are these people allowed 'dual-nationality'?

I know Tony Abbott has re-introduced Knighthoods, but since when did Sheikhs form part of our heritage?
Zouheir Issa has been preaching at south-west Sydney's Al-Azhar Belmore Mosque since coming to Australia in 2005. An adherent of the ultraconservative Salafi Islamic strain, he is no friend to the Syrian government of Bashar al Assad.
But what has been unrevealed until now is that Australian authorities believe he has (been) provided funding to Houssam Sabbagh - a Lebanese man who lived in Sydney for two decades but is today a powerful militia leader in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli.
Mr Sabbagh is wanted in Lebanon on weapons charges. He is regularly described in the Lebanese press as being involved with Al Qaeda and helping to provide fighters and weapons for jihadist groups fighting in Syria, including the Al Qaeda-linked group, Jabhat Al-Nusrah. 
Funding organisations such as Al-Nusrah, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation in Australia is a crime.
Preaching the 'Religion of Peace'. Covert or die.

The allegations will concern authorities, who are already on the alert due to the dozens of young Australians who have travelled to Syria to fight with groups such as Al-Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). 
"It's the greatest security threat to Australia this century," former head of counter terrorism for Scotland Yard, Nick O'Brien, told the ABC's 7.30 program.

Illegal? But oh so commonplace. But the luvvies who let these bastards in to pollute our society still want more of the same to come here illegally. 


The greatest security threat to Australia can be laid right at the feet of the Socialist Governments we have had to endure here.

Want more?
A teenage boy from Western Sydney has become Australia’s second suicide bomber, blowing himself up in a brutal terrorist attack which killed at least five people and injured up to 90 in a Baghdad market. The Saturday Telegraph has learned the boy was 16 years old when he left Sydney for Iraq late last year to join terrorist insurgents in Syria but had since turned 17.
Intelligence sources have confirmed the boy’s age and that he was from Western Sydney. It is believed he travelled with other young men seeking to join ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) forces fighting in Syria and Iraq, and had family links to the now notorious convicted Sydney terrorist Khaled Sharrouf. 
His family are believed to have been aware of his intentions but could not stop him.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sydney-teen-kills-five-in-suicide-bombing-on-crowded-iraqi-market/story-fni0cx12-1226994186108
No doubt if his parents HAD tried to stop him he could have had a zozchial verker get him an allowance from Centrelink to live in a doss house with his mates. 

I am all for Freedom. 

These people are free to live elsewhere.

They should not have been enabled to live here in the first place and should all be deported.

ANY connection with Islam should be outlawed in Oz. Not because of the 'religion'. Not in any manner restricting religious freedom.


Islam is NOT a religion. 


It is a diabolical hate creed. 

Specifically Anti-Christian.



Caution. I do not know if this is real or just some macabre modern 'artist's' Tate Gallery exhibit.


It is no more a religion than the Aztec 'priesthood' in old South America.

For all the protests that it is a 'religion of Peace', one knows a person or ideology ......
by what it does.

There is not a word coming from our Government about the wholesale slaughter of Christians going on in the Middle East. Not a word.

Pax.

Monday, July 21, 2014

Military Man of Good Conscience speaks out

This tavern honours Good military men. And women -although far fewer women take to the hard life of soldiering. The Landlord - that's me - the old Tavern Keeper, wore the uniform for many, many years and the old armour stands in the corner still.

The soldier obeys orders. He conducts himself well. But he fights against other military men who do not conduct themselves well.

His sword is not wholly his own. It has a 'shape'. 




A soldier must only obey orders that are legal and moral. All others he must resist; disobey. Even when those orders come from his own Generals. 

The soldier alone is the arbiter of his conscience. It is a human feature that has a 'growth path' like all other aspects.

He must act according to his own informed and mature conscience, not simply obey a star on someone else's shoulder or the latest zozchial trend.

It happens that sometimes the conscience of the senior officer falls well short of sense, soundness and even legitimacy. 


In which case the soldier must say 'NO'


Major Bernard Gaynor is a man of conscience and duty. He has been sacked from the Australian Army for being a 'sound' man; a man of sound conscience.

He has pointed to the rank hypocrisy of his Generals.

He has refused to sully his uniform and his oath.

He is paying the price.

So it was with some attentive pleasure  from many who gathered in the Oz Room today - with the walls lifted to include those in the US Room -  as the Major sat with a fine lady lawyer, Christine Niles, and answered some quite incisive questions. 

Christine welcomed Bernard to her radio show, telling us how he is a veteran of the Australian Defence Force; a fine man whose commission was terminated because he voiced his Catholic convictions with regard to Sydney's gay pride parade. 

He explained his story and responded to misinformation that has been spread. 


Men and women of goodwill - not all soldiers of God are men or in uniform - and fair-mindedness will applaud the Major's stance.

He WILL not be alone, either in Oz or the US.

The US Military started its campaign against Catholics several years ago with the onset of its current disatrously-conscienced President. It is spreading.

I may need to polish the old armour ready for another round of fighting again. 

At my age.... well, one is never too old. 

As another fine warrior shouted out, "Bernard, Sir, it is a good day to die".




Pax. But it comes at a price.



Please support this courageous man by visiting his website and helping if you can:   http://bernardgaynor.com.au


Saturday, July 19, 2014

Waking up.

A fine young man came by today with a tale of woe. It was one I have heard so many times, yet, oddly, so many others have not. They seem blissfully unaware.

He did not give himself airs or praise. He was an ordinary Joe. Jon actually. Jonathan Bornstein. Nor did he pick on this Tavern as his first port in a storm, but here he gets to speak out too as so many other poor sods have found a compassionate ear in this company.

Just how many times does a chap have to tell the same story - one he thought he was alone in telling - before people listen?

The few occasions when you might see the same or similar tales told in the 'mainstream' it is usually annotated with cries of 'Stop whining", or 'Man-up", as though that were the end of the matter.


But this is serious.

So, I will just relate in his own words and you can make your own mind up. I will pull a few pints.




I am coming out of the closet. Yep. Like many, it took me a long time to come to peace with it, years of soul-searching and introspection. But now I have come out to myself and to the world, and I feel like a weight has been taken off my chest. 
I am a men’s rights activist.
Growing up in the cradle of western feminism, the Upper West Side of New York City, and attending enlightened and well-funded public schools (where as kids we labored over the guilt-inducing importance of the failed Equal Rights Amendment), I was raised to be a feminist. A full-blown—male—feminist.
While I never advocated a policy of feminism, I am indeed the product of it. 
A complete product of it. I had brilliant female teachers who advocated feminism. I shared co-ed classrooms with brilliant young girls whom I admired, whose intelligence I wished I could emulate. We wrote papers on the first female Supreme Court Jurist, Sandra Day O’Connor. 
While Dad turned me on to the Yankees, Mom took me to the ballet and exposed me to her interests: The Met, Lincoln Center, refined stuff, etc. Mom worked; she was an accomplished full-time educator raising two boys along with my father in our nuclear family. Our synagogues were egalitarian.
Never was I exposed to any messages that specifically reduced women or girls. That was just philistine! Any suggestion that women were on their own merits inferior to men would have been met with rejection and ridicule. Looking back on this indoctrination now, I see a lot of mixed messages.
See, radical feminism exploits the natural confidence of young boys. It seizes boys’ engrained disposition that girls are separate and it guilts them. 
Yes, girls are separate from boys, aren’t they? Us boys are taught from a young age that girls are indeed separate. 
We are taught to be gentle with girls, not rough-house with them, to treat them as ladies, to defer to their feelings, to please them.
After all, men are 'Privileged, aren't we.



Young boys are taught to exalt girls. Boys are the dirty ones who ride bikes and fight over a touchdown. Girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. 
Then, BAM! We enter adolescence and we are told that girls are oppressed, sidelined, overlook, victimized by some boogie-man patriarchy. 
What the hell just happened? 
First I was trained to separate and elevate them, to regard them as fully equals. Now they are ringing the bell of cosmic victimization. Did I miss something?
I finally became acquainted with radical feminist policy when 
my role as a father was legally shattered. 
Enter adultery by my wife, followed by an allegation of invisible domestic violence. Jon’s life, over. 

No proof of a crime. Whatever one thinks of my character, (fine, I am obviously scum), let’s assume the worst of me, for argument’s sake. The crucial point is that without a shred of proof, but with complaints spoken by an admitted and exposed adulterer, my life was ruined. 
Where are the witnesses? The hospital record? The photos? The police reports? None to be found.
This low threshold of “proof” raises the obvious constitutional question about the role of the state. Should the state be so reactive that fathers are removed from children because of the words of a hysterical and adulterous woman who, as a person with the sudden liability of abandoning the marriage, has an interest in my removal? 
I cannot think of a more tragic sexist policy. 
And with this I was removed from my children, my home, my clothes, my heirlooms, my photos, my books. My whole life.
The state’s mobilization to remove me was the result of the Radical Feminist Legal Complex.
Look, I get it. If a dude hits his wife, charge him. Take him down. Felony. Existing statutes provide for this. 
But this dilemma is far more insidious. Apparently, New York operates along the thought-crime-like premise that domestic violence need not be “violent”—a concept at war with language and reason, as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently wrote. 
New York entertains something called implied violence. It is absurdia infinitum. 
My adulterous wife conveniently claimed fear of me. 
This is violence to New York.


I see it all the time. And, what is more I can see a strange and twisted logic in it. The criminal also 'FEARS' the consequences of being found out and punished, so he/she avoids the police and decent company. 


But our 'social', domestic laws say that it is illegal for a woman to fear, and anyone who is in the vicinity and/or that she has harmed must be guilty of making her afraid. HE gets punished. Men are 'oppressors' we are told, and 'Privileged'.
Since that day in September 2010, I have been to hell and back. Every participant in the systemic process has responded to my pleas with an apathy the likes of which I never thought could exist in a government to which I paid taxed, that once employed me, whose military I was prepared to join, whose public universities educated me.
Another matter to point out is that Jonathon had no choice but to register for the military, otherwise he would not have been able to have even a driving licence let alone go to University. His sister did not have to register. 
I am viewed differently now. As farm dung that fertilizes a massive—MASSIVE!—governmental process. There is an unmatched zeal “to get me”:  law enforcement, DAs, judges, court-appointed psychologists, attorneys ad litim—all shielded with immunity.
Today I have a new education to boast. I now know of VAWA, child support, orders of protection available like condoms at the health center, the Duluth model of domestic violence re-education theories, a complicit legal guild, Title IX, Title IV-D, university sexism, a consumer culture that mocks dads, prison, etc. 
There is an endless horizon of sexual-politics, radical-feminism policies that are reshaping every sense about manhood and fatherhood with which I was raised to see as proper and good. And took as holy. How stupid, right?
And I also learned something else: 
I am hated. 
Hated. Yes. I am hated. I get no presumption of favor—ever.  
The more I seek to remain a dad, the more I am told I am “angry” and thus unfit. 
The state is deaf to me and to what it does to me. I am also painfully alone.
I have tried to get my story out to every media outlet I can think of. I have found no support anywhere in my fight to be a father. Seems only fellow dads care about dads. 
Lawyers want money. Cops sneer or arrest. Legislatures are insanely politicized, as are judiciaries. 
Most dads’ groups are seen as “reactive” and “unfocused.” 
The silence of unavailable resources tortures me.
All of this is the result of a social/legal policy informed by vengeful radical feminist ideology, one that seeks to swing with a hammer than to extract with a tweezer.
Look, I am a lot of things: a loving father is paramount. The last thing I wanted is to be “that guy,” embittered and ranting about feminism. 
I just cannot figure out when I became such a bad guy.
So why am I now a men’s rights activist? My children. These policies keep me from them. I love them. They need me. And I need them. If this is a bad impulse, I am nothing.
http://womenformen.org/2014/07/19/the-state-is-deaf-to-me/
http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights/why-im-a-mens-rights-activist-now/
Jonathan Bornstein is a life-long resident of New York City. He spent many years as a High School educator; today he is in the private sector. His greatest role was as a Dad. Since 2010 he has been victimized by the state's oppressive and persecutorial policies that keep him alienated from his two children, Aaron and Lillianne.
Jonathon has drinking rights in the Knight & Drummer. He has friends here who understand.

Pax