Cultural Insanity

The dangers of the political gender gap

Young women and men are gravitating towards opposite political extremes, with potentially explosive consequences.

Throughout history, poverty, class and economic self-interest have driven radical political movements. The Bolsheviks harnessed the anger of impoverished workers and peasants to create a movement that controlled the world’s biggest country for seven decades. The Nazis came to power due to both the Great Depression and resentment towards a small but economically nimble Jewish community.

Today, extremist politics is not bubbling up primarily from the economically disaffected, as occurred both in medieval and modern times during periods of upheaval. The self-professed radicals of our age seem more driven by their own inner cultural angst and disturbed psychology.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Culture, Culture Wars

This isn’t a ‘young men’ problem. This is a class problem

The ‘crisis’ among men and boys is another symptom of the elite’s neglect of the working class.

Male privilege. Toxic masculinity. Smash the patriarchy. A thousand dumb slogans have shaped our debate about the respective lot of men and women for the past decade or more. But this past week, the agreed-upon narrative – that essentially nothing has changed since Victoria was on the throne; that women remain as stifled and disenfranchised as ever, while men continue to lord it over them – has begun to collide with reality.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity

Why the West must fight for its history

The culture war against the past is depriving us of a future.

In my new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight For Its History, I argue that unless we retrieve our historical memory, we are doomed to a state of cultural paralysis.

This act of retrieval won’t be easy. Our historical memory is under sustained assault by a significant swathe of our cultural elites. While many involved in this culture war appear to be focussed on controlling the way we speak and think in the here and now, their main mission is to render toxic the legacy of Western civilisation. This ceaseless attack on our history threatens to distort society’s memory of the past and create a state of historical amnesia.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Cultural Marxism, Culture, Culture Wars

It’s not a culture war when we do it

Did you hear the news? The ‘era of culture wars is over’. Lisa Nandy, the UK’s new Labourite culture secretary, said so. In a speech yesterday to her new staff at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Nandy tossed all that ‘division’ and ‘polarisation’ into the dustbin of history, all in a few short lines. ‘In recent years we’ve found multiple ways to divide ourselves from one another’, she said. ‘Changing that is the mission of this department.’

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Culture, Culture Wars

No English Culture for England

Over the weekend, The Daily Telegraph published an article which revealed that almost “£1.5 million in taxpayer funding has been awarded to a research project that aims to ‘decolonise’ folk singing.” Such research is surprisingly typical within universities at least in one respect, namely that the funding is awarded on the grounds that the conclusion of the research is determined long before any research begins. Hence, in no way can this be understood as scholarship, but rather it possesses both the form and the content of propaganda, and for a particular kind of regime.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted in"Anti-White Racism", Cultural Insanity, Cultural Marxism, Culture

Bill Maher defends Chiefs star Harrison Butker saying he doesn’t get ‘what the big crime is’ following kicker’s controversial commencement speech

Late-night political talk show host Bill Maher defended Kansas City Chiefs star Harrison Butker on his show, stating he does not get ‘what the big crime is’ following the kicker’s controversial commencement speech last weekend.

Butker has been under fire for nearly a week after his talking points as the guest speaker during Benedictine College were deemed by some to be sexist and racist.

In addition, Butker has been slammed for using his Catholic faith as a shield to project his beliefs, such as women are best as ‘homemakers’.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity

The Civilizational Masochism of the West

We are swiftly approaching the consequences of our suicidal blindness.

Last week, Joe Biden issued a schoolmarmish warning to Israel, which he has been browbeating for months to placate his party’s anti-Israel left and Muslim American voters in Michigan, a critical swing state. Speaking to the press, he threatened, “There’s got to be a ceasefire because Ramadan – if we get into circumstances where this continues to Ramadan, Israel and Jerusalem could be very, very dangerous.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCanada, Cultural Insanity, Culture, Culture Wars, USA

A fight for the soul of the West – How the suits are emasculating the boots

As if straight out of Roger Ramjet, when United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley admits Ukraine’s counter-offensive ‘hasn’t been a total failure’, you know it’s not long until this proxy war against Russia is exposed as a disaster. Just like the fall of Rome, it wasn’t the boots who lost Ukraine it was the suits. Right now, on so many levels, we are in a fight for the soul of the West. This is what the suits miss. That’s what is at stake. And Ukraine is a good example of how much damage can be done by so few to the lives of so many.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Culture

The crusade against ‘whiteness’ is destroying culture.

The cancellation of classical music

Until August 2020, Dona Vaughn had been the longtime artistic director of opera at the Manhattan School of Music. Her experience included singing, acting and directing on and off Broadway and on opera stages. The Manhattan School of Music’s 2019 production of Saverio Mercadante’s little-known opera buffa, I due Figaro, showed her influence in stunningly charismatic and witty student performances.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Culture Wars

EU Parliament Deliberately Supports Anti-Christian Propaganda

“Edgy” Eurotrash Art

On May 2nd, Swedish far-left MEP Malin Björk distinguished herself in the European Parliament by inaugurating a photographic exhibition featuring openly provocative and anti-Christian pictures—depicting a Christ who is sometimes black, sometimes homosexual, and surrounded by apostles who have become LGBT militants. Several conservative MEPs of different nationalities seized on the scandal to denounce the provocation.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity

Whetting the Appetite for Battle

The West is in the midst of a culture war which is often dull, sometimes hilarious, and always exhausting. Fighting Back: Defending Britain and the West in the Culture War, produced by The New Culture Forum, dispels such fatigue and whets the appetite for battle. With nine short essays, it aims to rejuvenate ordinary people with thoughtful reflections and practical advice on how to navigate a relentless culture war which otherwise saps them of strength.

Who is the enemy? It is nowhere near as brutal as the Nazi or Soviet totalitarian experiments, though its lack of solidity or a defined outline can make it more challenging to confront directly. The ‘wokesters,’ as they have come to be called, prefer Kafkaesque probes into alleged thought crime to the torture rack, they opt for digital cancellation before reaching for the iron rod, and they skilfully weaponize liberal values, such as freedom and equality, rather than dragging them through the mud like unsubtle tyrants.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Cultural Marxism, Culture Wars

The Ads Tell the Story

In Against the Great Reset, Harry Stein asks how the Left has managed to subvert the culture and trample so effectively upon the fundamental concepts of decency, equality, justice, morality, and even human biology itself, not to mention humor and modesty. The answer may be found not only in policy and power wielded from the top but also in the gradual saturation of the public mind with a vast set of implicit assumptions regarding what constitutes enlightened societal advancement. In other words, a large part of the answer is the Left’s near-absolute domination of mass popular culture — music, film, sports, news media, entertainment, and so on — all infused with the values and conventions that reflect the progressivist worldview. “We have been slow to recognize,” Stein writes, “the extent to which the culture has been weaponized against us.”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Cultural Marxism, Culture, Culture Wars

Where the Boys Aren’t

Culture wars over gender obscure the deepening educational struggles of young males.

According to the Tao of blue-state T-shirts—the sort that every nine-year-old soccer-playing girl in my Brooklyn neighborhood wears—“The Future Is Female.” On college campuses, that future has arrived. Women are now 60 percent of college graduates, men a mere 40 percent. This gender gap is not new—among college grads, the ratio has moved in women’s favor since the early 1980s—but it has reached a record extent, and people are paying attention.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity

The culture war over the Middle Ages

The left thinks it was too white while the Catholic New Right sees much to admire

There is a war afoot, here in late civilization, over the meaning and legacy of the Middle Ages. Two distinct fronts have emerged from either side of our political spectrum. On the left, in the academy, medievalism is being diversified out of existence, its defining Western characteristics relegating it to a smaller place in a global mosaic. On the right, a certain breed of new conservative is reclaiming the Middle Ages as a keystone period in which order and reason ruled, instead of the swivel-headed “scientism” of pure observation brought on by the Enlightenment.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCultural Insanity, Cultural Marxism, Culture, Culture Wars