Culture

The Stories That Saved the West

The Stories That Saved the West

What do fantastic tales have to do with the survival of our civilization?

The world that plunged from one World War to the next with an economic disaster in between demanded full seriousness to survive. Storytelling could surely wait.

In his new book on J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, The War for Middle Earth, Joseph Loconte answers: to the contrary. More than any other time, those years gave rise to stories that have strengthened the souls and minds, the hearts and the hands of all who must deal with darkness. Their stories uncover an inextinguishable flame and the beckoning path it shows back towards home.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture

Culture Beyond Politics

Culture Beyond Politics

You may not be much interested in politics, but politics—to borrow from Trotsky’s famous dictum on war—is certainly interested in you. With indigenous land acknowledgements to sit through, rainbow-coloured sidewalks to tiptoe over, and approved slogans to recite on cue, political preoccupation has colonized nearly all thinking. Entertainment, education, sport, business, and even private conscience now arrive freighted with ideological significance. Everything must justify itself politically before it can simply exist.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture, Culture Wars

The Feminine Wound: The Radicalization of Young Women Is about More than the Internet and Social Media

The Feminine Wound: The Radicalization of Young Women Is about More than the Internet and Social Media

Are women okay? The answer, clearly, is no. Women are not okay. The young ones, especially.

This week, Britain’s New Statesman introduced us to “the Angry Young Women,” an expanding coven of radical, unstable, men-hating, activist women. This is maybe the first time a mainstream outlet in the UK has acknowledged the precipitous leftward drift of young women and the major effects it’s having on British society: on politics, culture, relations between the sexes—pretty much everything you can think of, really.

Whether it’s Israel’s war in Gaza, the “Climate Crisis,” the Patriarchy, racism, or the prospect of a Reform government forcing them out of the workforce and back into the home, there to be tethered to the stove and the marital bed for the rest of their days, Britain’s Angry Young Women are “teetering on the edge of an anxiety attack” at any moment.

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

Why Morgan Wallen Terrifies the Left

His success wasn’t cleared by the cultural gatekeepers.

There’s a peculiar talent NPR has perfected over the years: the ability to moralize and condescend in the same breath, all while pretending they’re simply offering insight. Their latest exercise in public character trial — disguised as cultural analysis — centers on Morgan Wallen, a man whose real crime seems to be success without permission.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture, Culture Wars

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

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

The truth about ‘white rural rage’

Progressives have run out of empathy

A good American progressive is meant to disapprove of disparaging political stereotypes. But that hasn’t stopped them gleefully embracing the caricature of the enraged rural American. You know the tropes; they’re the last ones you can utter in respectable conversation: “white trash”, “redneck”, “hillbilly”, all them ignorant belligerents in stark raving anger ready to storm the Capitol.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture, Culture Wars, USA

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

Two-Thirds of Canadians Are Against ‘Cultural Socialist’ Attitudes: Survey

Two-thirds of Canadians oppose “cultural socialist” attitudes, says a survey and study by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

Key findings suggest that Canadians predominantly oppose the cultural socialist stance by a ratio of about 2 to 1, reflecting a “remarkable” similarity in opinion trends with their American and British counterparts.

The survey found minimal differences between Francophone and Anglophone Canadians on these issues. However, Canadians generally show higher trust in elite political culture, including journalists, teachers, and academics, than those in the broader Anglosphere.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture, Culture Wars

How Britain killed off its musical tribes

When the Teddy boys burst onto the scene at the start of the drab Fifties, they established the template for all subcultures to follow. There have always been ultra-loyal music fans of individual artists, but this was something else: a look, and a lifestyle. The pattern usually went something like this: establish a uniform, adopt a musical preference, stir up the media to a predictable frenzy (wittingly or unwittingly), be denounced in Parliament, endure hand-wringing editorials declaring that civilisation is about to collapse, and then gradually become yesterday’s news as the hysteria blows over. Oh and, most discreditably of all, be written off as old farts by a younger subculture who have stepped up to take your place in the firing line.

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture, UK

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 Real Reason for Vinyl’s Resurgence

Algorithms do not control the choices of everyone.

Music on vinyl outsold compact discs in the United States last year. The last time that happened the Soviet Union, Eastern Airlines, and Roy Orbison still existed.

The grooved disc record, whatever the size or speed, essentially spent a human lifetime as the primary way Americans purchased recorded music.

He’s right about “Modern music”

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by Blazingcatfur••0•Posted inCulture

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