Richard T. Ford's new article, Rights Gone Wrong, laments the Alinskyite strategy increasingly deployed by White males of forcing the Civil Rights hustle to live up to its own rhetoric. He drips with contempt for his fellow males, appealing to his warped notion of "common sense". For him, common sense boils down to the unspoken premise of the Civil Rights Movement: It's a weapon to bludgeon White males. It's inappropriate and nonsensical to apply the statutes as written, because the intention is the opposite of what's written. It's a fig leaf of universal rhetoric over the giant throbbing obscenity of anti-White and anti-male zero-sum identity politics.

Ford's leopard-print thong is in a bunch because a man alleged sexual discrimination in a Mother's Day contest. Of course he was sexually discriminated against for being a man, it was a Mother's Day contest. Ford echoes the popular sentiment which is that the man should shut up and "man-up". In a sane world, I would concur. However, there's only one way to fight a social and legal system which is half-retarded and throws the retarded half in your lap: go full retard. There's nothing wrong with ladies' nights and Congressional Black Caucuses, but when the system sanctions fairness for thee and retardation for me, I have a moral obligation to support what this gentleman had the foresight and courage to do.

He was defeated, of course...

Jaenelle instigated an epic firestorm with her recent article, "Where are All the Women?" Whether her position is correct or incorrect, she deserves credit for stepping up and starting the discussion. She's correct that the overt hostility toward women in some circles is an impediment to progress and she's also correct that women are generally less inclined—both by nature and nurture - to be a bit less politically vocal and comfortable with the concomitant competitiveness and hostility that comes with it.

Unfortunately, she leaves one with the impression that Women,  the identity group, are boycotting the good fight for our people and our future until a list of conditions are met. If a cause is both righteous and existential, then those who are awakened to the necessity of that cause have a moral obligation to fight for it regardless of what challenges they face from either their enemies or their "allies". To take up dissident political work is to be goaded into arena by spectators who are content to clap and cheer as the lion chases you in circles. It's not easy, but matter how off-putting some creeper bellowing about how you ought to shut up and make babies can be, it's not that guy's fault if women fail to do their part.

One might conclude if one didn't know better that Jaenelle is liable to run off and whimper on Morris Dees' gaudy red velvet sofa if we men didn't "shape up".

Her own actions contradict that interpretation. Jaenelle has been at the forefront of public advocacy, tirelessly working to organize and mobilize real world White Advocacy. As a co-founder of Hoosier Nation, she's played a pivotal role in building one of the most active and effective activist workshops in America from scratch. As the sole proprietor of Lighthouse Literature, she's doing as much as anybody to help spread the ideas behind our movement. She's faced down the illegal immigrant protesters and "antifa" thugs on the statehouse steps, choked on pepper spray, been kicked out of venues after bricks were thrown through the plate-glass windows,  had credible threats on both herself and her loved ones, and paid for much of that experience out of her own purse.

The real question is the very opposite of Jaenelle's. Men are the ones more or less absent from the struggle to preserve our White American heritage and way of life. Sure, there are relatively few women involved in the so-called "movement". But this struggle shouldn't be defined in terms of the "stuckment", but in on who is out in the real world struggling for White American interests and goals. By that standard, most hobbyists (and women are generally not hobbyists) who call themselves pro-White would barely qualify at all, and the vast army of moms, wives, and sisters keeping America segregated one neighborhood at a time would qualify.

Our enemies are quick to confirm that "racism" in America has taken on a softer, more subtle, more insidious tone. In other words, it's become more feminine. America's women are the ones putting their kids in "good schools", bothering the Homeowner's Association about all the cars parked next door until the Mexicans are forced out of the neighborhood, lobbying for zoning policies that prohibit lime green houses with purple shutters, championing the fascist zero-tolerance and anti-drug policies that make excellent proxies for race, and smirking warmly when their real estate clients propose to move into "that" neighborhood.

Had White America's women faltered to the extent that we men have in the past century, there would be nothing left for us to preserve. Where are all the men at? Had our women not found hundreds of millions of clever little ways to resist the federal government's tyrannical social engineering campaign, America would be a Brazilian circus by now. Had they contented themselves with bestowing grandiose titles upon themselves in the humid confines of their parents' basements and calling it "pro-White", we would all be hosed.

Steve Sailer has demonstrated that the phenomenon of "White Flight"—the first thing our opponents point to when attempting to name examples of Whites acting in their group interests - is driven almost exclusively by women of child-bearing age. Even the most confidently pro-White men find themselves going for the cheaper apartments that are closer to the office. Even the most liberal soccer moms find themselves going  for the lily-white subdivision. If, as Jaenelle suggested and many commenters put in more blunt terms, the men's work is overt political struggle and the women's work is practical local and familial toiling, then there's no contest.

Our birth rate is hovering below replacement-rate, now. Feminists are a big part of the problem. Heidi Beirich is still stomping around college campuses in search of "racism". There's much more that women can do to help, and I hope Jaenelle fleshes out her proposal for more female-friendly outreach and advocacy options. As a society, both sexes are failing to measure up to the legacy we inherited from our forefathers and pioneer mothers. If we're to earn the rich inheritance we've been entrusted with, both men and women must stop playing by the enemy's rules and thinking of our separate genders as competing identity groups. We must start thinking of ourselves as complementary halves of a singular tribe joined in a united front against the globalists and their third world minions.

From the New York Times...

Is Jousting the Next Extreme Sport?

The problem is that Andrews and Adams joust in a style they call “full contact,” which, while popular in North America, is considered by the rest of the world to be unnecessarily dangerous. It’s a reputation that isn’t helped by the video on YouTube showing the two men describing their many injuries, including the time a lance bruised Andrews’s heart and he nearly died from a pulmonary embolism. (He was back jousting five days after his release from the hospital.)

...

North American- and European-style jousters can spend all day criticizing one another’s style of competition, and they frequently do. The “full contact” jousters find the I.J.L. style froufrou and weak, dismissing their combat as “a sorority pillow fight.” I.J.L. jousters, for their part, portray the full-contact jousters as a bunch of ego-driven braggarts who have substituted brute force for safety, elegance and finesse. They dismiss the Americans’ lumberyard lances as “closet poles,” their armor as looking “like a trash can” and their draft horses as “tractors with four legs.” (Both Hedgecock and the Europeans use swifter draft crosses rather than the full-blooded drafts used by American jousters.)

...

“The sport of jousting is only going to survive in the United States if there is that ferocity in it,” Adams says. “If it’s just a bunch of guys hitting each other with balsa-wood lances, the only people going will be the Renaissance crowd.”

Lurking under the surface of the debate over jousting styles are deeper questions about masculinity itself. “American culture is a certain way,” Nowrick says. “The hubris and the braggadocio about how tough I am, the whole Rocky Balboa thing. But when you go to Europe, there’s a different yardstick by which men are measured.”

And in related news...

Historians locate King Arthur's Round Table

Legend has it that his Knights would gather before battle at a round table where they would receive instructions from their King.

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.

Jack Donovan joins Richard to discuss the decline of manhood, the denigration of heroes, and what can be done about it.

The first part of this piece, here, discussed Hanna Rosin's recent piece for The Atlantic, titled "The End of Men."

Part II: Shop Class as Soulcraft, "Idiot Work" and Other Observations

We are pre-occupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in the light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.

-- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a young man, Matthew B. Crawford developed an interest in repairing automobiles and motorcycles. The son of a physicist, he found that there was a difference between his father’s abstract, theoretical understanding of things and the tacit, real-world knowledge of the experienced gearheads he bumped elbows with at the shop. He worked his way though parts of college as an electrician, and found the work to be both satisfying and mentally engaging.

After picking up a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, he took his place as a “knowledge worker,” writing abstracts-by-formula for a company that indexed scholarly articles. His more esteemed job paid less, and was somehow less mentally engaging. The work lacked integrity, because in his words, it “could not be animated by the goods that were intrinsic to it.” His company produced products (abstracts), but the company was owned by a media conglomerate, and those products were merely a set of numbers in that company’s portfolio of holdings. The quality of the abstract itself didn’t matter; it didn’t really even matter if he understood what he was writing about, and the quantity of abstracts demanded guaranteed that even a smart guy like Crawford could never really be invested in what he was doing. It was busy work, and it encouraged a kind of lackadaisical attitude among his co-workers. One fellow confessed to him that he was doing heroin on the job.

Crawford eventually went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. He took a high paying job at a Washington, D.C. think tank, and was tasked with coming up with scholarly-sounding arguments that “put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” Any honest person with a substantial vocabulary and an aptitude for fancy writing will tell you that it is easier to come up with dazzling bullshit than it is to actually think. (See also: “the art world”)

After five months at the think tank, Crawford quit and opened up his own motorcycle repair shop. An education in the “liberal” arts didn’t lead to anything as freeing as being a man who is directly accountable for the quality of his own work, solving the kinds of problems that can’t simply be talked away. A motorcycle either runs properly or it doesn’t. You end up with the satisfaction of actually having fixed something and the feeling that you earned your fee, or you to take responsibility for your inability to fix it and make it right with the customer.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how work, beginning with manufacturing work but extending to today’s “knowledge work,” has been degraded by a separation between thinking and doing. He offers the example of a nineteenth century wheelwright, whose craft demanded that he know how to select trees and when to fell them, and whose skillfulness and ingenuity was tested by the unique characteristics of each piece of wood. The work was holistic; as he did the work, he had to think about the end product. There was a sense of individual agency in the work, and each wheel he completed was proof of the quality of his labor -- something he could be proud of. However, when the individual craftsman was replaced by factory assembly line, the work could no longer be holistic. The work of one man was separated into processes to be performed by many men, interchangeably. A series of steps that were once challenging and engaging became repetitive drudgery, the performance of a process. The expert, personal, tacit knowledge of the craftsman was replaced, often inadequately, by the documentation of his “process,” and the understanding of the whole was concentrated into the hands of a few who in most cases didn’t actually do the work and understood it only in the abstract. The systemizing of work into process has become the norm, and it applies to white collar work as well.

Under Discussion: WAR, by Sebastian Junger

In WAR, Sebastian Junger notes that while pure objectivity is hard enough to maintain while covering a city council meeting -- let alone in the middle of a war -- he committed himself to writing “honestly” about the American soldiers he lived (and very nearly died) with as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger gives a raw, real, gripping and insightful account of life and death in “The Valley,” but in WAR he never comes across as pretentious, preachy or even particularly political. Instead, Junger aims to get across what it feels like to be a man at war in a place where firefights often happen several times a day.

It is common to see soldiers portrayed as “victims” of war. Even as politicians and the media mechanically display a reverence for combat veterans and speak vaguely about “heroism” and “personal sacrifice,” it is often clear that many are uncomfortable with the idea that there are men who willingly kill for a living. Junger’s take on it is that they kill to keep on living, to stop someone from killing them. But back home many people speak of war as if it is something terrible that happened to soldiers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Junger refreshingly admits that “war is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them.” Like Sergeant First Class William James in The Hurt Locker (2008), a lot of men apparently end up missing combat when they are sent home.

A Conversation With Arthur from Arthur's Hall of Viking Manliness.

http://arthurshall.com/

Arthur's Hall has been around a while -- covering weightlifting, guns, heavy metal, conservative politics. All of the best things in life, except of course..."To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women." Tell me a bit about how you got started writing and how the site has evolved over the years.

Well obviously Conan's wisdom is something that we should all live by!

When I launched the site, I had no concept that it would become what it has become. Shatner and I just thought it would be funny to post some of my aggressively offensive and terrifically true observations on the Net. It was not long before I had a good following of readers and I quickly came to the realization that there is a latent desire for masculine camaraderie that is sorely lacking in our post-modern emasculated society.

I have worked hard to create a site that represents the true virtues of masculinity while maintaining a level of humor and irreverence.  It is a difficult balance and I have to say I have done a damn good job of making it work.

Sebastian Junger discusses for whom warriors will die, and for whom they won't. 

This essay, invoking knightly virtue, the Fall of the Roman Empire and the tale of Parzival from Tom Hoffman at The American Thinker should be of interest to readers of Virtus.

When Masculine Virtues Go Out of Fashion

The culture war begun in the sixties has, in large part, been won by the left. Nowhere is this clearer than in the feminization of men. The virtues of manhood which had been extolled and celebrated throughout the middle ages right up to the 1950s have been completely expunged from academia and pop culture. The baby boom generation was the last to be taught the values of rugged individualism, risk-taking, courage, bravery, loyalty, and reverence for tradition. John Wayne epitomized the rugged individual who was committed to fighting "the bad guy," but he was only one of a whole host of competing figures cut out of the same cloth. What happened?

Read the rest at The American Thinker.

 

Meanwhile, the left debates whether or not it should "explode" masculinity.Just in case you thought for a moment that Hoffman took it over-the-top.

Washington City Paper - Sexist Comments of the Week: Exploding Masculinity Edition

Also, Carrie Lukas notes that feminism is no longer about equality (golf clap) at National Review Online.

Under Discussion: Geoffroi de Charny's Book of Chivalry

A Western Hagakure

The Hagakure is a collection of commentaries on the Way of the Samurai by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, recorded between 1709 and 1716. Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a samurai during a period of peace who was not permitted to commit seppuku following the death of his retainer, Nabeshima Mitsushige. He retired to the mountains and lived as a hermit, frustrated by what he saw as a collapse of Traditional samurai culture into decadence and weakness. The Hagakure is often contradictory and curmudgeonly, and it is characterized by dark humor and what Yukio Mishima, who wrote his own commentary on the book, referred to as a "manly nihilism." Whereas Musashi's Book of Five Rings focuses more on swordsmanship and strategy, the Hagakure is more directly about a Way of living and dying.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo was a trained samurai, but he never saw combat. Geoffroi de Charny did.

Charny died heroically in battle, still clutching the oriflamme, a sacred banner charged to him in 1355 by Jean II, King of France. The bearer of the oriflamme was to be "the most worthy and adept warrior," a knight "noble in intention and deed, unwavering, virtuous, loyal, adept, and chivalrous." Charny had proved himself thus again and again in battle. When Jean II feared that French knights were becoming decadent, weak and cowardly, he formed the Order of the Star, a group of virtuous knights meant to reform French knighthood. Charny was an exemplary member, and it is likely that he produced The Book of Chivalry at Jean II's request.

The Book of Chivalry is not a manual on tactics or technique, it is a treatise on how to live -- and die -- like a knight. It describes "The Way of the Knight." And, importantly, it was written --likely dictated aloud to a scribe as the Hagakure was -- by an actual knight. Charny was not a monk or a poet or a politician or a novelist or a Victorian or a modern historian. He was a battle tested knight held in high regard as an exemplar of chivalry by his king and his peers. Chivalry was his Way.