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...

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.

The untutored or perhaps commonsense view is that there's something out of order about certain sexual acts. They're "unnatural," as people once said, or "intrinsically disordered," as the Church says today.

Nowadays of course educated people think that's all ridiculous. After all, no one says sodomy or whatnot is miraculous, so it evidently complies with the order of nature. And all intentional actions are unnatural in some sense, since they change what would happen if we let things go their own way.

So to discuss sexual conduct with people today it seems you have to go with the flow and start with the assumption that there's no natural or unnatural in human affairs. Still, there's less to the change than meets the eye. "Free to be you and me" is not the sum of all wisdom. There's still the question how choice should be exercised.

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.

Ever wonder what a country which was run by the faculty of the University of California Berkeley would be like?  Now you know.

SPOLAND, SWEDEN — Mikael Karlsson owns a snowmobile, two hunting dogs and five guns. In his spare time, this soldier-turned-game warden shoots moose and trades potty-training tips with other fathers. Cradling 2-month-old Siri in his arms, he can’t imagine not taking baby leave. “Everyone does.”

From trendy central Stockholm to this village in the rugged forest south of the Arctic Circle, 85 percent of Swedish fathers take parental leave. Those who don’t face questions from family, friends and colleagues. As other countries still tinker with maternity leave and women’s rights, Sweden may be a glimpse of the future.

In this land of Viking lore, men are at the heart of the gender-equality debate. The ponytailed center-right finance minister calls himself a feminist, ads for cleaning products rarely feature women as homemakers, and preschools vet books for gender stereotypes in animal characters. For nearly four decades, governments of all political hues have legislated to give women equal rights at work — and men equal rights at home.

Incredible.  So one country finally achieved sexual equality and all they had to do was take children away from their parents at twelve months of age and brain wash them.

Swedish mothers still take more time off with children — almost four times as much. And some who thought they wanted their men to help raise baby now find themselves coveting more time at home.

But laws reserving at least two months of the generously paid, 13-month parental leave exclusively for fathers — a quota that could well double after the September election — have set off profound social change.

Actually, never mind.  Men are forced to stay home by quotas and women still take nearly eighty percent of paternal leave.  Must not be trying hard enough.  Too many gender roles in animal stories.  

Sweden had already gone further than many countries have now in relieving working mothers: Children had access to highly subsidized preschools from 12 months and grandparents were offered state-sponsored elderly care. The parent on leave got almost a full salary for a year before returning to a guaranteed job, and both could work six-hour days until children entered school. Female employment rates and birth rates had surged to be among the highest in the developed world.

“I always thought if we made it easier for women to work, families would eventually choose a more equal division of parental leave by themselves,” said Mr. Westerberg, 67. “But I gradually became convinced that there wasn’t all that much choice.”

Perfect insight into the liberal mind.  Free to make your own decisions...until you choose wrongly.  

The New York Times wants the reader to get the impression that Sweden’s high birthrate and low divorce rate can be attributed to its proactive feminism, but the article itself makes it clear that there’s massive redistribution from the childless to parents.

Taxes account for 47 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 27 percent in the United States and 40 percent in the European Union overall. The public sector, famous for family-friendly perks, employs one in three workers, including half of all working women. Family benefits cost 3.3 percent of G.D.P., the highest in the world along with Denmark and France, said Willem Adema, senior economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

TFR in Sweden is 1.67.  In France, which is less insane on gender issues, it’s 1.97.  Obviously subsidizing children gets you more of them but the New York Times would rather pretend that feminism leads to a healthier demographic situation than apply a fundamental economic rule.

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.

The elevation of silly girl talk to the level of mountain top wisdom must surely be one of the signs of our coming Oprah-tastic Western apocalypse.

Marie Wilson, author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World , recently posted some silly girl talk, praising the virtue of vulnerability to The Huffington Post. In her piece Wilson uses the example of an oil rig where masculinity was artificially "re-shaped" to create an environment where "men, for the sake of safety and productivity, were encouraged to abandon the bravado, risk taking, and denying failure associated with tough jobs like these and make themselves, vulnerable." She muses that perhaps it would be better for everyone if the world were more like this oil rig, and brazenly incites women to collude to maintain a status quo that keeps "man-ly men behaviors in place."

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.