A heck of a build up there. Well worth the wait, though. +1, pede.
“GK Chesterton once said that to criticise religion because it leads people to kill each other is like criticising love because it has the same effect. All the best things we have, when abused, will cause bad things to happen. The need for sacrifice, to obey, to make a gift of your life is in all of us and it’s a deep thing. In the Islamic world today, people are trying to rejoin themselves to an antiquated and ancient faith and the result is massive violence when they encounter people who have not done that. We’d say that sense of sacrifice is good but only if you’re sacrificing your own life; once you sacrifice another’s life you’ve overstepped the mark.” ― Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” ― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
“It is not enough to be nice; you have to be good. We are attracted by nice people; but only on the assumption that their niceness is a sign of goodness.” ― Roger Scruton
“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.” ― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
“By living in a spirit of forgiveness we not only uphold the core value of citizenship but also find the path to social membership that we need. Happiness does not come from the pursuit of pleasure, nor is it guaranteed by freedom, it comes from sacrifice. That is the message of the christian religion and it is the message that is conveyed by all the memorable works of our culture. It is the message that has been lost in the noise of repudiation, but which it seems to me can be heard once again if we devote our energies to retrieving it. And in the christian tradition the primary act of sacrifice is forgiveness. The one who forgives sacrifices vengeance and renounces thereby a part of himself for the sake of another.” ― Roger Scruton
“Styles may change, details may come and go, but the broad demands of aesthetic judgement are permanent.” ― Roger Scruton
“The sense of beauty puts a brake upon destruction, by representing its object as irreplaceable. When the world looks back at me with my eyes, as it does in aesthetic experience, it is also addressing me in another way. Something is being revealed to me, and I am being made to stand still and absorb it. It is of course nonsense to suggest that there are naiads in the trees and dryads in the groves. What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being - the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task. This is a truth of theology that demands exposition as such.” ― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
“Beauty is vanishing from our world because we live as though it did not matter.” ― Roger Scruton, Beauty
“A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don’t. Deconstruction deconstructs itself, and disappears up its own behind, leaving only a disembodied smile and a faint smell of sulphur.” ― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey
“Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.” ― Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.” ― Roger Scruton, Face of God: The Gifford Lectures
“It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.” ― Roger Scruton
“It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since...it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.” ― Roger Scruton, A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism
“Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” ― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative
“Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.” ― Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative
“The disposition, in any conflict, to side with ‘them’ against ‘us’, and the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours’. Being the opposite of xenophobia I propose to call this state of mind oikophobia, by which I mean (stretching the Greek a little) the repudiation of inheritance and home.” ― Roger Scruton, England and the Need for Nations
“... while we are familiar with the adverse effect of drink on an empty stomach, we are now witnessing the far worse effect of drink on an empty mind.” ― Roger Scruton, I Drink Therefore I Am: A Philosopher's Guide to Wine tags: drinking, wine
“We appreciate beautiful things not for their utility only, but also for what they are in themselves—or more plausibly, for how they appear in themselves.” ― Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction
“We should reject the view that high culture, as the possession of an elite, is of no use to those who don’t possess it. This is as false as the view that science or higher mathematics are useless to those who don’t understand them. Scientific knowledge exists because a few talented people are prepared to devote their energy to pursuing it. That is what a university is for: and since you cannot pass on difficult knowledge without discriminating between the students who can absorb it and those who cannot, discrimination is a social good. The same is true of high culture. Those able to acquire it will be a minority and the process of cultural transmission will be critically impeded if that teacher must teach Mozart and Lady Gaga side by side to satisfy some egalitarian agenda.” ― Roger Scruton
“We live in an extremely anxious age in which the core of our beliefs has been undermined to a great extent by scientific thinking. People have a hunger for answers but an inability to formulate the questions, partly because of the short-term view of things that’s encouraged by the media and partly because there seems to be no centre to which people can turn in order to see what the heart of the discussion is. I think this is a failure of philosophy in our days – and also of the culture that our English-speaking world has generated – around the idea of an abstract question.” ― Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
“Music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.” ― Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
“Leftwing people find it very hard to get on with rightwing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with leftwing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.” ― Roger Scruton
“The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible".” ― Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
“We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home—the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right—through decorating, arranging, creating—are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.”
“Faking depends on a measure of complicity between the perpetrator and the victim, who together conspire to believe what they don’t believe and to feel what they are incapable of feeling. There are fake beliefs, fake opinions, fake kinds of expertise. There is also fake emotion, which comes about when people debase the forms and the language in which true feeling can take root, so that they are no longer fully aware of the difference between the true and the false. Kitsch is one very important example of this. The kitsch work of art is not a response to the real world, but a fabrication designed to replace it. Yet both producer and consumer conspire to persuade each other that what they feel in and through the kitsch work of art is something deep, important and real.
Anyone can lie. One need only have the requisite intention — in other words, to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, by contrast, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. In an important sense, therefore, faking is not something that can be intended, even though it comes about through intentional actions. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed, but his pretence is merely a continuation of his lying strategy. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member. Understanding this phenomenon is, it seems to me, integral to understanding how a high culture works, and how it can become corrupted.” ― Roger Scruton
“The doctrine of Original sin, which is contained in the story of Genesis – one of the most beautiful concentrated metaphors in existence – is about the way we human beings fall from treating each other as subjects to treating each other as objects. Love, respect and forgiveness come from that. When we treat each other as objects, then we get the concentration camps.” ― Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
Can't wait until (if?) we get the ability to post pictures directly to the website here. Wonder if the admins are doing any work or have any goodies up their sleeves to surprise us? heh, probably not but would be nice.
Very good. I like it.
We have the best Baldwins, don't we folks? The baldwin? The best. Some say. In the world. You decide. *points*
He needs to spend it on better and more media! Please, God!
That is the entire thing! Media, media, media. They brainwash kids with endless media surrounding them at all times until they really believe that the US is evil. Obama funneled millions through Tony "Van" Jones into ColorOfChange expressly to get negative images of blacks off the air. For a reason! You want America to be 'cool' and adults to vote in their own best interests and support the party that supports this country? Get to em when they're 5-25. Surround them with music, movies, magazine articles, comics even. Speak out! Fund the arts! Fund the storytellers!
Everything that informs them of how the world is! Maybe don't waste money on movies as they've got that locked down. We're the party of the future and innovation and markets (kindy)? Ok, even if Silicon valley is against us, do a ton of websites with digital art and hypertextual, smart narratives that tell a story ,,,a true story,,, through 15 different webpages. Etc. Be innovative but we need to do a waaay better job of getting our message out there. On websites where normies are, not just here, where nobody (but us) can see it!
"Please don't kill us." - Rose McGowan
She's got the lines down already? These people are only strong when behind a screen and biting the hand that feeds them. I'm starting to think it's really a case of low self-esteem and masochism. They respond so obediently to people halfway around the globe that want to toss them off the nearest rooftop but have nothing but contempt for gentleman cowboys and Southerners in their own backyard!
The evils of slavery! When we're the ONLY ones who stopped slavery!! https://ibb.co/vhB7MdC
Toxic masculinity and patriarchy when we are KNOWN for women on pedestals, chivalry and troubadours!! https://ibb.co/V9NfnhC
And yet somehow they did it! They've convinced 80% that the opposite is true! How? School curriculums that come from sociology departments, teachers all the way from 2nd grade,when you're the most vulnerable...they're taking over the place of your own parents, your own mother!, these teachers, on up to higher education and (mainly) non-stop movies, news, magazine articles, comics (*)and songs. Slavery, Nazis, racist caricatures on the side of non-racism based movies, 'disappearing' any decent, white male role model... 24/7 from birth! Up through elementary, middle school, college...over and over...like dripping water on a stone... hundreds, thousands of movies all saying the same thing, with endless articles and songs hitting you from every angle all saying the same thing: the US is an Evil Empire. Whites are evil. Men are evil. It's all passive with no rational facts or stats, just assumed. And the kids eat it up. Most adults never break free but asre so enmeshed in their lifestyle politics, only Democrats are 'cool', that they never break free.
(*) People think comics are silly. They are. But they literally are brainwashing kids before they even know it's happening. What kind of adult does that? https://ibb.co/W3mL0Bq
It was one of the better ones, too! Not many ads. Now it's imgur or whatever
What is the answer, though? As long as that border is open...thousands will flood in.
Yeah. I guess? Are you okay there, BradMD?
Misspelled Swedish. Sue me.
More marching in circles. Ho hum. Most are just bored kids though. If we could, strange as it may seem!, redirect that energy to joining some local conservative group or even non-expressly-political activity...these silly Democrats would lose 50% of their support.
Ahh! So close! It should go, "Kick ass and eat ice cream...and I;m all out of ice cream!" Still good, though.