What is Moral Inversion?

 From Frank Wright:

What we call ‘progress’ - which is usually taken to mean the moral and intellectual progress of mankind inspired by the Enlightenment – therefore inexorably results in the emptying out of the human soul. Liberalism and technology assist in the process, just as they also help to undermine the Divine. This is the Archimedean point of existence from which all sense, moral and otherwise, flows.

How does Liberalism do this? We are living in the end stage of Liberalism, which I have described elsewhere as the third religion of Man. The others – Fascism and Communism – have already expired in barbarism, as all utopian cults are wont to do.

The end stage of Liberalism explains the relation of Liberalism to moral inversion in several ways. Liberalism is the religion of Liberated Man, of the Liberty of action, of belief, of ownership and expression. To mention these basic precepts is also to indicate how poorly Liberalism is faring today.

Why is Liberalism so ill? Why is there so little liberty left? To recap, the last two years have seen people lose their liberty en masse due to a health emergency feverishly supported by the frail, the elderly and those with an interest in justifying their political legitimacy. The unfreedom of the last two years has given the political class a shot in the arm – a temporary sense of power and of immunity to consequences – which is proving to exact a cost that may be fatal.

The populations of the liberal democracies have seen that their so-called liberties can be taken away. Ditto their property, and also their sense of bodily autonomy. This panic has seen dramatic limitations on free speech applied to mentions of alternative medications, vaccine dangers and injury, statistics on mortality and comorbidity and on various measures such as the indemnity from prosecution of the novel mRNA treatment manufacturers. All this is deeply illiberal, and downright immoral. Perversely, it is the very people who ten years’ previously would have despised Big Pharma and its skulduggery who are most enthusiastic about supporting them now without question. This in itself is a noteworthy moral inversion.

The legal paradox of Liberalism is also evident elsewhere. In the aggressive promotion of individual rights, Liberalism finds itself in a quandary. It becomes necessary to preserve the claims of extreme individuals from the oppression of the majority by enacting laws which restrict majority preference from being expressed and which sanction majority opinion. Minority groups with favourable legal leverage have benefited enormously from Liberalism’s endorsement of deeply illiberal laws to ring fence their chosen beliefs and behaviours with the threat of punishment. Public expressions of fact, as in the case of women, or dislike - as with the hate speech laws of the UK – can and do attract the attention of the police. (Read more.)

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Largest Underground City

 From Western Journal:

In Turkey, archaeologists think they may have found the largest underground city in the world — and it was potentially used to hide persecuted Christians. The discovery, made in the Mardin province in southeastern Turkey, was first reported earlier this month. The news was initially reported by the Turkish government’s state-run Anadolu Agency, in an article published in Turkey’s Daily Sabah newspaper. According to the Anadolu Agency, artifacts dating from the second and third centuries A.D. were found “in an underground city featuring places of worship, silos, water wells and passages with corridors.” The Jerusalem Post noted the researchers excavating it believe it could be the largest underground city in the world. The city was in the Midyat district, already known for its rich, historical significance. (Read more.)

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Men's Clothing of the Seventeenth Century

 

From ECW Living History Resources:

The Wenceslaus Hollar engravings featured here were fetched from the Hollar section of Wikimedia Commons. All the images displayed are British (as far as I know). Dutch genre paintings are not included as it is uncertain that the same style of clothing was worn there at this time (1620-1650).

See Also The 1640s Picturebook, Costume & Stuff from the English Civil War. (Read more.)

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The Perils of Tik Tok

 From Crisis:

Now we see the fruits: isolation from the recent pandemic has accelerated existing downward trends in children’s behavior and education. Any school teacher will tell you that the new epidemic is a spike in wildly disruptive and inappropriate student misbehavior, fueled partly by students’ shared love of Internet videos. Students who were previously well-behaved in school have begun to act out. Students know shocking words that one wouldn’t even normally hear on television or in their families. Students know a huge number of inappropriate gestures and dance moves, and they all learn them around the same time. In schools, students congregate around screens at any opportunity; and if not that, they spend their time talking about what’s online. (Read more.)

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Is Ukraine’s War Now America’s War?

 From PJB:

Last week, sources leaked to The New York Times that, in Ukraine’s targeting and killing of Russian generals and the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, U.S. intelligence played an indispensable role. Apparently, our intel people identified and located for the Ukrainian forces what became the targets of their deadly attacks. Why U.S. intelligence would do this seems inexplicable.

By claiming credit for Ukraine’s most visible military successes, we diminish the achievements of that country’s own forces. By bragging publicly that we helped engineer the killing of Russian generals and the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, we taunt Russian President Vladimir Putin. We provoke him into retaliating in kind against us, thereby raising the possibility of a wider U.S.-Russia war that could escalate into World War III. Moreover, U.S. boasting like this plays right into Putin’s narrative that Russia is facing and fighting in Ukraine a U.S.-led alliance that is out to crush Russia.

Indeed, why are we going beyond assistance to the Ukrainians in defending themselves, into making this American’s war? When Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Poland following her visit to Kyiv, she virtually embraced the idea of the Ukraine-Russia war as now being America’s war, declaring, “America stands with Ukraine. We stand with Ukraine until victory is won.” (Read more.)

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Quest for the Grave of Scotia

 From Ancient Origins:

Queen Scotia appears in a chronical called the Book of Leinster , a medieval Irish manuscript which was compiled in around 1160 AD. The book was compiled by an abbot named Áed Ua Crimthainn who deeply respected the traditions and history of Ireland, even when they were at odds with his views as a Christian or his reasonable beliefs as a well-educated man.

She is described as the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh, the wife of a Greek king, and a contemporary of the Biblical Moses who allegedly cured her husband after he was bitten by a venomous snake. Both Scotia and her husband King Gaythelos were exiled from Egypt for unspecified reasons during a time of great upheaval, and it is after this that they traveled to Europe where they founded both the Scots in modern day Scotland and the Gaels in Ireland. Scotia gave her name to the Scots and to Scotland and Gaythelos gave his name to the Gaels. Scotia’s death in battle was supposedly the result of the pregnant woman attempting to jump a bank on horseback.

The myth of Queen Scotia has traditionally been regarded by historians as entirely fictitious. It was recorded by an abbot at a time where people in Christian countries wanted to assert their ancient roots, and links to important Biblical figures. It is particularly noteworthy that Scotia’s husband was said to have been healed by Moses.

The site of Scotia’s Grave itself could be a way for a place so remote from the original locations in the Bible to steak a believable claim to having Biblical links. ‘Burial place of the wife of a man who once met Moses’ is vague enough to be believable and unremarkable enough that it does not warrant extensive investigation to verify it, while still referencing one of the more important figures in the Old Testament. (Read more.)

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Hill House

From Architectural Digest:

After running her company out of a string of New York co-working spaces, Nell Diamond—founder of the endearing lifestyle brand Hill House Home—was ready to settle into what she describes as her “big-girl office.” As with most coming-of-age stories, appearances play a role: To properly outfit the frill-filled brand’s SoHo office, Diamond tapped longtime friend CeCe Barfield Thompson.

Over the course of six months, Barfield Thompson pored over Hill House Home’s stash of romantic prints that appear across its bedding, homeware, and clothing lines and translated them into uplifting interiors. “Nell shared all her art with me, and it was such an amazing opportunity,” Barfield Thompson tells AD PRO. “So much of my job is synthesizing a personality. I took a brand and did that same exercise, but instead of pulling from my library, I got to pull from Nell’s.”

Hill House Home, famed for its flouncy Nap dress, was founded in 2016, and ever since it’s felt like a community as much as a business, Diamond says. That’s why Barfield Thompson envisioned the office as a clubhouse, beginning with the wowing entry swathed in blue-on-white botanicals. “When people walk in, I want them to be transported. You come off the elevator into a dark hallway, and then you’re in this boudoir,” Diamond says. A riff on a classy ladies’ dressing room of yore—complete with fainting couch, curtained wardrobe, and frilly vanity skirt—this dreamy area is the only one devoid of natural light, providing Barfield Thompson the opportunity to “play with intense color and pattern,” the designer points out. (Read more.)

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We Awoke and Were Angels

 From Crisis:

It becomes hard to ignore the dissonance which then arises when essential value is ascribed to such accidents of embodied human life as race. We are told that real distinctions obtain on the level of race, distinctions which do not admit of gender’s celebrated fluidity. More still, racial distinctions bear with them qualitative moral distinctions. To be of a certain skin color is ineluctably to participate in a structural dialectic with definite ethical implications. Thus, we speak of brown bodies and white bodies as players in a supremacist power dynamic, phenotypically relegated to a role in a hopeless drama.

In such a dialectic, we seem to be thrown back upon an essentialist viewpoint, one in which existence is deeply conditioned by essence. Yet the dialectical movement goes a step further into what may be a deeper, more insidious angelism than that which the Sartrean view entails. For those who speak or act in violation of the structural moral code, damnation is swift and of course eternal.

Those, for instance, whose remarks on Twitter or Facebook have once been deemed racist, sexist, transphobic, and so on, are themselves in perpetuity racist, sexist, or transphobic. Whatever personal enlightenment they later achieve, whatever act of atonement they in time perform, avails nothing. They have gainsaid the Gospel of Wokeness, and their tongues must be cut out. (Read more.)

Also from Crisis:

The Left is currently in full meltdown-mode over Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. Its days of controlling what can and cannot be said on one of the world’s largest social media platforms appears to be ending. Blue check liberals are now threatening to leave Twitter, much like many conservatives left the social media giant after it increased its level of censorship in the wake of January 6th.

When conservatives flocked to Gab and Parler back then, many liberals complained that those outlets were just echo chambers that didn’t give all sides of an issue (their irony meter apparently being broken). Now, however, with Musk promising to make Twitter more open to what the Left considers unacceptable speech, liberals are looking for a safer space in which to vent.

Enter counter.social, which advertises “No trolls. No abuse. No ads. No fake-news. No foreign influence operations.” They have “zero tolerance” for any “fake news,” ban anyone coming from unacceptable countries (such as Russia), and will not allow any counter-narrative speech.

I decided to give Counter Social a try, just to see how serious they were about controlling speech. (Read more.)

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Venice and Versailles

 From The Express:

Located just outside Paris, the Palace of Versailles is one of the world’s most opulent buildings. The national landmark is the former royal residence of Louis XIV, who used the palace as a way of controlling the French aristocracy. It was originally built for Louis XIII in the 17th Century as a relatively modest hunting lodge. However, the site underwent major renovations during the reign of Louis XIV, who transformed it into the mega-palace we know today. The Sun King is thought to have shelled out £1.5billion in today’s money on the building to create the building of his dreams. Louis would host up to 10,000 royals, aristocrats, and courtiers in the enormous 700-room building. One of the most famous parts of the palace is the Hall of Mirrors, which features 17 arches filled with 257 mirrors. Due to the sheer scale of this room, during construction Louis’ finance minister was forced to turn to Venetian mirror makers to provide huge quantities of bespoke glass, which could not be made in France. The Italian craftsmen were part of a secretive guild in Venice who were threatened with their lives if they took their glass-making skills abroad. (Read more.)

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