Feeling Old

     Now and then, my years weigh upon me in a commanding way. It’s like they’re saying “You’re an old man! Why aren’t you acting like one? Get to it!” And of course I must comply. Anything else would risk… uh, well, something.

     We all have our roles to play. Mine is Funny Curmudgeon. I must make people laugh using my years and the lumber-room of my damnably retentive memory. While that might not seem consistent with the curmudgeonly mentality, it is nevertheless a public service of sorts. Among other things, it extends the probable lifetimes of curmudgeons everywhere.

     But I must admit that it doesn’t always work out. I just had an encounter that made me wonder about our young folks. You know, the ones who don’t know how lucky they are.

     It started thus:

How does a person get the Holy Spirit?

— YellowJacket 🐝 (@yellowbee0) October 22, 2026

     Being a religious man, such questions will always get my respectful attention. So I provided a perfectly responsive reply:

@yellowbee0 You have to save 500 S&H Green Stamps and bring them to an authorized redemption center. 😉

— Armand Morelon (@ArmandJville) October 22, 2026

     My interlocutor replied thus:

@ArmandJville ?

— YellowJacket 🐝 (@yellowbee0) October 22, 2026

     …and I had a moment of pure existential despair.

     She didn’t know about S&H Green Stamps! How is this possible? Is there anyone whose parents didn’t save Green Stamps?

     Well, all right, yes, there were a lot of other “loyalty program” stamps:

     Greenbax Stamps offered by Piggly Wiggly, Gold Bell Gift Stamps (in the Midwest), Triple S Stamps (offered by Grand Union Supermarkets), Gold Bond Stamps, Blue Chip Stamps, Plaid Stamps (a project of A&P Supermarkets), Top Value Stamps, King Korn Stamps, Quality Stamps, Gunn Brothers given by Safeway, Buccaneer, and Eagle Stamps (a project of several divisions of the May Department Stores Co. of St. Louis, Missouri and offered, notably, by May Company stores, supermarkets, drug stores, gas stations, and dry cleaners in the midwest area).

     …but Green Stamps ruled in the Northeast until the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company – that’s the A&P, to you Philistines with no respect for great corporate institutions – introduced Plaid Stamps to our district. My mother became an A&P fanatic and accumulated thousands of them… and forever after wondered what to do with her leftover Green Stamps. Well, into every life and all that.

     But seriously, how could any product of a Twentieth Century upbringing not know about loyalty programs? Didn’t her dad collect the game cards, cheap steak knives, and fragile tumblers from the local gas station? Today’s version of such programs may be found at credit-card companies, with their gift programs and cash-back deals. The idea is the same: Get the customer locked in. It’s one of marketing’s perennial agenda items.

     The story behind loyalty programs is bittersweet. Back then, most goods for sale were somewhat price-controlled, if not by the State then by the manufacturer. That applied especially to bulk commodities such as gasoline. So discounting had a lower bound: when a retailer reached that bound, he had to come up with something else to offer the customer for his loyalty. That happens with goods that are oversold, or for which there are too many sources.

     Well, tempora mutantur, and so forth. But my incredulity at my interlocutor not knowing about Green Stamps sent me swiftly to the sideboard. I’ve enjoyed a chilled glass of Harvey’s, have started on a second one, and reality’s edges have grown agreeably soft. Never mind the exceptionally clever pun; I toss off a dozen of those in a ten-minute conversation. Besides, I’m sure it will come in handy at some future time.

Last-Ditch Tactics

     Apologies for the lack of a piece yesterday. I had to go to one of the most forbidding places in America: the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. The experience very nearly ruined me. I spent the remainder of the day swatting imaginary insects and chanting old Al Stewart songs. Trust me: you would not have wanted to be around me.

     Anyway, the following brief video is what caught my eye this morning:

ON UCHICAGO CAMPUS: U.S. Senator from Michigan Elissa Slotkin hopes planned political prosecutions of republican leaders will scare young conservatives from getting involved in politics. @ElissaSlotkin https://t.co/p7NBJpDcQW

— The Chicago Thinker (@ThinkerChicago) October 17, 2026

     In the realm of political competition there are only three levels of interplay:

1. Competing with ideas;
2. Competing with ad hominems;
3. Competing with intimidation and violence.

     Of course, a peaceful society would prefer that the competition remain focused on ideas. When ideas butt heads and one proves better than the other, it can become policy with general assent. Life can continue undisturbed. But the enabling condition for competing with ideas is that each side must agree to concede should its idea lose the battle. This in its turn requires that all sides agree on an objective standard for assessing ideas’ comparative performance.

     We haven’t seen those conditions agreed to in America for a long time. The animus that characterizes American political rhetoric, while not unprecedented, makes it plain that competition with and through ideas is “off the table.” Instead, vituperation rules the exchanges. Barrages of insult, often descending to slander, are the greater part of what the general public hears.

     But the ad hominems level isn’t stable either. To prevent deterioration to the level below that, there must be agreement among all the participants that no one will cast the first stone. The politicians and their hangers-on can flail one another mercilessly by day, but they must revert to amiable drinking buddies by night.

     A side observation: When we of the hoi polloi speak of the Establishment, it’s often that enemies by day / pals by night coupling that we have in mind. Such an Establishment can present a surface appearance of competition and opposition while maintaining a quiet collaboration aimed at “not rocking the boat.” But such arrangements are not eternal. If one party becomes sufficiently determined upon hegemony, it can descend to true combat.

     The stones began to fly with Donald Trump’s 2015 presidential election campaign. Many were the stories of deliberate disruption of Trump rallies, often involving violence. In the aftermath, investigators such as James O’Keefe unearthed the organizers and specialists in incitement. Now and then an act of violence made the evening news, leading private citizens to wonder what was becoming of the Republic.

     We were slipping from the ad hominem level to the intimidation and violence level. The Left had decided that it simply must hold onto the power it had accrued with the presidency of Barack Hussein Obama. Trump threatened to overturn too many established, longstanding agreements between the Democrats and the Republicans. Only God knew what would happen to the D.C. cocktail party circuit.

     After the election, many citizens noted increases in disturbing indicators: Mad Maxine Waters’s public fulminations; prominent Republicans and conservatives being harassed in restaurants and other public places; occasional “egging” of cars and houses; AntiFa / Black Bloc attacks on conservative and free-speech rallies. We started getting nervous. There was no way to know how bad things might get. “Buy more ammo” became a watchword.

     Well, Miss Slotkin has put us on notice: if the Left retakes Congress in the November elections, the gloves will be off. She speaks only of intimidation tactics, of course; anything else would put her in jeopardy of prosecution. But the subtext to her words is that once we’re back in power, anything goes. Should they elect to employ actual violence, Leftist activists will receive a measure of protection, just as did the disruptors and intimidators sent forth to harass the attendees of Trump rallies.

     This is the sort of piece I least like to write. But necessity spares no one. Certainly it has no special regard for an old crank from Long Island.

Twenty-First Century Danegeld

     Though politicians decline to say so – their kind is allergic to candor and truth – it’s an open secret that Muslims who’ve succeeded in getting into Europe are on the rampage. They’re burning cars, looting businesses, destroying buildings, and generally doing all the “fun” things Muslims do when they mass to a sufficient degree in a First World nation. The destruction is particularly noteworthy in France, which has welcomed more Muslims to its shores than any other First World nation.

     Affected Europeans are desperate for relief and defense. I’ll refrain from ranting about the complicity of European governments in the chaos. Still, this is a data point. There will be a reckoning. European Whites should keep their governments’ passivity in mind for the resolution.

     What fuels this orgy of destruction has been plain from the first. An inferior species has looked upon the accomplishments of a superior breed, and the sight has filled them with greed and envy. Greed, because they want what they see; envy, because they know themselves to be incapable of anything comparable to the achievements before them. And as has been the case throughout history whenever inferiors confronted the heights of the First World, those things have filled them with an all-consuming rage.

     Ignore the whining about “racism,” “colonialism,” and “exploitation.” The whiners don’t know the meanings of those words. They use them exclusively as bludgeons with which to bash Whites. Our softer members react out of a guilt they ought not to feel. But that’s all “previous work.” The problem before Europe is to quell the violence, punish the responsible, and prevent a recurrence.

     Had action been taken when the first signs of trouble appeared, it might have been possible to prevent what has followed with moderate, largely non-violent methods. Unfortunately, Europe’s governments allowed the problem to go unaddressed as it metastasized. Their inanition has led to a state of affairs in which only one solution remains.

     Europe has suffered a slow-motion invasion by a hostile culture. Its governments must mobilize their military forces, identify the invaders, close with and destroy the invading forces, and outlaw their culture. That will require the plain recognition of the phenomenon, root and branch.

     The invaders are Muslims.
     They are engaged in a civilizational jihad.
     Their creed – Islam, for anyone still in the dark – commands it.

     This will be expensive, bloody, and generally horrifying. That’s what happens when you sit passively as a hostile culture establishes itself in your lands. It gets incomparably worse when, rather than fight the invaders in an open contest, you pay them to not make a fuss.

     I shan’t fulminate over how Europe ought to have known better. My Gentle Readers know the historical precedent. The remediation cost medieval England quite a lot in blood and treasure.

     The demands of the Muslim spokesvermin must be ignored. They’re merely cover for the invasion itself: pseudo-justifications for the chaos and destruction. The aim is not to secure any of the things the mouthpieces so piously mention. It’s to delay a military response to what’s plainly a military crisis.

     I could go on about this, but there’s no need. For once, there is no imaginable alternative to responding with armed force. Not to respond would constitute surrender to Islam: the incorporation of Europe into the Islamic ummah, in which sharia law prevails.

     All Muslims must be expelled from Europe, without exception.
     All mosques must be destroyed and the occupied properties confiscated.
     Islam must be stripped of religious status and legally classified as an ideology hostile to European values and norms, just as was Nazism.

     The survival of the Old World is at stake.

     (See also this seminal essay.)

The Blood Of Innocents

     Yesterday, after I read Haretina Kukuri’s most recent essay, I commented thus:

     "Money, borders, presidents and states exist because enough people agree that they do."
     Those things are not "metaphysically given," as the Earth is. A widespread recognition of their insubstantiality, and a sober consideration of the alternatives to them, could transform the whole world.

     Haretina replied:

     I agree that none of these things is given by nature, and I would only add a caution to the recognition you describe. Something that exists by agreement is not easy to replace, because the agreement is the whole of its strength. John Searle called these institutional facts, real in their effects while resting on shared belief, and a currency or a border works precisely because most people do not examine it each morning. Seeing through them can be liberating, but any alternative will need a shared faith of its own, built slowly, and the old one will not wait politely while it is assembled.

     …which is unimpeachably correct. But I had something in mind on which others of intelligence and insight have also discoursed:

     “[N]othing is forever. No matter how carefully you design a system, it will go bad and die.” – Poul Anderson, Tau Zero

     States, like men, have their growth, their manhood, their decrepitude and their decay. – Walter S. Landor

     If we stipulate, for extrapolation only, that the State is “a necessary evil,” consideration of the insights of the men cited above becomes imperative:

1. How are we to judge that a given State has outlived its usefulness and must be replaced by something else?
2. When the time for that judgment has arrived, what must follow?
3. Given that the existing, unsatisfactory State will resist replacement, what are we morally permitted to do?

     A State that has decayed will either be incapable of discharging its assigned responsibilities, or will be focused on oppressing and mulcting its subjects, or both (i.e., anarcho-tyranny.). That State will be inarguably a detriment to its subjects and to Mankind itself. But what, then, shall we do?

     Those who wield the powers of the State never surrender their powers voluntarily. Neither do they submit meekly to those who would uproot them. They’re aware ab initio of the fates of deposed masters. Aware that death would surely follow surrender, they would fight to the death. There would be a river of blood, some of it the blood of innocents.

     How great a price, not only in our blood, sweat, and tears but in that of innocent others, is it worth to depose a decayed, corrupt State?

* * *

     Haretina was exactly, painfully correct: that which was upheld by the “old shared faith” will not wait politely to be replaced. That makes pondering the price we and others would be required to pay morally obligatory.

     The greatest American surely had that in mind when he wrote:

     Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

     When are the “light and transient causes” displaced by “a long train of abuses and usurpations?” When do they evince “a design to reduce [us] to absolute Despotism?” How much are we prepared “to suffer, while evils are sufferable?” And when we’ve decided that those evils are no longer sufferable, how do we deal with the inevitability of collateral damage: the loss of innocents’ lives, the destruction of innocents’ property, and the ruination of innocents’ futures?

     Please give it some thought.

Declarations And Admissions

     Haretina Kukuri continues to impress. This young woman is making me think harder and with greater breadth and depth than I have in decades. Her latest major essay, “The Metaphysics of Geopolitics,” is a tightly compressed, brilliant disquisition on the levels of commitment and valuation that condition interactions between States.

     Haretina’s whole essay deserves your attention, but I could not help focusing on one segment of her observations. It concerns the unique, dualistic nature of the utterances of governments:

     J. L. Austin observed in How to Do Things with Words in 1962 that certain sentences describe nothing and simply act, so that when a judge says "I sentence you" or a minister says "I now pronounce you", the saying is the deed. John Searle built a theory of social reality upon the idea, and Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities in 1983, applied a related logic to nations, for money, borders, presidents and states exist because enough people agree that they do, and the agreement is kept alive by speech and ceremony.
     A great deal of geopolitics is therefore performative utterance.
     Recognising a state admits it to the club, a declaration of ceasefire creates an obligation, and designating a group as a terrorist organisation alters what everybody may lawfully do to it, so that a coronation, an inauguration and a treaty signing are each a spell cast with a lawyer in the room.

     Concentrate for a moment on the central gem of that passage:

Money, borders, presidents and states exist
Because enough people agree that they do.

     For those things are not material things. They are not “given” in the way that the Earth is “given.” We conjure them into existence. Think of that gathering of learned men in 1787 in Philadelphia, and of what they produced. Did a nation arise when they proclaimed their document ready for release? Did it arise on June 21, 1788 when the ninth state, New Hampshire, agreed to the Constitution? Or was it something inchoate, floating in the void where all abstractions live, that only acquired power and weight as millions of colonists transferred their allegiance – mostly without realizing it – from their local satrapies to the larger Union? And just how long did that process take?

     Reflect on how those questions illuminate the concept of sovereignty. Reflect also on this: When one State dispatches its armed forces in an attempt to impose its will on another State, what process has been invoked? Is it purely military and material? Or does it couple to the nature of the State itself: what it must, may, and must not do lest its sovereignty be weakened?

     Take your time over it.

* * *

     Long ago, in a seminal essay I’ve copied from site to site, I wrote:

     Today the world is riven into roughly two camps: those who believe, albeit fuzzily, in the concept called rights, which defends the life, liberty, and property of the individual, and those who reject that concept and its implications. The latter group provides our sociopathic monsters. It also controls most of the governments of the world, and by extension, most of mankind.

     Friedrich Hayek believed sociopathy to be an asset to one who seeks political power; that monsters, in part because of their monstrousness, have a better chance of rising to command the forces of the State, that institution whose agents exert coercive power over others without fear of legal consequence, than those of us who are constrained by moral scruple. (See the chapter "Why The Worst Get On Top" in his classic volume The Road To Serfdom.) If Hayek's contention is correct, the ascent of such as Stalin, Mao, Hitler, et alii is not an aberration but the working-out of a process controlled by certain hard incentives and disincentives.

     As we can easily see from history, a sociopath at the helm of a modern State, with the State's resources and many techniques for enforcing its will, is the most fearsome of all political developments. The death tolls attributable just to Stalin, Mao, and Hitler total perhaps a hundred million. It should be obvious that whatever mechanisms their States possessed to filter out their kind were inadequate to the task.

     But equally obvious is the importance of the powers of the State to the carnage they wreaked. Without those powers, they would have been three unpleasant old men, little more. The State put huge guns into their hands, guns too large for their victims to oppose.

     “Three unpleasant old men.” I doubt any Gentle Reader would contest that characterization of the dictators enumerated above. But in command of a State with its array of agents and coercive methods, they became the architects of great horrors. In only one of those three cases did the horrors end – and it wasn’t because their author repented of his sins. Other States had to do the job.

* * *

     It has seldom been the case since the Peace of Westphalia that a State has fallen to its own subjects. In both the French and Russian Revolutions, substantial fractions of the subjects of the dying States continued to believe in them and support them. Yet that fidelity and tribute failed to maintain them. That strongly suggests that a threshold of allegiance exists on which the health of the State depends. That threshold, if crossed, fatally weakens the abstraction, such that it can be dissolved by a sufficiently determined force.

     But note: Sometimes, when a State begins to falter, the States around it will prop it up. Neighboring States apply the means required to stabilize it. That demonstration of external allegiance is among the strangest phenomena in geopolitics. When I wrote, in the Foreword to Freedom’s Scion:

     The States of Earth exist in an anarchic relation to one another. Each has its own regional code of law, which might differ markedly from all the others. Despite several thrusts at the matter over the centuries, there is no "super-State" to enforce a uniform code of law over them all. More, they view one another as competitors in many different areas; their populations and institutions are often in sharp economic competition with one another. Thus, they are often at odds. They resolve important disputes among them through negotiation or warfare.

     Yet individuals manage to move among them with a fair degree of facility and (usually) little risk. Cross-border trade is commonplace, in some places torrential. Though wars are frequent, they seldom result in major alterations to the overall political pattern. The uber-anarchy of Terrestrial society exhibits more stability than one would expect from two hundred well armed, quarrelsome States, each of which perpetually schemes at snatching some advantage at another’s expense.

     …I glossed over that “States supporting other States” phenomenon with little consideration and even less thought. Yet today, it’s one of the most important aspects of life on Earth. A little reflection on how America’s major alliances arose, and on those cases in which American support failed to perpetuate an existing State, will illuminate that coupling too brightly to be ignored afterward.

* * *

     Early in her essay, Haretina issues a partition of sorts:

     What does a decision maker treat as more real than the evidence laid in front of him?
     Ask it at four levels and the whole argument takes shape.
     Where the answer is a sacred value, he holds something that no price can purchase,
     where it is a clock, he carries a settled belief about the direction in which history is travelling,
     where it is a ritual, he trusts words and ceremonies that make a thing true merely by being said.
     And where it is a private oracle, he relies upon the person he summons when the evidence has run out.
     Most analysis dismisses all four as static around the true variables, whereas my contention is that they govern how the true variables are used, so that a forecast which leaves them out will be right for years and wrong on the one day that matters.

     Even at the sacred level of values among States, there appears to be a great deal of variety. Haretina explores some of that variety in the subsequent material. But floating above those “provincial” values is one value that unites all States. Indeed, it sustains the entire world of statecraft.

     That value is the maintenance of the State-system itself.

     No State, whatever its conflicts with other States, can afford to have large numbers of people anywhere question the rightness and necessity of States. Should any confluence of events cause the hoi polloi to look at one another and say “We can do without this violent, brutal, murderously expensive notion,” the biggest house of straw in the history of Mankind would immediately be ablaze.

     The belief in the necessity of the State is indispensable to all States. That fiction is infinitely more important to every State than any value it openly purports to advance or defend. It’s the supreme sacred value that eclipses all others. Every State is absolutely committed to it. So are a multitude of other organizations, interests, and individuals whose existence the State makes possible.

     Benjamin Franklin knew it:

     “Gentlemen, you see that in the anarchy in which we live, society manages much as before. Take care, if our disputes last too long, that the people will come to think they can just as easily do without us.” – Benjamin Franklin, to the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention

     It’s but a glimpse at a high, remote mountaintop, a peak still too far off for men to attain. But like other metaphysical abstractions, a glimpse will sometimes suffice.

     Legitimacy is the secular word for faith." -- Haretina Kukuri

Tides Of Faith

     I’ve been up since 3:30 AM. Perhaps due to that anomaly, I find myself intellectually adrift. It’s one of those mornings when vagrant ideas and references clatter through the mind like trains on rough, uneven tracks. Now and then two of them meet, albeit seldom peacefully.

     What has the most enduring hold on my thoughts just now is Matthew Arnold’s old poem “Dover Beach:”

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

     Gorgeous, isn’t it? It’s a personal favorite, but it embeds a profound irony. For Matthew Arnold had no faith. He promoted Christianity, but not because he deemed it true. Indeed, note this passage from Wikipedia:

     [Matthew Arnold] rejected the supernatural elements in religion, even while retaining a fascination for church rituals. In the preface to God and the Bible, written in 1875, Arnold recounts a powerful sermon he attended discussing the "salvation by Jesus Christ", writing, "Never let us deny to this story power and pathos, or treat with hostility ideas which have entered so deep into the life of Christendom. But the story is not true; it never really happened".
     He continues to express his concern with the historicity of the Bible, explaining that "The personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and their conversations." He also wrote in Literature and Dogma: "The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness—a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs." He defined religion as "morality touched with emotion".
     However, he also wrote in the same book, "to pass from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."

     Though it’s often criticized for the predominance of left-leaning political views on contemporary issues, Wikipedia tends to be reliable on biographical and other purely factual subjects. What we see in Matthew Arnold is a man who denied the factual basis for Christianity while endorsing it for the value of its ideas. The man who wrote so feelingly in “Dover Beach” of the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith was a man of no faith.

     C. S. Lewis, himself a scholar of considerable depth, wrote thus of such “Christianity:”

     Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of Heaven as a short cut to the nearest chemist’s shop. Fortunately it is quite easy to coax humans round this little corner. Only today I have found a passage in a Christian writer where he recommends his own version of Christianity on the ground that “only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures and the birth of new civilisations”. You see the little rift? “Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.” That’s the game.

     (Remember, Gentle Reader: that’s a devil speaking to his nephew.)

     The demotion of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, to a useful fable, factually untrue but “good for the hoi polloi,” would kill the Christian faith. People will not subscribe to an ethos that’s been divorced from fact.

     There’s a characteristic arrogance in a man who would advocate such a thing. He’s set himself above others of “inferior understanding.” He knows “what’s good for you,” and he’ll batter you with it until it comes out your ears. But will he deal with it as factual rather than aspirational? No, thank you; that’s for the credulous and easily led.

     Such men allow themselves liberties they would deny to us “inferiors.” If we examine Victorian England, we quickly note the prevalence of vice of all kinds among the nobility and the gentry. Yet those men were apostles of Christian virtue to (and for) the “lower classes.” They routinely condemned in public the very indulgences they permitted themselves in private.

     The disjunction was noticed. The practices of the privileged could not be hidden for long. After all, they needed servants to tidy up after their bacchanals and orgies. Word got out, for the common folk of Victorian England were not fools.

     When it comes to faith, preachments contradicted by practice are impotent. In this venue more than any other, hypocrisy undermines the message. If you won’t live it, you can’t preach it.

     I could go on about this, but I’ll spare you. Have a nice day.

In-Languages

     In this piece at AoSHQ, we find a great deal of commentary about how the “fairer sex” strives to build itself up: i.e., by doing everything possible to alienate men.

     First, it cites an article from someone named Bridget Phetasy:

     I was mid-hip thrust when I found out Shane Gillis had called me a whore. Technically I found out four hours later, when I reviewed the footage of Saturday Night Live. My tripod was on the bench, my ring light was clamped to the squat rack and my boyfriend Tanner was holding the back-up phone for the side angle. Tanner films all my content. He is not allowed to look at me.
     The “joke” was about how women dress at the gym. I know it was about me, because everything is. So I did what any survivor would do. I went to my car and filmed myself crying. It took 11 takes, because the lighting in a Range Rover is unforgiving, and grief is no excuse for a bad shot. In the final cut, you can see a single tear land on my sports bra right over the logo, which clicks through to an affiliate link. My caption: “I’m literally shaking.”
     Then I put on the shortest shorts I own, went back inside, and filmed my ass from three angles with the caption, “Does this outfit work for you, Shane Gillis?” I wanted to send him a message that my body is not for men. To make sure Shane got the message, I tagged him. Then I tagged every man I follow. Some people say my response proved his point. These people are rapists.

     Is it possible that this… person was trying to be funny? She’s supposed to be a comedienne. That seems like a huge stretch. But as I’m not able to access the whole article, I’ll allow the possibility that the satire arrives further down the page.

     A bit later, Ace embeds a sarcastic tweet:

I love she’s calling a spade a spade.. It’s annoying https://t.co/TC5MWOgsnz

— Shaggy JTS 🇺🇸 (@JtShaggy) October 13, 2026

     Is it really that bad? Have women genuinely adopted an “in-language” designed to make them sound like black rappers on crack? I have to ask, Gentle Reader. I have too little in-the-flesh contact with other people to know. And I flatly don’t want to believe it.

     Reports from the field would be welcome.

* * *

     I go on about language quite a lot, as my Gentle Readers are surely aware. My reason is simple: language is the primary method by which we divide “us” from “them.” The more forceful methods come later, after language has done its work.

     Various occupations develop in-languages. Those are mostly shorthand for the ways those persons do their work and the specific problems they address. Now and then an in-language will be used to “protect the guild.” That is, familiarity with it becomes a passport of sorts, just as the ancient Hebrews used the word shibboleth to distinguish friends from potential foes. And of course, an in-language can be used to “dazzle the hoi polloi” with unfamiliar terms that hint at erudition and insight.

     If women are developing their own in-language to keep men at a distance, or to facilitate slagging us off in ways we wouldn’t understand, it bodes ill for relations between the sexes. And those relations are already pretty shaky.

* * *

     You’ve got to watch this stuff. Emerging in-languages portend division, unease, and potential hostility. How much of the separation between the White and black races can be put down to linguistic differences? How much of the animosity between Right and Left arises from the Left’s tendentious redefinitions of common words to suit its political agenda?

     I hadn’t credited too much international tension to differences in language, but it’s worth more than a passing thought. Certainly language is involved in promotion and propaganda among the nations. Remember the foofaurauw over “American exceptionalism,” back when? Even suggesting that ours is a uniquely gifted nation made voices rise… once again, especially on the Left.

     When Rudyard Kipling wrote:

The Stranger within my gate,
     He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
     I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
     But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
     They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
     They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
     When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
     He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
     What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
     Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
     Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
     And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
     They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
     And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
     And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
     By bitter bread and wine.

     …he may have been thinking of language quite as much as of any other cleavage among us.

     Some divisions are necessary, protective. But not all. If a division is rooted in language alone, I’d say we can do without it.