___k the Innernet!

Hey it's me!

I've been doing research on the internet about why the internet is bad for you.

When I was a kid, my elders called the television a number of derogatory nicknames, “the gogglebox,” “the idiot-box.” I remember that serious parents took to heart the warnings of the documentaries and books that children’s TV time should be strictly rationed. They were worried about kids sitting in front of the screen all day while Leave it to Beaver was still being made. What would Ward and June have thought of kids taking the TV with them wherever they went? I know an orthodox Jewish rabbi in New York who has nine children and still refuses to get an internet connection at home. I asked him about it once, and he said it wasn’t the porn, he just didn’t want his children growing up to be idiots.

Yeah yeah...shut up.

What, you think I didn't notice?



~

Sick. Of. The. War.

Looking longingly at that old Dream Job.

It's come up again.

Puffin-counter on Skomer Island off the Welsh coast. £12,500 for four months "work". Living on the island included.

There are lots of puffins there. They need to be counted.

It's important.



~

I think I'm getting the wrong message from this article

This nice-looking young man is complaining that the new tuition fees (£9000 a year, no matter what you're studying) are likely to be a bar to "working class" applicants to medical school. He says that doctors in Britain are usually chosen from the upper classes and has a go at the "posh" accent.

The other thing he seems to be complaining about are the high standards, and requirement to be a well-rounded person...

I’m no sociologist but the lack of working class kids becoming doctors is fairly understandable when you consider the huge number of hoops that have to be jumped through in order to successfully gain entry to medical school. Not only do you need to get top A-level results but you need to be able to pad out you application with tales of work experience, charity do-gooding, sporting prowess and musical genius. You then have to be adequately well spoken to impress during the medical school interview.

Oh No!

"Adequately well spoken..." Shocking!

I don't know about you mate, but as an oncology patient who was forced to put her life in the hands of other people, I'm pretty happy that doctors are required to have "top A-levels" and are skimmed lightly off the top of the cream of society.

But maybe I'm just an eeeviiiil elitist.

And forgive me but, if you're writing an op-ed for a major national newspaper complaining about the high standards of education required for medical students, do try to learn the difference between a plural and a contraction. Really, if you can learn the secrets of microbiology, the secrets of the apostrophe shouldn't be a big challenge.

Nor spell-check neither.



~

Ok, so now I'm all nervous

like maybe I'll get hit by a stray meteorite, or a piano will fall out of an airplane and land on me or something.

First, my art teacher tells me that she won't be moving back to Australia for at least another year so I don't have to make the awful decision about how to keep learning what she's teaching me without moving to Florence. (Thought about moving to Florence).

I'm willing to let that one slide. No need to start getting all warm and buttery over that. Life is still dangerous and precarious and the vague feeling of impending doom remains settled over my head. All is well normal.

Then the agency lady, who everyone said was pazzo, gives me a freezer, and it works.

I become suspicious.

Then the Fixing Things for a Measly Fifty Bucks guy doesn't charge me 300 Euros to fix my electrical sockets.

Now, I'm starting to worry.

Then, something really weird happens. The landlord just texted me with the phone number of the guy to call to fix the hot water heater. And told me to call him to make an appointment and he would pay for it and everything.

Holy Cow!

What, have I got cancer or something? Are my teeth all about to fall out? What?!

What is going on??!!!



~
Update: The landlord told me today that if the hot water heater was just worn out, he would pay for it to be fixed, but if it has been broken by the tenant, (me), I would have to pay...

I think I sense the universal order of things reasserting itself.



~

An honest business man in Italy

Most people think it's an oxymoron. But I am happy to report that today I paid a bill for the guy who came over to my place last week to fix things, and it was way less than I thought it was going to be.

He couldn't do anything with my antiquated hot water heater (Yay! Cold showers! Every day! Since June! Yay!) but he fixed three broken electrical sockets and made the fourth burner on my stove work. And he brought me a freezer. That the agency lady (whom everyone warned me was pazzo) gave me for nothin! (And the freezer works. I have ice cubes! The wonder of it!)

I took out a giant wad of money today from the bancomat, and he only wanted €50. I was so happy it wasn't 300 that I was actually grinning when I slapped it down. I took myself out for Chinese for lunch to celebrate.

What no one tells you when you are becoming infatuated with Italy on holidays, is that the actual work of living here more or less cancels out the fun most of the time.

But one thing it does is teach you to lower your standards, so that actually getting a guy to come over to your house and fix an electrical socket, and only charge you fifty bucks, is cause for celebration.

It's the little things...

I'm starting to think that Santa Marinella is outside the Rip Everybody Off Zone. The bike shop guy has been amazingly great too.



~

Here's just one

There are about 180 million little things about life in Italy that drive Anglos to the point of shrieking madness.

This is one of them.

The double standard was initially adopted because in Italy, up to the second half of the twentieth century, the electric power used for lamps (Luce = lighting) and the one used for all other appliances (Forza = electromotive force; or Uso Promiscuo = general purpose) were sold at different fares, charged with different taxes, accounted with separated electricity meters, and sent on different wire lines that ended with different sockets.

~

Take me to your lizard...

Ford and Arthur discuss politics when a robot steps out of a spaceship and asks to be taken to their Lizard.

The robot, said Ford,

"comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

"No," said Ford, ... "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

"I did," said Ford. "It is."

"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"

"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

"What?"

"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

I'm told this is making the bloggie rounds.

I also understand that there is an election expected soon in Yookay. It is, I am also informed, going to be a doddle for Ther Cameron.

Ther Cameron seems to want us to believe that when he takes over from Ther Broon, it will be because we picked him and like him best. He has promised that things will be Different under his thumb than it was under the thumb of Ther Broon. But this promise seems to have nothing to do with Ther Cameron's actual policies which he is also promising will be exactly the same. Because in the land of the Lizards, The Same is the same as Different, which is different from The Same.

I have only one thing to say...

got any gin?

Adding to my already vast collection of deathlessly nonsensical Tony Blair quotes is always fun.

Here's the master of self-contradictory blither on religion:

I think that for all religions, the challenge is how do you extract the essential values of the faith from a vast accumulation of doctrine and practice? For many people, the reason for their religious faith is less to do with the doctrine and
practice, and more to do with the values like love of God and love of your
neighbour.

Harm Reduction

When you beat your wife, please make sure to wear the officially authorized prophylactic protective gear.

The Association of Compassionate Christian Caregivers today severely criticized traditional Catholic teaching on marital "love" and called upon the churches to encourage wife-beating Africans to take the "prudent, practical steps" to reduce the risk of HIV infection when assailing their spouses.

Scientists and other specialists in AIDS transmission are dismayed that Vatican ultra-conservatives continue to ignore their findings and insist that all persons -- even unlettered Angolans and even when HIV-negative -- refrain in all circumstances from acts of physical violence against their spouses.

"Preaching charity will NOT solve the problem!" says Osbourne. "We need to work with the reality of where these people are. These are Africans, for God's sake, not persons capable of understanding and following a moral norm. It is irresponsible of the Pope to teach otherwise."

Heh.

Politics for the Logic-Impaired

Baron Ahmed sees no justification in "freedom of speech" for bringing Geert Wilders into the UK.

Because, you see, he called for the banning of the Koran.

So he had to be banned...

because of freedom of speech...you see...

Quiz:

Is Nazir Ahmed a shill for

a) The Guardian

b) the Islamo-fascists

c) the Labour Party


* ~ * ~ *

And the Guardian is all about freedom of speech I see. Shut the comments down after 216 people wrote in to tell him what an idiot he was being.

Broadminded loathing

Joan Smith: There's no end to the people the right loves to hate

"...whereas, we find it so much less complicated just to hate everyone on the right."

Coming up next:

on the CBC's New autumn lineup.

CBC – Welfare Wampum: Indians, head feathers, drums and white Liberal guilt.

David Suzuki - Earth God: why you deserve to die so the 3-toed Siberian tree frog can live.

Little Jihad on the Prairie : The zany antics of sleeper cell- redneck culture clash.

Ottawa Report: running the country and designing society is a job for the ivy-walled university clique. 1 hour a week we make you feel disempowered and insignificant.

Election Night in Canada: socialism is good for you so we have packaged 4 brands of it to chose from

Marketplace: The urgent need for more government regulation to protect consumers against an industrial capitalist economy is explored weekly

I've started a meme. Cool.

Rebuild my Church, which as you can see, is falling to ruin

The British government is more interested in saving English Catholic churches than are the English Catholic bishops.

The Archdiocese of Liverpool tried to have St Marie's demolished last year despite protests from local residents and the local council.

It was saved at the eleventh hour after being designated as a Grade II listed building, but has remained closed and now faces falling into disrepair.

"The Archdiocese is refusing to talk to us about their decision and seems determined to ensure that no-one can use it if they can't demolish it," he said.

"With so many churches struggling on in the face of dwindling congregations and punitive maintenance costs, it's particularly frustrating to see a church with an enthusiastic community around it which is forbidden to use the building."

Desperate makes you stupid, I guess

When Ester Blandford was born, 18 months ago, the Swedish state did all it could to ease her way into the world — and encourage her parents to have even more kids. Her mother, Therese, 29, a children's librarian in the small southern town of Nyhamnsläge, took 15 months off work, most of it at 80% pay, to care for the baby, her first child. She now works part-time. Ester's dad, Christian, also 29, a physical therapist, stays home one day a week to help out. He too gets 80% pay from the state for the day spent with his daughter.

80% for fifteen months?!

A state that is willing to bankrupt itself to try to get it's people to perpetuate the species.

And the result?

A whopping 0.21 increase in the Swedish general fertility rate from totally catastrophic to merely disastrous: 1.5 children per woman in 1999 to 1.71.

Yep.

That's socialism.

Taken for Chumps

Now, I know that the principles of rational thought are not popular these days, equally in schools as in parliaments, but one has to wonder at the willingness of so many to have their intelligence, whether real or imagined, so brazenly insulted, and their compassion manipulated, as it is by the abortion lobby in the case of the "rape exception".

The rape exception is the one argument that most irritates me. Not because of its inherent dishonesty - one expects only dishonesty from people conniving to murder helpless infants - but for the blind, drooling stupidity of the people who buy it, normally without the slightest examination. Or perhaps I should say the willing connivance of the marks. It is said that people who go to carnivals with a few shillings to spend on the ring-toss game, actually want to be swindled. Why else would one to go a carnival?

When I am talking to school groups about abortion, naturally after we have painstakingly gone through and demonstrated the existence of a human being in the womb (don't they tell these kids any more where babies come from? What are they doing in all those sex-education classes in kindergarten anyway?) someone in the back of the room will invariably put his (it is always a he) hand up and say "Yeah, but what about rape?"

He says this for two reasons: he has been taught that favouring abortion for rape is a mark of deep sensitivity and that "sensitivity" is a sure fire method of getting girls into bed, and that it is a stumper. He believes, in effect, that because the pro-life position is inherently flawed by its hatred of women and desire to oppress and subjugate them, that this is The Big One that will always end the discussion. This, he believes will establish his feminist political cred...which is also a sure fire method of getting girls into bed.

He expects me to have no answer, and sadly, this is the case with most of the people who consider themselves pro-life. In Britain, I would suggest, because there is no pro-life movement to speak of and those who imagine themselves to be pro-life have not the slightest notion of what it means, it is doubly the case. The British "pro-life" "movement" has failed so absolutely because it is based on warm fuzzy feelings towards cute little babies and depends wholly on a vestigial culturally generated moral sense that can now be found only in the previous generation, who themselves only ever had a hazy grasp of the meaning of the word "principle". Once the little old ladies, cooing gently over the sight of a sweet-faced cherub are gone, even that will vanish. And nothing will replace it. The world will belong to Generation Why. Maybe we could re-name them Generation Why Not?

What is saddest, and most ironic, about the eagerness of most of our progressively minded modern people, as well as many "pro-life" people, to defend the rape exception, is that they love it because it is held up as a model of compassion and toleration towards the victimised. This is especially tempting to pro-lifers who are possibly tired of being called EVIL FASCISTS. They long to be included in the ranks of the tolerant and compassionate. The same people will, with precisely the same earnest expressions, tell you all about the evils of capital punishment. They have such strong feeeeelings, you see, for the downtrodden, the oppressed, the victimised.

But no one stops to wonder who it is exactly that is doing the "holding up". Who exactly, has told them that abortion is a requirement in cases of pregnancy due to rape? And what are their motives?

But these goodthinkful people will not question the motives or origin of the received wisdom. That's why we call it that. When you ask them why they support the death penalty for the children of criminals, they simply look at you with a fullwise goodthinkfully blank expression and you can almost see their grey cells desperately rushing to batten down the hatches and close the sea doors.

"Doubleplusungoodthink. unoft, plusungoodthink or ungoodthink. Oldthink is unwith BB and party. oldthinkers unluv doubleplusgood waylive BB command. Oldthinkers oft is crimethinkers. Oldthinkers oft make crimethink."

Crimestop.

...

When giving talks in schools, I was able to relieve the tedium by setting these sorts of traps and watching the poor chumps dive eagerly into them. (Even more amusing than tripping blind people).

"Hands up everyone who supports the death penalty." Never any takers for that one, especially in Catholic schools.

"Good. It is true that most western progressive countries, those who have been governed for centuries by the rule of law, have abolished the death penalty. Even for serious crimes like treason, murder and rape.

"We do not execute rapists, in the hopes, perhaps, that they will be reformed. Or perhaps only on the grounds that it is simply wrong to kill, even to kill a dangerous criminal."

General agreement, but at the same time a vague sense of discomfort growing...they know something is going on, but haven't the acuity to guess what.

"Now, let's examine a country that does have it. Communist China has more capital offenses [brief pause to explain the terms 'Communist' and 'capital offense'] than any other country in the world. And they carry out more executions than any other country. Even than the United States.

"Let us pretend for a moment that you are an official of China's legal system charged with carrying out executions. Would you consider granting clemency to a rapist?" [pause to explain 'clemency'.]

...nod nod nod...

"What about to the rapist's 18 month-old daughter?"

Silence.

Crimestop.

I guess it isn't the first time I've thought about this

But it seems worth saying again:

But a question arises in my mind. If an entire country is complicit, an entire culture, as is the West, in the greatest systematic mass murder in the history of the human race, can there be any way for any of us to shield our minds from its effects?

Are we not all subject to the long-term damage caused by this impossible dilemma? We kill our children. We do it in enormous numbers. Those of us who do not participate in the killing are complicit by inaction. And everyone knows this.

Do we not all engage to some degree in one of the three reactions I outlined above? In each case the first instinct is to try not to think about it. When forced to address the issue, the most common response is the one least defensible: "I wouldn't have an abortion, but I can't force my opinion on others." A six-year old could tell you what is wrong with that, but most people will say it, and mean it, when they are confronted. I have found it is wise not to try to push past this by demolishing the logic of their position. Mayhem usually ensues.

I noted to a friend today, another Gen-X child of the hippie Culture-Wreckers:

Things continue fine but weird.

Every now and then, I am struck with one of those "What the hell am I doing here" moments. But, since those moments have been the defining characteristic of most of my life above the age of fifteen, I'm learning to ignore it.

I'm here. Life is weird. That is just how things are. Must get used to it.

I think the reason our parents never told us how weird and incomprehensible life was going to be is actually that it is much weirder now than it has ever been before. Their generation abolished all the rules and order of society. Naturally, they didn't notice this, and have carried on as if nothing has happened. But we have noticed because no one seems to know how we are supposed to live our lives.

I know there must be plenty of people out there who think this is a dandy situation and thrive on there being no rules and who say 'whoopee' and go off and do their own thing all their lives. But being a middle class Anglo means that I have a strong genetic predisposition to needing societal rules and day to day order...which no longer exists.

I'm glad, though, that I have finally discovered that my feeling weird all my life, as if things are not the way they are supposed to be, is not my fault. It's not me; it really is "society's fault" this time.

An Inconsistency

The following is a brief exchange between Dr. Henry Morgentaler and a Canadian interviewer:

"I'm like a newborn baby," Dr. Henry Morgentaler told the CBC's Evan Solomon about surviving a recent stroke and heart operation. "I enjoy being alive."

The irony wasn't lost on Solomon, who then asked the Canadian abortion doctor "how does a guy who's seen so much death (in Auschwitz and Dachau, where he was imprisoned as a youngster) fight for a cause which many people believe is a form of killing?"

"I won't deny there's an inconsistency," Morgentaler answered. "Maybe I've deluded myself."

It does seem to demonstrate a thing I've been thinking about.

It is actually impossible that Henry Morgentaler does not know where babies come from. He is not just a doctor, but an adult with a normal intelligence. The only possible explanation of how he could have done what he has done is that he is insane. That the cognitive dissonance has driven him mad.

And if it has happened to him, the leader of our abortive society, the Moses who has brought us into the fleshpots of Egypt, it has happened to the rest of us too. We must all be, at least to some degree, insane.

We are all, or nearly all, suffering from a sort of societal cognitive dissonance.
Recently I wrote:

There is never a point at which one is unmovable. Human beings cannot become so calloused as to be insensible. It is recorded that those involved in the killing in the German T4 euthanasia project in which disabled children and other vulnerable patients were killed by lethal injections, gassing and starvation, went slowly mad. Drug and alcohol abuse rose significantly among staff and they began to display bizarre psychological and behavioral problems.

There is something interesting that can happen to the human mind when faced with something impossible to accept. I have observed it quite closely in the last ten years or so. I don't know what the psych majors call it, but there is something that human beings can do to their own minds when they are faced with a truth about themselves that is unface-able. It is an unconscious unhooking of connections, as if they are trying to de-connect themselves from themselves. I have seen it many times and I think this is the answer to the puzzle of people no longer being able to make logical connections.

Logical connections -- "If A and B are equal, and if C equals A, it also must equal B", sort of thing -- are apprehensions of Truth, an immutable and indestructible thing that will not bend to our preferences and can only be acknowledged, not changed. A thing, in other words, beyond our power that rules us.

The trouble with truth is that when it comes to true things about one's self, it is mostly something unpleasant.

In our times, the truth about abortion is one of the most unface-able things going.

Nearly everyone is quietly in support of abortion being legal. At the same time, it is, given the amount of sheer data available to everyone, actually impossible for anyone to deny that abortion is the wanton murder of an innocent child. This means that we are nearly all in support of the wanton murder of innocent children.

A and B are the same, and if C is the same as A, it is the same as B.

Of course, the main way we have learned to deal with this is avoidance. Our television screens are daily full of horrifying things. Crime, war, disease, famine etc. We all know horror, but it is the kind of horror we can deal with because it is always someone else's horror. I have read that the normal reaction of an ordinary person when a horror comes to visit is "Why is this happening to me?" because we have all been trained to assume that we are going to be the exception to horror. We are supposed to be exempt. And mostly we are. It is true that everyone suffers, but most of us suffer in ways that are more or less bearable. It is still true that only a minority of us gets cancer, or is robbed, or raped. In this society anyway.

But the abortion horror is one that is with all of us all the time. Given the numbers since the late 1960s when governments started legalising, it is likely that you who are reading this have had an abortion. Or knows someone who has. Very likely, in fact.

But more than that, everyone without exception, is complicit in abortion being the plague that it has become. It is our fault. And we know this. Even the people who know what abortion is have not stopped it. We have all made excuses. We do it every day. Of course, the only way to deal with this unbearable truth is to push it aside, drown out the noise it makes, to disconnect those logical train cars from each other and try to leave them behind on the track.

But every once in a while, a person has The Moment. It is that supremely terrifying instant when he realizes beyond a doubt that he is evil, the bad guy. He is, himself, the enemy of goodness and right. He is on the wrong side.

I remember mine, and know it for what it was, a moment of grace, the hosts of angels hovering around desperate to rescue me from my own delusions. And of course, it did not come all at once, but was the culmination of years of careful mental and spiritual preparation. But even with it being mitigated, it was not one I would ever want to repeat. It is, however, one that I would fervently wish on everyone, because the alternative is much worse.

This utterly unbearable Moment is one of complete agony. To realise that you are the monster in your nightmares. As Uncle Jack once wrote, to fear one's self is the last horror.

I remember it perfectly well. I was just getting ready for a bath and was reading a book. It was 1998. Between one sentence and the next, I suddenly realised that I had been on the wrong side all this time. I was in the wrong. A year later, I started to recover my equilibrium. Probably the most painful year of my life.

After that, the task of life is to start the dreary process of re-connecting those abandoned rail cars, and being vigilant against the ever-present temptations to disconnect them again.

Maybe we can hope that Dr. Morgentaler's mild shrug, "Maybe I've deluded myself," is part of this necessary preparation for his own The Moment. I pray fervently that he does experience this one most horrifying instant, before he dies, that is.

But it does look, from the outside at least, that it is merely a manifestation of the disconnect. For a man who has made killing infants his life's work, and who has done so much damage to his society in the process, the disconnect must be very large indeed. That he is able to shrug mildly in the face of being called a mass murderer of infants and say, "Maybe I've deluded myself" and then reach calmly for another cup of tea, makes me think we've got a ways to go yet.

It is a disconnect so wide that it must encompass nearly all of his mental energies. It would require the entire re-writing of reality to keep it undisturbed. I think the only word for it is insanity.

To some degree or other, it is a form of insanity that we all must share. It is this form of insanity, that Dr. Morgentaler calls "an inconsistency" that makes us all, to one degree or another, unable to make logical connections. It is the one area of the mind that absolutely must remain suppressed for us to get on in daily life. Let the logical capacities out for a moment and we will end up screaming in terror at what we are.

The Great Escape

I think the saddest thing about this noxious and pathetic display is how far the fantasy is from the reality. Why do such deviancies attract such a pathetic lot of flabby, pastey, podgies? (The delicate-of-constitution among our readers may want to decline the link.)

I was having a discussion the other day with my long-time blogging buddy Steve about the attractions of fantasy. Fantasy, in various manifestations, has become the mainstay of our culture. People are drawn into its sticky entanglement and seem to prefer to stay there. It doesn't seem to matter what particular way your fantasy world manifests itself, as long as it keeps you well-insulated from reality.

We were discussing this in the context of the Trad fantasy world, wherein the Catholic confessional state is somehow going to be magically restored, schools will start teaching kids Latin again, the Vatican will renounce VII and women will go back to wearing long skirts and bonnets.

Steve writes that he knew someone in childhood who was a big Tolkien fan:

"The kid had an imagination. He learned those elvish runes from the back of the book and he would write on his wall calendar with them, making little notes to himself about what he was going to do...It was cute, the kid who spent half his life in a fantasy world of his own creation...

"But you see, he was a kid. The [Trads], they have families. Bishops Fellay and Williamson, they have flocks...

"These people all live in fantasy worlds, where brave-sounding words and misplaced bravado are supposed to mean they are part of something special. And here's the pope - this wonderful, blessed, pope - trying to welcome them back in and even making it easier for them to get there. And they're throwing temper tantrums and composing love ballads to idiocy and grabbing hold of their sword hilts and trying to find some way, any way, not to be forced to grow up and get on with it."

"That's bad for us. Isn't it?"

One day I came across a little group of people living in the States who call themselves the "Plain Catholics" (who have a blog, naturally). They were Catholics who had taken a look at the Amish and decided this was a good thing. A comforting fantasy scenario in which to live full time. The women dress in Amish style clothes and wear those charming little caps, they build their own barns...But they're Catholics, see. So it is way better than being Amish. Right?

Now, I'm sure these people are very nice and kindly... hang on, disclaimers like this always sound false and trite don't they? I'm not sure of anything of the sort. Frankly, they sound like loons. They sound to me like people who just cracked under the Fantasy World temptation.

I've seen a lot of it, especially in the Catholic world where we feel completely ringed around by an unimaginably hostile and horrifying Real World. There are lots of fantasists, Catholic Enclavists, who want to go off, and who have gone off, into the woods to create a happy and comforting little Catholic world, well insulated from Outside. The kids are homeschooled, the women commonly wear the trademark shapeless plaid jumper/white t-shirt and sneakers combo, the men work at home, the books on the shelves are all from Ignatius or Angelus press, the jokes are clean and not very funny, conversation is always holy, the horrors of the squelching, seething pornographic world Outside are clucked at primly and the introduction of ironic humour is a wild and somewhat scandalous sensation.

Sound familiar?

But I think this sort of thing is just a different manifestation of the same impulse as our podgy leather-clad friends in the link. It's just another form of the same denial and rejection of The Real. I remember well the hippie world on the Left Coast. The people in it, all of whom indulge regularly in some form of video game/sci-fi fanaticism/historical re-enactment group narcotic in addition to living in Vancouver, all regarded their self-created world to be superior to the one occupied by the rest of the world. Feminism, pro-liferism, political activism and right up to involvement in occult and esoteric or quasi-religious/psychological [New Age] practises are all in this category. Make anything into a replacement for The Real and you've fallen into fantasism.

What are its characteristics? A close-knit group of people, a rejection of the "world outside the group", adherence to special distinguishing behaviors, dress, diets, activities that set your group apart from, and usually in opposition to, the World Outside. Not many go as far as the "transsexuals" and actually have significant bits of themselves sliced off and bind themselves to a lifetime of body-altering chemicals, but loads of them like to dress up and "live the dream", and talk about "going full time". The goal, however you go about it, is to enclose yourself into another, more congenial world.

I am old enough to remember when all this started. It wasn't the 60s. In the 60s, people were just experimenting, seeing what they could get away with. It was the 70s and up that it really took hold. The concept of the "lifestyle choice" was born then, and grew into its current state of permanent adolescence in the 80s.

I replied to Steve:

Yes. It's bad. How bad?

My mum got into the fantasy world and lived in it all the time I lived with her. It was a hippie fantasy world, but it was the same prison, just a different cell block.

[After leaving home so early ], as the time has gone by, and I've slowly managed to shake off the remnants of my mother's make-believe world, I've come to realise that it was not just a survival thing to leave home, but it was the thing that saved my soul too. Divorced from reality, means divorced from grace.

I've seen lots of forms of it. Sci fi nerds, computer geeks, lots of Tolkein nerds, SCA people, even people who are fanatical fans of television shows. Even people in the pro-life movement have created a little bubble universe around them, which I hear happens a lot in 'Movements" and "Causes". Political parties do it too.

I think it's a product of The Collapse. We don't hold together any more as a society. People don't belong to anything, not even their families. They certainly don't belong to their countries (Britain has been horribly deracinated, and no one in this country knows why). The world has become so radically horrible, and there are so few natural ways of creating cohesiveness, it's natural we should try to build enclaves.

Yes. It's bad, but I think I understand it.

But yes, it's really bad.

It's why it is so very difficult to make people become Catholics. I got a note from a recent convert once who asked me what to make of the disaster that he saw in the Church. He wanted to know if he ought to go along with what was going on in his parish, out of obedience or something. I told him that above all, the pursuit of the Catholic life, holiness, is the dedication to The Real to the exclusion of anything false. Falsehood, self-deception, hiding from The Real, is hiding from God. And if you persist, I've learned from first hand experience that it is possible to hide from Him in a self-created fantasy prison right up to the moment of death.

Family-Friendly

"...take the sleaze out of ...the sex industry."

OK, let's just remain calm.

Can you imagine a rational person (ie: a Christian) writing a phrase like this? What do you think it might mean?

H/T to Steve.