Category Archives: Conservatism

Reorganizing my websites is not finished

Despite the seemingly definitive announcement about my websites in the previous post, I have continued to consider how best to display my intellectual interests. Perhaps I flatter myself that anyone is interested. Nevertheless, I continue to reflect on the issue for my own satisfaction. I look on my websites as a diary.

The latest is that I am now considering a third website that will concentrate solely on my books and writing, and the processes of publishing.

Over twenty-five years, I have read many books on writing, editing, and publishing, watched many more videos on the same subjects, and used the editing programs Grammarly and ProwritingAid. I now have a list of twelve books with a thirteenth in the writing. I have had a lot of experience as an Indie publisher. My knowledge might be of service to those considering the route of self-publishing.

The format of the proposed website will be entirely different from the present format. This website will revert to a particular category of social issues with no change to the format. Stay tuned for developments.

Recommended books

Socially and politically oriented Youtube channels often interview authors of books that have captured the reading public’s attention.

The books below attracted my attention because they give powerful arguments and evidence against the Woke class’s condemnation of Western Civilization.

The final two by Timothy Gordon and his wife, Stephanie, are so ‘out there’ on the fringes for most conservatives that they will not consider them. The books, however, restate age-old beliefs about men’s natural leadership and women’s role as organizer of the domestic sphere.

I intend to add to the list whenever I came across book of similar interest.

Against Decolonization: Campus Culture Wars and the Decline of the West, Doug Stokes

Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, Helen Joyce

Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, Nigel Biggar

The Case for Colonialism, Bruce Gilley

Feminism Against Progress, Mary Harrington

The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us, Carrie Gress

Occult Feminism: The Secret History of Women’s Liberation, Rachel Wilson

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The Case for Patriarchy – Timothy Gordon

Ask Your Husband: A Wife’s Guide to True Femininity, Mrs Timothy. J. Gordon

The Cardinal we know and admire

Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, lynch-mob leaders like delusional Louise Milligan, and that whole band of feral wokists have not bowed Cardial George Pell in the least. Not even 404 days in solitary confinement made one jot of difference to his immovable stand on moral and religious principles. He wrote three inspiring books about his experiences. When a German cardinal and a German bishop proposed changing key dogma of the faith, the aging cardinal was immediately at the barricades.

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Cardinal Pell Calls on Vatican to Correct 2 Senior European Bishops for Rejecting Church’s Sexual Ethics

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews.

Edward Pentin Blogs NCR March 15, 2022

VATICAN CITY — Cardinal George Pell has called on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) to publicly reprimand two of Europe’s most senior bishops for what he said was their “wholesale and explicit rejection” of the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics.

In a statement released March 15, Cardinal Pell asked the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation to “intervene and pronounce judgment” on comments made by Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, the relator general of the Vatican Synod on Synodality, and Bishop Georg Bätzing, president of the German Bishops’ Conference. 

Cardinal Pell had made the appeal a few days earlier, in an interview given to the German Catholic television agency K-TV on March 11.

Jesuit Cardinal Hollerich of Luxembourg and Bishop Bätzing of Limburg have both called for changes to the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in recent interviews. 

Read the rest here …

THE STUNNING DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE

Most reports about the funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, were favourable, acknowledging the solemn, affecting dignity of the ceremony. None complained that it was too long at three hours. But there was something else that unexpectedly attracted the attention of people worldwide.

It was the royal elegance and beauty of Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, recorded in a series of stunning photographs. One in particular had Catherine staring directly into the camera, her ivory complexion and sparkling clear green eyes mesmerizing the onlooker. Here was the sort of ethereal female beauty, the feminine mystique, that many men once found the ideal and which feminists went about destroying . Now we are brought to vomiting in revulsion by the likes of Cadi B. It’s where Betty Friedman took female beauty.

See the photos in Yahoo News Prince Philip in the First Royal Funeral.

The Cardinal Pell affair has SHIFTED to Edmund Burke Society site

NOTICE

The pages about the Cardinal Pell Affair have been transferred to my Edmund Burke Society (Aust) website.

As a preeminent political and social issue, it belongs on the Burke website

All comments and records about this most shocking episode in Australian history will from now be on the Burke website. Indeed, the Pell Affair is of Burkean proportions. This screaming miscarriage of justice is an accurate measure of how corrupted Australia has become from its foundations.

A powerful response to Milligan and the mob

Keith Windschuttle, editor of Quadrant Magazine, has written a book that is a must-read for those Australians who fondly think we live in a society unassailably based on the rule of law. Here he gives an account of the focus of his book.

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A Kafkaesque Scenario

Keith Windschuttle, Editor, Quadrant Magazine

The case of Cardinal George Pell and child sexual abuse is still not finished. There is the matter now being investigated by the Australian Federal Police about whether Pell’s opponents within the Vatican sent money to Australia to try to influence public opinion and legal proceedings. However, given the enthusiasm to persecute Pell displayed by those arrayed against him in Australian legal and media circles, if such bribery did exist it was probably wasted. As Humbert Wolfe observed long ago, when you see what they will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.

Moreover, with today’s benefit of hindsight over the competing perspectives that now come into view, the Pell case seems even more important on levels other than the multi-pronged witch hunt by the desperate characters who brought him down. Above all, the case is a demonstration of the fragility of the rule of law and of civilised social and professional relationships. Within the ideological imperatives that prevail today, any one of us could become George Pell. We could be accused by strangers of reprehensible behaviour, and then find the weight of the nation’s structures of law, government and public opinion piled on top of us—a Kafkaesque scenario.

Pell was lucky to be saved at the last minute by his only remaining hope, the judges of the Australian High Court. They retained enough independence and integrity to see the truth of his case as it was. However, these qualities had been beyond the ability of the majority of judges in the Victorian Court of Appeal and beyond the comprehension of the six former judges and legal officials who sat on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, all of whom displayed embarrassing failings in the logic of their findings. There are no guarantees that future members of the High Court will act as creditably as those who acquitted Pell.

In my book published last month, The Persecution of George Pell (Quadrant Books, 408 pages, $39.95), I not only cover the minutiae of police, court and Royal Commission proceedings in what defence counsel Robert Richter accurately described as “Operation Get Pell” from 2013 to 2020, but also place it within the history of the culture wars, political ideology and consequent changes to legal procedures related to sexuality that have accumulated since the 1960s.

Read the rest here…

The Crisis in the Church

Archbishop Vigano, Pope Francis’s most outspoken critic, recently raised serious questions about the Second Vatican Council. He has joined a long line of critics over the years, with Archbishop Lefebvre of the Society of St Pius X at the forefront. Archbishop Vigano has followed Archbishop Lefebvre in demanding the documents of the Council be jettisoned and the Church start again, with Traditional belief the starting point.

I follow St John Paul II and Benedict XVI in their interpretation of the Council documents. The documents should be read in the light of Tradition – according to the ‘hermeneutic of continuity’. Any apparent ambiguities are resolved by placing them in the teaching of what went before Vatican II. There have been a number of crucial documents following the Council that have corrected the alleged ambiguities.

The collapse of the Church after the Council was due to the adoption of the ‘Spirit of Vatican II’, which ignored the documents and created a whole new church, which was the stated aim of its promoters. The so-called ‘spirit’ prevailed politically, not doctrinally. The overthrow of the Traditional Church was a political victory.

The political forces for the new church were tightly organised before the start of the Council. On the 11th of October 1962, the opening of the Council, they went into operation. Their political manoeuvring and manipulation steamrolled the thoroughly unprepared Traditionalists, those defending the centuries-old Church. Several years’ work in the preparatory documents were tossed out and a new start made, at the head of which were some of the most notorious dissenters in the years following the Council. Indeed, it was only the intervention of Pope St Paul VI at critical points that stopped the Council tipping over the edge into heresy.

My thesis that the Second Vatican Council was primarily a political contest is grounded largely on Fr Ralph Wiltgen’s THE RHINE FLOWs INTO THE TIBER, reissued in 1978 as THE INSIDE STORY OF VATICAN II, and Roberto de Mattei’s magisterial THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL (AN UNWRITTEN STORY). There is also my experience of the Council and its aftermath. I was sixteen in 1962 and nineteen when the 1960s cultural revolution and the student rebellion exploded on the West in 1965. The Council wrapped up in December 1965.

In a very informative discussion of the Council, Patrick Coffin interviews Dr Ralph Martin about his new book A CHURCH IN CRISIS: PATHWAYS FORWARD. The discussion gives depth to my views. Highly recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S6VX1acem8

Raph Martin’s new book is available on Amazon.

Pride and Prejudice again

I often wonder what Jane Austen would have thought of the intense interest in her writings more two hundreds years further on. I wonder whether it had entered her mind that her books would gain a worldwide audience, and her popularity only grow. On the second, I think the answer would be a definite no. It never occurred to her. On the evidence, all she hoped for was the publication of her novels and their acceptance.

On the first, I think she would have been stunned, flabbergasted – and appalled. Appalled at the interpretation by some who attribute political views to her she did not hold. Feminists have given her the status of a feminist icon while the evidence speaks against this.

Jane Austen was a devout Christian, leaning to the High Church of England. Her traditional Christian beliefs, which include the idea of an ordered world, would disqualify this picture before we look at other evidence. In her novels, she savages a range of female types – the stupid, the ignorant, the neurotic, the manipulative, the deceitful, the cruel, and the list goes on. The heartless Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park is perhaps the most vile female character in English fiction.

Continue reading Pride and Prejudice again

Ben Shapiro smashes pro-abortion arguments

Ben Shapiro is an American/Jewish conservative commentator. I make the point that he is a Jew because he boldly presents himself as an orthodox Jew. His youtube video’s are well-known to conservatives around the world.

To those not familiar with the name I strongly recommend you have a look at a selection of his videos. To those who think Jews are naturally the propagators of left-wing theories, I more strongly recommend you listen to Shapiro in full flight. His thinking processes are razor sharp and lightning quick – and they defend a conservative view of the world.

An indication of his wide appeal to natural law conservatives is an article on the (deeply conservative Catholic LifeSiteNews channel summarising Shapiro’s arguments against abortion.

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Ben Shapiro smashes pro-abortion arguments at March for Life podcast

WASHINGTON, D.C., January 18, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Festivities for the 2019 March for Life kicked off Friday with a live broadcast of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” which the popular conservative commentator devoted to an overview of the case against abortion and common “pro-choice” arguments.

After taking the stage to enthusiastic cheers, Shapiro noted that this was the first time both at the March and doing a full hour themed around a specific issue, then quoted several pro-abortion statements from former President Barack Obama, including that God should “bless” Planned Parenthood.

Continue reading Ben Shapiro smashes pro-abortion arguments