Category Archives: Blogs, Socials

Conservatively speaking

July 18, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

First things first: I have a column up today at The American Spectator Online: They Don’t Make Hate Like They Used To.

I was thinking of linking to a particular internet post today, and then I thought, “No. Too political.”

And it occurred to me to ask, “We’re obviously a conservative blog. How is being conservative different from being political?”

This is an important question, and I think Phil and I are generally agreed on it.

Political questions refer to matters of legislation and electioneering. Heaven knows we comment on such things from time to time here, but it’s not what the blog is about.

Cultural conservatism is a much broader concept. I was a cultural conservative back when I was still a Democrat.

Cultural conservatism means having a long-range view of cultural issues. The fact that an idea is new gives it no more than neutral weight. Newness tells us nothing. The fact that an idea is old disposes us toward it positively (though certainly old ideas have been proved wrong from time to time). That which has worked for our ancestors is very likely to have good reasons behind it, even if we no longer see them.

Ideas do not age.

I know what you’re thinking: What about slavery?

But the fact is, the basic idea that slavery is wrong is not a new idea. Abolition is a new practice in history, but the essential principle is the Golden Rule—do as you would be done by. No one wants to be a slave, so no one should make a slave of another. That’s been true from the beginning.

The inconvenient fact that, up until the Industrial Revolution, civilization was impossible without slavery kept most people from examining the matter too closely.

But the principle itself is one of those old, conservative ones.

Blogs, Socials

Link sausage, 7-17-12

July 17, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

A few interesting articles that caught my attention today.

From World Magazine: Despite protests, Boy Scouts reaffirm policy on homosexuality.

“The vast majority of the parents of youth we serve value their right to address issues of same-sex orientation within their family, with spiritual advisers and at the appropriate time and in the right setting,” Mazzuca said. “We fully understand that no single policy will accommodate the many diverse views among our membership or society.”

What an outrage. When will this benighted organization understand that a boy’s life is forever blighted if he misses the opportunity to spend a night in a tent with a homosexual?

From National Review: A Letter to Young Voters, by the great Dennis Prager.

But just in case you need an argument to take an older person’s thoughts seriously, ask any adults you respect whether they have more wisdom and insight into life now than they did ten years ago, let alone when they were your age. The answer will always be yes. (And any adult who has not gained wisdom over the course of a lifetime is not worth listening to.)

Which directly leads to my point: Did you ever wonder why people are far more likely to become conservative in their views and values as they get older?

This seems an excellent point to me. How do you answer it if you’re a liberal? Either it’s false that people get more conservative as they get older (which utterly defies all experience) or it’s false that people get wiser as they get older (and try telling that to the Boomers, even the liberal ones).

And finally, a Minnesota-related post, from Mitch Berg at Shot in the Dark: The Beatings Will Continue until Morale Improves. It involves a huge, disruptive light rail project going on in St. Paul right now, which (aside from bankrupting many small businesspeople, most of them East Asian immigrants) is forcing drivers to divert to other streets. What’s the city to do? They’ll turn one of those streets into “bikes only!” That’ll make everything better (it should be noted, by the way, that Mitch is an avid biker).

Joe has too much faith in Wahhabi transit activists. They’re a little like post-modern German artists, the type that glumly intones “Art IS destruction and ugliness” as they unveil their latest, “installation”, a dancing man clad only with a jar holding a gutted cat pickled in urine.

Like the post-moderns, the chaos – to drivers, anyway – is precisely the point. The goal is to make driving, and drivers, miserable. And to them, it’s no matter if you deal with that misery by jumping on the train, or by expressing your anger, fulfilling their prophecy that drivers are base, benighted, spoiled, arrogant and above it all.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction, Reviews

Praise from Caesar

June 25, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of getting my review of Andrew Klavan’s novel Crazy Dangerous (not here, but in its The American Culture incarnation) linked today by Klavan himself. In the course of the linkage he refers to me as “my colleague.”

That’s kind of the apotheosis of the concept of generosity, right there.

I’m Klavan’s colleague in more or less the same way I was Sir Anthony Hopkins’s colleague when I was doing community theater down in Florida. Or in the same way I was Christopher Nolan’s colleague when I cobbled together my West Oversea trailer. Or in the same way that guy in the subway station who plays with his instrument case open for spare change is Yo Yo Ma’s colleague.

But the fantasy is appreciated.

Yesterday was Svenskarnasdag (Swedish Day) at Minnehaha Park in Minneapolis. As usual, the Viking Age Club & Society was there for the entertainment, enlightenment, and moral uplift of the community. I fought a few fights, and never did better than a mutual kill. I’ve come to accept the fact that that’s more or less my calling.

Talked to a fellow who asked me about the Vikings in Scotland, and I was able to unload a lot of the stuff I learned in The Viking Highlands.

The subject didn’t stray as far as the Battle of Kringen, in 1612, whose 400th anniversary is today. Information here. (Thanks to Tim Eischen for bringing this to my attention.)

In brief, King Gustav Adolf II of Sweden wanted to attack Denmark by way of Norway. He hired a group of Scottish mercenaries under the command of George Sinclair (ironically, the Sinclairs are one of those Highland clans with Norse roots. But I doubt if that bothered them much) to march across Norway. An irregular force of Norwegian farmers ambushed them in a narrow mountain pass at Kringen, killed most of them by causing an avalanche, and slaughtered most of the rest. A few survived, and numerous Norwegians in Romsdal take pride in being their descendents.

We Norwegians have relatively few military victories to celebrate in our history, so this event looms large in our cultural tradition.

Blogs, Socials, Goofing, Religion

Slumgullion Friday

June 22, 2012 Lars Walker Leave a comment

In the spirit of Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine, I offer the following excerpt from the nonexistent book, Lars Walker’s Fulsome Compendium of Rightfully Forgotten Church History:

The Vigilant Baptist Movement (June 1852): On June 3, 1852, independent Baptist preacher Titus A. Drumhead founded the Vigilant Baptist Fellowship. The Vigilant Baptists took their marching orders from Luke 21:36: “Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.” Operating on the hermeneutical principle that nothing whatever in Scripture is ever to be taken symbolically, Rev. Drumhead declared that he had given up sleeping forever, trusting that God was able to sustain him in wakefulness so long as he lived. He exhorted his congregation (which consisted of six people) to follow his godly example. On June 5 of that same year, the Vigilant Baptists nearly entered into a merger with the Independent Church of Spiritual Water, a group which took its inspiration from John 4:14: “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst….” and so abstained from all liquids entirely. The merger was never consummated due to Rev. Drumhead’s unexpected unconsciousness. Awakening twelve hours later and concluding that he was not among the Elect, Rev. Drumhead became a Methodist. The fate of his movement, however, was happier than that of the I.C.S.W.

Our friend Loren Eaton gave me a plug over at his blog, I Saw Lightning Fall, yesterday. Thanks, Loren.

Finally, another great article about an American cartoonist from Stefan Kanfer at City Journal. This time he writes of Winsor McCay, the first great (and insufficiently remembered) newspaper cartoonist and pioneer animator. When I was a kid, my grandparents had a book of Little Nemo in Slumberland in their house. I glanced at it, but didn’t care for the look of it. Little Nemo, in particular, looked like a sissy to me.

And indeed, McCay’s work isn’t really for children. As an adult I’ve had the chance to look at a little of the man’s work, and it’s… gobsmacking. Great vistas of incredible, hallucinatory images splashed all across the newspaper page in full color. The man’s draftsmanship, modeling, and use of perspective have never been surpassed. In fact, I don’t think anyone else ever tried to do what he did.

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Book Reviews, Creative Culture