Veils and Brutes, Whores and Bullies

Amazing what putting one little naughty word into the title does for one's traffic, as indicated by the spike on the right side of the chart:

No wonder our language has become so debased. It works! If only putting a shocking vulgarity in the White House worked so well...

Perry notes that it is possible for Love and Truth to become polarized, but only as a result of a kind of declension, or devolution, from their higher unity. In such a case, Truth devolves to mere reason, while "Love becomes sentiment."

Have you noticed, for example, how sentimental people become when they have rejected religion? Actually, they can become either hard or sentimental, but I've noticed that some of the hardest ones can have a sequestered area of pure mushy sentimentality as a kind of replacement for a more rigorous and demanding religioisity.

Why, for example, does Richard Dawkins get married -- not just once, but repeatedly? Why this spiritual flabbiness amidst the hard and selfish genes?

But really folks, Truth and Love. What would life be without 'em? No, not false and hateful, since those represent deprivations, not negations.

We can't even say it would be like mammal life, because we all know that dogs, for example, have some sort of rich emotional life, with something analogous to "love." I suppose it would be more reptilian in nature -- just existing for the pure, unreflective sensation of it, like Charlie Rangel.

In fact, existence without Truth and Love isn't even existence, really. In a way, it's indistinguishable from non-being, and in any event, not worth the bother.

This is what often strikes me about radical environmentalists, who talk as if human beings are a destructive parasite on an otherwise beautiful and harmonious planet. What nonsense. If there were no humans to enjoy it, the earth might as well be obliterated by an asteroid, for all we care.

This also explains the widespread touchiness of political correctness. It turns out that these brave nihilists have more sacred cows than an ultra-Orthodox Jew with obsessive-compulsive disorder (like my wife's late Uncle Davy).

You can hardly say anything without offending the tender sensibilities of the politically correct. The other day Ann Coulter stepped into a sacred cowpie for calling President Obama a "retard."

But he is a retard, if by retard we mean someone who is intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, or morally arrested. The Benghazi scandal alone qualifies him for moral retardation. I mean, if no one is retarded, then no one is advanced.

Which is precisely what the left wants us to believe, but only when it is convenient. Otherwise they regard themselves as morally and intellectually superior to the 99% rabble o' retards.

Leftists also treat women as "sacred objects," but they go about it in a completely wrongheaded way. In fact, there is something deeply sacred about femininity, something worthy of veneration and protection, and which properly evokes chivalry in the male.

But this is quite different from the vulgar leftist belief that there is something special about a woman just because she is a woman -- or, more to the point, a leftist woman who feels that life has treated her unfairly. The left venerates victims, irrespective of whether or not they have any praiseworthy qualities.

Perry observes how "veiling and unveiling" play "such a central role in the contemplation of female beauty." Why, for example, is there a Victoria's Secret, and what is it hiding? We're not complaining, mind you, but a male equivalent of this would not only be absurd, but pathetic. What's the deal with the veiling of feminine beauty?

Perry says that it has to do with "the sacredness of beholding the essence." All cultures are -- or at least were, prior to the 1960s -- aware of this feminine power, and try to deal with it in various ways. However, the balance can be tipped too far in one direction or the other.

For example, "An excessive emphasis on veiling, and on guarding woman from the predatory passions of men, while necessary in a world populated by brutes, can overshadow the deeper function of veiling which... has to do with protecting man from beholding the Divine Essence unworthily" (Perry).

This is precisely the problem we see in much of the Islamic world. But we have the opposite problem in much of the west, represented by the culture of porn. For what is this culture but an unveiling so thorough that there is no mystery left to behold? There is no there there, at least nothing transcending the purely material plane, just surfaces in friction.

For strict atheists and other secular nihilists, this is all there can be, which again makes one wonder why the left is so eager to protect women that a man can be get sued for looking at one the wrong way.

Ironically, this regime is analogous to a "legalistic hijab," a kind of state-enforced veiling that has totally forgotten why the veil is necessary to begin with. To put it more bluntly, you can't really shame a whore any more than you can be mean to a bully, because the first is truth, the second justice.

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Difference between zombies and liberals? If you give the zombie what he wants, he'll leave you alone: