Because I see gathering ethnic instability in my homeland and throughout Europe and try to calculate the consequences I’m a bit of a sucker for prediction in general.  A particularly fascinating example of the species appears in the Telegraph today.

The always thought-provoking Niall Ferguson offers the vision of a new authoritarianism in Russia.  The parallels he draws between Hitler’s Germany and what is emerging in Putin’s Russia are arresting: a weakened parliament, media control, a developing state control of the economy, a disregard for private property rights and the rule of law …

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“Women now make up over half the workforce and the proportion is growing.”

The deputy chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission, Jenny Watson, mystifying her audience at the launch of the “sex & power” report, Who Runs Britain (pdf).

My first reaction to this was regret since, obviously, I don’t.  But then my second was a rush of optimism from the equally obvious fact that the possibly cute but not acute Jenny Watson never will either.

Found her here but decided to leave my post as is.  Erm ... sure there are lots of ways in which she is lovely.  Being a lobbyist and human rights artiste may not be two of them, though.

Is it possible to be ungallant to a feminist?

“Who would want to be a TV dad?” begins a recent item by Wendy Tuohy in the Age newspaper. “If you’re in a sitcom you are most likely a man-boy buffoon, clueless about fatherhood or marriage, self-indulgent but not self-aware, unreliable, immature, and usually the butt of the family joke.”

Fathers, it seems, are either made absent in TV families (eg The Gilmore Girls) or are portrayed as harmless buffoons (The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond). It’s hard to think of a single example on TV today of an intact family in which a father exercises a wise and protective paternal authority.

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To be simultaneously Queen of the Britons and Head of the Commonwealth when the Commonwealth has come to Britain is a schizophrenic occupation.  Evidently, though, for the Sufferer it is made less onerous by the incapacity to see any conflict therein.  One side of the divide is, after all, cast down into the mud.  It hates, or so they say.  The other is graced by expedience and favoured by the conviction that liberal sanctimony is the measure of all decent men.  Much of the expedience, never forget, consists in the sure knowledge that the latter choice will assist the corporate survival of the Monarchy itself.

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I always like finding examples of genuinely conservative thought in history. It makes a nice change to be able to present these gems, rather than to be always a critic of liberalism.

So I was pleased to find the following piece of writing by John Jay, who was a Founding Father of America and the first Chief Justice of the United States. Jay wrote that,

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… which, all things considered, is a fairly appropriate moment to return to the subject of faith in our liberal times.  Earlier this month a Cassandra-like figure, Jayne Ozanne, lit up a debate in the Church of England with a private paper she submitted to the Archbishop’s Council.  It was leaked and in it she wrote this:-

I see a time of great persecution coming, which will drive Christianity all but underground in the West. I believe that this will primarily take the form of a social and economic persecution, where Christians will be ridiculed for their faith and pressurised into making it a purely private matter.

Meanwhile, the established Church will continue to implode and self-destruct, fragmenting into various divisions over a range of internal issues. There will be an increasing number who fear man more than God, and who shy away from admitting that there is any absolute truth. Instead, they will seek to promote a gospel that is socially acceptable to all. As a result, many will continue to leave – disaffected and dismayed by the lack of faith and courage needed to stand the ground.

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In a recent post John Ray writes that,

“It is of course my contention that Leftism can ONLY be understood as a psychological rather than a rational phenomenon.”

This statement touches on important issues, so I don’t want to let it pass by without comment. I don’t think that John has described things adequately. I believe that both the left and the right wing of politics have adopted the same underlying political principle and that the logical unfolding of this principle explains the course of Western politics.

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Crossposted from my web log.

Drew Pinsky, host of Loveline, writes about culture in his book Cracked.

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