Alex discusses the choices we have to make in a capitalist society that ultimately contribute to and direct the dominant culture. His point was valid, but I feel that we also must consider the foundational restraints of capitalism, and the concomitant cultural hegemony, that it entails.

Lately, I've had conflicting feelings about cultural darwinism. On one hand, it legitimizes global Americanization, but on the other, it also justifies the flourishing of minority cultures within the United States itself. Moreover, there is no choice within the cultural hegemony. Those in the developing world aren't presented with a choice about whether or not they want English-language, and Western-culture imposed on their society. The ubiquity of Coca-Cola in advertising is a good example: whether you like it or not, regardless of whether you're from Nicaragua or Canada, the average person recognizes and understands what Coca-Cola is. Yes, it stems from consumer-power, but Coca-Cola exists out of the dearth of power consumers have to represent national, domestic products.

Even if borne out of an irrational romantic sentimentality, there is value in preserving the language and customs of a nation by the mere virtue of ascribing value to it. Is the homogeneity of a global English-speaking world appealing to those even in the English speaking world? Everyone values exoticism to some extent. There's novelty in it, at the very least, but also a more primary appreciation for difference, even if to feel perversely superior to one's neighbour. The simplest explanation is that uniformity is boring.

There is a feeling of richness that comes along with belonging to a tradition, even a healthy insularity. It is so hollowly 21st century to discard the customs of your parents and grandparents in a single generation by so easily integrating into this international Americanness. It is the loss of a centuries-long cultivation of culture. To not lament that fact is too pragmatic for my tastes. When your children ask themselves who they are, they will search for something beyond a manufactured identity entangled in an equalizing political ideology.

Growing up, my mother worked and also did a great job parenting three children who, I have to face reality, weren't always angels. She happened to work at the school we attended as soon as her last one was in Kindergarten. Pretty convenient, and it kept her from Marge Simpson syndrome; cleaning for no reason and being cooped up in a house all day.

My mother is a bright woman who grew up in the 1960s and married in the 1970s - not in the counterculture, but rather in a traditional Italian household surrounded by friends and relatives in the same situation. She had her share of rebellion and has enjoyed plenty of nights out with the girls, but to this day, I can see that the values she took from her parents, even if they were a bit strict at times, were gladly passed down to her children. The fact that she's considered "a classic" by my wife and friends is no surprise: she's a great hostess who welcomes people into her home and takes great pride in keeping a clean home; she works hard and still has time to prepare dinner most nights for those remaining in her house; she always wants family around no matter how busy it makes her or no matter how tired she gets.

My wife's mother is much the same way; she did all of the work in raising her children herself and from what I understand was also strict at times. She has run a day care out of her house for decades after working in television and traveling during the 1970s. She's had a full life of hard work and parenting, she just chose not to pursue a career she knew was at odds with parenting once she had children.

To me, this is the working mom. Working moms put family first and worry about career later. Both examples noted above would be considered sacrelig by the modern mentality of "career first, materialism next, kids third."

So it confuses me that much more when I hear complaints about work-life balance from people who choose to delve into careers they know full well will take up most of their waking hours:

Listen to Nicole Russo, the mother of two young girls, and a partner at O’Neill Hospitality and Entertainment, speaking on a recent morning at a volunteer event before starting her day at work, then going home to West Roxbury to do the bath and bedtime routine. “People say, ‘you should do yoga, you should do Pilates, something for yourself for an hour.’ But who has an hour? Who has time for inner peace?"

If there’s one thing that’s harder to take than your own lack of equilibrium, it’s someone else’s success in that realm. To say “I spend time with my kids, and I volunteer, and I’m blessed with a wonderfully flexible job, and my husband and I have date night every Saturday,’’ is akin to boasting “I’ve got firm thighs."

But perhaps the best advice comes from the unbalanced moms themselves. Asked if they had work-life balance, many let out a long “ha ha ha ha.’’ In other words, when all else fails, laugh.

I'm not sure many working mothers can relate to someone who's a partner at an entertainment company. Someone in that position probably has a client-facing job and has to put a smile on for strangers all day, then come home tired to her family. The only difference is, people in roles like that often have the Blackberry buzzing all through dinner, and usually are left wondering what their kids are doing when their kids realize Mom is too busy with her other life to discipline them or keep a watch on them.

Parents end up doing the worst job they possibly can by thinking of themselves first and their kids second. Anyone who has a career or kids can appreciate that sometimes there aren't enough hours in the day. But to stay in a career that gobbles up all your free time, then complaining there isn't enough time afterward, is lost on someone like me. Plenty of mothers choose careers that allow flexible hours, and many of them are just as tired at the end of the day. Trading the fancy title and corner office for, say, a human services job that doesn't pay as well but offers night time hours offers the reward of leaving the job at work and making family first priority when home.

And just so there's no mistaking the motive: the same goes for men. If you find you don't even know your kids as they're in their formative years of school and choosing sports they will play through high school, it might be time to ease back a bit on the business travel or late meetings and make it a point to stay home more. Plenty of men who have jobs that require travel just don't make time for weekend hobbies like golfing which are mutually exclusive with being a Dad on the weekends.

As for me, though the income potential may be higher elsewhere, my current employer offers the type of flexibility that is worth more than a few dollars more in my paycheck every two weeks.

Love it or hate it, but Christianity and "Judeo-Christan" values compose the very backbone of Western law, morality and culture. Even Nietzsche had some good things to say about Jesus and Christianity. But with new scandals of pedophilia and corruption, Christianity is now a religion quickly losing momentum in Europe, and possibly also in America. We need to ask ourselves why, but while many will say "Richard Dawkins," and I will basically say they're right, the truth of the matter is that people are right in a way they probably don't expect to be.

When we talk about the three pillars of modern Western civilization, we point to Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. Democratic government, rule of law, Christian morality. The fact that we associate Western morality with Jerusalem, highlights the fact that Christianity originated as a sect within Judaism, headed by the rebel Jesus. The morality found in the New Testament changed our world, for better or worse, and spawned the underlying meme for the development of both liberal democracy and Western law: humanism.

Christianity was always about humanism, but from the beginning of its creation, it rarely lived up to its moral ideals of humility, peace, brotherhood and equality. The Christian feudal societies in Europe thrived on hierarchal power structures, constant warfare, injustices between social classes and conflicts between Protestants and Catholics. Christianity was the word used to declare war, burn witches or keep people suppressed under tyrants. Religion, just like today, could not be separated from the social reality of its time.

Nietzsche's prediction of a Christian nihilism, or a death in the belief in God and the morality that deity represented, was really just a rare prediction of how the social reality of Europe would come to develop. As many European countries went through the Enlightenment, people "discovered" that one could keep the Christian morality, but throw all the supernatural dogma out the window. Eventually this process came to develop what we today call secular humanism.

You might as well call it secular Christianity, because it contains all the Christian virtues that a religious tyrant would espouse 600 years ago, only there's no mention of rituals, community, duties or any deity. One way to look at this development is to regard secular humanism as the ultimate stage of Christianity. It's finally cut itself down to its very core ideals that Jesus once preached to unite people against the Romans. Only today we call ourselves followers of human rights, UN and Amnesty, not Jesus Christ.

If you understand this, fully, you now also begin to see the problem Christianity is facing. Actually, it concerns Islam just as much. We are slowly killing religion because we're taking a shortcut to what we believe is its essence, but in doing so we actually threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Christianity without its dogmatic and ritual foundation is just another outpost for the UN. And those human virtues may contribute to a positive development for many societies, but without the religious anchor, will also help to erode the cultural and communal unity that is necessary to support a safe, humane society.

Richard Dawkins is therefore, correctly, a destroyer of Christianity. He's advocating the shortcut to humanism. But I and many others believe that the destroyers of religion may end up creating new religious life anyway. Like Nietzsche professed, godless people may be moral, but they will also suffer from emptiness inside. Without beliefs, virtues tend to lose their vigor and become hollow words of little or no meaning. It is through the sacredness, community and ritual of religious life that people tend to understand and command morality. Not from the view of a godless scientist.

Quite frankly, a godless society is boring and uncreative. It's like it has something important it wants to say, but it just cannot find an interesting way to say it. None of this may necessarily point to a rebirth of Christianity. Maybe it's not even a good idea to attempt a European Christian resurrection. But the godless European is destined, just like his ancestors before him, to invent new gods and new sacred systems for himself. He's not satisfied with the ones he has already created at offices, televisions and parliaments. And when those gods rise, so will the people who have the courage to believe in them.

In "The happiness of the people," Charles Murray makes the same prediction every Anglo-American journalist has been making about immigration and European welfare for decades:

The European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birthrates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.

The argument seems to rest upon the notion that the welfare system in the past did work, but because immigration brought outside cultural values, the system will eventually break down. But is this really true? First, let's look at some recent history of Swedish economics:

Beginning in the 1870s, however, Sweden created the conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector. As a result, Sweden for many years had the world's fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third-highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s. Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States. By the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest. Economic growth slowed to a crawl. Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust. Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

People often forget that Sweden didn't became rich because of its post-60s welfare model, but rather despite it. Naturally, such a model would never have existed unless there already were strong unions and labor movements who pushed for social democracy rather than capitalism. These are the inherent "Swedish" values behind the Scandinavian experiment. The idea of inborn cultural values that profess this welfare model is simply a myth.

But the real fallacy behind Murray & Co's reasoning lies not in the myth of homogenous welfare values. The real question is whether "alien values" is a threat to the welfare model at all. Consider the welfare society as an organism. It operates bureaucratically; as long as its citizens go to work and pay their taxes, the system basically works. In a more capitalist society where deregulations eventually lead to a greater civic sector where people are dependent upon each other, cultural homogenity becomes more important.

You can therefore live practically your whole life in moderate isolation from your neighbors and community, as long as you bring home cash and send off taxes. You'll survive, and if there is trouble, an agency will continue to support you. The dependence on other people is minimal. This is why Sweden is an extremely individualist society with great tolerance for subcultures, often baffling non-Europeans. In a society where you rely much more upon your own actions and those of the community, you will need to find common ground quickly. This is where cultural values come in.

Immigrants to Scandinavia can therefore keep their Muslim, Jewish or Hindu identity and still make it multiculturally, because they will live much of their lives in isolation from native Scandinavians, or end up in another multicultural community just like their families and relatives. It "works," because the citizens of Scandinavia are financing a system making it possible to live as secluded as possible. The only alien values threatening the welfare model are those that break with the ethics that profess hard work, little pay and heavy taxes. Most cultures can and will adapt to that model, since they'll maintain a good material standard in return.

There does exist such a break in values, but there are reasons to suggest it will even out over time across generations. The real immigration threat to the Swedish model is rather the costs, and the model itself, which, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, thrives on "running out of other people's money to spend." Aware European conservatives therefore take the immigration issue seriously, but even more profess the greatest systematic threat is the system itself, which preferably would return to the high-growth, pre-60's model that made Sweden prosperous and economically competitive.

Joy is in the air. I get a lot of fun messages on Facebook today (add me here). These two are especially noted:

Nina Kupriyanova, writer at Alternative Right, is looking forward to the Cross Procession tonight. I can only imagine its beauty.

I just attended the Cross Procession this morning. The church was almost full, full of both older and younger people. I had small children running up to me during cemerony and asking what I was doing. To be able to manage my job behind the mixer board I chased them away with easter candy. I guess I won't be feasable for father-material like Frank any time soon..

Frank Joseph notes that Easter originally was grounded in seasonal changes. Indeed, in Swedish churches we put forward this lovely seasonal flower, which sees its birth during April and May, to emphasize the resurrection of spring and hope:

Let's celebrate this day by listening to Gustav Holst's second movement, Venus - the Planet of Peace, from "the Planets."

Men who say they are men, but still behave as boys. That's the topic of my latest article on paleo-masculinity at AlternativeRight:

If you study Western popular culture, you get an aesthetic view of masculine behavior and values. It's about fast cars, beer drinking, lots of chicks, nerdy computer games, and political labels. They all share a common denominator, aestheticism, or putting more value in the external than the internal. Instead of showing a man pursuing a value or goal, popular culture portrays a man as someone who has bought a certain gimmick or consumer lifestyle. Of course, since the traditional sociological move from boy to man has slowed down, and in many cases not even been made entirely, men need to share collective identity based on something else. If you're not managing a farm, a family, or a church, you have to pride yourself with something else. In our society, it's appearance.

Go and check it out!

For a couple of posts now I've made the case that civic work enriches life. It might be something as simple as helping your neighbor cut the lawn properly. But if there's something in it for you, there is also something in it for your appearance. In short, when you get involved with work outside of what's commonly expected of you, it will be recognized. Reputation.

The function of reputation is brutal, but useful once you learn to master it. Having lived most of my life in a small community, I know how this works. Do good, few people will recognize it. Do bad, most people will recognize it. It's harder to slay dragons and receive gold, than to accidentally trip on a baby and be sentenced to death by public opinion. There is a great satisfaction though in doing good and receiving credit for it.

Last Sunday I had to set up audio equipment for a professional singer, which in this case meant cutting the higher frequencies and boosting the mid-section register. Afterwards she told me I had almost perfect sound perception, and that other people had recommended my work. This is quite a charm after just a few week's worth of voluntary work, but it kind of proves my point. If, however, say an important key got lost and I happened to be the only one in the room at the time of its disappearance, my credibility would immediately be hurt.

I say this because people are small-minded crowdists, especially women, who love every chance to backfire and backstab to create drama. They may not even wish you harm, it's just their idea of wasting time. Reputation is therefore always a mix of action, appearance and myth. Civic work is good in that it's clearly action-oriented, it has a public appearance, and there's little myth surrounding it, since anyone can observe and join. Fearing I'd been too rough with a few female students, I dropped the church argument: "...anyway, you girls have fun, I'm staying home, I've got church tomorrow." Their jaws. Dropped. To the ground.

I increasingly meet a lot of women in their mid to late 20s, whose worst fear is to become pregnant. They say it'll ruin their whole life. When a kid comes, it's officially over. No more self-realization. But what does it mean to realize oneself today?

I'm going to call this one out for what I believe it really is: self-justification. When philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche urged people to explore their individuality, they weren't really talking about getting drunk at bars every weekend, traveling around the world to "find" your "true" identity, or live off of random jobs and welfare for as long as possible, with as many partners as possible. They were hinting at something else.

Self-realization in a modern context is self-justification. It's a catchphrase to justify looming around without any plans for the future. I can get drunk, I can travel, I can work here and there, I can embarrass myself in public. But this isn't really self-realization. It's a way to justify inaction in life. Western women who are still in their late 30s and barely able to maintain a serious relationship have yet to "realize" themselves in any productive way, either for themselves or for society. Did they start up a business? Did they join church? Did they write a great novel? No, they got shitfaced for the last 15 years.

The truth is that family people, which nowadays is a feared group among leftist academics and confused people past their mid 20s, realize themselves in a way most other people will never do. If you belong to stable institutions in society like family, church or university/business, you realize yourself every day. Through your daily work, where you enhance your abilities, through children and wife/husband, where your social and emotional skills are put to the test, and through vocation or community, where you do your part in a larger social whole. How many of these so called "self-realized" people have ever been involved in something similar without getting money in return?

I don't have a problem with confused women who don't want to have kids. They're too unstable and emotionally too immature to manage a family. But girls, and boys, please, don't pretend you're somehow better or more enlightened than the people who actually support the whole of society and make sure there will be coming generations who continue our traditions. You're free to realize yourself at bars and in foreign countries, but with that lifestyle also comes the public recognition that you're simply outgrown babies, who have yet to actually realize your character and abilities in a way that benefits someone else than just your ego.

I just had a new article published for newly-started Alternative Right, entitled "Let us fail!," where I argue that young men today suffer morally from not taking individual responsibility:

Here is how we morally destroy the character of men. It starts when we're just boys and we demand our parents buy the toys we see on television, serve us the food we want at any moment, and satisfy our every emotional demand as long as we yell loud enough. We learn as children that we can pretty much bully people around and get away with it. And parents, too afraid of what'd happen if they resisted or too lazy to even care, shrug and pay the dues. By doing so they breed a form of self-centered recklessness that damages the self-image and self-discipline of their children.

There's no excuse for being a lazy, incompetent fool, but as "preacher-dude" Mark Driscoll points out, a lot of blame is on girlfriends and mothers, because they'd rather babysit men than to force them into work. Authorities in welfare countries work the same way. By taking over functions that communities regularly would manage on their own, bureaucrats discourage us from being active citizens. Why bother, when someone else will do it for you?

I see this all the time, everywhere, in Swedish society. Curiously I also see it in church. When I spontaneously volunteered for work there, people were baffled. You get the kind of weird reactions like these: "But...you don't get paid?" or "Shouldn't you sleep on Sundays instead?" and even "No one is forcing you man, you better let others do it." It's laziness, but in aggressive form, and the logic is the product of decades of welfare-ism: don't volunteer to work for something you don't need to, only think about yourself. It even goes further: if I am lazy, but you are not, I better make sure you do like the rest of us and stay home all day, because otherwise you'll make us look...well, lazy. And people wonder why European culture is in decline?

Since a lot of women work within the church, you get a lot of babysitting unless you're a bit socially aggressive. If you're passive, they'll take over and pacify you. I had a weird conversation with the woman who was supposed to write contract with me. "You know, you can come here like every second Sunday or something." I insisted. "No, I want to make this a binding contract, I'm not here to fiddle around." She looked surprised. "That's great...you know, you don't have to take part in the ceremonies, it's free." I insisted again. "Part of the reason I come here is because I take interest in the ceremonies." So it went on until I had to talk her into signing me a binding contract. A-mazing.

It's not out of negativity or fear people are reluctant to give you pressing duties. It's the social mentality in an individualist culture where no one takes responsibility for anything - unless they're paid for it. They assume you're just another confused young dude walking in to check things out and then drop out when you pass the bar or something. Women in particular hesitate to give orders or enact their authority (those that do often abuse it, hence most women prefer male bosses). So a word of advice to male readers who are thinking of getting involved in civic work: women may treat you like a baby in the beginning. Press them to trust in you and your work. To female readers: we men love seeing you around when we work. The more of you, the merrier.

Sofia calls Islam a threat for contemporary society. I would clarify this statement by stating that radical forms of diversity is a threat to any established social or cultural order. Liberals disagree and don't think we can get enough diversity before we learn to import and export people like products across continents. Let's pick out some bullshit arguments about Islam and cultural diversity in Europe:

But Islamic shock is not simply a description of differences in flows of people. The claim is that the new wave of immigration has been uniquely disruptive of a European “way of life.” This narrative of pre-Islamic immigration by white Europeans sharing the same values, going to the same churches, and welcoming new immigrants with their good hearts, it turns out, is baloney. Yet even the most knowledgeable of the European-Islamic-threat writers, the journalist Christopher Caldwell in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (2009), describes an undifferentiated Europe now besieged by Muslims. Conveniently forgotten are centuries of religious wars, revolutions and counter-revolutions, attacks on Belgian and Italian immigrants to France, and, of course, the events of the early 1940s, in which good French and Dutch people joined good Germans in denouncing and arresting Jews and transporting them to death camps.

For a starter, this doesn't really justify the current problems Europe faces with integrating Muslims into our Western society. It merely describes the real problem of diversity. Further, there's no conflict between the existence of major differences among European cultures to this day, and the unity of these countries on ideas central to a common civilization.

Secondly, and most importantly, this is not a correct historical comparison. Europe's always been torn by religious, economic and political conflicts. Yet each country and State/region believed in and asserted a constitution and set of values that kept it moving. It would be impossible for instance to assert both a Catholic and Protestant church in Sweden after the religious wars in Europe. Today, however, hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Sweden demand Islam to become an equal part of Swedish culture as the Christian churches. That's a different situation, one that the writer conveniently leaves out of the picture.

The pertinence of these objections comes from the Burkean core of Caldwell’s complaints, highlighted by his title. People, he argues, should not have to radically change their ways of life. But the massive arrival of Muslims has forced such changes, wrested quiet Europeans from their peaceful ways, and forced them to look at minarets next to their steeples. Yet when about one-third of French people freely admit to being racist, and some Britons on camera casually compare Muslims to cockroaches, the conservative argument loses some of its bite. Perhaps some Europeans need a good jolt to confront the persistent racism that plagues the continent.

That French people are racist, or some British twats get caught on video for saying NILLA, are separate issues from the Islamic problem in Europe. Racism concerns ethnicity and not religion. Furthermore, the argument suggests the real problem lies with intolerance on behalf of the native Europeans. Everyone who has lived in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious community knows this simply isn't true. There are other more complex problems underlying the chaos in Paris, London and Copenhagen. Problems like a conflict between Western constitutional principles and Islamic values, begging for some kind of reconciliation. It's that reconciliation we need to discuss, not racism.

Indeed, current laws and policies in most of Western Europe do not promote immigration, but mainly guarantee residents’ legal rights. In Britain this means the right to wear religiously motivated dress to school and eat religiously required foods in the school canteen. In the Netherlands and France it means the right to have state support for religious schools that open their doors to anyone. These rights were won by earlier generations of Catholics and Protestants; they have nothing to do with naïve multiculturalist Islamophilia. While these legal rights are often challenged—by onerous language requirements in the Netherlands, or severe restrictions on family reunification in Italy—in principle, they are assured.

The immigration policies of the European Union render national policy more and more irrelevant. The social policies described are unproblematic for most Christians, since their religion is in tune with European culture and civilization. Non-Westernized interpretations of Islam are not. This is for example why wearing niqab is so controversial even in liberal cultures like Sweden: yes, you are allowed to express your religious freedom, but if your employer is not allowed to shake your hand and cannot see your face expressions, we have a problem. Whenever we avoid this discussion, we are in fact in the hands of "naive multiculturalist Islamophilia."

These arguments suffer from two defects: shallow historical memory and “block thinking.” As Paul Sniderman and Louk Hagendoorn remind us in their When Ways of Life Collide (2007), a generation ago those Dutch people who today vaunt their egalitarianism and their toleration of all lifestyles were authoritarian in family life and homophobic in public and in private. A recent study found a rising number of young Dutch men who espouse attitudes of tolerance, but then attack gay men. Nor have Europeans always been gender-equal. Two generations ago, French women were not able to vote and did not have the same rights to property as men, and Muslim women in much of the world had more avenues to gaining divorce than did most European women. Europeans, Africans, and Asians all have been moving gradually toward greater legal recognition of equal rights for women and men, and everywhere it has been a struggle.

The problem with this argument, that really should be posed as a question, as done by Mark Steyn: Then why aren't the Muslim communities and organizations in Europe actively condemning the terrorist and anti-freedom of speech plots committed in Madrid, Bali, London, Paris and Copenhagen? A moderate Islam exists, but if it's weak and silent compared to its more radical friends, then that fact doesn't really matter.

Shallow historical memory may be a vice, but short historical memory is probably worse. Go back a thousand years in European history and you will know why Europeans are wary of Islam. No, wait, you don't even have to go back that long. How about Yugoslavia? How about Kosovo? If you fail to understand the historical significance of Christian Serbs fighting against Muslim invaders to protect their land, and how it relates to the genocide we saw during the Yugoslavian collapse, you're likely not in the position of teaching history.

Perhaps more insidious is block thinking, whereby the diversity of perspectives within a social group is collapsed into a single caricature. Today, in Europe and elsewhere, there is a widespread assumption that all Muslims think one way and all non-Muslims another. True, polls show that in relatively non-religious Europe, Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be opposed to abortion, homosexuality, and suicide. According to a 2009 Gallup survey, in France 78 percent of the general public finds homosexuality morally acceptable, compared to 35 percent of French Muslims. We could also, however, compare Europeans with Americans on this question. A 2009 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Americans find homosexuality to be “morally wrong,” that regular church-going means a greater likelihood of disapproval, and that American Protestants and American Muslims disapprove of homosexuality in equal measure—60 percent. The gap is not between Islam and the West, but between more religious and less religious people.

The gap between religious and non-religious people, America and Europe, is real. Yet both groups agree to preserve and uphold each respective Constitution. The kind of intolerance we're seeing within Islam in Europe is often not only openly defiant of basic Constitutional ideals like free speech--it wants harsh punishments for certain lifestyles. Many conservative Christians may not wish homosexuals to marry in their church. That's intolerant. But when we look at Islamic intolerance in Europe, we're not just talking about if homosexuals can marry in mosques or not. We're talking about civic rights in an open and free society. This is where Islamic intolerance has proven far more radical than any fringe Christian nut movement.

Putting aside the faulty data—France does not even collect demographic data by religion—these arguments have two deficiencies. First, total fertility rates (TFR) are falling in many of the Muslim-majority countries sending people to Europe. During the period 1985-2003, the TFR fell from 3.3 to 2.2 in Turkey and from 4.5 to 2.5 in Morocco, thus approaching European rates—France has a TFR of 2.1. Second, Muslim women born in European countries are doing precisely what demographers predicted: having fewer children. Fertility rates for Muslim women born in European countries are declining quickly, heading toward rates for natives.

Basic math tells us this is irrelevant; natives continue with low birth rates and will never keep up with immigrant birth rates, hence the gap will persist. Additionally, a country like Sweden has taken in and still take in most of its immigrants from places like Iraq and North Africa, where people have high birth rates. The demographic gap, which this writer fails to explain, is and will persist. In fact, it's growing all the time, regardless of small adjustments among certain Muslim groups.

This writer is however correct on one point: there is no turning back. Europe is pluralist today. We have to deal with the situation realistically, and hence adjust policies accordingly, which is what every New Right movement in Europe right now is fighting for. Diversity, strangely pleasing to liberals and leftists considering the complex problems it brings, is currently one of our greatest weaknesses, not strengths. In the end, historically, we have only seen genocide and tyranny rise out of radical diversity. The aftermath legacy of Yugoslavia, and the absolute ignorance of terror displayed by its rulers, should teach us a lesson:

Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, has told judges presiding over his genocide trial that the Bosnian wars during the 1990s were "just and holy".

He argued that conflicts resulting from the break-up of Yugoslavia were a natural consequence of the struggle for land.

"And even then it was Muslim desire for domination in Bosnia, and the nefarious interference of Western powers, perhaps in particular Germany, which took Bosnia into civil war, and not the acts of the Serbs themselves.

Denial becomes a virtue in a culture divided by conflicting interests. Let's not repeat this mistake again, because if we do, a second, more unsettling question needs to be asked: Would the Americans be willing to bomb our capitals to end another series of genocides?

Liberalism arises from human self-pity, and causes us to think backward, so that instead of working toward a goal and liking ourselves for the attempt, we consider ourselves superior for reasons unrelated to reality, and this makes us neurotic.

The basic idea behind liberalism is that life is bad. Nature is bad, and life is bad, because they are scary. We the individuals could die at any minute. Even worse, we could screw up.

If you are hanging with your homeys, and you suddenly say "watch this" and try the coolest stunt ever and screw up, you look like an idiot. One of your homeys is going to make fun of you and he'll then look cooler than you. He will gain social power over you.

That's a big loss. How did you screw it up? The vision in your head of how reality works did not match up to the, ah, reality of the situation. You thought you could vault three speeding cop cars with your crotch on fire, but instead of a graceful result, here you are in the body cast. Idiot. Joe told us you'd screw it up and he was right, so he gets your share of the beer.

Liberalism is a counterattack by human beings against the cruel, cold, evil world. Since we have these big brains, and in them we keep track of the world in our holographic mind-maps, we can choose to edit the map instead of acting on reality. Why strive, when we can just say we did and go home?

The oldest form of this attitude is a kind of social non-aggression pact. It says that we all accept each other and ignore our deficiencies so we can keep the peace. It may be essential in really bad situations to have this type of social order; if all of your friends are morons, and you are one too, it's best not to compete for least moron status. You'll all end up in body casts.

Liberalism takes this attitude to a new level. Instead of waiting for results, we assume that results prove we as individuals are good, and then whatever happens becomes officially Not Our Fault. You tried to vault a cop car on a motorbike and ended up in a coma? Probably a faulty bike wheel made by a large corporation with ties to Israel or worse, the Church.

Most of our human activity consists in establishing this Not Our Fault level. We do this by not talking about results, but how nice, moral and friendly we are. This leads us to idolize pacifism over all else, and culturally agree to like nerdy, insecure people who make us feel happy because they're harmless.

This creates a large mob of people committed to denying reality and being useless because they pity themselves. They feel horrible about how evil life is, and how cute little bunnies get ripped apart by fast mean eagles. They start to idolize being useless and nice, instead of possibly mean -- but also smart. Because their thinking is already inverted, they quickly turn this into hating the smart because they could be evil.

When this hits a culture, it invents for itself a further justification -- it's progress, liberal thinking, big-mindedness, open-mindedness, whatever. That's all just advertising and is as sincere as the words of a prostitute or used-car salesperson. People of this mentality like to sabotage any order, authority or consensus as to what reality is, because that way they can hide behind the chaos. Anarchy, libertarianism, atheism, weird sex, postmodernism... these are all justifications, not positive and constructive reasons for living.

Check out the latest self-congratulatory stroking:

Generations, like people, have personalities, and Millennials -- the American teens and twenty-somethings who are making the passage into adulthood at the start of a new millennium -- have begun to forge theirs: confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.

They are more ethnically and racially diverse than older adults. They're less religious, less likely to have served in the military, and are on track to become the most educated generation in American history.

Nearly four-in-ten have a tattoo (and for most who do, one is not enough: about half of those with tattoos have two to five and 18% have six or more).

But at the moment, fully 37% of 18- to 29-year-olds are unemployed or out of the workforce, the highest share among this age group in more than three decades. Research shows that young people who graduate from college in a bad economy typically suffer long-term consequences -- with effects on their careers and earnings that linger as long as 15 years. - Pew Social Trends

What a positive article! "Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change."

But when read beneath the skin, you see that all of these traits are social traits. These have zero relevance to whether these people are, say, effective or intelligent. They like to think they're intelligent, but they use symbols of intelligence -- liberalism, open to change,diversity -- instead of actual intelligence. Does anyone else think this sounds like a marketing scam?

Buy the new Zipradical 3000 lawn mower! It's open to change, well-educated, under-employed and positive. Who knows if it cuts your grass? Your neighbors will think you're cool. Buy today!

If you were wondering how this backward logic -- using the symbol of being intelligent instead of being intelligent -- comes to play, check out this amusing anecdote from more trend-watchers. First, there's the positive spin:

Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa at the the London School of Economics and Political Science correlated data on these behaviors with IQ from a large national U.S. sample and found that, on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs. This applied also to sexual exclusivity in men, but not in women. - CNN

These people are forward moving, man. They pitched out God, are good pious liberals and are more intelligent -- so says the sample group anyway -- and even more, they're unique precious snowflakes because, as the article windily elaborates, "sexual exclusivity in men, liberalism and atheism all go against what would be expected given humans' evolutionary past." Whoah, dude, they've transcended evolution itself!

But later on you get the skinny:

Bailey also said that these preferences may stem from a desire to show superiority or elitism, which also has to do with IQ. In fact, aligning oneself with "unconventional" philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be "ways to communicate to everyone that you're pretty smart," he said.

In other words, if you want to look smart act like smart people you see on television. The article doesn't tell us where these IQ ranges fall, so it may be they're looking at a bunch of 118s who graduated community college, got themselves Volkswagens and now are busy telling the rest of us how dumb we are. No word on what the 130+ folks who can read and understand Schopenhauer are thinking.

As part of this whacked-out backward logic, it's important to always champion the underdog. The underdog after all has suffered, and so knows things those of us in comfy homes with stable lives cannot. We didn't die on the cross -- they did. But all of that is the tail end of the backward thinking, with the real goal being this: if we accept the most screwed up people on earth, and with pity make them equal to us, then no matter how screwed-up we are, we should accept and like ourselves.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.” - Prospect Magazine

Chant it with me now: who's going to save us? The slums are going to save us! The sharecroppers will save us! The dropouts, the addicts and the insane! Let's accept everyone, so we can accept ourselves.

This is the psychology of liberalism, leftism, progressivism -- whatever you call it, the origin is crowdism, or the will of the mob to have it be Not Our Fault. Instead of simply fixing themselves, they're seeking external scapegoats and self-esteem builders. The scapegoats are the powerful (God, Kings, corporations, Nature) and the self-esteem builders consist of lifting up the underdogs, praising the neurotic, and of course liking themselves. Backward thinking means you start by liking yourself; you don't like yourself because of anything you've done, learned, conquered or achieved. It's the loser table at high school appointing themselves Fuehrer.

It takes a long time for the nerdy self-conscious low-self-esteem dropouts of the world to unite and overthrow their betters, but they've had many centuries to do so, and they finally started to really pick up steam around 1945 or so. Ever since then, being strong and doing what's right has had that nasty sting of "well, you could be the new Hitlerstalin" to it, and so smart people have backed off from changing anything beyond their own matching paint tones at home. The result has been a chaotic society spiraling out of control, and the only real winners are the profiteers who pander to parasites and idiots with moronic products like hip-hop, Snuggies, Big Macs, glow-in-the-dark dildos and movies like Goonies or Save the Last Dance where a band of misfits comes together to take down the successful, attractive and intelligent ruling caste.

And what's the end result of all this liberalism? Well, since people are irresponsible scapegoaters who are obsessed with finding "uplifting" reasons to like themselves, the ship of state has veered out of control and tried to promise everything to everybody, with a net result being that we've squandered our wealth and replaced it with a giant angry mob of incompetents.

The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they've reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1 – or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 "lowest-low" fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And, compared with Spain and Italy, Greece has the least-worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

So you can't borrow against the future because, in the most basic sense, you don't have one. Greeks in the public sector retire at 58, which sounds great. But, when 10 grandparents have four grandchildren, who pays for you to spend the last third of your adult life loafing around?

By the way, you don't have to go to Greece to experience Greek-style retirement: The Athenian "public service" of California has been metaphorically face down in the ouzo for a generation. Still, America as a whole is not yet Greece. - Orange Country Register

I don't want to boil it all down to money, but money reflects the degree of organization in our society. A sensible society thinks forward: it looks at reality, tries to understand it, and then sets reasonable goals and charges forward to accomplish them. A sick society thinks backward: it congratulates itself on being brilliant, and finds a reason why it is owed money by government or some other large scapegoat. The healthy society thrives and gets more organized; the sick society lapses into greater degrees of disorganization until its population breeds itself back into gibbons and flings poo at the camera.

At this point, I wonder if what I'm expressing is actually an opinion. It's a prediction and an analysis. I don't even know if I like it. After all, I think I'd like being a liberal more -- but it's hard to turn my mind off to the consequences of my actions. Because, if you can get over the fact that life ain't fair and we all suffer, you can see this world as a mostly blank canvas in which great things can be constructed. But the liberal psychology turns its back on that, and from fear of it, hopes to destroy it.

Alex's latest post touched upon how unifying religion, and concomitantly culture, can be. In Toronto, social culture especially is strange, in that it tends to be very exclusive or dominated by introversion, shyness, and extreme forms of social etiquette. (Intentionally bump into someone in this fair city, and auto-pilot will prompt the other person to apologize profusely.)

As a fun experiment, I decided to sign up for JDate, a fairly large dating site for Jewish singles to connect. (Hint: I'm not Jewish.) The tight-knit mode of networking was truly impressive, and most of the people on the site tended to be marriage-minded. I've flirted with internet dating briefly in the past, and it was a much flakier experience. Also, most of the Jewish singles on the site were attractive professionals, so even provided with the pre-selection and screening the internet affords you, practically everyone was desirable in some way.

There is no stronger tie than religion and culture. Unfortunately, I'm not afforded either so the social initiative and the powers of charisma and personality rests entirely on me. I think more people than not are plagued with loneliness for the sheer effort it takes to constantly try and connect with people.

Politics is the new religion in dating, so I'm concerned about getting back on the market considering that most of my views are not status quo. When I decide to date again, it might do me well to convert.

Being human is a strange state of conflicts. Sometimes, we wish to conform. Others, we want to stand out. Being normal is to be lauded, while being mediocre is to be feared. Its the same state but changing the way you say it -- normal versus mediocre -- makes the same state mean different things.

Some people suffer in the modern mindset everyday is that we expect the impossible from our all too human selves. Men and women are expecting themselves to be able to play all roles, to be able to construct work, home, family and play successfully and beautifully. The inability to exercise a divine omnipotence in perfecting our lives and our influence among those around us may plague too many with a sense of failure. There are those with overblown sense of responsibility and of expectation from what they should be.

An entry as shown if you click here is just one manifestation of this but its a recurrent theme of the modern age. This sense of failure leading to dissatisfaction.

Its human to be a bit stupid with our dreams. However, it is important to remember that we live in an age of overpopulation and standing out is unlikely as ever. No matter where you are in the hierarchy, there will be someone who is better. There will be a better scientist, cook, friend, lover, mathematician or blogger.

I'm as guilty as anyone of sometimes fantasising of doing something that matters, of being responsible for a breakthrough in this or that, of changing the world. Everyone's already working on the problems, on the ideas you can have. All you can do is help.

The world is too big for you to change anything hugely significant in it alone.

I'm not proposing that aspiring itself is wrong. That's also not socially constructive: how would we have achieve progress thinking that way? What is actually wrong is allowing the inability to achieve a near impossibility as soul crushing or depressing.

Greatness is local. I believe where meaning and satisfaction lies is in what difference you make to the people in front of you and around you. You start with the self, the home, the community and then the country. Everything follows by the local examples you set and changes you make; this should also be where you find happiness.

There is greatness in attending properly to a child, in a job well done, in helping a neighbour, in generating local safety, in teaching a lesson, in preventing a crime by your or others, in inspiring someone, in contributing towards collective knowledge and in everyday kindness.

That's where I see greatness and that's where I appreciate it.

Yup, I went up early in the morning, feeling slightly drunk from last night, and went to church. The job I'm doing is pretty interesting in its simplicity. What you quickly come to understand if you actually take time to visit a Sunday ceremony is that the church ain't just a place for prayer. People who don't like the church or Christianity in general think there's some kind of weird brainwashing about herd morality going on. It's really nothing like it.

The church, at least where I work, is about community. It's a small church for maybe 50-60 people to get together. They sing and listen to the priest, who talks more about human dignity, unemployment and courage than about Moses or God. If it wasn't in a church, it could very well be a social center of some kind, with spiritual aspects. It's kind of cozy to sit there with a cup of tea behind the mixer board and listen to what's being said.

The church is also a place where old and young people from different generations can socialize. Teenagers figure the elderly aren't that weird, and they in turn find younger company and appreciate that. Local craftwork is presented in an exhibit for people to see and if anyone feels like talking to church people about their problems, they can do that later. You see, without a place like this, some other, similar, place would have to be invented. The church serves a social purpose for a community. That's conservation of values. That's something I dare to believe in.

Modern society searches for a new paradigm that is both ideologically forward-looking, and pragmatic. China may get there first.

When all your efforts fail, stop and think. You probably have gotten hold of a bad assumption and it's sabotaging you each time you try to act. Because the assumption is part of your personality, it influences everything you do and so it all fails.

If you've ever searched the house for your glasses only to find them on your head, or gone looking for your keys only to find them in your pocket or hand, you know how frustrating it is to carry the cause of your failure with you.

When we talk about civilization change, we're talking about changing such an assumption -- and in doing so, changing society at its most fundamental pivot point. If we're insisting up is down, to insist up is up becomes a radical act, and one that most people will violently oppose.

Then twenty years later, it becomes the norm, and we wonder how people could have been "so ignorant" as to oppose it.

Since the 1500s, when our liberal revolution started, the world has been moving on two fronts. The first is technology, which would have expanded with time anyway; the second is toward a liberal democratic view of the universe, which we recognize as modern liberalism.

We can envision liberalism as a fundamental assumption underlying modern civilization. Here's a good summary from John Kekes:

The view of human nature at the core of the liberal faith is thus that human beings are by their nature free, equal, rational, and morally good.

The assumption of liberalism is that we needed a justification for throwing out the kings and idea of God, so we created a new notion: equality. In it we're all the same, or at least should be, so we'll act that way. In order to assume equality, we have to assume that we're all good, intelligent, and capable of making the right decision if only we're given the right opportunities, education, and information.

We've been working on this assumption since the pompously titled "The Enlightenment," which was essentially a scam. People wanted to get rid of kings and the assumption that there was a divine right, or even single right way, to do anything -- even if it was based on reality and the gods were a symbol for how reality worked, much like science is a symbolic representation of reality.

All of our bloviation about "equality" and "morality" is not the reason for our actions, but the justification for them. Kind of like when you accidentally buy an extra quart of ice cream, and then guiltily shrug it off with "well, we'll use it anyway eventually" even though you're planning to take it off to the TV room and eat the whole thing.

China, as the nation that has accelerated the fastest into modern times, coming about 500 years in the sixty-year postwar period, is starting to re-think its fundamental assumption that guides its civilization. Instead of picking ideologies that react to material or demographic changes, it is picking a positive ideal -- the opposite of a reaction, this is a goal toward which society shapes itself, instead of the other way around:

Communism has lost the capacity to inspire the Chinese, and there is growing recognition that its replacement needs to be grounded at least partly in China’s own traditions. As the dominant political tradition in China, Confucianism is the obvious alternative.

The party has yet to relabel itself the Chinese Confucian Party, but it has moved closer to an official embrace of Confucianism. The 2008 Olympics highlighted Confucian themes, quoting “The Analects” of Confucius at the opening ceremonies, and playing down any references to China’s experiment with communism. - Christian Science Monitor

This type of ideological mutation is going to be mated to another change which is both ideological and practical -- namely, the change from doing things electively "because they're right" to doing things practically "because they work." Liberal logic works backward: we act as we want to as individuals, then find a justification through a universal, abstract and absolute good like equality, altruism, justice, etc.

Conservative logic works differently. We study the world, find what is possible, and then work toward it. Instead of using backward logic where we justify ex post facto our actions, we set a goal and strive toward it, recognizing that a pure result -- an emotionally and personally satisfying one -- is unlikely. But we do what is right nonetheless.

With China's actions, we see a shift away from justifications like economics and demographics, and a shift toward positive preferences, which create a goal toward which we strive. In the USA, we can see the other half of this equation in the shift toward the pragmatic from the emotional. This is the precursor to a massive shift from liberal logic to conservative logic, as you can see in the strong words of Detroit's new Mayor:

In his strongest statements about shrinking the city since taking office, Bing told WJR-760 AM the city is using internal and external data to decide "winners and losers." The city plans to save some neighborhoods and encourage residents to move from others, he said.

"If we don't do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I'm hopeful people will understand that," Bing said. "If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation." - Detroit News

In turn, this makes us re-consider evidence that happy people make exploratory decisions, and sad people make painful but repetitive decisions. This part of human nature means that 99% of the people active at any given time are repeating a failed idea, as if waiting for a tiny awakened minority to start exploring a better path. Not necessarily a new path; just a less obsolete one.

Reading that knowledge into history, we can see that our worldwide flirtation with liberalism has continued because we are miserable, and so keep repeating the sad logic of the last 500 years while not re-checking our assumptions. As multiple problems with our environment and social instability cannot be checked any longer, look for a sea change away from the liberal ideal toward a pragmatic, conservative one.

European media now runs a media war against Left-wing mayor Ilmar Reepalu of Malmö in Sweden. He's accused of downplaying leftist and Muslim attacks on Jews in his city:

"This new hatred comes from Muslim immigrants. The Jewish people are afraid now."

Malmo's Jews, however, do not just point the finger at bigoted Muslims and their fellow racists in the country's Neo-Nazi fringe. They also accuse Ilmar Reepalu, the Left-wing mayor who has been in power for 15 years, of failing to protect them.

Mr Reepalu, who is blamed for lax policing, is at the centre of a growing controversy for saying that what the Jews perceive as naked anti-Semitism is in fact just a sad, but understandable consequence of Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Unsettling for a Social Democrat like Reepalu, whose Red-Green ties to the Leftist party and their radical fringe of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli-American sentiment now cause trouble for him. Decades of tolerance is finally backlashing against the weaker and smaller groups in society, and this time no one can blame "Swedish racism" or "European intolerance." This is tolerance creating intolerance.

It's pretty simple logic. A multicultural society, or any form of society, cannot build trust and community based upon tolerance for everything and everyone. If we do so, groups will misuse that tolerance principle to please their own self-interests. This is how kids began manipulating their parents in the 70s, how Muslims have forced European leaders to compromise with Western constitutional rights, and how women have created feminist lobby groups to compensate their own individual inertia in the work field with socialist policies.

European leftism hasn't yet understood what Right-leaning leaders have trying to assert for a long time, and what the Danish government already is saying. No, we cannot and should not accept whatever culture takes root in our society. We need certain bedrock beliefs that we uphold above else. Call it cultural superiority if you will, or selective multiculture. We embrace diversity, but only if we stand on a firm platform. This viewpoint is unacceptable in the current European climate, as evidenced by how Right-wing leaders are attacked in the media:

The leading Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter (“Today’s News”), has once again targeted the Sweden Democrat Party in its editorial pages. The newspaper commissioned a psychoanalyst, Thomas Böhm, to probe the soul of the only organized group in today’s Sweden that publicly criticizes the Swedish state’s nation-transforming immigration policies and dogmatic commitment to that component of existing Leftwing perversity, which goes by the name of multiculturalism.

Taking a page from Soviet internal policy of the Leonid Brezhnev era, Dagens Nyheter, through Böhm’s poorly written and incompetently reasoned article, accuses the membership of the Sweden Democrat Party of suffering from mental disease.

For the Jews, however, this analysis is simply no longer true. The tables have turned. If liberal-leftism was dominant in protecting and defending the right of Jews after WWII, it's currently constructing conspiracy theories against them and Israel in an attempt to discredit the homeland and allies of the Jewish people. Instead the conservative Right-wing parties in Europe have become pro-Zionist and critical of the Arab-Palestinian movement.

There are partly party political reasons for this, and they can rightly be criticized on their own. The main point, however, remains fundamental: centuries of Judeo-Christian culture has shaped the West and Israel is the only truly Western-oriented nation in the Middle East. There are no obligatory ties, but obvious ties for cultural reasons, and therefore the Right is correct in ceasing this opportunity to expose the liberal-leftist hypocrisy.

Case Malmö is really case multiculti. We've essentially imported cultural conflicts, and since we lack the mojo to uphold our constitutional rights and traditional values, we lose the game, every time, along with any group too weak to defend itself against the crowd. Yes, this is how tolerance for intolerance paves way for decadence. Democracies, who are systematically weak on their own, self-destruct when they become tolerant of groups or ideas critical of their founding principles. This is what Constitutionalists feel about Obama in America and what Sweden Democrats feel about immigration in Sweden. And they're both Right.

I am happy to read about inspiring activities some of our readers are involved in. "fafner" enjoys physical activity:

I write, visit the gym and teach yoga besides working.

Teach yoga? That sounds like a healthy experience, and a perfect complement to lifting weights.

"EinZeta" is probably a very busy guy:

I'm a member of my local art gallery, volunteer as an adult literacy/ESL tutor, a designer/promoter for the local game design club, and am in the process of grooming some of my friends into a proper Germanic Heathen kindred.

You're doing a lot of fun things on the side, it would be seriously interesting to follow how that Germanic club is going to develop over time.

"Tommy D" describes something quite unusual:

Every months we do conferences about the Cosmos and I help to make people more connected with the Universe with personal experiences.

This sounds like a mystical alternative to visiting a church, very interesting idea.

"Wargozer" works for an entire community:

pierogi making parties, ice fishing, bbqs, beer brewing, gardening, potlucks, fixing ramps at the town skate park, surplus of garden goods goes to food kitchen

Apparently I'm not alone in believing in the power of people rather than bureaucracies. So what do people do when they're not working together with people? Well, they complain:

Now that you've brought up the subject, I have to ask: do most church going Swedes think differently than the reigning social democrats?

Then I have to ask in reply: Why would that matter? But to give you an answer, I think most church goers are pretty conservative, even if their political beliefs probably vary a lot. We can expect that most Christian Democrats are active church goers. Regardless, they all seem to value a few central ideas, which at least beats just voting for a party and living the dummie lifestyle for the rest of the time.

... capitalism causes people to become super materialistic, you'd be hard pressed to pry everyone from there wealth, whether that be TV, sports, games, or what have you.

...so, what are you doing about it, except complaining? I don't think computers and televisions actually stop people from taking an active civil role in society. I do think some people are doers and others are complainers by nature. Which one are you?

Forget this, now it's all about boosting your high self-esteem by doing something that people consider as "cultural".

What's wrong with that? If people feel good about working together with others to create culture (I don't know how you define that term, but over a thousand years of Christian heritage lies behind most of Western art, education, architecture and philosophy), how is that wrong?

We can now recognize the following simple dichotomy: doers and complainers. Some people fall in the middle, e.g. they don't feel motivated to work, but don't want to complain. I expect most readers fall under this category. So I'd thought I'd blog some about my civil work and maybe inspire you to do something similar.

My civil work will consist of working as sound technician during church service. It's in a small community church where maybe around a hundred people show up on Sundays. My job is to discuss the service together with the priest and other church workers, setting up the audio system, checking mics etc. I then sit in front of a mixer board during service to change sound channels depending on what mic is active and generally make sure everything goes as planned.

Afterwards there's supposed to be a coffee break, which is a time when I get to know people around here and learn something new. It's also possible I'll be helping out with ads for the church paper, taking photograph sessions during concerts for the web and other media-related work. I'm sure I'll learn a few things along the way and maybe spread some New Right Christian Jihadism among church goers. I'll try to blog about my experiences to describe just how a job like this can develop over time and what may come out of it. Stay tuned.

Sofia's latest post on her brand of conservatism highlights an interesting point. She identifies her struggle of resolving typical traditional values -- or perhaps more widely what she ideally may want to typically support -- against the way she lives. Despite coming from different perspectives, I identify perfectly with the sentiment she makes using the comparison of chastity: trapped between two extremes and not truly belonging to either. We must invent a middle ground.

This is something we all go through. How can we support measures that would disadvantage us in any way? How can a person who's tried cannabis in their youth and come to no harm advocate harsh measures which would punish those in similar situations?

If I didn't give a thought to it, I naturally may want softer policies on immigration for my own self-interests. Most often people do this and brainwash themselves, believing what's good for them is good for everyone. They deny evidence to the contrary. They fail to recognise the wider social implications and that these implications will have an effect on their very own future and present.

When we advocate for change to the status quo, this is often a crisis you have to face: you usually have benefited in some way from what you seek to change. If you're old enough, you may even have supported a measure that you later disagree with.

Be honest to yourself about the issues you face. Be open to the idea that you may be wrong. Acknowledge that you may be advocating something simply in your own interests, rather than as part of a coherent ethical system. Who knows? You may even choose to occasionally decide that what's more important to mankind or its planet is more important than you. Humans are much more altruistic than the cynicists in us gives them credit for.

I've written before about not being a "typical Conservative." However, I must further vulnerably express that anyone in a similar age and station in their life, i.e. accruing debt, unemployed, and pursuing formal education, would be an idiot or a perfect altruist not to vote for public education and health care. Ironically, it's just naked self-interest, which is how the political system practically functions - socialist, liberal, conservative or fascist.

I've been meaning to confront these contradictions in my philosophy for some time now: marrying my fondness for traditional, eternal values with the modern, selfish creature that I am. I feel trapped in the transition between classical Conservative values, and the wonders of liberal progressivism: by traditional standards I'm a Jezebel, by Western standards I'm practically chaste.

Not being tied to religion, something Alex's latest post ever-so-lightly touched upon, or culture (my ethnic, national, and civil affiliations are all incongruent), leaves me groping in foreign, untreaded territory when it comes to protecting my heritage, or values. For me, it will always be heritage in general and values that are secular, and philosophical, which will always appear hollow to those that have been cultivated in myth for centuries.

Those who reside in a similar vacuum identify more easily with liberalism, and though it's more effort, thinking and deliberating like a true philosopher should, you should eventually come to the conclusion that it's more worthwhile to stand for something rather than nothing. There is such a thing as culture without a nation, and so to, there is such a thing as secular morality. It's possible not to buy into the perpetual stream of constructed bullshit, whilst protecting your vision of the Good, and come out a better person for it in the end.

I'm hesitant to ascribe a political label for myself for a number of reasons, though much of my views align with Romantic traditionalist conservatism. Here are some points of divergence from the commonly perceived "Right" relative to my own:

1. Supporting environmentalism is imperative in building sustainable societies that are not geared toward collapse. Modern-day, Western hyper-consumption is a sickness that allows people to avoid confronting their respective existences.

2. As a corollary from (1), recognizing that the individual should aspire to transcend himself, intellectually, physically, and spiritually, and that this can be manifested in helping society at large.

3. Multiculturalism is beneficial to society insofar as culture remains unified, and not divided. On a quasi-related note, American cultural hegemony is not the most desired outcome.

4. There is no political niche that represents the values of CORRUPT, and rather than apply an inapplicable misnomer of my beliefs, I would rather have them stand independently, as they have all been examined independently.

Interestingly, stemming from (4), I think many people potentially ascribe to the values of CORRUPT, they just aren't aware enough to search beyond the political spectrum to seek a representation of their beliefs.

Principles that extend beyond individualistic solipsism, coupled with conservationism, is really a strong demarcation from classical American Conservatism, which I believe deserves a name to itself in the common sphere.