Am simply astounded by media coverage of The Australian Club. Its membership appeal is not insignificant, ie club lunch is the food you could get reliably a century ago, eg roast beef etc, none of this poncy nouveau cuisine. Imagine membership worries women mean sushi, vegans etc
Napoleon said his Army marched on its stomach. In a less combative way, men eat in ways different from women. I suspect that the appeal of a specifically male club is less the chance to run into some guy who mattered 20-30 years ago & more lunch is roast beef & Yorkshire pudding
The dumbest part (of many dumb parts) of that SMH article above is one major reason men join a club is that they want to get away from the society outside it. They do not want esp the food & mores of 2021 which they can get outside it. Same way no man wants to drive a Prius.
Thank you for all the DMs from 'clubbable men' too afraid to 'speak their truth' here. My online Thermopylae epitaph will read, "Stranger, tell the club men that, here obedient to the laws of the club, I was cancelled for standing in its defence."
As when media go off about the excesses in Private Schools leading to boosted private school enrolments, am almost certain that membership inquiries for The Australian Club will have gone through the roof this week. You cannot buy this sort of publicity & criticism from brokens.
Apparently, Malcolm was a member of The Australian Club for 36 years and he only noticed yesterday that it had no female members. A remarkable state of affairs, really, if to be taken seriously.
It is not anti-Putin as anti-Russia as a traditional society. It is also why elements of the Right will admit in private that Russia, like the Visegrad 4, has an admirable refusal to salute whatever this week's flag is .....
Traditional Russia, generally, and Putin esp, is a hated target for liberalism - as it was in Tsarist times. Russian welcomes this hatred & will use it. See this magnifcent piece by @20committee from 2014 which noted & predicted all this
The strangest part of 2021 is western liberals who were never too sure about confronting the USSR are now certain that Putin's Russia is a mortal threat. The liberal tendency to the hyperbolic comes from religious outrage - that the Russians refuse to kneel before 'progress'
"Workers say they crave job security
Employers want reliable workforces:
The case for Serfdom"
Conservatives either solve the housing problem or socialism will do it for you. On taking power in Japan, General MacArthur broke up the great estates & literally gave land away to former tenants. He ended communism in Japan over night. I think of this all the time now.
History Nerds: am trying to watch the David Starkey series, "Monarchy", but in ep1 he basically pays off the Romans leaving Britain & then makes out the Anglo-Saxons (displacing the actual Britons) were basically metropolitan Whigs with aesthetic pretensions. Does it get better?
I do not think I have more eagerly awaited the Normans now than I have with David Starkey boosting the Anglo-Saxons....the revenge of the Franks is the revenge of Rome! Not a word about the Celts on any fringe.
It annoys me the Starkey rejects the Roman (correct) use of Britain - this weird anti-Roman/Norman sense - and then goes for "English" even when what he is describing is not at all English but Celts/Gaels etc.
There is nothing better for clearing your feed of 'woke vets' than discussing why ~20 years of 'eating soup with a knife' etc has not worked and was never going to work. If you will the ends, you will the means - or, if not, you should not waste lives & resources trying
UBL noted that people back 'the stronger horse' and clearly in Afghanistan, not just the Pashtu, but others, all knew that the West (via ISAF) was going to leave sooner or later & was the weaker horse. There was also the sheer absurdity of what was trying to be done there.
I may write a longer thread here. Basically unless you are willing to colonise (including by use of immense violence) a territory in Afghanistan's position, for a number of decades, and create a client culture as well as class, it is all pretty hopeless. It always was.
Growing up, in our local parish, was Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Daly KBE CB DSO, battalion commander in WW2 & Commonwealth Brigade commander in Korea. He was a daily Massgoer & Volunteer at Sydney's Mathew Talbot Hostel, looking after the homeless. He was always known as "Tom"
Edward Kenna was awarded the Victoria Cross for his extraordinary heroism in World War II. Post-war, he returned to Hamilton in Victoria where he worked for the local council and played football.
Captain Charles Hazlitt Upham won VC & Bar in WW2 & returned to a successful farming life in New Zealand. His name was in the local phone book and, so I was told, local children would drop by to meet the Uphams for afternoon tea & to ask him about the War for their school project
Amazing the philosophical and ethical controversies created by all these Carls - Barth, Jung, Schmitt, Hempel. Probably the most problematic of names really. My take.
Anglos hate philosophy. Europeans feel they should be interested in philosophy whereas Anglos fall asleep. Anglos who are Philosophers feel a certain enduring insecurity because they know 'home' thinks they are weird & they know that 'foreigners' have no respect for them.
Brings to mind the maxim from the 90s ABC series "The Late Show" that the British legal series, "Rumpole of the Bailey", is not a patch on the German version, "Das Rumpolshe".