Conservatives aren’t losers, they just live like the frontier never closed. Part 1/?

A common claim about conservatives is that they are losers, they don’t want to “win”, etc, etc. All of this is misunderstanding the core situation. I am as guilty as anyone on this front, not being a child of the frontier myself.

Conservatives, or really the descendants by blood of frontier settlers who never civilized, are trapped in a frontier mindset that leaves them endlessly vulnerable to incursions on their ability to live, work and form families. They cannot protect each other because pathological individualism is inherent to the frontier personality. They can only come together under the influence of a strong personality for specific tasks for extremely limited periods of time. They are under-civilized, yet dependent on hyper-civilization to have the tools and resources that allowed their ancestors to farm hundreds of acres almost entirely solo.

As far as culture war stuff and economic warfare by liberals, it’s all of a piece. Cake shops are frivolous and unnecessary, since you can bake your own cake, so you ought to no matter what. Same for flower shops, why pay someone to pick flowers and put them in a vase? They’re everywhere, after all. So there is sympathy for someone having a hard time from mean city folks, but really, they’re also city folks, so, well, you know.

Same for people getting fired from retail work and high-wage work (or any non-political job) by hyper-progressive liberals. They’re not working their own land, they’re working for a wage, it’s really their own fault for not having a homestead to live off. They should have just done that. None of this is remotely conscious or deliberately cruel and small minded. It worked really well for millions upon millions of Americans for many, many decades to think this way and live accordingly. The rapid urbanization of the 20th century was a curveball they didn’t really adjust to well.

 

Are there 5 million trades jobs paying 75k+/yr with <5 years experience?

This is the first question that should be asked by anyone who is seriously interested in more alternatives to college as a path to family-supporting wages. Because the answer tells you how much work there is to be done. The second question depends on it, as well. If there are, the second question is different than if there are not.

I don’t know the answer, but I want to know.  I would be delighted if someone provided that information.

Fairy cloth is real, Grimm’s fairy tales were veiled nonfiction

This is astonishing but true. One of the more fascinating aspects of this is that it puts a strong pin in the idea that oral transmission is foolproof and highly reliable. Old women were repeating stories about an industry that existed, produced seemingly magical fabric, and which was essentially dead by the 19th century due to newly rich middle class people wanting it to be available at a price they could afford.

Fairy cloth, cloth so fine it could be shut up in a nutshell, but was warm and comfortable, was altogether real, immensely expensive, and required a near-army of women to harvest the fibers and process them into the cloth. It was demanding, painstaking work, and the families that produced the cloth did not receive nearly the wages of the middlemen hawking it to sultan’s daughters and the wealthiest of European aristocrats.

There have been some recent attempts to revive it, but the plant used centuries ago is kindasorta lost and the current efforts are inferior and there is no certainty that they can figure out how to grow the right kind of plant and also relearn or reinvent the necessary weaving and processing skills in the longer term.

There is so much like this, because the beautiful things of the past required a lot of work and infernal machines cannot replicate this work.  I think it is not bad that you can find re-enactors painstakingly describing and giving examples of how people lived in the 18th and 19th century on video or streaming media.  But it is bad that we haven’t accepted the amount of manual labor involved in making the beautiful things of the recentish past enough to reclaim and restore some of those old glories.

 

Expectant Pause

I like this blog, I think it’s profitable to post the things that I post, but I have limited energy and it’s better served for now doing more offline stuff as best I can.  So I may post now and again, or I may leave this thing idle for months or weeks at a time.  I may turn up to comment here and there, but mostly I’m just taking pressure off myself to fret, since I could fret for the gold medal if it were an Olympic event.

I continue to hope and pray that more conservatives become serious about normal living and undertake the painful and necessary steps to help make it more likely for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren (yep, it might just take that long).  I also more importantly hope and pray that the Christian conservatives specially might put on the holy armor of Our Lord and be the best Christians grace grants them the strength and perseverance to be.  It is hard out there, we are being persecuted in America and the wider West.  But we must pray for those who are actually being martyred right now for Christ and not forget that we can still worship in public spaces and carry Bibles around freely.  We still have it and we can still use it.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that the bolder in Christ we are, the worse it will go for us with the secular world.  If we do excommunicate adulterers and don’t bake wedding cakes for multiple divorcees and refuse chemical and physical birth control except for the direst medical need, it will not be easier.  If we teach our children the Narrow Way, the True Word, public schools will not rejoice and cheer us on in the PTA.  If we hold fast to what is lovely, true and real, things will not be light and cheerful.  The secular world will not go “How amazing to see you live your values, it’s so wonderful you are living near each other, building communities of blood, Christ and love, working with and supporting each other in economic, spiritual and collective ways!”

They would instead start looking longingly at the countries that kill Christians.  But we could yet count it all joy, for it would be, then.