SAET Blog

justice Posts

  • April 30, 2012 by Jason Hood

    Success as Judgment

    There were no good guys on WWII’s Eastern European front. In a war between Communism and Fascism, Hitler and Stalin (who split Poland between them), no one was remotely close to fighting on the side of righteousness and truth. Hitler butchered Jews, among others; Stalin butchered everyone.

    But Russia earned Anglo-American sympathies because of two principles: (1) “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” ; (2) Hitler was the aggressor, and everyone sympathizes with someone defending their mother, even if that mother is a whorish hammer and sickle.

    In a recent piece there’s an illustration of a third principle that turned the war Russia’s way:

    “Kiev,” Stahel concurs, “was uniquely Hitler’s triumph.” His strategy had been bitterly opposed by his senior generals before the event. But he had been aided and abetted by the intransigence of Stalin, whose dismissal of his own senior generals and insistence on defense [of Kiev] at all costs made a major contribution to the German victory [thought at the time to be a near-guarantee of German success in the war against Russia].
    The two dictators drew opposite conclusions from the outcome of the battle. Stalin belatedly recognized that it would in the future be wiser to leave matters largely to his generals. Hitler saw his triumph as a vindication of his own strategic genius, brushing his generals aside with ever-growing, ever more thinly veiled contempt. Yet as Stahel notes, the victory was Pyrrhic, the triumph illusory.
    Here’s the principle: sometimes success is not a reward, but God’s way of making us more in love with ourselves, so that we possess an even greater commitment to our own folly for our destruction. God’s justice is profound: it leads him to shatter the proud with the wrecking ball of their erstwhile glory.

    Categories: General | History | Jason Hood | justice

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  • August 24, 2011 by Jason Hood

    Barbies, Bratz, Porn, and Justice

    In a Times Literary Supplement review, Natasha Walters’s Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism hits on a conversation point that is common in the Hood household: the slutting of dolls and the inevitable negative impact on our girls.

    When girls aged five to eight played with a Barbie, and were then asked about their own body image, they reported more dissatisfaction and a greater desire to be thin than did girls who had either been playing with a larger doll or who had not been playing with any doll.

    Barbie, with her long legs and large breasts [[Hoods' note:  we had to create new clothes for the last Barbie my daughter was given]], and Bratz [[Hoods' note:  we've drawn the line here:  no Bratz allowed]], with fishnet stockings, feather boa and up-for-anything attitude, are not “just toys”; they indoctrinate girls into the culture of pornography wherein girls are raised not only to be thin and compulsively critical of their own physiques, but also to be “babes”.

    These dolls form part of the pornography that has entered mainstream culture to transform girls into animate versions of the sexist and sexy dolls they embrace in innocent delight.

    In another (far more mature) review of the same book, to which I won’t link, the point is made that the pornification of our culture is having far-reaching negative effects on girls, women and society:

    “Some years ago, four ingenious psychologists conducted a study in which young men and women were instructed to complete a short maths [Brit-speak...they are either so smart or so postmodern in the UK they have more than one math; Mason can clarify] exercise while wearing either a sweater or a bathing suit. The women wearing the bathing suit performed less well on the maths test than did the women who were wearing a sweater.”

    The upshot is that “with her painfully inflated breasts and surgically manipulated features,” the average woman “empowering herself” in the media “is as much a slave to cultural oppression as the poor African girl who has her genitals mutilated, or the Victorian virgin who would never dare to show an ankle.”

    I think it’s safe to say that this is an issue of social justice, even if it is not trendy to name it as such. So I’m filing it accordingly. If I am contributing to the pornification of my daughter, have I done what is right by her?

    The more pornified we become, the less oppressive older customs look. (I know Matthew Mason thinks that head-coverings weren’t such a bad idea.)

    Categories: General | Jason Hood | justice | porn

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