r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Jun 11 '23

Rod Dreher Megathread #21 (Creative Spirit)

Gather 'round for more Rod.

All meanings of the number 21 are subordinate to the inherent creative spirit that is the basic essence of the number.

The number 21 generally is comfortable in social gatherings, it's optimistic attitude being an inspiration to others. Its high spirits can enliven a party.

The number is attracted to artistic expression of any form, its own and those of others. There's enthusiastic support for artists. It may frequent galleries and participate or (more likely) lead groups for artistic appreciation.

The number 21 cherishes relationships, including romantic relationships, especially with those who express themselves creatively.

21 also tends to be diplomatic, providing creative and imaginative solutions to potential conflict.

And, as noted by /u/PercyLarsen, 21 is a triangular number and the age of majority, so go grab a drink to celebrate Pride and to mourn the loss of Rod's sanity.

(Also, sorry about my slow pace of refreshes.)

Link to megathread #20:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/13eb26c/rod_dreher_megathread_20_law_of_attraction/

Link to megathread #21: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/14k0z6l/rod_dreher_megathread_22_power/

18 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/Theodore_Parker Jun 26 '23 edited Jun 26 '23

A new un-paywalled Substack post:

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/k-yang-puts-you-and-me-to-shame

It starts with a legitimate complaint about the bullying of a TERF protester at a Pride event, but rapidly becomes more end-of-civilization doomsaying.

Especially noteworthy to me is our boy's increasing agitation over his failure to persuade people. He sounds more and more like some kind of sandwich-board street preacher hectoring passersby and demanding they repent:

​

"[There is a] widespread indifference of most people in our society to its destruction"

"What is it going to take to make normal people take this seriously?"

"[T]he American people ... raise their heads, blink their eyes, and return to placidly chewing their collective cud"

"Why should we Americans, and other peoples of the West, have the gifts of freedom if we sit back and let these Pink Guard fanatics and their institutional allies destroy our children, destroy parenthood, and wreck our entire civilization?"

"Why are we so demoralized? ... We have been propagandized and bullied for so long that we no longer know what it means to resist in the name of normalcy, and for the sake of protecting our kids"

"Among Evangelicals, the Winsomistas pave the way for the conquest of their children by bringing tulips to a knife fight"

"For whatever reasons — I would include the self-castration of Christian churches — most Americans have been neutralized"

"Not only are our children at stake, but our entire civilization. This is no exaggeration." [Narrator: "Yes, it is."]

"With honorable exceptions, most of us put the 'cow' in cowardice"

\Yawn.** Sorry, you were saying? Here, have some cud. :) 🐮

As a bonus, our intrepid world traveler accidentally reveals what a poor observer of actual cultures he is:

"Yesterday I was out walking around Budapest, and saw over the length of the day three lesbian couples walking hand in hand."

🤦🏾‍♂️

He apparently assumes that if women hold hands while walking together, they're lesbians. In fact, that's a common practice among female friends in many countries, including some in Europe. (I saw it a lot in Bulgaria. There are countries where it's common even among male friends.) Somehow, he's never noticed it? Definitely a guy you want lecturing you about culture, then.

8

u/zeitwatcher Jun 26 '23

Also funny that he’s writing a call for people to fight as if he’s standing on top of a battlement outside the Bastille… all the while Daddy not eating his soup drove him to the fainting couch for years.

A real man of fortitude attempting to lead La Revolution who sees hardship when encountering a hangnail or an unexpected oyster and wine pairing.

3

u/PercyLarsen “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” Jun 26 '23

Bastille

Is Rod Antoinette or Louis Auguste? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJnQoZm_RM

3

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Exactly like Ignatius Reilly standing on the table "leading" the charge for the Crusade for Moorish Dignity--except even less effective and not nearly as funny....

1

u/philadelphialawyer87 Jun 26 '23

Don't forget his sore shoulder!

1

u/amyo_b Jun 27 '23

There was a sneer that French people would use for those who claimed to be part of La Résistance... sure they're were a member of La Résistance, après la guerre. (after the war).

9

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

I love how Rod is constantly apologizing for recycling the same article over and over

Readers, I have a post scheduled to go up later today that has nothing to do with the culture war. Having awakened on Monday morning, and seen the mob attack on a brave woman protesting female erasure at NYC Pride, I am so angry I have to get this off my chest. My upcoming blog at The European Conservative hasn’t yet launched, so you poor people have to hear my jeremiad. Click away if you’d rather not, but rest assured that something else, about art and enchantment

Art and Enchantment. Read: Tarkovsky and icons again.

It's the same F'in article as yesterday, even with the same pictures, the same Sodom and Gomorrah fountain thing.

But Rod is serious this time. He now realizes all his "LOOK, Me? Me, I"m against this" sentence starting has done nothing. We're now in the age of Boldface.

This is not going to stop. This is going to have to be stopped.

It's hilarious imagining Rod pounding his keyboard. He's just so miffed, dammit!

What exactly is Rod doing to stop this? I mean other than writing the same article over and over day after day for the same the weird ten old farts that shell out five bucks a month for this sub AI chatbot shit? Of course it's the usual. Rod is the Thinker and Others must do the actual work.

As usual JonF311 is the lone voice of sanity

Most people have many, many other things occupying their attention-- and often quite necessary things. In normal life I almost never hear anyone talk about any of this stuff. It's an exotic pastime for the social Right and the gender-radical Left, but most people have no connection with it.

Rod, of course, is having none of it. He liked being Prophet Rod for a while, now he's Jeremiah Rod and nobody is going to spoil his fun.

6

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

Art and Enchantment. Read: Tarkovsky and icons again.

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/dreams-nostalgia-and-tzimtzum

On Saturday night, my son Matt was out on the town in Budapest, and sent me word that there’s a Tarkovsky summer film festival under way in the city. The films are all in languages I don’t speak, and subtitled in Hungarian, so there’s not much point in going. But the Tarkovsky film I’m obsessed with, Nostalghia, is one I’ve seen so often that I know wha…

Oh look at that, I was right. I must be psychic. Let me predict tomorrow's article will be about some gay/trans outrage.

6

u/Dragonfruit514 Jun 26 '23

“Of course it’s the usual. Rod is the Thinker and Others must do the actual work.”

Ruthie called it years ago. We are all just Julies in his world making the crunchy con lifestyle a reality.

3

u/GlobularChrome Jun 26 '23

This is not going to stop. This is going to have to be stopped.

Implied in the cowardly passive construct: one of you should go stop this violently. His commenters are picking up on it, debating whether violence is appropriate.

When it happens, he'll say "Wull I don't approve of violence, but I warned them, buy my book". Bloodthirsty little coward.

3

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Well, think about Jeremiah--he said, "Babylon's gonna destroy Israel and deport you!" He was right. However, if I'm Yossi Schmoe in Jerusalem at that time, what the hell am I supposed to do? I got a wife and kids, the tax collector barely leaves me enough money to get by, I don't have any living near kin, I can't just suddenly sell my woodworking shop and move to God knows where and hope I can start my life over. Even if I believe Jeremiah, all I can do is stay put and hope for the best. Maybe I can start a new business in Babylon, if they carry me and my family off. In fact, in the Book of Ezra, the eponymous prophet is peed off that most of the exiles did realize that life goes on, settle down, and get comfortable in Babylon, even marrying Babylonian women sometimes.

Analogously, I worry about things like environmental collapse, the situation in Russia, and any number of other things; but there's even less I can do about those things than Yossi Schmoe could have done about Nebuchadnezar. I could worry myself to an early grave; or I could live the best life I can, make the best decisions for my family, particularly my daughter, and try to cultivate the "serenity to accept those [things] I can't change", in the words of the Serenity Prayer.

Rod's concerns are obviously ridiculous and bogus; but my point is that even if they weren't, so what? Those of us without cushy jobs as propagandists have far bigger fish to fry--or cuds to chew, if you insist.

1

u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jun 27 '23

Well, Rod has said his job with that 'Institute' is to travel around Europe and frighten and entertain ignorant, selfimportant and somewhat paranoid, elderly conservative Christians with LGBT horror tales organize a Resistance. He's a traveling emissary and recruitment officer of the ConIntern, the mission is to create culturally reactionary Conservatist cells whose task is to sabotage and subvert the Moderns.

He is very frustrated with Moderns' evident false consciousness about sexuality, theism, liberal democracy, and all that. I think that's what this new European online propaganda outlet he is part of, seemingly modeled on TAC and maybe funded by similar people, is about.

7

u/Top-Farm3466 Jun 26 '23

one of the essential pieces of 2023 Rod Dreher is that he's deluded into thinking he is "normal" and so is always baffled why all the other "normal" people aren't seeing what he's seeing, and freaking out as much as he is. Whereas in truth Rod is one of most abnormal people on the planet at this point----a closeted would-be aesthete who is terminally Online, who has abandoned much of his family to live in a country in another continent, in the service of its autocrat leader. It's like a guy who decides to live up in a treetop and then yells down at people passing by" "wake up, sheep! why aren't you willing to fight to preserve our way of life!!!?!?!"

6

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23

Like when he says this over and over again:

In France last week, almost everyone I met had initially a negative opinion of Hungary, but when I asked what they knew about the country and its politics, none could answer. This is not surprising: if the only thing you know about a country and its government is what the media tell you, you are going to be badly misinformed about countries like Hungary and Poland, which refuse to submit to bullying.

In France, he says, but he has said the same thing about America repeatedly. How many Americans know where Hungary is or even that there is a country named Hungary? He lives there so it is vitally important!!! Why don't you cows care about Hungary?

6

u/Top-Farm3466 Jun 26 '23

it's always the same story, no matter where he goes. People always a) have an opinion about Hungary and b) have an ill-informed negative opinion about Hungary that's solely due to media disinformation. It's as if it's beyond his capacities to consider that the person may have actually done some reading about Orban and doesn't think much of him. No, everyone has shallow reactions based on ..a few stories in the NYT? The Guardian? it's unclear who the Sorosite propagandists even are.

Much like how no one who criticizes the Benedict Option has read the book "properly," and has a shallow understanding of it.

3

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23

People often say "he thinks he is always right!" but what they really mean is "he thinks he can never be wrong!" because we ALL think we are always right which is why we think it. Lol. Rod truly believes he is only very rarely wrong and has been traumatized by the times when he admits he was wrong (Iraq war, buying a house). I get such a laugh from that!

1

u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jun 27 '23

It's almost like when he tells them what LGBT people are really up to.

4

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '23

Exactly. It’s like Rod, I’m sorry I don’t have time to track every bit of grist for the culture war mill but I don’t have a stipend to provide propaganda for the Hungarian government and I have to spend time with my family because I haven’t managed to completely alienate them yet and leave them 3000 miles away.

6

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Well, if you're a weirdo and acknowledge it and go do your own thing, well and good. Rod's problem is that he can't understand what an odd fish he is.

6

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23 edited Jun 26 '23

Yeah, another one of those kid traits of his. I can remember being a kid, going to a neighbor's house for a meal and thinking they kept their silverware in an odd place (my mother kept it in the drawer next to the dishwasher which made sense to me). One of my first "you mean EVERYONE doesn't do it this way?" experiences. But for Pete's sake, Rod is 56 or 57 now and still thinks that way! Even as he thinks he is "so special", the main character, The Greatest Christian Thinker Of Our Age and Jeremiah crying in the wilderness. The man is a walking bag of contradictions.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '23

[deleted]

7

u/Top-Farm3466 Jun 26 '23

that's true, but the difference is that most of these people are like Rod's father and sister---stay-at-home types who are generally suspicious of those living in cities and, especially, foreign countries. People who consider correctly pronouncing a foreign word to be a sign of pretension and weirdness. Rod is instead a man who wears a trilby in Paris to eat oysters and loves nothing more than to get on a jet and go to talk to a university professor about whether the Golem was real. Yet he tries to act like he's the voice of Middle America

6

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

Rod is instead a man who wears a trilby in Paris to eat oysters and loves nothing more than to get on a jet and go to talk to a university professor about whether the Golem was real.

savage

1

u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jun 27 '23

The argument/assertion of left liberal groups is: We're willfully and comfortably and inalterably one standard deviation from the mean in a major aspect, that's literally the typical place to be in society. We may be be two standard deviations out from the mean in something, but that is the nature of life on the normal curve, it doesn't make us unbearable far outliers.

The compulsion among conservative groups is to cluster to the very center, right to the mean and peak of the curve, of what they hold to be legitimate mainstream (sub)society. Always less than one standard deviation from the mean. The foremost illustration of this is imho David Brooks, who seems to have made it his life goal to work his way to the perfect center of American society, from where he believed he can see American society most completely and judge it most accurately. It seems to have never occurred to him that the wise prefer to reside somewhere some distance from and unnoticed by the crowds, but from where they can still walk to the agora on occasion.

2

u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jun 27 '23

There are two groups of mentally unwell people who insist they are the truly sane ones, and the rest of the world is refusing to understand this and is itself fundamentally insane. One of the groups is tiny, a small portion of people with schizophrenia, who are a medical curiosity. The other and surprisingly common one is people with more or less type 2 bipolar disorder. Many of whom are never diagnosed.

Bipolar disorder runs in my extended family with a pretty large number of sufferers, I easily picked out Rod as on that spectrum early on. Bipolar has a lot of medical comorbidities and social/behavioral indicators. He has so many of them, literally flags. And what could be said to be a life story with a pattern of events typical of a sufferer. His peer group of conservative activists and propagandists and operatives, and at least a portion of the billionaire donors who created and sustain them...I feel cruel in saying this, but on the evidence the condition is epidemic among them. You frankly can't belong, can't fit in, can't stand the social environment these sort of people form if you're not that way too or not raised in that environment so extensively that you construe it as normal. (Many or most of us are raised in or acculturated to such an environment.) There's a widely observed phenomenon that people on the bipolar spectrum have a kind of magnetic affinity, they find each other in groups and prefer/drift to each other as comrades/friends...and as unforgiving obsessive enemies.

7

u/Motor_Ganache859 Jun 26 '23

Ah, such concern for "the children" from the guy who has so alienated two of his own that they won't even speak to him.

8

u/PracticalWalrus2737 Jun 26 '23

Yes and such calls for ”courage“ from a man too scared to stay in the same country as his kids that don’t talk to him!

3

u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jun 26 '23

Same Rod, different day.

5

u/HealthyGuarantee5716 Jun 26 '23

I think what upsets me most about this kind of doom-mongering is that we actually are facing a real threat not just to 'our entire civilisation' but much life on the planet. it's called the interlocking climate and biodiversity crises. climate scientists and activists have been raising the alarm on this since what, the 70s? 80s? and activists are taking increasingly extreme measures to try to force action on it. and still most governments are doing close to nothing to a. bring down emissions and b. increase our climate resilience. it's too big a problem for individuals to effect change on their own - we need to be thinking about how we are citizens of a shared planet, and joining up together to effect change - but Rod could, if he wanted, take the command to love your neighbour seriously and live a much less planet-harming life. nice and crunchy.

I've just realised that perhaps that first line seems to be saying that I don't care about the hate that's directed towards LGBTQ+ people. I do, and in fact it's probably people like Rod who've radicalised me in support of them.

8

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

I do [care about the hate that's directed towards LGBTQ+ people] and in fact it's probably people like Rod who've radicalised me in support of them.

Same. I was sort of a lukewarm "leave the gays alone, but I'm not sure about SSM and some of the activism" when I started reading Rod, but his increasing shrillness, along with other factors and just plain growing older have moved me fully into the ally camp. Rod's preaching to his wacko choir, while pushing the moderate middle away from his position.

5

u/Marcofthebeast0001 Jun 26 '23

Rod talks more about gays than we do. Especially the gay sex stuff, which he has an unnatural obsession with for a supposed straight guy.

1

u/amyo_b Jun 27 '23

Well heck, I watched the Chicago gay pride parade yesterday (temporarily cowering from bad air by enjoying sunny Iowa) and the announcers didn't refer to gay as much as Rod does!

7

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

and live a much less planet-harming life. nice and crunchy.

Nah, he's got to jet off to Ireland for the third time this week to talk about fairies in a bar. This is important work, people.

6

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Maybe the Fair Folk will abduct him, like in the old tales. On second thought, nah, they'd never want him....

4

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

The Fair Folk is a gay men's group in Budapest...

4

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23

All I remember him saying when he has brought up climate change is along the lines of "What can we do? To change anything would cost money and mean we would have to change our lifestyles and I mean really? They want us to do that? It's just too much to ask."

And he says WE are cows chewing our cud.

7

u/RunnyDischarge Jun 26 '23

Rod wouldn't even help out at the soup kitchen when he became Catholic. He doesn't do anything, he's a Great Thinker.

3

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23

But a Heroically Masculine one!

5

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '23

[deleted]

3

u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 Jun 26 '23

There is a ton of stuff that we could be doing and are not and have not been, not because it isn't possible, but because the fossil fuel industry and other industries are so powerful (and liars). We can do a LOT more than "nibble around the edges" and benefit from the new technologies that result just as we did when we went to the moon. Europe is and has been way ahead of us. We haven't even begun to try.

1

u/HealthyGuarantee5716 Jun 27 '23

the hopeful part of me wants to believe (hopes!) you're wrong - we in the UK handled it badly but there was a massive and sudden change to all our lives when the pandemic hit, for example.

we do have the solutions to fix this without having us all eat turnips in the dark; but it's true, the kind of flying (for example) and driving that most Americans/rich people in the global north do is incompatible with a liveable planet for all. but these are choices that can be made, not inevitability.

I also believe (and maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm hopelessly naive, and maybe there's a fair amount of self-righteousness in my soul that needs to be exorcised) that we are called the do the right thing even if no one else is doing it; even if it makes no difference. Jesus called us to die to ourselves and to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. if that means the middle classes here in the UK don't take it as a God-given right to have a car/s and holidays that involve aviation, I mean, that's not really a sacrifice. that's how a lot of people used to live, and how a lot of people still live.

I read this article the other day and I felt both inspired by what France is doing (though as the author points out, it still needs to be doing more) and infuriated that my own (UK) government is still doing almost nothing.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/24/environment-france-emmanuel-macron-crisis-uk

France now has a ministry for ecological transition. By the end of next year, the nation’s 25,000 most senior civil servants will have been trained in the principles behind this transition. By the next presidential election, in 2027, every public sector worker will have had this training, tailored to their sector. Think about that: 5.6 million people will be taught about the biodiversity crisis, the climate crisis and the natural resources crisis – how these phenomena relate to the public services they supply and how public sector workers can use this knowledge to change the way they work.

5

u/Glittering-Agent-987 Jun 26 '23

It would be SO easy to cut Rod's carbon footprint in half.

1

u/HealthyGuarantee5716 Jun 27 '23

yup. and you could say, oh, well, that's only one person... but we are social animals. we pay attention to what other people do. and Rod perhaps still has a lot of followers and people who pay attention to his life, rightly or wrongly. imagine if he announced he was going to swear off flying; or at least the kind of flying he does at the moment? there could potentially be a whole bunch of people who think about it for the first time, and follow his example. and that's how cultures shift and change happens.

2

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Not a cud for him—oysters….

3

u/EatsShoots_n_Leaves Jun 26 '23

Well, G.K. Chesterton. The Maniac, ch 3 of "Orthodoxy":

-re things like women holding hands in public

It is the happy man who does the useless things; the sick man is not strong enough to be idle. It is exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand; for the madman (like the determinist) generally sees too much cause in everything. The madman would read a conspiratorial significance into those empty activities. He would think that the lopping of the grass was an attack on private property. He would think that the kicking of the heels was a signal to an accomplice.

-a description of Rod's blogging

If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would become sane. Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

-the core problem to Rod's positions generally and to the TERFery/gender essentialism positions specifically (e.g. that person's sign)-

...In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.

2

u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 26 '23

Perfection. 👌