General Sir Charles Napier Had A Point [CBD]

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."

[To Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Suttee (burning widows alive on their husbands' funeral pyres).]

Ace had a rolicking good post yesterday about the Catcall video that went viral.

I am not suggesting that the penalty for behaving like an ass in public should be hanging, and in reality, any legal recourse would stomp all over that pesky little thing called the Constitution. Even assuming that in its infinite stupidity, some legislature actually sneaked in some law preventing offensive speech, the Left would co-opt it immediately and have all Right-of-Center public commenters arrested for violating the 2015 Sexual-Violence-Free Streets Act (The Hollaback Law).

But...The Melting Pot usually took care of this kind of behavior. Importing other cultures, without regard for the fact that THEY ARE FOREIGN, leads to just this sort of unacceptable public behavior being tolerated.

Y-not made an excellent point about cock-fighting. It is perfectly acceptable in Latin (and South?) America, but almost universally banned in this country (Y-not thinks that Louisiana may still allow it). Why? Isn't it a legitimate expression of cultural character?

At the end of the 19th Century, when a bunch of my ancestors arrived here, they were immediately placed in public schools, where they learned such outmoded topics such as Civics and Government and American History and Grammar. And...they were expected to behave commensurate to their ages, not to their origins. Immigrants weren't the only people expected to conform to minimum standards of behavior; the typical American public school was quite capable of instilling minimum standards of behavior.

I have no doubt that my paternal grandfather never once spoke to a lady on the street in a manner approaching some of what we saw in the video ---he was probably too busy studying Latin and Greek (yes, topics in the NYC public school system just one century ago).

But Cultural Relativism has destroyed the concept of a unifying mode of behavior. Yes....we lost the culture wars a long time ago.

I wonder how complete the cognitive dissonance among the Left will be when the first lawsuit demanding Female Genital Mutilation (paid for by government health insurance) as a cultural right is filed by a group of recent immigrants?

posted by Open Blogger at 12:00 PM

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