There are 5 pictures of the baby. Some of them are already out of date (she has grown quite a bit this past month!) and in the last couple weeks she has started to have her own personality. She seems to be a very quiet and serious baby thus far. I'm still waiting for her to become less fussy and more interactive though.

Other new things in my life. Finally got to go to Cape Breton, using my lefty sister-in-law and her friend as an excuse. I don't believe we got along too well, given that they think that belief in the Nicene Creed makes me an figure of anteduluvian irrationality and oppression. So, like most other lefties of that type, I took perverse pleasure in rubbing their faces in it. It really is quite unfair though, given that I've grown up in the institutions of the left. Government, primary schools, university, etc. The attitudes are as familiar as my own. The left on the other hand is largely regressed to a smug parochialism.

After all, to be progressive is to be at the forefront of human endeavour. What could any left wing individual possibly have to learn? It has been much the same attitude that has existed since Hegel first wrote "The Phenomenology of Spirit" which spawned a movement that includes Sigmund Freud, Carl Marx, and Emile Durkheim. The history of humanity (bad history in all of their writings, but I digress) is a grand epic in which human society evolves to a higher technological, moral, intellectual life through the unconcious, which then determines and manifests our conscious beliefs. The culmination of this history was the European societies of these eminent gentlemen, just as being progressive continues to be a flattery for the ideological left. Not only is our society the pinacle of human thought, but the progressive within that society are the pinacle of that society.

Of course, for those that don't believe in this grand narrative, and believe that traditions and institutions have value, well I don't imagine that this worldview would be particularly respectful our intelligence and our fitness to contibute. We can all agree that societies must and do change, but I imagine a good dose of hofealthy skeptism about where that change is leading. After all, the ideologies of the eminent men above have left horrors behind in the 19th and 20th centuries that makes any sins of the Catholic Church look minor in comparison. These tragedies have the potential to repeat themselves, in the prevailing attitude of the left that we are socially and genetically determined. They will rage amongst themselves about nature vs. nurture, but will never stop to consider that free will is the gift of a rational mind and an examined life.

Without that you cannot expect that people should be equal under the law, or that they can be consulted for policy decisions that affect them. Rather, it should belong to the progressive "elect" who are fortunate enough to be born with the right genes, the right upbringing, or the right ideological beliefs. G.K. Chesterton wrote "to be a conservative is to leave this a torrent of change". This is an admonition that you cannot stop progress, but it is also a warning that social engineering is generally results in the marginalization of your own citizens and their contributions and creating a static and dogmatic society. This would of course be borne out in the repressive "progressive" totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

Pictures of the baby!

You have all been requesting it, so now you got it!