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The OG Nazis, it should be remembered, strived to at least in theory to reduce the stigma of unwanted motherhood.
This was in the fairly specific context of a society with a female-skewed prime-age population (due to the extreme and unusually battlefield-only lethality of WW1) and a strong monogamy norm. The trad Christian approach was to put the surplus women in all-female communities under religious supervision. The effective pro-natalist approach was to support the surplus women in single motherhood. Of course, under the actual trad rules of large-scale warfare, the surplus German women would have been second wives of the victorious British (if they were lucky) or French (if not) troops.
Except (Protestant) Germany had the problem that since Luther, monasticism and religious life was strongly downgraded in favour of "God wants you all to get married, have kids - 'be fruitful and multiply'" (Luther did a lot of writing about how there was in fact no right to take a vow of celibacy and nobody could impose it on you or punish you for breaking it).
So if you have a lot of single women and no husbands for them, you have a problem as to what you do with them. If they get pregnant outside of marriage, then if you need the rebuilding of the population, you can't afford to shame them. Discreet (or not so discreet) abortions of future citizens in a country that lost a lot of men during the previous war is going to leave you weak, particularly if the people in charge have a shiny new ideal of being the Master Race and conquering all of Europe by right.
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Care to explain the distinction?
"That sweet enemy France" 😀
Google AI will say that there is no specific author of that phrase, it mentions a book by that title, but I know better, having first encountered it mentioned by Chesterton:
"Sometimes it is right because there is something to be a salt to its sweetness, as in Sir Philip Sidney's line; "Before the eyes of that sweet enemy France."
And looking up Sir Philip Sidney, it comes from a poem:
Astrophil and Stella 41 By Sir Philip Sidney
Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance
Guided so well that I obtain'd the prize,
Both by the judgment of the English eyes
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France;
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance,
Town folks my strength; a daintier judge applies
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise;
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance;
Others, because of both sides I do take
My blood from them who did excel in this,
Think Nature me a man of arms did make.
How far they shot awry! The true cause is,
Stella look'd on, and from her heav'nly face
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race.
So sorry, Google Gemini, but you're wrong; the book gets its title from "a direct quote from a specific individual":
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Anglo-French relations are 1000 year hereditary bromance. If you don't get it, it can't be explained.
Rudyard Kipling tried and I'm not aware of anything better.
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I don't think that it was only in that specific context (and a fair amount of things that we take for granted about the Nazi ideology was also at least partly about answering a specific context, such as their particular attempts to appeal to the working class in the specific context of a threat of Marxist working-class rebellion). The Nazis had a mission to combat traditional religious morality and advance a more... nature-focused sort of an understanding of various things, such as sexual relations.
Something that Americans also adopted the instant the birth-control pill hit the shelves (hippies were famous for this- they said free love was natural for a reason, but every "all-natural" person exhibits profound ignorance of what technological advancement lets you see as natural, like how everything you eat has been specifically bred for gigantism). Being able to not get pregnant on a whim is a massively transformative technology; so is having so much food the poor only starve if they're explicitly trying to, for that matter (and the Germans invented the chemical process that makes that possible, too).
The foundation of traditional religious morality is not meaningfully distinguishable from "sex bad" (no other intelligent examination other than "Bible says it's bad"), so it makes sense traditions holding that viewpoint get absolutely bodied by the new reality that a good chunk of why it was destructive is now obviated. Some traditionalists have tacitly accepted this, but they won't actually say it for Overton window reasons.
The more intelligent traditionalists focus on "but a woman who has a body count is spiritually degraded" for that reason- if they had any better arguments, I think they'd be making them, but they aren't. So "vibes" (and "men want virgins", when they're being more honest- and I can accept that doing things that help men would make society better, but in a general sense rather than this specifically) is obviously the best they have.
I'm sympathetic to those for whom biology meshes better with first-century sexual norms, but they're too busy thinking with their other head in this matter. So putting them in charge in a context where technology has obviated most of the previous reality they cling to is (rightly) viewed by everyone else as destructive. (The same is true when you put women doing that in charge, but rejecting that is an even more cutting-edge idea.)
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Trad christians pro-natality is a byproduct of their anti-sex mindset: every sex act must carry the maximum penalty, and a child is the last punishment available when they run out of stones and insults. By contrast, nazis are pro-natality first , and a ‘sex positive’ mindset is a natural consequence.
That you view children as a punishment rather than a blessing is why secular liberalism is suffering (or perhaps enjoying) a collapse in fertility.
I don’t. I don’t think sex deserves punishment. And I believe in personal freedom – and you don’t choose a punishment.
That's why trads deny women the right to choose, so they can use children as a sex deterrent. Children are just means to an end in their two thousand-year anti-sex crusade.
If they really thought children were a blessing, like you say, they’d be more like the nazis, encouraging promiscuity and so-called illegitimate children. Illegitimate children are the opposite of their god. He was allegedly conceived by parthenogenesis or midichlorians or something, completely without sex (ie sin). While they were the result of a sex act that wasn't even authorized by a virgin in a church.
I find it simultaneously hilarious and kind of sad that you think Trads are "anti-sex". You've clearly never interacted with a sincere Catholic or Orthodox Jew before. (Or Mormon for that matter)
You have the causality exactly backwards. Trads, as a general rule, are pro-natal/pro-family-formation first and thier disdain for the liberal mantra of freedom from consequence/responsibility and "soulless pleasure seeking" is a result of them being pro-natal not the cause.
Nonsense. My family's full of them, and they usually don't deny it.
I don't have to take the words of christian apologists at face value. Their mythology, rules and actions betray an extreme hostility to sex. You yourself, in the middle of arguing christians aren't anti-sex, can't help but insult sex as "soulless pleasure seeking", whatever that means. Just accept that you're anti-sex and stick to the ascetic line.
The problem with accepting that I'm anti-sex and sticking to the ascetic line is all the sex I've been having with my wife. I would imagine most other Trads would tend to have a similar problem, given the available stats and evidence.
If you do not understand the concept of "soulless pleasure seeking", I'm not sure what to tell you. I have lived as a "sex-positive" Progressive, and I have lived as a Trad. In my personal experience, the trad life is much, much better. Progressivism aims for the blossom without the roots or stem, but without the roots or stem the blossom withers and is gone.
I guess I’ve just had better experiences than you. I’ve never been depressed about casual sex or masturbation. Or anything, really. Another difference between you and me is that I do not want to stop others from choosing your path, or the other, while your side is fundamentally willing to coerce.
Quite possibly this is true. Perhaps it will continue to be true for the rest of your life. What I observe from society at large, however, is deep discontent bordering on open rage at the sexual environment our society has delivered. Having attempted to have the bloom only, the bloom withers and is gone, and people generally are much worse off for it, and perceive themselves to be much worse off.
Meanwhile, I have a spouse, and children, and strong ties to a family of considerable size. Do you have these things? If you do not, how do you think that fact shapes the world over the next two or three decades?
Then you and your preferences are irrelevant to the question of what the future will be. Coercion is an indispensable building-block for large-scale, high-complexity social order. To the extent that you disagree, it seems likely to me that you are either blind to the coercion you endorse and participate in, or else you are in a temporary pocket of calm created by the push and pull of competing ideological constructs. The tide goes in and out, and there's doubtless a moment there in the middle where it seems that the water is being neither pushed nor pulled, but it will not last. You will be found either by the coercion of Progressive ideology, or the coercion of people like me, or the coercion of some other construct, because atomic individualism creates a vast power vacuum, and sooner or later that vacuum will be filled.
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller life
(Which started by loving our neighbor, and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children, and the men lost reason and faith
and the Gods of the Copybook Headings said, "The Wages of Sin is Death."
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Are you trying to suggest with a straight face that the anti-religious right side, whom are the leftists that oppose FC, don't try to coerce and police other people's behavior?
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Whether it's a punishment or a blessing depends on whether it's forced upon you when you're least ready or given when you're most desperate for it.
@Tree's comment clearly treats "children are a punishment" axiomatically.
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