Take that, Abercrombie & Filth

If you check the news today, my city's A&F retailer is making waves in the national press by having had some posters of scantily clad young adults removed by the police. Not just scantily clad, but exposing some naughty bits.

Good! This stuff isn't "cutting edge," it's crap.

I'm a thirty-year old middle of the road conservative who is tired of the normalization of perverse behavior, whether it's Orbitz.com travel for those with perverse lifestyles, Cox Cable On Demand movies for those with perverse lifestyles, or A&F encouraging impressionable kids that modesty doesn't belong in a storefront. I'm part of the last bastion of society that doesn't care to embrace male-on-male shirtless frolicking. I mean, all the people that falsely believe this kind of thing is a virtue, well, if you accept it, I can only tell you that this isn't a lifestyle - this is a "deathstyle." (Credit Dr. Savage on that quote.) This is the death of common sense, the affirmation of crimes against nature. Minorities should be offended that these deathstyles are being compared to civil rights crusades. Everyone else should be offended that the mass media is getting away dismantling our modesty. Dare I say it: now, I'm a lot more interested in learning what those fomenting the "red scare" believed instead of just accepting the junior civics view that it was "bad."

And then there's the rare article, a faint voice trying to make sense of what is happening all around us.

"I'll bet this has happened to you. Some friend or relative is a little bit nuts -- maybe they just are, or maybe they have been burned by painful experiences. So they get very anxious about imaginary threats and outraged by imagined injustices. Maybe they're paranoid because they're smoking dope, or they drive drunk because they're young and stupid and think it's cool. Or maybe they're just jealous of people who look happier, or prettier, or have better toys. It's just ordinary human folly. "

"And to keep the peace, we indulge their craziness."

"That's our biggest mistake. That's why we are in such trouble as a people and a culture.
We have been taught to indulge craziness. It's supposed to show that we're "compassionate". Psychiatrists know this: If you let crazy folks set the rules, you have to get crazy right along with them. It doesn't matter if your client is crazy for good reasons. The cause doesn't matter one little bit. Good therapists are taught never to indulge craziness, because that just makes everything worse. Alcoholics Anonymous has long understood exactly the same thing. Real compassion doesn't mean joining people in the pits. That just means that you get two crazy people instead of just one. And then you get more and more, as the phony compassion spreads. "

- James Lewis, American Thinker (online periodical), 26 July 2009

How about a little nationalism, how about a little pride? People like the manager of that store only care about the "bottom line."

$$$.