The modern "liberal" brand lives on fuzzy headed thinking. The linked article exposes a good bit of it relative to "tolerance" and "hate speech".
Tolerance simply means “to tolerate.” Nothing more, nothing less.
However, leftists seem to believe that tolerance means something more akin to acceptance and celebration.
One need not CELEBRATE a gay "marriage" to toleratre it! Likewise with 58 genders and rising.
According to this columnist, the left then applies the same logic as they look at "Nazis", and consieer "tolerating" Nazis to be "acceptance and celebration" of Nazis, so they validly refuse.
The article points out that actual Nazis and KKK member sorts are exceedingly (and gladly) RARE. They serve largely has an all purpose demon with which to demonize anything that is remotely "right wing" (which of course is another left wing construction that in reality bears no resemblance to the construction) ... in reality, "left" is any form of increasingly totalitarian state control, and "far right" is anarchy. National Socialism ... or the KKK for that matter are very much about CONTROL. Identifying certain groups as "undesireables", removing their rights, and then removing them!
Certainly a free society wants to prevent any ideology that will destroy it -- Islam/Sharia Law, Socialism, Racism, Political Correctness, etc from becoming powerful enough that tolerance is ended. The main risk of that in the US is of the nation becoming a single party state where "The Party" (TP-D) achieves enough dominance that their opposition is demonized to the extent that they can be removed.
As the linked column puts it in closing ...
In other words, Popper had no interest in destroying the right of free speech. He had an interest in preserving a free society, which is precisely what progressives are trying to destroy today.
So maybe it’s time for liberals to revise their idea of what makes up tolerance, and recognize that you can meet intolerance and combat it, giving it no comfortable place to take root, without becoming the very thing they claim they’re trying to prevent.
I only included links to two articles assuring us that requiring IDs to vote is RACIST!, but there are hundreds more, plus I've had it explained to me like 100 times on NPR.
According to the dominant media in this country the racism of requiring IDs to vote is a FACT -- at least as proven as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW ... human caused).
So assuming that blacks are unable to acquire IDs in sufficient numbers for this to be an issue, then that MUST also mean that blacks are unfairly excluded from obtaining internet by an FCC rule. It isn't just the internet ... they can't ship UPS packages, get on planes, check into many hotels, use a credit card in many places, or a host of other things. It is enough to make one believe that there truly IS "white privilege" in this nation, and blacks are unable to get an ID, thus being excluded from a huge part of life in America!
Assuming this is the case as we are assured it is, we can only assume that righting this wrong and helping this vast number of blacks to get an ID is no doubt one of the top priorities of many "progressive" organizations in the US. Could you name one?
I did some searches ... I came up with"Vote Riders", an organization ONLY focused on getting IDs for voters in states that require them. Otherwise it appears that nobody cares.
How can this be? If there are a large number of blacks without IDs, this is a national tragedy, and it can be easily remedied by getting them IDs. Perhaps a study on what strange cultural phenomenon it is that causes them to have such difficulty in obtaining basic documents allowing them to live their lives in the modern world is in order.
If we do not believe this, then we are being asked by the dominant media and political party to believe and repeat the lie that having an ID to vote is "racist". Blacks would therefore be capable of getting IDs, and in fact would HAVE IDs, and the voter ID issue would be a fabrication.
A quick look at Wikipedia shows us that Canada, Mexico, and a good deal of the world require ID to vote. I especially like the Swiss options ...
Switzerland
In Swiss cantons (i.e. the subnational political level in Switzerland) that still use the Landsgemeinde or cantonal assembly; Historically, or in Appenzell until the admission of women, the only proof of citizenship necessary for men to enter the voting area was to show their ceremonial sword or Swiss military sidearm (bayonet); this gave proof that you were a freeman allowed to bear arms and to vote. Women, and men who choose to do so, may show their voting card instead.[13]
So our dominant media and party is saying that all these other countries are racist, or are they simply lying to us?
I think we all know the answer -- for the left, consistency is NOT an issue! Political expediency and power is all that counts, and they are assured that the preponderance of voter fraud is on their side, therefore, they are neither going to try to reduce it, or do anything to figure out how large it is! IT IS IN THEIR FAVOR, and that is really all that counts!
Their position is completely non-factual, and the fact that they are effectively calling most of the other developed countries on the planet "racist" is beside the point. They are certain that they are gaining SOME percentage of fraudulent votes, and it MAY be large ... without IDs, it is pretty much impossible to determine, which is fine by them The result is IN THEIR FAVOR ... and that ultimately is all that matters to a Democrat.
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
Or, to understand it in more modern terms ... just destroy everything! (yesterday, August 29th was Skynet self-awareness day).
Or in God's Word 1 Peter 5:8
Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:
Creation vs Destruction -- The super free to view (but not to lose) fight of the ages.
We all understand what is happening here, it has happened many times. Tear down the statues, burn the books, declare views that you disagree with to be "hate speech" / "subversive" / imperialist / capitalist ... in other words, "bad". The important thing is to DESTROY THEM!!!
The Creator or the Destroyer? The modern destroyers seek to deny any "creator" save randomness -- very very unlikely things "just happen". There is really no other explanation -- for there to be a creator would mean that some level of respect was owed to that creator. Or even classical civilization, Christianity, Founding Fathers, or, dare we say it ... parents / elders.
But then how could each and every modern be "god" --- each with their own "sacred view" (well, at LEAST as "sacred" as the next guys, gals, ????)
Raze the earth of it's past -- the PRESENT is so much better, and the future? Well, no doubt it will be better still in the "progressive" model -- it will have to be, it will be NEW ... for a bit, and then it will be gone ... ever replaced by the latest and greatest "more perfect" level of knowledge
Thus saith the "progressives"! Materialist "knowledge" ( depending on a universe randomly ordered) is god, wisdom is bunk.
Matt 4:9 "All this I will give you," he said, "if you will bow down and worship me."
I've read quite a bit of Haidt (pronounced "height"). Happiness Hypothesis, and Righteous Mind being examples -- in general he is a very smart guy and I enjoy his perspective.
It is a bit funny how in "Righteous", Jonathan points out that liberals claim to be virtually immune to "sanctity/degradation" relative to sexual mores because they have been so indoctrinated that no matter how "yucky" some sex act is, as long as it "doesn't harm anyone" (temporally, they don't believe in eternity), "it's OK". Of course, when asked about things like a guy taking a chicken home from the grocery store, warming it up a bit and having sex with it, a PET scan showed that the old tired morality centers of their brains were screaming "WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!" as God intended -- they had just been socialized to lie about it, so they claimed it didn't bother them.
Who says indoctrination doesn't work? (at least if one can't peek at the wetware (brain))
Haidt seems to have the hypothesis that while lefties have managed to get vast swaths of humans to deny and lie about their sense of sexual sanctity/degradation wired in by either many 10's of thousands of years of evolution or divine design. OTOH, somehow within the last "30 years or so" (being charitable -- BO and Hilly were against gay "marriage" in '08), sanctity/degradation about the KKK, created by Democrats in 1865 and being recruited for by Robert Byrd up to the 1950's is going to be absolutely the end of Republicans!
In that moment, Trump committed the gravest act of sacrilege of his presidency. In that moment, the president rendered himself untouchable by all who share the belief that Nazis and the KKK are not just bad—they are taboo.
"NAZI" of course stands for "National Socialist", and the party of socialism isn't the Republican party. KKK is a creation of DEMOCRATS, who were the party of slavery and Jim Crow for well over 100 years. Isn't it amazing how "sacrilege" fails to stick to Democrats? Yes, yes, I understand that the idea that "right" is "nazi" has been more marketed than lite beer, but I'm just not the lite beer sort. I'm guessing that Haidt has bought into it -- no matter how smart you are, marketing tends to work unless you are the sort of iconoclast that is WAY more disbelieving in human wisdom than someone tearing down monuments
This is why, for many Americans, things feel so unsettled this week. Extraordinary sacrilege has occurred, but divine retribution has not yet come down from the heavens, and we have no priest and no scripture to guide us. The world is out of balance, and America can’t just go on as before.
Yes, but can BOistan? America would have had to have a Constitutional Amendment to kill 60 million babies in their mothers wombs, it would have impeached AND removed from office any cad who would stain the oval office (literally) (Slick Willie), and it CERTAINLY would have had a Constitutional Amendment before there was such a wacko thing as gay "marriage".
I understand that Haidt can't go there, but doesn't his PET scanner give him a little insight to what ACTUAL sanctity/sacrilege/degradation looks like when something as basic to the species and every human religion in history as gender is supposedly beyond figuring out?
What is "sacred" in BOistan? I'm not so certain that divine retribution isn't raining down constantly ... people are dying in droves from suicide, substance abuse and just plain old hopelessness. Compared to what I grew up in, and certainly the '80's and the '90s, this is HELL -- hundreds of young black men die in just Chicago at each other's hands every year now ... thousands across the nation in other Democrat controlled cities. MUST the wrath of God be mass plague, nuclear war, dogs and cats living together?
I DO understand the marketing -- we are all supposed to decide that some tiny rump remnant of old National Socialists or Robert Byrd recruited KKK is "a big threat", while an Administrative State with it's roughly 14 million workers when fully accounted for is "nothing to worry about". Haidt would like it if our very paganized state of BOistan deeply felt "sacrilege" --- but how are we to do so when we have been indoctrinated to believe that the ultimate good is "equality and tolerance"? If you remove all distinctions and claim anything goes, how well does the "except THIS!" really work? (we believe the science except for that X and Y chromosome thing)
The truly strange thing is that if the universally left wing reviled Trump tweet ... "We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!" was said by a previous president (not that many of them could actually state something that succinctly), it would sound dangerously like a boring platitude. It is the horror of TRUMP that creates the hysteria.
I understand that to the ruling elite and media, "Trump and reviled" are synonyms, however does that REALLY sound any different from what you would have heard from every president in your lifetime? Certainly our betters have TOLD us that BLM, Antifa, and even "Islamic Terrorists" are not violent (and in the case of self labeled Islamic, they aren't even Islamic), but DOES ANYONE SANE BELIEVE THEM if you PET scanned their brain?
We need to remember the smarter old Bill ... or William S
“I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
Why so can I, or so can any man. But will they come when you do call for them?”
Are there any pockets remaining in the US that don't know what they are SUPPOSED to think? My sense is that is precisely why there is Trump. I'm actually not the only one that quit buying "The Party" (TP-D) mass marketing sometime around when Slick shook his finger at me and said that I better quit making a spectacle of "his privates".
This is BOistan, not "America" ... that was a nice place with God, churches, intact families, common decency, respect for the Constitution, freedom of speech, hard work, individual responsibility ... you know, that kind of tired old crap that our modern schools and TP detest!
Taboo? Is that a science guy thing?
Yes, the name of "progressivism" is to create constant new realities at each instant, and given the wonders of modern marketing, to make sure everyone at least claims to buy these new realities.
But how does the more ancient brain behave? Haidt would seem to know -- he has seen that even with full modern indoctrination, the underlying wetware still signals the actual OLD taboo, the question is just if you can condition the subject to lie as long as you watch them. But what if you are not watching -- or your "subject" doesn't actually give a rats ass for your conditioning?
Certainly Haidt is indoctrinated enough to believe (at least for publication) that National Socialists and the KKK have been "rebranded" to fit the current narrative, but DOES IT WORK? Are we truly as "the flies of summer", or is there a wee bit more in the human core -- perhaps, dare I say it, even a SOUL?
I keep wondering if deep down Jonathan has not studied a bit too much too deeply and might end up having a dark night of the soul. I pray that he does. I believe that our time frame is a LOT longer than the past 50ish years of heavy duty progressive indoctrination -- as in eternal.
News at 11, Washington is totally corrupt, and has been for a long time, however, all that has NOTHING to do with this case!
Power Line does it's usual good job of reporting the Sheriff Joe pardon shortly and sweetly.
Obviously the left hated Sheriff Joe, a conservative who believed in protecting the border. (and somewhat of a crank as well, but aren't "crank" and "conservative" synonyms today?)
BO managed to inflate the idea of a sheriff thinking you were more likely to be an illegal alien if you were Mexican than if you were Swedish into "profiling" (a left wing sin comensurate to making money other than through graft of theft).
So they wanted to put an 85 year old man in jail to teach him ... and of course anyone else who might disagree with them, a "lesson". All the way back to Stalin, Hitler and Mao, the left LOVES "lessons" ... it is a VERY important part of their "education" and more importantly RE-education of the recalcitrant free thinking sorts!
Remember, LEFT is the party of DEATH!! -- if you have no ,mercy for babies in their mother's wombs, you certainly have no mercy for an 85 year old guy that pissed you off by trying to enforce immigration law!
Oh, and crocodile tears over presidential pardons? Please spare me!
Founded by slave owner and indian fighter Andrew Jackson in 1828, the Democratic party is the party of Slavery and Jim Crow in the United States. One might say that Democrats have never met a form of slavery they don't like, as today they are quite commonly Socialists, and would have elected one Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, as their presidential standard bearer if the Clinton Crime Family had not rigged their own primary.
At the moment, the Democrat party seems intent on tearing down the statues of their own Civil War heroes, the bulk of which were erected by Democrats in the Jim Crow south, or it's border states. The current Democrat Minority Leader in the House, Nancy Pelosi's father erected some nice ones in Baltimore that the linked article points out as now being part of Democrat history that they would like to erase.
Barack (BO) Obama was president from '09-'16 (the mourning goes on) and from '07-'10, Ms Pelosi was Speaker of the House -- somehow, neither Nancy or BO ever managed to mention that any sort of Civil War statue was worthy of any concern ... let alone being removed.
Democrats, which I call "The Party" (TP-D) since much like the old Communist Party in the USSR, they dominate the vast Administrative / Deep State where the real government power is at today, academia, the proffessions, finance, the wealthy, corporate CEOs, and of course the media -- both the admitted fake Hollywood entertainment sort, and the "stealth Fake" supposed left wing "news". Since they are so dominate, their whim of the moment is always made to sound like brilliant wisdom falling from heaven -- or more likely in their case, an official howl from Satan himself, since Democrats are not very oriented to anything about God and Heaven!
"Memory", or "consistency" are terms which Democrats simply don't consider of any use --- OK, so they supported slavery, created and presided over Jim Crow, founded the the KKK, put up all the statues honoring confederates in the first place, and up until very recently, they could care less about any of it. So? They suddenly decided it was politically expedient to tear them down. You didn't really expect them to honor any sort of historical memory or consistency did you? What part of "we make the rules and you just kneel" is it that you have failed to understand?
Making a "deal" with a Democrat is somewhat the same as making a deal with the Devil -- in fact, I suspect Satan is a tad more reliable. At least you ALWAYS know he is going the evil route -- in the case of Democrats, they will do ANYTHING to gain power -- even the occasional "good deed":
The idea that they have suddenly decided that their own statues are "bad" is a great example of how the Democrat mind works -- POWER, POWER, POWER!
Another excellent column from Archbishop Chaput. I thought this paragraph was especially good:
When an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a mainstream religious liberty advocate like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) as a “hate group” it’s simply betraying its own bitter contempt for the people and convictions the ADF defends. So yes, hate has a home here alright: not just among white nationalists, immigrant-haters and neo-Nazis, as loathsome as their ideas are, but also among the “progressive” and educated elites who have the power to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own delusions and bigotries.
Vast swaths of the media and the left are so insanely angry that pulling a sports announcer of Chinese descent from announcing a football game because his name is "Robert Lee" seems "reasonable. Certainly there is anger amoung Trump voters as well, however they are not the ones tearing down statues.
Anyone that qotes Seneca gets some favorable bias from me.
Anger “is greedy for punishment” and a kind of “brief insanity” as Seneca says elsewhere. It first deforms and then destroys the person and the culture that cultivate it. If that’s true – and it clearly is – America 2017 is urgently in need of a healing. We’re a culture addicted to anger. And we’re relentlessly reinforced in it by mass media that compulsively feed our emotions and starve our reason.
If they didn't exist, they would have to be invented. The left has not had a new idea since Ho Chi Minh ... so they look at what they want to think the "Right" is about, then try to emulate it in leftist terms.
The video embedded in the linked is pretty much a Rangemasters nightmare ... the table loaded wiht guns, people on both sides of it, and folks loading magazines is an invitation to lethal AD.
As the article concludes ...
Eventually, they will show up with their fancy weapons that they don’t understand. Eventually, somebody is going to pull that trigger, as happened at Kent State in 1970. Then the Brownies will learn what guns are all about. They will also learn what it is to be cannon fodder.
In these days of zero memory, it is so laughable to go WAY back to January 2015 before the primaries had got going. French goes through a bunch of mental gymnastics as to why the "establishment" like Trump better than Ctuz, but I think the reason is obvious. They thought Cruz might beat Hillary and they were CERTAIN that Trump would not. "The estabishment" in both parties preferred Hillary over either Cruz or Trump, and they were starting to see how weak the other R candidates were.
The establishment’s anti-Cruz faction sees the real-estate mogul as more capable of bringing disaffected Democrats to the GOP, and thus potentially more capable of defeating Hillary Clinton. They’ve developed a grudging respect for his success, and a hope for what it augurs, since one does not remain a going concern at such stratospheric levels without an ability to adapt and compromise. Though they still think he’d lose to Clinton, they’ve stopped waiting for his campaign to fall apart, and they’re noticing that he represents a classic constituency — Jacksonian America — that is in many ways perceived as less radical than Cruz’s grassroots army.
The failure of the GOP to repeal BOcare has convinced me that they had decided to sit this one out, let Hillary and the Davos crowd keep driving the bus, while the sitting GOP Congressmen and Senators kept riding the gravy train. The election of Trump was and is as painful for guys like Ryan, McConnel, McCain, etc as it is for D's ... maybe more so, since the R's have been exposed as the feckless liars that they are. Promising since '10 to "REPEAL BOcare!" ... and then not doing it when they have control!
David Brooks is not a man whose voice I would follow into a coffee shop without a good deal of skepticism -- however, I find this column generally worth reading. My view is that "moderation" is impossible without a transcendent view -- the best of which I find to be Christianity.
Politics is a limited activity. Zealots look to the political realm for salvation and self-fulfillment. They turn politics into a secular religion and ultimately an apocalyptic war of religion because they try to impose one correct answer on all of life. Moderates believe that, at most, government can create a platform upon which the beautiful things in life can flourish. But it cannot itself provide those beautiful things. Government can create economic and physical security and a just order, but meaning, joy and the good life flow from loving relationships, thick communities and wise friends. The moderate is prudent and temperate about political life because he is so passionate about emotional, spiritual and intellectual life.
I totally agree that politics is not only "limited", it ought to be WELL down the list of personal priorities ... God, Family, Friends, Community, Vocation, Study, ... maybe a couple more, and THEN "politics".
I strongly disagree that "government can create economic and physical security". It CERTAINLY can't create anything economic at all -- it is an EXPENSE! It can aid in physical security, but absent a moral and religious people, it is totally unable to protect individual physical security. Those are responsibilities of free men and women, and Brooks error in believing in the impossible shows how far from reality we live.
Beware the danger of a single identity. Before they brutalize politics, warriors brutalize themselves. Instead of living out several identities — Latina/lesbian/gun-owning/Christian — that pull in different directions, they turn themselves into monads. They prioritize one identity, one narrative and one comforting distortion.
Making "Christian" just another "identity" means there can be no "moderation". In order to put all our "hats" into perspective, we humans need somewhere to stand that is transcendent. Without a point to stand that is beyond temporal earthly concerns, we attempt to make earthy things into heavenly things, and thus we end up precisely where Brooks laments. Any "Christian" that puts their race, sexual persuasion, material owning, etc AHEAD of their Christianity is certainly NOT a Christian in any form at all. To be a Christian is to seek FIRST the kingdom of God!
I PERSONALLY don't understand how one can truly transcend humanity without Christ and the Holy Spirit presenting inhuman goals to me like "love your enemies", however I withhold judgement -- perhaps a very strongly held philosophical position could suffice to provide the transcendent grounds to reach that even-handed non-emotional appraisal of politics as Brooks seems to have begun to wish for as he watches the forces which he would normally support tear down even our own history.
His paen to "humility" would be better said as "The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom" ... for without that fear, his objective is for naught.
Humility is the fundamental virtue. Humility is a radical self-awareness from a position outside yourself — a form of radical honesty. The more the moderate grapples with reality the more she understands how much is beyond our understanding.
Brooks echoes Proverbs 9:10 here, so this is not exactly new thought. It is just RARE thought in these days of the "latest being the greatist" ("progressivism") -- a cause for which Brooks regularly shills, however at least he has his moments where he realizes that Pandora is well out of her box and the ability to limit her violence without naked force appears ever more unlikely.
All in all, a worthy read -- Brooks is at least apprehending our peril, although I find his appraisal of it inadequate and wishful.
If you would like to see where we watched it, follow this link. In the sandhills S of Alliance NE -- we avoided the crowds. We were going to watch it from York NE, the clouds looked bad, so we abandoned our friends and just headed west ... for a spell just outside of Ogallala NE, it appeard that we would be punished for our sin ... it actually got a bit worse than this picture!
We found our spot, and we sat and watched the slow occlusion in bright sun, then we got some high clouds just before totality ... they broke for totality, and then it clouded right up. Whew!!
Here is my one 360 degree video -- I hesitate to include it because like so much of our modern world, it is FAKE -- the real experience is what is awesome, our reading, videos, movies, documentaries, "first person accounts", etc have more and more given many the idea that real experience isn't all that important. I'm starting to feel more and more like there actually isn't anything except real personal experience, with others, when at all possible.
The video underplays the darkness with the 360 degree "sunrise/sunset" effect. You can see that you are in a special spot of totality. It gives you a LITTLE of the feel that "things are not what they have always seemed". Go look at the best movies of the corona that you can find -- it is ALIVE, and the naket eye shows it in all it's majesty during a total eclipse. I had always assumed that the beautiful corona pictures were from special high resolution telescopes -- Nope! There it is in all it's mysterious glory. The mystery is that the surface of the sun is at about 6K degrees, but the the temperature increases very steeply to a few million degrees in the corona, in the region 500 kilometers above the surface,and we don't know why.
The other amazing thing is how light it is right up to that last "flash" as the sun totally disappears -- it looks like a super cloudy day, with a "weird filter", but not enough to really make you look up if you did not know what was going on..
"Experience vs Knowledge". Mike is orbiting at the Hubble spacewalking, looks around and EXPERIENCES the billiant light of the stationary sun as the earth rotates out of darkness ushering in a new 90 min Hubble "day". Mike EXPERIENCED the fact that the sun is stationary (relative to earth) and the day and night are caused by the rotation of the earth. Of course he "knew" that, but experience is much more. Telling someone about being a grandparent is not the same as being a grandparent.
You "know" what is going to happen, yet when it happens there is an emotional effect -- it "feels odd", how can this be? Even when you have been a space nut your whole life and watched men walk on the moon in rapt attention, there is something about the experience of the moon blocking the sun that you sense is rare, and it is an honor from a greater source to be able to experience it.
As a believer in divine creation, an eclipse is especially poignient, as it feels like a direct message from God ... "As you grow in knowledge of my creation, you are able to discern my joy in creating the moon 400 times smaller than the sun, yet having the sun 400 times farther away so that at special times because of the eliptical orbit of of the moon, and the tilt of the earth, you may see my hand of creation as the sun is blocked perfectly. I give you these signs so that you may know that I am God".
Alas, for many today it is but one more random phenomenon in a cold and random universe that is so far beyond exceedingly unlikley that the fact of an eclipse would add a few exponents to the number of required universes were the God deniers to consider the ramifications of not only there being a universe that can sustain life at all, but one in which intelligent life arises -- nay, even CONSCIOUS intelligent life that can survey it's place in the universe AND, just happens to live on a planet that experiences perfect total eclipses ... where the sun is EXACTLY blocked, making it's corona visible!
One "explanation" is what Elon Musk believes ... we are in a "simulation" a sort of "Grand Matrix movie". This explanation is really no "explanation", since it just makes "god" to be whomever programmed the simulation. According to modern physics, there ISN'T any explanation -- it's pure randomness all the way down, so there "must be" something like 10 to the 400th UNIVERSES in order for the extreme unlikelyness of our existence to happen.
To accept 10 to the 400th universes or "being a simulation" is considered intelligent and rational in these times -- God is however something that only the most backward and out of touch with reality believe in.
I pray that others may feel a little "sense of small" as I did in their observations of the eclipse. Our greatest shared loss, and with it, our ability to see our fellow man as similarly tiny short lived entities in a vast and timeless cosmos, is our sense of small. It isn't just our elites that have lost it or at least heavily distracted ourselves from it. Nobody with any sense of their smallness in the universe would waste their time tearing down statues of any sort if they were part of a very small and temporal humankind. Even all of human history is such a tiny blip in time that we barely have any history at all ... let alone any to tear down.
As it has been since Adam and Eve, the human sin that exceeds all others is PRIDE. for me, the eclipse was a visceral experience in being very small and very finite in the face of God and eternity.
Thanks be to God for allowing me to witness this example of his greatness.
Seems rather odd that an attempt to boycott a fund raiser in LA because Dennis Praeger was going to guest conduct is a bit tepid to be "NY Times" level news, but it was.
The boycott worked about as well as your standard left-wing cause -- the concert sold out.
See if you have "divisive" political views, you ought to be boycotted ...
His political views are divisive. Just last month, Mr. Prager posted on Twitter that “the news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.” In 2014, he wrote that the “heterosexual AIDS” crisis was something “entirely manufactured by the Left.” That same year, Mr. Prager suggested that if same-sex marriage were legalized, then “there is no plausible argument for denying polygamous relationships, or brothers and sisters, or parents and adult children, the right to marry.”
I'd love to hear the "reason" to deny polygamy, brothers/sisters, etc? As far as I can tell, if they declared themselves gay, bi, or something else, the relationships are in fact ALREADY legal. Like what would a "bi-sexual marriage" (already legal), look like if it doesn't involve at least 3 people?
What grounds does one deny things from the left like this? "Morality"???? What the hell is left wing "morality" ... epsecially on anything remotely related to sex? And it's basis would be ??? "Well, we don't like THAT!!!!!"
While we are at it, isn't "bi" a little outdated with at least 58 genders and rapidly rising?
Well, while allowing lots of genders is certainly NOT divisive fromt the left, having different opinions from the left is VERY divisive, and likely "bigoted" as well.
This barely hit the news at all, and is LONG gone at this point. Nothing here folks, move along, Debbie is a **D** !!!!! No reason to do any reporting on this!
In a plot Tom Clancy might have dreamed up, an IT staffer who’d worked for Democrats in Congress was arrested by federal officials and charged with bank fraud. Fox News has reported that officers and agents from the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and Customs and Border Protection, were involved in the arrest of Imran Awan at Dulles International Airport not far from Washington, D.C., as he tried to fly away to Pakistan.
Small potatoes ... a little under $300K, some security exposures and ALL DEMOCRATS! Why would one expect this to be "news"?
Politico has reported that Awan is “at the center of a criminal investigation potentially impacting dozens of lawmakers.” Awan was arrested after wiring $283,000 from the Congressional Federal Credit Union to Pakistan, says The Daily Caller.
Just in case it turns out that Debbie becomes a liability, she will likely not wake up, finding herself the victim of an unfortunate "suicide".
It is important in the understanding of the Secular Humanist mind to realize that this is the NY Times, not "The Onion".
I read tons of books, meditate, think and pray on the topic of "meaning". Do we have a purpose? How do we discern it? What have great men of history had to say on this topic? What is "the good" in life? I often lament that our Declaration of Independence says "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" as opposed to "pursuit of meaning, or service, or God's will, etc" ... Happiness is a byproduct, it can't be obtained by direct pursuit ... it is a very unfortunate mistake.
The Secular Humanist view is different. I open with their closing paragraph:
Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.
That is a good paragraph to ponder -- LOTS of "government intervention" ... gulags, secret police, building walls to keep people IN (the left was never bothered so much by that!); was worth it ... because? Well ...
A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women.
A rational person with any tiny understanding of human behavior, statistics, accuracy in self reporting / recollection" of different groups, etc, MIGHT find this "a bit" questionable. However, I'm going to to with it as gospel truth.Women in totalitarian socialist states have more and better orgasims! It's true! It's true!
While we are discussing "Havana", as in "baby I'm not from", this wistfulness for socialist paradise reminds me of the joys of Castro lowering heart disease in the '90s. How did he accomplish this brilliant health success? Well, famine and starvation --- but hey, less heart attacks! Socialist success!
If one believes that material is all there is, and that love and consciousness, since non-measureable , are just as meaningless as "God", "Truth", and other unproveable things, then maybe they are "right"? In a purely physical, materialist world, sexual release is probably as much an approximation for "the good" as anything else -- and likely better than many. For example, the "joy" of ritualistic killing of young virgin women, children, etc in rites almost as common in pagan cultures as various temple protitutes.
I suspect that many, even on the left, find it odd that the "big issues" of modern lefty "morality" come down to more and different sexual release. The pill! Abortion! freeing women to have more sex! Gays! Bi-sexuals! genders beyond belief (and imagination)! Perhaps that is the answer -- in a purely materialst world, sexual release is the "highest good" that can be scientifically verified and documented ... therefore, the left dedicates themselves to more sexual release, even if it may need a little "heavy handed" state control as sort of a "totalitarian sex aid".
I did actually read the whole tedious article, and it is pretty easy to develop a hypothesis as to "why" ... guess what, most babies are born in July, August and September. Why? There tends to be less going on in the winter, nights are longer, days are shorter and, "things happen". Give western women fullfilling jobs, lots of stuff to buy, lots of cool stores and malls to buy it in, health clubs, hair salons, all sorts of entertainment, etc, and sex is "one star in the sky" ... when you are standing in line for toilet paper all day OTOH, there are next to no entertainment options, and there is nothing waiting for you at home except ...
Oh, and yes, I caught the "emancipation proclamation" allusion ... women are slaves, once the all powerful state issues the proclimation to free them, they can blissfully stand in line dreaming of basic necessities and better orgasims! Socialist paradise!
Guesss what, the "revolution" is not likely to stop at tearing down statures of Civil War heroes!
As an avid NPR listener, I DO know how I am SUPPOSED to think about Charlottesville. Charlottesville is FINALLY the turning point for Trump. It unmasks him completely as the racist he has always been and shows once and for all that conservatism is racism! It's SIMPLE, as the positions of NPR tend to be -- oh, and if you refuse to agree with this obvious truth, then you too are a RACIST -- end of story. There are correct thinking progressives -- Democrats, the MSM, etc, and then there are the racists. We live in a very simple and easy to understand world -- at least for the standard NPR listener.
The linked article gets long, but it can be summarized in a valid fashion pretty easily -- you won't get it all from here, but you will get the sense of it.
The ALT-right is the modern equivalent of the campus radical left "Weathermen", etc from the 1960's. Acolytes of Saul Alinsky -- rebel revolutionaries and faux revolutionaries like Tom Hayden, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (Obama worked as a "Community Organizer", the main foot soldier in the Alinsky revolutionary vision). The key words are YOUNG, radical and transgressive ... as the young often are.
The '60's lefty revolutionaries grew up and became Senators, Presidents and such -- somewhat less rabid than when they were young, but still with the same far left views. The left grew up, suffered under Reagan, then mostly took over the levers of power and gave us a stagnant economy, gay "marriage" and gender confusion -- not everyone was excited about these developments, so now the youth are "Alt-Right".
These young rebels, a subset of the alt-right, aren’t drawn to it because of an intellectual awakening, or because they’re instinctively conservative. Ironically, they’re drawn to the alt-right for the same reason that young Baby Boomers were drawn to the New Left in the 1960s: because it promises fun, transgression, and a challenge to social norms they just don’t understand.
Of course, just as was the case in history, the parents and grandparents just won’t understand, man. That’s down to the age difference. Millennials aren’t old enough to remember the Second World War or the horrors of the Holocaust. They are barely old enough to remember Rwanda or 9/11. Racism, for them, is a monster under the bed, a story told by their parents to frighten them into being good little children.
Naturally, the dried up leftist old fogies like Hillary, BO, Bernie, Nancy and their buddies at all the major news outlets want to go as negative as they possibly can on the Alt-Right, so it is important for them to link the group with skinheads, National Socialists, white supremacists, etc, and those groups of course DO exist, just like the Black Panthers, Students For a Democratic Society, SLA (kidnapped Patty Hearst), Charlie Manson, etc existed in the '60s ... and the "right" attempted to tie them to the general anti-war, peace, free love movement. (when the media is on the other side, it never works)
Repudiating National Socialists, skinheads and actual white supremacists is great and correct. We don't want to be like the left is with "Black Lives Matter", Nation of Islam and Islam itself. BLM is obviously a black racist group that needed to be repudiated from the left a thousand times over, but of course it has not been. Likewise, the difficulty which BO had with uttering the term "Islamic Terrorism" would be funny if it were not so sad.
The problem is that since the left media is dominant, and the left are EXPERTS at identity politics, Trump is on very dangerous ground here. He would have been FAR better off sticking with his initial statement about "ALL SIDES". Absent the old world of actual principle -- eg. "we all revere God, Country, the Constitution, Apple Pie and Chevrolet", the "burn your bad actor "allies"" strategy is only demanded of one side. BO can cozy up to BLM even when they are yelling "Pigs in blankets, fry em like bacon!" with no MSM outcry to "repudiate BLM"!. (why would the media want to repudiate BLM? they are on the same side!!!) In a world with no actual shared values, WINNING is the only "value" that counts.
Racism is indeed wrong, although it is inherent in the human condition. "White Privilege" is the current black equivalent of calling whites the equivalent of the N-word. Every white has it, they can't escape it, it is evil, it invalidates whites, etc ... They are a bunch of white N-words! We all have racism in our DNA -- the magic for the left is to be allowed to use it for their side BOTH to make their own identity groups (BLM) feel superior, but to label the other side as "bad racist", while blacks braying about "white privilege" have "dog whistle privilege".
So what is a "true conservative", the sort that has values beyond economic success to do? The article covers the "true conservative" (they call it "natural conservative") definition pretty well.
For natural conservatives, culture, not economic efficiency, is the paramount value. More specifically, they value the greatest cultural expressions of their tribe. Their perfect society does not necessarily produce a soaring GDP, but it does produce symphonies, basilicas and Old Masters. The natural conservative tendency within the alt-right points to these apotheoses of western European culture and declares them valuable and worth preserving and protecting."
Needless to say, natural conservatives’ concern with the flourishing of their own culture comes up against an intractable nemesis in the regressive left, which is currently intent on tearing down statues of Cecil Rhodes and Queen Victoria in the UK, and erasing the name of Woodrow Wilson from Princeton in the U.S. These attempts to scrub western history of its great figures are particularly galling to the alt-right, who in addition to the preservation of western culture, care deeply about heroes and heroic virtues.
So the Alt-Right has a strongly shared value with "natural conservatives" -- which is likely why we more natural conservatives are reticent to throw the whole Alt Right movement out with the bad apples travelling with them. We are perfectly willing to repudiate David Duke, skinheads, National (and other) Socialists, but draw the line at tarring the whole Alt-Right with that broad brush.
The left OTOH, won't even repudiate BLM -- let alone tar NAACP, Black Caucus, "White Privilege" intellectuals, etc with a validly repudiated negative label! In fact, they cowtow to BLM because they know how identity politics is played! Repudiation rhetoric is for SUCKERS -- which means Republicans to them.
I found this paragraph to be very intriguing:
Some alt-righters make a more subtle argument. They say that when different groups are brought together, the common culture starts to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Instead of mosques or English houses, you get atheism and stucco.
Sadly, this is often the case. Decide you want "Christian Unity", and soon you have women ministers, gay ministers, ministers that can't tell you what they are, atheist ministers, no historical Jesus ministers, etc, etc. As long as America was a "melting pot" where everyone signed up for AMERICAN values -- hard work, self-reliance, reverence for the Constitution, Christianity, speaking English, etc, etc (ie. "American Culture"), it was fine to be an "Italian AMERICAN" who did some different dances, drank some different wines, and served some tasty food -- but spoke English and revered America.
The current sort of BOistani balkanization is more like the Italians would own a section of the city, speak Italian, throw out non-Italians, and the Mafia would be in charge -- and that was OK, cuz it was "their culture", and there was no thought that there was any sort of "American culture". (why would there be? We live in BOistan). If the left Davos elite succeeds in defeating Trump, natural conservatives and assorted disenfranchised Christians, workers, misfits and hangers on (the likely outcome), the Alt-Right will be less than a footnote in a few years. **IF** however by some amazing luck, act of God, etc, "America" -- or something like it rises from the swampy wasteland of BOistan, then the Alt-Right likely contains the leaders of the future -- 30, 40, even 50 years in the future, as the Alisky left contained the leaders of today's now "mainstream left" -- even including avowed socialists like Bernie. Will Natural Conservatives stick around as researchers like Haidt would say they must because the position is "wired in" to everyone ... and dominant in many?
The conservative instinct, as described by Haidt,includes a preference for homogeneity over diversity, for stability over change, and for hierarchy and order over radical egalitarianism. Their instinctive wariness of the foreign and the unfamiliar is an instinct that we all share – an evolutionary safeguard against excessive, potentially perilous curiosity – but natural conservatives feel it with more intensity. They instinctively prefer familiar societies, familiar norms, and familiar institutions.
At one level, all humans want to "go home". I argue that "home" is actually Heaven (and the Garden of Eden), and the evolutionary psychology ideas of "Darwin's Cathedral" are VERY specialized wishful materialist imagination. Christ is the difference that allows Christian Conservatives to make the best attempt in world history at actually loving their enemies and viewing history / reality through the transcendent eyes of eternity.
Or we may just be deplorable white privileged racists as the left has confidently labeled us.
As the failed state of BOistan continues it's decent into chaos, we need to get a handle on the combatants. The "anarchists", "antifa", "resistance", "BLM", etc are pretty much "aligned", to the extent that term can ever apply to "anarchy".
“The main principles of anarchism is solidarity and the importance of solidarity within society,” Petrohilos said. “So I think it’s incredibly important that people are showing up for each other when we are seeing the harshest state repression in a generation.”
The problem wuth such a manifesto is always "solidarity with WHAT?". Sure, anti-xxxx, with xxxx being Trump, capitalism, money, religion, decency, etc can last for awhile, but what's an anarchist to decide on as "solidarity FOR"? Destruction, anger, hatred, etc tend to be self limiting -- creation is hard, destruction is much easier, but the end result is a meaningless smoking ruin.
I like to consider "end states" -- I see the anarchist end state as basically one final guy sitting in a totally destroyed world proudly stating "I won, it IS all meaningless and there is no hope at all!" ... as he puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. "Mission Accomplished".
So how does a budding anarchist move from just normal "progressive" liberal; sullen whining and complaining, to truely getting some nasty destrction done? Here is one of those people describing her journey.
They would rant on Facebook about the latest news, then do little to solve the problems that vexed them. When people started rioting in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, she recalls some of her classmates being shocked by the violence and saying they could no longer support Black Lives Matter.
“I was like of course they’re breaking windows, they’re mad,” she said. “That’s going to make you stop supporting Black Lives Matter?”
What constitutes "doing something"? Well, rioting, breaking and burning stuff! What did you expect, they are ANARCHISTS! We can take heart though, they do take part in normal left wing "positive activity" as well ...
The election was still months away when Carrefour and a friend were in a District rowhouse in June 2016, drinking beers, smoking pot and lamenting the exhausting presidential race. With Hillary Clinton the clear front-runner, they decided it was time to begin planning inauguration protests.
I'm pretty sure this is the mantra of all left wing groups ... "drinking beers, smoking pot, and lamenting". The standard "silent majority" conservative right mantra might be "going to work, going to church and drinking beers with buddies" ... so at least we have beer in common!
I suppose we ought to give the anarchists credit for going actually going out PERSONALLY and breaking and burning stuff. It IS more active than much of the typical "progressive action" which boils down to "let's have more highly paid government workers take even more money from more productive people, give more to us, and some more leftovers to people even less productive than us so we can feel righteous about it!"
The linked article gets a litte tedious (like exhausting presidential races), but I really think I've captured the essence of the anarchist "movement".
All three of these black men are giants among men -- of ANY color! Their intellect, their character, their ability to communicate and their accomplishments put them in a position where all three ought to be role models for millions of young people of any color, and especially blacks.
Why are they not recognized? Because they are CONSERVATIVE thinkers, and to be a brilliant conservative black man is something that the plantation owners of "The Party" (TP-D) simply do not allow! You will speak as your TP masters tell you to speak, and if you do not, they will marginalize you!
The bottom line of TP is that "diversity" is wonderful for the left as long as it is racial or sexual.
When it is diversity of IDEAS as in there being at least two sides to nearly every discussion, well, that is NOT something that TP wants people to hear!
To have a brilliant black man be able to defend conservative positions to any audience no matter how learned? No way! TP is angry that such men exist!
Pretty much every story has at least two sides. For the past few years we have been being innundated on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) side of the story -- racist trigger happy cops shooting young black men for no reason whatever. "Murder", "assassination", "genocide" ... all sorts of nasty descriptions.
The police side of the story is is rarely told at all, and when it is, it is often tinged with "the officer panicked", "why did he even have his gun out", "he ought to have just tased him", etc, etc. We see often shown parts of videos that look especially incriminating relative to the officer involved. Videos like this tend to be FAR from universally seen.
Please take the time to watch this video and then imagine that you are the officer, or the officer is your husband, wife, son or daughter. When the shooter sees that all the officer has in his hands is a tazer, do you think that makes a difference to the shooter? If he was staring down the barrel of a .40 or .45, would he feel less "luckly"?
Consider this in comparison:
I strongly suspect that if you are looking at the business end of a major handgun vs a taser, your quick draw confidence is reduced due to the increased price of overestimating your speed.
Why did the officer select his taser rather than his handgun? Why did the shooter think it was acceptible to ignore the repeated commands of an officer of the law?
THIS is what BLM is building. Police are not in a "fair fight", they have no way of knowing why the person of interest has their hands in their pockets. They MUST consider it is for the reason we see in the video above. As a nation, we need to ALL understand that when you disobey direct orders from a police officer, you are RISKING YOUR LIFE! You are risking your life because you are risking the officers life!
You have a choice -- you can comply, and in many situations you made the choice to be there. Like Philandro Castile ... you got high and drove around, you decided to carry a weapon, you decided to yell out "I've got a gun!", you decided to keep reaching for whatever you were reaching for ...
The officer decided to be a police officer, and now it is part of his job to answer calls and enforce the law. The OFFICER deserves the benefit of the doubt when he chooses wrongly at the last instant -- in this case, a wrong choice in the other direction (taser vs gun) nearly cost his life.
Certainly police should be scrutinized, but BOTH sides of the story need to be told. There really is a risk to an officer when somebody will not take their hands out of their pockets. Now you have seen it -- quit denying it.
This somewhat longish column is a poster child for an attempted left wing analysis of "what went wrong"? How did they discover that something went "wrong"? Trump was elected. The wordy article leads us on a merry chase of how this terrible thing might have happened -- it is written by Kurt Anderson, who is a writer that graduated from Harvard and founded "Spy" magazine. An example of what "Spy" was about:
Founded by Kurt Andersen and E. Graydon Carter, who served as its first editors, and Thomas L. Phillips, Jr., its first publisher. After one folding and a rebirth, it ceased publication in 1998. The magazine specialized in irreverent and satirical pieces targeting the American media, entertainment industries and the mocking of high society.[4] Some of its features attempted to present the darker side of celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, John F. Kennedy, Jr., Steven Seagal,[5]Martha Stewart, and especially, the real-estate tycoon Donald Trump and his then-wife Ivana Trump.[6] Pejorative epithets of celebrities, e.g., "Abe 'I'm Writing As Bad As I Can' Rosenthal", "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump",[7] "churlish dwarf billionaire Laurence Tisch", "bum-kissing toady Arthur Gelb", "bosomy dirty-book writer Shirley Lord" and "former fat girl Dianne Brill" became a Spy trademark.
Strangely, although Anderson finds Trump to be a disaster of the first order, a quick read of the paragraph would indicate that Kurt and Donald ought to be bosom buddies ... "former fat girl Dianne Brill"? Indeed. So what IS the shape our peril according to Kurt?
By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy. A third of us believe not only that global warming is no big deal but that it’s a hoax perpetrated by scientists, the government, and journalists.
Kurt certainly seems to have a solid view of "reality" -- to the extent we can discern it's base, the key point seems to be strong materialist atheism -- creation, angels, heaven, and "a personal God" (we will assume he means Jesus) come in for special snark. For those of us that believe in Christ being God made Man, the "Word of Kurt" (WoK) calling him "some guy" seems just a bit presumptions. Somehow, I'm guessing he is far less snarky about "allah" ... at least around Muslims. They don't love their enemies, they kill them.
Kurt goes on a long discussion of how "America" has gone "haywire". So why is it that Kurt's ideas on this are supposed to be of interest to anyone at all? Kurt does a great job of answering the reason for that right up front -- there is really no reason to read the rest of it.
Why are we like this?
The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.
So what are the qualification of one of the founders of "Spy" magazine to give us a psuedo-intellectual tour of history? He is admittedly Ivy League educated, but certainly not philosopher, theologian, scientist, political scientist, or even sociologist; on what does he stand to provide us the answer for the deep meaning of "haywire". Clearly KURT believes that Trump defines "haywire", however what expertise, philosophy, revelation, equation, data, "standard", dream, etc is Kurt standing on as he says it? I'd argue it is exactly like Potter Stewart's definition of pornography ... "you know it when you see it'.
Kurt HIMSELF has clearly stated "expert's be damned" -- The WoK is being proffered as useful because he himself finds his own views to be "equal or superior to anyone else's". He invalidates his own case right up front.
My view is that we forgot that "the fear of God is the BEGINNING of all wisdom". Transcendence, something unchangeable and beyond mere matter -- TRUTH. A book that points out where we left the track is from my perspective is "Ideas Have Consequences" and the point and which we first became unglued was in the 14th century.
"This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged."
Without SOMETHING that is at least very close to an eternal principle, we ALL lack any place to stand to make any sort of judgments at all! Science leaps from the precipice that says "the universe is ORDERED, and results that we see today are assumed to be repeatable across time and space". The foundation of science is INDUCTION -- "it worked today, it will work tomorrow, and it will work anywhere for all time".
The difficulty with this is PERSPECTIVE. The Thanksgiving turkey postulates that humans are a benevolent species that cares and provides for turkeys. On the very day in which the turkey's "proof" has gained the status of maximally proven scientific "fact", the induction crashes and the turkey finds himself at a meal in which he is the guest of honor. The turkey lacked the perspective of a larger view -- as do we humans relative to eternity.
The other problem is of course that right/wrong, beauty, consciousness, love, etc are completely outside the realm of science, as science is about STUFF ... material, matter. Human life is founded on human consciousness -- right, wrong, up, down, inside out, or non-existent, it IS what WE perceive as humans!
Kurt certainly views HIS consciousness as a superb basis for analysis ... as do we all unless we recognize a power greater than our own perspective (eg. "the fear of God" or maybe "fear of Kurt"??).
Let's look at Kurt's "analysis" a bit":
Meanwhile, over in sociology, in 1966 a pair of professors published The Social Construction of Reality, one of the most influential works in their field. Not only were sanity and insanity and scientific truth somewhat dubious concoctions by elites, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann explained—so was everything else. The rulers of any tribe or society do not just dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself. To create the all-encompassing stage sets that everyone inhabits, rulers first use crude mythology, then more elaborate religion, and finally the “extreme step” of modern science. “Reality”? “Knowledge”? “If we were going to be meticulous,” Berger and Luckmann wrote, “we would put quotation marks around the two aforementioned terms every time we used them.” “What is ‘real’ to a Tibetan monk may not be ‘real’ to an American businessman.”
Therefore, Kurt's "reality" would also be relative ... however, since he wrote this long article, we are to understand that it isn't really. Somehow, "The WoK" is privileged. (See "reality based" above}.
So what kind of heresy has failure to accept the WoK unleased?
Even the social critic Paul Goodman, beloved by young leftists in the ’60s, was flabbergasted by his own students by 1969. “There was no knowledge,” he wrote, “only the sociology of knowledge. They had so well learned that … research is subsidized and conducted for the benefit of the ruling class that they did not believe there was such a thing as simple truth.”
Ever since, the American right has insistently decried the spread of relativism, the idea that nothing is any more correct or true than anything else. Conservatives hated how relativism undercut various venerable and comfortable ruling ideas—certain notions of entitlement (according to race and gender) and aesthetic beauty and metaphysical and moral certainty.
Ah, "simple truth" --- or as we can see from the column, "the WoK". Sadly, the evil American Right thought that there WERE ultimate truths ... like the Word of God, which included Genesis, now known to fail the "reality based" test, according to the WoK. So the decried "relativism", as now apparently so does Kurt -- it's just that he finds any "relativism" according to the "Word of Kirk" to be bad -- therefore, he is a "rightwing fundamentalist" in relation to the "Word of Kirk"!
"Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided. Until then, big-time conservative opinion media had consisted of two magazines, William F. Buckley Jr.’s biweekly National Review and the monthly American Spectator, both with small circulations. But absent a Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh’s national right-wing radio show, launched in 1988, was free to thrive, and others promptly appeared."
Here I think we arrive at the crux of the matter. As long as whatever was being stated was duly approved by a part of the Administrative State lodged comfortably in the womb of the Federal Communications Commission, all could be certain that only Administrative State, Union Approved, Ivy League vetted, Davos Certified, "truth" would be provided to the masses. Everything was "ideologically SINGLE sided", which was "the good", and the idiots that provided the alternative comic relief -- Bill Buckley and the American Spectator, were "fringe" --- as heretics ought to be!
Did his voters know that his hogwash was hogwash? Yes and no, the way people paying to visit P. T. Barnum’s exhibitions 175 years ago didn’t much care whether the black woman on display was really George Washington’s 161-year-old former nanny or whether the stitched-together fish/ape was actually a mermaid; or the way today we immerse in the real-life fictions of Disney World. Trump waited to run for president until he sensed that a critical mass of Americans had decided politics were all a show and a sham. If the whole thing is rigged, Trump’s brilliance was calling that out in the most impolitic ways possible, deriding his straight-arrow competitors as fakers and losers and liars—because that bullshit-calling was uniquely candid and authentic in the age of fake.
Perhaps there really were consequences to Slick Wille having BJs in the oval office, lying about it, and skating. Maybe calling a vast power grab and re-distribution scam called the "Affordable" Care Act, "affordable" even though it added a grab bag of new benefits to health INSURANCE thus being certain to radically increase the cost, was slightly disingenuous. However, saying that "If you like your doctor you can keep him", "if you like your insurance plan you can keep it", etc was TOTALLY a direct lie which anyone that paid any attention understood to be a LIE ... or to put it in Kurt's words, "a show and a sham".
I personally know MANY people that budgeted for retiring with healthcare TOTAL costs (insurance + deductables + co-pays) of $8K for a 60 year old couple, finding that they needed $22K for insurance along, PLUS, another 8-10K for deductables and co-pays. $30K vs $8K ... PER YEAR!
Slick Willie ushered in the age of fake. BO made it the standard.
So what do I believe caused America to "go haywire", and turn into BOistan?
We have to stand on SOMETHING! As John Adams said: "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other". That morality was founded on Jesus Christ -- we never had any other rock to stand on, and sorry to say, the WoK isn't much of a substitute.
So what does the "word of Kurt" say on this point?
What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America From the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair the levees, and maybe stop things from getting any worse. If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America—whether the blue part or the smaller red part—must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and for future generations. We need to firmly commit to Moynihan’s aphorism about opinions versus facts. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. A grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and lately reshaped our national politics—the opposition to political correctness. I envision a comparable struggle that insists on distinguishing between the factually true and the blatantly false.
What is "reality"? Is it matter only, with meaning defined by induction? Kurt, founder of "Spy" magazine firmly believes in the "World of Kurt" ... if you follow Kurt, you too can be "reality based". Isn't that special?
Choose ye this day whom you will serve ... Kurt? or something larger? Trump is only a very temporary occupant of the highest office in what is at this point the failed state of BOistan. I believe that God is bigger than Kurt, Trump, and BOistan, so God is my choice as the basis for reality -- eternal reality.
In a wild case of the pot calling the kettle black, the left leaning WaPo goes after the competitive lefty NY Times! So which do lefties prefer? Fake news, or REALLY Fake News?
That correction, which sits at the foot of the story, dutifully straightens out the record. Yet given the magnitude of the screw-up, it should sit atop the story, surrounded by red flashing lights and perhaps an audio track to instruct readers: Warning: This story once peddled a faulty and damaging premise.
Sure. The REAL "faulty and damaging premise" is that you get an actual sound from only a left hand "clapping". Other than maybe a little "whoosh", there is just no "clap".
The internet allows us to run into such wonderful concise definitions of our modern retreat from philosophy and theology that one bows in appreciation of why we are intellectually dead.
Here, I just want to take a step back from the memo controversy, to highlight a paradox at the heart of the ‘equality and diversity’ dogma that dominates American corporate life. The memo didn’t address this paradox directly, but I think it’s implicit in the author’s critique of Google’s diversity programs. This dogma relies on two core assumptions:
1). The human sexes and races have exactly the same minds, with precisely identical distributions of traits, aptitudes, interests, and motivations; therefore, any inequalities of outcome in hiring and promotion must be due to systemic sexism and racism;
2). The human sexes and races have such radically different minds, backgrounds, perspectives, and insights, that companies must increase their demographic diversity in order to be competitive; any lack of demographic diversity must be due to short-sighted management that favors groupthink.
Got that? The races and sexes are totally the same and totally different. Deny that and you are not welcome in our dominant culture! You MUST believe!
Our modern society is rife with this kind of thinking because the dominant political world view is forced to ignore paradox and declare that consistency is not a matter of concern -- ENDS are what count, and the fact that those ends are often logically inconsistent is a point that must not be made under threat of excommunication from the Secular Humanist religion (firing as per the google empoloyee, fines as per not baking a gay "marriage" cake, etc)
Theology always alllows there to be truth that transcends our condition, and wherein paradox from our perspective is perfectly reasonable -- virgin birth, fully God and fully man, etc
Some philosophy allows this as well, Plato for example.
Science however claims to NOT allow paradox -- so in a world actually based on science, transcendence, love, beauty, consciousness are excluded ... at least until they can be measured.
So, "diversity" has to EXCLUDE logic and therefore diversity of thought -- because the theology of Secular Humanism demands that diversity is an "ultimate good", stated to be effectively transcendent in the old fashioned way. By DEFINITION, and heritics must be burned to enforce it as "truth". (that part is painfully old)
That is our world -- and thanks to the exclusion of thoology and philosophy from the knowledge of most of our people, the vast majority of our people find themselves as a man blind from birth trying to explain "red" to you.
An excellent SHORT article on the failed decades long "negotiation" with NK -- the money paragraph.
But here’s the thing: If you go into negotiations with an enemy who sees negotiations as nothing more than a stalling tactic (or shakedown operation) in its pursuit of a goal, then you have to decide how far you’ll take negotiations.
Assuming that all the "intelligence" is true (and I'm forever skeptical of that) and NK does actually not only have a nuke, but a minaturized one they can put in a warhead, then negotiations have clearly failed.
The form of the decision seems very easy:
Hope and pray that the latest Kin Jong nutcase isn't really a nutcase -- although "un" has a very bad ring in english for the "end of the line" -- the "UNcola" comes to mind. If he really is a nutcase, then he is going to nuke someone on HIS terms -- which given the nutcase designation is pretty random. Guam? Really? Hank Johnson, a sitting Democrat House member is on record as being concerned it may "capsize " (that level of intelligence is OK if you are a Black Democrat)
Stop him. Of which the ways are nasty and long, but what needs to really be thought is the "worst case", which gives us:
Nuclear -- Which we have been taught is "unthinkable", however see top bullet 1.
We have highly paid people that have been thinking a really long time about I assume ALL the options ... although Republicans claiming they were going repeal BOcare for 7 years and not having an agreed to plan doesn't really give one that much confidence.
The saddest part about "success" is that much like I found at IBM, until things REALLY blow up -- and by that I certainly DON'T mean you start bleeding revenue, market share, people, relevance, etc; talk often really IS believed to be a subsitute for action. No, it takes something MUCH more immediate than that ... like a nuke in the face for a country, or bankruptcy / being purchased for a company. We humans are much more prone to talk smart than act smart.
I suspect the most likely near term outcome here is the "bluster and hope" from both sides. Longer term?
Well, "someday" I believe that somebody is going to use nukes again. We live in a world of Comunism having killed over 100 million in the 20th century, abortion killing 60 million in the US since '73, Hitler killing 6 million, Pol Pot 3ish. It is an extensive litany that just goes on all the time ... "ethnic cleansing, genocide, jihad, ..." killing and "unthinkable" are not really terms that are related in the human mind. Pretty much any sort of killing is VERY thinkable, and historically, always doable as well. The Kim Jong line seems like a likely candidate to take the "unthinkable" out of our lexicon relative to nukes.
This cartoon covers my views on the press and much of the left in the US ... Trump is their enemy, they recognize no other. , if nuclear war is a negative for Trump, it has gotta be good!
Can a nation struggling with gigantic issues like which bathroom to use take ANYTHING, including nuclear war, seriously? Count me skeptical.
If I was Trump? I'd go on TV and do a very short speech that went something like this ....
"We have looked at the options remaining relative to NK and have decided that there are no options that are likely less costly than living with a nuclear NK. That is extrodinarily regrettable, but it is the direct result of failure to act for decades across many administrations.
If NK launches missiles toward destinations that are protected with ABMs, we will do our best to shoot them down. If we succeed, if we fail, or if a nuke is used against an unprotected target, NK will cease to exist. We will do our best to choose a time where wind currents minimze effects to other populations in the area, including giving advance warning and evacuation of areas close to NK.
I have instructed the State Department to establish plans with all nations in close proximity with NK. I very much regret that this is the only option remaining. Let us resolve to never allow good intentions to bring us to this perilous juncture again. "
What will Trump choose? I have no idea -- but I sleep well at night secure in the knowledge that I *MUCH* prefer having him and his cabinet in charge than I would if Hillary was working on how to best build Clinton Fund cash and arrange for Chelsea to succeed her. We had BO for 8 years, and this is only one of the horrors it brought us.
