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.
I'm thinking Tom is on vacation and mailed this one in after a bit too much fine wine. He AGREES with Trump on four major points and thinks that Democrats should too!
Yes, yes, Fiedman works at the NY Times, and it was a nerd at Google that got fired for saying that women might have needs for different things if we want to be successful in tech -- if you read this blog, you must be smart enough so I just insulted your intelligence.
Why do cultures die? Because "diversity" of race, gender, ??? gender uncertainty ???, and sexual preferance become mandatory "values", and diversity of thought is prohibited!!!
Man can neither live by bread alone, nor by his gonads alone. The essence of humanity is somewhere in the region of the soul, consciousness and intellect, not between the legs or painted on the skin. Is it really important if there are 58 "genders", or 5800? There are really only two and we all actually know it. If one has to swear fealty to some other nunber in order to work, the shallow basis for a grasp of reality slips even more. People forced to ascribe to nonsense become more and more able to live with nonsense rather than reality. (a potential degree change in temprature in 100 years is a greater crisis than $20 T debt, $ 150T unfunded liabilites TODAY!)
I'll go read what the guy wrote eventually, but seriously, if he can do his job well, is it not remotely possible that he could be allowed to believe that other people as well would be better served in doing their jobs rather than being "stylish"?
Have we come to the point where saying "women better suited for conceiving and bearing children than men" is "inappropriate? Note, I DID NOT say ONLY having children!
BOistan is certainly not a very factually oriented place.
According to a recent paper by Princeton economist Alan Krueger nearly half of the men who are not looking for work are on painkillers and many are disabled. They "experience notably low levels of emotional well-being throughout their days and ... they derive relatively little meaning from their daily activities," Krueger found. And there are 7 million of them.
When did this trend start?
If there is a Year Zero for Male Infantilization it is 1965, the year President Johnson launched the American welfare state by rolling out the “Great Society”. Eberstadt also identifies it as the year when the Great Incarceration began. A crime wave started which was handled by jailing more and more criminals. Nowadays the US has the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Strangely, the author of the column can't figure out any really good ideas to fix this.
I have a couple:
Stop rewarding sloth with free stuff.
Stop penalizing work -- maybe even SUBSIDIZE IT a bit, IMMEDIATELY ... that is the kind of gratification that we have trained our youth to expect.
Start penalizing sloth -- you go to a work camp if you "need assistance". That is the BEST assistance that could be provided!
I grew up on a dairy farm 8 miles from Barron WI ... at that time, population < 2K. Poskin was the closest town -- population "40". Rice Lake was the BIG town, population 7K, Eau Claire, population 45K was the BIG CITY ... Minneapolis and St Paul were just too big to contemplate. Chicago? Beyond anything but being "named", comprehension impossible.
I'm headed for York Nebraska, population 7.7K right on I-80 in Nebraska for the big eclipse. 7.7K still seems like a decent sized town to me. Our lake place is near Emmetsburg IA, 3.9K people -- hey, it's bigger then where I grew up, it seems pretty urban to me!
Perspective makes a lot of difference -- While I have lived in the area, Rochester has grown from being the size of Eau Claire when I moved in to a 100K behemoth today. My God, I drive around Minneapolis and St Paul as if THEY were the Eau Claire of my youth, and have driven in New York City, Boston, Miami, Dallas, LA, San Fransisco, Chicago and many others. I may be jaded, but 32K is STILL a decent sized city in my mind!
I often describe my pilgrimage as from a 1974 tiny rural HS, 1978 no name university BS graduate, culturally flat technical hick; to autodidact idiot savant pseudo-intellectual student of Western civilization, Christianity, Philosophy, Literature and Science hick, as a series of pitches going up a mountain on which I often THINK that I have seen the peak, but realize at various junctures that all I have seen are outcroppings, many of which involve yet another LONG pitch I must traverse to gain a glimpse of the next dizzying (to me) height. I've ceased to imagine it will be the peak -- that will be in the life to come.
This is a review of Smith's sort of of extended cliff note narrative summary of Charles Taylor's 874 page mountain of a book, "The Secular Age" which I now have on order (don't expect the review blog anytime soon)! Here is a review of The Secular Age" if you want a different / more extensive take on the larger work.
Smith says that Taylor "gives us an account of our cross-pressured situation -- suspended between the malaise of immanence and the memory of transcendence". Immanence meaning "matter and the physical is everything" and transcendence meaning this is not all there is -- there is a higher Platonic / spiritual / metaphysical reality that is more real than what our imperfect senses can apprehend.
Taylor perceives and makes plain to us "that transcendence and immanence bleed into one another; that faith is pretty much unthinkable, but abandonment to the abyss is even more so;" ...
"Employing a kid of intellectual colonialism, new atheist cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to natural science and empirical explanation, flattening by disenchantment. ("Graveyards of the gods" are always highlights of this tour)."
My favorite diagram from the book is this one -- I apologize for having to resort to taking a picture of it.
I think a reasonable attempt at tiny summary of the Smith book is that Taylor tells the story, AS A STORY, of how it became possible to exist in a disenchanted immanent world where the most important thing is the Buffered Self -- meaning the self devoid of attachment to culture, history, religion, or even family. A detached self that is never the less haunted by being "pushed by the immanence of disenchantment on one side, but also pushed by a sense of significance and transcendence on another side, even if it might just be an echo of lost transcendence".
We all live by a narrative -- the pure humanist narrative of "progress" is that we once lacked physical vs metaphysical explanations for what we saw around us, so we imagined "enchantment". Spirits and gods were all around, but we were only children. The definition of "progress" or "maturity" is NO ILLUSIONS ... we live in a cold meaningless universe that is ONLY matter. Meaning is only about matter ... man is the measuring creature, measurement is meaning. If it can't be measured, it is an illusion, and therefore does not exist!
"If one were to preserve God's sovereignty, one would have to do away with "essences", and with independent "natures". And the result is a metaphysical picture called "nominalism" where things are ONLY what they are named."
If you can name it and measure it, it exists. If not, it doesn't. So, with the Nietzschean "demise of God, we are the only authorizing agency left" ... these two paragraphs give the barest thumbnail of the "CWS", Closed World View -- it's matter and us, that is all the material available to try to construct meaning.
And so, the disenchanted immanent "meaning" constructed is the "Modern Moral Order" (MMO) -- it is pure humanism, bootstrapped from matter and human thought and ruthlessly applied to all as a dogmatic religion, with much more restrictive dogmas, pervasive in all areas of society, especially schools, media, and law ( like gay "marriage", transgender grooming for kids, etc).
"Because of an inadequate appreciation for moral sources, modernity fixates or moral articulation -- a fixation on more and more scrupulous codes of behavior .... we don't know how to make people moral, but we do know how to specify rules, articulate expectation, lay down the law. This happens in policy, but also informally in cultural codes of political correctness ..."
What is lacking is any sense of inner motivation -- it is all external, we will yell at you if you fail to meet the ever growing MMO -- or maybe worse, we will pass more and more laws, you MUST NOT use plastic grocery bags, you MUST recycle. you MUST drive an electric car"! Thus saith the MMO.
It becomes clear that the CWS / MMO / Buffered Self, etc ARE a form of metaphysic, and thus effectively a "religion" -- the self is not actually "buffered", unless they can exist as an effective modern hermit of constant distraction, escape, and self-delusion. The Buffered Self must BELIEVE that all of this is "the good", but part of the CWS itself is that it is a "good" completely made up of whole cloth.
Man STILL cannot live by bread alone, but must have a some sort of "social imaginary" (Taylor term), metaphysical dream, or every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
So what exactly is the advantage of the certified manufactured illusion with ZERO parts transcendent content of the MMO, over thousands of years old moral order that at the minimum leave the thought of transcendence open to the psyche?
Well, in an immanent sense, of course NOTHING -- since there can't be anything that isn't made up by randomly developed creatures out of nothing except "stuff" (matter). Taylor -- and Smith believe that there actually aren't any honest humans that fail to sense the haunting of the transcendent. Is it real, or is it just side effect of some old caveman brain circuits that would be best excised in our modern world to allow us to be completely "grown up" as a Nietzschean disenchanted, immanent buffered self that deserves to be tamped down and unacknowledged -- even if it means they must lie about it to make it seem that the fiction of pure rational atheism exists (which it doesn't, at least since Quantum Mechanics).
Unsurprisingly, no answers are given. The task of the book is to make Christian faith POSSIBLE in our flattened, disenchanted meaningless world, essentially by just making it clear that EVERYONE has "faith", it is only a question of "faith in what". The intellectual playing field of the world today is purely secular. Taylor sees us at the possible cusp of faith no longer being "allowable", although he does not predict that will be the actual outcome ... he believes that even the merest ghost of the transcendent cannot be ignored because "this heavy concentration of the atmosphere of immanence will intensify a sense of living in a wasteland for subsequent generations, and young people will begin to explore beyond the boundaries ..."
Even for the subject Smith book of a mere 139 pages, I have but scratched the surface lightly. Yet again, I find myself regularly running to the Internet to bone up on my definitions in order to begin to understand what I am looking at. I feel as a non-english native speaker, who after a couple semesters of English is thrust into reading Shakespeare and asked to provide commentary. And this AFTER 100's of books over decades of my attempted intellectual improvement.
In the 500 years since the Reformation, science, philosophy and religion have sold us the chimera of "reform / progress" with no concept of "to where"? It seems that in some circles the thought was "to a mature human vision of a morality built on "facts" rather than "superstition" -- however, morality is more than a set of rules, and mature human vision is perpetual change toward an unknown objective rather than a "goal" ... and it likely is merely going in circles chasing its tail.
We remain lost so tragically we often fail to even detect our lostness. Does my quest for knowledge lead me forward, or into the abyss? My prayer is that with Christ holding my hand, there can be no truly uncharted abyss (Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me). I know the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Can this mountain of human knowledge be somehow be translated into a form that allows modern man to see the truth of transcendence in Christ? or is my quest just an old guy attacking the Everest of knowledge alone without oxygen?
If you have ANY time and inclination, BYPASS ME and just GO READ THIS! It may well be the best reading of this length that I've read this year, and as you know, I read a lot.
I grew up in a church that thought Catholics were devil worshipers -- joined with the Harlot. I've come to believe that they are "THE Church". As a Lutheran, I'm still staking my faith that they are not the ONLY church.
What I love about the Catholic Church is HISTORY and PERSPECTIVE -- and the linked article is a great example of both. A huge failing of Protestants is that our churches are all certain that Christ is returning "soon", which is certainly true in God's time. After over two thousand years however, the Catholic Church well understands that God's time is not our time (which is also true). One would hope that in this 500th year anniversay of the Reformation, perhaps Protestants could begin to fathom this other important truth.
The Protestant failing that is destroying Western civilization is the idea that everyone deserves and can fashion their own god. Sure, they may often do it in a myriad of sects, splits and schizms, but at base it comes down to what I see as a heresy -- although Jesus saves each of us personally, God the Father is ONE GOD, eternal and unchanging -- we do not get to make him, and futhermore, fear of him as the **I AM** is the beginning of wisdom.
Thus ends my short paen to the Cathoic Church. The linked column is WAY too deep and rich for me to summarize. I see it as nothing short of basic blueprint of what is required for Christians to save the remnant of a tattered and bleeding Western civilization, as well as the realization that it is ONLY Christ and his followers that can save it if that is Gods plan. If we want to recover, have to find a foundation of meaning to build on, and it is not "information" or even knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom, not knowledge, is the framework of a fully human life; the architecture of interior peace. Scripture is the Word of God, and Ecclesiastes tells us that “the words of the wise in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools.” Wisdom is more powerful than might and better than the weapons of war (Eccles. 9:16-18). Wisdom is more precious than jewels, and once we have it, then knowledge becomes pleasant to the soul (Prov. 8:11; 2:10).
I VERY grudgingly select this 7th point to share -- I want you to READ IT ALL, because this point is in no way a summary.
Here’s a seventh point: Democracy advances equality by flattening out injustices and social inequities. But it goes much further than that. It also tends to flatten out distinctions and hierarchies of every kind. Unguided by religious faith, democracy flattens out even the human spirit because any kind of divine transcendence or human excellence also implies a kind of inequality. This is why Alexis de Tocqueville said that democracy creates not just a new and different kind of political order, but a new and different kind of humanity.
Much of our people and culture are like a cartoon person flattened by a cartoon steamroller. God's universe is infinitely dimensional, hierarchical, celebratory of TRUE diversity -- diversity of spirit, gifts, thought, experience, blessing. Spirit can't be manifest in a flattened cartoon projection of being human, and so very many of the people in our age have been totally and tragically flattened.
I can't resist one last quote, however, please realize that overall, the column is POSITIVE, unlike what my quotes might lead you to believe.
If you want to see the face of Europe in 100 years, barring a miracle, look to the faces of young Muslim immigrants. Islam has a future because Islam believes in children. Without a transcendent faith that makes life worth living, there’s no reason to bear children. And where there are no children, there’s no imagination, no reason to sacrifice, and no future.
Read the linked and ponder the richness of Grace and possibility that God wants us to live!
The idea that a life without meaning is not likely to be worth living is nothing new to a reader of this blog. It is also no surprise that depression, anxiety, addiction and suicide are at epidemic levels, especially in the young. A worthy read.
:A far stronger case can be made for our society’s decline in religious faith as the cause of these mental pathologies in the young. The decline in religion that began in the ’60s has accelerated in the past 15 years and is especially great among young people. A recent Pew report noted that over a third of its young respondents described themselves as “believers in nothing in particular.” Schrobsdorff’s omission of religious decline is one indication of how great the decline in religion has been — and how much our secular culture is in denial on the issue. The media just doesn’t “get” religion.
I'm sure that Michelle's pain is real, and it is too bad that she has pain and apparently doesn't understand that it comes with public life, especially political public life. Everyone is never going to be fully on any of our sides, black, white or orange.
I'm guessing that the market for Trump or Melania's sharing of their pain is going to be limited -- especially in Denver.
