Tag: cultural musings

Oh, Boy! ‘Post-Truth’ Politics

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[S]hall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar…   –Romans 3:3-4

The Oxford English Dictionary has selected, as its Word of the Year for 2016, the charming little term, “post-truth,” as in “post-truth politics” ( http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/oxford-english-dictionary-names-post-truth-word-of-the-year-w450650 ).

Somehow I missed that one. Post-truth politics is defined as repeated appeals to emotion, continuous repetition of talking points, and not bothering to answer facts offered in rebuttal. Disingenuously, this term has been applied mostly to the Brexit movement and to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign–as if it were any kind of truth at all that Britain ought to remain in the European Union no matter what, and, even more preposterous, that Hillary Clinton should have been elected president.

I’m pretty sure “post-truth” ought to refer to anything said by any member of the Democrat Party, anytime, anywhere.

Let us not forget that, for the past 20 yours or so, the sages at our collidges have been teaching that there’s no such thing as truth, there’s only “your truth” and “my truth” (even though their “truth” is always insisted upon as the only permitted point of view)–and this teaching has borne fruit.

Go ahead, just try to get some true truth out of the nooze media, the government, Hollywood, or any public school or university. Let everybody know if you succeed!

But we are sure God wishes us to tell the truth, and value it, and resist the post-modern fetish for lying.

From 2016

REPRINT Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I Jan 14, 2011

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Movie Review by Lee Duigon

It’s hard to review a piece of a movie-which, for all its nearly three-hour length, is what this is. If you haven’t seen the earlier Harry Potter movies, or read the books, watching this movie will be like entering a roomful of strangers all talking about people and incidents you have never heard of. There’s no flashing back to make things clear, no explanations provided for anything. If you’re not a Harry Potter fan, you can forget about understanding this film.

So why review it, then?

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels have sold millions and millions of copies, and millions of movie tickets, too. This is the most successful series of books ever published, and it has revolutionized young readers’ fiction. It would be irresponsible to ignore it.

Because Harry Potter is such a cultural phenomenon, and this movie is a slice of it, we can look at it to see what it can tell us about our culture. What has Harry Potter taken out of our culture, and what has it put in?

Magic and Science

In the alternative universe of Harry Potter, everything important gets done by magic-or “wizarding,” as they sometimes call it. Witches, wizards, and warlocks are the elite of that world.

As a thought experiment, plug in “science” for “magic”-and you’ll see that the Harry Potter world pretty closely approximates our own. By “science” we mean what Jean-Marc Berthoud calls “the cultural domination of our whole culture by a purely mathematical model of the universe (the so-called scientific worldview, valid in fact only in its strictly limited domain, that of the measurable) as normative of every aspect of reality.”1

Materialistic “science” in our culture has excluded God. In Harry Potter-land, “magic” does the same. Given the awesome power of magic in that world, there would appear to be no place for God.

Despite various efforts to spin the Potter books as some obscure kind of Christian enterprise, we see no evidence at all in Deathly Hallows I that there is any Christianity at work in any of the characters’ lives, or any other recognizable religion, for that matter. Yes, there is one brief scene in which we see a village church with people inside it singing Christmas carols. What of it? Millions of Americans celebrate Christmas as a generic holiday and are dead to its religious significance. And every now and then, a character in the movie says, “my God.” But that doesn’t mean that they believe in God. For millions of Americans, “God” and even “Jesus” are just words to be tossed casually into a sentence, stripped of all meaning.

J. K. Rowling has been accused of promoting witchcraft. But I think it important to note that in Deathly Hallows I, there is no hint of any power higher than that of the magician. Paganism is supposed to feature pagan gods and goddesses, but we see no gods here. The world of Harry Potter much more closely resembles the fantasy world of The Humanist Manifesto II than it does anything in paganism. Take the Humanist Manifesto and substitute “magic” or “wizarding” for words like “science” and “technology,” and you will instantly find yourself in Harry Potter’s universe.2

Thus we discover that Rowling is not promoting paganism. Wittingly or not, she is promoting humanism.

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Important Crapola: The Evolutionary Fallacy

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Ornithomimus dinosaur running computer artwork Ornithomimus meaning 'bird-mimic' was agile ostrich-like omnivore about 1 8-2 4 Stock Photo - Alamy

When I was growing up, dinosaurs were depicted as primitive, sluggish, brainless hulks doomed to extinction; but now we know better. They weren’t primitive at all.

We’ve outgrown our assumptions about the dinosaurs (adroitly replacing them with new assumptions!), but we haven’t outgrown our evolutionary fallacies concerning just about everything else.

“New! Improved!” What 1950s commercial failed to promise that? It captures the fallacy rather well: Whatever is new is better than whatever preceded it.

This way of thinking explains a lot of Far Left Crazy. All any idea has to be is new–and of course the more shockingly new, the better. So we went from shacking up to homosexuality to transgender and are on our way to pedophilia, and every poor doofus who hasn’t outgrown college is hopping on board the lunatic express, destination unknown.

As they see it, everything naturally evolves to perfection, everything is constantly improving. It’s better if an all-powerful government helps it along by crushing everything and everybody that’s “old.” And sometimes what you need to hustle the process along is a violent revolution followed by a reign of terror. (We are now looking at sickeningly familiar patterns of history.) Best of all, “everything” started just by means of some cosmic accident–so there’s no God, no immutable moral laws, no throne of righteousness. Just evolution. New is always better.

So, yeah, we tried that freedom stuff, it got old and doesn’t work anymore, it’s time to move on… we’ll set up a social credit system, you’ll own nothing and be happy, socialism will make the flowers grow–(please, mommy, make it stop!).

The hilarious thing about it is that nothing is older, staler, more worn-out, more old-hat, more flagrantly false than all the Far Left horse-schiff. If anything resembles the old stereotype of the dinosaur, it’s all forms of leftism. The fallacy contains a paradox.

Gee, what’ll they attach their brains to after they get bored with pedophilia?

‘An Interview with Western Civilization’ (2020)

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Image result for images of new york in ruins

Some readers were kind enough to call this Newswithviews piece one of the best things I’ve ever written. I thought we might revisit it.

An Interview with Western Civilization

Does 2020 seem a long time ago to you? It does to us. America and other countries have been forced to eat a lot of **** since New Year’s 2020.

Honk if you think the globalists are doing a great job of running the show.

‘Goodbye, Adulthood’ (2020)

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Living As An Adult Baby - YouTube

Who wants to be a toddler forever? How much freedom are we willing to give up in order to be “safe”?

Goodbye, Adulthood

Isn’t this shameful? Unworthy? What’s happened to our self-respect? Do we really want The Government to “take care of us,” as if we were just children?

Guaranteed: a government that powerful will turn into a predatory beast, constantly seeking whom it might devour.

 

Question! Question!

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Halloween, naked man caught in spider web Stock Photo by ©outsiderzone 32578743

Patty has been watching all these YouTube videos about new technologies and Artificial Intelligence, etc., that are going to eliminate millions and millions of jobs, worldwide, and eventually do away with the need for almost all work, leaving tens of millions of people… idle. And so there’ll have to be some kind of universal handout, a basic income doled out by a gigantic all-powerful government. [He pauses to shudder theatrically.]

Question!

If we can do something, does that mean we have to do it? Do we have to get rid of all those jobs, just because we can?

Oh, well! Work blows, as the collidge wallahs say. Not having to work anymore will leave almost everybody free to Be Creative, writing operas and works of philosophy…

Fat chance.

Take away work from men and women, and they won’t be men and women anymore. They’ll be overgrown children at best: sluggards, dullards, and dummies at the worst. Maybe criminals.

This will be the widest door to mischief ever opened.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

What Happened to These People?

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Communism in America Archives - The American Mind

When I was a nooze reporter, way back in the 1970s, I spoke with politicians every day. Most of them were Democrats. Most of them were ordinary sane people. Some of them I really liked. None of them was crazy.

Now? Holy cow. The whole party has run right off the cliff.

Yo, readers! I’m collecting theories. What happened to ordinary people who were Democrats? Some of these old Dems from the 70s are still alive, but long retired. Point is, whatever happened, happened quickly. Suddenly the party was nothing but Far Left Crazy.

They aren’t just wrong anymore. Anybody can be wrong. There’s a big difference between being wrong and being evil, being wrong and being out to lunch. Most people are right about some things and wrong about others, but today’s Dems are wrong about everything. All the time.

Look at their program. Ruptured borders. Critical Race Theory (“white people are all born racists, blah-blah…”). Transgender. Global government. Government growing by leaps and bounds. Mandates galore. Defund the police and let the felons out of jail to prey on people. That’s what they have to offer us–and who wants that?

And yet millions of people vote for these parasites. That’s another mystery that needs to be cleared up.

What do you think, folks? What happened to the people in this party? What turned them into Maoist wannabes? I mean, I have seen family members, formerly sane, go right off the deep end with the Party. If the Party makes a sudden 180 degree turn on a core principle, these individuals will turn with it–no matter how whole-heartedly they believed in the principle that now must be radically changed.

I can’t relate to that. I don’t change my core beliefs because some nudnick tells me to.

So what’s your theory, O reader? I’d really like to know… because I don’t think I have one.

‘Am I Still on “The Right”?’ (2017)

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See the source image

This question hasn’t gone away since I asked it four years ago. Again I ask Conservatives, what are they conserving?

Am I Still on ‘the Right’?

We’ve done a very poor job of, um, “conserving” our culture. What we’ve done is to let the Far Left Crazy trash it. Now we’re stuck with a transgender movement–which, if everybody does it, the human race goes extinct. Which is almost certainly its purpose. All Satantic schemes are aimed at death.

Some of these “conservatives,” as long as their stock porfolio’s all right and there’s no riff-raff in the country club, all’s right with the world…

What’ll I Write for Newswithviews?

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Why do cats go batshit crazy in the middle of the night? |

While Big Tech plays with the search engines to make conservative blog posts hard to find, we can do nothing but hang on and put our trust in God. So we keep on working.

I try to write my weekly Newswithviews piece on Tuesday. I’ve got an idea that won’t go away. I’d like to know what my blog readers think of it.

Three abominations have been imposed on America in my lifetime: abortion; normalization of homosexuality; and “transgender.” All three were once considered sins (if a man running around asserting he was a woman was worth considering at all). All three are now in that “How dare you!” category: no criticism allowed.

We also have Criticial Race Theory, which they’re trying to load onto us, but that’s suddenly run into unexpected opposition. Really, you’ve got to sneak these things into the culture, not bring them on with a brass band. You want people to wake up wondering whether someone moved them to another country while they slept.

Big Tech, the Democrat Party, and our Free & Independent Nooze Media are doing their damnedest (and I do mean “damned”) to “fundamentally transform” America into a gigantic mental hospital run by inmates.

Pushback has only just started. They had to steal our presidential election to get our attention.

Pray it hasn’t started too late.

Book Review: ‘The Tyranny of Big Tech’ by Sen. Josh Hawley

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Amazon.com: The Tyranny of Big Tech (9781684512393): Hawley, Josh: Books

Senator Hawley wants Congress to rein in the oligarchs and world government wannabes who own and operate Big Tech–before they can stomp our constitutional republic out of existence.

https://chalcedon.edu/blog/the-tyranny-of-big-tech-by-sen-josh-hawley-book-review

The tech giants tried to suppress this book, but Regnery has published it and it’s doing very well. In fact, he’s already made a success of it just by delivering his message. These are things that rich and powerful bad guys don’t want us to know.

Hawley analyzes and explains the various dirty tricks Big Tech pulls on the American people. The light bulb clicks on: “Oh! So that’s what they do with all that information they have on me!”

As yet the people can’t stop these abuses. We are waiting eagerly to support powerful competition that’ll draw millions of customers away from the existing tech monsters by not spying on us, not selling our private information–and by not censoring us!

Because in addition to getting richer than anyone has ever been before, the Big Tech honchos are fully committed to reshaping the world according to their own mad utopian vision of it.

May the Lord confound them as He confounded the builders of Babel.