tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-82870652024-03-18T08:01:50.135-04:00Od's Blog!
Catholic comments on the passing parade.Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.comBlogger5493125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-85074429204233424602024-03-18T08:01:00.002-04:002024-03-18T08:01:17.050-04:00The Laugh Test<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T8XeDvKqI4E" width="320" youtube-src-id="T8XeDvKqI4E"></iframe></div><br /><p>In a recent Club Random interview, John Cleese and Bill Maher make the important observation that psychopaths have no sense of humour. Nor do sociopaths or narcissists—I suspect it is all the same ball of wax. This is not exactly true; a psychopath will laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel. But they are utterly literal-minded, and so cannot get irony, satire, or even puns.</p><p>Then Bill Maher ruins it by citing Donald Trump as an example of this.</p><p>It is true that I have never seen Trump laugh in public. But then, try to think of any other prominent politician you have seen laughing. I can’t, with one exception. Kamala Harris.</p><p>And she gets raked over the coals for it. People cite it as unlikeable. This may be a perfectly adequate explanation why politicians do not laugh in public. I guess people see it as frivolous, when there are important issues on the table; and perhaps as being out of control of oneself; not wanted in a leader.</p><p>Even aside from this, it is reasonably possible to fake a laugh or titter when one really does not get the joke. Accordingly, we cannot use laughing as a measure.</p><p> But there is another, better measure: can they tell a joke, especially extemporaneously? This is a surer test. Even a canned joke, to work, has to have the right timing; being able to judge that shows a sense of humour. And, confounding the original laugh test, the best comedians often do not laugh on stage. It generally spoils the joke, by pointing out the irony and telegraphing it.</p><p>By this measure, Trump scores especially high. He can do a two-hour standup routine without notes. Pierre Poilievre seems pretty funny off the cuff.</p><p>Those who hate Trump, on the other hand, inevitably do not get his jokes. They always take him absurdly literally. They are the narcissists.</p><p>Who is conspicuously not funny, especially off script? I say Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden. Biden’s idea of a joke seems to be a mere insult: “lying dog-faced pony soldier.” And he prefaces every lie with the phrase “not a joke”—implying that he does not understand what a joke is. He thinks it is the same as a lie. </p><p>I cannot picture Trudeau ever attempting a joke. I don’t think he could do it even scripted.</p><p>QED.</p><p>Narcissists and psychopaths are literal-minded, Cleese and Maher go one to agree, because they are nervous; nervous people are afraid of anything unexpected. They jump at shadows. They will therefore fear, resist, and deny the reversal of expectations that is every joke’s premise and punch line. </p><p>“What an elephant was doing in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.”</p><p>That they fear the unexpected disproves the claim of current psychology that a psychopath has no conscience. What else do they fear? Truth being told and being exposed is what they fear; they would not fear it if they did not know they were lying and doing wrong. </p><p>This is a life lesson worth remembering: beware people who do not laugh, except at slapstick, and are not witty.</p><p>And definitely do not elect them to high office.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-31498161882251149152024-03-17T19:39:00.000-04:002024-03-17T19:39:01.440-04:00Everybody's Going Christian?<p> </p><p>Benny Johnson is also noticing the ground shifting:</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/T0adriFCDOI" width="320" youtube-src-id="T0adriFCDOI"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-66955162278954295122024-03-17T19:28:00.000-04:002024-03-17T19:28:45.340-04:00Self-Esteem<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cdn2.oceansbridge.com/2018/10/04112103/Satan-in-His-Original-Glory-William-Blake-Oil-Painting.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="643" height="400" src="https://cdn2.oceansbridge.com/2018/10/04112103/Satan-in-His-Original-Glory-William-Blake-Oil-Painting.jpg" width="322" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Satan in his original glory, by William Blake</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>I recall reading somewhere the estimate that medical science only began doing more good than harm in about the 1920s. Bloodletting, inserting a bellows in the rectum, and introducing new infections with septic conditions was until shockingly recently the largest part of the trade.</p><p>Yet, for thousands of years, physicians have plied a recognized and profitable profession. </p><p>Because people in pain are desperate, quackery always has an audience. Then, should the quack by chance achieve a cure, or a cure by chance happen after their ministrations, they will be venerated by the sufferer almost as a god. It works like fortune telling works: people always remember the hits, and forget the misses.</p><p>That’s medical science of the proper, physical sort. Psychiatry and psychology are nowhere near the point of doing more good than harm. The common advice given someone who is struggling with some mental conflict, “get help,” is therefore cruel. Unless you are directing them to a priest, you are as likely throwing them to the lions.</p><p>Modern psychiatry begins by throwing in the dustbin all the accumulated wisdom of the ages about the human soul. This is called the Humanities. It is what the Humanities is all about. It is what philosophy, the arts, and religion are there for.</p><p>One terrible thing psychology has done recently is the drive for “self-esteem.” Self-esteem is formerly known as pride, or hubris: the first and deadliest of sins. We are reaping the fully predictable benefits now in generations of narcissists, snowflakes, and acts of random violence.</p><p>It is not about either self-esteem or self-debasement. The problem is the same in either case: thinking of yourself all the time. The nature of consciousness is such that you experience yourself on an entirely different plane of existence than everyone else. In the end, we only know our own thought and our own perceptions—not anyone else’s.</p><p>It is easy to imagine that no one else matters—or exists.</p><p>Berkeley struggled with this in his otherwise seemingly unassailable esse es percipio philosophy: how can we actually know that anyone else is out there perceiving? All other life is alien life.</p><p>This is the core problem that must be overcome in bringing up any child, of making them fit for company. </p><p>Encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wonderful, and you are making the problem irreparably worse, by taking out any objective measures of their limits by which they can calibrate self. It is just as damaging as if you encourage them to believe they are unconditionally wrong or evil. Either way, the self, the soul, is destroyed.</p><p>Will we, as a civilization, as a species, be able to escape the morass psychiatry and psychology has gotten us into?</p><p>While they keep coming up with new problems for us?</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-18173828260204587192024-03-16T09:19:00.000-04:002024-03-16T09:19:35.103-04:00Bravery Is Now Required to Be on the Left<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.2SzoF3KqCQwvbqMtzvbSsQHaGa?w=236&h=180&c=7&r=0&o=5&cb=10&dpr=1.3&pid=1.7" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="234" data-original-width="306" height="306" src="https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.2SzoF3KqCQwvbqMtzvbSsQHaGa?w=236&h=180&c=7&r=0&o=5&cb=10&dpr=1.3&pid=1.7" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Signs of the great turning proliferate. I mean a victory in the “culture wars.” I mean the cultural pendulum swinging right. For example, friend Xerxes, left-wing columnist of my acquaintance, has stopped running political columns. Now he sticks to topics like memories and growing old. He seems no longer to want to be identified as leftist, or to defend leftist beliefs. </p><p>I rarely see leftist screeds on Facebook any longer. They used to be a relentless drumbeat. Of course, this may have to do with leftist friends “unfriending” me on Facebook when they realized I was not on the bandwagon. On the other hand, one of the bitterest of them, I now hear third hand, has been asking whether she should read Ayn Rand. I suspect she requested that the question be forwarded to me.</p><p>Another sign of the times is this rare Facebook rant by another leftist friend, who does not know my politics.</p><p></p><blockquote><p>What the hell did you expect me to do?</p><p>You told me to love my neighbors, to model the life of Jesus. To be kind and considerate, and to stand up for the bullied.</p><p>You told me to love people, consider others as more important than myself. "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." We sang it together, pressing the volume pedal and leaning our hearts into the chorus.</p><p>You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never "hate" anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.</p><p>You told me it's better to give than receive, to be last instead of first.</p><p>You told me that Jesus looks at what I do for the least-of-these as the true depth of my faith. You told me to focus on my own sin and not to judge. You told me to be accepting and forgiving.</p><p>I payed attention.</p><p>I took every lesson.</p><p>And I did what you told me.</p><p>But now, you call me a libtard. A queer-lover.</p><p>You call me "woke." A backslider.</p><p>You call me a heretic. A child of the devil. </p><p>You call me soft. A snowflake. A socialist.</p><p>What the hell did you expect me to do?</p><p>I thought you were serious, apparently not.</p><p>We were once friends. But now, the lines have been drawn. You hate nearly all the people I love. You stand against nearly all the things I stand for. I'm trying to see a way forward, but it's hard when I survey all the hurt, harm, and darkness that comes in the wake of your beliefs and presence.</p><p>What the hell did you expect me to do?</p><p>I believed it all the way.</p><p>I'm still believing it all the way.</p><p>Which leaves me wondering, what happened to you?</p><p>Grace is brave. Be brave.</p><p>-Chris Katzer</p></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p>This is not another new demand, as we had come to expect, in order to built “hope and change” and a leftist future. Like demands that we use his preferred pronouns, or that some statue be torn down or street renamed, or that someone be silenced. The tone has changed. This sounds defensive.</p><p>Whoever the “you” here spoken to is, the opinion of this “you” seems more important to the speaker than the speaker’s own opinion. The speaker insists they have always been obedient and compliant to this “you.” That is a concession that the left has lost the argument. It sounds like a convicted felon pleading for a lighter sentence.</p><p>Instead of condemning “conventional morality” and “Christian nationalism,” this most recent effusion tries to claim that the left were the real Christians all along. This is a major concession. After loudly rejecting all moral standards as “social constructs,” they now want to appeal to some common set of values. They want to come to the negotiating table. They know they are losing.</p><p>The author (my friend was quoting this) says he learned to sing: "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." So far, so good. But he carefully prefaces this with “You told me to consider others as more important than myself.”</p><p>This is not what Christianity teaches. Christianity teaches “love thy neighbour as thyself,” not “love thy neighbour more than thyself.” This straw man looks like a tacit admission that the left have been racist; while admitting that Christianity demands human equality.</p><p> “You told me to love my enemies, to even do good to those who wish for bad things. You told me to never ‘hate’ anyone and to always find ways to encourage people.”</p><p>That the word “hate” is put in quotation marks seems another backhanded admission of wrongdoing, that the left has altered the meaning of the word “hate.” Christianity does not tell us to “do good to those who wish for bad things,” and certainly not to encourage those who have sinned, but to wish the best for everyone. This looks like a belated admission that the left has been endorsing and encouraging sin. Of course they have: but now they seem to admit that sin is a real thing.</p><p>The author interprets “woke” is an insult. That is perhaps the most significant sea change. The term of course comes from the left, as a boast: they were “enlightened.” Now they do not want to be associated with it--that’s conceding the whole game. Only a few years ago, in the days of the Bernie bros, they were proud of being socialists. Now they find the term offensive.</p><p>They are unrepentant, yes, but they know they have lost the argument.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-3148994764257145382024-03-15T07:28:00.003-04:002024-03-15T07:28:10.130-04:00Richard Dawkins Is Right<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/6mmskXXetcg" width="320" youtube-src-id="6mmskXXetcg"></iframe></div><br /><p>Richard Dawkins, celebrated atheist, makes an important point. If you call yourself a Christian, attend church, and say you believe in Jesus and God simply because you were brought up to do so, it is meaningless. You are not a real Christian. Any more than you can become a real Buddhist simply by being raised in a Buddhist milieu. Salvation is individual. </p><p>Salvation comes not from saying the name “Jesus,” but from seeking truth and seeking to do what is right. </p><p>Jesus said “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” In other words, to follow Jesus, you must follow truth, and follow his way. Simply mouthing “Lord, Lord” is of little significance.</p><p>One must sincerely seek truth wherever that leads.</p><p>The real Christian must and will make themselves aware of what Jesus actually said and taught—they must read the gospel. They must make themselves aware of his way and his life. </p><p>The Christian claim is that, if anyone sincerely does this, undertakes this study, they will know in their heart that this man was whom he said he was, and his teaching is correct. The words will speak to them.</p><p>This is what confirmation is supposed to be about; or adult baptism, in the Protestant tradition, or being “born again.” One must be personally convicted.</p><p> A sincere Christian ought also to acquaint themselves with alternative philosophies: with Marxism, Freudianism, feminism, existentialism, Islam, Judaism, Buddhist, Hinduism. One is not seeking truth if one wears blinders. They must honestly consider and judge the plausibility of each. A sincere and ethical atheist is a better Christian than a nominal Catholic. The latter is merely a hypocrite.</p><p>And a sincere Christian will recognize a sincere Muslim, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Jew, as a brother.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-65674449213132248022024-03-14T08:29:00.001-04:002024-03-14T08:29:02.030-04:00Blessed Are the Poor<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hanca.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/image10041.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="398" data-original-width="530" height="300" src="https://hanca.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/image10041.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p>I have a friend with whom I regularly share our nostalgia about N.D.G.—Notre-Dame-de-Grace, an old inner suburb of Montreal. We both grew up there, at about the same time, and went to the same church and school, although we did not know each other then. </p><p>Recently, he sent me a vintage photo of Montreal West, knowing I had lived there for a time as well. </p><p>But I do not have fond memories of Montreal West. The feeling is completely different.</p><p>Which makes me wonder why. </p><p>Growing up, I lived in and around Gananoque, a small town in Ontario; N.D.G.; Westmount, another part of greater Montreal; Montreal West; and then to university in Kingston. I have fond memories of Gananoque and N.D.G., and an abiding distaste for Westmount, Montreal West, and Kingston.</p><p>Thinking about it, I recognize the commonality. Westmount and Montreal West are posh. Kingston is cut by Princess Street, and this border is deeply significant. We lived on the south side, the posh side. And I was going to Queen’s, perhaps the poshest of Canadian universities. Gananoque was necessarily, as a small town, mixed. N.D.G. was mostly recent immigrants, many families in rented apartments. In Montreal West, I found my friends down the hill in the duplexes of Ronald Drive, the one non-posh part of the neighbourhood. My truest friend in Kingston grew up north of Princess, and had no contacts with the university.</p><p>At one point, as the family business collapsed, we moved from a huge house in Montreal West to a house without running water four miles outside of Gananoque, where we slept two to a bed. Both I and my brother, in more recent years, have reminisced about how happy we were then. “Away from it all.”</p><p>I conclude that I do not tend to like rich people, and they are on the wrong side of life. To begin with, rich people tend to be aggressive and competitive. They tend to be emotionally unavailable, always wearing a mask and blinders; not open to new ideas or new experiences. They also tend to be one-dimensional, lacking interests. This makes them seem unintelligent. They are relatively robotic. They are not fully alive. They have sacrificed real life and selfhood to an appearance of life and self.</p><p>Poor people are more varied in their characteristics and their interests. They have fewer shared assumptions, and are more open to the assumptions of others. They are often creative, and often kind. </p><p>They smile more. </p><p>My poorer grandmother, a farmer’s wife with eight kids, used to laugh with her whole body; I remember her always smiling. </p><p>I never remember my richer grandmother laughing; she would titter, but it was obviously calculated. She was a good woman, I believe, and kind to a fault, a rebel against her class and its assumptions; but not a happy person.</p><p>It can all perhaps be summed up in a short phrase: blessed are the poor.</p><p>Some rich people are good people, and some have diverse interests. But those who do suffer for this, because they are then alienated from their milieu. Their milieu is full of the sort of people the New Testament calls hypocrites.</p><p>It is possible that what I say about the Canadian upper class would not apply in other countries; Canada does not have an upper class in the European sense. What I describe in Canada as upper class values might correspond to what Europeans call “bourgeois values.”</p><p>But I think of Jesus’s call in the Beatitudes. He plainly spoke of the lower class, the poor, or the poor in spirit, as his people, and not the rich nor the professional class. The rich, more or less by definition, are all in on this world, have committed to it and endorsed its rules. As Jesus says, “they already have their reward.” But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of this world is folly to God. </p><p>The relatively poor are often the more thoughtful, who consider things more carefully, who have more diverse or more balanced goals. Things like family, friendship, faith, morality, beauty, art.</p><p>The rich do not often get this; they see the only issue as money. But I remember the resistance of one factory worker when his progressive employer wanted to end the assembly line to make his work more meaningful: “they pay me for my time. I do not want to sell them my mind. I want my mind to be free.”</p><p>Probably the philosophy of most long-distance truckers; or most farmers. Or most shepherds, traditionally. One of the most interesting and erudite people I ever met was a shepherd at the livestock market in Al Ain, Saudi Arabia. Such people have time to think.</p><p>By contrast, I was acutely conscious going to grad school, and then working as a professional editor and college prof, that one was always required to accept and endorse some shared ideology; some group idolatry. Much of what we call professional education is really vetting people for conformity.</p><p>This being so, it is the poor who are the creative element in our, or any, society. The great breakthroughs and insights and poetic epics will appear in garages, or be proclaimed by shepherds returning from the hills.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-66366545468613420102024-03-13T08:36:00.007-04:002024-03-13T08:38:11.793-04:00Is She or Isn"t She?<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/v81g1tldi4c" width="320" youtube-src-id="v81g1tldi4c"></iframe></div><br /><p>The internet is percolating with claims that Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Macron, is actually a man. Without rehashing it here, the evidence looks convincing; and the Elysee Palace has not seemed able yet to rebut it.</p><p>So what? </p><p>Candace Owens calls this “the biggest scandal in the history of the world.” But why should anyone even care?</p><p>Because it leaves the President of France vulnerable to blackmail? But he is only vulnerable to blackmail if we care in the first place. A good argument for leaving the private lives of politicians private.</p><p>But perhaps there is something more. Why, after all, if it is true, did they feel the need to cover it up? </p><p>It might be that the historic prohibition on homosexuality has a hidden logic to it; the same logic that until recently required segregation of the sexes in the workplace. Sexual attraction makes people do crazy things: like promoting a lover over a more competent but less sexy candidate, say. Or sacrificing the interests of your employer in order to get sexual favours from an attractive supplier or competitor.</p><p>Ask the many spy agencies who regularly use “honey traps.” </p><p>Blackmail is only one possibility. </p><p>Over time, as well, a “gay mafia” might form within an organization, or an orgiastic “hellfire club,” a cabal of lovers promoting one another’s interests in return for sexual favours; with each able to blackmail the others should they deviate from some group programme.</p><p>Which might explain how gay and transgender issues have become dominant in political discussions everywhere, despite gays being only a tiny fraction, perhaps one percent, of the general population. They may form a higher percentage at the top of the social pyramid, due to logrolling.</p><p>And it may be important to keep their sexuality secret, so the general public does not realize there is a cabal.</p><p>What other world leaders might secretly be gay?</p><p>What other world leaders might secretly be pedophiles?</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-36907899865718663982024-03-12T17:47:00.006-04:002024-03-12T17:48:57.983-04:00The Real Victims of Prejudice.<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://mvcdn.fancaps.net/7839489.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="585" data-original-width="800" height="293" src="https://mvcdn.fancaps.net/7839489.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>I am a big fan of the Coen brothers. And MacBeth is my favourite Shakespeare play. But I have never bothered to see Joel Coen’s 2021 MacBeth. I dislike resettings and modernizations of Shakespeare plays. At best, it seems a gimmick. And messing with the Shakespeare original is like painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Coen’s MacBeth made MacBeth a black man—an absurdity in 11th century Scotland.</p><p>Why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, must C0oen choose this one in particular to do in blackface? Shakespeare sets most of his plays either in England, or in the romantic Mediterranean. At least in the latter case, there are more legitimate places to plausibly put a sub-Saharan African character. Othello comes to mind—although of course a Moor is not a sub-Saharan African, the miscasting would not be so jarring. There is, by contrast, only one Shakespeare play set ijn Scotland, and its uncanny Scottishness is integral to it. It is often referred to simply as “the Scottish play.”</p><p>So it seems pretty in-your-face and up-yours to Scotland to culturally appropriate its main character. </p><p>I suspect this is an example of a larger and longstanding effort in the English-speaking world to devalue and to efface the Scottish and Irish and their cultures. </p><p>Others have noticed what seems to be a recent prejudice against characters who are “ginger”: Green Gables is now being partly converted into a display of aboriginal culture. Disney recently turned the Littlest Mermaid black. There is a common wisecrack in England: “do gingers have souls?”</p><p>Red hair is especially characteristic of the Irish and Scottish. It is far less common almost everywhere else.</p><p>And the Irish and Scottish are insulted regularly. Although “the n-word” cannot be spoken, nor even the innocuous Eskimo or “redskin.” Yet the terms “hillbilly” and “redneck” sare in common use, and are unambiguously pejorative.</p><p>I recently read that the term “hillbilly” was originally a term for the Scots-Irish: “billies” because they supported William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. So, reputedly, is “redneck”: Scots-Irish Presbyterians wore red scarves to show their resistance to the imposed Anglican faith. </p><p>And, of course, the actual people usually referred to as “rednecks” and “hillbillies” in the US are the Scots-Irish. Whose ancestors usually came to these shores as indentured servants, as term-limited slaves, driven out of Ireland and Scotland by clearances.</p><p>While blackface is prohibited in polite society, nobody objects to whiteface: the traditional clown makeup, supposed to show an ignorant yokel. Clowns also usually also have red hair. They are a parody of an Irishman or Scot. And you laugh at them, not with them.</p><p>The English, and the Anglosphere, always had a benevolent attitude to darker-skinned people: subSaharan Africans, East or South Asians, or Native Americans. As an island people, they could afford to; they had no natural enemies there. Yes, they used Africans as slaves; but they had convinced themselves they were doing this in the best interests of these poor primitives. They were like children; do adults usually hate their children?</p><p>Even Jews were little known in the British Isles, and so little thought of. The ancient enemy, and the ancestral hatreds, are reserved for the Scots and the Irish. They represented rival cultures in the home islands. Worst of all, they were Catholic. Or Presbyterians, who were also an ideological threat.</p><p>The old prejudices are stronger then ever now, and growing. Extravagant favours now granted to blacks, aboriginals, immigrants, can perhaps best be understood not as some newfound tolerance, but a way to humiliate, efface, and keep down poor “whites”—that is, disproportionately, the Scots and the Irish.</p><div>Arguably, so, in its day, was slavery. </div><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-43237887302214685872024-03-11T10:49:00.002-04:002024-03-11T10:50:32.060-04:00Thoughts in Saint John Cathedral<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://mynewbrunswick.ca/wp-content/gallery/cathedral-of-the-immaculate-conception-saint-john/Cathedral-of-the-Immaculate-Conception%C2%A9LDD_7255.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://mynewbrunswick.ca/wp-content/gallery/cathedral-of-the-immaculate-conception-saint-john/Cathedral-of-the-Immaculate-Conception%C2%A9LDD_7255.jpeg" width="267" /></a></div><p><br /></p><p></p><blockquote><p>14 as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so must the Son of man be lifted up</p><p>15 so that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.</p><p>16 For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.</p><p>17 For God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but so that through him the world might be saved.</p><p>18 No one who believes in him will be judged; but whoever does not believe is judged already, because that person does not believe in the Name of God's only Son.</p><p>19 And the judgement is this: though the light has come into the world people have preferred darkness to the light because their deeds were evil.</p><p>20 And indeed, everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up;</p><p>21 but whoever does the truth comes out into the light, so that what he is doing may plainly appear as done in God.</p><p>-- John 3: 14-21</p></blockquote><p></p><p><br /></p><p>Sitting in Saint John’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, it seems strange to me that this church is not packed every Sunday. One is surrounded by beauty: the gothic arches, the dizzying vault of the nave, the sunlight streaming through stained glass, the statues, the paintings; the bright vestments, the incense; we have an exceptional choir. And there is the beauty of the ritual performance, that connects us with the ages.</p><p>This is the sort of live experience people would otherwise pay a good deal for, in a theatre or a gallery or a concert hall. Here we have all three, and it is free, and yet many seats are vacant.</p><p>In Korea, my favourite thing was to visit Buddhist temples on the weekend. Not that I am Buddhist; but beauty is beauty, peace is peace, tranquility is tranquility. Few were as substantial as this cathedral.</p><p>The only explanation, it seems to me, for all the empty pews, here and elsewhere in the magnificent churches we find in Eastern Canada, is that people understand full well that God is there. And this scares them away. </p><p>Today’s mass reading says it. </p><p></p><blockquote>“Everybody who does wrong hates the light and avoids it, to prevent his actions from being shown up.”</blockquote><p></p><p>Declining attendance at church, let alone the rash of church burnings, speaks ill of us as a society. </p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-18991659720739039372024-03-10T08:09:00.002-04:002024-03-10T08:13:12.503-04:00The Need for Smaller Class Sizes<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://news.virginia.edu/sites/default/files/article_image/Pavilion_Seminar_Class_13HR_CG_0.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="267" src="https://news.virginia.edu/sites/default/files/article_image/Pavilion_Seminar_Class_13HR_CG_0.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240308123326.htm" target="_blank">A new study suggests that classroom size does not affect student results</a>: smaller classrooms are not better. But this has been known for years. Many previous studies have shown the same. It is an eternal surprise only because teachers’ unions eternally assert the opposite.</p><p>They do so, I imagine, because a larger class demands the lecture format, whereas a small enough class can be run as a seminar, a group discussion.</p><p>The currently fashionable education philosophy, “constructivism,” holds that truth is not a constant, there is no objective truth. Knowledge is “constructed” in groups, making the seminar approach mandatory. If the group decides that China is in Europe, then it is in Europe. If they decide the sun goes around the Earth, then the sun goes around the Earth.</p><p>Constructivism does not account for what happens if groups in contact with one another arrive at different conclusions. Might makes right seems the inevitable, necessary approach: you pass a law or fight a war and force submission.</p><p>This is how fascism works. And this is how our schools currently work. Increasingly, under the influence of the schools and constructivism, this is how our society works.</p><p>The attraction for the teaching tribe, however, is that running a seminar takes no effort on their part. There is no need for them to either actually know anything about the subject, or know how to explain it. They just get to sit in judgement over the conclusions the students come up with in their seminar. And on what basis can they judge, given that there is no truth? The only possibility is to object if any group comes to an opinion that differs from that of the teacher. Meaning the teacher has no responsibilities, but gets to be the absolute dictator in the classroom.</p><p>It's a good life, as long as the money keeps pouring in.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-10987889258348459772024-03-09T08:23:00.001-05:002024-03-09T08:23:23.389-05:00The Politics of Envy<p> </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjFBHMXdJmuQkOPrfAVj5jtNPMuyWjLMfpXQS1asJio89eV7jrvFlG27w4MmoIApWhNJFvXaigkxjlEKcykkIYBM7H5_w9rGM23TS16p1EjqlYde6DjNTWxNT1kUYKSt9kqYDOCRjP1LDaF-RryYvRtf5DbJEI_MT-f5XlW1b1ikHg2s7dE2w" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="642" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjFBHMXdJmuQkOPrfAVj5jtNPMuyWjLMfpXQS1asJio89eV7jrvFlG27w4MmoIApWhNJFvXaigkxjlEKcykkIYBM7H5_w9rGM23TS16p1EjqlYde6DjNTWxNT1kUYKSt9kqYDOCRjP1LDaF-RryYvRtf5DbJEI_MT-f5XlW1b1ikHg2s7dE2w=w300-h400" width="300" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>I see, in a recent Facebook post, the flag of Palestine flying over Grant Hall, at my old Alma Mater, Queen’s University. </p><p>At the same time, the Canadian government is announcing the resumption of support to UNWRA, which as been implicated in the planning and execution of the October 6 attack on Israel. This means there has not even been an interruption of funding from Canada.</p><p>Back in more innocent days, it used to be a common classroom question: had you been around in the day, would you have stood up against Hitler’s holocaust? Or would you have done nothing?</p><p>Now we know. Had the bulk of those in apparent charge in Canada been around then, they would have supported Hitler.</p><p>But we already knew that; we already had the holocaust of abortion, bigger than Hitler’s holocaust. We already had postmodernism, essentially the fascist concept. We already had “Medical Assistance in Dying.” We were already scapegoating “cis white males” and “whites” generally for all conceivable ills, in the same way Hitler scapegoated Jews, and for the same reason. Jews are simply “ultra-white.” It was bound again to come around to them. They work too hard, are too smart, and are too successful. Envy is the game.</p><p>We’re the baddies.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-31257980434486329932024-03-08T09:36:00.003-05:002024-03-08T09:36:23.111-05:00Gatsby as Marx Sees Him<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/w5vZOb3W9-8" width="320" youtube-src-id="w5vZOb3W9-8"></iframe></div><br /><p>Literature classes in these times are endlessly complicated, indeed rendered pointless, by our refusal to see the religious context of Western (or Eastern) culture. All great art deals with ultimate questions, which means that all great art is necessarily religious. Unless we are prepared to go there, we cannot understand great art.</p><p>Yet instead, at all academic levels, we go down interpretive rabbit holes leading nowhere: Freudian interpretations, Jungian interpretations, Marxist interpretations, feminist interpretations, structuralist interpretations, deconstructions, and other such meaningless races with our tails.</p><p>A student in China was asked by his English literature teacher to interpret a segment from the film “The Great Gatsby.” I can’t show the entire sequence here, for copyright reasons; but I attach roughly the second half of it from YouTube.</p><p>It shows Nick, the narrator, on his way by train with friend Tom, who is wealthy, to a lunch at Tom’s apartment in the “golden city” of New York, coming from the exurbs of Long Island. But Tom has them jump off the train in an intermediate “valley of ashes,” a “dumping ground” for the coal dust from the metropolis. The scene is presided over, as in the book, by an old billboard advertising a long-gone oculist, two huge eyes. Tom takes Nick to a garage, where he meets Tom’s mistress, Myrtle, made up and dressed in red. Tom arranges a rendez-vous that afternoon in his Manhattan apartment, almost under the eyes of Myrtle’s mechanic husband, and urges Myrtle, despite Nick’s protestations, to bring along a sister for Nick.</p><p>And my student was dutifully trying to make sense of it in Marxist terms: the valley of ashes was the working class, exploited by the rich capitalists. The huge eyes were the eyes of capitalism. He felt there was some special significance to a brief scene in which a boy in the valley was feeding a dog a bun; then at the end of the sequence, a Scotty was feeding on red velvet cushions. These were images, he felt, of the working and upper classes. His teacher had made the cuts to end with the Scotty, suggesting it was supposed to be a kind of summation of the scene.</p><p>But he was well aware that things were just not fitting together. What point, then, was the clip trying to make? </p><p>It did seem as though rich Tom was doing wrong by working-class Myrtle’s husband, for his pleasure. But if so, he was equally betraying his wife, who was upper class like him. Because he was rich, he could do as he wanted? But then, it seems, so could working-class Myrtle; while Tom’s rich wife was helpless. </p><p>So where was he supposed to go from there?</p><p>It was all immediately sensible in Christian terms. The “golden city,” a term used in the narration, is the New Jerusalem, a Biblical image of heaven. It is our rightful destination; but we are led astray, as Nick is by Tom, into carnal pleasures. This takes us to some dark valley: a “dumping ground,” the phrase used in the movie’s narration. This actually translates to Hebrew as Gehenna, that is, to use the Anglo-Saxon word, “Hell.” </p><p>The eyes of the oculist on the billboard are the all-seeing eyes of God, of conscience. The narration, clubbing us over the head with it, actually says “like the eyes of God.” </p><p>“But God doesn’t exist,” the student protests weakly. “He can’t do anything.” </p><p>Doesn’t matter. You cannot impose your own beliefs on the text. You have to go with what it is saying. </p><p>Identifying these fictional eyes as the eyes of capitalism does not work. Capitalism is just an abstract concept, not some entity that can think, observe, or judge. Moreover, an out-of-business oculist is not a capitalist except in an incidental sense. You could have chosen better if you’d wanted a symbol of capitalism. If this is capitalism, it is now, by implication, out of business: the vision of hell we see is socialism. </p><p>Interpreting the dark valley as the realm of the working class also leads to the awkward conclusion that the poor are poor because they have sinned, done wrong—for this is also clearly the place of temptation, from the point of view of the narrator, Nick. And the soundtrack sings “let’s misbehave,” over a closeup of his face looking perturbed. Not a proper Marxist message, then, let alone a Christian message: the rich deserve to be rich, because of their higher morality, and the poor deserve to be poor.</p><p>This place, the valley of ashes, is not primarily where manual labour is done. There are images of men swinging picks, which happens to be a form of manual labour. In the book, the relevant passage is “the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.” Sounds more symbolic than a description of the real life of an average working man. This is not productive labour: Sisyphean labour, that accomplishes nothing visible, as in the classical concept of Tantalus, the Greek Hell.</p><p>As to the two dogs: granted that the first dog is a working-class dog, and the second is an upper-class dog--what point is being made? That the poor are kind to dogs—and so are the rich? The only visible contrast is that the poor dog eats standing in the street, and being petted, while the rich dog is shown alone, and on velvet cushions. Does this suggest that the rich have it better than the poor?</p><p>What difference does it make to a dog whether he is eating on velvet cushions? Probably none. </p><p>The point, I assume, is either that we too should not care whether we are rich and high in social status or poor; or else that dogs do not face moral issues. In contrast to us.</p><p>Either works well as a Christian message. Neither works well as a Marxist message.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-5148001150223881502024-03-07T08:06:00.007-05:002024-03-08T09:49:23.167-05:00Why the Conservatives Will Lose?<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.49fcc69cefd57b5197c79379dd75e65c?rik=lpDIGmmrVUf%2fyQ&pid=ImgRaw&r=0" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.49fcc69cefd57b5197c79379dd75e65c?rik=lpDIGmmrVUf%2fyQ&pid=ImgRaw&r=0" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/don-martin-pierre-poilievre-s-road-to-apparent-victory-will-soon-start-to-get-rougher-1.6796894" target="_blank">Don Martin, in a recent column,</a> repeats all the tired old talking points of the leftist commentariat on how the Conservatives are unelectable, and must change their tune and stop being conservative.</p><p>First, of course, they must “move to the centre” to appeal to more voters. Despite already appealing to more voters than any other party.</p><p>Obviously bad advice. If a voter is dissatisfied with the current government, they will want to vote for something different—or why are they dissatisfied? If they are satisfied with the current government and its policies, why vote for someone merely similar? If it’s just a matter of changing names or faces, why vote at all?</p><p>Then the old saw about there being nothing the Conservatives can reasonably cut from the federal budget. As soon as they get down to details on what they would do, they are bound to cut programmes that everybody wants. They must name specific programmes they will cut. If they do not give details, and name the programmes, they have a hidden agenda. It is not as though the current government could have misspent a penny.</p><p>Here are areas where the Conservatives could cut.</p><p>To begin with, the federal payroll has grown 31% under Trudeau; while ordinary Canadians have found government services declining. Demonstrably, therefore, the federal payroll could be cut by 30% without affecting services. It is bloated. Milei in Argentina has reputedly cut their government payroll by 70%. Elon Musk did something similar with Twitter, with no visible problems. Yes, there is a huge amount of fat in the bureaucracy.</p><p>Aside from numbers of employees, work hours, and measurable productivity, in principle, in order not to become parasitic on the productive economy, no one working in government should receive a pay package as high as the equivalent job would earn in the private sector. At present, they earn more.</p><p>Reducing regulations should lead to automatic savings. Every regulation requires a bureaucracy to enforce it; while reducing economic activity and therefore tax revenues.</p><p>Next, all subsidies to the CBC and to the media should be ended. This does nothing for the public but undermine democracy.</p><p>More broadly, end all corporate welfare. Government should not play favourites in the market. It never makes economic sense in the long run, always costs the common people more, and is an open invitation to graft.</p><p>Next, although it is not a direct federal responsibility, no government transfers should pay for abortion or for gender transition therapy. Neither are legitimately health care, both are discretionary, and both raise freedom of conscience issues if taxpayer funded.</p><p>Next, no government money should go to multiculturalism. This is a waste of taxpayers’ money. It is offensive to immigrants. It is discriminatory. And it erodes the social fabric.</p><p>Although it might not be politically palatable, for many of the same reasons, the endless payouts in the name of “reconciliation” with indigenous groups should be ended. They are almost never required by treaty, they are discriminatory, they never achieve reconciliation, and they almost never do anything to improve the lives of actual Indians.</p><p>More generally, no government funding should go to advocacy groups. These increase government costs, create a feedback loop increasing bureaucracy and bureaucratic control, artificially skew the political discourse, and subvert democracy.</p><p>Is a Conservative government really going to institute such reforms? </p><p>One can at least hope.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-81152039484419035872024-03-06T07:35:00.004-05:002024-03-06T07:35:25.965-05:00The Durham Byelection<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th.bing.com/th?id=OIF.AiAplWqlxKCbTYpQSl8x%2fQ&rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="474" height="224" src="https://th.bing.com/th?id=OIF.AiAplWqlxKCbTYpQSl8x%2fQ&rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Jamil Jivani’s win in the Durham byelection illustrates an important trend. The Liberal vote collapsed, but did not go to the NDP. The NDP vote declined even more dramatically. This defies the conventional political wisdom that Canada has a baked-in left-wing majority, and the Conservatives only win when the Liberals and the Dippers split the vote. </p><p>People are not that ideological. People are either for or against the status quo, satisfied or dissatisfied with things as they are. When Robert Kennedy was shot during the 1968 US presidential race, the bulk of his popular support in polls went to George Wallace. It wasn’t the specific issue, it was getting the rascals out.</p><p>The left now obviously represents the powers that be; and Jagmeet Singh has cemented that with his informal coalition. Those who want change will go to the Tories or the PPC.</p><p>The NDP has made its brand that of opposing the state of things as they are; and along with the Liberals most often being the power that is, representing the powers that be, and both being on the left, that created an illusion of Canada having a permanent left-wing majority. And, conveniently, protected the powers that be from any real challenge. It was a controlled opposition.</p><p>That may be changing now. Perhaps only for a Diefenbaker moment; perhaps for the longer term.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-43106145113542740942024-03-05T08:10:00.005-05:002024-03-05T08:10:51.773-05:00The Democrats' Box<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/2ucy7yw5z46m1d2u/images/file8CTZJ5UF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="458" data-original-width="800" height="229" src="https://article-imgs.scribdassets.com/2ucy7yw5z46m1d2u/images/file8CTZJ5UF.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>John Fetterman, second from the right. Kamala Harris, third from the left.</i></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p>The Democrats in the US are in a quandary. They fixed the nomination last time to give it to Joe Biden. This was already a desperate choice; they knew he was old and unsteady. An op ed at the time said “just stay alive until election day, Joe.” But Bernie Sanders was even older, and not even a Democrat: he was, officially, an Independent Socialist. He looked like he was about to take the nomination. Pete Buttigieg, the next possible option, was only the mayor of a small midwestern city. Michael Bloomberg, only recently a Republican, had fizzled with the voters, despite a huge cash outlay. And nobody else was in striking distance in the party’s primaries.</p><p>So the idea was to push Biden as at least a safe pair of hands, who would be a one-term president and then pass it off to the anointed. Kamala Harris was the one they really wanted, primarily on racial and gender grounds: a black woman. But she had fizzled in the campaign. Now they would have time to coach her and to build some buzz.</p><p>Three years later, things have not worked out for them. Harris has not jelled; she does not seem capable of it. Biden is obviously failing. </p><p>Which puts them in a box. They can’t safely run Harris; and Biden is failing in the polls. Any other candidate amounts to a rejection of Harris, and charges of racism and sexism. Nor is there another plausible candidate of sufficient stature. People speak of Michelle Obama; but she has no real qualifications for the job, reputedly has no interest in it, and her popularity would probably nosedive as soon as she started taking positions on issues and being seen as a politician. </p><p>The essential problem here is a lack of quality candidates on the left, both in 2020 and now. Two words: John Fetterman.</p><p>The Canadian Liberals face a similar problem. Justin Trudeau is now an albatross around their collective necks; but there is no plausible replacement waiting in the wings, as there always had been in the past: no Paul Martin, no Jean Chretien, no John Turner, not even a Michael Ignatieff. No figure of independent stature around whom there is some real buzz. Mark Carney, perhaps; but he seems a faceless bureaucrat. Trudeau himself, as leader, was something of a Hail Mary pass, obviously underqualified, and there is no one else behind him. </p><p>Why there are no leaders available on the left?</p><p>Because they seem to suppress and force out those of any leadership potential: RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Jodi Wilson Raybould. In the wider culture, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Warren Kinsella, Stephen LeDrew. Which is to say, they cannot tolerate and force out anyone with principles and independent thoughts. This is what leadership is about, and what it requires.</p><p>This is the mark of a cult, which has some guilty secret to conceal. You cannot trust someone with principles who thinks independently; they are bound to see and mention it.</p><p>This is death to any human progress. It is death to any democracy.</p><p>Why do people still vote for the Democrats, or the Liberals, despite the lack of any real leadership?</p><p>Because they are complicit. The shared guilty secret turns them into NPCs, zombies. And they react violently to any independent thought.</p><p>The guilty secret: a foetus is a human life.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-76763941227323637942024-03-04T09:12:00.003-05:002024-03-04T09:12:31.424-05:00The Matriarchy<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://lovelace-media.imgix.net/getty/99850223.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="533" data-original-width="800" height="267" src="https://lovelace-media.imgix.net/getty/99850223.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>A Chinese student of mine has, for homework, written an essay advocating classes segregated by sex. He rightly points out that the research is overwhelming—both boys and girls learn faster when segregated. </p><p>However, he illogically assumes we never knew this until recently, and that previous sexual segregation in the schools was based on discrimination against women.</p><p>Feminist dogma now apparently dominates the world—even China. And it is impossible to disprove, because it is presupposed a priori regardless of evidence.</p><p>In earliest times, my student begins, women were given no formal education, because of their low social status.</p><p>However, the European ruling classes were also, traditionally, given no formal education. Often they could not read or write. The same was true in India or China. I believe the present King Charles was actually the first member of the British Royal Family to attend university.</p><p>This was a job for clerks. An aristocrat, not needing to work for a living, was above such tedious labours.</p><p>So the fact that women were traditionally given no formal education might as well be cited as evidence of higher social status. They did not have to work, but could expect to be provided for.</p><p>My student then asserts that women were later educated separately from men because they were being discriminated against. This sounded plausible in the early days of feminism because of the US Supreme Court’s rejection of school segregation on racial grounds. “Separate but equal.” But does it apply in the case of the sexes?</p><p>It overlooks two other possible explanations. </p><p>Firstly, the moral argument, that having boys and girls mix casually and daily past puberty and before marriage might lead to teenage pregnancy, sexual harassment, emotional upsets, sexual favours, sexual blackmail, and the entire #metoo morass that we currently have to deal with.</p><p>Secondly, the obvious one emerging again from current research, that both men and women learn faster when taught apart. The feminist case must assume that our ancestors were profoundly stupid. That is itself a form of prejudice. </p><p>All traditional Chinese philosophy, back to the Classics, endorsed and was based on the idea of the bagua, the harmonious balance of yin and yang forces, being the key to the universe. And yang represented masculine, and yin feminine—they were meant to be in perfect balance.</p><p>He’d forgotten all about that. Feminism puts blinders on. It forces historical amnesia.</p><p>The same concept is familiar in ancient Indian thought. Perhaps not in Western thought, but I would challenge anyone to find in the Bible any clear assertion that men are superior to women.</p><p>The fact that God is portrayed as masculine? But that also implies that the human soul is feminine—as it is in Greek thought.</p><p>And if men have indeed dominated women, always and everywhere until modern times, how did they possibly pull it off?</p><p>Amusingly, the original argument, back in the early Sixties, were that men were better at cooperating in groups. This is why there was a drive to end "old boys' clubs," to desegregate all-male organizations.</p><p>Ironically, feminism now asserts the opposite, that men are naturally competitive, and women naturally cooperative. Yet they do not see that this undermines their entire argument.</p><p>It has, perhaps, been replaced by a more crassly materialist idea, than men have been able to control women because men are naturally more physically powerful—at least when it does not come to performing on the job or in a sport. Or in the movies.</p><p>But this does not work either. Yes, men are more physically powerful. But women have everywhere and always been in charge of preparing food. Poisoning is easy enough. A man must trust his wife implicitly.</p><p>Feminism is obviously false; and yet it rules the world.</p><p>Because men are too accustomed to deferring to women, whatever they want.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-8267439503371563882024-03-03T07:45:00.002-05:002024-03-03T09:33:01.377-05:00It's All for the Children. Think of the Children<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://hellhorror.com/images/inTheaters/origs/9eb39-minority-report-poster.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="533" height="400" src="https://hellhorror.com/images/inTheaters/origs/9eb39-minority-report-poster.jpg" width="267" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>The Trudeau Liberals’ proposed new Bill C-63, the “Online Harms Reduction Act” is supposed to criminalize child pornography online. But it also provides for preventative detention or possible life imprisonment for “hate crimes.” </p><p>Child pornography online is already illegal. And preventative detention on suspicion of perhaps committing a crime in future, and life imprisonment for hate crimes, are unconstitutional. Not to mention an obvious violation of human rights.</p><p>What is the government up to?</p><p>Perhaps they are counting on the Conservatives to vote against the bill, as the outrageous violation of human rights that it is, and they will then propagandize this as “The Tories support child pornography!” This would be a useful counter to rightists objecting to men in women’s bathrooms, or drag queen story hours. They have used this tactic before; notably on the bill purportedly establishing free trade with Ukraine, which in reality sought to make the carbon tax impossible to rescind, as a matter of treaty obligation.</p><p>But the child pornography provisions might instead be cover for actually pushing through the outrageous violations of human rights. Although unconstitutional, it is naïve to expect the Canadian justice system to defend either the Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or human rights. They have not done so in the past. After all, the Prime Minister appoints the judges. And the judges can always appeal to the rider that this or that violation of rights is “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” We are supposed, for example, to have freedom of expression. That ship left the pier long ago, with no passengers on board, when the “hate speech” laws were passed.</p><p>“Hate crimes” are inevitably in the eye of the beholder. It will be easy for the government to declare any opinion they dislike “hateful,” and lock up opponents for life. </p><p>Nor will even silence protect you. If they suspect you of dissent, they can use preventative detention.</p><p>Can we trust Poilievre to rescind this law, and similar laws? For that matter, can we trust the present government to allow another election? I can’t even say another “free and fair” election. We have reason to believe elections have not been truly free and fair in the recent past. There seems to have been, at a minimum, Chinese interference, which the government has been covering up.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-36221384513258437712024-02-28T21:17:00.003-05:002024-02-28T21:17:25.902-05:00Why We're All Going Crazy<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/44b8xess5cY" width="320" youtube-src-id="44b8xess5cY"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-52719102086511801372024-02-27T13:05:00.004-05:002024-02-27T13:06:03.953-05:00Murderous Family Values<p> </p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/InVitroFertilization.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="495" data-original-width="547" height="362" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/InVitroFertilization.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Politicians from both sides are scrambling since the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that in-vitro fertilized embryos are human beings, and cannot be casually destroyed. This presumably makes common fertility treatments illegal. In-vitro fertilization almost always involves killing unwanted embryos.</p><p>Democrats hate this, because it implies abortion is illegal.</p><p>Republicans hate this, because it will prevent some from having a family. “Family values,” after all…</p><p>It is a useful reminder that “family values,” like nationalism, can easily come in conflict with morality. “Family values” are an idolatry.</p><p>The court decision is undoubtedly correct. The desire of an adult to have children does not trump the child’s right to life. Children are not pets, or toys, but are given to us as a sacred trust.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-59360401522456120342024-02-26T08:10:00.004-05:002024-02-26T08:10:48.691-05:00Transformers<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.synod.va/content/dam/synod/news/2022-10-16_prolungamento/EN_PNG_2024.png/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.web.1280.1280.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="704" data-original-width="800" height="352" src="https://www.synod.va/content/dam/synod/news/2022-10-16_prolungamento/EN_PNG_2024.png/_jcr_content/renditions/cq5dam.web.1280.1280.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>Our parish bulletin is dutifully pushing the “synod on synodality.” It publishes an appeal, not written by any local pastor: “Our Church is currently working to grow as a dynamic, synodal church. … Around the world, we are asked to reflect on this question: ‘HOW can we be a synodal Church in Mission?’ In this transformation, are we open to the new and ready to let go of what has been?”</p><p>The obvious answer is, “no.” The entire point of religion is to put us in touch with eternal truth. Eternal truth cannot change. Any change is necessarily a decent into error—unless the entire enterprise has been a sham from the beginning.</p><p>All ecumenical councils can do is to discern and to clarify what is understood to have always been church teaching, if and when some issue arises. Change or letting go is never on the docket.</p><p>Vatican II may look like a departure; and it was, and remains, deeply unsettling to many. But it is conventionally understood as concerning itself only with the liturgy, not with faith or morals, and to be properly interpreted according to “the hermeneutic of continuity.”</p><p>So what can a synod on synodality legitimately consider? The liturgy? Perhaps, for example, exploiting improvements in technology to feature sermons presented on large screens during the mass, from the very best preachers and expositors, instead of by the local pastor. Perhaps a return to the Latin mass. Perhaps administrative issues like how to keep the Vatican solvent, or what should be required for an institution to call itself “Catholic.” But this does not seem to call for an elaborate consultative process. It seems more like a matter for experts in a given field.</p><p>And none of this seems to warrant the term “transformation.” The last thing a faithful Catholic wants is for the Church to “transform.” </p><p>And what sort of transformation would cause the Church to grow in membership? After all, there are already many non-Catholic alternatives out there. Does the world really need another non-Catholic alternative? Is it crying for it?</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-90695475429737043142024-02-25T08:33:00.007-05:002024-02-25T19:02:28.801-05:00God-Given Rights<p> </p><p><a href="https://twitter.com/WadeMiller_USMC/status/1761015125673222572?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1761026557467111651%7Ctwgr%5E073bd0229cb0e4173e18b378dbf7c9fc3e54a420%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnotthebee.com%2Farticle%2Fif-you-think-rights-come-from-god-and-not-government-congrats-msnbc-says-you-arent-a-christian-youre-a-christian-nationalist" target="_blank">An MSNBC guest recently expressed concern over “Christian nationalists” who believe that rights come from God, rather than from Congress or the Supreme Court.</a></p><p>Which of course they do, as explained in the US Declaration of Independence. “Endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”</p><p>Leftists here actually make the case for Christian nationalism. They are conceding that America was founded on Christian principles. They are conceding that if you throw out Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism, you are consenting to have governments arbitrarily take away of your rights. </p><p>They simply want this to happen.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-30060987471095341532024-02-24T07:53:00.003-05:002024-02-24T07:53:20.107-05:00Lent According to Francis<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://anglicancompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/cover-1179704_1920.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="485" data-original-width="800" height="243" src="https://anglicancompass.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/cover-1179704_1920.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>Pope Francis has apparently issued his own suggestions for the Lenten fast. </p><p>I had not heard these. I hear them now from my leftist friend Xerxes. </p><p>Francis seems to be more popular among non-Catholics than Catholics. Within the church, he is far less liked than his two immediate predecessors, Benedict XV and John Paul II. He has stirred up much confusion and opposition.</p><p>Here are his recommendations:</p><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from hurting words and say kind words.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from sadness and be filled with gratitude.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from anger and be filled with patience.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from pessimism and be filled with hope.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from complaints and contemplate simplicity.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from pressures and be prayerful.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from bitterness and fill your heart with joy.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from selfishness and be compassionate to others.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from grudges and be reconciled.<br />•<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Fast from words and be silent so you can listen.</blockquote></div><p>I do not like these suggestions. They do not involve giving up anything for Lent. </p><p>You are always supposed to avoid hurting words. “Anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”</p><p>You are always supposed to avoid anger and grudges; it is one of the seven deadly sins.</p><p>You are always supposed to hope; it is one of the theological virtues. Despair, as acedia, is one of the seven vices.</p><p>You are always supposed to pray; not just during Lent.</p><p>You are always supposed to be compassionate—that is the chief of virtues, charity.</p><p>On the other hand, there is no virtue, as Francis seems to claim, in being happy, nor vice in being sad. How cruel a thought is that? The Christian truth is the opposite. Jesus actually said, “Blessed are those who mourn.” The Pieta is one of the great expressions of Christian art. What is striking about the earliest Greek icons, in contrast to the pagan Greek art that came before, is the expression of grief on all the faces. And Jesus wept. No compassionate person can be happy as a rule.</p><p>There is no virtue in avoiding pressures. Did and do the Christian martyrs duck the fight? St. Paul said we are to “Work out [our] salvation in fear and trembling.” If you are avoiding pressures, you are taking the broad and easy high road to hell.</p><p>There is especially no virtue in being silent. This is a denial of the Holy Spirit and all the prophets. The duty is to evangelize. Jesus said, “Let your light shine before men.” He said “Go forth and make disciples of all nations.” He declared John the Baptist, the “voice crying in the wilderness,” the greatest of saints, of all those born of woman.</p><p>Francis is all over the map, and one cannot tell where his thinking is coming from. It does not seem to be Catholic or even religious. It is perhaps from the Rotary Club. </p><p>There is good reason for the traditional Lenten fast being from meat (and alcohol). Meat is a very tangible thing, and one is obviously either doing it or not doing it. Francis’s suggestions are just alibis for doing nothing for Lent, and actually seem to give permission to hold grudges, be selfish, and never pray the rest of the year.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-8749137781553009352024-02-23T09:23:00.002-05:002024-02-23T09:23:27.640-05:00Whether People Like It or Not<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9jX6jbPAk1U" width="320" youtube-src-id="9jX6jbPAk1U"></iframe></div><br /><p>The leftist commentariat is delusional. </p><p>Note this recent panel on CityTV’s Breakfast TV. The host asks whether “the numbers are so skewed now that we’re going to get a new prime minister whether people like it or not.”</p><p>Who exactly are the “people” here? And who are “the numbers”?</p><p>He then argues that Poilievre is taking a risk in coming out against hormone therapy for minors and allowing males to compete in female sports. He must move to the centre sooner or later or he is unelectable, “no matter what the polls say.”</p><p>Is he admitting that Canadian elections are fixed? Or is reality obliged to conform to his will?</p><p><a href="https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/gender-womens-sports-poll/" target="_blank">Polling shows Canadians are against men in women’s sports by a four-to-one margin</a>—and all four other major parties, Liberals, NDP, Bloc, and Greens, are on record as supporting hormone therapy for minors and men in women’s sports. </p><p>Who exactly is not moving to the centre? </p><p>How does this math work, that the vast majority of Canadians are “far right” and the centre is on the extreme left? </p><p>And why does the commentariat never argue a need for the Liberals or the NDP to move to the “centre”? Why is it only incumbent on the right to do so?</p><p>The commentariat said a year go that Poilievre would be a disaster as Tory leader, it was a mistake for the party to choose him, because he was too far right. How was he ever going to “move to the centre,” as O’Toole obediently did? Now look at Poilievre’s polling numbers. Compare them to O’Toole’s. </p><p>Either the leftist commentariat are delusional, or they intend to deceive.</p><p>They similarly persist in framing the issue as a matter of defending transgender “rights.”</p><p>The right to make life-altering decisions as a child, even without parental consent, is not extended to most children—only, as they propose, to supposed “transgenders.”</p><p>The right to choose which bathroom to use, or which sex to compete against in sport, or which prison to be sent to if convicted of a crime, is not extended to most of us—only, as they propose, to supposed “transgenders.”</p><p>The right to choose which pronouns others may use when speaking of you in your absence has never been extended to most of us—only, now by law in Canada, to supposed “transgenders.” They get to dictate.</p><p>These are not rights, but privileges. </p><p>Either the leftist commentariat is delusional in calling them rights, or they intend to deceive.</p><p>But the same issue arises with the whole concept of “transgenderism.” A man believing he is a woman, or a woman believing she is a man, is delusional. They are disconnected from and in denial of physical reality—that is what a delusion is.</p><p>Or else, of course, they are intending to deceive.</p><p> I give them the benefit of the doubt: they are insane. Hubris drives people insane. It is the classic trajectory of Greek tragedy, and the downfall is near.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-37607115953302245052024-02-22T07:20:00.001-05:002024-02-22T07:20:12.496-05:00The Phantom Tsunami of Book Bannings in Canada<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.7kOFgx-_3Lj4wytHFwuwPwHaET?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="275" data-original-width="474" height="232" src="https://th.bing.com/th/id/OIP.7kOFgx-_3Lj4wytHFwuwPwHaET?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>I am apparently a “free speech absolutist.” Which is what they call anyone these days who believes in free speech. </p><p>So <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/freedomtoreadweek-schools-1.7106913" target="_blank">when I saw the CBC headline “Calls to ban books are on the rise in Canada,”</a> I thought I’d be outraged by these calls for book banning.</p><p>Yeah; no.</p><p>What the article calls book banning is actually just restricting access to books in school libraries. </p><p>And which books? “Books that deal with sexuality, 2SLGBTQ+ themes or gender diversity.”</p><p>In other words, pornography. Books that deal with sexual activities.</p><p>Just to begin with, a book is not banned if it is not featured in a library. All libraries are curated. </p><p>And a school library is supposed to be curated in the spirit of guardianship, in loco parentis, for the same reason children are required to attend classes and study what the teacher and the curriculum says. Children do not have the right to vote, or to have sex, or to work, or, broadly, to make their own decisions; they are children, and wards. They naturally do not have the right to read whatever they want.</p><p>Even for adults, there is a free speech case for censoring pornography. The point of free speech, as John Stuart Mill explains, is to ensure a free and open discussion of ideas, so that truth may be known. Pornography is not exactly heavy with ideas, other than the idea that one should have sex, perhaps unconventional sex. It does not seek truth, is not about seeking truth; it is purely a form of entertainment, like bear-baiting. Which, at best, is lacking in social importance, in the words of an old US Supreme Court ruling. There is no problem with censoring or banning such things.</p><p>Surely the only possible point in calling the restriction of pornography in school libraries “book banning” is to trivialize all objections to censorship, and make real book banning seem reasonable. And, when someone objects to any actual book banning, allowing the left to claim hypocrisy, and to say "you want book banning too! You want to ban any books you disagree with too!"</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8287065.post-6347794510580432592024-02-21T15:45:00.000-05:002024-02-21T15:45:00.256-05:00On Standing Up to Bullies<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.ed18cd219689c9c00214f0b4189152ba?rik=s41vJUV5vmSNAA&riu=http%3a%2f%2factivehistory.ca%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2012%2f05%2fbeaver_72rgb.jpg&ehk=ovxKZ8oEuRHqLWHbitfKhFNGSIsTKYNP%2fVjpGW3e1Kg%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="504" data-original-width="624" height="323" src="https://th.bing.com/th/id/R.ed18cd219689c9c00214f0b4189152ba?rik=s41vJUV5vmSNAA&riu=http%3a%2f%2factivehistory.ca%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2012%2f05%2fbeaver_72rgb.jpg&ehk=ovxKZ8oEuRHqLWHbitfKhFNGSIsTKYNP%2fVjpGW3e1Kg%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw&r=0" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p>I am what is referred to these days by many as a “war pig.” That is, I endorse military aid to Ukraine. I endorse Israel’s pacification of Gaza.</p><p>I believe those who object, saying it is “none of our business,” and we should not be sending money overseas when there are serious problems at home, are being cowardly and selfish. </p><p>Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan: we find Ukraine or Israel set upon by robbers and left lying in a ditch. It is our responsibility to help.</p><p>Remember Edmund Burke’s caution: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”</p><p>Moreover, collective security requires that acts of aggression against anyone not be allowed to succeed. Ensuring that aggression does not succeed is the surest way to ensure peace internationally, just as having a police force is the surest way to ensure peace domestically. We cannot honourably duck our responsibility and hope someone else does it.</p><p>I think it likely that the current turmoil in Ukraine has much to do with the disorderly American pullout from Afghanistan, which seemed to signal a lack of resolve.</p><p>Suggesting we should not send money abroad when there are needs at home is the fallacy of the false alternative. The one does not necessarily preclude the other.</p><p>If those who endorse unilateral pacifism really thought they had an argument, they would not resort to namecalling and would not try to dismiss pro-intervention positions out of hand.</p><p>We don’t want war; that’s why we must fight.</p><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.</div>Steve Roneyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10594350543441265186noreply@blogger.com0