Desiderata

 

Whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

We are going through hourly political chaos, but the happy truth is that we are managing, it seems, to make the necessary changes, to dissipate all the public rage, in a reasonably orderly fashion, without the system breaking down. 

The issue is summarized well by Reform’s deputy leader, Ben Habib: it is bureaucratic government against popular, democratic government. The bureaucrats are now losing everywhere.

The British disaffected have Nigel Farage, an effective figure to really around. The bureaucratic state has been using dirty tricks against him, but it does not look as though they will be able to pull it off. He’s not going to win the election coming in a couple of days, but he will change and quite likely control the political conversation over the next few years. He may crush the Conservative Party and emerge as the obvious alternative next time.

The Tories are arguing at the doorstep that if Labour gets the huge majority projected, they will be in power for a generation. The opposite is as likely. When parties get huge majorities, they are heavy with disaffected backbenchers who cannot all be given posts. They almost always fracture into infighting. See how quickly the Tories have fallen from their big majority four years ago. 

In Canada, Trudeau should be smoothly replaced by Poilievre’s Conservatives, channelling the anger in a mainstream party. Canada is, as usual, more orderly than anyone in this revolution.

The likelihood, of course, is that Poilievre’s Conservatives, if they get the projected big majority, will also fracture. But in the meantime, some steam will be let off.

France just voted strongly for the Ralliement National in the first round of legislative polling; the rest of Europe is quickly going anti-woke.

And the US, of course, has Trump. He now seems a shoo-in to win the presidency back. The lawfare against him got severely set back by the new Supreme Court decision that came down today. And the Supreme Court has also struck a blow directly against the bureaucratic state with their recent decision to overturn Chevron.

Everything seems to be going in the right direction. And it is hard not to see God’s hand in it. The future seems clear.

Daily Wire's New Full-Length Comedy May Change the World

 

There have been no good comedies coming out of Hollywood for years. All superheroes and 3D animations.

As a result, Daily Wire has announced the release of their own new full-length comedy, “Lady Ballers.” Mocking “transgender” participation in women’s sports, and full of cameos by right-wing figures—they say because no conventional Hollywood actors would take the roles.

At the same time, as many enough have noticed, old TV comedy staples like Saturday Night Live or Steven Colbert or the Daily Show are no longer funny. They seem to have abandoned laughs altogether.

Why?

Because comedy works by revealing truths you are not supposed to notice or say. That’s the punch in a punch line—the “reversal of expectations.” It cannot be predictable, or it is not funny. It must be something that is both true, and unexpected.

When society as a whole, or the audience, or those financing a show, have guilty secrets they do not want exposed, comedy becomes too dangerous to their conscience to enjoy or allow. What if someone should hear the beating heart below the floorboards? What if someone should notice it, and say something without thinking?

This is why narcissists never have a sense of humour. This is why those living with narcissists always have the feeling of “walking on eggshells,” having to guard what they say. This fear of saying the wrong thing prevents the spontaneity required for artistic expression, and especially for comedy, which most needs spontaneity.

And this is why European courts used to employ a court jester—to tell the king the truth, to keep it all honest and prevent hubris or delusional thinking.

The decline of comedy, and art generally, is the surest sing our culture is in trouble. 

Hollywood films have become unspontaneous and uncreative; new ideas of any kind have come to look dangerous to the powers that be. Safer to recycle old “brands” and “franchises,” swapping races and genders as an excuse for a remake, as a safe and unthreatening novelty.

While making sure they are not “triggering” to the narcissists; deleting anything that might challenge their delusions.

So too with pop music. Pop performers are no longer selected for talent, or for any unique quality. They are selected as safely compliant, visually appealing vehicles; and every song sounds more or less the same. Deficiencies can be fixed in the studio. Soma.

And yet, we are now also seeing the signs of rebirth; and it started with comedy. Many comedians have now come out as “far right,” choosing their art over politics and personal safety: Dave Rubin, Greg Gutfeld, Steven Crowder, Roseanne Barr, John Cleese, Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, Norm Macdonald, on and on; a list that seems to grow every week. And we are seeing the traditional role of the court jester being reasserted, in the face of furious censorship, over the Internet.

Daily Wire and Angel Studios have now begun turning out new TV shows and films at a surprising clip, and audiences are eating them up. At least some significant portion of the population is not depraved. When these films and shows start outgrossing Hollywood, we will know the future is won.

Now this full-length comedy, “Lady Ballers.” This may be the most devastating blow yet to woke narcissism. There is nothing a narcissist hates more than being laughed at.

Wokeness Defined

 

The essence of CRT/CT, postmodernism, “wokeness,” can be expressed in one simple statement: “Reality is a function of belief.” I think that is Kierkegaard’s formulation. Or here is William Blake’s: “A firm persuasion that a thing is so, makes it so.”

There, I defined it; and the left claims nobody can. 

So, say the woke, there is no truth; there is only “your truth.” There are no rules, no right and wrong; only a need to impose your own preferred reality on others. As in, demanding they use your pronouns.

Men declaring themselves women is the currently fashionable test case. If it looks relatively harmless, just wait for what comes next.

I have been hearing versions of this dogma—dogma is the word—since undergraduate days back in the 1970s. It took decades for me to fully shake this off, if I even have. One must not, in any circumstances, be “judgemental.” One must not get “hung up” on “meaning,” as one prize postgrad essay in religion asserted. Marcuse was hot back then: “Beware: even the ears have walls,” as one graffito said during the Paris uprisings. This idea has been drilled into our young people now for perhaps 3.5 generations.

The idea is attractive to the young. Sensitive or intelligent young people must realize that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy”—that philosophy being the dominant materialism. Postmodernism seems to offer the response, segueing nicely from LSD: we are not limited to the material, but can live entirely in our imaginations.

Heck, it even seems to be endorsed by the Christian tradition: Blake and Kierkegaard were, or considered themselves, Christians. Jesus said  “if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20). Martin Luther emphasized faith as both necessary and sufficient for salvation: the whole ball game.

But there is something critical missing in the postmodern formulation: God. The faith spoken of by Jesus, or Blake, or Kierkegaard, is not faith in self or in the will. That’s Hitler.  It is faith in God.

Consider the traditional solipsist conundrum: “If a tree falls I the forest, and no one is there to hear, did it make a sound?”

And the necessary answer is, it makes a sound because God knows. God is the touchstone of all existence, the ground of being. Without faith in God, as Descartes, for one, explained. one has no warrant that anything else is real. It is then possible, as Chesterton pointed out, to randomly believe in anything.  Madness is inevitable, the only alternative to such faith. 

Accordingly, if God says a mountain will move, it must move. If he says it will move at your command, it will move at your command. Because God. Nothing else is or is anything here or there except because God.  But this magic works if and only if you are following God’s will, not your own.

And, of course, it is generally God’s will that a mountain be where he put it.

In denying God, we are collectively pulling the plug on everything. It is mass madness, and it is the madness of the proverbial lemmings.

Jivani on Wokeness

 

My quibble is that Jivani himself resorts to racism to defend his position by characterising wokeness as "American." As though this is a rap against it.

The Words of the Prophets are Erased from the Tenement Halls

 

I am horrified to learn what has happened to the Tenement Museum in New York.

I saw it perhaps 12 or 15 years ago, and it was a high point of the trip. Although I can claim no personal ties to that history, I grew up to my Irish grandmother’s rendition of “The Sidewalks of New York.” It was a kind of anthem to North American Irish. We looked to New York as a kind of ethnic capital, since there was little left to us back in Ireland.

Growing up, there were still areas of Montreal and Kingston, too, that we were told never to go to as kids. They were the tenements our Irish ancestors had inhabited. We were still to insecure in our status to be comfortable about them. Be seen there, and we might easily be taken for “that kind” of Irish. Goose Village, Griffintown, Point St. Charles. In Kingston, the entire north quadrant was as if roped off. In Toronto, it was Cabbagetown, Corktown, St. James Town.

I have been warned on several occasions, by women, almost on first meeting, that their mothers had made them promise never to become involved with anyone Irish. In college, the student newspaper once published an opi9nion piece titled “Let’s sink Ireland for a Day.”

The historic discrimination against the Irish, or the Jews, or the Poles, has not abated; it is still common. It is the life experience of many now living; Jews are still the most common target of all hate crimes. Yet now we Irish, Jews, and Poles, are having our own history here erased while being falsely accused of being the “oppressors” of other groups with whom our ancestors rarely came in contact. Or when they did, met as equals and most often comrades at the bottom of the greased pole. 

I suspect it is just a continuation of the same discrimination; just a new excuse to discriminate against the Irish or the Jews, while using them as a scapegoat for the sins of others. Like scapegoating poor Scots-Irish “rednecks” in the South for supposed discrimination and slavery, when their own ancestors never owned slaves, and came as indentured servants, a kind of term-limited slavery, themselves.