Catholic comments on the passing parade.
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One possible explanation for the strangely destructive behaviour of elites over the last few years is that they have calculated, rightly or wrongly, that with AI emerging, they simply do not need people any longer to do their bidding. The vast mass of humanity becomes excess baggage. Why not kill them off and have a better view from the cottage?
There is an obvious oxymoron in Donald Trump appearing as the “people’s champion,” defender of the little guy against the establishment. He is a famously rich man, the son of a rich man, a TV celebrity. Surely if anyone is part of the establishment, it is Donald Trump?
The anomaly is yet more dramatic in the case of Elon Musk: the world’s richest man has supposedly become our saviour against the forces of government and corporate censorship.
Or RFK Jr. Kennedy is a maverick bucking the establishment? He is, after all, the American equivalent of royalty.
Surely we are being played? Surely this is all a sham, controlled opposition? How can we trust these guys to go against their class interest?
No; there is reason here. These are the only people who can stand against the machine.
Jefferson, the inventor of American democracy, argued that it relied on the bulk of Americans being freeholders, “yeoman farmers.” That meant they were not too dependent on the system; they were relatively able to resist authority without losing their livelihood. They could bar their front gate and still feed and shelter their family.
Especially if armed. It has been cogently argued that democracy emerged first in England because of the invention of the English longbow. It meant every English yeoman had a weapon that could pierce a suit of armour. The local nobleman could not run roughshod over his hearth. He needed to negotiate consent.
It has been observed that nations generally become functioning democracies at about the point when the GDP per capita reaches 10,000 USD. At that level, a bourgeoisie has usually developed with enough independent resources to go to the mattresses against an authoritarian government, and stand a better than even chance of winning.
In present days we have an elite, an essentially fascist coalition of government and big business, trying to hold power and extent their control through the new technologies. They can and will destroy the career and livelihood of anyone who breaks ranks and opposes them. They can and will “deplatform,” revoke licenses, refuse to graduate, prosecute capriciously or selectively, get you fired, attack your marriage, seize your children, take your house, send for “reeducation,” seize or freeze your assets, for dissent.
As Jefferson foresaw, but with raised stakes, the only people who can stand up against this are those so wealthy, so popular, or, in the case of women, so beautiful, that they can’t be crushed: the Joe Rogans, the Scott Adamses, the J.K. Rowlings, the Tulsi Gabbards, the Kennedys, the Trumps, the Musks.
Even they are taking a great risk. They may miscalculate. The powers were able to take out Conrad Black. They took out John McAfee. They may have taken out Alex Jones. They are trying to assassinate Donald Trump.
This shows how high the stakes are.
And this is a reason we must reject governments and political parties determined to go after “the rich”; just as we must fear governments and political parties that go after religion and the church. Whatever their faults, we actually need the richest among us to protect our freedoms.
At about the same time he is promoting the heresy of indifferentism, Pope Francis has also said that he cannot choose between the evils of Trump’s platform and that of Harris in the current US presidential election.
“Who is the lesser evil? That lady, or that gentleman? I don't know. Both are against life, be it the one that kicks out migrants, or the one that kills children."
This is a clear example of false moral equivalence. Francis is saying that to expel an intruder from your home is morally equivalent to murder.
This is obviously wrong; it amounts to an attempt to justify abortion.
Is it even wrong in the slightest to resist illegal immigration or to deport migrants?
Acts 17: 26 says it is God’s plan that nations and peoples have borders:
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.”
One doesn’t have the right to immigrate any more than one has the right to live in another man’s home.
It is not plausible that Francis does not know this.
It is increasingly obvious that in our times we are fighting a war of good versus evil. The masks are off, and it is no longer a matter of people of good will coming to different conclusions.
And Pope Francis is on the side of evil.
Pope Francis just said the following to the children in Singapore:
“All religions are paths to reach God. They are—to make a comparison—like different languages, different dialects, to get there. But God is God for everyone. If you start to fight saying 'my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn't', where will this lead us? There is only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christians; they are different ways to God."
This is, straight up, the heresy of indifferentism. It is not plausible that the Pope does not understand this. The Pope is a heretic.
Of course one is Catholic because one is convinced that Catholicism has more of the truth than other religions. Otherwise what is the point of having a Church? What is the point of having a Pope? What is the point of Christianity? Why didn’t we all remain pagans or Jews? Were the martyrs just bigoted fools to die for the faith?
Yes, all religions are paths to God, and all major religions are largely true. Given a good God, it must be so. It must be possible to get there as a Hindu or a Jew, with sincerity and effort. That is the doctrine of invincible ignorance. But consider the different religions as paths up a mountain. Not all paths up a mountain are equally straight. Not all paths get you all the way, even if they go in the same general direction. Some paths will prove to be impasssible higher up.
The analogy of language, which Francis uses, suggests all paths are equally serviceable; for that is the general view among linguists about languages. Thery all do the job. No one dares say English is a better language than French.
Moreover, the teaching of the Church has always been, “no salvation outside (or without) the Church.” And Jesus said “no one comes to the father except through me.” Francis must reconcile his claims with these doctrines, and I do not believe he can. He cannot be indifferent to truth claims.
So now what do we do?
Nobody understands rhetoric.
Donald Trump’s great talent as a politician and a leader is that he does. It is like magic. Pierre Poilievre does too.
Lots of people have criticized Trump for saying, during the recent debate, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating cats, dogs, and family pets. Kamala Harris laughed at him in split screen as he said it. The moderator stepped in to deny it was happening. Warren Kinsella and Ben Shapiro and many others saw this as a serious misstep by Trump. Kinsella said it made Trump look ridiculous.
I think we see, even just a couple of days later, how smart the reference was. It is all over the Internet, in song, meme, and dance.
The best way to make a point is with an image. The best image to make a point is a dramatic one; a shocking one or a ridiculous one. Trump knows this.
People who do not understand rhetoric, repelled by the shocking image, object to it instinctively. It makes them uncomfortable. Hence the blowback from the moderator, Shapiro, or Kinsella. “You can’t say that!”
It is not the rhetorician’s job to make anyone feel comfortable. Comfortable is boring and forgettable. It is to get his point across.
The image of foreign-looking people eating family pets is perfect because it makes people very uncomfortable. The more so because it has a strong emotional pull. People love their pets, usually more than other people. Good writers know that the perfect way to make a reader sympathize with their character forever is to show them being kind to a cat or dog in the opening pages. Or to make the reader hate a character, show them kicking a dog.
Trump may also have, at a blow, won back all the childless cat ladies.
And we have the video, in split screen, of Harris laughing at the claim. She’s laughing at cats and dogs being killed and eaten? She has identified herself in many minds as the villain.
And the name of the town is Springfield? The same as in The Simpsons—a name chosen because every state in the union has a town named Springfield. It is perfectly generic. And Ohio? It is everyone’s home town.
This could happen you, member of the audience, any day now. Your dear pet Mittens or Snoopy is not safe.
True or not, it is a perfect image to express the growing general alarm over high levels of immigration and lack of assimilation. It crystallizes it and fixes it in the mind.
Along with all the memes and TikTok videos, It has also set off a general investigation all over the internet to find out if the claim is true—making the issue of mass immigration the focus of discussion for days or weeks to come.
And pulling up lots of evidence that it is indeed true.
As the evidence piles up that it is true, the image of Harris laughing at it looks like callousness. She doesn’t care. She’s fine with people killing Fido. And the moderators too are shown to be the bad guys.
Trump is great at this. His image of a wall across the southern border was similar. Give people a concrete image: a wall. Build the wall.
So is the story of his showing the leader of the Taliban a photo of his own house. Make it concrete, make it visual, make it dramatic. Trump understand this. People think and especially people feel in images.
Trump also knows enough to repeat basic points, rather than getting bogged down in details. Political wonks object to this; to lack of details. But rhetoricians and ad men know the way to convince is to stress one point—the “unique selling proposition.” Too much detail, too many reasons, loses the sale.
We ought to use the wisdom of rhetoric the classroom as well. We deliberately reject it there, and in doing so we are missing completely the essence of educating, which is to make the lesson memorable. What you do not remember, you have not learned. Teachers and educational bureaucrats instead instictively reject anything that might make a lesson memorable. They keep everything as bland and forgettable as possible.
Back in the Seventies, the US government funded a massive survey to find which teaching techniques might improve results in the public schools. I think twenty different approaches were approved, and tested against each other and against a control group, in classrooms all over the US. All but one of the new techniques came from the Ed Schools, the educational experts. And all of them failed—all actually did worse than the control group. They were positively harmful. The one that turned out to be better, “ Direct Instruction,” was developed not by an Ed School, but by an advertising man.
But this was ignored. The results of the massive study were buried. The ed schools and the ed establishment were too powerful. We went with the methods proven to fail.
I hear Direct Instruction is currently being introduced in the Philippines, however. I have had my own students in Qatar, who have experienced it, demand it. I suspect it is being used elsewhere in Asia.
Another example of the value of rhetoric in education: you may have heard of Khan Academy. Short videos online that explain concepts in the school curriculum. It started with math, but now includes a variety of subjects. Everyone now seems to be using it.
Salman Khan, who created it, is an advertising man. He knows how to present.
While the usual public school classroom just has students break into small groups and stare at one another.
Nobody understands rhetoric.
Today is 9-11. Everyone remembers where they were on this day in 2001. It is one of the great inflection points in modern history, a day on which the world changed. Before 9-11, Muslim terrorism was not a thing. There was no Department of Homeland Security. Boarding a plane or crossing the US border was a relatively simple process. There were not metal detectors everywhere.
I have seen the argument recently that 9 – 11 inspired the new aggressive atheism. It gave many the ides that religion, or “extremism,” or believing in anything, was the root of all evil.
It also threw globalism in to reverse. Opening all doors to foreign influence and foreign cultures turned out to mean something more than a wider selection of restaurants and colourful ethnic dances in the multiculturalism festival.
And of course it led to a generation of war, in Afghainstan and Iraq.
I noticed that before 9-11, everyone was opposed to honouring soldiers and the military. After 9-11, soldiers were heroes.
What other such inflection points have there been in my own lifetime?
The first one has to be the Kennedy assassination. That seemed like the death of an era in which America was universally admired. Europe had messed up badly, but America was the great hope. The war was won, we had defeated the dragon. Sure, there was the Soviet Union, and the overhanging threat of nuclear war. But we at least had confidence in who the angels were, and who the devils were, and some evidence that angels win in the end.
The Kennedy assassination ended all that. Evil had won after all.
One almost immediate result was the death of the folk boom. Folk music was too innocent, optimistic, and socially engaged. In came the angrier and more self-centred electric music, the Beatles and the Stones and Blonde on Blonde. In came the drugs and the idea of turning on and dropping out: we gave up on “the system” and trusting authorities.
The other great inflection point was the fall of the Berlin Wall; 1989. Although this was mostly a symbol for the more drawn-out collapse of the Eastern Bloc. The bipolar world we had taken for granted was suddenly gone. People rather absurdly declared the “end of history.”
Lesser inflection points are perhaps the inauguration of Ronald Reagan in 1980, corresponding with the release of the Iran hostages; that is certainly an event burned into my memory. Perhaps by the same token the election of Trump in 2016. Perhaps the election of Pope Francis in 2013; perhaps that of John Paul II in 1978. Perhaps the War in the Falklands, which established Margaret Thatcher as the Iron Lady and signalled the returned vitality of Britain.
And perhaps too, although it was a couple of years instead of a day, the Covid pandemic. People any more tend to date things pre-Covid or post-Covid, the way they used to date things either pre-9/11 or post-9/11.
Everybody is expecting Donald Trump to win he big debate this evening. I think this is dangerous for Trump. Expectations for him ae too high. Harris will have to be really awful to be seen to have lost.
To begin with, this debate will naturally automatically be compared with the last one, against Biden. So if Harris can avoid actually drooling on stage, she will look good by comparison.
Harris has a reputation as a bad debater, because of her epic failure against Tulsi Gabbard in 2019. This low expectation is automatically to her advantage: success in these debates is usually about exceeding expectations. And the low expectations may be unwarranted. Harris did well enough in a VP debate against Mike Pence in 2020; there is no reason to think ger skills have declined since then. And she is a lawyer and experienced prosecutor: the skills needed for that are debating skills.
Trump has a reputation for being deadly in debate. But he can’t use his best weapons against Harris: the sharp put-downs. Because Harris is a woman, and a minority woman at that, she gets special privilege. You can’t punch a woman hard, or you look like a bully. This is the reason I thought the Democrats should have gone with Tulsi Gabbard in 2020: Trump is weakest against a woman. Granted, he was able to debate Hillary Clinton effectively; but nobody really believes Hillary Clinton is a woman.
So I expect Harris to at least hold her own.
Trump’s hope must be that she chokes under the pressure. There are signs she has trouble handling pressure. But they can dope her up, can’t they?
Jagmeet Singh just pulled the plug on the NDP-Liberal pseudo-coalition.
This is as I predicted: he had to cancel it a decent interval before the next scheduled election, in order to give voters any reason to vote NDP instead of Liberal. He will now, to prove his bona fides, need to vote against the Liberals now in any plausible no-confidence motions.
This need not bring down the Liberal government. They could be kept in power by the BQ without the NDP.
But given the current polling, it probably will. The latest seat projections show the BQ becoming the official opposition, and both they and the NDP picking up 16 seats. So everyone but the Liberals has an incentive to force an election now.
I predict an election before Christmas.
