If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
I do not trust Father Chad Ripperger. Just an instinct; I feel what he says does not cohere. Rather like Jordan Peterson: everything must be taken on his personal authority.
But I am interested to hear him claim that exorcisms take less time recently. In the Sixties, he says, a typical exorcism took a couple of days. Five years ago, a typical exorcism took years. Now the times are declining rapidly: currently about a month or so.
This sounds right to me. We are entering a period of general disillusionment.
Much buzz now about Elon Musk buying MSNBC. I hope he doesn’t.
I think Fox is highly vulnerable to a competitor on the right side of the spectrum. I think they have too much power, and the US and US right would be well served to have someone else in that space—so that Fox could not suddenly dump extremely popular presenters, or inordinately influence Republican candidate selection.
However, or Musk’s sake, I think it would be a bad investment. Cable news is on its way out; it cannot compete with vloggers, who have no restrictions on their speech and much lower overheads. There are big names dumped by Fox whom Musk could scoop up and put on his revamped MSNBC: Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, and on and on . But if they have an audience, they are now well-established on podcast. Would they want to go back to the restrictions of being an employee?
And I think it is time to be concerned about concentration of ownership by Musk. It is troubling for one man to be in control of so much of the media landscape, and indeed the economy.
If, however, someone were to buy MSNBC and turn it into a competitor to Fox… they could so some nice things with it. There is a general tiresome sameness about both Fox and MSNBC now: all just talking heads making the same political points on every issue. What is the point of watching Hannity, then Ingraham, then Pirro all say the same thing?
I’d like to see a show like the old Hannity and Combs, or Point-Counterpoint. Have competent spokespeople for left and right sound off on the issues of the day. This is the way to know both sides of the issue, and we are losing that. We do get panels with a single embattled spokesperson for the other side, but that is still not balanced.
I’d also like to see a formal debate program, on the lines of Oxford Union, addressing wider and deeper questions.
I’d like to see something on the upstream culture, beyond mere politics, featuring those right-wing artists and creators who have been blacklisted for so many years. This could be a late-night talk show like the old Carson Tonight Show; but featuring the counter-culture. Huckabee has been doing something like this.
Do a soft interview show, like Rogan, Larry King. One guest, one hour. We could have two shows like this, one for more political figures, one for cultural figures.
Do a regular town hall show, with different guests answering questions from a live audience—to hear the real concerns of the people. The intention would be to break through the screen of a professional journalism class setting the agenda.
I’d like to see a “Libs of TikTok,” showcasing the most absurd expressions of the woke. This or a separate show could also do Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder, or Candid Camera-style intrusions into woke spaces.
And how about a program on the DOGE theme, just investigating examples of supposed government waste, and arguments for and against the expenditure?
These are among the TV shows I would still be interested in watching.
At mass a couple of Sundays ago, the sermon lamented a general sense of “disillusionment” in society. All the drug use; the rising rate of suicide; of mental illness; of cynicism; crime. He might have mentioned bad art.
But if people are generally disillusioned, the next question is: what was the illusion? And the question after that: Is it better to live in an illusion, or to be disillusioned and see things as they are? Surely disillusionment, if painful, is better than illusionment, and is a step toward the light.
It also occurs to me that “disillusionment” might be the better formulation for what we call “depression.” The depressed generally have a better grip on reality than the rest of us.
Most people most of the time live their delusions. They believe what seems most pleasing to them, and ignore the real situation.
The broad general illusion of our time, I would say, is materialism. I don’t mean the pursuit of wealth: I mean the philosophical position that only the physical is real. And with this as a cosmology and religion comes scientism, the notion that science explains the universe, and anything labelled “the science” must be true.
Eyes are opening, and further revelations may come.
There was a wonderful flowering of Canadian culture in Montreal when I was young. It was a magic time. There was Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler, A.M. Klein, F.R. Scott, Hugh MacLennan. There was Aislin. There was the NFB.
And that flowering wilted and died.
I believe it was killed, first, by Quebec separatism, which made life difficult for Anglophones, and caused many of the best and brightest to head for Ontario. So the centre in Montreal was broken up.
But why couldn’t it have simply re-formed in Toronto? Toronto has never been able to match Montreal’s creative ferment of the forties to sixties.
I believe this is due to the dogma of multiculturalism, which suppresses the development of Canadian culture. Toronto is the centre of the multicult. The multicult will not publish Canadians; only writers celebrating their alienation from Canadian culture.
But there seems to be another factor. See how many of those Montreal names are Jewish. Montreal in those years had the largest concentration of Jews in Canada. Toronto, it is true, now has more, but as part of a much larger population—not as concentrated.
And some of the brightest lights of Toronto culture are also Jewish: Wayne and Schuster; Sharon, Lois and Bram; Lorne Michaels.
For Jews really are a light unto the nations, a leaven commissioned by God to spread culture wherever they go.
Any nation that wants a rich culture should encourage Jews to immigrate and to stay.
As immigrants, Canada should give absolute priority to Jews. This would vastly enrich Canada, and at the same time, reduce tensions in the Middle East, where Jews are apparently not welcome. The more fools they. It’s a win-win situation.
Of course, many resent the success of Jews. This is the sin of envy, and should be condemned whenever encountered. It is obviously to the benefit of all that the best rise to the top.
If the Jewish population of Canada were large enough, it would be that much harder for other ethnic groups to oppress them. It would be a protection for them.
I think even now, they would be safer in Canada than in Israel.
I keep getting blasted on Facebook by an inane ad for “Jublia,” apparently a medicine for foot fungus. It’s a song, with dancers and the lyrics “Jublia. It comes in a bottle. Jublia. Not a person, it’s a medication. Jublia. Your doctor has more information. Saying what it does-- that would be too much!”
This seems at first glance a ridiculous waste of money. I have no foot fungus; I can’t imagine I have done any searches that might make it seem as though I have. They have targeted their customer universe terribly, then. What are the odds that a random person watching YouTube would have any use for this medicine? And yet they’re pounding it into the ground. I seem to see this ad more often than anything else.
And how can it sell the product without saying what it does? Advertising is to give the potential customer information. Further, an ad should concentrate not on the product, but on the benefit to the customer. So what is the point of an ad that deliberately withholds how the product might benefit the consumer? And instead boasts that it comes in a bottle?!?
I can think of a few reasons why this ad campaign might make sense.
First, it piques the curiosity. How, after all, do I know that it is for foot fungus? Already at a computer, I just had to google and find out. I imagine others would too. So, in this day and age, advertising online, there is really no need to say it. Better yet, Jublia has doubled its advertising dollar or better, getting the viewer to encounter it twice and in greater detail than a quick ad could manage. It has at the same time certainly caught my attention. It made the product interesting; this is not just one more spam ad that passes by the eyes and is not remembered. Not incidentally, by prompting a Google search, it has made the viewer listen carefully for the product name, and type it out. Perfect for memorization.
This still does not explain why it is worth broadcasting this particular product to random viewers, instead of targeting those most likely to have foot fungus.
Part of the programme might be to drop huge amounts of advertising in the media on something, anything, simply to ensure that the media, needing the revenue, doesn’t report critically on this pharmaceutical company, or the industry as a whole. Especially now, when “Big Pharma” is under siege in the media, and terrible things are coming out about the Covid vaccines. In the case of YouTube, to encourage the platform’s algorithms to censor such content.
In other words, it is a payoff, explicitly or implicitly to ensure favourable coverage.
Improbable? That’s exactly what the Kamala Harris campaign did: indirect payoffs to Oprah Winfrey, Al Sharpton, Call Her Daddy, and other news and affairs outlets for favourable coverage.
How is it that Trump believes he can keep the peace worldwide, at least without sacrificing US vital interests? After all, broadcasting in advance that you are against war would seem to only give aggressors free license. But he really did keep the peace for the four years he was president before. Was this just luck? And, in anticipation of his coming to office, I notice that Qatar has announced they are expelling Hamas from their country.
I think we can see Trump’s technique. It is the same technique that works in making a business deal. He makes a dramatic threat; if it is ignored he hits swiftly and hits hard. The other side backs down, or, of necessary, as with ISIS, quickly gets wiped out.
Why was ISIS wiped out so quickly and relatively painlessly? Because he unleashed his generals. No restraints on them.
Contrast this with the usual American way of war, as we witness it in Ukraine, or what they are requiring of the Israelis in Gaza, or saw in Vietnam, or Korea. You send in men and armament in dribs and drabs, worrying about “escalation.” Certain vitally strategic areas on the other side are out of bounds and mustn’t be touched.
That looks a lot like a cover story. It is the way to prolong war: feed in just as many troops and just enough materiel to keep the war going at a good pace, without resolution.
And it is responsible for millions dying unnecessarily, not just soldiers but all those women and children they pretend to be concerned about in Gaza.
Why do American governments do this? Are they really so stupid? Still, so long after Vietnam? They can never learn the simple lesson?
Surely it is more sinister.
Just as the cynics have long said; as Eisenhower said in his farewell address way back in 1960.War is hugely profitable for certain large corporations. Politicians they fund have a huge incentive to encourage war and make it drag on.
This even explains the chaos of the Afghan withdrawal. The abandonment of all that materiel through a hurried withdrawal may have been a feature, not a bug. It would all have to be replaced in the American arsenal. Lots of new defense contracts.
Trump seems to show this suspicion to be true, with his successes. This is probably one big reason they were determined to keep him from office, by fair means or foul. And why their first thought was to try the “Russia collusion” hoax. He doesn’t want war? He is helping our enemies!
The other half of the Trump formula, of course, is not to poke and provoke foreign leaders, as the war hawks do. Not to threaten their interests. Trump will respect and appeal to the interests of the other leader.
This explains why Trump is actually rather popular with the Chinese, with Putin and the Russians, with North Korea, with both the Arabs and the Israelis. They understand the rules of the game, and know that if they follow them, they can say out of trouble. Weakness makes the boundaries unclear; they can easily miscalculate, and face disaster.
For Trump’s system to work, he must of course preserve a credible threat of force; if necessary full-scale war, few holds barred. That is why he needs a hawk at Secretary of State: Marco Rubio, not Tulsi Gabbard. He needs someone who can spit bullets, for a good cop/bad cop negotiating routine. And he needs someone who will build up the readiness of the American Armed Forces.
In Gaza, I expect him to unleash the Israelis to go in and end it quickly. In Ukraine, I expect him to force a deal leaving Russia with Crimea, the Donbas, and a pledge that Ukraine stay out of NATO.
There is a saying: “never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.” It is often useful to defuse one’s anger.
But is it true?
It does seem to me that groups and nations pursue obviously bad policies, insist on obvious untruths, and seem impervious to explanations. One obvious example: the persistent insistence that there are mass graves of indigenous children murdered in the old residential schools. Another: that Trump claimed Nazis or white supremacists were “good people.”
Are they simply ignorant of the facts, only repeating what they have heard? No; if told the facts, they do not counter them; they just ignore or suppress them. They react in anger. Can it be that they don’t understand what is being said?
Let’s assume that people are this stupid. They just can’t make logical connections. Wouldn’t the obvious solution, then, be to select out those with the highest IQ’s, and have them run things?
This is more or less what Plato proposed in the Republic.
So should we turn things over to the “Experts,” presumably weeded and fostered based on their intelligence and knowledge by the universities?
No; these academics seem more prone to believe obvious nonsense than the general public. This has long been ovserved: the “ivory tower” syndrome. Academics is an echo chamber in which delusions can be mutually reinforced indefinitely without ever being tainted by reality.
How about selecting for raw IQ?
And this is the premise on which Mensa, the high-IQ society, was founded.
And it did not work, does not work, either. On any given issue, you will never get a consensus among Mensans. They are about as likely to believe the latest obvious untruth as the general public. And hold to it with the same energy. A meeting of Mensans is like herding cats.
(Of course, I face my own logical problem here. How can I be sure it is the other guy who is clinging to an untruth despite evidence? Am I smarter than the Mensans?
I recall this little poem by Albert Einstein: "A thought that often makes me hazy:/Is it them, or am I crazy?"
But all I can do is look at the evidence and arguments, and use my own judgement. I think it is conclusive if the other side does not counter. Although it might also be that they find the matter so obvious that arguing it is tiresome.)
It seems to me it cannot be incompetence, in most cases. It is deliberate self-delusion. Most people simply believe or try to believe what they want to believe. They believe whatever they find most comfortable or most in their interests to believe, and ignore both the truth and the general good.
I daresay women are more prone to do this than men… They will cover an ugly situation with a pretty word, and it will all be okay.
A case in point I noticed recently: a YouTube psychiatrist advising that you should cut all contact with any relative or spouse who voted for Trump, telling them “How could you vote against my livelihood?” (Sic: surely she meant interests).
This presupposes that everyone should vote only for their own self-interest. (Given that it is also in one’s self-interest not to alienate one’s relative or spouse.)
And so, I arrive at an important truth about the world: most people are delusional, and people are morally responsible for their delusions.
Which explains why we do instinctively think insanity is not a disease, but a moral failing.
The Bible knows this. This is why, for example, it makes acceptance of the dominion of God the first commandment. Not to see this, to be atheist or agnostic or polytheist, is a deliberate delusion.
And this, according to the Bible, is the litmus test for heaven: are you seeking truth, or not?
The archaic smile: a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.
Had a discussion with the chief of catechesis for my diocese. He reported that Pope Francis is reorganizing the Catholic Charismatic Renewal to focus as one of its priorities on helping the poor. Apparently it was previously deficient in this regard, and said function is not sufficiently covered by the rest of the church and Catholic Charities.
More broadly, he stressed Pope Francis’s belief that the key message of the church to Christians is joy.
Happy happy joy joy. Bobby McFadden stuff.
This is of a piece with the directive for those catechising children: that the sole message should be “God loves you.”
I have been brooding about this ever since. This is off the rails. We must have better from the church.
Helping the poor is of course good. This is uncontroversial, everyone agrees, and no reason to have a church, let alone a charismatic prayer group. Many secular authorities are on that case.
“Feeding the hungry” is indeed one of the corporeal works of mercy. However, it does not seem to me to be within the charism of the Charismatic Renewal, which stresses the spiritual, not the corporeal. For them, it looks like a rod shoved in their spokes, a demand for them to turn to the material and away from the spiritual. Their proper concern is the spiritual works of mercy: comfort to the afflicted, forgiveness, prayer.
Ending poverty is not the business of the church, not possible, and not desirable. “Ending poverty” is an idolatry. “The poor will be with you always.” Are we to take pity on and send money to the Franciscans and Poor Clares, who have taken vows of poverty? “Blessed are the poor.” Being poor is, literally, a blessing.
It is important to notice that what Jesus asks of us is not to give money or aid to “the poor” as such, but to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter the homeless. The distinction is important. We do this not because they are poor, but because they need something we have far more than we do. Their survival is more important that our comfort.
We are equally obliged to visit those in prison, or in hospital or old age homes. To put sole emphasis on “the poor” smacks of Marxist materialism.
As for the key message of the church being joy—isn’t that callous, when you are also obviously aware there are people going hungry, without shelter, without clothes, sick, old, in prison? Is the essential Christian message “I’m all right, Jack!”?
Jesus said the reverse: “blessed are those who mourn.” Did he ever say “blessed are the joyful”? No, again, the reverse: “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”
In Athens, I visited museums full of ancient sculpture, and another museum of early Christian icons. The striking difference between the two: the older pagan sculptures showed blank eyes and grins—the creepy “archaic smile.” The images of Christian saints showed faces that seemed sorrowful, eyes like dark wells that seemed grief-stricken at the world.
As one ought to be, once one realizes what should be.
The message of Christianity is not joy, but truth. Truth is harrowing. It is the mysterium termendum et fascinans. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy towards us, poor banished children of Eve, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Pope Francis is not Christian. He has not seen the world as it is.
Trump’s win is moving the Overton window rapidly in the US. Some people are going to be caught with their pyjamas down. The NYT and The View have caught the smell in the wind, and are trying to shift their tone. Trumpism, is now demonstrably the mainstream, and they risk either bankruptcy or irrelevance. The woke will soon be laughing stocks.
What does this mean in Canada? For Canda, just as for the rest of the developed West, the US sets the tone—more now than ever before, because we are so interconnected. Pierre Poilievre, in particular, has a tricky path. He needs to make rapid policy changes to more closely conform to Trump’s agenda, or start to look stale and conventional. He needs to make some striking new policy proposals to keep people’s excitement. He can’t just talk about the carbon tax.
This is a revolutionary period, and the revolution eats its children. You must race to stay in front of the parade, or be trampled by it.
Is Poilievre, and are the Conservatives, up to it? If not, Maxime Bernier might steal his thunder.
Trump’s drive to cut taxes and regulations and unleash oil
and gas is also going to force whomever is in government in Canada to do the
same. Otherwise investment will flood out of Canada into he US; the results
will be too obvious. Voters will not stand for it.
The times are bringing forth the heroes we need: the “Justice League” of superheroes that many are recognizing in Trump’s cabinet: Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Trump himself, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, and the rest. Even Ron Paul has apparently signed on.
What do they all have in common? That they bucked the consensus of those around them, in the various fields they are now about to be in charge of, and demonstrated moral courage.
The essence of the hero is moral courage. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, courage is the one essential virtue without which no other virtue is possible. Therefore, to be declared a saint in the Catholic church, one must have demonstrated “heroic virtue.”
Only when the social and cultural consensus in some time and place is in serious error is heroism either possible or necessary. Bad times generate heroes. Heroes emerge as the social background recedes from them, recedes from obvious truth, need, or virtue, exposing them.
The 1980s spontaneously generated heroes: Ronald Reagan in the US, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, John Paul II in the Church after years of confusion and managed decline. The Sixties and Seventies were pretty messed up.
Similarly, the crisis of the Second World War forced to the front Churchill, Tito, and De Gaulle.
We are at such a point, and quite evidently at a greater such inflection point than either of these former ones. The gravity of the situation is reflected I the fact of so many heroes emerging at once.
Not just in the US; the rot is everywhere. Milei in Argentina, Meloni in Italy, Wilders in the Netherlands. Farage in Britain; Poilievre in Canada; and so on. Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Billboard Chris, Tommy Robinson, the pundits and risk-takers at the Daily Wire, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and on and on. The heroes are mustering everywhere.
We are living in a heroic age, and the dark night may be over.
I am tutoring a high school student with his regular English literature course. They are studying Bram Stoker’s Dracula. They have been asked to interpret it using three lenses: a Marxist perspective, a feminist perspective, and a psychological perspective.
What is missing?
The obvious significance of Dracula is religious: it is all too heavy-handedly about the nature of evil and the nature of the human soul. This is not even touched on.
Stoker and his audience might have been familiar with Marx. Feminism or modern psychology would have been unknown to them.
I am told all texts in the course are subject to the same three analyses.
This is not knew. It was true when I was going through college and grad school in the 1970s. Religious or ethical concerns were never whispered at in English lit classes. Even though, as a historical fact, this would have been the primary concerns of any author up to at least the beginning of the 20th century. I often wondered why the later work of so many authors was ignored. I assumed poets must burn out. Instead, it was because with age they all tended to get too obviously religions.
We had to fill our essays and theses with Marxist, or feminist, or Freudian, or Jungian, or structuralist, readings of each text, knowing that they could not possibly be correct, and that the underlying theories had usually been discredited. A complete waste of time, made bearable only by the excuse to read the texts themselves. Much sound and fury, signifying nothing. While all the time, the meaning we were searching for was perfectly clear by reference to Christian principles.
We are deliberately avoiding religion and ethics in our education system, as though it is the proverbial third rail. Our children and youth are being deliberately directed away from any spiritual or ethical concerns.
And this has spread throughout society.
I have for almost two years been trying to set up a group of “Poets of Faith,” “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.” Yet over these two years, whenever I get a group together, and start a meeting, someone begins by objecting to the mention of a Supreme Being. The meeting dissolves in chaos, and I must start all over. Sisyphus, move over. Despite the stated purpose of the group, the premise under which it was convened and under which people agreed to attend: “who believe their craft is in service to a Supreme Being.”
I think this is the same problem, the same cancer. Even allowing others to form a group acknowledging the existence of God and some responsibility to him is not to be tolerated.
It is the same reason churches are being burned down across Canada, and priests assaulted at the altar. And black legends are spread about mass graves near residential schools.
This is no doubt why our arts are moribund and our civilization in decline. It is decadence.
The rumour is that Trump will name Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. This has caused consternation in some MAGA circles. Rubio has a reputation as a hawk, a “neo-con.” What happened to Trump’s commitment to peace? Couldn’t he have picked Tulsi Gabbard, say?
This is faulty thinking. I love Tulsi Gabbard, but she would be wrong for Secretary of State. She is too closely identified with the anti-war position. The only way to keep the peace is through deterrence. Trump needs somebody threatening, a bulldog, someone ready to pull the trigger, and, more importantly, someone adversaries believe is ready to pull the trigger. He needs a good cop/bad cop team.
Note how Trump has handled things before when conflict loomed: not just by rattling sabres or making threats, but by firing missiles and dropping bombs. Once by dropping the mother of all bombs. Then he can make a deal.
All my Chinese students, surprisingly, and all my friends in the Philippines, seem to support Trump.
Why? Trump seems to want to be tougher on China than the Democrats.
One student today tried to explain. The bottom line is that they believe Trump means peace. He may fight China economically, but he does not want war. They appreciate that. Of course all American presidents are for America, not for China, But they don’t want chaos.
And, my correspondent says, although Trump is tough on China in trade talks, Trump’s economic sanctions against China do not really seem to have been a big problem. He forced them to buy a huge quantity of American soybeans. A year later, Covid hit, and China was lucky to have those soybeans. Okay, he kept Huawei out of the US market; Huawei is now bigger than ever.
Perhaps these trade concessions were actually better for China. After all, what was lost by Chinese producers was generally gained by Chinese consumers.
As a Canadian, I had the same feelings about Trump’s renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was hoping the Americans would force the Canadian government to drop their egg and milk price-fixing. It would have been of great benefit to the Canadian consumer.
Beyond that, my student says, the Chinese find Trump humorous, and always interesting. They are accustomed to not taking anything at face value, and therefore do not get agitated by his rhetoric. They probably understand this, and get his sense of humour, better than Americans do: it is about face, about bargaining. You bargain for everything in China. You do not take it personally. Of course he is all about America first, but they think he is generally well-disposed enough towards China. And very funny.
This bodes well, I think, for Trump genuinely bringing about a period of peace and prosperity.
It all began, not with the pill, but with the development of mod cons after the Second World War: washing machines, driers, refrigerators, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners. The automation of the household.
At this point women lost their traditional role. Before about the fifties, a woman’s work was a full-time job. A man could not get by alone. If he was not married, and not with his parents, he lived in a boarding house.
Hugh Hefner capitalized on this change. A man could now manage his own “bachelor pad” and be a playboy. There was no need to marry. Women were just for sex.
At the same time, with automation, women were bored; there was not enough to fill their days. This was what Betty Friedan capitalized on: how boring life was in the suburbs. It is her actual complaint in The Feminine Mystique.
First they experimented with just making themselves busy by having a lot of children—the Baby Boom. Not good—work had not changed for men. The added financial burden with nothing in it for them drove men further into the Playboy Philosophy.
So, with Freidan's feminism, women used their free time instead for political agitation. And they demanded careers outside the home to fill their days.
So why marry?
The most common and obvious remaining reason, if the marriage .was not for love, was to guarantee regular sex Not a great incentive.
At this point, women had an advantage over men. Men generally want sex more than women do. It’s genetically programmed.
Exploiting this advantage, and their free time, feminism was able to run roughshod over men for a generation or two.
But now that has changed--with the ready availability of porn on the Internet. Men no longer really need women for sex. No doubt live sex is still better, but throw in the draconian laws feminists have imposed making marriage, sex, or any contact with women risky for men.
Women have overplayed their hand.
Young men are beginning to ask, what does a woman bring to the table, making a relationship with them worth the risk?
If the relationship is transactional, it is hard to see an answer.
For children? Yes, but women are programmed by nature to want children more than men do. They can physically have children with just a one-night stand, but it is hard to raise children on your own.
A man is also still valuable to a woman for protection, and for heavy lifting around the house. Women are simply not as physically strong as men.
But what does a real woman bring to make a man’s life better anymore? What can she do that he can’t do for himself? What does she bring that is worth the expense and the risk?
Suddenly men have all the chips in this game.
Women do not seem to realize this yet. They have been raised to view themselves as immensely valuable. Just for existing.
The result will be a rapid increase in the number of angry cat ladies, who will wonder what happened.
Since the call came down early this morning, I have encountered three leftists lamenting their loss to Trump. What most concerns them surprises me.
“Prices will go up,” one says.
“Don’t those stupid people realize it is not China that pays the tariffs? It’s the consumer!” another says.
So they don’t fear some Trump Nazi dictatorship, or the supposed loss of abortion rights. Those were just a cover story for the rubes, I guess. Of course they were: those were absurd on their face.
It is tariffs.
But then, how can their concern really be that prices will go up? After all, prices held steady through Trump’s first term; they went up dramatically under Biden. Their guy.
It is not prices. It is tariffs.
And not just any tariffs either.
After all, not long ago, it was the left that was opposed to free trade. The Canadian Liberal Pary lost my support over just that issue.
The only way I can see this making sense is that they fear tariffs will hurt China, and they are secretly rooting for China to defeat the evil capitalists to show that the Marxist system is best.
To be fair, not just China. They of course also want tariffs and trade barriers on Cuba dropped as well.
Trump does says he wants to impose more tariffs. It does seem common sense that this will raise prices. I have always been a free trader myself. But I am open to Trump’s arguments.
If it will raise prices, it will do other things as well. I was convinced by Trump’s argument for tariffs on steel: it is strategically important not to rely on some foreign source for essential materials. This makes you vulnerable to blockade in time of war. Or, as we have seen recently, times of epidemic.
It will further encourage more manufacturing, and more economic activity, at home. This is Trump’s current argument. Things may cost more money, but more of the money stays in the USA, instead of being drained away to China or some other nation. When you look at it in those terms, of the economy as a whole, might tariffs actually conserve, i.e., save, money? Don’t you save money by keeping it in the household, making your own things, darning your own socks, growing your own garden, instead of spending it at the store?
And Trump has raised another issue. The extra money from tariffs goes to fund our government. Trump suggested this might even replace income tax.
The argument that tariffs are being paid by the consumer, not by China, is being made by the same people who keep selling or buying the idea that taxes on “big corporations,” or a raised minimum wage, is money taken from the corporation, and not the consumer. Same to same.
So the real question is whether it is better to pay your taxes as tariffs, or as income tax. The foreign goods actually remain the same price.
Paying taxes on consumption rather than income is more voluntary, and that seems a good thing. Taxing income naturally serves to suppress initiative or hard work, and takes money the individual might have better use for—such as investing it to improve their business, hence the economy. With a tax on consumption, you can reduce your tax burden by reducing your consumption of foreign goods. It encourages saving and investing rather than spending.
Granted, an economy needs consumers as well as producers. But on balance, surely someone who overproduces is more valuable to the economy and to the rest of us than someone who overconsumes. And if producers can be found abroad, as now, surely consumers can be too.
Kamala Harris has by come commentators been nicknamed “Kamala Chameleon,” because she seems to tell every interest group whatever they want to hear. She is against fracking; she is for fracking. She is against a border wall; she is for a border wall. She wants to confiscate guns; she is for the Second Amendment.
This, since she herself raised the comparison, is something else she and the Democrats have in common with Hitler. This is why historians have trouble classifying Nazi ideology, have trouble defining what Nazism actually was. As William L. Shirer observed in following Hitler’s rise, he would simply promise every crowd whatever he thought they most wanted to hear.
This makes sense, because Nazism’s core value was simply power, ultimately power in the hands of one man. Like the modern left, it saw all of human society as a power struggle. The goal was (and is) to get more power for yourself, not to advance anyone else’s interests. So you make whatever promises will achieve this. Once in power, you then do as you like.
Another way in which the modern Democrats echo the Nazis is in their embrace of the propaganda technique of the “big lie”: that if you keep repeating something often enough, it comes to be, or be accepted as, truth. This is the fundamental ideology of postmodernism. It is why they can assert that men become women, and vice versa, by saying so, and it must then be illegal for anyone to say otherwise. They use the big lie on the hustings again and again, asserting the Russian collusion hoax, the fine people hoax, the Vance sofa hoax, the Liz Cheney firing squad hoax, the drink bleach hoax, and a dozen others, knowing they are debunked.
It is the eve of the US elections, and the polls are contradictory—Including polls from previously highly accurate pollsters. Just the other day, one highly reliable pollster showed Harris up by three in Iowa, and another that Trump will win by seven. That’s no margin of error.
I think polling is no longer a science; I guess because people no longer answer their phones or are prepared to tell a stranger how they will vote. It is hair-raising to hear a pollster talk about all the adjustments they make to the raw data. I also keep hearing them cite polls, even their own, and then say “but I can’t believe that’s right.” In the end, they are guessing.
We should have a clearer idea by this time tomorrow.
God seems to have intervened again in the US election, again in Trump’s favour. The issue of the day is, unexpectedly, the killing of Peanut the squirrel by the NY state government. This seems well timed and calculated to endorse Trump’s message of less government regulation. It should also remind everyone of his “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” comments at the Harris debate; and seems to reinforce them. Big government does not care about animals. And people generally care more about their pets than other people.
Incidentally, it irritates me that commentators, even those opposed to the government’s action, keep referring to Peanut and Fred the Raccoon being “euthanized.” “Euthanasia” properly refers to mercy killing. This includes when it is done to animals—we do not refer to a chicken or a cow being “euthanized” at the abattoir, even though every effort is made to make their death painless. It counts as euthanasia if the likely alternative is suffering for the animal. Peanut and Fred were executed or killed by the state, not euthanized.
And since I mentioned it, about the phrase “they’re killing the dogs. They’re killing the cats!” Notice how often Trump’s comments are made into rap memes. It shows his profound talent as a rhetorician. His cadences are naturally musical. They are also naturally comic; timing is everything in comedy, and Trump has a perfect ear for rhythm and timing. This makes him always enjoyable and memorable to listen to.
He is completely aware of this; he works at it. Talking to Joe Rogan, he demurred that “Communist Kamala” was not an ideal insult, because it is hard to say. The rhythm is not great. He knows what he is doing.
It seems obvious that God is helping Donald Trump. There is his miraculous survival of an assassination attempt, obviously. But we have just seen something else miraculous.
Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally should have been a powerful ending to his campaign. It seemed to me to make the point that all the coolest and smartest people were supporting Trump: Musk, Carlson, Ramaswamy, Vance, Gabbard, Kennedy, Hogan, Melania Trump, Dr. Phil. People with a lot of charisma and with independent followings.
This it seemed to me was an important message. The left has been able to run for some time on the premise that they were the cool kids, the club you wanted to join, with the parties you wanted to be invited to. The glamorous red carpet crowd.
MSG seemed well calculated to end that. Now there was a cooler group of kids.
An essential part of that was to have a good comedian to warm up the crowd; show “we” are the ones who have fun at our parties. Comedians have been in the forefront of the culture war, for this reason, all along.
Unfortunately, the chosen comedian, Tony Hinchcliffe, a fine comedian, made a serious misstep. He referred to Puerto Rico, jokingly, as “an island of garbage floating in the Atlantic.” It did not matter that the joke obviously fell flat with his audience—he was not expressing the opinion of the room, let alone of Trump, who was not present. This was a gift to the opposition that looked about to overshadow the entire affair, and end Trump’s campaign on a bad note. To kill all the good of the rally.
But then God intervened. Harris held her own closing rally, at the Ellipse in Washington. As she was speaking, Joe Biden was on a video call responding to Hinchcliffe’s joke by calling Trump supporters the real garbage.
Now any harm caused by Hinchcliffe’s ill-advised joke was miraculously turned instead on the Democrats. Not fair to blame Harris for what Biden said? Surely more reasonable than to blame Trump for what some comedian said. Hinchcliffe was joking; comedians have license to say outrageous things. Biden was not joking. Biden obviously meant the people themselves—and Hinchcliffe probably did not. The most reasonable interpretation of what Hinchcliffe said is that he was referring to actual garbage. Which is a recognized problem in Puerto Rico. If he did mean the people, Hinchcliffe was calling 3 million people garbage. Biden was calling 150 million people garbage. Hinchcliffe can be forgiven for saying something politically unwise; he’s a comic, not a politician. Biden is an experienced politician and president of the US. His words matter far more, and must be taken far more seriously.
Levels of magnitude worse.
Now both Hinchcliffe’s joke and Harris’s closing message are totally eclipsed by Biden’s remark. What looked like a blow to the Trump campaign has become a serious blow to Harris’s, in the dying days of the campaign.
I now predict Trump will not only win all the “seeing states”: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. He will also win Virginia and New Hampshire.
Not because the polls are wrong. It has long made me nervous that Republicans have casually assumed the polls will undercount Trump supporters. First, being a Trump supporter is more acceptable now than it was; we should see fewer “shy Tories.” This needs to be taken into account. Second, this assumes the polls have not been able to correct for previous undercounts. Surely they are trying to do so; how can we just assume they have failed? Third, the concept of “push polls,” partisan Democratic pollsters faking their results to make Harris look stronger, makes no sense. The political polls are done primarily as advertising by the pollsters to attract corporate clients. Publicizing a poll that turns out to be inaccurate is obviously against their interests. At least close to the voting date, their polls are bound to be as accurate as they can make them.
But I predict a stronger than expected Trump showing because, as they say, polls are just a snapshot. You need to look at trends. Trump has the momentum, and that momentum should continue up to polling day, pushing his numbers higher than they look now. The Biden comment ensures the momentum for Trump continues, perhaps grows. Second, any voters undecided this late in an election cycle tend to break against the incumbent party. They are almost by definition unsatisfied with the most obvious choice, which would be the incumbents. They are looking for alternatives.
It is grimly comic that the Harris campaign has in the dying days of the election whittled down their argument to the claim that Donald Trump is a Fascist.
For this is a perfecdt illustration of the popular misreading of Godwin’s Law: “the first party to mention Hitler has lost the argument.”
Either inadvertently or semi-consciously, they are conceding the election. They are telling us they know they have lost.
They are also projecting. Fascisim is indead among us once again, and a clear and present danger. But it is the Kamalites, wokes, and Democrats who are fascists.
What is fascism: at or near its essence, it is the collective over the individual. That is what the symbol of the fasces illustrates. This is the postmodern opinion, prevalent on the left: reality itself is a social construct. The individual exists only as part of the group. Hence the leftist/Democratic stress on ethnic identity, intersectionality, and group rights over individual rights.
As an economic system, fascism is a cartel formed by government in collusion with big business. Corporations become an arm of government, doing its bidding. Which has clearly happened under the Democrats over the last few years, with corporations enforcing censorship, enforcing vaccine mandates, while small businesses and competition are crushed by government policies.
Fascism is totalitarian: the government claims the right to dictate even the details of our lives. “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” as Mussolini put it. It is the left that demands more laws and regulations. It is the left that declares “the personal is political.” It is the left that wants to police even the pronouns we can use.
Fascism believes that reality is a social construct. Mussolini said, “Fascism is relativism.” The state can invent reality. This is what the left believes today: it believes it can declare a man a woman, or invent new genders. This is why it believes so fiercely in censorship: saying a thing is so makes it so.
The state also gets to decide right and wrong. Fascism rejects “conventional morality.” The Nazis called it “slave morality.” And the modern left rejects it. This frees them to do whatever they want in moral terms.
This suspends the “do unto others” principle, and frees those in power to abuse unfavoured groups. The latter have no rights; their existence does not serve the collective. In Nazi Germany, Roma, Slavs, and Jews. In leftist America, white “cis” males, Asians, increasingly white women.
And this leads to holocaust. In Germany, as we all know, the Jews, the Roma. In modern America, unborn children. Soon, if Canada’s model is followed, the poor and infirm. Their existence is inconvenient.
I think it’s worth considering whether Justin Trudeau’s entire career as Canada’s PM has been the Liberal Party’s dead cat bounce.
I’ve long thought Jean Chretien destroyed the Liberal Party by making the party structure dictatorial, entirely top-down, the leader getting to choose or refuse local candidates. This might have been convenient for the leader, but it cut the party off from the grassroots. No surprise that it drifted away from any base over the years, and began to listen only to echoes and its own elites.
That almost already killed it under Ignatieff. It was running on fumes. It has to take a bit of time to kill what had become the Natural Governing Party. That implies a lot of inertia. Even so, choosing Trudeau as leader looked like a desperation move, to keep those yellow dog Grit instincts alive by evoking the sainted memory of his father.
About a generation seems right for the death throes of such a large cultural artefact. You need a full generation of new voters to break the spell. Chretien left office in 2003.
And Trudeau the Lesser never did that well. He lost the popular vote in all but his first election, when he was a novelty and could make the matrons swoon. Against Scheer and O’Toole, both of whom chose the appalling strategy of trying to sell themselves as just like Trudeau. As soon as Canadians were offered, with Poilievre, a clear alternative, the wheels came off the little red bandwagon.
When it works, it works, but the life of a centrist party is always precarious. Maybe more suited to the Canadian temperament than most others, but it can easily be squeezed into oblivion by any passionate disagreement between left and right. The British Liberal Party died, as any real contender, in the 1920s. In Canada, centrist parties have been squeezed out in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
I predict that Justin Trudeau or the federal Liberal Party without him will lose the next election. Nor can they save themselves with any new leader. And I predict they will never return to power.
A certain sister of my acquaintance worries if she is guilty of the sin of pride. For usually, when she goes out to eat at some restaurant, she concludes she could have cooked the meal better herself at home. How likely is that?
Fairly likely, in fact. There is a reason so many restaurants offer “home cooked meals,” or call themselves “Mom’s.”
In the real world, it is hard to judge whether your idea that you could do better than some professional is a matter of pride, or simply true. Somebody, in the end, has to be the world’s best chef; and he cannot be accused of pride for thinking so.
Many people are falsely accused of pride out of envy. Anyone who is especially good at anything will be accused of pride. It is a way for those less competent to cope. I realized this back in the days of Pierre Trudeau as Canadian PM. He was constantly being accused of arrogance. It was obvious to me that he was not arrogant; he was just a lot smarter than the journalists questioning him, and was not prepared to pretend he was stupid for their benefit. Why does he have any such obligation?
And this, pretending to be dumb, is a difficult skill to master. Ronald Reagan pulled it off—but he was a trained actor. Donald Trump pulls it off, despite his Ivy League education, and it is the secret to his political success. In Canada, Jean Chretien had the knack, or Ralph Klein. Michael Ignatieff went down to defeat because he hadf not learned it. People hate those more competent than themselves, and will want to hurt them. Most often by calling them proud or arrogant.
But Adam could easily be accused of pride had he refused to take his wife’s advice and eat the damned apple. How dare he assume he knew better than she?
So people are about equally likely to underestimate or to overestimate their abilities, to be too proud of them or not proud enough of them, because the opinions of those around them are not a reliable measure.
We know in our hearts that this sort of pride, confidence in your own abilities, is not sinful. I remember some friend remarking kindly to my grandmother, “you must be proud of your children.” And I winced at her answer: “Of course not. Pride is a sin!” We know in our hearts that was a nasty bit of Pharisaism. Of course one should be proud of one’s legitimate accomplishments, and those of one’s children, or one’s nation. There is a passage in Yeats:
For Parnell was a proud man, No prouder trod the ground, And a proud man's a lovely man, So pass the bottle round.
We know pride, personal dignity, is a good. It is a form of integrity. The misunderstanding that Christian morality rejects this has been a common enough cause of souls going astray, making it seem a “slave morality,” in Nietzsche’s term.
William Blake taught the essential measure: “humble before God, not before men.” That is the only test. To be humble before the next guy you talk to has an even chance of being an idolatry. But one must always submit to the wisdom and the justice of God. You kneel to God; you do not kneel to tyrants, or your fellow man. You pray for guidance and for perspective.
The root of the current drive for censorship, “deplatforming,” cancel culture, and unfriending, which has destroyed so many lives and so many relationships, is simple and obvious. Too many people are lying; especially people in power. You never want to silence anything you believe is untrue. There is no drive to censor the claim that the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Conversely, you never want to end debate if you believe you are telling the truth. If you discover the earth goes around the sun, contrary to what others have assumed, your instinct is not to suppress the field of astronomy. It is to publish, present your arguments, and take the win.
Therefore, what we are not permitted to say is a reliable indicator of what is true.
An obvious current example is the drive to criminalize any claim that the Indian Residential schools in Canada were not genocidal, or that there are no mass graves of students.
I suppose I’d better not proceed to other examples. It is, after all, taking a risk. But you can find them for yourself.
Once one becomes committed to any one lie, there is a multiplier effect: truth in general begins to look threatening. You will want to restrict speech as a matter of principle. .Who knows otherwise what might slip out?
And underlying the commitment to a lie is a growing popular philosophy that we are gods and can decide for ourselves what we want to be true.
A thing what went around the internet some time ago: women asking their husbands and boyfriends how often they think of the Roman Empire. And being shocked to hear that men commonly think of it every day.
This is a good illustration of the difference between the male and female minds. We have, thanks to feminism, spent decades pretending that men and women are the same but for a few specific body parts. Otherwise feminism collapses: there may then be a good reason why there are more men in engineering, say, or higher management, and more women in nursing or secretarial positions.
Men think of the Roman Empire often, because it is the foundation of our civilization. Most notably, it is when and where Christianity emerged; but we also owe to the Romans much of our legal system, our languages, our writing system, our calendar, our customs, our political structures.
And men spontaneously take responsibility for keeping things on course, for society as a whole. Forget the Roman Empire, and we forget where we came from and where we are going. The ship drifts aimlessly onto the shoals.
Women do not have such worries. For them, he personal is the only political.
This is also why men can read maps, and women get lost. I used to do a little test in my classes: first, I would ask all the women, and only the women, to point North. They would have no idea. Then I would ask the men. Most would be able to do so.
Men have an internal compass in all matters, not just geography, pointing to absolute terms of reference. Women lack this. Exploring, women navigate by visible landmarks and asking directions. Their perceptions are purely situational and relative. Men will navigate by compass direction and absolute distances.
It is all of course designed this way, by God or nature, so than men and women are compatible; so they can form a permanent, mutually supporting union to nurture children. The man leads, and the women is the perfect “help-meet,” as Genesis prescribes.
Men are better in maths, and gravitate to maths, because math deals in absolutes. Women are better in language, and gravitate to language, because language is all about synchronizing with others.
As a result, it is a fundamental error to put women in leadership positions. With rare exceptions, they will almost immediately lose sight of the mandate and wander down primrose paths to unpredictable destinations. Their job may be to sell beer; instead, they will devote the company’s advertising budget to something like promoting transgenderism; or nicer offices for the staff.
To put women in leadership positions is, therefore, a way for any organization, nation or civilization to self-destruct.
This is of course why Saint Paul said women should keep silence in church. The Buddha similarly resisted allowing women to become mendicants, saying the dharma would deteriorate twice as fast as a result.
As always, there is something to be said for the wisdom of the ages.
Here’s a cheerful thought. Our current leaders seem to be the least competent and most corrupt in modern times. The elites seem to have gone mad. And yet—I have never been one to admire politicians. Those I genuinely admired in the past could be counted on the fingers of one hand: Bryce Mackasey, Eugene McCarthy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Men of genuine principle.
Yet there are suddenly a lot of public figures out there I genuinely admire, and would vote for with enthusiasm: Pierre Poilievre, J.D. Vance, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard.
I may be culturally prejudiced here. One thing I notice is that most of these figures are Irish and Catholic. All except Tulsi Gabbard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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