Stephen Roney's Blog, page 121

An Alarming Warning

 

... from Jordan Peterson.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Coming Winter

 

I feel a tipping point has been reached. If my instinct is right, the tipping point was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. The crazy woke left and the bureaucratic elites have held things together with bullying and fear. But the problem with that tactic is fragility. Once the dam starts to crack, things can happen fast.

The dam is starting to crack.

The latest big-budget movies and TV shows peddling the left-wing message have bombed spectacularly: She-Hulk, Rings of Power. People aren’t buying it any more. Shia Labeouf has just released an explicitly religious pop song with Kanye West. Tim Poole’s pop song is currently number two on iTunes. Polls suggest young people are going conservative in Canada. CNN is firing all their overtly left-wing on air “talent.” 

This winter is predicted to be rough. That is further going to turn people against those in power, on a charge of incompetence.

A new era is about to begin.

Of course, not as epochal as Cohen suggests in the clip above. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

More from Poilievre on Plain Language

 

A winning issue with me.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Huge Brazilian Ivermectin Study

 

... shows it highly effective against COVID. 

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Darth Biden

 

Biden appeared last night before a darkly lit blood red backdrop, with marines at attention behind him, and declared “MAGA Republicans” an existential threat to American democracy.

People are calling this tone-deaf. After all, it made him look and sound like a dictator.

I don’t think this was unintended. It is too obvious. 

The idea is to intimidate. 

It is of a piece with what Biden said earlier that day, mocking gun rights: “you need something more than guns to fight the government. You need F-15s.” 

That was a threat. Just try to come at us, little people.

Biden’s America is following Trudeau’s Canada, Ardern’s New Zealand, Witte’s Netherlands, Xi’s China, in rapidly becoming authoritarian, totalitarian, fascist. In turning on their own population.

They would not do this if they were not scared. This is the “fight or flight” response.

Something is going to give, I think within the next year. Things cannot go on much longer in the direction they are going.

Governments are going to fall.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Does the Bible Endorse Sin?

 

Jephthah's daughter
Something puzzles me. 

In a recent column, friend Xerxes claims that the Bible endorses child sacrifice, because in it Jephthah sacrifices his daughter; it endorses incest because Lot has sex with his daughters; and it endorses prostitution because Tamar prostitutes herself.

To be fair to Jephthah and Lot, as the Bible tells it, they do these things unintentionally. An unintended action is not sinful.

But the broader point is that, because the Bible reports a thing happened, does not imply that the Bible endorses it. The Bible says that Adam and Eve ate the apple; does that mean they should have? The Bible reports that Herod killed the innocents. Does that mean he should have? It reports that the Romans crucified Christ. Does that mean it endorses the crucifixion of Christ?

When I called him on this, Xerxes did not make the argument; but perhaps in his own mind he was making a distinction between those the Bible presents as protagonists and those it presents as antagonists. If so, the Bible also endorses murder; both David and Moses murder people. Adam was the Bible’s first protagonist, the first patriarch, and he was hardly without sin.

To lengthen the list of sinning protagonists would be tiresome; the Bible does not represent anyone but perhaps Enoch as without sin. That’s what cheap novels do. The Bible is not a cheap novel. That is the ugly world of plaster saints.

Xerxes’s defence, rather, was that to claim the Bible was simply reporting, was reading the Bible just as one would a newspaper. And this amounted to a denial of the special sacredness of the Bible.

For the life of me, I cannot see his point. I imagine that, in his mind, there is some radical distinction between “truth” and “Truth.” I can see none. But then too, I can see no distinction between soul and consciousness, and many seem to want to make the soul something mysterious.

I suspect that any hard line between truth and Truth is an attempt to claim a license to lie. Any attempt to make a distinction between soul and consciousness is an attempt to deny the reality of the soul.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Rave Reviews for ArriveCAN

 

The Canadian government’s ArriveCAN app is collecting a historic number of highly favourable reviews in the app stores.

This is odd, because in the normal course of things, not that many people would have used it. And the reviews posted online on the web seem generally negative.

It is surely clear that the Canadian government is paying someone to post positive reviews. Either bots, or some large group of people. This is a trick the Chinese government has perfected: they have a “ten cent army” of reviewers they pay to post positive and negative reviews online. Indeed, given the volume of favourable reviews and the likely expense, it seems a reasonable guess that the Canadian government has cut a deal with the CCP to use their ten cent army for this. 

And this fits a pattern.

The current Canadian governmet is pushing the ArriveCan app very hard. According to one of the main organizers at the time, it was the requirement to use the app, more than the requirement to get vaccinated in itself, that sparked the trucker protests back in February. They realized it was being used to identify them before they approached the border. In other words, it allows the government to track us at all times. 

The tourism industry and border city governments have been complaining loudly of how it is destroying their business. Tourism is a huge industry, and one that causes relatively little harm to the environment. One would expect that promoting it would be a government priority. 

Yet despite this, despite the fact that other countries have ended border restrictions, and despite the fact that the pandemic has subsided, the federal government has not backed down, but has doubled down. They are promoting ArriveCan as something permanent. And we see they are pushing the app aggressively, by fair means or foul.

Surely this has to be a plan to impose a Chinese “social credit” system on the Canadian population. China can track its citizens through their phones, and know where they are, whom they are talking to, and what they are purchasing. In case of need, they can shut down their phones, freeze their bank accounts, and grab them off the street.

Unthinkable in Canada? This is just what the Canadian government did in response to the Freedom Convoy protests. It was a trial run. With this system, soon, as in China, organized opposition to government will no longer be possible. 

Pair this up with a shift to Dominion voting machines, apparently happening now in Canada, just as their reliability has been credibly thrown into question in the US, and no Canadian government need ever worry about the people again. No Canadian government—but from then on, there would be no alternation of Canadian governments, either, would there?

Really, as paranoid as this sounds, what other explanation can there be?

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Poilievre on Plain :Language

 

Pierre Poilievre just keeps coming up with winning policies. This one should get the adrenaline pumping for writers and editors. Deliberately obtuse language costs us all a huge amount, and enforcing a Plain Language Policy alone should be a major boost to the economy.

I fear, however, that Poilievre will face fierce opposition. This means less work for lawyers and accountants.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

Rebel News on the Kamloops Mass Graves

 

This is a trailer for a new documentary.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.

The Backlash in Europe

 

A backlash against high levels of immigration is underway in Europe. Denmark now wants to send refugees from Syria back. If they cannot, they will round them up and put them in camps. Sweden wants to stop accepting refugees. Britain voted for Brexit to cut the flow of immigration, and is now sending refugees to Rwanda. Hungary has built a wall. Politicians have found it necessary to take these positions, which only a little while ago they would have condemned as “far right” and beyond the pale, due to public outcry. 

Politicians in Canada would be wise to take note. This convoy is almost surely headed our way. Those who tie themselves too tightly to the mast of multiculturalism may soon find they have no support.

The problem is not immigration as such; at least that is what the politicians say; and I believe them. We need immigration. It is the failure to integrate. This means social division and high crime rates. It turns out that diversity is not our strength. Strength is from movement towards unity, “e pluribus unum.”

And the problem is not racism or discrimination against immigrants. The problem is that some immigrants discriminate.

Compare Chinese with Japanese Canadians. There has been at least as much discrimination against Japanese immigrants as Chinese—most North Americans can’t tell the difference visually, and if they can, history gives more reason to resent the Japanese. The Chinese were never interred. However, much as I love the Chinese, Chinese do not integrate, and the Japanese do. The Chinese stick together in “Chinatowns.” Japanese intermarry and engage with the culture. There are no, or few, “Japantowns.”

When Europeans move into some other country and then stay aloof, sticking to their own neighbourhoods and not learning the language or culture, we condemn this. We see them as colonizers. 

It works the same way regardless of skin colour. Immigrants who do not integrate are colonizers. They want to change the country they come to to suit them; and this quite properly causes resentment among those already there. They have their own culture, have a right to it, and want to preserve it. Unlike the immigrants, they did not make a choice to change.

An intelligent government can predict and should distinguish among immigrant groups who will strengthen the country, and who will lead to problems. Much is predictable based on cultural characteristics. Chinese, for example, do not integrate well because Confucianism does not recognize any responsibility towards anyone with whom you do not have some formal relationship. Strangers are ghosts. Therefore foreigners are ghosts.

You can also see it from experience. Filipinos are good at integrating. Greeks make good immigrants. Koreans make good immigrants. Sikhs make good immigrants. Jews make good immigrants. Lebanese Christians make good immigrants. They are quickly contributing to the mainstream culture.

Muslims make poor immigrants, for predictable reasons. Islam is not compatible with liberal democracy, Canadian social norms, and religious pluralism. In principle, in Islam, no government is legitimate that is not Muslim, and enforcing Islam as state religion. No law is legitimate that does not conform to shariah law. 

Accordingly, any Muslim immigrant is in principle hostile to the government and alienated from the non-Muslim majority.

You may well argue that this assumption is not fair to “moderate Muslims.” But if someone is prepared to reject the moral code with which they were raised, and which they claim to follow, are they a good bet to be a moral person? Are they not also likely to be a problem, perhaps a worse problem?

I say this with great respect to Islam and to my own Muslim friends. Islam is an admirable ethical system; but it is not compatible with immigration to and assimilation to a non-Muslim nation. Muslims themselves will insist this is so: whenever numbers warrant, they will demand a separate state.

'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.