Stephen Roney's Blog, page 213
December 8, 2020
Of Fig Trees and the Banality of Evil
Now in the morning, as he returned to the city, he was hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the road, he came to it and found nothing on it but leaves. He said to it, “Let there be no fruit from you forever!”
Immediately the fig tree withered away.
- Matthew 21, WEB
Many find this passage odd; yet versions appears in three of four Gospels. What does Jesus have against an innocent fig tree?
Perhaps it is meant to repeat and reinforce a message found often elsewhere in the gospels, in different ways: by their fruits you will know them.
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits you will know them. Do you gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree produces good fruit, but the corrupt tree produces evil fruit. A good tree can’t produce evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree produce good fruit. Every tree that doesn’t grow good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
--Matthew 7, WEB.
The traditional understanding of “fruits” here, especially for Catholics, is of course “good deeds.” Moral behavior.
This does not work well, however; because Jesus elsewhere says we should perform our good deeds in secret. And any clever con artist knows enough to perform good deeds in order to deceive--what else does “wolf in sheep’s clothing” mean?
So what then are our fruits?
Fruits may instead mean works of art or craft. This may then be what Jesus means when he tells us to “let our light shine,” “be like a city on a hill.” A city is, after all, a massive work of art or craft.
But then the image is not perfect; since fruit suggests nature rather than handicraft or manufacture.
The most obvious, literal meaning is simply that we can judge a person by looking at their children.
I think that is right.
If some young person is in turmoil, engaging in self-destructive behavior, seems spiritless, or acts immorally, the parent is probably at least in part to blame. If a child’s life seems significantly less successful than their parents, then the parent is liable to be at least in part to blame.
And this is in turn the surest way to spot a bad person. For it is difficult otherwise. Bad people who are at least halfway intelligent are going to wear sheep’s clothing; their malice will be carefully hidden from view. But their children are defenseless, their power over them, when young, absolute. Everything is literally behind closed doors. Their own children are the perfect victims.
Which brings us to Hunter Biden, and his spectacularly self-destructive behavior.
You might object that the son or daughter of any very prominent person might suffer as a result of living in their shadow, and so be tempted to such errant behavior.
Yet this is demonstrably not so. Compare Donald Trump’s children. They all seem to be doing well. Notably, Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner, is himself a successful businessman with a prominent role in her father’s administration. This is striking, because any narcissistic father will resent the spouses of their children, especially their daughter. George H.W. Bush’s sons also obviously did quite well.
Hunter is acting out the classic role of black sheep, familiar in almost any dysfunctional family. His father is a monster. Joe Biden is the banal, congenial, classical mask of evil.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 7, 2020
Mollie Hemingway Fact-Checks the Fact Checkers
And, unsurprisingly, finds them utterly unreliable on the Georgia vote video.
December 6, 2020
Canada Frog-Marches on to Progressive Hell
Call me Ishmael.My gauche columnist pal Xerxes is currently celebrating Canadian Bill C-6, “An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (conversion therapy).” He endorses it as a breakthrough in recognizing human rights, and titles his column “Conversion therapy is criminal coercion.”
In charity, I can only say that he has been misinformed. Bill C-6 is not about therapy done, in Xerxes’s words, “against a person’s will.” That would already be a serious crime: kidnapping. No need for any new law.
Rather, the law bans conversion therapy as such: defined as “a practice that seeks to change an individual's sexual orientation to heterosexual, to repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviours, or to change an individual's gender identity to match the sex they were assigned at birth.” It prohibits advertising or profiting from such a service.
This is discriminatory: it bars homosexuals from a treatment they might desire. And not only for religious or ethical reasons. Think about it from their perspective. Imagine the situation if perhaps 98% of those to whom you are physically attracted are uninterested in a relationship at best. And you usually do not know which ones. Only once you get past those overwhelming odds do you begin to encounter the level of failure in love that makes all the rest of us suffer so much; that caused the suicide of sorrowful young Werther. The constant rejection, the constant unrequited eros, must be crippling to one’s self-image and emotional well-being.
But now any escape from this situation, if possible, is prohibited.
It also opens any religious group to prosecution and suppression. For all major established religions preach that homosexual sex is sinful, and that one should resist such temptations. Doesn’t this make religion per se a “service that seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation”?
Far from advancing human rights, this directly violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
This is without getting in to the issue of seeking to realign one’s “gender identity” with one’s biology, one’s actual sex. If we accept this logic, we would have to make all psychiatry illegal as discriminatory: its entire purpose is to align our thoughts with external, physical reality.
Perhaps there is an argument to be made, that psychiatry in all cases violates our freedom of thought. Perhaps we want to argue, too, that psychiatry must never be permitted, as it is now, to impose treatments against a patient’s will. But that is another discussion.
Merriam-Webster defines “delusion” in its psychological sense as: “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.”
To prohibit care to anyone with this particular delusion, that although they are biologically male, they are “really” a woman, or vice versa, is discriminatory; we would not refuse treatment for any other psychosis. And the suicide rate for those with this condition is extremely high.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30009750/
Not to mention that this delusion, or belief, regularly leads to self-mutilation and other behaviours dangerous to heath: hormone treatments and cutting off portions of one’s anatomy.
Your response, gentle reader, might be that such therapies do not work, and so, like fortune-telling, they can be prohibited as a form of fraud. However, Canada’s criminal code needs to be consistent: the laws against witchcraft and fortune-telling have been removed. Nor do we ban chiropractic, or herbalism, or any number of medical and psychiatric practices that have no scientific proof of efficacy.
Does conversion therapy work? While any given approach might or might not, the proposition that one’s ideas cannot be changed with regard to either one’s perceived gender or one’s sexual orientation is obviously untrue. We are not robots; we can change our minds, and it is dehumanizing to suggest we cannot. Many people do attest to having changed their minds about either their sexuality or their gender. We hear frequently enough of people who have been living as a heterosexual declaring themselves homosexual, or as a man declaring themselves a woman. It is inconsistent to assume that all such transitions can only be in one direction, away from biological reality. And probably you, like I, know some personally whose convictions have indeed moved in the opposite direction. Although such contrary movements are never reported in the media.
Human rights are now subverted wholesale.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 5, 2020
The Manchurian Candidate
Biden His Time?
A big point of having a democracy is that the leaders are beholden to the people. The problem with letting Biden become president is that he apparently is not. He is beholden so some unknown person or persons who engineered his nomination and election.
We do not know who they are; we do not know what they want. But they will have their demands, it must be something important, it must be something they cannot afford to let the rest of us know about, and he will have to accede.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
A Poetry Slam
A recent example of the growing racism in Canada: I recently received a Facebook announcement for a Poetry Slam. Poets were invited to sign up, to be chosen by lottery. However, just below this was the note, in large print, “60% of slam spots reserved for Black and Indigenous poets.”
Couldn’t be more blatant than that.
The invitation was illustrated by a photo of a woman wearing a black t-shirt reading “NOT TODAY COLONIZER.”
Segregation, racial quotas, and hate speech, too. Lynchings next. I would be concerned about attending such an event while white, Jewish, or Asian. Poetry slams can get emotional.
The event is free for blacks and indigenous; $14 for all others, explicitly as a form of “redistribution/reparations.” (Although they say nobody will be turned away for lack of funds.)
Interesting that this is one post Facebook neither flags nor bans. Just to see what would happen, I reported it, and they quickly assured me that it violated none of their "community standards."
Welcome to the Weimar Republic.
December 4, 2020
War Drums Along the Potomac
The revelations from Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell may not be enough to prompt the Supreme Court or Congress to overturn the election. But they are already enough to convince just about everyone on the right that the election results are not legitimate.
The great strength of democracy is that, having voted, everyone feels they have a stake in the government, and this prompts most of us to comply with the laws and the rules. This is suddenly no longer so in the USA.
We now have the worst possible scenario. If Biden is allowed to take office, the right will not accept it, Even commentators who scoffed at it until a few weeks ago, are now talking revolution, martial law, or civil war. If Trump is left in office, the left will erupt in new violence. And there will be demands from his supporters for a clampdown. These people, after all, have been shown now to be treasonous.
We have been dumb lucky so far that only the left has been trying to impose their will by violence. It is going to get far messier if now there are two sides.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
War Drums Along the :Potomac
The revelations from Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell may not be enough to prompt the Supreme Court or Congress to overturn the election. But they are already enough to convince just about everyone on the right that the election results are not legitimate.
The great strength of democracy is that, having voted, everyone feels they have a stake in the government, and this prompts most of us to comply with the laws and the rules. This is suddenly no longer so in the USA.
We now have the worst possible scenario. If Biden is allowed to take office, the right will not accept it, Even commentators who scoffed at it until a few weeks ago, are now talking revolution, martial law, or civil war. If Trump is left in office, the left will erupt in new violence. And there will be demands from his supporters for a clampdown. These people, after all, have been shown now to be treasonous.
We have been dumb lucky so far that only the left has been trying to impose their will by violence. It is going to get far messier if now there are two sides.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
The Threat from Danish Mink
There is a possibility they may spread coronavirus to a reservoir in nature.
December 3, 2020
The Mask of Authoritarianism
Icarus asserts his liberty.My friend Xerxes, the left-leaning columnist, has recently made the Orwellian assertion that anyone who resists wearing a mask is an authoritarian.
No doubt he is sincere; Project Veritas recently released recordings of internal conversations at CNN, and they too sound absolutely sincere. This is the Devil’s work. The Devil, the Accuser, predisposes us, once we go off the moral rails, to begin to assert the very opposite of the truth. Xerxes, I can deduce, wants a nice authoritarian government, and he wants to blame someone else for it.
His logic is this:
1. people who resist masks do so because the experts keep changing their advice.
3. it is authoritarian to expect truth to be objective and unchanging.
To be clear on how wrong this is, Merriam-Webster gives its first definition of “authoritarianism" as “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority.” Oxford defines "authoritarian" as “A person who favours obedience to authority as opposed to personal liberty; an authoritarian person.”
But that would not matter to Xerxes; in the same column, he objects to dictionary definitions as “authoritarian.”
Xerxes acknowledges that the experts have indeed kept changing their advice. Although it would be more accurate to say that different experts have expressed different opinions all along, and it is government that have been changing their advice.
But, he points out, that is how science operates.
“Initially, masks were considered useless. Immediately, experimenters began testing that hypothesis. They measured aerosol transmission indoors and outdoors. Medical recommendations changed to reflect those findings. That’s the scientific mindset.” For science, “any advice that doesn’t change will be suspect.”
So those who resist current government authority fail to understand science. They want “An absolute, unimpeachable, forever and ever, authority. Which is the opposite of the scientific approach.”
Here he gets the scientific enterprise backwards. Science is and has always been the quest for natural laws: that is, for maxims about nature that are always true: the Law of Gravity, the Law of Inertia, and so forth. It is true, by the nature of things, that any such established law of nature might be overturned tomorrow by a “black swan” event; natural laws do not have the certainty of the laws of reason. But that is not considered by science the goal; rather, it would represent a failure of the science.
It is also true that science progresses by disproving things, never by proving things. However, the likelihood that a given model or theory is true is measured in science by the fact that it has been tested over a long period and not been disproven. That is the scientific method. If you find theories and models being rapidly overturned or changed, this means science has, in this case, clearly been failing to approach truth. To see the change itself as evidence science is getting closer to truth is like seeing pollution as proof that a factory is working efficiently, or fever as evidence of good health.
As this suggests, more broadly, truth is stable and unchanging by its nature. It is not the truth that keeps changing; it is theories that keep changing if they fail to correspond with reality. Were this no so, there would be no grounds but whim on which to change our theories. To say that science now thinks relativity is more accurate, and Newtonian physics inadequate, is not to say that the cosmos changed between Newton and Einstein.
Nor is it some sort of infringement on personal liberty to seek the truth, or to act in conformity with it. It is nonsense to argue that acknowledging gravity is authoritarian because it denies us our freedom to fly at will.
But that is where the political left now is: that is the sort of thing they now assert. That is what we see now, for example, in “gender studies.”
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 1, 2020
The League of Democracies
An earlier failed experiment,
This brings to mind something I suggested here some time ago: a League of Democratic Nations. One important function of such an international group would be to ensure the legitimacy of one another’s elections.
We cannot rely on the UN for this: the UN includes nations that are not themselves democratic. Just as we cannot rely on the UN to protect human rights.
If, however, we had a consortium of democratic nations, teams of observers could be sent whenever a member was holding elections, and they could certify that the process did or did not meet established standards. As foreigners, they would not have any vested interest, as everybody charged with managing and with counting votes in the US currently does. Or even if the observer from New Zealand did have some partisan interest, in seeing one party and not another winning an American election, said partisan interest would be unlikely to also align with the interests of the observer from Norway.
If the election was declared fraudulent, and the host country did not invalidate it, the obvious sanction would be to eject that nation from the alliance, presumably losing some important advantages.
Among said important advantages might be this: should any member government be overthrown by undemocratic processes, a coup, say, or a revolution, the other member states would be bound to intervene jointly to re-establish the lawful government.
As an additional incentive, other members of the alliance could be bound to grant sanctuary for any electorally-defeated leader who seeks it, without possibility of extradition. This makes it personally worthwhile for leaders to sign on, and guarantees continuing democracy at the same time. Too many fledgling democracies fall into the folly of prosecuting former leaders for crimes while in office. Doing so gives leaders a powerful incentive to refuse to hand over power. Their punishment, at worst, becomes exile.
To join the alliance might require one’s elections to be observed and certified legitimate a set number of times—perhaps three election cycles. A certain standard of human rights should also be required.
The alliance should also be a military one: member states come to one another’s aid in case of attack from any outside power.
If such an association were set up, I suspect it would go a long way towards expanding democracy around the world.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
