Stephen Roney's Blog, page 56
January 1, 2024
Two Trains in the Night
Maybe more accurate with a donkeyMy predictions for 2024 have been intentionally optimistic. Now 2024 has actually begun with a major earthquake, in Japan. Not a good sign.
It is hard to see how the 2024 US election turns out well. The Democrats have demonstrated that they will do anything to prevent Trump from being president—Tucker Carlson expects them to resort if necessary to assassination.
That would be a trauma greater than the Kennedy assassination.
If Trump does not become president as a result of the election, his supporters will have every reason to assume—indeed, they will know—the system was rigged against them. What will they do?
When democracy is denied, the option left is violence.
Conversely, the Democrats are determined that Trump must not become president. If he becomes president as a result of the election, what will they do? Lose all their determination and go home?
It looks like two trains coming at top speed down the same track, towards each other. It looks like revolution or civil war.
Yet history suggests that God has a special relationship with the US. I recall a friend on Facebook putting out a map showing that “most peaceful countries” correspond closely with “least religious countries.” He thought this discredited religion as a cause of violence. What it showed was that people turn to God when in need, and ignore him otherwise. Countries, as they become peaceful and prosperous, tend to turn away from religion. As do people.
The US has largely bucked that trend. As Europe or Japan have moved to apostasy, levels of religiosity in the US have remained relatively high. In the current crisis in the Catholic Church, Francis finds his traditionalist enemies in America, Eastern Europe, and Africa. With their intellectual centre in America.
Despite promulgating the postmodern madness, the US is not where it began. Traced back, it was a European import in the early and mid-20th century. The heart of America, as I think Cohen saw, remains strong. “he brave, the bold, the battered heart of Chevrolet.”
If civil war now seems inevitable, God has plunged the US into civil war before for a necessary cause. If the left is foolhardy or desperate enough to push it to this point, I believe at least the forces of democracy will win.
And perhaps be a beacon to the rest of the world, as America became in 1776.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 31, 2023
Pandemonium in the Magic Kingdom
Why did Disney commit suicide by going woke instead of tending to its core business of entertainment? It is an abiding mystery. Why did the BBC series “Call the Midwife” go woke? For that matter, why did Anheuser-Busch seem to deliberately alienate its core customer base, with its Dylan Mulvaney sponsorship?
The conventional and natural answer is that these corporate bodies were taken over by some educated elite which had lost touch with the general public; who were trapped in an information silo, and had no idea everyone did not agree with them.
No doubt that is a partial explanation; thanks to media and internet censorship. But it does not seem to be enough to account for it. After all, their core business was still to entertain, or sell beer; there should have been no reason to get involved in politics. As soon as you do, after all you are sure to alienate somebody. Even without opposing voices, the causes they champion are in defiance of reason or common sense. And in principle, even with censorship, the internet should have been making it easier for creatives to poll or solicit the views of the general public: improved communication. Now ordinary people can run their own podcasts or blogs. Censorship of the internet is a rearguard action.
The Disney and Bud Light crew must at a minimum have been trying to avoid listening to the public, even though it was their job to do so. They had their fingers in their ears. Why?
Guilt. One wants to block out opposing views when one anticipates criticism, and knows it is deserved. Ultimately, guilt over jettisoning “conventional morality,” and most especially, over endorsing abortion. And so, fearing condemnation, the creative elites have been avoiding listening.
But there is another layer to this. Creativity works by inspiration. Inspiration is not something you can turn on and off. It comes from God, or if not from God, from some ambient spirit. In other words, a demon. If you are concealing guilt, and refusing to repent, you have cut off that conduit to God. You may her nothing, and be obliged to recycle old material just substituting some simple gimmick. Or you may instead begin to hear from ambient spirits; and rejoice in no longer being barren of ideas. But they do not have your or humanity’s interests at heart. “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods, They kill us for their sport.”
Guilt and doubt has turned off the taps for the creative class; so art in general has been moribund for decades. The Disney creatives are unable any longer to come up with compelling stories; the comedy writers can no longer come up with punch lines; the ad copywriters can no longer come up with interesting angles. Instead, coming into this void, the signals they are picking up are malicious, vices, seeking ultimately to destroy their careers, their employers, and the culture.
Creative types are not adept at questioning or testing the spirits. You do not argue with inspiration. And so they are easily possessed.
All hell is breaking loose.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 30, 2023
The Horror of Back Alley Abortions
A TV series I have enjoyed binge-watching, BBC’s Call the Midwife, has decided to go for relevance and wade deliberately into politically charged issues. It is a perhaps muted model of the general problem with films and TV in recent years.
They had already threaded in intersex, and homosexuality. Even though neither fits plausibly into the likely work encounters of a midwife. They had already introduced black and South Asian characters, who then of course were shown to experience discrimination; and a black midwife has shown up as a new lead. And she is, of course, an entirely admirable character, with no dark edges about her. No crustiness, no struggle with alcohol, no illicit loves.
Then they brought up the issue of abortion.
The series is set in 1960s Britain. Abortion was still illegal. The series shows young women getting “back alley” abortions and suffering dire consequences—due to unsanitary conditions and inexpert practitioners.
Worse, the abortionist is portrayed as a decent sort who thought she was helping women. And repented as soon as she was convinced women were being harmed by her incompetence.
No mention is made of the health of the child. The child does not matter. Good people do not care about killing children. Chillingly, in a show about midwives. No mention is made of the alternatives of simply not having sex outside of marriage, or putting the child up for adoption. These are apparently literally unthinkable.
The clumsily intended moral is that abortions must be legal. Because, apparently, women “must” have abortions, and the only concern is that the abortions be performed in the best possible circumstances.
A sane view would be the opposite: if illegal abortions are dangerous, abortion is dangerous. This alone is reason to ban it, since it is always a voluntary procedure. And this even before we consider the key question, the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 29, 2023
Mummers
St. Stephen's Day Traditions
Have Yourself a Merry...
Predictions for 2024
My predictions are always wrong—like everyone else’s. We humans have a lousy track record on predicting the future. Something to remember when you hear alarms raised about global warming. And things have gotten especially unpredictable recently. Aliens? The pope not Catholic? Turning the frogs gay?
So I might as well go ahead and be optimistic—without being unrealistic. After all, God’s in his heaven.
I predict that, in 2024, Trump will win back the US presidency. The Economist gives him a one in three chance. I think it is better than that. He looks to have a lock on the Republican nomination, and the polls show him ahead of Biden in the general. The Democrats seem all in on Biden, and Biden may be impeached for his corruption and possibly treasonous activities, may be too obviously senile by election day, or may, at his age, suddenly die of natural causes. He is also historically unpopular.
Perhaps they think they can fix the election, but can they? If so, why are they trying to get Trump off the ballot? That’s too blatant, and looks like desperation. I think they are overreaching.
It seems to me the NDP must officially pull the plug in Canada on their coalition with the Liberals before 2025. Otherwise, they will be too closely associated with the Liberals to mount a plausible campaign when the election comes—and it must come no later than 2025. To make this dissociation real in the public mind, they must also start voting aggressively against the Liberals on confidence votes. So there is a decent chance the Conservatives can craft a confidence motion to bring down the government; especially considering all the incipient scandals under investigation. So I predict a Canadian election in 2024, and a win by Pierre Poilievre.
I predict the Liberals will not switch leaders to forestall this. The have no plausible star in the wings, history suggests it would not help them, and Trudeau does not want to go.
And Poilievre is just too good as a politician; he is not going to lose.
Pope Francis has ratcheted up his “reforms” in the church recently; as if something has been triggered. It might be that he felt constrained so long as Benedict was alive—had he gone this far, Benedict was an obvious rallying point for opposition. But it might also be because Francis hears the beating wings of the angel of death. There are rumours that he intends to fix the election of the next pope; this too suggests he expects to die soon, but his haste to get things done suggests also he has no confidence in his ability to do that. Historically, conclaves have tended to elect candidates contrasting with the previous pontiff, as if to keep things on a steady course. And the worldwide church seems now on the verge of schism in response to Francis’s innovations. The next conclave has a strong motive, then, to try a different tack. God, too, must not be discounted; he will protect his church. So I predict Francis will either die or resign in 2024, and a new pope will be named who is traditionalist.
I am not the only one to notice that wokery is past its high water mark, and is becoming an object of ridicule. When they begin to laugh at you… Bud Light is deservedly toast; Disney is in desperate traits; and when such big fish can be taken out, the little fish too must take heed, and tremble. Now Harvard is losing its reputation and its endowment. I expect this trend to rapidly accelerate, as a bandwagon effect kicks in.
Might as well predict the fall of Xi, Putin, and the Iranian regime as well. All are hanging by a thread, and might collapse at any time. So why not this year? The fall of any of the three makes the fall of the other two more likely, and the fall of any one is likely. Xi is facing economic disaster; Putin is facing military disaster; the Iranian regime is wildly unpopular. So let’s call it as a set.
If Iran falls, to a more liberal regime, that in turn will have profound repercussions throughout the Middle East, where Iran is funding Islamist movements. Like Hamas. Or the Houthis in Yemen.
If either the CPC or the mullah in Iran fall to a liberal regime, we should also see mass conversions to Christianity in those two countries. Which will in turn have world-wide effects. China, for example, could become the centre of the Christian world.
I hear predictions that inflation, and interest rates, should ease by summer. Why not believe them? There may or my not be a terrible recession; so let’s believe there won’t be. It is just possible that the productivity gains being brought on by AI, and computerization generally, will be enough to cancel out all the reckless spending and government financial mismanagement.
Speaking of AI, new technologies are always overhyped in the beginning. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any really new technology is always indistinguishable in the popular mind from magic. So I’m wagering that all the concerns about AI making us all obsolete, and being a threat to mankind, are hysterical. Instead, it will be a boon to productivity—especially for computer coding.
I see signs of a genuine religious revival in the US at least. God may not have given up on them yet. Back in 1992, Leonard Cohen saw two possible futures, good and bad. The dark option is what we have been getting lately:
Destroy another fetus nowWe don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby
It is murder
Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing
Nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world
Has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul
But Cohen saw another option. Having explored the dark side, and discovering where it leads, we may pull back and choose instead the vision seen in “Democracy is coming to the USA.” Of, specifically, the principles in the Sermon on the Mount. If it comes, Cohen sees it as coming to the USA first. And coming first to the “holy places where the races meet”: to the Christian churches.
The New Atheism is dead, and there seems to be an earthquake in the sciences, forcing God back into the picture as necessary hypothesis. Theism is becoming fashionable again, at least in the highest intellectual circles. Every week we hear of some new convert.
Financial considerations still argue strongly for mass immigration, even if unpopular—and there are other arguments for it as well. But multiculturalism is rapidly becoming unfashionable. Affirmative action, “equity,” is rapidly becoming unfashionable. We may be back to valuing and respecting “Western civilization.” And expecting immigrants to assimilate, as most immigrants want to do in the first place. There is a reason why they come to Canada, or America, and it is usually not because they loved things back where they came from so much. Trapping them in multiculturalism is trapping them in exile and alienation.
The influence of Elon Musk’s new Twitter has not yet been fully felt, but the emergence of a widely-used platform that is not enforcing a political agenda makes it untenable for other platforms and media to enforce such an agenda. So that house of cards should now come tumbling down. Once people can choose, they will choose open discussion, simply out of natural human curiosity. I expect the immanent demise of the “legacy media,” the TV networks, the newspapers, and the practice of big tech “gatekeeping.”
The war in Gaza will end with Hamas wiped out, and will trigger no wider war.
People are losing confidence in the experts; the experts discredited themselves on Covid. And so the public is losing confidence in all the predictions of global warming and all the draconian measures governments are imposing in its name. Chicken Little will soon be called out. Climate change is losing its marketability. If global warming is real, the only solution is improved technology, and the best way to achieve improved technology is for governments to get out of the way. Political parties will soon no longer be able to jerk this chain.
And so 2024 may be the year of the great turning. The world could look very different in twelve months.
And then there’s aliens.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
December 28, 2023
A Thing of Beauty
I think we are lucky to have Pierre Poilievre. He is a master of rhetoric. And, in politics, rhetoric is the whole game. In a good sense.
The Cherry Tree Carol
A special favourite of mine. I wrote and directed a Christmas play once based on it.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.Christian Nationalism
The image of Jesus Pantocrator--Jesus as rightful king of the world. One of the oldest images of Jesus in existence.Many on the left are raising the alarm about “Christian nationalism.” It has apparently now supplanted “white supremacy” as the greatest threat to our freedoms.
What is Christian nationalism?
Literally, it is the belief that the US, or Canada, is and ought to be a Christian nation.
Horrors?
This is, in the first place, a simple statement of historic and demographic fact. North American culture is deeply Christian. Anyone before, say, 1960, would see the statement as self-evident. To pretend otherwise is politically motivated historical revisionism.
It is, in the second place, a belief necessarily shared by all Christians that the US and Canada ought to be Christian nations. Any Christian believes Christian values should govern the state. Any Christian believes Jesus Christ is Lord, the rightful ruler of mankind. Non-Christians might or might not agree, but any non-Christian who finds this view problematic is intolerant of Christianity.
In the third place, Great Britain, for example, is constitutionally a Christian nation. While the UK no doubt has its flaws, it is hard to see Britain as a cautionary tale of the tragic consequences of Christian nationalism.
What exactly is the terrifying program of contemporary North American Christian nationalism? According to Wikipedia, “Christian nationalism supports the presence of Christian symbols in the public square, and state patronage for the practice and display of religion, such as Christmas as a national holiday, school prayer, the exhibition of nativity scenes during Christmastide, and the Christian cross on Good Friday.”
Whom does such things harm? Isn’t this all part of our shared culture, even if we are not ourselves Christian? Shouldn’t we celebrate our shared culture? Aren’t we even doing most of that now?
Striking out or refusing to acknowledge any parts of our culture that are explicitly Christian is not religiously neutral: it is discriminating against Christianity in favour of atheism.
Some will raise the issue of the “separation of church and state.” Yet this phrase and this principle is not in the constitutions of either the US or Canada. It might have been; the framers rejected the idea. It comes from a private letter by Thomas Jefferson. We might think it is a good idea, but we have no right to smuggle it into the national mandate without passing a constitutional amendment.
I actually agree with Jefferson’s concept; but it does not mean keeping religion out of politics. The separation of church and state work in the same way as the separation of powers within the government, and is important for the same reason. Church and state should be organizationally independent so that they can serve as a check and balance on one another. Churchmen must be free to call out immorality in government, like the Old Testament prophets; at the same time, churches must not exercise government power, because an act imposed by law cannot have moral value.
This does not mean that government should ignore the admonitions of the churches, or the teachings of Christianity, any more than that the executive should ignore the rulings of the Supreme Court.
Given how reasonable the Christian nationalist position is, why is the left so alarmed by it? Why do they see it as an existential threat?
The answer is obvious, and begins with the letter “a.”
They will probably instead raise homosexual rights. No doubt if government listened to Christian principles, gay marriage would go back in the box. But this is not the real reason: it affects few people, and it does not affect them deeply. No: gay marriage was always a feint for not questioning the big “a.”
The fear is that abortion be restricted. “Christian nationalism” is the euphemism. The problem is that by now, too many Americans and Canadians are personally implicated in the crime of abortion to acknowledge that it is a crime.
The term “Christian nationalism” as a euphemism for opposition to abortion is also a lie: abortion is not wrong only because it violates Christian teaching. It also violates Muslim teaching, Jewish teaching, Sikh teaching, Hindu teaching, and Buddhist teaching. It violates liberal teaching, it violates the principles in the Declaration of Independence, and it violates the Golden Rule.
But Christianity is the obvious scapegoat for morality in general, because it has such a good record of standing up for it.
Which is why we need more Christianity in public life.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
