Stephen Roney's Blog, page 63

An Opening for the NDP

 

According to the latest Nanos poll, the Liberals are now tied with the NDP, and 19 points behind the Conservatives. It is not that the NDP vote has risen; but the Liberal vote has collapsed. Nevertheless, this means that, were an election held today, the Dippers would stand to almost double their seat total. More jobs for their pols.

Surely this is a huge incentive for Jagmeet Singh to break his informal coalition with the Liberals. It will be highly suspicious if he does not. And, given their unpopularity, being closely associated with the Liberals when the next election comes can only hurt his brand. 

Even if the NDP does pull the plug, this does not make a spring election certain. The BQ has enough seats to keep Trudeau in power, and their own prospects are only of holding steady on seat numbers.  

This, on the other hand, gives Singh a golden opportunity to pass the buck to them.

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

Indian Identity

 

The leader of the Piapot Natin has called on Buffy Sainte-Marie to take a DNA test to see if she really is or is not an Indian. Although she has had contact with that nation for many years.

Question: if you can't tell whether someone is an Indian by looking at them, an you can't tell someone is an Indian by talking to them, how is it possible to discriminate against Indians? You can still discriminate in their favour, yes, but not against. They could always just deny their ethnicity.

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

Daily Wire's New Full-Length Comedy May Change the World

 

There have been no good comedies coming out of Hollywood for years. All superheroes and 3D animations.

As a result, Daily Wire has announced the release of their own new full-length comedy, “Lady Ballers.” Mocking “transgender” participation in women’s sports, and full of cameos by right-wing figures—they say because no conventional Hollywood actors would take the roles.

At the same time, as many enough have noticed, old TV comedy staples like Saturday Night Live or Steven Colbert or the Daily Show are no longer funny. They seem to have abandoned laughs altogether.

Why?

Because comedy works by revealing truths you are not supposed to notice or say. That’s the punch in a punch line—the “reversal of expectations.” It cannot be predictable, or it is not funny. It must be something that is both true, and unexpected.

When society as a whole, or the audience, or those financing a show, have guilty secrets they do not want exposed, comedy becomes too dangerous to their conscience to enjoy or allow. What if someone should hear the beating heart below the floorboards? What if someone should notice it, and say something without thinking?

This is why narcissists never have a sense of humour. This is why those living with narcissists always have the feeling of “walking on eggshells,” having to guard what they say. This fear of saying the wrong thing prevents the spontaneity required for artistic expression, and especially for comedy, which most needs spontaneity.

And this is why European courts used to employ a court jester—to tell the king the truth, to keep it all honest and prevent hubris or delusional thinking.

The decline of comedy, and art generally, is the surest sing our culture is in trouble. 

Hollywood films have become unspontaneous and uncreative; new ideas of any kind have come to look dangerous to the powers that be. Safer to recycle old “brands” and “franchises,” swapping races and genders as an excuse for a remake, as a safe and unthreatening novelty.

While making sure they are not “triggering” to the narcissists; deleting anything that might challenge their delusions.

So too with pop music. Pop performers are no longer selected for talent, or for any unique quality. They are selected as safely compliant, visually appealing vehicles; and every song sounds more or less the same. Deficiencies can be fixed in the studio. Soma.

And yet, we are now also seeing the signs of rebirth; and it started with comedy. Many comedians have now come out as “far right,” choosing their art over politics and personal safety: Dave Rubin, Greg Gutfeld, Steven Crowder, Roseanne Barr, John Cleese, Ricky Gervais, Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, Norm Macdonald, on and on; a list that seems to grow every week. And we are seeing the traditional role of the court jester being reasserted, in the face of furious censorship, over the Internet.

Daily Wire and Angel Studios have now begun turning out new TV shows and films at a surprising clip, and audiences are eating them up. At least some significant portion of the population is not depraved. When these films and shows start outgrossing Hollywood, we will know the future is won.

Now this full-length comedy, “Lady Ballers.” This may be the most devastating blow yet to woke narcissism. There is nothing a narcissist hates more than being laughed at.

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

Arendt on Education

 

Hannah Arendt

“In her 1954 essay The Crisis in Education, Hannah Arendt says, 'Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it.' How does your view of education compare to Arendt's?”

The question is taken, following our series here, from McMaster University Department of Medicine admission tests.

It seems to me to expect the student to endorse the notion that the formally educated have the inherent right to rule the world. Presumably the uneducated do not get to love the world, nor to assume responsibility for it. What is their role? 

Conversely, is it enough to “love the world” in order to be educated? Don’t you need some knowledge or skill in some field? Medicine, say?

The implications of this attitude are troubling.

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

Will It Soon Be Illegal to Question the Official History of Residential Schools?

 

This is getting flat-out Orwellian.

Tried to post the link on Facebook, and immediately got the message, "this content is not available any more." More Trudeauvian censorship: cannot link on Facebook to any Canadian news...

Reminds me a lot of living in China back in the 90s.

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

Moral Force

 

The Erinyes hound Orestes

Comrade Xerxes writes recently that power corrupts. 

           “Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Government… Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu… In the U.S., white evangelical males… All lash out at perceived threats. All double down on preserving their own power, whatever it is.”

I find it interesting that he identifies “white evangelical males” as the power in the US, parallel to Vladimir Putin in Russia and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. A white evangelical male is not in charge in the White House, as Putin is in the Kremlin, or Netanyahu in the Knesset. Nor has been, since Jimmy Carter. And before him? Can’t think of anyone. It is conspicuous fact that, even though it is America’s largest Protestant denomination, there have been few even nominally Baptist presidents. And none from any other “evangelical” denomination.

So why does he come to perceive “white evangelical males” as the real power in the US?

It is not that they are such a large voting bloc. They come in at 9% of the population, according to Pew Research; fewer than blacks or Hispanics, both at 11%. And they are less inclined to vote as a bloc.

It is not that they have overwhelming economic power, that might buy or command influence over policy. Evangelicals are disproportionately the rural poor—the “hillbillies.”

Is it because they are especially fierce in defending their power? Doesn’t work, if they don’t have significant power to begin with. What weapons do they have? Banjoes? Church organs?

Nor, speaking of church organs, are they overrepresented in the media or the arts, another way a minority might punch above its weight. There’s country and gospel music, and Christian fiction, but this is proverbially unpopular outside the ranks of the evangelicals themselves; there is little “crossover,” only preaching to the choir. Your typical current American journalist or artist is urban, middle or upper class, female, and irreligious.

So why Xerxes’s perception that white evangelical males wield great power in the culture?

And it is not just his perception. Everyone is aware of the evangelicals, and what they think about a given issue, and everyone talks about them as though they have influence and either must be taken into account—or resisted at all costs. Why?

This demonstrates what “soft power” is, also known as moral force. It is the weapon wielded so effectively by Martin Luther King Jr., or by Gandhi or O’Connell to defeat the military and economic might of the British Empire. It is what has given the Jews immense cultural influence, though a small minority, wherever they have lived. It is the tactic Jesus advised, in cases of facing overwhelming force, as “turn the other cheek.”

It is the spiritual authority that comes of being right, and in the right. 

Ultimately, everyone recognizes the difference between right and wrong. When they realize they are in the wrong, their conscience pursues them like the hounds of heaven. Subjectively, it feels to them like an overwhelming force.

Because it is. Over the longer term, it is indeed the strongest force of all.

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

Apocalypse Now?

 

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We used to b so hopeful back in the 1960s. This, many of us felt sure, was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Which would be in every way better than the present age.

The mood has darkened significantly.

An interviewee on John Cleese’s Dinosaur Hour made an unsettling point. Increasingly, mankind is developing technologies that could put an end to mankind. We have been living with the threat of nuclear annihilation since the 1950s. We are now close to developing AI to a level at which it might act unpredictably. And then there is genetic manipulation, which might be used to create something rather worse than Covid-19 at almost any moment. A highly virulent, 100% fatal virus seems a possibility.

At the same time, technological improvements make such tools accessible, over time, to more people. 

How long will it take before one such tool is in the hands of a psychopath, the sort of mind that shoots up schools? Someone who wants to die, but also wants to take the whole world with them?

The commentator on the Dinosaur Hour thought it inevitable by the end of this century.

I can’t see, offhand, where his logic is wrong. Other than it is all, as it always was, in the hands of God. Perhaps he planned this for the end times.

This might also explain the frequency of reported alien visits in recent years. Either they are coming to save us, or to watch the fireworks.

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

Shall the Twain Meet?

 

We have been looking at the essay questions assigned to get admission to Canadian university programs; specifically, at McMaster’s essay questions for admission to the department of medicine. They seem politically charged. Here’s one for today:

OPTION B: Thomas King gave the 2003 CBC Massey Lecture Series entitled The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. In it, he comments on the centrality of dichotomies (that is, a sharp binary distinction between two things understood to be opposites) in many Western narratives: We do love our dichotomies. Rich/poor, strong/weak, right/wrong... We trust easy opposites. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigma.' What dichotomy do you find to be especially problematic, and why do you think it Is important to take a more complex view of that issue?

The question assumes that “Western narratives” are “problematic.” The question seems crafted to oblige the student to show consent to this proposition.

A clever response would be to point out that King himself is creating a dichotomy, between “Western” and “native,” and indeed between “dichotomies” and a “complex” perception. So his thesis is self-invalidating.

Dichotomy is the essence of all rational thought: Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. Or ask any computer engineer: all logic is binary at its base.

Including all “Eastern” logic. 

Why this drive to deny logic, or thought itself? The present question is almost explicit in revealing motive: what is really problematic is the dichotomy between “right” and “wrong.” I suspect this is the answer it is fishing for. This is a consistent postmodern theme: one must not be “judgmental.” 

Of course, it is those in power, otherwise unrestrained, who will most chafe at any hint of ethical responsibility. They want to be sure they are not admitting any potential whistleblowers to the profession.

This is something of a shift in medical ethics. We used to have something called the Hippocratic Oath, which imposed specific moral responsibilities. Rights and wrongs.

Simple dichotomies can indeed be a problem. Not because they are dichotomies, but if they are wrong or ill-conceived. Ironically, a leading candidate for the most “problematic” dichotomy in our current culture is that between “Western” and “native.” It is unnecessary, divisive, existing only to discriminate; and both categories are incoherent. There is no such thing as “Western” logic, “Western” mathematics, “Western” science, or “Western” civilization. There is simply logic, mathematics, science, and civilization. A bridge built in India does not need or use different laws of physics or different mathematics in its construction than one built in London. 

Nor is it possible to coherently define “native” or “aboriginal” or “indigenous.” We are all literally native or aboriginal or indigenous to some place. All of us are equally native to the place where we were born. None of us are aboriginal or indigenous to that place. The current term “aboriginal” or “indigenous” is simply a euphemism that replaced, in recent times, the earlier anthropological term “primitive.” That is, it simply refers to less technologically advanced cultures.

Which tend, in brutal honesty, to have fewer lessons and insights to share with the rest of mankind.

A similarly divisive and useless dichotomy is that between “white” and “non-white” (or “racialized”). Both are purely social and political constructs that do not describe reality. People tend to intermarry, for one thing. For another, “non-white” as a category includes ethnic groups more closely related to “whites” than to other “non-white” groups. “White” itself masks a wide variety of ethnicities, whose sense of themselves has nothing to do with any “white/non-white” distinction. The social classification really works only in the US, since the 19th century. For most of modern European or Canadian history, the crucial ethnic dichotomy was instead Protestant/Catholic, and in Medieval times, it was Christian/Muslim. “White/non-white” is still hardly the major dividing line in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Nigeria, Burma, or Northern Ireland.

Time we stopped obsessing over skin colour, or where our ancestors came from. But dichotomies in general are not the issue.

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

How to Reognize Oppression

 

Amanda Gorman

Many Canadian universities now require an essay to apply for competitive programs. Most competitive of all, reputedly, is McMaster Medicine. And many of the essay topics assigned are concerning. They seem designed to elicit one’s political position; and could be used to select and exclude on this basis.

Here is one example from a recent intake:

OPTION A: In The Hill We Climb (2021), National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman wrote "...being American is more than a pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it." What aspect of the past will you play a role in repairing?

It is not possible, of course, to either step into or change the past. If there are wrongs in the past, they cannot be “repaired.”

This sounds as though one must embrace the current leftist call for “equity” in order to enter medical school. One must endorse and practice discrimination on the grounds of physical appearance or ethnic identity. 

In justice, granted, if harm is done to an individual, they deserve compensation--by whatever party or corporate entity caused the harm.

One cannot, however, simply look at someone—say, their skin colour--and know they have been mistreated; any more than you can look at their skin colour and know they are lazy, or avaricious. This is the essence of prejudice.

Nor can you rely on people self-reporting the matter. If saying you are abused gets you privileges or payouts, many who aren’t will claim to have been abused.

However, there actually is a way to tell—and doctors are best positioned to do so. 

The Center for Disease Control, official arm of the US government, notes that, “In one long-term study, as many as 80% of young adults who had been abused met the diagnostic criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder at age 21.”  Psychology Today maintains that “In almost every case of significant adult depression, some form of abuse was experienced in childhood, either physical, sexual, emotional or, often, a combination.”  

A recent study by Martin Teicher at Harvard, confirmed by other researchers,  demonstrates that childhood abuse causes permanent changes in the brain.  

The Wikipedia entry for “Depression” accordingly gives, at this writing, under “Causes”:

Adversity in childhood, such as bereavement, neglect, mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and unequal parental treatment of siblings can contribute to depression in adulthood. Childhood physical or sexual abuse in particular significantly correlates with the likelihood of experiencing depression over the life course.  

Childhood abuse has also been found also to correlate strongly with panic attacks, dissociation, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder (manic depression), schizophrenia, alcoholism, addiction, drug abuse, and eating disorders.  

Childhood abuse has also been found to produce higher rates of cardiovascular disease (heart disease), lung and liver disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, asthma, and obesity.  

A summary meta-analysis by Judith Carroll and colleagues, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (US), concludes that the psychological damage resulting from childhood abuse and its effects on physical health are “well documented.”

Medical doctors are thus in a favourable position to diagnose abuse, from its established symptoms—not just current child abuse, but past abuse. This could be a genuinely just basis for determining compensation.

But if a student suggested this to McMaster, would he or she be permitted to become a doctor?

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

The Theology of Superman

 

Friend Xerxes has rejected monotheism in his latest column, on the grounds of that old saw about God logically not being able to create a stone too heavy for him to lift. Therefore, the concept of God as omnipotent is incoherent.

“Can God do anything?” the boy asked.

“Yes, dear,” said his mother.

“And God can make anything?”

“Yes, dear. That’s why we call him Creator.”

The boy asked, “So could God make a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?”

This is the “irresistible force meets immovable object” paradox. I remember it being the premise of a Superman comic as a child. Superman supposedly being both. It appears in China already in the 3rd century BC. 

Is it a problem for monotheism? No; there are two ancient responses.

It is a logical contradiction to posit that there can exist at the same time both an irresistible force and an immovable object. It is definitionally impossible. And the Christian response is that God is subject to logic, because logic is his own essence—the Logos. God cannot create a square circle, or a female male, or a married bachelor. So he cannot create both an irresistible force and an immovable object, existing at the same time. This is not a limit to his omnipotence, because if you abandon logic, “omnipotence” itself has no meaning.

If, on the other hand, you accept that God is not subject to logic, the problem or paradox still disappears. Then he could create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and lift it. This is only impossible if you accept the need to conform to logic, to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.

It is actually an argument for monotheism: if there cannot be both an immovable object and an irresistible  force, there can be only one God, one entity who is both immovable and irresistible.

The Christian belief, that God creates, abides in, and follows laws, gives birth in turn to science. Science is based on the premise that there is no such thing as chance, randomness, or coincidence. Everything has an explanation if we study it closely. As Einstein crudely put it, “God does not throw dice.” God creates and follows laws.

Xerxes then, predictably, raises the problem of evil: if there is a God, and God is good, why is there evil in this world?

And this question too is older than monotheism itself. With or without a God, why is there evil in the world?

The point is, monotheism provides an answer.

To begin with, how do you define evil? How do you know that a thing is evil?

Xerxes’s example is “a logging truck … crushing your daughter’s car.”

This is evil if you define evil as something you do not want. This is obviously a thing you do not want, and something your daughter did not want. 

But does that demonstrate that it is evil? Consider a small child wanting another chocolate before supper. Is it evil that his parents refuse it?

No; to simply define “good” as “getting what we want” is puerile. It also does not work if, say, what we want is something someone else has. Good instead means something like “justice” and what is best for all concerned.

Now, while we know that our daughter does not want to be hit b a logging truck and killed, do we know that it is best for her not to die?

We do not, because we do not know what comes after death. For all we know, death releases her from bonding into a much better life.

We also know we do not want suffering, either the physical pain she might experience in the crash, or our own loneliness at her sudden absence. But do we know that suffering is evil, in the sense of not being in our best interests?

The parent who refuses the child a chocolate makes him suffer. The parent who takes his child to the dentist makes him suffer.

What about the muscle strain and bruising you feel as you win the Grey Cup, or the intense soreness after? Seriously, would the win be as sweet if you had done it without any pain or effort? Is a film fun to watch if nothing bad or scary ever happens to the heroine throughout?

Suppose that ignorance is bliss, and beauty only comes with suffering. Would you rather have a frontal lobotomy and be ignorantly happy? To remain in a childlike or vegetative state? Or is it worthwhile to grow up into wisdom, responsibility, and creativity?

To be, with God, a co-creator?

To embrace logic, justice, and beauty?

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