Stephen Roney's Blog, page 84
June 15, 2023
Situation Report from the American Civil War
I think I see the morning star appear: the woke left is finished.
The “rainbow coalition” of special interest groups that has been the foundation of the American left since the Eighties has always been fragile, because it is a random group without shared interests: feminists, African Americans, various immigrant groups, notably Hispanics and Muslims, and gays. As I have long noted, these groups have few interests or opinions in common. They were united only by a shared hatred of straight white Christian males. Each of these groups, taken individually, actually has more in common with straight white Christian males and the American mainstream than with each other. It was only a matter of time until some of them began to figure this out.
Dylan Mulvaney and the extreme, visibly pedophilic demands of the trans activists turned out to be the straw that set afire the camel’s back in a holocaust of mixed metaphors. We now see demonstrations by Muslim parents against trans pride in the schools. It is not good to anger the Muslims. Asian-American immigrants have been pulling away rom the left for some time. Suburban moms have been protesting at local school boards; so much for the women’s vote. Latinos are uniting against the LA Dodgers’ celebration of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, fairly described as an anti-Catholic hate group. The left, completely detached from the lives and concerns of actual immigrants, seem never to have noticed that Latinos are Catholic. Prominent feminists like Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling have pointed out that trans rights are fundamentally incompatible with women’s rights. A growing number of gays have dissociated themselves rom the trans movement. After all, the difference between men and women is the whole reason they are gay.
The working class, once the foundation of the left, has been of course abandoned long ago. They are now the deplorables, who should not be allowed to take up space. Especially not on Parliament Hill or on the Capitol Building.
African-Americans, blacks, seem to be lagging in figuring this out and moving beyond their prejudices. But there are voices of growing prominence: Larry Elder, Tim Scott, Candace Owens, “Tyrus.” It is happening; and it is inevitable. The trans and leftist hostility to Christian values goes against a deeply religious strain in the African-American soul.
Why, in face of this, is so much of the leadership on the left still embracing and identifying themselves with the trans activists? Why did they embrace the movement to begin with?
To begin with, because they are out of touch; and this is their own fault. They have plugged their ears, sought to silence and deplatform, voices and opinions they did not like. The necessary result is that they have been living in a thought bubble, unaware of what is really going on.
Secondly, because their fundamental philosophical principle, that there is no truth, reality, or true morality; that each of us is radically free to create our own universe; is perfectly expressed by the trans movement. It is their flagship, their battle standard. It is their hill to die on.
And I think they will.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
June 14, 2023
Not with a Bang but a Muffled Scream
Everybody loves children. So we keep telling one another. Even the cruellest dictator, to show what a decent sort he is, will pose kissing babies. Because everybody knows that everybody loves children.
But those who live by the lie will commonly state the opposite of the truth. It is actually dangerously common to hate children. The narcissistic will look at a child with deep if hidden resentment, aware that, one day, they will be dead and that child will still be alive. This is intolerable. It is the key to that inevitable beginning to every ancient Greek hero story, the oracle’s prediction that this child will grow up to supplant the parent. Of course he will; children do, in the natural course of things.
And a good number of us will hate them for it.
It was rightly said by Gandhi that a society can be judged by how well it treats the weakest and most vulnerable of its citizens. Children are the true weakest and most vulnerable among us.
And, contrary to protestations, we are treating them badly.
Most obviously, with abortion. We are killing them at their most vulnerable. Even when the alternative of adoption is readily available, and there is a shortage of babies to adopt. This looks like malice.
We are sacrificing the interests of children in allowing and commonly committing no-fault divorce.
We are sacrificing the interests of children in accepting and commonly committing deliberate one-parent families: women choosing to have children without a husband.
When pedophiles want to prey on children sexually, with their rainbow flags and unicorns and drag queen story hours and pornographic books in school libraries; government, schools, big business unite to aggressively support the pedophiles. It is hard to explain this without assuming malice.
When somebody runs a pedophilic pleasure island, we do not learn or demand to know his clients.
We recently demanded all children get vaccinated for Covid, even though, at their age, the vaccine was more dangerous to them than Covid. The health of children was sacrificed for the health of adults; or even just for the sake of harming children.
We are sacrificing aboriginal, “First Nations” children and young people wholesale. First by closing down the residential schools, which were largely orphanages for those from broken or desperately poor or dysfunctional homes. Then we objected adamantly to putting them up for adoption—the “Sixties scoop.” Abandoning them, in many cases, to a terrible fate. We then studiously ignore the issue when aboriginal young people form suicide pacts to escape the abuse. We ignore the true cause of an epidemic of missing and murdered aboriginal women—invariably young women fleeing an intolerable home life. We grasp at any alibi to avoid solving the problem. If a young Indian woman escapes, and inevitably ends up on the street in the city, our “solution” is to force her back into the abusive family. Insisting it is all her fault.
More generally, if a child is abused, we rarely or never blame the family. Instead, we declare him or her “mentally ill.” Giving us a license to not listen to their cries for help.
And then there are the schools. Not the residential schools, the public schools. Our public schools are deliberately designed, as a matter of historical fact, per John Taylor Gatto, to prevent children from succeeding in life. They are held there incommunicado, unable to follow their own natural impulses for knowledge, and deliberately not taught what they most need: the meaning of life, the rules of life, the skills of rhetoric, of organizing in groups, of bookkeeping and managing money, of formal logic and logical fallacies, the scientific method. No, they are not taught science. They are taught the opposite of science, and it is called science, as though the point is to obscure science in their minds. Instead, they are taught to stand in lines, respond to bells, sit still for long periods, do as they are told, accept as absolute the judgement of designated adults on themselves and the world around them, not to question or to dream or to think independently.
Yes, children need to learn discipline. But not this arbitrary and ungrounded discipline; not this template for dictatorship.
Much of our economy, and our regulatory apparatus, seems then designed to make it hard for young people to get out on their own and to establish themselves once they leave school. The minimum wage, eliminating jobs for those just starting out and learning. The demand for arbitrary and elaborate credentials to legally work at a given job: needless certifications for every specific job: haircutting, teaching, journalism, massage, serving coffee; almost any field. And each certification costs large amounts of time and money. These regulations and certifications exist to profit those already in the field at the cost of young people starting out.
Now we’re mutilating and sterilizing the young, in the drive for “gender affirmation.”
The point of a culture is to pass on the best rules for life to the next generation. A culture that turns too obviously against the next generation is a culture that must be destroyed; and that will be destroyed, since it is destroying itself. One thinks of the ancient Canaanites, who practiced ritual infanticide. This justified eliminating them. Ritual infanticide justified the Romans in salting the earth of Carthage.
This is the way a civilization ends.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
June 13, 2023
Sign the Petition
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
Unicorns and Rainbows
Watching video of recent demonstrations in Ottawa for and against “LGBTQ rights,” there is no trouble distinguishing sides. I see that one of the pride protesters is dressed as a cartoonish furry pink unicorn, against the inevitable backdrop of rainbow flags and rainbow colours and pastel pink and blue trans flags. It looks a lot like Disneyland.
Which brings up an obvious thought, one I am amazed has not occurred to me before.
Before the era of trans and gay rights, what would be automatically evoked by cartoonish furry pink unicorns? By rainbows? By pastel pink and baby blue? For that matter, by men in whiteface painted extravagantly as women? Who would be the intended audience?
Children. Not knowing what it was all about, children would naturally be delighted, and drawn to such an exhibit. Clowns! Toys!
The whole gay thing has always been targeted at children. They have always been coming for the children, as the San Francisco Gay Choir recklessly blurted out in song some years ago.
Saudi Arabia has a reputation for suppressing gay rights. I lived there for some years, and a lot of foreign teachers I knew were there because it was a paradise for gay men. They could be open about it, find a partner every night, and nobody bothered them. One of my Arab students even did his class presentation on his gay lover. Nobody seemed to have any problem with it.
But one colleague was suddenly given 24 hours to leave the country. He had solicited a student.
In other words, the actual offense is not homosexual sex. It is grooming. This is no doubt why homosexuality has traditionally been banned in most cultures.
We have or some years been fed the fiction that people are born gay or trans. This is obviously untrue: if there were such a thing as a gay or trans gene, it would be bred out within a generation. Gays are made by sexual experiences in childhood or early adolescence; we are programmed to be deeply imprinted by our earliest sexual experiences. In ancient Greece, it went without saying that an adult gay man’s lover would be a “youth.”
It is only becoming more explicit that the fundamental “gay right” or “trans right” is pedophilia. Without this practice, given the natural operation of human sexuality, there will over time be no gay partners.
And finding partners is necessarily a grave problem for a gay.
It was all bound to come to a head, and now it has.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
June 12, 2023
DARVO
A Man's a Man for A' That
What is a woman?
“A woman is an adult human female,” the dictionaries say. And “female” means “of or denoting the sex that can bear offspring or produce eggs, distinguished biologically by the production of gametes (ova) that can be fertilized by male gametes.”
Aha, objects the trans lobby--but there are some “biological women” who cannot bear offspring or produce eggs. For example, those past menopause. Yet you still call them women. So it is arbitrary to say “biological men” cannot be women.
To which I respond, by this standard nothing can be defined, and no word has meaning.
Consider the analogy of the elephant. What is an elephant?
“A heavy plant-eating mammal with a prehensile trunk, long curved ivory tusks, and large ears, native to Africa and southern Asia.”
Aha; but many elephants do not have long curved ivory tusks. Their tusks have been cut off for the ivory trade. Therefore, either most circus elephants are not elephants, or else it is impossible to define “elephant,” and if I tell you this monkey is an elephant, you must accept that it is so.
With animals, we determine what they are, in case of doubt, by looking at their DNA and their bone structure.
Human males and females can also be conclusively identified by their DNA and their bone structure.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
The Fall of the Persian Empire
The left has gone too far. The tide is turning against them.
The latest evidence comes from my leftist columnist friend, Xerxes. In last Sunday’s column, he warned against Big Pharma and Big Tech (he called the latter “the media,” but named only Facebook and YouTube). Just as the right is doing.
So far, no surprise. These are corporations operated for profit. Profit has always been evil to Xerxes.
But then he goes on to warn about governments as well. In fact, he says, government is worse. It is able to silence its opponents and throw them in jail.
I wrote to agree with him, and he responded that, while some might say “follow the money,” he now says “follow the power.”
And that simple insight puts him, I think, on the right. The left has been deluded by Marxism to see capital as the enemy. Xerxes may not yet have worked out the implications—I suggested he should look also, with the same lens, at the learned professions as a power elite. I doubt he would say he was on the right. But from this point, I think the logic is inevitable.
And it is occurring to more and more people. I suspect the days when it was cool to be on the left are at an end.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
June 11, 2023
A Small Victory over Grooming in Schools
But credit to him for at least shaving a corner off the far-left agenda in the schools.
Advanced Alien Cilvilizations
I have no insight on the recent claims of alien craft in the possession of governments. I have always thought that, because of the extreme distances, travel from another solar system was improbable. To make it possible, almost necessarily, an alien civilization would have to know how to travel not just through space, but through time. This would also explain the “impossible” maneuvers the craft are reported to make.
But if the critical factor is time travel, there is no need to assume space travel as well. These uncanny visitors could be from our own future; Occam’s Razor.
But whether or not they are alien visitors, commentators on UFOs are shockingly ready to assume the possibility of civilizations “more advanced” than ours on other planets. Shockingly, because in any other context, claiming that one civilization is more advanced than another is rank heresy. It is racism, and will come, quite possibly, in Canada, with criminal penalties. We cannot, for instance, suggest that the European culture that appeared on American shores in 1492 was more advanced than that of the natives, or that contact was likely to be a boon to them on balance. No; such an idea is “cultural genocide.”
Worse, the government scientists are reputedly trying to "reverse-engineer" the acquired crafts, to learn from them. This is blasphemy. Necessarily, as all civilizations are equally advanced, we can have nothing to learn from any aliens. This is all blatant alien supremacy.
Yet it is obvious that one civilization, or culture, can be more advanced than another. Advanced not just in this way or that, but even overall. It may, as is theorized about the UFOs, have had more time to work out the various kinks of mortal existence; less time preoccupied with mere material survival in a state of nature.
A culture or a civilization is a tool for achieving the best life. Not all tools are equal.
Some tools are even harmful. One thinks of the need to wipe out Nazism in Germany, or the cult of the divine emperor in Japan. The ancient Israelites, Greeks, and Romans similarly saw a need to wipe out the Canaanite and Punic practice of child sacrifice. The British felt justified in wiping out the Thug cult or human sacrifice in India, and the practice of widow-burning, suttee.
An immigrant society like Canada, the US, or Singapore, can take advantage of this fact of cultures living cheek by jowl by choosing the best from each. A wise workman chooses the best tool for the job, not the one manufactured closest to his home. It is no accident that immigrant and outward-looking trading societies have been the main sources of culture and technological improvements over the centuries.
Tragically, more recently, we have instead deliberately tried to halt the progress of civilization, with concepts like “multiculturalism,” “cultural appropriation,” “affirmative action” and “equity.” In the natural course of things it is likely that different ethnic groups will dominate in different spheres, in which their culture gives them expertise, and which their ethnic culture most values: Irish in policing, say; Dutch in luxury trades; blacks in preaching; aboriginals in the military; English in accounting; Italians in the food industry. It is cruel and artificial to try to prevent this, barring people from their dreams, and we all lose as a result.
We’ll never achieve time travel with this approach.
So it may indeed be aliens.
'Od's Blog: Catholic comments on the passing parade.
