Stephen Roney's Blog, page 88

The Turning?

 

I may be a cockeyed optimist, but I see yet growing signs that the tide of woke is going out, and some are about to be left high and dry.

The Bud Light boycott is critical here. But Disney is also shedding jobs and viewers. So is Fox, after firing Tucker Carlson. Biden is tanking in the polls; as is Trudeau in Canada. And dark things are coming out: the criminal dishonesty of “Big Pharma” and the lies told during the pandemic. The dealings of the Biden family. The influence of the CPC on our politicians. 

All of this looks as though the general public has at last awakened, and shifted allegiances. They are no longer buying the increasingly unreasonable claims of the elites, and the common sense of the common man, as Pierre Poilievre calls it, is asserting itself. They are beginning to listen instead to the dissident right

It also looks as though significant numbers of members of the elite are starting to turn. The leaks and revelations are coming from whistleblowers inside the “deep state.” RFK Jr. has turned, and is perhaps going to make it respectable for elitists to turn. This was a critical moment in the French Revolution: when members of the First and Second Estate, the clergy and the aristocracy moved over to join the Third.

I think the woke left went too far, drunk with the hubris we call narcissism, and has finally killed their credibility. 

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

What Rough Beast?

 

A random comment seen on Twitter, in response to a local school banning Mother’s Day: “woke destroys everything good.”

A simple statement, but truth is usually simple. I think it is deeply true.

Begin with the premise, known and accepted from ancient times, that the purpose of human life is to seek the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is so regardless of your particular religion, regardless even of whether you are a monotheist, a secularist, or a pagan. The absolute value of these three things is intrinsic, self-evident and beyond argument. You simply cannot coherently say that good is not good, or truth is not true. The response to beauty is immediate, unmediated, not a matter for judgment or doubt. The monotheisms merely posit a personal God as the ultimate source and essence of all three.

Now we see a contrary spirit, roaming the landscape as if to devour, a rough beast; which we currently call “woke.” It targets these three, goodness, truth, and beauty, as if a guided missile. 

Begin with motherhood; for the present epidemic seems to have begun here. It is an emblem of the good. In a healthy culture, motherhood is inviolate. Remember “motherhood and apple pie?” This is why the cow is sacred in India: as a symbol of motherhood. Individual mothers fall short, but motherhood itself is an image of selfless love, of wanting the best for the other; and this is the essence of the Good. Perhaps even more, the child’s reverence for the mother or father is an image of the proper loving attitude towards the divine. Which is why we pray the “Our Father.” 

And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

For comparison, it is because they do not nurture their young that serpents and reptiles have become, everywhere, a symbol of moral evil.

Sometime in the early 1960s, the culture turned against motherhood and children. Witness feminism. The premise of feminism is that motherhood is bad; all else follows from this. And this was reinforced, suddenly, with a concern over “overpopulation.” Having children was bad. Indeed, they should be actively done away with. And then we have abortion. Now actually glorified as a kind of sacrament. We are now moving on to genital mutilation of children to ensure that the next generation is infertile.

Homosexuality became admirable, largely or entirely because it does not lead to motherhood and children. 

Parallel is the attack on “conventional morality,” i.e., morality as such, and the common constructivist claim of moral relativism. Churches are vandalized; priests and ministers jailed; crosses replaced by snowflakes. We are now “spiritual, but not religious.” Why the difference? Religion implies a commitment to moral conduct.

The term “woke” is itself an attack on truth. It means here the opposite of its literal meaning. The “woke” become like NPCs. If they think for themselves, if they diverge even slightly from the “narrative”—and this term is itself a denial of truth—they are no longer “woke.” They are like sleepwalkers, in sum. The concept of a “zombie apocalypse” has so captured the popular imagination in recent decades because it is exactly what we are experiencing, day to day.

“Political correctness,” a term that emerged in the 1970s in its current sense, as a shorthand for adherence to “woke” doctrine, is a systematic reversal of the meaning of words, an assault on truth and truth-telling. A spade must not be called a spade. “Exceptional children” are now not the most intelligent or talented, but the least. “Gender-affirming care” destroys one’s gender. “Pro-choice” strips the child, the father, the grandparents of all choice. “Reproductive rights” deny men’s reproductive rights. “Equity” means inequality. “Social justice” means systemic social injustice. “Anti-racism” means racism. “Antifascism” means fascism. “Community” means alienation from your neighbours in favour of strangers who share some political interest. “Health care” means killing, of unborn children or, more recently and increasingly, the old, the poor, the despondent.

The “deplatforming,” the “unfriending,” the censoring, the cancelling, and the “hate laws,” are also an assault on truth, because it is only through free discussion that truth can be sought or known. Now everyone must guard their speech, and anyone who seems to say what they actually believe is, for that reason, and apparently no other, condemned, perhaps fired. Witness Tucker Carlson. Witness Joe Rogan. Witness Trump Derangement Syndrome.

As for the assault on beauty: feminism made a virtue out of making oneself appear ugly. The current issue of “fat shaming” is in this mold: one is now obliged to accept a woman’s declaration that she is beautiful, regardless of one’s own senses. But then, just as often, if you say she is beautiful, you are harassing her. And this is surely at least  a part of the current celebration of crossdressing: the bottom line is that Dylan Mulvaney and other “drag queens” are grotesque, a parody of feminine beauty. 

As for the beauty of art, that has been under attack since perhaps R. Mutt in 1917. Witness more recently the pulling down of statues, of public art, the burning down of beautiful churches, the assaults on paintings in the galleries of Europe.

Many attribute it all to George Soros or to Klaus Schweib and the WEF. But this is not an adequate explanation. Even if they plan evil, these people would not have the power to do so much. They are themselves zombies. The real culprit has to be a powerful spirit with a capability for mind control, for possession, fascination, or ecstasy; these are the characteristics of the pagan gods, the daemons, the obsessions. And a spirit bent systematically on evil and the destruction of man. Perhaps you can, as the Rolling Stones once sang, guess his name. There is a spirit of destruction in the universe, who hates God and mankind.

The term “woke” is a funny little tipoff here. It seems borrowed from the Gnostics, the Satanic heresy that has dogged the monotheisms throughout the centuries. Gnostics imagine themselves superior to the general run of mankind, because they are “awake,” possessing secret knowledge. This puts them above concerns like morality or truth that delude the common rabble. They can create their own morality, invent their own truths. Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment was the type. Hitler was apparently an acolyte. Self-styled “elites,” along with those who have been pampered growing up, are particularly vulnerable to such thinking.

Where does this all lead? We must have faith. God is in control, and evil is self-limiting. It will go so far, and then it will collapse.

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

The Trudeau Crown

 

The Trudeau government plans to exploit the occasion of King Charles’s coronation to create a new “Canadian” crown for the Canadian coat of arms. Anything that hints at religion—crosses, fleurs de lys—is stripped out. The cross on top is replaced by a snowflake.

This leaves Canada open to derision.

The crown is supposed to represent solidity and continuity; foundation. That is why crowns are, when possible, made of incorruptible gold. That is why they are encrusted with jewels, the hardest of substances. Crowning the crown itself with a snowflake looks like a parody: the most ephemeral and weakest thing in nature. It mocks Canada as of no consequence.

The removal of religious symbolism is more sinister. This is appalling at a time when the rates of suicide, mental illness, and drug use are skyrocketing. The need for meaning and direction among Canadians could not be more urgent. That is what religion is for. That is being withdrawn when most needed.

No doubt the Trudeauites argue that symbolism like the cross or fleur de lys, being Christian is improper in a multicultural Canada, which includes people of many faiths.

This is disingenuous. Does anyone really think that a devout Muslim or Jew feels more at home among atheists or secularists than among Christians? That they are happier with no God than with the Christian conception of Him? No; the new design discriminates in favour of atheism.

And the real reason is that monotheistic religion implies morality. The immoral will always hate it, as Hitler did; as did those who crucified Christ. 

Such are those who currently rule us. And they mean to use their power.

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

The Name Game along the Saint John

 

There is a drive to rename the Saint John River in New Brunswick “The Wolostoq,” on the grounds that this is the traditional Indian name. Band spokespeople say "It is the obligation of the province to do so," and not doing so is an “assault.”

I like Indian place names—we all do. We already have a lot of them in Canada. Beginning with “Canada.” Or “Ottawa,” “Toronto,” “Quebec,” “Ontario,” “Manitoba,” “Winnipeg,” Saskatchewan,” ”Nunavut,” “Yukon” “Miramichi” … or my home town of Gananoque. Indian names are already well-represented. Shouldn’t we also recognize names from other groups of Canadians, and other periods in our history? The name “Saint John” was given by Samuel de Champlain. It is an artifact of our French-Canadian heritage. 

There is a total of 17,000 registered and recognized members of First Nations in New Brunswick. There are 200,000 of French ancestry. Why are they and  their culture worth less than the First Nations? And the First Nations, for that matter, are of three different linguistic groups. Only one of them would call the river “Wolostoq.” And, being nomadic, all historically passed along the river. Why should we give the river the name used by the Maliseet, say, instead of the Micmac name?

And, of course, any renaming costs money, and does nobody any material good. So there’s that.

You’d think the people of New Brunswick, and the native people of New Brunswick in particular, would have more pressing problems.

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

Lay On, MacDuff

 

Writers and poets are the true psychologists, the authorities on the psyche. It takes a deep empathy, a deep understanding of how the human psyche works, to make a believable fictional character, or to write a poem that resonates with many souls, not just your own. This is what Keats called “negative capability.” Their fruits—the beauty of their writings—certifies their wisdom and expertise. We are mad that we do not turn to them first when in mental turmoil.

By contrast, we have no way of knowing if a scientific psychologist or analyst knows what they are talking about; and can generally assume they don’t. Because the psyche cannot be studied “scientifically.”

As the greatest of writers, this makes Shakespeare the greatest of authorities on the human mind. His characters always have authentic motivations.

He has much to say on the matter of madness.

MacBeth is one example. Both MacBeth and Lady MacBeth go mad in the play. Both have what psychologists these days call “psychotic breaks”: they hallucinate. Lady MacBeth commits suicide.

And Shakespeare makes the cause clear: guilt. People are commonly driven mad, psychotic, by their own guilty conscience. A concept familiar too in classical mythology: one is hounded to madness by the Erinyes.

Modern psychiatry/psychology rules this out altogether. Moral considerations are not allowed in modern psychiatry. Meaning that in such cases modern psychiatry is useless, or worse than useless.

No wonder that, in modern times, “schizophrenia” and “bipolar disorder,” the psychotic forms of madness, are considered incurable. Psychiatry only dulls the symptoms with drugs.

By contrast, in Shakespeare’s play, while Lady MacBeth kills herself, MacBeth seems to recover lucidity by the end of the play—seemingly because he accepts that he is about to be killed, and accepts it as his proper fate. He has ended his rebellion against God, and returned to an appreciation and acceptance of divine justice.

Once, abroad, needing something to read, I picked up a paperback on Florida’s Death Row. And the author claimed the prisoners on Death Row were invariably barking mad.

Yet they cannot have been mad when they committed their murders: some were mob hit men, professional murderers. They did it for money, and had to plan for the killings. You can’t do that if you are out of touch with the physical world around you.

They too seem, then, to have been driven mad by guilt.

This is not the cause for all mental illness; Shakespeare makes this, too, clear.

Lady MacBeth’s Doctor remarks: “yet I have known those which have walked in their sleep who have died holily in their beds.”

“More needs she the divine than the physician.”

Implying that others will, to the contrary, need a physician. Some madness is caused by physical illness. Some is caused by bad upbringing: Plato and the New Testament agree on this.

But when, as is often the case, the problem is moral, no “physic” can work.

MacBeth:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor:

Therein the patient Must minister to himself.

The cure is confession, repentance, and restitution.

However, the sufferer also has an obvious vested interest in avoiding confession. This conflict is what drives them mad. On the one hand, fearing discovery, they become paranoid, and will add sin to sin in defiance of their conscience, now an enemy.

“I am in blood Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er.”

Himmler said more or less the same thing in justifying the Nazi Holocaust.

“Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

Sin hardens into vice. 

This is why it is up to the patient to minister to themselves. If their only help is confession, they will try to destroy anyone who tries to help.

On the other hand, the desire to confess, to “make a clean breast of it,” also becomes overwhelming. This causes them often to, as if inadvertently, let their guilt slip out. As MacBeth does before a table full of prominent nobles. As Lady MacBeth feigns doing with her nighttime notes.

“I have seen her rise from her bed, throw her night-gown upon her, unlock her closet, take forth paper, fold it, write upon't, read it, afterwards seal it, and again return to bed; yet all this while in a most fast sleep.”

The cure for such mental illness is obvious. And you will never get it from a psychiatrist.

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

Asymmetrical Warfare

 

It is an unnerving thought, but it seems increasingly clear that Justin Trudeau here in Canada, and Joe Biden in the States, have for years been in the pay of the Communist Chinese government. And that this has influenced them to go at times against the interests of their own country.

And after all, why wouldn’t this be so? Bribery is the standard way to do business in China. Now that China is the second-largest world economy, their government has vast financial resources. Plenty enough to bribe foreign leaders. Why wouldn’t they apply their business culture abroad?

In past generations, even were this attempted, we could probably count on our leadership, our political elites, to be too committed to the ideals of Canada, or the USA, to their homeland and its people, to take such bribes. But now, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, our elites no longer feel this way: Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden have made it no secret that they do not feel this way. There is, we are told, no Canadian mainstream culture. Biden and Trudeau and those around them have open contempt for Canada, or the US, as patriarchies, “white supremacist,” and “settler colonies.” They pretty much must be torn down. This can surely justify, at least in their own minds, dealing with the enemy. Especially if they is a lot in it for them. 

It is telling that much or all the money seems to have gone to close relatives, rather than to the two politicians themselves. To the Chinese way of thinking, the family is an indissoluble unit: money given to any member is money given to “the big guy.” It is also an essential part of Chinese culture that any gift implies a quid pro quo. This is not optional; they will keep accounts and balance sheets.

Which may explain why they were so livid at Canada’s detaining the HuaWei CFO.

Without assuming this Chinese control, it is hard to account for many of the actions of the Trudeau government’s, or indeed Biden’s. They often seem to go against the national interest. Or they resist and stall when action against China seems advisable.

Why is this coming out now, and at the same time in both countries?

It is “whistle blowers” somewhere in the security service.

Why are they leaking now?

Because a few years ago, such payments might have looked corrupt, but not alarming. 

Since Xi Jinping has gone totalitarian, and seized Hong Kong, the bribery has begun to look more like a direct threat to national security. Making  it seem now necessary to take the risk of blowing the whistle.

If Canada is worth the subverting, we can be sure the CCP is doing the same in many other places. New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, the Philippines, show evidence of this. I wonder about France, the Netherlands, South Korea. That they have bought many African leaders is common knowledge.

Sun Tzu says that the war is won before the first shot is fired. This is what the CCP is doing. They are undermining Canada and the West from within.

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

O Wad Pow'r the Gift He Gie Us

 ... To see oursels as others see us.

Remember those old days when Americans or Europeans had no idea what was going on in Canada?

Like this better, now that Canada is on everyone's mind?

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

Madness and Civilization

 

Since it came up in our reading, I posed to my students inthe last few days the question, “is there a rule book of a program for life? Isthere a purpose to life?”

Unfortunately, none could give a satisfactory answer.

My most thoughtful student first offered the constructivistposition: the goal and the rules and the real are whatever one’s own societyhas decided they are.

So, okay, is it, on this basis, legitimate to criticise NaziGermany—let alone go to war with them? Is it legitimate to go to war to endslavery in a society that accepts it as proper? What about child sacrifice?Cannibalism? Wife-beating? They can be no better or worse in principle than anyother random moral standard, right?

And when the world believed the world was flat, then it was flat.

He backed away at this, and proposed instead the existentialist position. We are free to decide for ourselves on our own particular life goals.

We had been reading MacBeth. So, did MacBeth or Lady MacBeth choose properly, in making their life goal to gain power no matter who else got harmed? Don’t they themselves soon come to regret the choice? And indeed, on this basis, o we have any right to criticize John Wayne Gacy? Execute, perhaps; but arbitrarily, in the end.

These are the official, and it seems prevalent, views on ethics and ontology in our time. They are logically and indeed morally untenable. For right and wrong, justice, and reality are actually objective and immutable qualities. You cannot will a thing into being, or into being right.

This shows why mental illness is rapidly on the rise. It explains why drug use and suicide are surging. And it explains why mass shootings and such desperate escapes as transvestitism are on the rise. It explains  social breakdown generally.

The problem is quite simple, and it is drastic: to most moderns, life itself is pointless.

Some, the good among us, will sink into hopeless depression. Some will seek death, a chemical escape, or self-mutilation. Others will conclude that the only value left is self-interest, and become like MacBeth.

This is often a failure of parenting. But then, if the parent has no moral core or values, they have nothing to pass on. And our culture has suffered a collapse of values. 

Going to Catholic schools growing up, the answer to the question was obvious. The purpose of life was to know and love God, and to serve him in this world and the next. There was a rule book: the Ten Commandments. One might reject it, but at least the answer was held out to you. 

Public schools, of course, no longer teach any such thing. They teach constructivism, or existentialism.

There I no excuse for this; for even across all religious beliefs, the purpose of life is clear, and always has been, even to the ancient pagans. The purpose of life is—in fact, self-evidently—to seek and promote truth, justice, and beauty. This corresponds to the Catholic teaching, because that is what God is: the perfect ultimate source and essence of truth, justice, and beauty. But it is equally true ithout that insight. There is, leaving aside the Ten Commandments, necessarily, a necessary rule: the rule of universal love, expressed in all cultures as “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant demonstrated that, apart from any specific religious belief, this was a categorical imperative: treat others as an end, never a means. Act as you would wish all others to act. Stray from these essential truths, and you are insane.

Most of us are, in the true sense, insane.

It makes me fear to even walk among other men.

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

Trudeau's Truth

 

In this clip, Justin Trudeau shows a notable lack of intelligence. To put the most charitable interpretation on it.

He begins by boasting that he goes by the dictionary definition of words. Then he gets the meaning of the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” confused. He thinks “misinformation” is deliberate, and “disinformation” unintentional.

Here are the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:

Disinformation: “The dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media.”

Misinformation: “Wrong or misleading information.”

He then proceeds to a logical fallacy. He poses the question, “Who decides what is misinformation or disinformation?” And he responds, “There has to be an acceptance that there are experts out there who create a basis of fact.”

This is the “argumentum ab auctoritate,” or argument from authority. It is really an evasion of the question.

To begin with, what if authorities disagree—as, of course, they always do? By what authority do you choose one authority over another?

Are you going to take the “consensus of experts”? Now you have committed the ad populum fallacy as well, that truth can be arrived at by popular vote. If everyone on Earth voted that the moon was made of green cheese, this could not make the moon green cheese. If nearly everyone thought that the sun goes around the earth—as almost everyone once did—this does not make it true that the sun goes around the earth.

Is a majority more likely to be right than a minority? No. After all, the smartest people are necessarily going to be an absolute minority of the general population.

Second, how do you know that person A is an authority on the matter? What authority vouches for him being an authority? And who vouches for that authority? You are into an infinite regression; an infinite regression of unknown quantities remains an unknown quantity.

Third, authorities, even if genuine, can lie. They will have their own vested interests. To call yourself an authority is to say “just trust me.” One ought to automatically suspect a con.

Fourth, to uncritically accept the word of existing authority brings all science, all human thought and human progress to a halt. If authority is always right, then Galileo was spreading misinformation, as was Newton, or Einstein, or Columbus, or the Wright Brothers, or for that matter Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, or Jesus Christ.

In practice, who would inevitably decide what is and is not disinformation? Trudeau’s bottom line must be government—actually the usual source of disinformation. It must, in short, be him. Government is authority, and therefore gets to decide and declare the experts. Which means by definition the end of democracy and an increasingly authoritarian regime. 

It is terrifying that this man is in any position of power.

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

How Canada Now Looks from Australia

 

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