Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1373

A reader writes...

The Globe & Mail has posted an interesting article about how schools are banning affection that, in many cases, seems to be natural and normal.

Strangely, it seems that in this case, the USA and UK have been more censorious than Canada, which usually leads in the nanny-state sweepstakes.

Obviously, not all of this stuff they're worried about is just simple uncomplicated friendship. But it does go to show how the sexualization of culture undermines real bonds of trust and interpersonal peace. I do think that good friendship is both a necessary precondition for, and a result of, chastity. It's sad to see it undermined so. Anthony Esolen further illustrates the point.

Yup. Our reduction of all love to eros inevitably leads to these insane whipsaws. Normal people require all of the normal human loves (affection, friendship, eros and agape). But our culture now inflexibly decrees that only eros exists and that the other loves are simply sublimated forms of eros. So expressions of affection get ruthlessly labeled as incipient sexual abuse and banned by draconian zero tolerance idiots who are paranoid about lawsuits (or simply infected with the itch to domineer).

Zero tolerance policies are the bureaucratic substitute for thinking.

Did Jesus Exist?

A brief look at one of the dumbest tropes to take root in the Bright community--a living laboratory demonstration of the fact that intellect worship is inversely proportional to intellect use.

Pretty nifty!

Here's a well-made little video about Catholic Answers Live



I've had the honor of doing the show several times and they run a tight ship and do fine work. Excelsior, gang!

A reader writes...

Yes, you can own your very own jiggly replica of a pound of fat for $34. For $90, you can purchase 5 pounds of fake wobbly blubber to have lying around the house!

I'm thinking they should feature this on the homepage for Valentine's Day:

"Forget jewelry and roses! Get one for Valentine's Day to let that lovely lady in your life know that you're really concerned about her health! She's guaranteed never to speak to you again after she eats the entire heart-shaped box of clearance chocolates you so thoughtfully wooed her with."

I'd love to have a box of these and build a creature out of them. Good thing Christmas is only 11 months away!

Damn! And I just lost 45 pounds for free!

No. Really. FOX Doesn't Care About You

You are food for a corporation that wants to exploit you, not a person they take seriously. Indeed, you religious types creep them out as much as you creep out Keith Olbermann. And between Rupert Murdoch and Keith Olbermann, laughing at you and your silly primitive rituals is kinda fun. No, the malice and hatred between FOX and, say, MSNBC is over who gets to control Mammon and Bacchus, not over concern about the feelings of the conservative Christian suckers who think some corporation dedicated to those gods actually cares about them.

Jesus loves you. Rupert Murdoch could not care less about you. Don't be a sucker. Get your gospel from Jesus.

The ever-fun-to-read John Zmirak

...shouts into the wind:

There are two emotive responses that arise in the heart of a conservative when he considers foreign lands with alien ways:

a) A bored apathy, summed up by Nancy Mitford's line: "Abroad is bloody, and foreigners are fiends." This is the instinct on which old-fashioned isolationism relies.

b) An arrogant impulse to take up "the White Man's Burden" and reshape those unruly foreigners in our image.

The default position of most conservatives is apathy, but it only takes a terrorist attack or some threat to one of the many imperial outposts we planted (of necessity) during the Cold War to move most of us instantly to arrogance. In 1991, and again in 2001, Buchanan and his supporters tried to arrest this natural movement -- and failed. That's no surprise; as it's typically phrased, position a) invariably sounds like cynical selfishness, and is prone to caricature as short-sighted and finally suicidal. Position b), on the other hand, is easy to dress up in the rhetoric of idealism and inflate with ambitious slogans that appeal to our "can-do" spirit. Gosh darn it, if we can put a man on the moon, we sure can . . . fill in the blank. Build a Great Society on the banks of the Mekong River. Democratize the Dar al-Islam. Turn Somalia into Switzerland.

What we need is to recast our opposition to foreign adventurism in principles that appeal to deeper strains in American culture -- for instance, in the humility that is demanded of every Christian. (George W. Bush used such language in the 2000 campaign; the only problem was that he was lying.) Conservatives, even those who haven't found God, believe in original sin, and that's one tenet they share with those of us who sing "Amazing Grace." If instead of casting ourselves as Machiavellian "realists," or self-serving America-Firsters, we used the language of humility, we might be able to gain some purchase with voters the next time a foreign policy crisis emerges.

Imagine (I can dream, can't I?) President Rand Paul addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress, responding to a terrorist attack. He could lay out the suitable measures for increased domestic security, the retaliatory strikes we would undertake against guilty parties, then end with a humble, Christian admission that even we Americans are bound by human limitations, that we cannot reshape thousands of years of culture with a few years of military occupation, and because of that, he will not commit our soldiers and our budget to open-ended attempts to remake other civilizations in our own, imperfect image. Such rhetoric has at least a fighting chance of avoiding another disaster like Iraq; it has the added advantage of being true.

Of course, this will never happen. The Evil Stupid party and Stupid Evil Party are solidly committed to the proposition that every war we undertake is World War II, the Crusades, and the Battle Between St. Michael and the Dragon rolled into one. Any appeals to common sense or just war doctrine will be shouted down as cowardice, American Hatred, and all the usual hysteria will be deployed--till the country final collapses under the sheer unsustainability of Bill Kristol levels of prophetic delusion. We will continue to believe that if force fails, that's because we used insufficient levels of force.

Classic Tyrant Stuff

After a week of basically peaceful protests, Mubarak sends in the goons to shoot people, beat them up and throw molotov cocktails. Then he humbly explains that, much as he'd like to, if he stepped down now, there would be chaos.

Just a humble public servant keeping order. Meanwhile, the Obama administration can't comment on whether the goons beating up protesters are in the service of Mubarak. Brilliant.

Luke the Nordic Giant Speaks Wisely

"Everyone who enjoys happiness" should listen to the Tobolowsky Files. Stephen Tobolowsky (seen below as Ned Ryerson in the Groundhog Day clip) is a character actor who also happens to be a natural-born storyteller and one of the most interesting people on Planet Earth. Check him out and get happily addicted.

I can totally relate to this post

I am so damn meek. I am the meekest Christian of ALL TIME! I'm way meeker than you, punk.

Obama Administration tries to ride tiger

Latest idiocy: trying to gingerly pretend that pro-Mubarak rent-a-mob thugs don't have anything to do with Mubarak.

Meanwhile, Israel's upset even with this tepid attempt to back away from the regime.

Meanwhile, Yemen starts to light up, along with Jordan. And Syria is starting to feel the heat.

And the guys in Egypt want the death penalty for apostates from Islam and are itching for hostilities with Israel to resume, so that's really promising.

Long ago, I remember when Bill "Wrong about Everything" Kristol was prophesying about the glorious fruits of democratic revolution in the Middle East:



That "chain reaction" thing seems to be finally paying off for ol' Bill. Mass democratic movements are springing up across the Islamosphere. And yet, oddly, our country seems to be highly ambivalent about them. That *could* be because, as Glenn Beck crazily asserts, this is all the fruit of some shadowy plot by Bill Ayers and (possibly) Obama. Or it could be because people living lives of desperation under tyrants sometimes get fed up. The thing is, mere mass democratic movements are no guarantee that people will not democratically vote to bind themselves with adamantine chains of authoritarianism worse than the despot we have been supporting--and remember forever that we supported the regime they just overthrew.

The lesson repeated by France, Russia, Hitler's Germany, post-colonial Africa, and Iran is that sometimes people want more tyranny, not less, just so long as they think they will get to be the tyrant. The notion that mere democratic "movements" must lead to freedom is one of the most naive and conflicted of our ideological commitments, which is why we simultaneously jabber like Bush's second inaugural:

Freedom, by its nature, must be chosen, and defended by citizens, and sustained by the rule of law and the protection of minorities. And when the soul of a nation finally speaks, the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own. America will not impose our own style of government on the unwilling. Our goal instead is to help others find their own voice, attain their own freedom, and make their own way.

...and then start to feel deep fear when this mystical faith in the healing and redeeming power of democracy is, in fact, put to the test in Islamic countries where we have been supporting despots and the drive for democratic revolution allows the "soul of a nation" to finally speak and say, "Sharia now! Death to apostates! Death to Israel! Death to America! Death to the infidel!" Yes, "the institutions that arise may reflect customs and traditions very different from our own". One might even call them "mortally opposed" to our own. Because men can freely choose chains as well as liberty as they "make their own" (and everybody else's) way.

So we waffle between maintaining the mystical belief in the saving power of democratic revolution while cynically supporting the despots and only gingerly suggesting they step aside when our whole sleazy contract with them is in tatters.

My suggestion: heed Washington's words about foreign entanglements, stop meddling in the affairs of nations and stop making people sick by talking about our commitment to liberty while propping up dictators.

One way to achieve that might be to listen carefully to Bill Kristol's prophetic utterances and then go do the exact opposite. If the man had lived in biblical times he would have been stoned to death.