Also, I made this for you:
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2012
Because Gun Control...
...is on my "absolutely positively under no circumstances discuss this on Facebook" list, I'll link this article here (warning: it's long; 10k-ish words): http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/
Also, I made this for you:
Also, I made this for you:
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
On Martyrdom.
Years ago, back when I went to the YMI day retreats, one of my group leaders asked us if we knew what it meant to be a martyr. Me, always the over-achiever, raised my arm high and proclaimed that it was someone who died for their faith. The missionaries laughed at me. "Not in America!" they proclaimed.
And I think they are right. The idea of feeding Catholics to lions, or burning them to death as was the fate of the Ugandan martyrs, seems highly unlikely. The American character is too averse to such open persecution, and the evil too blatant, to really grab hold in this country. So what does martyrdom look like in America?
(And you are fooling yourself if you think there aren't American martyrs. The world cannot simultaneously hate the Church and tolerate Her presence. A sinner hates nothing more than the guilt of his sin, and cannot help but harbor a grudge against those who reinforce that guilt by denouncing the sin.)
About once a year, a priest from Vladivostok, Russia, makes the tour of Orange County, preaching at parishes, and asking for support for the missionary work in Russia, undoing the evils of the Communists. He tells the story of what happened to the Church in Vladivostok at the beginning of the Revolution. Most of the city's inhabitants were Orthodox—too many to openly persecute—so the Soviets simply bombed the churches. One Easter Sunday, in front of all the faithful, they simply closed the Orthodox churches, save one, and blew them up, to be rebuilt for The Party's use. The Catholics were not so lucky. They were a small minority, and the Communists saw no reason to try and tolerate them. Catholics were simply rounded up and executed, and the city didn't notice much difference.
So there is strength in numbers. It's hard to imagine a relatively peaceful country killing off a fifth of its inhabitants (or even a twentieth, if we only count those who meet the bare minimum requirement of weekly Mass attendance). 60 million (or 15 million) is a lot of graves to fill. But the tactics of the Soviets may lend an insight. If there are too many to round up, simply keep them out of their churches.
Of course, even the American government closing churches is a bit too much to take seriously. But a literal shutting of doors is not necessary, and probably not even desired by the secularists. Instead, the tactic will be to keep them in their churches. Shut the doors with the faithful inside.
"Leave your religion at the church door," I suspect, will be the descriptive phrase for the age to come. If the world can't keep people from being religious, it can at least try to keep religious people from being in the world. And this is the persecution that we are already seeing.
And I think they are right. The idea of feeding Catholics to lions, or burning them to death as was the fate of the Ugandan martyrs, seems highly unlikely. The American character is too averse to such open persecution, and the evil too blatant, to really grab hold in this country. So what does martyrdom look like in America?
(And you are fooling yourself if you think there aren't American martyrs. The world cannot simultaneously hate the Church and tolerate Her presence. A sinner hates nothing more than the guilt of his sin, and cannot help but harbor a grudge against those who reinforce that guilt by denouncing the sin.)
About once a year, a priest from Vladivostok, Russia, makes the tour of Orange County, preaching at parishes, and asking for support for the missionary work in Russia, undoing the evils of the Communists. He tells the story of what happened to the Church in Vladivostok at the beginning of the Revolution. Most of the city's inhabitants were Orthodox—too many to openly persecute—so the Soviets simply bombed the churches. One Easter Sunday, in front of all the faithful, they simply closed the Orthodox churches, save one, and blew them up, to be rebuilt for The Party's use. The Catholics were not so lucky. They were a small minority, and the Communists saw no reason to try and tolerate them. Catholics were simply rounded up and executed, and the city didn't notice much difference.
So there is strength in numbers. It's hard to imagine a relatively peaceful country killing off a fifth of its inhabitants (or even a twentieth, if we only count those who meet the bare minimum requirement of weekly Mass attendance). 60 million (or 15 million) is a lot of graves to fill. But the tactics of the Soviets may lend an insight. If there are too many to round up, simply keep them out of their churches.
Of course, even the American government closing churches is a bit too much to take seriously. But a literal shutting of doors is not necessary, and probably not even desired by the secularists. Instead, the tactic will be to keep them in their churches. Shut the doors with the faithful inside.
"Leave your religion at the church door," I suspect, will be the descriptive phrase for the age to come. If the world can't keep people from being religious, it can at least try to keep religious people from being in the world. And this is the persecution that we are already seeing.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Delusions of Reality
Do you know what the definition of insanity is? No, it's not doing the same thing expecting different results. That's called practice. I do it every day with the piano and, sure enough, the results are slightly better each day.
No, insanity is when one's perception of reality is different from reality itself. For instance, a man who believes himself Theodore Roosevelt, or thinks himself a cat, or that he hears voices. In each case, the person's idea of what is real is different from what is really real. The man is not Theodore Roosevelt, or a cat, and the voices are mere hallucination.
Increasingly, I've been feeling that the whole world has gone, by this definition, completely insane. Totally loony. Off their rockers. Large swaths of the population seem to be totally given over to ideas that have no bearing in reality. It's like everyone is playing a children's game where we all pretend we're monkeys in the zoo, or astronauts in outer space, or cowboys and Indians. But when I don't play along, or return to reality and stop pretending, everyone gets mad and indignant with me because they really believe they are monkeys or astronauts or cowboys. It's really quite surreal.
What brought on this feeling most recently was an article my Google reader recommended items pointed me towards (it recommends weird things). Apparently a school in Michigan has refused to allow a girl to be homecoming king because she's a girl, not a boy. This is, apparently, a problem because the girl is playing a make-believe game in which she pretends she's a boy. But the weird part is that so many other people are playing along and pretending the same thing. The news item itself refers to her as a "him", despite the fact that it even mentions towards the end that she hasn't even had the cosmetic surgery to add boy-parts. So in no real, objective way is this girl a boy--only in her mind and the minds of those playing along with her. She has no Y-chromosome, or male genitalia, or a prostate, or any of the biological capabilities that set men and women apart, yet many people seem totally willing to give themselves into the fantasy that she is somehow a boy.
The thing is, I understand how we arrived at this point. This bit of insanity starts with a very simple and common desire--people want to have sex. Nothing in the world wrong with that, of course. "The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity," sayeth the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2335) (emphasis original). The problem comes when people want sex without consequences. Since procreation is the natural end of sex--as ordained by God and, y'know, biology and natural selection--we have to step into our first little bit of insanity to get the footloose and fancy free sex we want: we must pretend that babies are not the natural end of sex, but an unintended side effect. This is, of course, a perception that is disconnected with reality--an insanity, if you will--but one that is pretty easy to make. After all, babies only occasionally occur from sex, and with contraception, they almost never occur (although I always feel obliged to mention my friend who has gotten pregnant three times while on The Pill). It becomes very easy to enter the contraceptive mentality, and convince ourselves that, as Jennifer Fulwiler says, "pregnancies that weren’t planned [are] akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street — something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives."
But this new pseudo-reality we've created for ourselves has consequences and implications of its own. If we pretend that sex is only for pleasure or bonding, and only mutual consent is required, then that means that any sexual act that fulfills that purpose of pleasure is not only licit, but equivalent to any other sex act with the same goal. The necessary outcome of this make-believe logic is that homosexual acts are equivalent to heterosexual acts. Suddenly, we've found ourselves with a new bit of insanity and we must now say that sex that has the potential to produce life is no different than sex that cannot by its very nature. We must pretend that homosexuals' unions are just like that of my wife and me, even though we made one of these and they can't. This is a much bigger disconnect from reality, but once we have accepted it, we are forced to pretend that, since homosexual sex and heterosexual sex are the same, therefore gay "marriage" must be permitted because not to do so would be discrimination.
And yet again, this new bit of greater insanity pushes us further along. For if gay "marriage" and real marriage are no different, then that means that men and women, when you get right down to it, are no different. And here we've finally arrived in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is where we end up saying that we must pretend a girl is a boy simply because she says she is. We have separated our thoughts from reality. Real, objective things in the real, objective world no longer hold sway on our minds. We have gone bonkers.
(Another consequence of the make-believe world in which pregnancy is an accident is that it leads us to the perfectly reasonable and compassionate conclusion that it's cruel to require a woman to be pregnant against her will--since her little insanity made her incapable of knowing sex could get her pregnant--which leads to allowing her to "terminate the pregnancy", to use a euphemism for infanticide. But since no one is in favor of infanticide, we must, therefore, pretend that the infant is not one, or is not alive, or does not exist. This delusion leads us to completely absurd ways of rationalizing our make-believe world. Instead of using the English word for baby, we use the Latin one ("fetus"), and pretend that changes the nature of the baby. We invent arbitrary and make-believe criteria for humanity or personhood or "aliveness" and pretend that since the baby absorbs oxygen through an umbilical cord instead of his lungs, or since he cannot survive in an environment hostile to him, he somehow is not alive (how many dead people do you know with a heartbeat?). The more science piles on evidence of the humanity of the pre-born, the more we arbitrarily raise the bar and invent make-believe reasons that it is not.)
The thing is, at some point between "I want to have sex with that hot girl in the bar" and "a girl is a boy," I would think that people would realize the insanity of their train of thought, and the disconnect it has with reality. But yet people plow ahead, full throttle, never looking back, never stopping to consider where they're going. I find myself wondering, with a good deal of trepidation, what the next piece of absurdity will bring.
As J. Budziszewski points out, sin begets sin, but as Mark Shea points out, sin makes you stupid. We start with a simple sin and end with a simple madness.
No, insanity is when one's perception of reality is different from reality itself. For instance, a man who believes himself Theodore Roosevelt, or thinks himself a cat, or that he hears voices. In each case, the person's idea of what is real is different from what is really real. The man is not Theodore Roosevelt, or a cat, and the voices are mere hallucination.
Increasingly, I've been feeling that the whole world has gone, by this definition, completely insane. Totally loony. Off their rockers. Large swaths of the population seem to be totally given over to ideas that have no bearing in reality. It's like everyone is playing a children's game where we all pretend we're monkeys in the zoo, or astronauts in outer space, or cowboys and Indians. But when I don't play along, or return to reality and stop pretending, everyone gets mad and indignant with me because they really believe they are monkeys or astronauts or cowboys. It's really quite surreal.
What brought on this feeling most recently was an article my Google reader recommended items pointed me towards (it recommends weird things). Apparently a school in Michigan has refused to allow a girl to be homecoming king because she's a girl, not a boy. This is, apparently, a problem because the girl is playing a make-believe game in which she pretends she's a boy. But the weird part is that so many other people are playing along and pretending the same thing. The news item itself refers to her as a "him", despite the fact that it even mentions towards the end that she hasn't even had the cosmetic surgery to add boy-parts. So in no real, objective way is this girl a boy--only in her mind and the minds of those playing along with her. She has no Y-chromosome, or male genitalia, or a prostate, or any of the biological capabilities that set men and women apart, yet many people seem totally willing to give themselves into the fantasy that she is somehow a boy.
The thing is, I understand how we arrived at this point. This bit of insanity starts with a very simple and common desire--people want to have sex. Nothing in the world wrong with that, of course. "The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the Creator's generosity and fecundity," sayeth the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2335) (emphasis original). The problem comes when people want sex without consequences. Since procreation is the natural end of sex--as ordained by God and, y'know, biology and natural selection--we have to step into our first little bit of insanity to get the footloose and fancy free sex we want: we must pretend that babies are not the natural end of sex, but an unintended side effect. This is, of course, a perception that is disconnected with reality--an insanity, if you will--but one that is pretty easy to make. After all, babies only occasionally occur from sex, and with contraception, they almost never occur (although I always feel obliged to mention my friend who has gotten pregnant three times while on The Pill). It becomes very easy to enter the contraceptive mentality, and convince ourselves that, as Jennifer Fulwiler says, "pregnancies that weren’t planned [are] akin to being struck by lightning while walking down the street — something totally unpredictable, undeserved, that happened to people living normal lives."
But this new pseudo-reality we've created for ourselves has consequences and implications of its own. If we pretend that sex is only for pleasure or bonding, and only mutual consent is required, then that means that any sexual act that fulfills that purpose of pleasure is not only licit, but equivalent to any other sex act with the same goal. The necessary outcome of this make-believe logic is that homosexual acts are equivalent to heterosexual acts. Suddenly, we've found ourselves with a new bit of insanity and we must now say that sex that has the potential to produce life is no different than sex that cannot by its very nature. We must pretend that homosexuals' unions are just like that of my wife and me, even though we made one of these and they can't. This is a much bigger disconnect from reality, but once we have accepted it, we are forced to pretend that, since homosexual sex and heterosexual sex are the same, therefore gay "marriage" must be permitted because not to do so would be discrimination.
And yet again, this new bit of greater insanity pushes us further along. For if gay "marriage" and real marriage are no different, then that means that men and women, when you get right down to it, are no different. And here we've finally arrived in Cloud Cuckoo Land. This is where we end up saying that we must pretend a girl is a boy simply because she says she is. We have separated our thoughts from reality. Real, objective things in the real, objective world no longer hold sway on our minds. We have gone bonkers.
(Another consequence of the make-believe world in which pregnancy is an accident is that it leads us to the perfectly reasonable and compassionate conclusion that it's cruel to require a woman to be pregnant against her will--since her little insanity made her incapable of knowing sex could get her pregnant--which leads to allowing her to "terminate the pregnancy", to use a euphemism for infanticide. But since no one is in favor of infanticide, we must, therefore, pretend that the infant is not one, or is not alive, or does not exist. This delusion leads us to completely absurd ways of rationalizing our make-believe world. Instead of using the English word for baby, we use the Latin one ("fetus"), and pretend that changes the nature of the baby. We invent arbitrary and make-believe criteria for humanity or personhood or "aliveness" and pretend that since the baby absorbs oxygen through an umbilical cord instead of his lungs, or since he cannot survive in an environment hostile to him, he somehow is not alive (how many dead people do you know with a heartbeat?). The more science piles on evidence of the humanity of the pre-born, the more we arbitrarily raise the bar and invent make-believe reasons that it is not.)
The thing is, at some point between "I want to have sex with that hot girl in the bar" and "a girl is a boy," I would think that people would realize the insanity of their train of thought, and the disconnect it has with reality. But yet people plow ahead, full throttle, never looking back, never stopping to consider where they're going. I find myself wondering, with a good deal of trepidation, what the next piece of absurdity will bring.
As J. Budziszewski points out, sin begets sin, but as Mark Shea points out, sin makes you stupid. We start with a simple sin and end with a simple madness.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
It's Just Too Easy
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine made a MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! on Wednesday, which was touted as something to EXCITE! Democrats across the country and get them ready for November's elections.
Their big announcement? A new logo!
Isn't that exciting? Doesn't that just get you pumped? No? You're weird. It gets me excited. In fact, I was so excited I nearly fell off my chair. It's just an amazingly exciting logo. But perhaps it could stand some improvement. Let's see how we can fix it.
How about that? Think it gets the point across? In an exciting fashion? No? How about:
Bullet holes are exciting, right? But oops! Now we're advertising the wrong organization. Let's try again:
This will certainly appeal to the teachers' unions, right? Aren't they democrats? Lastly, how about:
So there you have it. An exciting new logo for these exciting times! I wonder how long it took the Democrat Party to come up with that! Good thing they have plenty of time to spend on making silly logos! I mean, it's not like there's anything else they need to be doing. No sir. This country is squared away! No problems here, nosiree.
(Of course, the more time they spent working on the logo, the less they spent messing up anything else.)
Got any other ideas for their logo? Post 'em in the comments!
[UPDATE]
Thought of a couple more for ya:
Their big announcement? A new logo!
 |
| They make it too easy. |
Isn't that exciting? Doesn't that just get you pumped? No? You're weird. It gets me excited. In fact, I was so excited I nearly fell off my chair. It's just an amazingly exciting logo. But perhaps it could stand some improvement. Let's see how we can fix it.
 |
| Frank, yet candid. |
How about that? Think it gets the point across? In an exciting fashion? No? How about:
 |
| When you paint a target on your back.... |
 |
| Alternate caption: "Better than an F++." |
 |
| Dopey indeed. |
(Of course, the more time they spent working on the logo, the less they spent messing up anything else.)
Got any other ideas for their logo? Post 'em in the comments!
[UPDATE]
Thought of a couple more for ya:
 |
| Tilt your head to the right. |
 |
| A lot of other things could work here "–NIED", "–FEAT", "–UH", "–CIET", "–CEPTION", "–LUSIONAL", "–PRESSION", to name a few. |
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Speaking of The Onion...
One Year Into the Stimulus.
Meant to link that a while ago. People from Smelly Old Virgina will appreciate item #2. People who have the tiniest grasp of basic economics will appreciate the last item on the list.
Meant to link that a while ago. People from Smelly Old Virgina will appreciate item #2. People who have the tiniest grasp of basic economics will appreciate the last item on the list.
Courtesy The Murloc's Parents
...who were at the Reagan Library to see Mark Levin live. The video of the speech is below and is a very, very good watch. It's long but I recommend you take a look.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Happy 6th of July!
Boy, it sure is a good thing handguns are illegal in Chicago: http://cbs2chicago.com/local/chicago.area.shooting.2.1072542.html. Heaven forbid I have one.
Monday, May 18, 2009
No, YOU'RE wrong!
[Warning: long rant on religion and politics follows]
So someone recently made the statement that a Catholic who supported the the invasion of Iraq must be just as morally confused as someone who is pro-choice. Although I provided a clear and concise rebuttal to the originator of the statement ("your stoopid"), I thought I'd explore this statement in a little more detail.
First off, "moral confusion" is an imprecise and ambiguous phrase, so when I use it what I really mean (and what I assume the original commentator meant) is "morally incorrect." "You're confused" as I usually see it used in this context seems to be intended as a more polite way of saying "you're wrong," except it's not more polite because everyone knows what it means, and condescending because it implies the other person isn't emotionally capable of dealing with someone telling them they're wrong.
Let's summarize why someone might be pro-choice (this has been discussed at length on this blog):
1. Unborn babies aren't human, so abortion is not an act that murders a human.
2. There's nothing inherently wrong with murdering innocent people.
3. Unborn babies are human, but it's okay to murder them because they aren't born (or crossed some arbitrary development threshold).
Note that I am assuming that we all accept that something that is inherently immoral is always morally wrong (i.e., if under some circumstances an act is not wrong, then it was not inherently so: the ends cannot justify the means). Item #1 represents "moral confusion" by virtue of incorrect facts. It is morally correct under the premise that unborn babies aren't human, but biology indicates otherwise. Item #2 represents a point of view that most people do not hold, and I don't honestly think the original commentator believes that all those who support the war hold this view. Item #3 is only morally correct with the introduction of a new moral principle that specifically excludes humans of some developmental stage or status from the prohibition against murder. I have never seen a justification, much less a clear statement, of this new principle. This also requires item #2, although supporters of abortion rarely admit it. The only other possible position for someone who supports legal abortion is that it is the immoral murder of an innocent human and should not be prohibited by government. This is an unusual view of the role of government.
In order for supporters of the war to be guilty of the same moral confusion as pro-choicers, then it must be because they believe that fighting a war is not inherently immoral, and possibly that there is some special reason that the invasion of Iraq need not be justified according to traditional just war theory. But the Church teaches explicitly that waging war is not inherently immoral, and proponents of the war that argue it is justified within the traditional just war theory (whether you agree with their reasoning or not) do not require some new moral principle (example example example). Therefore, proponents of the war in Iraq (including one singled out by the original commentator) clearly do not suffer the same "moral confusion" as pro-choicers in any meaningful sense.
The only other context given with the original offending comment was that the "morally confused" should have realized, after five years of tragedy, that the original decision was unjust. This implies that the unintended, undesired, unforeseen consequences can affect whether a decision is just after it has been made, which leads to a ridiculous impossibility of making moral judgments, since all possible effects of a decision cannot be foreseen.
It is a logic error (and perhaps a lack of charity) to assume that those who seem to be wrong on a moral issue must be suffering from deficient moral reasoning. Anyone can understand how identical logic applied to different premises can lead to different conclusions.
The only other statement by the original commentator I wish to comment on is "it is a reflection of ideology, not considered thought, to think that." But how can one think that which is not thought? Please be more clear. Did you mean, "it is a reflection of belief not based on reason"? But that is false on the face of it: as I showed above, the position (support for the war) is reasoned from facts and moral principles. As far as I can tell, this statement means nothing.
Comments are welcome.
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