America is so laden with propaganda...

...that white, tenured professors and journalists who barely have three credit hours each of history and economics still succeed in making generations of Americans believe that capitalism leads to a few rich billionaires and a destitute lower class, without even thinking to ask the questions "where'd the middle class come from, then?" and "why aren't we talking about the dearth of historical evidence that any alternative to capitalism has not just fewer billionaires but fewer middle class people and more poor people?"

Never mind Russia....

We need to look into China's meddling in American political affairs.  

The election isn't here yet so the disruption of legitimate political activity could still be minimized--at least, where there's nothing untoward that might be uncovered--and any collusion not uncovered would still be chilled as dishonest agents who wanted to stay below the radar, kept themselves below the radar.

Why is that when pro-choicers point to programs intended to help break the cycle of poverty as part of their efforts that have the effect of reducing abortion...

...they don't allow pro-lifers to make the same argument?

Maybe someone volunteers at soup kitchens, helps minorities in juvenile detention learn reading and other life skills, but if he goes to pray one rosary across the street from an abortion clinic or goes online, he's accused of not taking a holistic approach to honoring the dignity of human life and therefore isn't sincere at all.  Meanwhile his accusers do nothing but show up to shout at him, vote D, and then say "we pay our taxes to support these things."

Yeah, and he pays the same taxes.  Then he donates time and money willingly where he thinks it will make the biggest difference.


"Studies have shown 100% of abortions are carried out on women who don't want to be pregnant, and 0% on conservative white Christian men, so butt out."

Nice rhetoric, but you can only get that 100% figure by including women who don't want an abortion but aren't allowed to be shown alternatives, and women who want to have their babies but are dragged to clinics by their boyfriends who may use phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid paternity hearings," and girls who are reluctant but undecided yet whose mothers drag them to the clinic on the grounds of "you live under my roof and I drive you around and feed you and I'm supposed to raise you, but since I failed to teach you to be 'responsible' then you must also have not learned what it takes to be a mom, so instead of showing you we're doing this," and girls who are reluctant or undecided yet whose boyfriends drag them to clinics while using phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid statutory rape charges."


As for the 0%...there are atheist pro-lifers, and liberal pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers, and none of them is negligible in number, so why don't you stand your ground and defend your position, and log off or stay home for a while when you get tired of being reminded that people exist who disagree with you?

So much hangs in the balance....

Earlier this evening Mark Levin was justly mocking various high level leftoids for using melodramatic rhetoric about the importance of the November elections--stuff like "civilization as we know it hangs in the balance!"

I think, though, that they're technically correct.

If they win, the United States will be the point source for more societal poison administered by marxists and the caliphate, pushing us farther down a sleep and slippery path to cultural suicide.   This just happens to be what they want, as long as they can keep their hands on the reins.

If they lose, western civilization as we know it will last a little bit longer, and who knows how much there will be to hope for in 2022 or 2024?

This is how one knows one lives in a post-Christian society

They go on social media and post memes like "If you see a problem, you can pray about it, and it will be quick and easy and absolve you of the responsibility of solving it, and it won't solve anything, but if you put in the effort, it won't be quick or easy or absolve you of responsibility, but you will have solved it."

All the while assuming that what you and they might agree are social problems are things every decent human being anywhere across the world and throughout history would would also recognize as social problems that both must and can be fixed (or, at least, deserve the attempt).

This is, of course, not true.  

Look back to the founding of our country.  Most people at the time were not giving slavery as an institution a good prognosis in the long run, but there was some doubt as to whether it might be eradicated entirely and freedmen might really be able to enjoy the benefits of all that rhetoric about liberty.  

Look farther back, and you find concubines common not just in secular royal courts but even in the Vatican where it was doubted that the ideal of sexual continence was even possible.  I know, rumors and scandalous news articles these days support the notion that it's aiming a bit high, but plenty of priests and religious have shown that it is possible and that it need not settle for being honored more in the breach.  

Look elsewhere, and almsgiving is an obscure concept.  In India dying people are stepped over.  In China you are likely to be asked why you're tipping the homeless.  When religious orders go to such countries and do what little they can with the resources they can scrounge up, they're criticized for not meeting FDA standards (which no one outside the US honors, so...ethnocentric much?).

In the West, though?  Helping the destitute and lifting up the downtrodden are so built into our society that it doesn't occur to these "your faith doesn't fix things, I do" folks that helping the hopeless  doesn't occur to just everyone.  It's so ingrained in our secular culture they don't realize it came from religion--and the Christian religion in particular--or that they wouldn't even be motivated to criticize if they hadn't been raised to believe even that much.

Which leads to some interesting dynamics, where the believers start bringing science and logic to the table and it's the unbelievers who start getting wishy-washy about philosophical questions like "what's a person?" and "Who gets human rights?" when they're not even getting basic facts about embryology right--or they choose to categorically forget that there are pro-lifers who not only disbelieve in Christ, but disbelieve in any sort of god at all.

Then they come around and twist the establishment clause and try to school us with more memes like  "You have the right to hold your religious beliefs, but you do not have the right to impose them on others."  

Well, friend, I happen to believe murder and assault and theft and (perhaps with qualifications, but let's not get off track) the male gaze are sins, and my reasons are in no small part religious.  Do you want to take those off the table too?  

Two things I encounter in the world that make me most confident that the Catholic Church is the true Church

1)  Anti-Catholic apologists who take a contrary position to some straw man and, despite all attempts to clarify and correct, refuse to acknowledge that their understanding was in error, even in the interest of developing more relevant arguments against Rome.  They've got their arguments pat, by gum, and there's no need to let facts get in the way.

Not that this is always the case, but it happens often enough that I'm left with the impression that lame arguments are favored because good ones just aren't available.

e.g.:
"Catholics think they get a second chance at heaven with purgatory."
"No we don't.  Our fate is sealed at the moment of death; purgatory is just a matter of how Christ's sanctifying graces get applied to us once the judgment is rendered."
"That still sounds like a second chance."
"No, it really doesn't.  We're saying that for those of us who get invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb, some of us are met at the door by the maitre'd and told we will be provided with a shower and formalwear before the party starts.  It's a service that is only offered to people holding an invitation.  It's not the same thing as a bouncer stopping you and telling you to go make yourself presentable in the hope of finding an invitation that had blown into a storm drain or something."
"Seems like it to me."
"Well, it shouldn't.  Purgatory does not get you saved.  Purgatory gets people sanctified.  Only saved people get to have it.  Even if you don't accept it, if you won't recognize the distinction I'm trying to make here, I can only conclude you are willfully or shamefully declining to engage the argument, and are persisting in your misconceptions, that the Church teaches something it doesn't teach, and therefore your arguments are not intended for my ears, and I will not bother myself with more of us talking past each other."
"Well, it still sounds like..."
"I'm sorry, but 'it sounds like' isn't really an argument."
"Well then, it looks like--"
sigh.
Do not judge as man seeth, for man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart.

As it has been said, if this is the best argument that can be made against Rome, then the argument for Rome must have some meat to it.

2)  Anti-Catholic apologists who are apparently so zealous about saving Catholics from Rome they forget to be charitable and develop sweeping powers of telepathy that they handily employ in alternatingly attempting to prick our consciences and flat-out judge us (perhaps with only intent of doing the former).  The amateur ones tend to demand that Catholicism be proven by Protestant means (which is largely impossible, unless one proves that Protestant means are self-defeating, since non-Catholic policies of exegesis and ecclesiology had to be invented to justify the Reformation in the first place), and failing the presentation of a compact answer, declare themselves head and shoulders above the confusion.  The professional ones (of this sort--not conflate them with people who make a living doing this sort of thing) tend to dredge up the material that usually goes into Catholic arguments, declare the preponderance of history to be on their side, and conclude that we Catholics are too stupid or lazy to find our own way out of the maze of Romanism.  These claims are quite bold, considering they are often repeated liberally, and often applied to individual arguments that are only intended to rebut particular claims, often to individuals who have not contributed enough to the debate to allow any fair party with the normal range of senses to judge the extent of their education, let alone the quality of their motivation or the state of their soul--and oddly, often paired with reminders that they are only being rude out of a charitable concern for our eternal destiny.
Some people do have a gift of discernment, but applying it so sloppily, like a politician would twist the words of an opponent, only suggests that the alleged discerner is not accurately gauging the knowledge intuited to him, or that he is merely speculating being judgmental for political or personal reasons, or that he is lying. In none of these cases can he be relied on to provide meaningful information at face value.