There has been so much outrageous stuff in the political sphere (never mind Pope Francis's...follies) that I haven't been able to keep up.

 So, I'm just going to hit a few bullets, while I still can.  I'm getting burned out anyway and hopefully I'll be able to make more religious or merely theoretical political posts in the future.

Or I guess several bullets.  Sorry I couldn't keep this briefer.  It's actually better than my initial drafts....

• I've been getting Scientific American weekly e-mails for years but finally unsubscribed when they got as bad as the NY Times weekly headline e-mail.  I never read every article but the last straw was today when there was one article of interest to me, one apparently scientific article that didn't really float my boat, and several political ones claiming they're not really and never were all that political but it's time to change (especially now that Trump has gone all COVID denier...not sure if that was supposed to be before or after he shut down travel from China to the complaints of Leftists that he was going overboard).  Between that and the transparently biased sources they cite, I'd had enough.  Crying out loud...multiple articles said they and scientists at large (excepting academics, who are predominantly leftist in this era; at least they owned up to that) tend to be apolitical so risking taking a stand should mean something.  Buh?  Where have you been during global warming, SA?  If you forgot that you've been politicizing it ever since Gore lost the election--and no, I don't mean just talking about policy solutions--then you're not competent to write professionally.  
• Twitter, Hunter Biden...not much I can add.  Just gonna emphasize that Trump's been harassed and impeached for what the Bidens apparently consider to be business as usual.  And if they didn't do anything wrong, why the media blackout?  After four years of weak counterarguments, open lies, and you're-only-fooling-yourself defenses like "Debunked!  There weren't 30,000 people there, there were 25,000!" the silence is deafening.
• People are saying the Left is so enraged at Trump because they thought they'd be able to usher in USSR Mark Two in 2016.  Makes some sense, but the Long March has got to be a hundred years long by now; what's another four or eight?
• I wish people at large would think about their prior knowledge when they get presented with propaganda.  Do they even ask themselves "what about what I used to know?" when they're told some contradiction?  This isn't even Gell-Mann, although maybe it's a subsequent effect.
• Various talking heads: "Trump hasn't even agreed to make a peaceful transition if (or I hope when) he loses!" Dude: You’re the only one taking this seriously. He’s clearly trolling you—you’d know if you read more than half his tweets. After all, you’re the one who thought to raise the question—you’re either drinking your own Kool-Aid or lying. Meanwhile, put a lid on your characterizations of tyranny. You know what else is that kind of behavior? Changing voting rules during the early stages of an election. And he’s not the one doing that; you are.
• Trump is like Zaphod Beeblebrox. The only problem is, in this cynical and bitter galaxy, instead of letting him distract from the real work of whatever constitutes running a country these days, everything’s just getting exposed because he’s distracting them from what constitutes running a country these days.
  
• Some protestor: “This movement isn’t going to stop until it sees real and substantive change.” Fine, but at some point that’s going to mean not causing more property damage and injuries to innocent bystanders and not further provoking law enforcement. Are they willing to come to the table or, like they’ve said, are they going to burn it all down as long as they haven’t gotten whatever they haven’t decided yet will be good enough?
• "I'm politically correct.  Unlike you, I don't think you should force your opinion on others' lives." Oh, but your whole position is that some people should do so, under certain--or broad--circumstances.  You just think I shouldn't get to be one of them.
• "We didn't build a wall; the world built a wall around us."  Okay, clearly hyperbole, and that's fine, but what that means is the rest of the world thinks building walls does work.  Message received.
• I have a much longer post on different strands of socialism I'm still incubating that I still haven't decided to post, but considering the entities and bodies--you know, I'm going to use the term "bodies" for guerrilla type organizations in the future because they might not be hierarchical in quite the same was the military or the Church is, but they are nonetheless cellular--that brought most of the actual violence to 2020's protests, I will say this:  it is disingenuous to say fascism is rightist because it focuses socialism at the state level.  A genocide that gets focused in one city instead of across a whole region does not turn into an affirmative action movement.  It's just the same thing with a few administrative alterations.  
• Pursuant to that, if the crybullies and SJWs were truthful and right in their claims to fear the government, they would already be getting disappeared.
• Someone said once "Socialists like to claim that public roads are socialist so I must be a hypocrite if I'm okay with those, but I like to tell them 'I'd be more amenable to your position if you stuck to building public roads."  In the same vein, communism is frequently defended with assertions like "It's never really been tried!  If we had the right people in charge, we could make it work."  I think you're lying to me or at least yourself when you say that, but even if that might be true, before you start talking about implementing socialism to the degree where it will lead to Maoist degrees of granularity in federal involvement in your personal life, can we have a conversation about how you expect to make sure only these elusive right people get put in charge?  Because socialism sure seems to attract people who have more of an interest in the power itself, and they pay a lot of lip service, but when we get to late stage communism, where Marx and Stalin claimed that the state apparatus would just whither away (I guess by the proletariat getting habituated to just doing whatever the right thing is; they weren't explicit on this point, understandably), these not-the-right-people just end up kicking the can down the road so they can keep what they got.
• When you call someone racist, and they tell you you're projecting, it's because you say things like "being non racist is racist."  It is incoherent to say "racism is bigotry plus power"--which sounds like the position you'll be in if Biden wins, so you'll have to wear the label racist even by your own logic--but then here turn around and accuse individuals of the same thing.  It's why when you call people racist, they don't even bother refuting it anymore; you've overused the epithet and even people who aren't racist aren't bothered enough to take it seriously.  Meanwhile, consider the circumstances of Phillip Anderson and Mouat Freelon.  If you didn't accuse every white person of supremacist attitudes, real ones wouldn't be able to come out into the light, and if you didn't oppose free speech, you wouldn't know these people for what they were until they erupted into opportunistic violence like you've been seeing.
• Think twice before attempting to uplift the Black Man with your patronizing politics.  It's infantilizing and othering.  Maybe we're all equal beneath the state, but he's not beneath you.  Engage him like an adult.
• When you gloat about how web sites that suffer sanctions for promoting fake news have a disproportionate negative effect on conservatives, stop and consider for a moment that your zeal to connect those dots makes you look like you don't really have a good answer to Trump's accusations of you propagating fake news--you know, the anti-conservative stuff that used to be the only thing most people heard because the so-called independent media have a cartel that used to monopolize the channels of communication--and are left with making the "I know you are but what am I?" defense. And we both know that doesn't cut it.
• I won't begrudge anyone for having their preferred information/news sources.  We've all got to decide for ourselves what's best to take in.  But we should make a point of listening honestly to people we disagree with who can support what they claim to whatever threshold you find to be the bare minimum of "not some tin-hat wing nut."  If you don't...if a source you trusted ever did lie to you, how could you ever know?
• "You're the people history warned us about!"  ("Leave Britney alone!") You sure?  Because w're not the people who are changing dictionaries on the fly to "enhance" support for current events.  Back in the day, it's people who were talking like you, like a majority terrified of a tiny, insurgent conspiracy, who were screaming out of fear for the fate of the Dritte Reich at the hands of the Jews.  Just sayin'.  
• People like that, and like the ones who have been knocking out black men's teeth for the sake of critical race theory:  are they doing this because this is what they think activism normally looks like?  Do they have some vague image of Kent State in their heads and figure this is Just What Is Done?
• Was looking at an information source (I won't call it news) I don't usually read and there was so uniformly pro-Biden/"Facebook is fake and Republican" that I started wondering if I had been thinking myself into a corner all this time and relying too much on unreliable sources of my own. They were going on about the Hunter smear campaign and how it had been debunked and all that. Even comments like "Trump is the worst president ever!"  Then I realized two things.  (1) I'm willing to look at the other side and ask myself if this is what's happening to me.  Even Wikipedia lets its contributors do that, no matter how their final product turns out.  (2) I saw the video for myself where Joe bragged about playing hardball with Ukrainian officials to get personal benefits ("turns out Hunter wasn't that influential," another defended, but that's just it, isn't it?  He was there to collect a salary that his dad would "tax" and to maintain a point of contact--all before Trump ran for office).
• As for Trump being the worst, let's see...Harding is widely considered a bad president just in the general not-suited-for-the-office sense.  Jackson was instrumental in the movement that led to the Trail of Tears.  Andrew Johnson thwarted Reconstruction.  FDR put Japanese Americans (not Japanese-Americans, thank you) in concentration camps during WW2.
• The "mostly peaceful" protests...okay, maybe numerically they are and only the riots get the press coverage, but one has to question the integrity, the competence, the motives of media that will stand in front of an instance of arson in progress and use that phrase to describe it.  But I'm less concerned about the--what?--alleged 97% peacefulness than I am about the 3% who are killing and burning and looking but aren't getting any pushback from their mostly peaceful co-marchers. But on the other hand, that 97% apparently had no problem with the status quo until George Floyd died, so I'm a little skeptical about motive even then.

Post hoc procrastination roundup

I haven't had much time to write lately, as you might surmise. I'd try to jot down a few thoughts at work while on break, to e-mail myself later, but I never seemed to get around to checking my e-mail for this account and cleaning the prose up.  I'm taking some time now, though, and what with it being so far after the fact on some of these issues, I'm just going to take some pot shots at several of them at once.

Pope Francis: I like his style.  I think Benedict was more my speed, I think we would have benefited from having someone in charge who made a point of focusing on things like orthodoxy and liturgy, but God knows better than I do and it's not like I really have a problem with the preferential option for the poor. My only worry would have been if people would see Francis give an inch on social justice and then take a mile in the direction we're already headed.  But, maybe someone who doesn't give the first impression of "Oh, he's that kind of Catholic because he's politically conservative," which tended to be the [mis]understanding by modern pundits of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would seem less threatening to people who....aren't politically conservative.  Apparently it's the right time to show that you can help the needy and still stand for something more foundational than the endless advance of novel civil rights.  Plus, it gives the old Jesuit conspiracy theorists lots of fodder to play with it, and we're one step closer to being done with the silliness of the alleged prophecy of Malachy.  Also, it was interesting to see early and frequent criticism from people who are ignorant of the College of Cardinals or at least ignorant of the limits of their understanding of the Church; after hearing and reading comments from both Catholics and non-Catholics like “There was no one of intellectual stature after Ratzinger,” “John Paul packed the College full of yes-men,” "The only thing we have to look forward to is a papacy of mediocrity, because there is no one to choose from other than lousy bureaucrats” and “I don’t like him; it was a political move, he’s just the first pope from Latin America,” I know I can sleep easily knowing he's already made all the right enemies.

The IRS scandal: Sure, maybe Republicans did much the same under Dubya. I don't know why it wouldn't have gotten more press; I'm still inclined to believe that reporting is more honest during Republican administrations because reporters are happier to air the GOP's dirty laundry, but whether it was just covered up better or they just focused more on warrentless wiretaps, it's happening now; as Mark Shea says, Obama voters, own this.

The Boy Scout decision to accept openly gay boys:  I don't think it was a mistake to be accepting, but I think getting drawn into the debate to where they felt they had to say something one way or the other was a mistake.  I don't know how much has changed since I was active in Scouts, but no, we didn't really talk about girls or sex much at all, what with busy doing boy stuff and camping and learning about good citizenship and character.  There was one boy I know of who came out of the closet in college, and I don't know if he was hiding it the whole time or hadn't quite figured it out for himself yet (my tangential knowledge suggests this was common, especially so before homosexuality got normalized), but it just didn't matter, and while most of the guys in my patrol probably would have been more scandalized if he'd said something to us when he was SPL, we still would have been a bit off-put if other guys just started talking about what he liked about girls.  It's just not the place for it, and that is the whole pitfall. If there's someone who can help a confused kid, great; I think that's why the national council ruled the way it did. But it introduces sexuality explicitly where it should never have been in the first place. On top of that, how are they going to handle all the gay Eagle Scouts when they hit their 18th birthday? It's one thing when all the concerned parties in a scandal are minors, but how long is the fear of gay ephebophilia going to withstand the pressure of youths who want to have their sexuality approved--and behind them, the pressure of real gay predators who have just been waiting for this target-rich environment to expose itself?  And I'm kind of surprised the LDS Church didn't kick up more of a fuss, what with Scouting being a huge component in its youth program for boys; for years, the Mormons provided the backbone in resisting encroachment by the gay agenda.  Again, just to summarize, I don't think gay boys should be kicked out of Scouting--a concrete, masculine but otherwise asexual environment is probably the most healthful place for a confused youth; but Scouting should never have gone down this road.  There's no way to answer "Have you stopped beating your wife?" without sounding guilty, and there's no way to address the issue without introducing it into Scouting culture.

Meh, I thought this was going to be brief, but it's late and I'm tired and I have to work today, so if I think of anything else worth going over old ground for, you'll be the first to know.