I'm getting tired of being accused of rigidity and divisiveness--even if it's not a simple case of projection

Any Latin scholars passing through, I invite your corrections, for I looked this up on some Internet-based robo-translator I'd never heard of before.  

I'd like to get this phrase into more widespread use:

“Si non esset, non tibi."  

I call it the“If it weren’t for you” fallacy.  It's the solipsistic idea that everything would be fine if everybody just did what I wanted, mostly because what I want is what matters, problems only arise from the uppitiness of other people, and not because I honestly analyzed my positions and objectively determined they were closest to the truth.

So one of the thing "anti-racists" claim is that punctuality and scheduling are racist--that is, that they are too white a concept.

 I'm sorry, but this is going on my list of "things that are actually dumb that I won't sugar-coat."

In their zeal to oppose themselves to western civilization, they have completely failed to acknowledge the diversity of Europe.  

Have they never attempted to make a social appointment in Latin Europe?  I mean the Mediterranean-adjacent states, not some transplanted hispanic-american fiction you are trying to imagine.

If that's the path you're choosing, good luck.  I'm not even going to speculate about other, dumber stuff that fits your paradigm; you'll just blame me for it when it blows up in your face after you figure it out for yourself.

“DNC is more pro life. I side with them because they want to end the causes of poverty that result specifically in abortion.”

If you’re right, then fine. There’s room for people of good will to reach that conclusion on their efforts and methods as far as this goes.

However.

That’s not an entirely fair depiction.

Ending poverty by other means can achieve this—fine. That’s the stuff they accuse us of not doing, which would be fair if it were true. But them picking up the ball when we drop it isn’t all they do--and dropping the ball isn't all we do, either.

The two big things they also do that make it very hard to justify this are (1) they promote social behaviors and programs that promote abortion, such as teaching utilitarian and Malthusian philosophies about humanity that at the very least but usually far more don’t rule out abortion as a means to an end (2) promote abortion itself as a necessary and inherent good in the life of a civilized, defeminized, and fully actualized woman.

That makes it a lot harder to justify the “on the balance they’re still better than the alternatives” rationale.

Especially when the jury is still out.  Sure, in the short run, local governments providing contraception to teenagers behind their parents' backs can reduce the demand for abortion--and I'll be thrilled to see how Planned Parenthood reacts when the state bogarts their business--at least, it can today, but (1) there are medical side effects to any form of contraception that have to be factored in (2) there are sociological effects that have to be factored in, which are usually cited as evidence for bans on contraception (3) there are also sociological effects from changing laws to permit going behind parents' backs that need to be factored in (4) there is such a thing as risk compensation, and with pregnancies often taking several weeks to discover and months to run to completion, changes in behavior are bound to happen.  Do the powers that be consider any of these things, or do they just wave their hands and say "it's the responsible thing?"

Never mind that to hear them talk lately the only problems of concern in the world are racism and sexism in the US, which kind of neuters any seamless garment arguments about life issues. These are certainly not good things, but they are not the only pressing matters and I don’t want my leaders to ignore everything else or see everything as just variations on those two evils.

And if you're a Christian, you're doubly burdened because Jesus Himself said the poor we would always have with us, so while we shouldn't give up trying, we should be a lot more modest about our goals; especially if we end up not feeding the hungry and not clothing the naked and not housing the stranger  because we don't want to take our eyes off the prize to see the opportunities all around us to do some actual good.

On the Custodians of Tradition

 I know the conspiracy theories, I know the charitable theories, I recognize the sliver of truth within the propaganda....

I started going to the Latin Mass a few years ago just to experience an aspect of our heritage that I had only read about.  Eucharistic adoration was another that I was drawn to.  Also, the fact that they had frequent times for confession was appealing, so I wouldn't have to worry about going to my own pastor and being too embarrassed to be forthcoming in front of someone I knew.

I went on occasion, but after a while I went to the Tridentine liturgy almost exclusively.  There are things I like about the Novus Ordo on paper, but--and I recognize that this is an emotional argument but I don't want to get lost in the weeds here--when I'm at the Latin mass, those things just don't hold up.

So I'm not thrilled about what was promulgated Friday.  But:

The pope is still the pope.  His policy is distasteful, and might not even be honest, but he's the pope and this is the Church.  There's really no where else to go.  You can get farther away by joining one of the Eastern rites, and still get a beautiful and reverent liturgy, but Rome is still there.

And eventually Francis will pass, and then as now, Christ will guide His Church through a history that holds no secrets from God.

I don't know what we'll have to adapt to, resist, or contend with.  But keep your rosaries in your hands and your knees behind Roman Catholic pews; we need the grace and faithfulness more than ever.

Not the way to do ecumenism...two perspectives

So several days ago I was watching a Trent Horn video where he responded to a Seventh Day Adventist allegedly converted from Catholicism, who was posting a number of reasons why he left the RCC.

Some of the SDA's reasons were better than others, but none was bulletproof.  It might edify other Adventists or confuse poorly catechized Catholics, but wouldn't convince anyone who wasn't already on Team Ellen White.

To be fair, it was probably a half hour video, and you can only cover so much ground, but it was a critical research failure spoiling oversight of simple details; like, despite looking up instructions on a Catholic web site, reporting that the Rosary consists of "at least 33 Hail Marys"--okay, 53 is technically at least 33, but huh?--and basing the old canard that Catholics removed the prohibition of images in worship from the Ten Commandments on the strategy of directing the attention of the viewer to the paragraph below the one with that text. I guess the line between incompetence and malice is malfeasance.

At the risk of sounding condescending, I got a sense more that these are the things he was told as a child when he asked his parents why they started going to a new building on Saturday nights, and stopped taking him to the pretty church on Sunday mornings.

Most of the other reasons relied on assuming up front that SDA doctrines were true, because there's no way a mere mortal is going to have access to the supernatural knowledge that sacraments are inefficacious or Mary is dead/in soul sleep.  Not without some divine intervention that would have been his #1 reason, which it wasn't.

Even though half an hour is kind of long for even a top ten list, I would have expected a little more depth to his positive arguments.  But they were all on this level.

Perhaps the most interesting was his claim that that Bible was clear that Mary was dead.  In fact, the Bible is completely silent on Mary's demise.  He can only infer her death by looking at extrabiblical data on life exptectancies and taking as axiomatic that Mary did not receive any exceptional treatment like Elijah.

Sure, it's a reasonable inference or assumption for a non-Catholic, but the Bible doesn't actually say so.  This ended up being a common theme in my overall experience.

I got involved in the comments section, just meaning to make a couple points, but got dragged into it with someone who might have been a troll, and I remembered why I drifted away from religion arguments online in the first place, and have been quiet lately after I got sick of politics as well.  God bless 'im, but I don't have Trent Horn's charitable patience.

Talking with one of the commenters was...not much like talking to another person.  He expressed some satisfaction that I could cite a chapter here or a verse there, but his interest seemed to lie in proving Mary was dead in her grave.

By way of example, he tried to demonstrate that Moses was not.  And a few general references to the resurrection and general judgment at the end of the world--none of which speak to exceptions that both of us make.  Him, Elijah and Moses; me, Elijah and Mary--but maybe also Moses; I know that I don't know and that the Scriptures aren't explicit.

The discussion was difficult.  He didn't seem interested in Trent's defense of Mary or the communion of saints, and seemed to think I would find it novel to consider praying directly to Jesus.  I said I do both, and she does the same anyway, so what does it hurt?  He told me to prove from scripture that Mary prays to Jesus in heaven.

I said pretty much everyone does.  I think if I'd suggested that ligaments hold bones together, he'd ask me to provide sources.  He seemed to think that this was a linchpin in my argument--in the whole edifice of Mariology--because he kept coming back and pretending I had repeated this claim in new words instead of talking about other things, like why his Biblical claims were spurious.

I think I made a misstep here.  I'm used to debating more mainline protestants, who mostly believe that Christians go to heaven right after death, and I think I got stuck between working on that basis and working on his belief in soul sleep--which in my defense Trent Horn had gone over in his video.

When I asked how he could know Mary was dead, he quoted something about the resurrection at the final judgment.  That's nice, but it doesn't discuss Mary; he is relying again on extrabiblical sources that he hasn't disclosed in order to assume that Mary is not a special case.

His response:  "Such as?"  

Dude: You're the one making the claim that the Bible says Mary died.  I'm not the one here who has to show the passage that states it, or the supporting extrabiblical documents that argue for such an interpretation of some Scripture.  That Bible passage about the final judgment does not name or infer Mary, and by this point in the argument, we'd already visited the precedent of Elijah and Moses, so there's no way to fall back on "Well, everyone."  In retrospect, I think he was trying to dodge this and make me or his audience think that I'm being coy about extrabiblical sources to prove something about Mary, and I need to come out and 'fess up more than he needs to participate in dialog as if we were both adults.

I wasn't buying Moses, though.  I pointed out that Jude 1:9 is about the handling of his body, not the status of his soul.  But he insisted that was sufficient proof.

Man, no it's not.  It's not proof of anything.  It's not even a reference to the Old Testament.  It's to a lost book called the Assumption of Moses or the Testament of Moses, and we only know about it from Jewish tradition and a Patristic reference to this book as a possible source for Jude's comment.  

I pointed out two more things to him:  (1) He's made enough maneuvering room in his "Bible-based" doctrines for the same thing the Catholics do, but he only allows it to be applied to Moses and not Mary, based on Scripture that doesn't spell out that she died or that he was raised  (2) He's not even quoting Bible verses anymore.

"Well," he demurred--I'm paraphrasing, sorry--"I usually don't get much traction quoting Scripture to Catholics, since they don't know it."

Well, I kept up with you when you started out doing that, and you were nice enough to admit it.  So why stop when I beat him to the punch on citing one of the most cryptic verses in the New Testament?  

I'd had about enough at this point.  If I said something he thought I'd buckle under trying to defend, he'd attack, but if not, he'd go back to insisting I prove from Scripture that Mary prays to Jesus in heaven, as if all the intervening comments never happened.

That is confusing enough just to read.  Maybe he thought he was keeping me on my back foot by never giving a straight answer when he could press me to prove something that had been addressed in Trent's video.  Maybe he didn't like it--Trent's own video, including the clips from the original, was a little more than an hour, so he didn't have room for extensive dissertations either--but even if Moses was assumed into heaven the way we believe Mary was, he hadn't given any evidence that actually pointed to it--and wouldn't when asked, except to insist that what he didn't admit were Ellen White's mystical interpretations were both interpretations and correct.  It's not like I really know Moses is normal-dead, but this is leaning way over the line into "Shakespeare indicated the door was blue to symbolize the sorrow and vastness of..." territory.

There’s a difference between claiming a verse or passage means something, and explaining how it does. If he had attempted the latter without merely gainsaying me and moving on like my concerns were both put to bed and not worth discussing, I might have continued under the presumption that he was either honest or competent enough to be worth dialoging with.

Maybe he was assuming some interpretations and then assuming I'd just pick them up.  But whether it's true or not, whether it's intended or not, this stuff is not what the Bible literally says.

And maybe he was trying to do the same kind of thing I was trying to do:  me, forcing him to admit that his creative interpretations and smuggling in assumed conclusions is the same thing he accuses Catholics of doing; and he, forcing me to admit that if Mary's not in heaven because she's in soul sleep then she naturally wouldn't be praying for us.

Since I brought it up, here's Jude 9:  "But when the archangel Michael, contending with the devil, disputed about the body of Moses  he did not presume to pronounce a reviling judgment upon him, but said 'The Lord rebuke you.'"  That's not even about Moses; it's incidental.  It's a specific example showcasing Michael's humility.  You can compare other translations if you want to see for yourself.  Spirits fighting over a holy man's body does seem like an unusual situation--in fact, it's so rare I don't think there are any other cases we can make a comparison to or draw expectations from--but from that and the fact that the text doesn't rule it out only leaves us with speculations.  So maybe it's true.  But we can't honestly say the Bible sews it up.

So I told him I was done.  His response?  "But I asked you one thing, to prove Mary prays to Jesus in heaven.  Now you bow out?"  Yeah, because you're rude and incoherent.  You haven't responded directly to anything I've claimed except to bogart Mary's privileges for Moses.  But a nonanswer isn't really an answer.

I suggested if he was interested in honest discussion to pay more attention to the channel and the professionals in the combox.  But no, now he reveals that he had been a Catholic for thirty years so he was already well familiar with all our doctrines that just don't make sense.  

If he really were, he'd already be familiar with the arguments for the Assumption, and that we don't put Scripture exclusively above Tradition.  Instead, he sounds more like the guy Trent Horn deconstructed.

Yeah, I ended up effectively sidestepping his question.  But he should have already known the answer, and my point was to show him that he actually uses a similar hermeneutic to support his own beliefs, so either we both might be right and we have to look in other directions or we're both wrong.  After all, even if you take a strong view of Biblical self-sufficiency, that's still not the same thing as mandatory Biblical sufficiency.

Maybe it would have helped if I’d more directly addressed his demand for a passage. Like: “Why do I have to cite a prooftext?” As I said, if he really was an ex-Catholic who left because he plumbed too deeply and found problems, he’d know and understand what I was getting at without me having to point it out; but his double standard, I suspect, would have been too overt to elide.

I mean, man, come on:  You come onto a Catholic channel for a video that discusses soul sleep as a widely recognized error--and it's a public space, I'm not saying you're not welcome--and pick fights with everyone who will listen to you, tuning out when they don't stay on your script, to prove to you that Mary is asleep-dead but Moses isn't...

...and the problem is that I, just I, am not telling you what you want to hear?

I think you're already getting what you want.  

If I talk to him again, I'll apologize on behalf of his catechists for failing him as profoundly as those who failed the guy who did the original video, who failed him so badly he couldn't even count to 53.

Because it's that or he's a character out of a Chick Tract.

So my redneck and immigrant coworkers were arguing recently about children being tried as adults.

They shared consternation at the idea that a youth tried as an adult and convicted would be incarcerated with other adults as opposed to being put in a juvenile facility until reaching 18.  One mentioned a place that sounds basically like a prison for high school students, which sounds reasonable except maybe in the case the immigrant coworker mentioned about a 14 year old from Texas who was tried as an adult, executed, and later was exonerated.  Someone that young would do better at one of these high school places than a regular maximum security penitentiary, certainly, but kids who are bad enough to end up at a place like that are their own special kind of brutal, so would a 14 year old really do as well there as one might hope?

The redneck couldn't believe in this day and age that something like that would happen without the judge, jury, and district attorney's office getting purged and blackballed.  At first he thought it was some more fake news.

Well, turns out this was a real case from the 1940s.  Look up George Stinney if you're interested.  Actually it's a good idea to read up on it anyway; it's a good example of how a small town conspiracy can thwart federal law to maintain social mores.

"Oh!" the redneck said when he was clued in.  "That' I'd believe."

"What makes it okay in 1944 that doesn't let it still be okay today?" the immigrant asked.

The redneck had run out of argument at this point, having tried to call a bluff and lost the pot over it, but I'd like to provide an answer without acknowledging that such a miscarriage of justice is ever okay, because of other things that were said.

In short, it's not okay, and the redneck didn't even say it was.  He only said he'd believe such a story was true.

After all, such a thing has happened, and not just to George Stinney.  Separate juvenile court systems weren't established until 1899, and enjoyed a "diversity" of standards until some Supreme Court cases in the 1960s led to a modicum of uniformity.  One can still see some variation in laws and expectations from state to state when statutory rape laws are compared, as high school and college students sometimes like to do.  But even before the 60s, at least some of the problems were well recognized.  

So it's not that the redneck was wrong.  It's that the immigrant's rhetorical question that was a red herring.  Failing to distinguish the undeveloped judgment of a child from the malformed conscience of an adult criminal was a known flaw in America's justice system before the second half of the 20th Century, one that has received some attention though not perfect correction since then.

Nobody in the office that day was defending history.  But it can be educational to note who seems to be allowed to criticize it, and who does not, even if for the same reasons; and who takes on the mantle of gatekeeper in such a matter and who lets them.

I'll be coming back out of stasis shortly....

 I'll be reviewing my Redemptorist scapular post and putting it back up on top sometime in the foreseeable future; found a conflicting interpretation elsewhere in cyberspace and I want to more closely compare my interpretation of a certain source to his, and see if anything new to me has floated to the top.

Meanwhile, it will be business as usual.

So, I'm going to be changing gears in the near future, getting back to my roots a bit....

Got one or two things in the pipe, and then I'm going to get away from politics for a bit.  It's still before the electoral vote acceptance thing when I write this, so I don't know how peaceful or violent things are going to stay, but there are other projects I want to work on, and I'm having trouble juggling this and the others.

Maybe my readers are too few and visit too rarely to notice the difference, but, y'know, just in case.

I'll still be around, reading and writing, but just not as much on here for a while.  But before you decide to stop coming back, make sure a few weeks have passed since I posted this, so you can be sure I've cleared out my queue.  I am interested in some scrutiny of my next religious post, which I plan to leave front and center for a time, for the sake of visibility, so if you haven't seen it come up yet, don't step out just yet.

But meanwhile...

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, or why I haven't seen it much elsewhere, but you know how they've been talking about how Trump is dividing the nation and we need to heal and reconcile and whatnot now that he's on his way out?

You know who else they said that about?

Lincoln.  

Yes.  Abraham Lincoln.  The man who presided over an internal war that had been in the making since before our nation was founded.  The man who realized the war was all but inevitable, and instead of sacrificing a limb just to lose the patient anyway, decided he was not going to let its fate be dictated by people who didn't want to play by the Constitution anymore.

So, all you progressives out there who only attend to a few mutually approved news sources, be careful which historical parallels you choose to draw.  Don't like thinking of The Donald as a latter-day Freedmen's Party?  Then it's time to reconsider some of the things that led you to your current mindset.

The point of the electoral college

I once had modest luck explaining the function of the electoral college to someone.  It was in Michigan, some time back when there was more serious talk about piping Great Lakes water to California to alleviate their plight/malfeasance.  So, I used that as an example:

"What if it came down to a vote between California and Michigan, between Calfornians and Michiganders, all other states having no standing to participate in the discussion or having been convinced for the sake of my argument to butt out and let CA and MI hash it out?  In a purely popular vote, California wins, by a landslide, every single time."

"Well, their need is dire, real, and immediate.  I'm willing to help them."

"They're not voting to ask you for help.  They're voting to get all your water. Water rights are complicated but out west they are a high stakes concern, and the guys downstream can really throw their weight around. Just ask the Californians who live upstream.  Anyway, the state's population outnumbers ours roughly four to one.  You want to talk about your vote not counting?  That is what will happen."

His eyes got big.  "Um..."

"Yeah.  If California votes on matters of Michigan, Michigan will never come out on top, ever.  In a simple, pure democracy, California can dictate the affairs of another state just because it has more people to vote on the matter.  We have a constitution and a federal government that trumps state governments in cases of conflict expressly for the purpose of preventing one political body from oppressing another just because they have more members.  This is one example.

The electoral college is another.  California has as many electoral votes as the fifteen smallest states combined, so don't listen to any complaints about individual Californians not having their vote go as far as yours. Half again as many as Texas, almost as many as New York and Florida combined--and note that while Texas is red for now, and Florida is a swing state, New York is solidly blue thanks to NYC and Albany (and tbf Rochester).  If you grew up anywhere outside of Detroit, how would you feel about the Detroit city council deciding how your mayor and chief of police were going to handle business in your hometown?  If you lived in Detroit, how would you like it it if pinheads in Ann Arbor called the shots for Wayne County?  That's what NYC looks like to the Empire State, what Chicago looks like to Illinois, what the Twin Cities look like to Minnesota.  The Founders wanted to stop that from happening at the national level, but may have been optimistic about the electorate, or perhaps concluded it was too intrusive to decide for the states whether or what kind of safeguards they might put in place for themselves to keep the same from happening at a smaller scale."

So, a few new thoughts...

 Yeah, I've been quiet lately.  Been spending more of my time in prayer, which is more useful than anything else I'm in a position to do.  When I write this, things are still up in the air, but the "president-elect" theater is so thick on the ground you'd think it was an official thing and not just "the guy who looks like he will get most of the electoral votes in December, assuming a normal election." But I think a few observations need to be made.

Whichever outcome you think is best, there are some concerns about how we've gotten to where we are, and where we seem to be headed.

Until now, only third-world dictatorships have stopped ballot counts partway through and then either flat-out declared a winner or made a show of resuming counts with suddenly overwhelming democratic support.  Now it's happened here.  Will it ever be otherwise in the future?

The Dems told us their game plan.  They tried to soften up our resolve with predictions of a "red mirage," which sounded like wishful thinking until they started using the phrase "by any means necessary."  Considering things now look shady, apparently that wasn't hyperbole.  

And yes, whether you like the putative outcome or not, this is sketchy.  We gave Gore the opportunity for recounts twenty years ago, and all he did was demand re-recounts in traditionally Democrat districts hoping to squeeze out more (D) votes, but every time it went further against him.  And also he tried to stop military ballots from being counted due to a discrepancy in absentee voter laws, knowing that those votes go predominantly (R).

But not only did the red mirage seem to happen, not a single late-counted mail-in ballot went to Trump.  Not one protest vote, not one crank, not one error, not one ambiguous ballot; and not one with down-ticket votes.  We happen to know already that Democrats don't comprise the entirety of mail-in voters, so where did the Republican voters go?  And why did Trump do better than Hillary in every state except for the ones that stopped counting around 11 pm and resumed after they found enough ballots to reverse Trump's lead?  States, I might add, that are swing states headed by Democrat leadership--or at least, were headed by Democrats.

Even if everything is above board--I'm sure a few things will shake out in unexpected ways, but assuming everything we suspect now is righteous--why are they acting like they have something to hide?  Judges are throwing out requests for hearings to present evidence on the grounds that they weren't provided the evidence in advance.  Georgia is destroying ballots even though state law requires they be kept for 22 months.  The media are telling us it's over and there's no news to cover regarding the recounts and lawsuits.  The recounts in 2000 were so belabored that by day 37 everyone was tired of the uncertainty and a lot of Gore voters were willing to concede if Gore would just stop being an ass about it.  Now all we're hearing is "dolphins still missing, nothing to report."

I still hold out some hope that we're finally going to wise up about election security and fraud minimization.  People who say voter fraud is better than voter suppression either don't understand that those are morally the same thing, or they're lying because historically voter fraud as a specific thing has gone their way and voter suppression as a specific thing has not gone their way.  But if the KKK had diluted legitimate votes in predominantly black precincts with thousands of fake ballots instead of just scaring them away on election day, those "any type of security is still racist even when I run out of reasonable arguments against protections that have been known to work elsewhere in the world, so you still can't do it" folks would be a lot more circumspect about how to balance the one species of procedural corruption against the other.  

And that's all it is.  Being able go into a booth and pull a lever or darken a bubble isn't some magic invocation of human rights.  Being able to participate in the process at all, and legitimately, is.   

Actually, one last thought...

 I'm not going to laud everything Trump has said or done.  I'm not going to defend his character, although the spiritual rhetoric I've heard him use lately sounds a lot more like that coming from a believer than the stuff I hear from the other side, which sounds like they're trying to talk the way conservatives and Christians talk but they only know it from how liberals and non-believers tell each other how Christians and conservatives talk.

But I used to say my biggest complaint about him qua president was he wasn't very presidential.  He was crude, inelegant in speech, prone to trolling in social media, and could have done a better job neutralizing the negative spin the MSM put on his works and words.  

Now, though?

He's the most patriotic president we've had since Regan.  He doesn't just express a love for America and a respect for hoi polloi at large, he does so consistently.  He bothers to show up to meet the people. And when he faces criticism, he may make fun of career politicians who still haven't learned the lesson about glass houses and throwing rocks, but he doesn't call concerned citizens bad names, nor does he call their race into question for daring to be circumspect and nuanced about their own political opinions.

That's a lot more presidential behavior than we've seen in a long time.

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.

In 2008 Obama was elected and people started talking a lot how Bush should immediately resign so, despite all succession laws and the fact that presidential terms, per the Constitution, run January 20 to January 20,  Obama could take over early and get a head start on his "progress." Now, RBG has gone off to whatever her reward is and despite the fact that Trump is still president until January 20 at least of 2021 (so hold off on your “until a new president” talk), certain entities want him to wait for him to do a well established part of his job until what they want is to believe is a referendum on his performance to choose a replacement. And meanwhile, you're openly talking about packing the court and expanding the riots--so that's an admission that you're actively engineering this unrest, this destruction of cities across the country for political reasons, as well as the odd admission that you assume your winning the presidency this fall is a foregone conclusion--and trying to rationalize it by saying things like "the precedent has been set--no nominations in an election year."

Well, that's a lie and wishful thinking.  In the 20th century alone there were at least 10  successful nominations and 2 unsuccessful ones, by Democrats and Republicans alike, during election years.  So if there's a precedent, it's twofold:  (1) the president isn't paralyzed in the last quarter of his administration just because he might turn out to be a lame duck (2) you can be relied on to threaten violence and dishonesty and unethical when you don't get your way.  LBJ tried to pack the courts, FDR tried to pack the courts, and now here you are.

We get it, you don’t really believe in the rule of law, but what would your argument be if he didn't announce anybody now, but still wins in November and then announced someone?

odds and ends from socmed

 "Don't criticize the post office for failing when the US military gets so much more money in your tax dollars."

The army doesn't charge me directly for providing a personal service.

"Beauty and the Beast is such hogwash.  Reverse the roles and see how ridiculous it would be.  No one tells a guy who give an ugly girl a chance because she's nice."

1. Beast wasn't a nice guy who happened to be ugly.

2. Guys get told "she has a great personality" all the time.  It's a meme older than socmed itself.

"Strong nationalism...government-controlled media...xenophobia...all signs of fascism and they're all happening here and now."

Yeah, except the things you call "strong nationalism" and "xenophobia" we call "vet immigrants, and welcome in those who are willing to play by our rules;" and it's not the politician you don't like who controls the media, it's opposition party politicians in other branches of government that are anti-nationalist who want to import voters who will be loyal only to them.  If you're still not sure, ask yourself which faction is trying to control the words you use and sometimes even admits that this is an effort to modify the way you think.  Whether it's well-intentioned or not, this is a tactic of fascists, communists, and other varieties of socialists.  If this seems like a granny knot of competing standards and morals, then you might just have tasted a red pill.

"A 1% dip in the market is a recession; the 2.5% dip was called the Great Recession; a 6.5% dip is a depression; what do you call the 35% dip we're going through right now?  The Trump Effect?"

Recessions and depressions aren't a simple matter of degree.  1% is a large fluctuation for an economy of this size but you have to figure in longstanding effects on prices and employment.  Meanwhile, there's a pandemic that we've collectively decided to handle by staying home instead of going to work.  If you don't like that, I have some really bad news for you about socialism....

"We didn't build a wall, but in the end, the rest of the world built one around us!"

So you're saying that there is consensus in the entire rest of the world that proactive border controls work. Meanwhile, in Scandinavia where they didn't shut everything down like you're happy to insist on here and then blame Trump for, their infection statistics are way down.  One would think the goal you're actually pursuing is not the well-being of this country, which leads one to wonder why you want Trump out of the picture.

*mouth foaming about antifa*

Do a Google video search for something like "Seattle May Day protests."  You'll find articles and multimedia about violence erupting on the Left Coast at "demonstrations" that aren't even in opposition to questionably-violent organizations, organizations that--whatever their reputations and legacies--aren't even present; easily going back ten years.  Whom are we supposed to blame for that?  Unless you count the successfully-woke Starbucks, there isn't an openly capitalistic entity in sight; there might be a few individuals floating around, but they don't refer to Oregon and Washington as being "ultraviolet" because purple has red mixed in with it.

A while ago I got in an argument with some relatives.

Several of us were on the same text message thread when one posted something tentatively hopeful about Covid treatments.  Another one tore into her for believing Fox News, whence the article originated.

OP and I were a little taken aback.  This was supposed to be a light, if a dim one, in the darkness; why was it relevant to attack us for "trusting" a news source they didn't like?

I'd been quiet for a while but tired of it quickly and called for moderation:  I pointed out that Fox has no monopoly on error (which is a little weaker than my personal position, but that was part of my point), and I hear enough ignorant back-and-forth at work, so could they please not include me in the conversation?

*bam* Links to MSM articles allegedly exposing Fox News in barefaced lies.

Dude:  I just got done saying I don't really trust anybody.  How do you think it makes you look when you get even more strident while trying to bring more evidence to the table that one side is dishonest, but it all comes from the other side?  

I don't need one more person telling me some of the "news" I take in is disinformation.  I take it in order to compare with the stuff that many people like my relatives appear to swallow whole.

It's difficult to walk the line in the middle; easier it is, to take a side, accept it wholesale, and then only let yourself see enough of the opposition's arguments to further convince yourself that they're still just making things up.

Things have been getting crazier lately so I wonder if we're getting close to a point where the MSM superfans aren't going to be able to explain away the cognitive dissonance between the beliefs they still strongly hold and the narratives they're told that change more quickly than their minds. 

I was listening to someone or other's channel on YouTube more recently (and this really isn't changing the subject), someone who I think is a little Left but mostly libertarian except on a few social issues, and very much capable of being fair to and having civilized discussions with conservatives.  She made a point that erenow I had not realized needed to be put so succinctly into words:

Conservative news and progressive news, whatever you think of them, are in the business of polarizing their viewers. 

Fox News might have been created not really as a lone voice in the wilderness to give succor to lonely conservatives, but moreso to provide merely a dramatic foil to CNN and MSNBC.  Which is not to criticize the on-air personalities (although a few self proclaimed Catholics could try a little harder to be orthodox before being conservative) as much as the top level executives who are all politically inbred.

Look at how the summer 2020 riots were covered.  In broad strokes:  Fox showed pasty young white people wearing black as-good-as-uniforms causing most of the damage and didn't shy away from black people burning down black neighborhoods, blaming Antifa and cultural problems in the black community itself; CNN & Friends showed peaceful protests and white people dressed in civvies causing problems, and blamed what they deemed conservative racists.  I'm sorry I come off as biased here but I tried to avoid getting sucked in and since I don't have TV at home I was rather at the mercy of the viewing preferences of some of my social associates.

The point is that neither side is really interested in telling the whole truth.  Maybe some individuals are, maybe they're not all drinking their own Kool-Aid.

What they're interested in doing is taking a page out of Bob Lutz's book (I mean specifically Guts, which is worth a read for his business anecdotes, but I'm also speaking generally).  Lutz believed--and I think he's right--that you'll have a healthier customer base if you put out product that is polarizing.  It won't much affect people who already love or hate your work, but it will motivate people who are on the fence; you'll drive a few of those folks away, but you'll get commitment from others who might have gone elsewhere, and that's the proverbial bird in the hand.

The problem is that news isn't a product.  Okay, in a sense it is--you or advertisers pay for an information service--but when it's this processed, it may not really be facts and analysis anymore, which is what they claim to be selling.

Also, to bring this back to the YouTuber's point, a polarized people is a divided people.  I can throw in a quote or platitude about hanging separately or houses divided against themselves.  But in the end, the highest level people with the most money and the least publicity at Fox will greet their equals at CNN and congratulate each other for keeping the populace too fragmented and off balance to really rise up and make a substantive difference.

It's not all about social engineering and tinfoil hat territory.  But it does help explain why stupid shit persists instead of winning a social Darwin Award.

Two inadequately explored questions that pertain to the 2016 and 2020 elections

1. Considering the benefits that had obtained to, for example, Biden, which we learned of during the Russian election interference probe, what benefit did Russia hope to gain by helping the political opponent of the previous administration gain the office?
2. If electronic tampering was such a problem, and considering that any improvements in polling security have been so modest that they hardly make the news to reassure the voters, then why are certain elements still insistent on relying on electronic balloting (on-site or remote/mail-in), without bothering to reassure us; instead of coming up with more sanitary ways to vote in person?

It's not that there are no answers to these questions.  The suspicious thing is that no one is really talking about the answers.  They're fighting about the questions to keep our attention focused there.

So AOC, in the current illiterate book-burning craze of tearing down statues for any or no reason, wants to get rid of St. Damien of Molokai...

(edited 8/16/20)

...to which I reply "WTF is wrong with you?"

Of course, he's Flemish, so that should be a good enough reason, right?

Not by a long shot.

St. Damien was not a "colonizer."  He was not an oppressor.  Say what you will about Europeans in Hawaii at the time in general, but St. Damien was there to serve the leper colony that lived on that island.  He eventually contracted leprosy himself and died there.

Not denying that colonization happened, or that it brought trouble with it.  But St. Damien was amongst those who were trying to take some responsibility for and mitigate the harm done, and made the ultimate sacrifice--whether that's good enough or not, it's the most anyone can be asked to do.  He didn't drive Europeans out of Hawaii like St. Patrick and the snakes of Ireland, but the lepers would still be suffering from leprosy whether or not white men were still around.

If your woke anti-colonialism won't permit someone to do that much, then most of the Woke Left needs to sit down,  shut up, and think about how your life got to a place where your outrage justifies erasing history but not actually alleviating the pain of people you claim to care for, because they're not doing anybody any more good than that.

Yeah, yeah, he taught Catholicism.  He was still instrumental--biases in Western reporting against indigenous contributions to these efforts notwithstanding--in improving the life of people in the Molokai colony.  He dressed lepers' ulcers, helped build homes and schools, organized farms.  I know this still constitutes impurity of action to the Woke, but I don't see the Woke doing even this much good.  Just some symbolic gesture so inflammatory that it is counterproductive.

You're being behalfist over the Hawaiians.  Being disrespectful to their beliefs is othering and infantilizing.  And all your Marxist-derived critical theory is European, anyway--didn't you realize Marx was an old white German man who abused his family and domestic staff?  Knowing that, shouldn't you be asking if his class warfare theories are just some next-level patriarchy that is merely hiding behind Wokeness?

See the pattern again?

Russian election collusion turns out to be nothing, but COVID is an emergency.  We're not sure it is, but we're being overly cautious; it's handled problematically on all sides, but we haven't seen something like this in a hundred years, so call that a wash.  But people are getting tired of being pushed around and kept at home and they're seeing through the wannabe Stalins petits testing the waters.

Then George Floyd died.

They tried to blame Trump with the racial narrative they'd been toying with for five years, they tried to convince you that it was he and not some other billionaires who bussed in violent protest infiltrators (wearing black, not tank tops and the Stars and Bars) and pallets of bricks (not ARs slung over shoulders) in an event they couldn't decide would spin better as a surprisingly huge number of KKK adjacent groups that apparently fill middle America finally deciding the iron's hot enough to strike; or whether they're really just staging false flag operations that look exactly like what BLM events have always devolved into, except on an unprecedented scale.  But in the end, it was opportunistic leftists and anarchists and I-don't-care-I-just-want-a-bag-of-shoes-to-go-with-my-TV-ists burning down their own cities and destroying their own neighborhoods and a few white sympathizers who got lost amid the whites who thought they could hide behind patronizing signage and even more vandalism

After a few weeks that peters out, because utopia doesn't spontaneously erupt from chaos or even a tabula rasa, and the progressive politicians who were so supportive before, found themselves hypocrites and the proverbial "mugged liberals," and decided enough was enough.

Luckily for them, the virus didn't honor the grace period from sheltering at home, so now that it's a full incubation period after the riots, there's a spike in corona cases that they can now blame entirely on the reopening.

That'll be Trump's fault.  That'll be why his numbers are consistently falling behind where-is-he-now-and-what-is-my-name Biden.  That and Russia is back.  

It's all just too convenient not to be true.  The facts, the causality, the interpretation, the omissions from the news.  Trump will lose again, just like he did in 2016.

So some talking heads--talking voices, I guess, although that sounds less clever--on the radio were defending the pollsters from the 2016 election

I didn't catch the whole segment, so I don't know if they distinguished the raw data (which were, I am reliably told, within sampling error of parity, which happens to align with the popular vote numbers we saw) from the reported results of 90% or 95% or 99% in favor of Hillary, whatever it was.

But that extreme error is what they were defending.

They went on about how people being polled were reluctant to appear too in favor of such a contemptible fool as Trump, lest it turn out that the pollster was a DNC employee testing the waters for an opportunity to dox a defenseless alleged bigot--even though doxxing wasn't so widely known a thing back then--or worse yet, the people polled felt that they would come off as bigoted even though they still wanted to vote that way.

So the pollsters apparently just struggled with trying to discern how the non-responses would have broken down by party lines, and how many dishonest results they got from paranoid voters, and so on.  

Those are fair concerns, but those are the concerns that define the pollsters' job.  This wasn't some historical anomaly that just coincidentally led them all right into the blind spot that corroborated every modern electoral conspiracy theory.  That, I would have excused if they had looked at the roughly 50/50 numbers and came back with a solid lead for Hillary but Don still making a competitive showing.

Ninety-plus percent, though?  

A landslide would be putting it mildly.  How much closer to a unanimous vote would it have to have really seemed to them before they stepped back and said "You know what, we better double check our methodology."  They wouldn't even have to admit to themselves any realistic bias like "Hillary is one of the more polarizing figures of the decade and we better make sure we don't undercount the people who hate her and still turn out to the polls."  All they should do is say "raw counts make it a toss-up, final analysis shows Hillary did almost twice that well and Trump got almost nothing; isn't that a stretch?"

No, I don't think it was an honest mistake.  I think it's a "mistake" they plan to make again, if our memory is short enough to let them, and they're trying to prime us with the suggestion that they're generally responsible people who happen to completely fubar their job but can be trusted to do better this fall even though times are even more uncertain all around.

Have you noticed they tend to demand the dismantling of police forces now...

...but dreaming up a replacement, such as it might be, is only a subsequent concern?

Do they really think, or want us to think, that anarchy is a preferable alternative to some kind of gradual and measured and deliberate transition?

Or is chaos simply their goal?  Is their goal to make things bad quickly so in the collective panic that ensues, hoi polloi will accept any solution, no matter how bad?