Showing posts with label Community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Community. Show all posts

Sunday, March 31, 2024

Easter Sunday, 2024. The Day Joe Biden lost the 2024 Election by choosing to lose it by lurching to the Progressive Left.


Just below this post, is this one:

Hurling invectives.

That post isn't limited to the left or the right, although right now, invectives are coming more loudly from the Populist right.  They do come from the Progressive left as well.

I note that, as people may misinterpret the post below as being solely aimed at Populists.  Indeed, Populists are likely to look at it that way, as they tend to be very shallow in their political analysis. All their opponents are members of "the Radical Left", they believe. Even Conservatives who oppose them are members of the "Radical Left".

Not hardly.

The actual Radical Left is in the news today through its capture of much of the Democratic Party, which started before the Populists became as influential as they currently are in the GOP.  Indeed, as we discussed last week, the Progressives, which are not the same as the Liberals, have roots in the Democratic Party that go back at least as far as the collapse of the Progressive Party in 1912-1914.

I've often said here that Democrats don't lose elections, they throw them away.

When future historians go back and find the point at which Conservatives who were teetering on the edge of supporting Joe Biden determined to reluctantly give their votes to Donald Trump, they'll cite the issuance of this proclamation:

A Proclamation on Transgender Day of Visibility, 2024

On Transgender Day of Visibility, we honor the extraordinary courage and contributions of transgender Americans and reaffirm our Nation’s commitment to forming a more perfect Union — where all people are created equal and treated equally throughout their lives.  

I am proud that my Administration has stood for justice from the start, working to ensure that the LGBTQI+ community can live openly, in safety, with dignity and respect.  I am proud to have appointed transgender leaders to my Administration and to have ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in our military.  I am proud to have signed historic Executive Orders that strengthen civil rights protections in housing, employment, health care, education, the justice system, and more.  I am proud to have signed the Respect for Marriage Act into law, ensuring that every American can marry the person they love. 

Transgender Americans are part of the fabric of our Nation.  Whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they help America thrive.  They deserve, and are entitled to, the same rights and freedoms as every other American, including the most fundamental freedom to be their true selves.  But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families — silencing teachers; banning books; and even threatening parents, doctors, and nurses with prison for helping parents get care for their children.  These bills attack our most basic American values:  the freedom to be yourself, the freedom to make your own health care decisions, and even the right to raise your own child.  It is no surprise that the bullying and discrimination that transgender Americans face is worsening our Nation’s mental health crisis, leading half of transgender youth to consider suicide in the past year.  At the same time, an epidemic of violence against transgender women and girls, especially women and girls of color, continues to take too many lives.  Let me be clear:  All of these attacks are un-American and must end.  No one should have to be brave just to be themselves.  

At the same time, my Administration is working to stop the bullying and harassment of transgender children and their families.  The Department of Justice has taken action to push back against extreme and un-American State laws targeting transgender youth and their families and the Department of Justice is partnering with law enforcement and community groups to combat hate and violence.  My Administration is also providing dedicated emergency mental health support through our nationwide suicide and crisis lifeline — any LGBTQI+ young person in need can call “988” and press “3” to speak with a counselor trained to support them.  We are making public services more accessible for transgender Americans, including with more inclusive passports and easier access to Social Security benefits.  There is much more to do.  I continue to call on the Congress to pass the Equality Act, to codify civil rights protections for all LGBTQI+ Americans.

Today, we send a message to all transgender Americans:  You are loved.  You are heard.  You are understood.  You belong.  You are America, and my entire Administration and I have your back.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility.  I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twenty-ninth day of March, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-four, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-eighth.

JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR.

Defenders of this will no doubt state that Joe is just honoring the "right to be yourself".  Maybe he thinks of it that way.  Indeed, the statement is sufficiently bland enought to nearly be calculated to attempt not to really offend.

This isn't how many will take it.  Many will take it as "you are forcing me to accept a radical fraud about yourself and pretend it's okay".

And frankly, they're right.  Words actually do have meaning, and not only the spoken ones, but what they suggest.

This comes down, in a way, to the essential difference between how conservatives, liberals and progressives see the world (yes I've left populists out of this intentionally).  Only Progressives believe in the Existential Me, or the Isolated Absolute. Everyone else believes that you are part of a community.  Indeed, Progressivism is, ironically, the ultimate extension of a belief that Progressives claim to hate, that being American Individualism written large.  You can' be just what you want to be, and ignore everyone else.  

In reality, Homo sapiens are a community animal with a fixed nature, and you can't.

I'd normally be reluctant to cite Jordan Peterson, the right wing Canadian pundit, but he is a psychologist and he and a reporter have an interesting podcast episode entitled The Biggest Medical Scandal Of Our Time.  I'm not going to link it in, people can simply look it up, but it does a good job of pointing out the degree to which the entire transgender thing is simply a fraud.  Peterson spends much of the podcast being outraged, as he's a very poor interviewer, but what you'd basically learn is that in the extraordinary rare instances in which gender confusion arises, it's confusion and nothing else.  The basic proper course for minors is not to treat it, with most who are generally afflicted, according to Peterson, coming into adulthood comfortable with their genders, but being homosexuals.

I'm no doubt more radical yet, as I don't believe that transgenderism actually even exists, but is rather a psychological affliction that is limited to the Western world and expresses something else going on in our culture.  It's deeply contrary to nature, as much of our society is in general.  It's a reaction to some sort of unnatural stress, not an expression of nature.

There's utterly no reason whatsoever for the Federal Government to recognize transgenderism and the fact that it does, and that it's even crept into surgeries being allowed within the Armed Forces, is in fact evidence of how deeply woke some elements of our society have become.  There's no reason to oppress people who express this, but going the next 100 miles and pretending everything about it is okay about it is frankly going a bridge too far, and most people instinctively know this.

People have become used to various months being declared to represent the history of one group of people or another.  Originally, it was a few definable groups who deserved to have their history brought forward.  Black History Month was a good example.  March is National Women's History Month, which was as well. 

November has become Transgender Awareness Month according to some, or there's a month in November that's been declared Transgender Awareness Week.  Now we're all learning that March 31, the last day of National Women's History Month, is Transgender Day of Visibility.

Some time ago I heard a podcast by somebody, I can't recall who, who discussed how transgender mutilation of men into women goes an extra level in being an existential insult to women.  That it's a fraud is self-evident.  You cannot change your gender, you can only surgically and chemically attempt to partially mask your actual gender.  

But what hadn't occured to me is that actual women go through, due to their natures, something that men can barely understand.  To experience in your youthful prime an event in which your young healthy body suddenly starts bleeding monthly and your hormonal system subjects you to a raging hormonal cyclonic storm is something men do not experience and cannot grasp.  To take pills and subject yourself to surgical butchery doesn't mimic that in any fashion.  Women's entire bodies, after a certain point in their teens, remind them of our species elemental genetic roles.  Boys have things turn on, but not in a way that can result in them bearing another human being, and in fact monthly demanding that they do so.

To have the Oval Office recognize something that, at this point, is basically hurled in everyone's face, and which all humans know at an elemental level to be existentially wrong, is insulting.

Do declare it on Easter Sunday is an insult beyond that.

That Biden did this is tone-deaf beyond belief.  His defenders are pointing out that this day is "always Transgender Day of Visibility", which is absurd on its face, as it hasn't "always" existed.  It's new, and it's misdirected.  Noting those who fall into this self-declared group is worthwhile, but to sympathize with their plight and seek to address it honestly, rather than to verify that their condition is a dandy one. But this is what we do now since the Progressive Left has become so inserted in our society.  We honor the afflicted in their affliction rather than seek to help.

Recently, an insulting event occured at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, in which a funeral that openly insulted conservative beliefs in general and the beliefs of the Catholic Church occured.  The tone-deaf appearance by those whose duty it is to protect the beliefs of the Church were widely discussed on the Catholic Blogosphere.  This, however, is wider yet.

No matter how imperfectly understood, a major element fueling Populist rage (and there are multiple ones, not just one) and horrifying genuine conservatives is the forced demand of acceptance of certain things that actually are part of somebody's "radical left agenda".  While much of the invectives that cite that are baloney, this much is in fact true.  When Justice Kennedy and his fellow robbed travelers insisted that Obergell didn't mean the onset of a societal revolution, they were obviously wrong at the time, and they set off the inevitable counter revolution.  We noted then:

These justices have perhaps assumed too much if they've assumed that they can now act so far that Marshall would be horrified, and I'd be surprised if, long term, this decision doesn't either mark the beginning of a Cesarian court and a retreat of American democracy, or the point at which the roles of the Court began to massively erode in favor of a more Athenian democracy.

Either result is really scary.

Well here we are.

So, with Joe Biden, who supposedly is an adherent Catholic (which based on his public positions, he obviously is not), having signed a proclamation that places a day honoring something that repels conservatives and enrages Populists, and which actually does offer insult to Christian tenants in general, and which places the honoring on Easter Sunday in an election year, he's sealed his doom in the Fall.  Those defending him that this "always" occurs on this day are essentially noting that Joe was too distracted to take note, which only fuels the fire that he doesn't know what he is doing.  Never mind that Trump either doesn't know what he is doing either, his adherents already know that the Führerprinzip means he'll follow their lead, as it gets him attention. And indeed, they are already.

And this points out once again the tragedy of a moronic "two party system". There's no reason that real conservatives, or real liberals, should have to vote for these two fallen parties and their ancient, unappealing candidates.  

Indeed, there's a good argument that thinking people shouldn't.

Related threads:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and LIberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.


Friday, March 22, 2024

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 7. What would that look like, and why would it fix anything, other than limiting my choices and lightening my wallet? Wouldn't every one be just bored and poor?

The Agrarian's Lament: A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with th...:   

 

His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.

Wendell Berry, A Native Hill.

So we've gone through this and lamented on the state of the world.

We looked at how working for largely local businesses, in an economy in which most were local, would work, in terms of economics.

In other words, if you needed an appliance, and went to Wally's Appliance Store, owned and operated by Wally, rather than Walmart, owned and operated by anonymous corporate shareholders, how would that look?

And we looked at something more radical yet, Agrarianism.

So how does this all tie together, and what difference would it really make?

Let's revisit the definition of Agrarianism.

Given the above, isn't Agrarianism simply agricultural distributism?

Well, no.

Agrarianism is an ethical perspective that privileges an agriculturally oriented political economy. At its most concise, agrarianism is “the idea that agriculture and those whose occupation involves agriculture are especially important and valuable elements of society

Bradley M. Jones, American Agrarianism.

Agrarianism is agriculture oriented on an up close and personal basis, and as such, it's family oriented, and land ethic oriented.

We also noted that agrarianism as we define it incorporates The Land Ethic, which holds:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively the land.

The Land Ethic, A Sand County Almanac.  Aldo Leopold.

So what would this mean to society at large, and a distributist society at that?

To start with, it would mean a lot more family farm operations, and no remotely owned and operated ones where the land was held by Bill Gates or the Chinese Communist Party. Combined with Distributism, it would also mean a lot more local processing of agricultural products.  Local packing houses, local flour mills, local bakeries.

It would also mean a society that was focused on local ownership of homes with residents who lived a more local, land ethic focused, lives.

Indeed, the local would matter much more in general.

And with it, humanity.

There would still be the rich and the poor, but not the remote rich and the ignorable poor.

Most people would be in the middle, and most of them, owning their own. They'd be more independent in that sense, and therefore less subject to the whims of remote employers, economic interests, and politicians.

All three major aspects of Catholic Social Teaching, humanity, subsidiarity, and solidarity, coming together.

An agrarian society would be much less focused on "growth", if focused on it at all.  Preservation of agricultural and wild lands would be paramount.  People would derive their social values in part from that, rather than the host of panem et circenses distractions they now do, or at least they could. 

They'd derive their leisure from it as well, and therefore appreciate it more.  If hiking in a local park, or going fishing, or being outdoors in general is what we would do, and we very much would as the big mega entertainment sources of all types are largely corporate in nature, preservation of the wild would be important.  

And this too, combined with what we've noted before, a distributist society and a society that was well-educated, would amount to a radical, and beneficial, reorientation of society.

We won't pretend that such a society would be prefect.  That would be absurd.  Human nature would remain that. All the vices that presently exist, still would, but with no corporate sources to feed them, they'd not grow as prominent.

And we will state that it would cure many of the ills that now confront us.

Such a society would force us to confront our nature and nature itself.  And to do so as a party of a greater community, for our common good.

Which, if we do not end up doing, will destroy us in the end.

Last prior:

A sort of Agrarian Manifesto. What's wrong with the world (and how to fix it). Part 6. Politics


Directly related:

Finis

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Hearing what you want to hear, without actually listening and Coffee and Donuts isn't assessing the view of the Parish. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 50th edition, the Synod Edition.

Steve Millies 

The theme I see in a lot of clerical #Catholic comment on the #synod is—'Who are all these laypeople and why do they think they get a voice in *my* church?'

Oh, bull.  I haven't been hearing that at all.

Quite the contrary, in facdt.

Apparently, I'd note, I’m not the only one either:

Fr. Joseph Krupp@Joeinblack

So weird. I follow almost 800 priests, and not one of them has said anything remotely like that.

Mostly, we worry about how to deal with the increasingly large piles of demands on us.

We worry because everyone is an expert on our job, but most are only willing to help if they…

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In six decades now of attending Mass, I can't think of a single instance in which I've personally heard a priest openly criticize a Bishop or the Pope, although I'm sure they didn't always agree with them.  They simply obeyed and did their duties.  This would include not only the Pope Francis era, but the real "spirit of Vatican II" disruption of the 70s.  

All of the criticism of Bishops and Popes I've heard have come from the laity, and it tended as a rule to object to reforms.  Even the mantillas I am now seeing for the first time in sizable numbers being worn by young women are a form of protest in a way.  The point is that a lot of "the voice of the laity is being ignored" doesn't come from the class under age 40, really, whose, but from the Western middle-aged and old.

Mr. Millies is, I'd note, a Professor of Public theology who was born in 1972.  That makes him nine years younger than me, or 51 years of age.  He's not a Baby Boomer, the generation that's most frequently picked on here, but he's not a kid either.

The young church might not really be the voice that people 50 years old and up really want to hear, as it might look like a voice that actually is more from the lost past that the dying post Boomer present.

On assessing the voice of  the parish, moreover, every parish I've ever been to worked desperately to do that, usually unsuccessfully, in trying to get the rank and file of the parish to express their voice and to come to thins other than Mass.  As I've noted, this has been, in my experience, uniformly unsuccessful.

Which takes us to this.

Also on Twitter, one Canadian Catholic commentator, D.W. Lafferty replied to another person's credulity regarding assessing the views at the parish level in an interesting fashion. That post noted:

Apparently, "synodality" is just a euphemism for "a discussion group in the church basement." Huh. twitter.com/rightscholar/s…

Lafferty replied:

That's where it can start, for sure. It's the simplest thing in the world to have people in a parish get together to talk and listen. Might cost a few bucks for coffee and donuts. If we can't pull that off, what are we even doing?

And, similarly:

How much does it cost to have a discussion group in the church basement? Or to have a volunteer take notes and produce a synthesis? Cost is not the problem. Lack of interest and motivation on the part of many pastors is the problem.

And here we meet the academic in academia, rather than the regular person in the pews.

I've served on a parish council.  I didn't ask to run for the position, but received anonymous nominations three times.  I rejected the first two, as I’m not a joiner, and I'm busy.  Finally, the third time, I felt compelled and served for several years.

I've also been on a professional board. Same thing.  I didn't volunteer, I was asked to serve.

And I once served in a professional role that was, well professional, the same way. Asked to serve.

The point?

Well, I’m an introvert. I have opinions on everything, but only very rarely will I cause myself to attend something.  I will, but it's rare.  Most of the time I've had public roles in anything, I was volunteered, and at least some of the time, I declined.

When the Synod got up and rolling, I didn't attend the parish meetings, and looking at the various parish reports on the number of people who attended, attendance was generally low.  I regret that now, but I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt I would have been the odd man out at the meeting. . . if not necessarily in the pews.

A brief diversion.

My old parish had breakfasts after the early Sunday Mass every week.  They had excellent sweet rolls.  We would occasionally eat there, but more often than not I'd pick up a tray of sweet rolls and take them home.  Why?

Well, that says a lot about my personality.  It often surprises people who know me professionally if I mention that I'm introverted, but I am.  I feel massively uncomfortable sitting with people I don't know or barely know in a setting I'm not anticipating.  It's one thing to sit with a group of lawyers, or clients, etc.  Quite another to be sitting there after Mass.

Additionally, while I work most days in the white collar legal world, I'm very much a rural Irishman at heart.  Mentally, I've never acclimated to being able to not look out on a golf course and not think that it would look good with sheep on it.  People don't treat me that way as a rule, however.  On off hours, I'll sit and ponder how hard it would be to put a 4bt Cummins in a 1953 NAPCO truck, or that I wish I was hunting.  On Sundays, I don't ponder the Rule Against Perpetuates.

Like a lot of Wyomingites, I work six days out of seven, if not seven out of seven.

The point? 

I'm not likely to sit down in a basement to discuss anything with anyone, and having coffee and donuts available doesn't sweeten the deal whatsoever.  In my entire life, I've never gone to a basement to have coffee and donuts. I've never been to the Knights of Columbus pancake breakfast either.

And again, I'm not alone.  I know lots of people just like me.  They're loyal Catholics in the pews, to be sure.

And it just isn't Wyoming natives wondering how the state's politics have been disrupted by out-of-state imports who are mad at the world.  You aren't going to get the Mexican father who comes every week dressed in his Chihuahua formal clothes along with his wife and three kids to go to a meeting dominated by a bunch of super friendly handshaking Anglos.  Nor are you going to get the 23-year-old mantilla wearing girl.  Nor are young to get the Rad Trad that vaguely suspects that everyone else is in some sort of Novus Ordo conspiracy.  No, you aren't.

But you really need to.  Indeed, in an average parish, there's probably a lot more of those people, combined, than whom every will be drawn to the basement for "fellowship".

You'll have to conscript them.

You can do it, however.

It'd actually require a near demand from the pastor along the lines of "thank you for coming to the 8:00 Mass. .. the 10:00 has been cancelled this week as we are all meeting. . . I'm not dismissing the Mass until we all talk so if you leave now, your Sunday Obligation is not fulfilled.  Welcome to a Synod meeting."

And you would actually have to bring up the uncomfortable topics yourself, as people uncomfortably shifted in their seats?

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Something I hadn't thought of.

From a Twitter post (from last year, actually).

The trick-or-treating ritual is one of the few times a year when many Americans go out of their way to interact with their neighbors, and for no other reason than tradition and the fun of it.

We all need that kind of community, and in a very important sense it’s good politics.