Why Is It Always You Five?

Well, it happened again. Big business, the media, crappy American false dichotomy politics, videogaming and the pro-choice people have once again caused me a major upset. Yes the article is a year old but this is the internet and someone’s opinions remain the same until proven otherwise. Poorly designed mess though the page is the contents of the article are even worse.

“I’m currently not proud to be an American,” tweeted Jack “CouRage” Dunlop, “Women no longer have body autonomy. Children are slaughtered in schools due to outdated gun laws and lack of mental health support. Millions of Americans can’t afford basic medication and health care due to obscene costs. Disgusting.”

I find it telling that the pro-choice people often don’t even say the word abortion themselves. If abortion is so acceptable let the people who support access to it say the word. I can empathise with living in a country where the health and education systems are bad but here’s the thing; America is a federal system whereas Ireland is centralised. Here abortion is legal in every county, even Donegal which voted against it whereas in the US the states decide so my sympathy for him is limited. Also the children murdered in the American schools weren’t murdered with the state government’s money or acceptance. Children murdered in schools got names and will get funerals.

”Bungie, the developer that originated the popular Halo franchise, announced that the company had created a “travel reimbursement program” for employees needing to travel to another state to obtain access to an abortion.”

Pff, ”needing to”. If you didn’t know what slant The Washington Post had now you do know. It’s this sort of thing that annoys me about liberalism/libertarianism; ah once a supposed right is infringed then it’s a huge deal and a big company will do something but they didn’t give money towards what would prevent women from looking for abortions in the first place (socioeconomic conditions). Oh they will spend money on their own employees getting abortions so then they’ll be back to work soon but not on tackling the causes of abortions in the first place.

“This is a difficult day for our country.”

Every day is difficult for every country. If Bungie care so much about the country as a whole let them buy government bonds.

”[We] will do whatever we can to protect our people and ensure they can live happy, healthy lives.”

By funding the murder of their own children. The pro-choice people care plenty about health when it’s not the unborn baby’s health.

“We are human beings who make games,” Insomniac Games tweeted. “Reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy are human rights.

Ratchet & Clank 1-Gladiator and Into The Nexus are pretty much all the games I do like so you can imagine this upsets me. Pity they don’t respect the unborn’s right to not be murdered. Neil Druckmann donated $10,000 dollars (not the first time an Israeli settler was complicit in making things worse) while Sony themselves seemed to try to have it both ways; they weren’t commenting themselves but did donate money to pro-choice organisations (as did Microsoft, Lyft, Uber, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft. If social conservatives thought big business was their friend the aftermath of the Dobbs decision forever proved that they aren’t.) So did Bethesda (trust them to not see a problem with something), Innersloth (abortion sus, vote it out) and so did Niantic (pity abortion never evolves into something better). The article calls it abortion care of course so apparently I stand corrected; the pro-choice people will say abortion but only if that also is part of framing.

“Markiplier” called the ruling “an erosion of women’s rights.”

Nobody has a right to- ah you get the idea by now.

The court overturning Roe v. Wade “reinforces this absurd, backwards notion that women shouldn’t be allowed to be in control of their own bodies,” he wrote on Twitter.

They can be in control of their own bodies, if doing so doesn’t mean destryoing someone else’s. Notice so far that it’s a bunch of men calling foul? On the one hand when men oppose abortion it’s ”no uterus, no opinion” but then when men are pro-choice that’s 100% OK. Evidence yet again that with the pro-choice people (and anyone else it seems) x only makes a difference as far as it suits the broad outline that is someone’s ideology. People say that x or y means they’re right but if x and y weren’t the case they’d still be convinced that they were right so x and y actually make absolutely no difference anyway.

“They don’t care about children; unborn or born. They don’t care about YOU — they just don’t,” wrote Soe Gschwind, a commentator for the Overwatch League. “This is about control & we all know it does not stop here.”

Typical pro-choice behaviour. ”Oh we’ve no actual evidence that it’s just about control and not about saving babies but it’s convenient to our views so that’s what we’ll say.” ”We all know it does not stop here” sounds like something a far-right conspiacy theorist would have said during the COVID lockdowns, or during anything really. She didn’t say here it does end so the tweet isn’t telling me much.

“Pokimane” writing: “They’re not pro-life, they’re pro-minimizing-women’s-rights. If they were pro life, we’d have better gun control, universal healthcare, better support for homeless people & those in need. Don’t be fooled by their jargon.”

sigh Here again a staple of the pro-choice behaviour; pro-life is our term but then they use it to mean whatever they want it to and there’s the old reliable of conveninetly ignoring those of us who very much DO support gun control and the others she mentioned. There it is yet again; it’s not conveninent for pro-choicers to realise that not everyone who’s pro-life is conservative so they don’t bother to realsie it or do realsie it but act as if they don’t. Time and time again they do the Sr Joan Chittester routine (and she’s an ultraliberal, DISSENTING nun I’ll remind you) but I don’t see people calling foul on them for not being pro-choice about taxes or guns. Pro-life and pro-choice are framing terms by the 2 sides to describe themselves; the OPPOSING side doesn’t get to decide what the framing term means. Also if you’re relying on Pokimane to prop up your side you’ve really gotten desparate.

“Zach “Asmongold,” a popular Twitch streamer with 3.2 million followers”

The article keeps saying how many followers these people have. Why? An attempt at argumentum ad populum?

just wrote: “If you don’t have autonomy over your own body, what real freedom can you have?”

If you don’t have freedom to even be born what freedom do you have? I can’t help but think that there’d be less ill treatment of people if we were all born because everyone recognised that we have a right to life and not because we happened to be born to pro-life mothers or at least mothers who didn’t abort. sigh I finally got to the end of possibly the worst newspaper article I’ve ever read.

Overlapping Fields of Failure: The New Atheism

Yes this blog rarely gets any views but it’s 2023 and the internet atheists STILL are bashing religion (well, Christianity and Islam, being contrarians they would bash on the 2 biggest ones constantly and ignore the rest) so yes, here I do go again criticising their worldview. There’s crummy worldviews, awful worldviews and worldviews so awful their failures prevent each other from being fixed and the New Atheism is certainly one of them.

Disregard of Philosophy

It’s a bad habit of the New Atheists to start by deciding that religion is a load of nonsense so it’s not worth knowing about but because they don’t know much about it they can’t criticise it effectively. Dawkins doesn’t value philosophy (and consequently neither do his internet fanboys) so he doesn’t know much about it (here’s only one example) and since he doesn’t know much about it he can’t see the value of it. In true polemicist fashion the fanboys don’t bother to fix either problem since ”ah whatever because we’re right anyway”.

Materialism/Verificationism/Scientism

For all the New Atheists’ caring about evidence when (they claim) theists don’t have any these people buy into the aforementioned trio even though there’s no material evidence for materialism, the verification principle can’t be verified and there’s no scientific evidence that science is the only form of knowledge and they would recognise that materialism, verificationism and scientism are actually philosophical claims if they valued philosophy which they don’t because it isn’t science because they think science is the only form of knowledge (because science has achieved a lot in the last few hundred years which causes its admirers to sometimes get starryeyed about it, I guess, although perhaps I’m being too charitable in assuming there is some actual decent reason and it’s not just their usual overconfidence.) These people use religion as a byword for anything they unilaterally decide lacks evidence but yet people believe in passionately (a lot of other things would make an equally good byword by that token, like insert name of political ideology you don’t like) but m/v/s themselves have no evidence supporting them; inspite of gerrymandering God out of existence these worldviews would be religions by the New Atheists’ standards.

Science can’t get them out of the m/v/s hole but the m/v/s followers don’t think there is any other form of knowledge so nothing will get them out.

M/V/S, Chronological Snobbery and Supposed Support of The Enlightenment

On the one hand they say time and again that the Bible is from the bronze age (the New Testament is from the classical age but this is the new atheism we’re talking about, facts can’t get in the way of making an argument that sounds convinicing to themselves but actually isn’t convincing) but on the other they say they’re for The Englightenment. If something older is automatically worse then that means The Englightenment is worse than what we have now but if The Enlightenment is a good thing then things are not automatically worse just because they’re older and all this doesn’t mention the fact that The Enlightenment ended in the 1800s. For a bunch of people who dismiss Christ as being a necromancer they sure are trying to engage in necromancy with this.

Another problem is that The Enlightenment involved a lot of philosophy but these people are materialists, verificationists and supporters of scientism and so of course they think science is the only form of knowledge and so philosophy is useless. Yet again they leave me wondering which it is; if philosophy is useless then a lot of The Enlightenment was a waste of time so they’d be wrong to support it but if The Enlightenment was as great as they claim to think it was then philosophy is indeed useful.

Third up is that if newer is better and verificationism was buried in the early 20th century then they’re again contradicting themselves. If newer is better they should have left verificationism in the grave where it belongs and if verificationism is a good thing then newer isn’t better. The new atheists’ claims that religion is fiction is rich considering that calling their claims fiction would be an insult to fiction; at least with fiction someone bothers to put time and effort into making a good story and not throwing out the first thing that comes to one’s head and then submitting it ot the internet thinking it’ll be a slam dunk against whatever he (they are overwhelmingly male for some reason) doesn’t like (never mind that his hundreds of other efforts didn’t succeed so he’s wasting the time of anyone unfortunate enough to read it).

Counterproductive Air War

On the one hand these people feel some desparate need to persuade people of atheism (instead of sitting back and letting the opposition self-destruct which unfortunately it often does) yet on the other exhibit an insufferably smug attitude to anyone disagreeing with them in the slightest. On Quora they pull the baldfaced gaslighting of saying that they’ll only be rough with someone if you were rough with an atheist but I’ve seen it with my own eyes plenty of times that they’ll go ape on someone just for not agreeing with them and they’ve been called on their toxicity even by fellow atheists, even by Steve Shives, himself very much an internet atheist. Being crummy to people will just annoy them but the New Atheists operate under the Nietzschean morality namely that the superior man does as he pleases. As far as these people are concerned it’s OK to treat us like scum because as far as they’re concerned that’s what we are. There’s a lot of them, they’ve had plenty of time and if they’re so smart like they claim to be they would have either given up on trying to convince theists or would have stopped calling us sheep, cultists, religiots and whatever. It’s high time the New Atheists realise that their advertising is so poor it’s actually making their (already very unattractive) product even less appealing; the more content they put out the worse the New Atheism looks. The awful and fanatical behaviour of its defenders are one of the main reasons why I’m a devout theist and not simply a standard issue one. Their ground game, also, poor, just reinforces how pointless the New Atheism is; even with different ideologies people will act the same; the atheist street epistemologist acts like the Protestant street preacher.

Their nastiness is majorly counterproductive to winning people over but it’s inevitable they would treat other people like they’re inferior to them because on their nietzschean morality anyone not agreeing with them is inferior to them.

Firehose of Falsity

The firehose of falsity involves throwing out a lot of arguments and repeating them constantly even if some contradict others and the new atheists seem to be the masters at this; few other groups have churned out content on an industrial scale for so long. Perhaps they think that if they throw enough stuff at the wall then something will stick but the problem is their arguments are so bad that the more they make and the more they repeat them the worse things get. They could slow down and try to think of better arguments but it’s a political movement in democratic countries so of course they’ll be in a mad rush to constantly get more members but by being in a mad rush they trip themselves up.

Making Defectors Look Bad

The new atheism could have won more people to its cause by looking better but because of how poor the arguments are and how badly its adherents behave it makes anybody switching to the new atheism look like either a wimp who will accept being bullied or somebody who isn’t all that bright. By going about winning people over in such crummy ways they get more people but they’re more people who make the movement look even worse. Yet again in trying to get the quantity they royally shot themselves in the foot when it comes to quality which in fact reduces the quantity.

Some Proposals For Reforms To American Politics

People being what they are you might already be thinking ”You don’t live in America, you don’t know enough to go making suggestions” well I disagree due to the fact that I use the internet a lot and on the internet you’ll run into American politics constantly whether you were looking for them or not, they get shovelled into even things that are only tangenitally related to them. Back in 2006 when I first started to use the internet in earnest it was full of furious, Richard Dawkins level canister shot polemics because of America’s culture war so in fact it is my business. On the English speaking internet the world seems to be divided into America and Other so in fact I think I do know enough to make suggestions and there’s also the fact that the Americans seem incapable of fixing their political system themselves so perhaps someone with a more zoomed out view will get the full picture.

Instant Runoff Voting

In the American elections whether for President, the House of Representatives or Senate whichever candidate gets the highest number of votes gets the seat/electoral votes; whether or not that candidate got a majority of the votes. The problems with this are that it can and does often end up that someone the majority did not vote for will win that election; the majority won’t get what they voted for in spite of it being a democracy. There is also the problem of vote splitting; for example a leftwing person might prefer to vote for the Green Party but if leftwing votes are split between the Democrats and Greens the Republican candidate could win that state/seat as happened in Florida in 2000. This allows the bigger parties to blame smaller ones for their defeats in close races as opposed to blaming themselves for not doing a better job or changing the voting system. In instant runoff voting the candidate who comes last is eliminated until at the end there are only 2 and whoever gets the majority of the votes is the winner. If a candidate needs a majority and not simply a plurality of the votes to win then this would make candidates do a better job and not be as extreme since they need to reach more people.

End Gerrymandering

Here in Ireland we have an independent boundary commission and so even if a party is dominant in a certain county they can’t divide up a constituency in their favour. In America however there is widespread gerrymandering and many congressional districts are heavily in favour of one party due to both packing and stacking. With candidates more worried about being defeated in a primary election by somebody in their own party than by a candidate from another party this contributes to polarisation; which is only getting worse over time. If congressional districts both make geographical sense and not merely political sense and can only be won by someone with a majority of the vote then this surely will help to reduce polarisation.

Reduce the number of Senate seats by 1 per state and increase the number of House seats by 1 per state

A Senate seat is statewide whereas House seats are in areas of a seat. I see no use in there being 2 senators per state and with America being a 2 party system this only makes things worse and not only that but at present (30th June 2023) in 44 states both senators are from the same party (46 if one counts Krysten Sinema and Bernie Sanders as Democrats); only one party is represented at Senate level in 88% of the states. If the number of Senate seats each state gets isn’t determined by population anyway and are statewide then it might as well be 1 seat while an extra House seat in each state will mean smaller and more local areas can be better represented (and with all of the federal dysfunction perhaps more localism is need anyway) but also there’s the fact that an extra seat in each state means borders will have to be redrawn; hopefully that would be an opportunity to draw them up more fairly, to end gerrymandering.

Scrap the Electoral College and elect the President directly by national popular vote

It was argued that the American people wouldn’t be informed enough to decide for themselves who should be President but the problem today is that too many of them are misinformed.

One of the arguments made by its defenders is that scrapping the electoral college would mean that the small states would be ignored but with the electoral college they’re ignored anyway and so are even the biggest states! The candidates spend their time and money on the closest states since almost every state whoever gets a plurality of the popular vote in that state wins the entirety of its electoral votes.

Another problem, yet again, is that the losing party gets nothing. Yet another instance of 2 parties but a winner-take-all system meaning one party gets nothing which leads to polarisation.

The Democrats may say that the electoral college favours the Republicans but in reality it’s like a subsidy that keeps a failing industry going when really it would be better off dieing. The Republicans can go as far to the right as they like and still be competitive since they’re the biggest rightwing party. A lot of even rightwingers might not like them but no other rightwing party (or candidate, not even a Mormon running in Utah) can win even one state and thus not even one electoral vote (barring the odd faithless elector, a rare occurence) without having the official Republican nomination. I say on balance it’s bad for both parties as the Democrats are more likely to win less of the electoral votes than popular vote is what goes wrong for them. It’s true that the Democrats are kept artificially competitive for the same reasons as the Republicans but the Democrats have gotten more of the popular vote at every election (bar 2004) since 1992 and so it’s not they who need to reform (in terms of getting votes, obviously on policy I would prefer more left wing economics and the party to be more socially conservative).

Abolish the Supreme Court

It used to be that nominations to the Supreme Court were uncontroversial but from Bork onwards it has become highly partisan and talk of justices being liberal or conservative with the unfortunate result that Supreme Court decisions are often postmodernism; there’s no objective truth about the thing itself, just opinion and whoever has the power enforces their opinion. In the Roe v Wade decision it was argued that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy (it doesn’t mention one) and within this right to privacy a right to abortion was read in. If something can be read into the constitution and something else read into that then pretty much anything goes just as long as it’s before the Court. It was said that there are a penumbra of rights in the constitution; a penumbra is small bit of light on the moon. Something closer to Earth and bigger in size would surely be better and of course then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Perhaps a longer constitution more relevant to today would be better than the current one but (people’s own partisan interpretation of) the constitution is some kind of sacred cow which the Americans seemingly will never slay.

Cop On

The American people themselves although often misled by internet commentators or ranty talking heads on the cable news also need to do better themselves.

One thing to do is to stop saying the same things over and over again. Apparently the advice is that people should say things over and over but both sides do this so I see no reason to prefer one over the other except when it comes to the substance of the policies. Whether it’s politics, religion, atheism or anything people spend too much time on the advertising and too little on the quality of the product which is a twofold recipe for annoyance.

Another is to stop with the solipsism. Both sides say try to convince the other using their criteria but this is silly; if the other side accepted your sides’ criteria they’d be on your side. There’s also the notion that if we’re for policy x for reason y then the other side must hate policy x for reason y. This happens a lot with American libertarians where they’ll oppose something in the name of freedom and then brand anyone supporting it a communist or fascist (as opposed to they’re pro something like safety or equality as opposed to anti-freedom) and with the social liberals if they support something in the name of equality or secularism then anyone opposing it is an evil ignorant, bigoted, theocratic homophobe/transphobe (as opposed to someone not being convinced by the arguments for gay marriage or transgenderism and seeing plenty reason to think making changes to a conservative status quo on these would be dangerous). Treating the other side as some mirror image of oneself is not only ignorant but will put them off of your side and further erode what little chance there was of them going over to yours there was to begin with.

Some on the right say America is a Christian nation well then let there be a repentance; a turning away from sin. From polemics, ridicule, dogpiling, nutpicking, gaslighting, always playing the victim like some manipulator and assuming the worst of people, turn away America.

Spare The Child

Well on the average day nobody reads this blog, literally 0 people, but I feel like giving out about something that has been annoying me for years or in this case decades so like Whitesnake ”Here I go again”. I have already covered the fact that adults won’t voluntary put up with something like the education system that is a relic of British colonialism being forced on themselves yet adults in a number of countries make children put up with it so I won’t repeat myself here.

The Intelligence Scam

Whereas Professor Haidt called foul on the rationalist delusion in moral psychology I’m here to call foul on the intelligence scam when it comes to society’s treatment of children. Adults have so much power over children supposedly because they know a lot more and yet if the adults use what intelligence they have got to justify stupid, arbitrarily made decisions after the fact or come up with sensible and rational decisions in the first place then the child is equally supposed to obey either way. Whether the adults waste what little intelligence they have got and have a proven track record of failure; a perennially messy house, constantly unhappy children (because of substantive issues in the family, not entitlement on the children’s part) etc. or whether they have vast intelligence that is put to good use the child is again equally supposed to obey either way. Really then, as with a lot of things, a group has the power supposedly because they would be the ones to best put it to use to get things done but in fact they have the power because they best know how to hold on to it; holding onto power is what they want to get done. If a clever (objectively clever, not simply clever by the standards of children) child with stupid parents and a stupid child (even by a child’s standard) with (objectively) clever parents are both equally supposed to obey then the level of intelligence doesn’t actually matter. Parents, teachers etc. could just just drop this pretense of their authority coming from their having more intelligence and be honest that it doesn’t and that may upset the children but it’s the truth and there’s nothing the children can do about it anyway. In that fideist piece of rubbish Miracle On 34th Street the lawyer for ”Santa” (a thinly veiled analogy for God) asks the court to consider whether it would be better to have a lie that draws a smile or a truth that draws a tear (pessimist that I am I say go with the truth, whatever it raises) but when it comes to adults’ treatment of children the choice is between a lie that draws a tear and a truth that draws a tear. If adults are so keen to have authority over children let them get some moral authority by telling the truth.

The Phrase ”Acting Childish”

Contra the whining of a rightwinger on Imgflip after a meme I made about gun control was featured I am not ”an edgy shitposter who pretends to be a centrist”; I am a communitarian who doesn’t pretend to be anything else. This being said when it comes to speech as with a lot of things there are two extremes, both of which are pretty rotten. On the one hand there are people who think they have some absolute right to say anything; not simply to call things dumb or lame but to call their fellow human beings autistic as an insult and on the other people who wouldn’t want anything or anyone to be called any of those things (and not even for autistic people to call non-autistics neurotypical even though neurotypical isn’t an insult and a lot of groups have a word for ”people who aren’t us”. I know that othering can lead to negative stereotypes and discrimination but there’s comparatively little of that by autistics against neurotypicals, even on a per capita basis I would say.) My angle is that there’s nothing good about being unable to speak (dumb) while there is a neurodiversity movement saying that autism is a difference and not a deficit and when it comes to mild autism I’m convinced the facts would bare this out and so calling something dumb or autistic isn’t the same thing (and to use both of them as a byword for stupid is just idiotic. If dumb is already a byword for stupid adding autism as another byword for stupid is redundant.) The point is that the right position is to not be against every phrase like dumb or lame but not to accept every phrase like these either and acting childish is one of those phrases to not accept.

If a black American says to another black American that he is ”acting white” this is an insult. When straight people described things as gay they at times meant this as a byword for bad (as in low quality) but this has largely become unacceptable yet adults calling the behaviour of other adults ”acting childish” somehow remains an acceptable insult. Bad enough that this is yet another piece of arbitrary discrimination for children to put up with, worse yet that adults themselves often act in a so-called childish way (like when they lose an election) and ”acting grownup” is a good thing. It’s not the children who carried out the Holocaust, Stalin’s purges, the so-called Great Leap Forward or the myriad other abuses of dictators on the far left and far right. Perhaps acting grownup should be a byword for acting tyrannical while projecting your own failures onto people that can’t stand up for themselves.

Schroedinger’s Child

While on the one hand adults will dismiss a child’s opinions since ”I’m older than you” when it comes to punishment a child knows plenty. Whether a child knows nothing or knows plenty and even whether someone is a child or not all depends on what is convenient to the adult in question. Greta Thunberg was dismissed as a child but when there was graffiti at an oil company depicting her being raped the owner said ”She isn’t a child; she’s 16.” and yet as far as Sweden’s voting age was concerned she was indeed just a child. At home or at school or anywhere apparently I was too young to decide whether to be there or not but old enough for adults to roar the head off of me if I so much as was perceived to have done even a minor thing wrong; whether or not I had actually done anything wrong. This was another double standard of my childhood; I had done something wrong if it was so much as possible I had done something wrong (but anyone could have possibly done something; possibly doesn’t say much) whereas adults hadn’t done anything wrong even if I had caught them redhanded. It was all completely arbitrary. In one’s late teens someone can be old enough for being tried as an adult but not voting or can do military service but not drink depending on the laws of that country. Adults put children in a crummy position then; the first 17 years of life is some demo for the main game which they tout as being far better (”feel like a man”, ”man up”, ”you broke the boy in me but you won’t break the man”, ”separating the men from the boys” etc.) yet the closer you get to the end the more trouble you can get in even though you’re still not a man/woman at 17 so according to adults you still don’t know anything.

Bad Demo, Worse Game

I had said that adults treat the first 17 years of life as the demo for the main game well much like Rise of Africa in Fate of the World the demo doesn’t do much to prepare someone for the main game. The supposed superiority of being an adult is another scam; whereas according to adults being a child automatically means someone doesn’t know anything being an adult doesn’t necessarily mean that someone does know something; adults will even brand other adults idiots automatically for following the wrong politics or for being religious (some theists think the atheists are idiots but I don’t see this anywhere near as much). School got people accustomed to being workers but hasn’t taught us how to make work more meaningful, the economy fairer or why it’s fair (if it is fair, which I doubt) that some have so much while others have so little. I no longer experience growing pains of course but the pains of childhood I doubt will be any use when the pains of old age come. School taught people what to think but not how, how to read but not how to analyse and so the internet is awash with ”Ha ha! This one chart says we’re right so we are! Checkmate other side!!111111!11!” when often the chart only kinda sorta says this, or the y axes aren’t even, the data was p-hacked etc. Childhood got people used to being followers but didn’t prepare them to be leaders (unless they went to posh schools perhaps) and that combined with such Mammon-worshipping economies makes it little surprise to me that our current crop of leaders are often little more than incompetent puppets of big money. Based on how people were themselves treated as children they know how to control children but don’t know how to treat children as people and not half-persons; the teachers there at the moment were themselves treated as half-persons by school so all they know is treating children as wild animals to tame, that it is the adult man’s burden to civilize the child savages. The bad treatment of the children of today produces the bad adults of the future and the cycle continues ad inifintum. Experiencing rainy days as a child doesn’t make it any easier as an adult. The difficulties of being a child didn’t prepare me for the difficulties of being an adult; being under suspicion all of the time for no good reason was obviously no help with losing interest in this tv programme or that book since my standards went up. I went from not having the vote to rarely being on the winning side in votes. I went from having no vote to my vote rarely mattering much.

What I am calling for is to treat childhood as its own time of life with its own strengths and weaknesses and not some practice run for the rest of life. Let children be children and not submissive workers in training, not as half-persons that either know nothing or know plenty depending on whether adults want to keep something from them or punish them but as full persons who either know plenty or know little whatever adults want from them. There is plenty of time later to experience firsthand that the world is unfair and that life is cruel; since children are supposed to believe what they’re told anyway then for them simply telling them that life is unfair should be enough; not having to make life unfair for them on purpose repeatedly so they’ll be used to it being unfair and being used to doing nothing about it. Let there be no more talk along the lines of ”childhood is only a fraction of someone’s life” when some people die in childhood and it takes until the age of 35 to have spent most of one’s life being other than a child and judging by 30 35 isn’t worth waiting for.

Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome IV: A counterblast to Rush Limbaugh on Evangelii Gaudium 54.

Source: Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome IV: A counterblast to Rush Limbaugh on Evangelii Gaudium 54.

Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome II: Wherein Bishop Bernard Fellay giveth a homily.

Source: Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome II: Wherein Bishop Bernard Fellay giveth a homily.

Pope St. Pius X vs. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome.

Source: Pope St. Pius X vs. Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome.

The Prince of Egypt – Hans Zimmer & Stephen Schwartz

An interesting analysis of The Prince of Egypt‘s soundtrack.

Scores of Scores

Jeffrey Katzenberg, when he was working as chairman of Walt Disney Studios, had long desired an animated adaptation of the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, which tells the story of Moses in the biblical chapter of Exodus: his raising in the palace of the Egyptian Pharaohs, his powerful encounter with God, his quest to free the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt and his eventual communion with God and receiving of the Ten Commandments. Katzenberg decided to put the idea into production after founding DreamWorks in 1995. The task must have been daunting -The Ten Commandments was one of the most successful biblical films of all time, produced by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille, and starring one of the greatest personalities of Hollywood, Charlton Heston.

But Katzenberg was not deterred – he gathered together 350 animators from Walt Disney Feature Animation and the recently disbanded company Amblimation…

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Why I’m Not A Conservative

Although social liberals tend to support abortion and gay marriage this doesn’t mean anyone opposing these should write a blank check to conservatives. All too often they conserve what ought to change and fail to conserve what ought to be conserved. It has been said that ”Conservatives believe in an imaginary past and the liberals an impossible future” and by GK Chesterton ”The liberals make new mistakes and the conservatives prevent the old ones from being corrected” and I see plenty reason to agree. In my other post I had criticised both social and economic liberalism and here I will criticise both social and economic conservatism (both economic liberalism as in negative liberty and fiscal conservatism as in being against spending money are both aspects of capitalism so to divide the world into people being liberal OR conservative ultimately doesn’t make sense).

Poor Handling Of Change

You don’t need to remind me of the French Revolution or the Irish general election of 2011 to show that change is not inherently a good thing that will make things better, I do reject the liberal progress narrative. The problem of course is that, as happens all too often in politics, just because one side gets things wrong it doesn’t mean that the other side is better. On conservatism ”If it ain’t broke then don’t fix it” becomes ”Don’t fix it even if it is broke” and had things stayed the same we’d still die before 50 having lived in poverty with little hope of things being any better for the next generation and women would be seen as inferior to men. The education system in a number of countries is badly in need of a change but the people who would most benefit from it being reformed are the ones least likely to be listened to, the environment is badly in need of a change for the better and the list goes on.

Conservatism doesn’t have to mean no change at all though, it can mean change does happen but more gradually than the social liberals would like but this only postpones the inevitable and the result is the same anyway. Gay marriage in the UK was legalised under the Conservative Party (most of them were opposed to it I gather but it happened anyway) with David Cameron justifying it using small c conservative language but the fact remains it’s a liberal policy and in Ireland the supposedly conservative Fine Gael (who are members of the conservative EPP group in the European Parliament), led by supposedly conservative Catholic from Mayo Enda Kenny and then Leo Varadkar, a gay man from Dublin, legalised abortion where the mother’s life is at risk, successfully campaigned for gay marriage to be legalised and abortion legalised during the first trimester for any reason, repealed the ban on blasphemy which nobody was prosecuted for anyway, reduced the waiting time for divorce from 5 years to 2 and just recently the government of which they’re a part are handing out free contraception to 17-25 year olds. Sure, the Conservatives and Fine Gael had been in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and Labour respectively but these latter were the junior partners. If social conservatism is expendable but fiscal conservatism non-negotiable then really conservatism is libertarianism which would explain why Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan made such far reaching libertarian changes to their countries’ economies in the 1980s.

Two Princes

Although conservatives in different places and times may have had little doubt that conservatism was libertarian or authoritarian I’m not sure how anyone can say that conservatism is or ought to be one or the other. American conservatives have a dogmatic hatred of government while in South Korea conservatives were authoritarian like Syngman Ree and General Park. Conservatives from western Europe and the US may recoil in horror at the notion that the Nazis were conservative but they promoted the traditional family, patriotism, a staunch hatred of communism and a near worship of the military, all things conservatives often espouse. While American conservatives have a hands off approach to the economy they are fine with the government banning abortion, gay marriage and drugs and took a very hands on approach to warfare. If libertarian conservatism is just libertarianism and authoritarian conservatism is just authoritarian (authoritarian leaders whether conservative or not often act as the pater of the national familias) I see little point to saying that conservatism is some political philosophy of its own.

The Economy

Dr King spoke of capitalism for the rich and socialism for the poor but as bad as that would be it’s often worse; we get state capitalism for the rich but anarchocapitalism for the poor. On the one hand under capitalism the government is supposed to stay out of things but in Ireland there was the infamous bailout of Anglo-Irish bank which bankrupted the country and led to the country itself being bailed out by the IMF, EU and ECB. A failed bank was bailed out while the many, including people not doing too well as it was, were hit with years of austerity. How awful to expect fiscal rectitude from everybody else when Anglo clearly had none and the Irish government wrote it a blank cheque. George W Bush’s TARP was more successful but still a remarkably statist thing for a capitalist to do. Some say the government should operate like a business but that is what the government does; it borrows money now to invest hoping to make more money and not only pay off what it owes but to be in a better position long term. Whereas business investing in new technology is apparently an investment wages are treated as a cost with no benefit and exposes what sort of behaviour capitalism produces; people are supposed to be allowed to get as much money for themselves as they want but when labour tries to do this the capitalists will try to thwart this. The conservatives like to think of themselves as fiscally responsible but I see nothing fiscally responsible about the high unemployment Margaret Thatcher caused or the Irish government’s austerity in the early 2010s which just made the economy even worse until the IMF finally left. Improving the worst neighborhoods in the country would surely generate more money in the long run than it would cost; less money would be spent on policing and more people would be off of the welfare roll and on the payment roll and of course less mental health issues and the list goes on but this goes against the conservative outlook; the private sector won’t do this as it isn’t profitable in the short term and the government doing things (other than sucking up to the rich) is seen as heresy. On the conservative worldview poverty is a moral failing; people deserve to be poor since it’s their own fault anyway and spending money on them would be a waste that fosters dependency but the rich get tax cuts and other benefits, even the ones who only inherited their wealth. If the conservatives really do value hard work and individual initiative let’s see them raise inheritance taxes and cut income taxes. Conservatives say they value family but they also often support capitalism which is individualistic and this circle cannot be squared. If they want to prevent abortion and reduce contraception usage it’s high time they adjust the workplace to be more family friendly so as few people as possible have to choose between children and career.

Treatment Of Minorities

Although the social liberals are too quick to label people not agreeing with their particular solutions racist, homophobic etc. the reality is there is still a degree of these around and while not all conservatives are racist etc. it seems to me a safe bet that most of the racists etc. are conservative. The slavery in the southern US, apartheid in South Africa, anti-immigrant sentiment in the US as a whole whether against Irish and Italians in the 1800s or Hispanics now, insults and even violence against LGBTetc. people and of course the alt right’s puerile ”humour” about the misadventures of Daryl, a stereotypical black man who has big lips and tries to commit crime and the alt right’s ignorant labelling of anything they don’t like as autistic and anything opposing their ideology as autistic screeching (the ignorance never ends from the alt right). In both Japan and the US the far-right think that foreigners do more crime but they actually commit less and in Japan’s case an ageing population means either encourage people to have more children (hasn’t worked), raise the retirement age (Japan’s a democracy so this would cost the government votes) or reduce pensions (same problem) or encourage immigration (to a jingoistic country whose language is not widely spoke outside of it). As someone in minorities myself (I’m aspie and asexual) there’s no place in conservatism for me. The conservatives say time and again ”People wouldn’t get away with saying x or y about insert name of minority group” well no they wouldn’t; the minority groups (apart from the rich) haven’t got the power. It isn’t the same.

Shortcomings On Religion

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m a very religious guy myself who can’t stand the new atheists but I can kind of see where they’re coming from and as with any group it’s best not give them ammunition. Ireland prior to the 1990s was on the surface a very Catholic and conservative country (it still is compared to most other European countries) and yet we had an attitude to sexuality that was stifling and bear in mind I’m certainly no supporter of the sexual revolution, divorce etc. and the treatment of single mothers in the mother and baby homes was a national disgrace which isn’t to say that these were unique to Ireland or Catholicism but as believers in a religion that teaches that works are important (but not enough by themselves) for one’s salvation then we are called to set a better example than non-Catholics and clearly this didn’t happen. The clerical sex abuse and coverup I hardly need to remind people of and this as well as the other wrongdoings I’ve mentioned caused an enormous backlash against the Church and resulting ultraliberalism in social policy. As for the American religious right it gained a lot of influence in the 1980s which is still around but not as much as it used to be as there were scandals in it. In a religion whose sacred text has many verses about helping the poor the religious right certainly did little if anything to reduce the growing gap between rich and poor in 1980s America and its militaristic stance on foreign policy has caused a lot of death and suffering, even the propping up of far right regimes during the 1980s. Meanwhile in American conservative Catholicism one finds the traditionalists who never seem to tire of bashing Vatican II or Pope Francis and complaining about the ”Novus Ordo” mass and branding defenders of these things modernists which is dishonest; there used to be a heresy known as modernism in the Catholic church but this was squashed and they conveniently forget there was also a heresy known as traditionalism which said that tradition was more important than reason. I they can resurrect a term for a heresy already gone to bash their opponents with then they themselves shouldn’t call themselves after a heresy that’s already gone. In US politics the religious right for the most part wrote a blank cheque to Trump with (white) evangelicals going from the group most likely to least likely to say a candidate’s personal integrity was important and this isn’t good enough. Yes the American political system is a 2 party system but this ought to be fixed instead of people being stuck writing a blank cheque to any Republican who gets the nomination. I think to myself a lot of Americans don’t actually like the political party they support but are stuck with them anyway given the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college.

Why I’m Not A Liberal

For the benefit of any Americans who may be reading this I’m talking about liberal as in social liberalism (in the sense used in the anglosphere) and also classical liberalism (libertarianism). Why Americans made liberal mean egalitarian I can only guess. Emerging from the grim darkness of the pre-Enlightenment days liberalism must have seen a breath of fresh air well as with almost all politics what started as an understandable outlook and perhaps even a necessary one at the time has grown stale and isn’t being fixed no matter how broken it has got. I’ve dealt with postmodernism already so I won’t here.

Atomistic Society

In spite of all of our technology and (unevenly distributed) wealth (which is to a large degree based on nonsense I would think) there’s so much depression, anxiety and suicide in the west as well as South Korea and Japan. At first glance this may seem a paradox but really it isn’t; a tribalistic species now acting as islands unto themselves was bound to cause problems and people, especially the vulnerable, to suffer. The every man/woman/intersex person/child for themselves software just isn’t going to run well on the conformist hardware that is human nature. On an individualistic attitude to society if something is somebody else’s problem then ”Hard luck to them but it’s not my problem” as opposed to ”It’s a problem so let’s solve it”. Adam Smith may have been right to some extent about rational self interest but he could hardly have foreseen just how bad negative externalities could get as technology improved. Big industrial cities became places where people lived difficult lives in unsafe, dirty and noisy conditions and then came home to poor, overcrowded houses that lacked sanitation. Not that most factory owners cared much if at all, they were alright Jack. On social policy there’s this attitude of ”You can’t force your opinions on other people” (”forcing one’s opinions on” apparently means any time someone supports a ban or restriction on something liberals support) when it comes to abortion and gay marriage but sexism and the environment are (rightly) thought of as objective evils which can’t be a matter of choice. I submit that choice is not inherently a good thing; a choice is only as good as the option you’re likely to pick.

The Sexual Revolution

In the BBC documentary I Hate The Sixties it was pointed out that the contraceptive pill was used for what you would expect but then people had much more sex and more pregnancies happened anyway. In Ireland contraception was legal first, then abortion, then more abortion and now they’re giving out free contraception to 17-25 year olds. Any pro-choice people saying that contraception will reduce the number of abortions either has a short memory, doesn’t understand that ceterus paribus is only any use if ceterus really is paribus or is just using (the claimed achieving of) a lower abortion rate as a trojan horse for contraception. In a society obsessed with money then of course thievery will happen and people accept this instead of being less obsessed with money but people can’t seem to understand that a society obsessed with sex will have a certain amount of rape; they do want to have it both ways on that. Not only that but in a society obsessed with sex it’s not surprising that ignorant fratboy dudebros in America (of which there are an awful lot) use virgin as an insult, as if there weren’t enough prejudice against minorities as it is but wait, there’s more! (Our lives are like Colombo; there’s always one more thing.) Now teenagers, not the best people to raise children (no offense, teenagers) feel pressured into having sex even as young as 13 and anyone supporting any restriction on sex other than it must be consenting adults is branded sex critical or sex negative as if setting a limit on what food to eat and how much is food critical or food negative. The framing continues with prostitution; some now want to treat it as ”sex work” but what they’re working with is their bodies; the ”sex positive” people are literally commodifying women’s bodies which I thought would have been one of the last things liberals would want but this is liberalism; if there’s money in prostitution, condoms, pills, patches, shots, abortions, IUDs and advertising as well as slathering sex all over the TV programmes and movies well then nothing will thwart the purposes of the almighty dollar. Video after youtube video going into seemingly every gory detail is something I could have done without either and ladies please stop trying to make words like hoe and bitch compliments; they aren’t. Let them refer to a gardening tool and a female dog respectively and nothing more. The sexual revolution reduces men to animalistic barbarians with no self control and filthy mouths and women to objects for men to pleasure themselves with and slaves to chance rather than adjusting work to make it more family friendly so that nobody has to choose between a child and a career while on artificial contraception. On liberalism society also runs the risk of ”My body my choice” (that slogan repeated ad nauseam that ignores that the baby has a body too and that location doesn’t determine rights) becoming ”Her baby her problem, I’m not letting MY money go to support somebody else”. A society that truly values positive liberty will make it such that females don’t have to choose between murdering their own babies and being left to fend for themselves (especially of course if they didn’t consent to the sex in the first place).

Liberal Progress Narrative

One of the complaints of social liberals when something doesn’t go their way is ”It’s (insert year name here)” as if things are destined to get more liberal and thus, in their view, better over time. This may be true for science but it certainly doesn’t hold true for everything. The environment keeps getting worse as does the divide between the east and west of Ireland and looking at health there used to be no HIV or COVID and now both of them are worldwide problems. It is not the case that the liberals are right on everything and that it was a historical inevitability that they get their way so often; it was missteps of conservatives and an increase in the number of people living in cities that let them get their way so often. Relying on other people’s mistakes, nastiness and lies as well as a trend continuing indefinitely is not a reliable way to go. With a notion like the liberal progress narrative in their heads it’s not surprising then that no matter how much they get their way it still isn’t enough for them (much like the rich and their wealth).

Can Becomes Have

People can (are allowed to, in society’s view) have sex outside of marriage and all manner of different kinds of sex decayed into people, especially female, being pressured into sex and virgin becoming an insult. Fanatics, especially fanatical atheists, can churn out content on an industrial scale so other people have to stomach it. I certainly didn’t choose to run into all of their demented rants on youtube, blog sites or Yahoo! Answers and their smug, simplistic memes but there’s just so many of them out there you’ll run into at least some of them eventually. The media can be owned by a small number of people so whether it’s Rupert Murdoch or Tony O’Reilly you have to stomach the fact that it is owned by a small number of people. The rich can dodge taxes so the rest of us have to pick up the slack; if the people best able to pay the taxes would pay them the rates of taxation could be lowered. If abortion can be taxpayer funded then if you’re pro-life you have to put up with the fact that your taxes are going toward something you don’t agree with. People can make short, near pointless IMDB reviews that are really comments, not reviews, that’ll say ”Best anime ever! 10/10” (yes, I really did see a review that said that and I’m not strawmanning) and the like when it was in no way 10/10 and certainly not the best anime ever so anyone looking for some insight into an anime have to put up with this fanboy/fangirl rubbish.

Stranglehold On Society

If each person who can vote gets one but of course some have more money than others and money can buy influence then it’s not surprising that the rich man’s ideology; libertarianism, is the dominant one. Economic decisions made in the anglosphere are nearly always rightwing ones while social liberalism is a hivemind among the music and film industries. In Ireland we had a government, led by Fine Gael of all parties, constantly passing liberal social policies either by act of parliament or referenda and compassion was the mantra. Compassion, from the most capitalist of the mainstream parties in the state. Compassion, said a party that implemented austerity. When gay marriage was legalised in 2015 the media went on until late 2017 touting it as if it were the best thing to ever happen in this country with only an upcoming referendum on further legalising abortion shutting them up. With all of this talk of equality and compassion where was the equality and compassion for working class people? What use is the Irish Labour party if when they get into power they only change social policy and not economics? In theory people are free to oppose the libertarian ideology but when freedom is treated as reason enough by itself to support something and anyone opposing a libertarian policy is accused of being a socialist or a theocrat and will be outspent by the rich and pounced on by the media that’s hard to do. Not every social liberal is a capitalist but the mediaworks out well for the capitalists; while people are consuming lowbrow prolefeed entertainment that’s time they’re spending not thinking about what harm capitalism does and what a better society would look like, not to mention advertising (which these days is often virtue signalling) being big business which the media emits.

Ideological Solipsism

The social liberals can’t seem to fathom that not agreeing with their particular solutions to problems doesn’t mean you hate the people they’re trying to help. The capitalists think that if you don’t agree with their policies you’re a socialist or a communist as opposed to every political ideology has its flaws that you can critique without supporting its opposite like you don’t have to be an anarchocapitalist to recognise the inefficiencies of communism. The weed legalisation supporters brand anything they don’t like fascism and prohibitionism and that anyone opposing it must be bribed by the FBI or something as opposed to drugs are harmful and the effects of alcohol don’t justify legalising other harmful substances which will then be as easily available. The pro-choice people think anyone opposing so-called abortion rights hates women which doesn’t make sense considering in my experience women are more pro-life than men (I’m not simply talking about raw numbers; I mean in percentage terms) and even some feminist, otherwise liberal groups like Rehumanise International and the New Wave Feminists are pro-life.

Arrogance

The social liberals being disproportionately wealthy and urban look down on people not agreeing with them as ignorant bigots from the bog as opposed to equally sincere and serious minded people with genuine concerns while the libertarians think the majority of people are sheep but they fail to realise that just because there tuned out to be some conspiracies that doesn’t mean that everything that goes wrong is a conspiracy. The social liberals seem not to realise that intelligence and level of education are 2 different things and with universities being overwhelmingly liberal already of course people will come out of there with liberal views; more education doesn’t necessarily mean people will make better political choices as they’re still vulnerable to the same factors that make everyone else tribalistic. As for the libertarians branding people sheep that are far left won’t persuade people to their view and will put them off of it and there also seems to be a fair overlap with edgy atheism; that people like this go against the grain just so bein in a minority opposed to people they perceive as sheep makes them superior somehow.

Conspiracy Theories

Whereas Patrick Henry had said ”Give me liberty or give me death” and Thomas Jefferson had said ”Whoever would give up a lot of freedom for some temporary security deserves neither” (emphasis mine due to how often people butcher the quote) with the libertarians the outlook seems to be ”Give me liberty even if it might cause my death” and ”Whoever would give up even the slightest bit of freedom for any amount of even long term security deserves neither”. The conspiracy theorists don’t like x and they don’t like y so therefore x is y (oh but it’s the government who are the idiots of course, they’re stupid and they pull off conspiracy theories?). More could be done to fight global warming which would end up preserving land and save money in the long term as we wouldn’t have to put up with as many natural disasters and making do with ever diminishing fossil fuels but this would involve international cooperation and big business adjusting how it operates but the libertarians don’t want that so it must be a socialist conspiracy. They don’t like vaccines and mask mandates and they don’t like government so this must also be a conspiracy, for some reason. Sure, some conspiracies have been unearthed but that doesn’t give anybody license to think then that any conspiracy theory (that suits their own politics, not other people’s) is true; a broken clock may tell the right time for 2 minutes each day but it’s still wrong the other 1,438 and I wouldn’t go by it. Global warming and COVID are no respecters of borders or individual liberty and people’s actions don’t happen in a vacuum; we do need to act together.