The days of taking what our institutions and their experts say at face value are over. Their behavior during Covid saw to that. We need to go full Regan. Trust but verify. Listen to opposing views, engage in critical thinking, ask ‘who benefits’ be prepared to stand alone.
Well said. Trust but verify is a good rule for life. If someone makes a claim, evaluate it on the merits and respond with intelligence insofar as you disagree or add your own emendations to make it better. Will a sincere cultural resurrection of good-faith Socratic Dialectic take place? I am hopeful.
"If your mother says she loves you, check it out." -- journalistic bromide that needs dusting off and tatto'ing on the inner eyelids of every present-day journo.
In day-to-day interactions "trust but verify" is the way to go. But when it comes to politics and news media "remain cynical". The list of neutral, honest, journalists is pretty small. Good ones get duped all of the time. The sycophants who surround our political figures are lying if their lips are moving.....heck, they were running our country a few months ago.
And a good zeroeth rule: Ask "Does this really matter to me?" If it's no skin off your butt why bother to stress and obsess about it? We have enough on our plates, well, most of us, without getting torqued up about a lot of inside DC baseball.
You are correct, but... most of what's being fed to us about even the most serious matters IS inside DC baseball. The only thing Dems care about is, will publishing this help Trump, while the only thing the GOP cares about is, will publishing this hurt Trump? There are other polarities, and they don't all involve Trump. But almost nobody in high places or with access to a platform is soberly examining the facts and following where they lead. Its all about scoring brownie points.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Keyes says that the quote has not been successfully traced:1
. . . which Kennedy attributed to Edmund Burke and which recently was judged the most popular quotation of modern times (in a poll conducted by editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). Even though it is clear by now that Burke is unlikely to have made this observation, no one has ever been able to determine who did.
Anne, we are given the conduct of our own lives to rule over only (OK, and parents have responsibility for children, and we have to keep our pets from too much mischief). I am not urging Anabaptist secession from the public sphere, as I believe we have a duty to participate in public life, albeit that should be more locally focused than it usually is (you might actually do some good close to home). But if you exhaust yourself over things you cannot change you will end up in despair, which is a grave sin. Have you seen the news about the beautiful Louisiana plantation house that burned to the ground? That's terribly sad, and the woke idiots rejoicing over it are anal orifices of some magnitude. But nothing I can do about that, or about the tornadoes that ripped across large areas of the country yesterday. Very often if only to keep my sanity (and I remind you I suffer from PTSD) I have to follow Vergil's advice to Dante concerning the punishment of certain sinners: Don't concern yourself with them, just look and move on.
Judgments about Good and Evil often surpass me. I am content to let God deal with all that. He knows what He is doing (so rarely true for us) and no one will escape Him.
Back when Donald Regan was White House chief of staff, it always irritated me that we had someone named Donald Regan working for someone named Ronald Reagan.
This column, I think, is real wisdom that can only be gained by living life and being bitterly disappointed when we discover the fallibility and humanity of those around us.
There’s a terrible day when you discover that your father and mother are all too human. I’ve been visiting my parents recently and to see my 80-something father, physically frail, mentally diminished, reduced to whining and pleading where once he was this remote, driven, intellectual and intimidating man whose approval I chased and craved on some level for years—it’s shocking to me still although he’s been this way for some time now.
I remember him so vividly, the way he was decades ago. I sometimes expect that man to walk back into the room, and then I’m shocked all over again.
Can you really blame Jill Biden for looking at her husband and seeing the man he was decades ago?
And yet, you’re right—we have to look and see with clear eyes the truth of mortality in front of us. Our culture does not like to do this. We conceal death as much as we can so we can get on with living our lives, secure in the illusion that life will continue as it has for us.
Until it all comes crashing down one day and, thunderstruck, we are forced to confront the truth about ourselves. I used to laugh at the whole “mid life crisis” thing. I don’t anymore.
When we are young, we are afforded the luxury of having heroes to believe in. Eventually, we learn that their feet are made of clay. At that point we can double down, reject the testimony of our lyin’ eyes, and insist that the emperor is indeed wearing the finest cloth of gold. But then we have to live with ourselves.
Or we accept that the great man was always thus—hopelessly flawed. But that he deserves our respect and love anyway.
This is why I could never buy into the whole “Make America Great Again” slogan. America was never great, not in the way it’s being sold to us. She’s always been human, all too human. But I love her enough to see her, as well as I can, warts and all, having done wonderful and terrible things. I don’t need the illusion of a halcyon past that never was and never will be to understand that it’s still worth building and supporting.
There a huge difference between seeing your parents age and become feeble, and 80 million people being brainwashed so effectively that they would vote for that cadaver. The evil of people who perpetrated the myth of “sharp as a tack Joe” is difficulty to comprehend. It speaks to deranged gullibility on the part of his voters and a contempt for democracy on the part of those who enabled the autopen. People are outraged and disgusted over Trump? oh, boy, look in the mirror. And accept that a massive hoax was played on you and you sensed it, but played along. I can only wonder how our enemies did not do more than snicker at the fools who voted for him, how we weren’t attacked in some horrific way. It is fitting for the democrats to wander in the desert for 100 years.
Joe Biden wasn't Donald Trump so that's why he won the 2020 election. If a turnip was allowed to run as president as a Democrat, he would have won the presidency.
BIden also wasn't Bernie Sanders, the only strong candidate in the Dem field in 2020, but one who would have pulled the party much further left, which is why the party fixed the primaries to give Biden the nomination - thanks to years of Obama's ruthless gutting of the Dem's leadership (Obama, like Trump, valued loyalty over competence, and saw competence as a threat because competent people will disagree with you), the Dem bench had nobody else.
The Republican mid-term landslide elections of 2010 and 2014 decimated the Democrats, leaving them just the typical Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts, California and New York.
Charlie Rosenberg of this site believes that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump in 2020. Sanders was ahead of Trump in the polls. Yet Sanders' self-declaration as a Socialist would have made him easier for Trump to attack than the basemented Joe Biden.
Sanders' past was a gold mine of quotes praising assorted Communist leaders which, taken out of context of course, would have provided the GOP with highly effective attack ads.
And Sanders was hardly a spring chicken either. What's wrong with us that we keep running these fossils and relics? Isn't it time for someone "young" (like maybe my and Rod's age) to move into the White House and congressional leadership?
Of course. Likewise, they positioned Bloomberg to shake up the field just enough to insure Biden got the nomination, and Biden insured high level Wall Street support when he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. Voters be damned, the money flowed in after Joe picked Kamala. Liberals hate it when I call her "Wall Street's darling," but at the time, she was.
Sanders' year was 2016. By 2020, he was better than a dubious field of alternatives, but he was aging and getting spun too. I don't think voters would have cared in large numbers about the socialist label -- everyone knew he was a self-declared socialist, and that sort of name-calling would have fallen on deaf ears. He said things people wanted to hear about doing things people wanted done. Trump attack ads crying "But Sanders is a socialist" would have been money down the drain.
Younger people were more in favor of Sanders. If he had been the candidate in 2016, there's a chance he might have won. But once the primary was rigged against him and then he turned around and supported Clinton, some of his supporters moved on.
Bernie might have had a chance in 2016 but he changed his positions to even more on the left for 2020. Such as supporting restriction on guns and being more in favor of illegal immigration when he was opposed to both in 2016.
I would say he moved right -- or rather into the wilderness of culture war issues. He was always mildly sympathetic to various Palestinian causes and factions over Israel, but he doubled down on it, and his 2020 campaign (as Rod reminded me with suitable links) veered sharply toward more LGBTQWERTY pandering. I refer to those as issues of non-class origin, which is why I consider them to be Bernie moving to the right. I used to know an old communist who asked of Yasser Arafat, "Would you buy a used camel from this man?" Nationalist, opportunistic, but not left. The only really left-wing Palestinian leader was Dr. George Habash, who was both a communicant Orthodox Christian and a Marxist-Leninist. And no, his way didn't succeed either.
I actually disagree with this and think Joe Biden had value as a figurehead, which is undoubtedly why everything was fixed for him to win the primary in 2020.
Here’s the thing. The Democrats’ branding problems are not that new. Most people simply do not like the new, IdPol Democrats (see Clinton, Hillary). They like the Democratic Party they remember, the one that was working class and populist, that looked out for the common man. Joe Biden was an avatar of that earlier era in Democratic politics. I believe that a lot of voters took comfort in that image and took him at his word when he promised to unite the country and move us past the divisions of the Trump era. Even Sanders harks back to much of what voters once liked about the Democrats.
I don’t think that most of the newer generation of Democrats could have managed the same feat, and that includes not just Harris but everyone else who was running too. For better or worse (mostly worse if you’re a Democratic partisan), younger Democratic politicians are all tarred with the toxic combination of progressive and neoliberal excesses of the last thirty years. The party is only really going to start to recover when some Democrat comes along and explicitly rejects the legacy of that era in more or less the same way that Trump rejected the legacy of the Bush-era Republican Party.
Generally true. After Biden stepped aside, there were articles about union industrial workers saying they had seen Biden as a friend, but weren't getting that vibe from Harris (who of course didn't have it). But its worth remembering that the "new" image the Dems cultivated was a reaction to the success of Reagan... the Clintonesque solution was to tone down the populism and come across with "moderate" personalities that also pandered to an elite crowd that appeared to be the wave of the future. After all, the factor jobs had already been shipped to China.
I agree with everything you say, NCMaureen, but you inadvertently diminish what was done here by calling it "a massive hoax." In fact, it was the greatest, longest-lasting, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional fraud ever perpetrated against the American people. There should be hell to pay.
Re: I think, is real wisdom that can only be gained by living life and being bitterly disappointed when we discover the fallibility and humanity of those around us.
Geoff, my default position is to maintain a certain degree of cynicism. That way I am seldom disappointed about things,. but sometimes I can be pleasantly surprised. A motto from an old sign at a place that didn't accept credit cards or checks where I once worked: In God We Trust-- All Others Pay Cash.
Geoff Guth: America was Great, and CAN be great again. We saved Europe, twice in the 20th century (with help, of course). "America, America, God shed His grace of Thee, and crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea." We are the new Jerusalem.
We shouldn't have gotten into World War I at all. Europe came out of it worse than they went into it, and it really wasn't our war, it was J.P. Morgan's war. We won World War II because the USSR tied down the majority of the Wehrmacht, killed a lot of Germans, and took 20 million deaths doing so. (They couldn't have done it without us either, but we didn't "save Europe" or the world.) One of the greatest lies ever told is "Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears..." In the context of world history, the USA doesn't come off half bad, but we've made some progress, we have seldom been "great."
Well, at some level: "All wars are banker's wars." I disagree that we shouldn't have gotten into WW1 because I agree with historian Max Hastings that the Germans had to be checked (twice--first WW, then second WW). Some historians point out it was really like one big war with a 20-year intermission period. I think we were great in those efforts (and others), but now we've been poisoned by a stolen election (2020) after a long slide after Reagan toward military interventionism and domestic overspending, from which we may not recover. SCOTUS is not helping. If we can't get the illegals out, we will not be able to true the vote. Not to mention that we cannot afford to be invaded by that many needy people all at once.
I see no reason whatsoever for thinking that "the Germans had to be checked" in WW1, no more than saying "the Brits had to be checked in WW1." No busininess or vital interests of ours whatsoever were at stake, and we could have gotten along well enough with whatever side emerged as exhaustedly victorious without our assistance.
I refer you to Max Hastings on the necessity of WW1. Now, you can still say "Let England sink, let Europe sink." But we have a special relationship with Britain that is only being shredded now, now that Keir Starmer has decided that it's okay to knife white Brits (including little girls at a party), and there ought to be jail for silent- prayer-sayers, and a two-tier justice system is the best (as long as the whites get the sword), and yeah, just keep mutilating the children and having little girls be gang assaulted (as long as the right criminals do the assaulting) and men rob women of their sports tropies.
I give you 3 minutes of Sir Max Hastings, with a lot of nearby links if you click in which he expands on the topic:
"But we have a special relationship with Britain ..."
That came after WW1. We almost went to war with old Blighty in the course of the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute of 1895-99 (and were certainly willing to go to war) just as France and the UK almost went to war over the Fashoda Incident in 1898. My point"
But we (might have had) a special relationship with (Germany).
Europe wouldn't have sunk, it would merely have been devastated, as it was anyway. But the rise of the Nazis was fueled in large part by England and France insisting on war-broken Germany somehow paying reparations to cover the full cost of the war -- which had been caused by all kinds of tangled ill-considered alliances and rivalries. While the US has clung to its "special relationship" with Britain ever since Churchill pandered to Roosevelt to cement it, its been crumbling at the same time. Even during WW II, General Stilwell found both the Brits and Chiang Kai Shek unwilling to prosecute the war against the Japanese in northern Burma. Chiang was hording all the American supplies flown "over the hump" and all his troops for the later battle against the communists (while Chao En Lai was saying "I would take General Stilwell's orders"), and the Brits were afraid to arm "native" levees for fear these would seek independence from colonial rule. Its amazing we got through WW II without turning our guns on the Brits, what with Churchill pushing for a pointless bloodbath in the Greek islands, and Montgomery pushing the disaster of Operation Market Garden.
Finally, if you want to make a point, please try to use what you have learned from reading any source to explain it yourself. If you are just saying "Read this book, its great," then you don't really understand the subject matter.
We were making a difference in Russia and England even before Pearl Harbor. Well, we helped the allies win WW1, that's not nothing. 20th century was the American century. 21st century is the Chinese century, unless we in USA get our act together. SCOTUS has to get its head screwed on tight if we are to recover from the disasterous Biden presidency.
If all wars are bankers' wars, then we are not "great" getting into any of them. Even if the Germans had won WW I, they would have so exhausted themselves doing so that they wouldn't have posed much of a threat for decades. Of course I also consider, as I would and you wouldn't, that international socialism would have got a better break with an exhausted Germany imploding on its hollow victory, while England and France imploded on their defeat, and the Shop Stewards Councils might have emerged triumphant, while Lenin might have slipped and fallen given even a modest remaining German presence. Since German Jews were very much part of the patriotic war effort, Hitler's theories wouldn't have had the same traction after a victory, however unrewarding.
If you think Reagan was anything but a warmongering interventionist, I must ask what kind of mushrooms you have been consuming. George Bush's terrorists were Ronald Reagan's freedom fighters -- you can't blame it all on Charlie Wilson. Reagan was still bemoaning that we didn't win the Vietnam War.
It is not the constitutional role of the US Supreme Court to "help" any more than it is to make policy. It is the job of the judiciary to check the other two branches when, and only when, they step outside their constitutionally assigned and restrained powers.
Your obsession with stolen elections is pathetic -- not unlike the Democrats who briefly tried to claim that the 2024 election was stolen because "13 million votes don't just disappear." It was more like 8 million when the counting and verifying was completed but yes, 8 million people who voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump (albeit having to hold their nose) might very well sit it out when offered Donald Trump v. Kamala Harris.
America is NOT the New Jerusalem! As a Catholic, surely you know the Church is, not a secular nation. Only harm, both spiritual and moral, comes from identifying any secular nation as the new Jerusalem.
You know you've grown up the day you realize that while you may admire many, you are no longer in awe of anyone.
I never had that sense of near invincibility about my parents which you had about your father. I loved them but was aware of their fallibilities. Every time Bill O'Reilly talks about his father, he reminds me of mine. Everyone talks about The Greatest Generation, but few people talk much about the PTSD which half of them must have carried through life, incited by The Great Depression in their childhoods or early adulthoods, and inflamed by World War II on into the 1950s. O'Reilly's father remained taken advantage of because he was terrified of taking a chance on tossing away a secure job for one which paid much better but brought possible instability with it. My father had that exact psychology, which was lunatic because he was so good at what he did that at seventy, he was approached by a national company to work for them. The father of a kid I knew through Little League had that same insecurity. And weird as it was, our next door neighbor had it, as well. He sputtered along as a mildly successful insurance salesman, something you would not have expected of a man who had fought with The French Resistance.
My mother was sick most of her life.
You're wistful, I'm wistful, few people aren't, and usually, they are psychopaths.
The key to fording life is the understanding that we are sin cursed, corrupted creatures who inhabit a cursed and dying creation, that the life, death, and resurrection of The Lord God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, has made our redemption and rescue from death possible, and that believing in Him is our only and infinitely more than sufficient hope.
I’m in my early thirties, and at this rate, I’ll be casting third party protest votes and packing a sick bag to get me through every single Presidential term the rest of my life. Seriously, how do we go on when the Left is devoted to aggressively gaslighting the public so that they can run a revolting hybrid of Brave New World and 1984, while the Right’s best solution is to latch on to a tinpot dictator because hey, at least he knows how to meme on the libs! God help us, we are so screwed.
I wouldn't be so dramatic or worried. I think 2020 was a crisis year, the crisis was successfully averted, and everything is going to be fine moving forward
Wow after yesterday's bombshell this is quite a follow up. I live in Budapest ( yes we have met) and your comment on avoidance of decision making is spot on. Frustrating, pervasive and prevalent to say the least. Passive obstruction. Hope to grab a coffee on of these days.
Meh. The whole business is nothing but an effective tactic to take our sight off what's happening right now. F*** the past. Talk to me about the future-- that is something we might be able to change.
So ignore the past? Is yesterday the past? Forgive student loans because they are in the past? Going to leave my wife, that wedding was in the past. Interesting concept.
That's one of those literary turns of phrase everyone loves to quote because it sounds so pithy until someone asks "What the Sam Hill does that really even mean anyway?"
It is obviously true that the past impacts the present -- what world we were born into, what options we have to change it, at what cost, whether the changes we are motivated to try are in the long run good or bad... all is determined by the history of everything that came before us. But if that was all he meant, he hardly needed to say anything. The phrase rings like a profound revelation, and it isn't one.
In particular "It's not even past" strikes me as definitely false, and therefore a kind of mock profound hollow turn of phrase. Burning witches at the stake is past, not present. For the USA, establishment of religion is past, not present. Slavery as a universally accepted and legal practice is past, not present. Are there echoes and consequences and residues that continue to this day? Sure -- but its not certain that these will ALWAYS be with us. We could have reduced them a good deal except for some well intentioned wrong turns. So the phrase seems false to me.
Trump Derangement Syndrome! It is the proper term to use against vindictive leftist bigots who cannot acknowledge any Trump success. The term fits when the left media claims Trump and his supporters are racist, misogynist, religious nuts, and right wing extremists. Trump Derangement Syndrome even causes a Speaker of the House to disrespectfully tear up a President’s State of the Union speech on National television. TDS does not apply to persons using reasonable debate and holding mere differences of opinion. TDS applies to those that display pure HATRED!
One side effect of having a population that has trouble doing math and doesn't comprehend how scientific things work is that people are left to trust what they are being told by "experts". Forgive me for beating the same drum over and over, but so many of the numbers and statistics that were being thrown out about Covid from the very beginning were so preposterous that it was plain that they couldn't be true. Yet "Fauci said" was supposed to be our newly revealed gospel or something. Reasonable conclusions from information that was out there was deemed heresy and "heretics" were to be punished. It is a lot harder to fool people who have actually learned things and had to apply them in their life. Once upon a time, not all that long ago, finishing 8th grade gave a person a minimum of functional knowledge to be able to live; now we're lucky if our college graduates do.
My grandparents had eighth grade rural educations. Yes, the famed one-room schoolhouse. They could do math in their heads, especially fractions and area conversions. Read poetry and I dare say knew and lived their Catechism better than some of today's bishops. They were about as functionally self-supporting as circumstances allowed.
To Katja's larger point, there's an interesting 1989 book "Innumeracy", where a math professor points out the social cost of a society incapable of grasping the basics of probability, statistics and plausibility in general.
In short, the public is easily hoodwinked by advertisers, activists and novelty pushers. People would be ashamed to be illiterate, but the number who wear their distain of mathematics as evidence of emotional intelligence, 'deepness' or otherwise being more perfectly human than their presumedly soulless Vulcan-like math-capable neighbors does the Republic no favors.
Many of us have likely seen an eighth grade graduation exam from the early 1900s that most graduate students today (myself included!), wouldn't be able to pass. And schools today are notorious for passing students barely able to read and write.
I've been binge-listening to personal finance stuff recently and one thing that absolutely blows my mind are the number of people who are broke, can't pay for a $1500-$2500 car repair, and then get themselves a new car with a payment of $750/month for 7 years or so because in their mind, it's somehow a wash mathematically in their heads. Over and over and over again.
Sure, that car that needs $1500 in repairs may not last another seven years, but a new vehicle isn't maintenance-free either. AND it seems like a lot of these people weren't doing the routine maintenance on the car in the first place, which is why they end up in a crisis situation to begin with. My car is nearly nine years old. It's paid for, and it's running well. I'm also taking care of it because I know that keeping up on oil changes, tires, brakes, and other routine maintenance is a lot cheaper than having a car payment again. Last year, the car needed a new water pump and new tires, which helped bring the total maintenance cost to $2617. I cannot imagine thinking that $750 a month would somehow be a deal.
These days kids get in trouble for doing math in their heads. You can only pass if you can "show your work," and that hurts a lot of kids and keeps them from advancing in the subject and mastering it.
The problem is that many educated people also believe in credentialism and that people with medical and science degrees are experts who cannot be questioned and can never be wrong. So whether the population is educated or not didn’t really matter, because if you aren’t educated in that specific field you have no right to an opinion. But also folks who were educated in those fields but had different opinions were shunned as well, so fighting the narrative at the time was pretty futile.
I'm pretty well "credentialed" in my field, and I know other things as well. All that, however, is tiny compared to what I don't know, even to those things that I know I don't know. But I mostly know when I should keep my mouth shut (or my fingers quiet), lest I embarrass myself. Others should learn to do (or not to do) likewise.
Re: people are left to trust what they are being told by "experts".
Except they don;t. All sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense and tinfoil hattery flourishes. Trust in this country took a huge hit when I was a young child due to Vietnam and Watergate and it has never recovered.
Re: Once upon a time, not all that long ago, finishing 8th grade gave a person a minimum of functional knowledge to be able to live
Not sure I agree. If we're just talking about living one's personal life we do not need expert advice for that (and often enough those experts disagree with each other), unless you count the auto mechanics, electricians, plumbers and of course doctors to deal with things that surpass our abilities. As for Covid, it was a Great Unknown at first and all sorts of contradictory ideas were being thrown out about it. Still, vastly less nonsense than was bruited around in major epidemics of the more distant past. And there's a very old tendency to overestimate casualties from a disaster before hard numbers can be found. As of this morning they're still counting the dead after the tornadoes in KY and MO, and trying to figure out if the destructive storm that hit parts of Baltimore and its suburbs was or was not a tornado. These things can take time and in meanwhile rumor flourishes. Hence on 9-11 early estimates posited ten thousand dead or more-- and fears about everything from nerve gas to dirty bombs. (And we are still dealing with the 9-11 Truthers)
The early 2020 Diamond Princess's voyage of the damned revealed how the pandemic would play out. That cruise ship was a veritable Petri dish of Covid virus transmission and lethality. Over 3700 passengers and crew, of which 19 percent came down with Covid, with 12 or so fatalities, all over 65 years of age. As many virologists pointed pointed out at the time -- at least those willing to speak in public-- pandemics begin with less transmissibility and more virulence and end with more transmissibility and less virulence. The "science" of this particular pathogen was fairly clear from the get go -- and then duly ignored. What followed in many states were draconian lockdowns and the criminal act of closing schools when there was no reason to do so.
We knew from there start that we were dealing with an airborne upper-respiratory virus. Who's talking about bubonic plague or smallpox? You're being intentionally dense.
Air borne respiratory virus have killed millions.You are stating disinformation about the Pandemic ion its earliest days, and looking for scapegoats because the world did not go as you would have had it go. I have no patience at the moment for that sort of darkness and will not continue this thread.
So you're OK with school closures that went on for far too long, closures that affected kids in the most vulnerable communities, because the "science" wasn't clear enough? Got it.
The old McCuffey’s Eclectic Readers had an essay from Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England in the last volume, level or grade 7, I think. I have heard that many first year Law students these days struggle with it. Of course modern law professors dismiss Blackstone’s (in my mind correct) view that the Ten Commandments were the basis for the common law.
I remember being told that Holmes County Ohio had one of the highest literacy rates in the whole state. Many residents of Holmes County are Amish and only remain in school until 8th Grade.
When I taught at James Madison University (1981-82) the only bookstore in Harrisonburg VA was owned and operated by Mennonites. (Eastern Mennonite College was across the street from my residence.) I went there to order a book that had recently been reviewed in the Wash. Post, titled The Art of Biblical Criticism. I forget the author’s name. I had cut the review out of the Post to make sure they would order the correct book. They giggled like crazy when I showed them the review because its title was “The Bible Tells me so.” They apparently did not bath often, given the way the store smelled.
Some Mennonites (like the ones near Tuscaloosa AL) stop education at the 7th or 8th grade.
But others not. There was an economics professor at East Carolina who was from a Mennonite group that stopped at 7th grade, but he had convinced his father it would not make him prideful. Which in his case was definitely true.
A record for me on a single comment, I think, but I don't think Rod in general. However, anything over 50 here is quite good. :) (Not that I'm counting or anything! 😂) A lot of it was the luck of the timing... Comments within the first 100 posted always have a better chance of doing well, and Rod posted at an odd time, and I woke up in the middle of the night because I was so exhausted I fell asleep in a chair downstairs at about 8pm. It wasn't terribly comfortable, and I woke up sometime after 2, knowing I would hurt even more if I didn't get some sleep in bed. I dragged myself to bed, and just happened to check over here, because, if it's the middle of the night and if you're barely awake enough to make it to bed, the *logical* thing to do is to check if Rod has posted something new, right?
Reliance on experts is way out of hand -- but we have to learn to do math and be reasonably informed about facts on the table if we want to break free. I remember basic history curriculum actually proclaiming 'government by experts' as one of the great contributions of the over-hyped Progressive Era. Experts have their place -- my own senses do not tell me how much mercury is in my drinking water, nor what level, if any, is safe for me. But experts needs to explain their findings in terms the average citizen (or juror) can understand and evaluate. We should never trust someone who says "I'm an expert, take my word for it, you wouldn't understand." Experts need to live up to the Albert Einstein rule: If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
Agreed. My parents generation often only went to eighth grade and then it was off to work. Yet almost all of them had successful careers in something, albeit labor oriented.
You are too kind Rod. This was more evil than motivated reasoning. Repeat after me: DEMOCRATS LIE.
Yeah, I used to think they were just mistaken too, but I’ve watched them for decades. And if 2020 doesn’t tell you that they will push any number of big lies to keep power, including running a rigged fraudulent election, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Charles Krauthammer once wrote that Republicans think Democrats are stupid while Democrats think Republicans are evil. He was partly wrong. Most Republicans think Democrats are not only stupid but evil as well. Democrats are Satan's contribution to American politics.
The Democrats certainly are not the party of Roosevelt and Truman. However, had they lived long enough, I think Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey would have evolved into your typical mentally ill leftist.
I think both Kennedy and Humphrey would have evolved on questions like abortion. I think Humphrey already had evolved but he died in 1977 when the issue just began. You are right on Johnson. He was morally corrupt and would have backed abortion had he lived long enough. I think if Johnson had lived long enough, his politics would have been the same as Jack Brooks and Jim Wright.
Dem lies kill -- Ukraine war, CV vax, CV lockdowns (useless), transgenderism, an infant emerging from its mother's body is still "a fetus," and not a person.
So do GOP lies -- they just do it more slowly. "Free trade," globalist expansionism, spreading "democracy" via war, exporting multiculturalism and other anti-traditional claptrap, economically steamrolling smaller countries who won't "get with the program," turning a blind eye to ecological ravage related to the above, etc., etc.
“It’s all too human. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five cases known to me in which this kind of motivated reasoning carried the day in various crises — personal and institutional — with seriously bad results. We all are susceptible to this. All of us.”
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”. The quote is from Eliot but he was drawing on a major theme in ancient Greek mythology and literature: hubris, to which all human beings are tragically prone, leads to loss of touch with reality - atē - which is followed, inevitably, by nemesis (there wasn’t much room for mercy in the ancient Greek view of things).
I honestly just don’t care if he was half way demented. I’d still rather have a half demented Biden than the complete and total grift we’re getting from Trump. The scale of the corruption and incompetence is just not even close. I wish he’d have had the self awareness to only stay in office for one term, and come to terms with that in 2022 as opposed to 2024, but that’s not the timeline we got unfortunately.
On the other hand, I also believe that Trump is going to leave office in a similar manner to George W Bush, despised and recognized for his failures with an approval rating around 28-29%. That sets us up for a Mayor Pete, Wes Moore, Chris Murphy style presidency. That’s an outcome I can live with.
Yeah, hundreds of billions of Biden-initiated grift and bribery is what we need to keep us afloat. We need 10 million illiterate illegals to take our places in rental housing, hospital beds and the welfare rolls. Ukraine war is great--emptied our Treasury and filled up the morgues of Europe. For what? And all those murdered young women! Wonderful. Did we really need a person like nurse Laken Riley to graduate and serve the public anyway? (Well, maybe her mother needed her.) And all those sexually mutilated children! So much grist for the mentally-tormented-for-life mill. I sleep better knowing Hunter Biden will never have to work a day in his life, nor his progeny because he got his cut from "the big guy".
DOGE has exceeded my wildest expectations for cutting our bureaucracy. I’m grateful taxpayers aren’t on the hook for Pride parades in Chile anymore (or anywhere else).
I’m glad that the grift of both Dem and Rep admins is now being exposed.
“Currently, the $TRUMP coin is trading at approximately $12.87, with a circulating supply of 200 million tokens, resulting in a market capitalization of about $2.5 billion. The total supply is capped at 1 billion tokens, with 800 million held by Trump-affiliated entities.”
He’s made 2.5 BILLION off of the office of the presidency. This isn’t “Oh Hunter got this job because of who his daddy is” type shit, this is Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Bashar Al-Assad level corruption. He is everything that the right accuses Biden or the Clinton Foundation of being.
You completely ignored the comment and went off in a new direction that is largely irrelevant. Here are few of Joe's accomplishments. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was worse than botched, it was tragic. Thirteen young Americans killed with many more injured. Many other Afghans who worked with us were abandoned. Over seven billion in military equipment was left behind for the Taliban to use or to sell on the black market. Profligate government spending into a healthy economy that set off inflation levels not seen in 40 years. A Secretary of Defense that went AWOL, literally, with no accountability. A Secretary of Transportation who did nothing with the shambles of our air traffic control system. Appointments of bizarre men who have mental illnesses into positions of authority. Dithering on Israel after October 7th. Forcing a Ukrainian official who was about to investigate Burisma out of his job by threatening to withhold US aid, and then bragging about it on camera. Holding classified documents in cardboard boxes in a garage near the door. Lying about influence peddling by family members, who had no business experience or interests other than influence peddling. Having a fawning corrupt media perpetuating the lies about his health, well being and dignity. These are just a few and just off the top of my head. Biden was a disaster. He makes Trump look like a genius.
Pretty good list. I'd add that in his one successful speech, the speech in the fiery cavern before the 2022 mid-terms, he declared forty-five percent of the country reprobates worthy of expulsion into the outer darkness.
We’ll just never agree on this, which is ok! Joe Biden was a fine president, the IRA, CHIPS act, and the infrastructure bill were fantastic pieces of legislation that will continue to make America a better place for decades to come. Wasn’t perfect obviously, Afghanistan wasn’t ideal and he should’ve just been a one term president, but he did ok.
Trump is an incompetent moron who’s engaging in the most corruption we’ve ever seen from an American politician bar none, and it’s not even close. That’s what the evidence shows. The trade war was a disaster and was just an excuse for him and his friends to engage in a pump and dump scheme. Not to mention the human rights abuses in sending people to El Salvador. It’s monstrous.
Biden started out well initially but as his abilities declined so did his performance. (No, I don't buy the claim that he was already dumber than a head of broccoli when he took office).
You just give the same tired assertions without any facts. I quoted for you nearly a dozen factual failures and disaster and all you have come back with is that Trump is a moron and corrupt.
The assertions being stated here about Biden are also "tired assertions" without a shred of actual medical evidence.
Meanwhile Biden successfully campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and acquitted himself well in debates against Trump. The beginning of his administration was rather energetic, with a number of major bills passed, You may think that legislation was bad and wrong, but getting such stuff accomplished is not a thing a leader utterly lost in dementia could accomplish.
See my comment here about Afghanistan. Donald Trump, and really the American people who were sick of us being in Afghanistan (which we should have left years ago), are responsible for that fiasco. Given the imperative of getting the hell out of that mess there was no other way it would end except in a huge mess.
Oh and let's not forget the disaster in East Palestine Ohio, that never was addressed. And then there is the disaster in Western North Carolina, that Biden left unsolved. The more I think about these things the more contemptible I realize Biden was. By far he was the worst President of my lifetime. I was born under Eisenhower...
A train derailed with toxic chemicals. A bad accident. How is the President of the United States responsible for that?
The disaster in North Carolina was due to a (by then weakened) hurricane-- which hit us in St Pete first causing huge storm surge and vast flooding, along with a number of deaths. If presidents are responsible for hurricanes then can we also hold Trump responsible for the tornadoes that ripped across the country Friday?
The worst president of my lifetime remains George W Bush. The consequences of his flubs and follies have left us with far more long term damage than anything that happened 2021-2025. I reserve judgment on Trump until he is out of office.
What a shallow attempt to deflect my comment. He didn't cause the accident, as is obvious, but his heartless lack of response was painful. He waited a year before he even visited.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was negotiated by Donald Trump. Biden tried to extend the timetable, but the Taliban insisted on the term agreed to. It was going to be a mess no matter who was in office. Conversely, Trump approved and funded Operation Warp Speed, but by the time the vaccine was ready to roll out on a mass scale, Biden was in office. I did know some Dems who said in the fall of 2020 "I'm not going to take a vaccine when Trump says to." But when Biden rolled it out, a lot of Trump loyalists did the reverse.
More... Biden pledged billions for student load debt relief and did so even after the Supreme Court ruled against its legality. Aside from the fact that is was never obvious why the debt accrued by an unemployable gender studies major was more sacrosanct and more deserving of government relief than say the debt incurred by a hard-working young tradesman buying tools and a truck, it was just the most egregious, unconstitutional and deliberate voting-buying scheme ever perpetrated on the American people.
And, Ketanji Brown Jackson a woman who "could not" define what a woman is because she was not a biologist, became a Supreme Court Justice because of her skin color. And, who knows how many illegal aliens (10 million, 15 million ?) were given a free pass into the country and resettled selectively for maximal Democrat advantage. The corruption was almost unfathomable under Biden.
A man with an external locus of identity is pointless to argue with. In other words, you don't argue right of way with the sheep, you have to argue with the shepherd.
This is like saying “You can’t argue with a Catholic, they all think the same thing”. No, identity, like most things, is a spectrum. Psychology is usually not a concrete set of constructs that you can just say “You are x” like in medicine or mathematics. That’s not at all how this works.
Most people are around 50/50 when it comes to internal vs external locus of control, identity, etc. No one is 100% one thing or the other. You’re always defined by your environment to some extent, whether you want to be or not.
Of course people are affected by their environment, but some people's need for belonging and external validation is a lot stronger than others. They'll be looking for someone to give them a framework to understand the world, and when confronted with an event will look to a thought leader, a peer group, a philosophical construct, or even a parent or spouse, to interpret the event.
Really? Hugo Chavez? I'd take Trump any day over Hugo Chavez; if Trump starts nationalizing vast swathes of the US economy, then yeah, I'll accept the comparison.
As I review all these failures, it is as if we did not have a president...while Biden was in office. The sheer gravity the failures is astonishing. And, yet, people still defend Biden, which is equally astonishing. What does it take for Democrat to admit to their failures? How much worse could a president be and still they will not give one inch? They are in a cultish mind set and as such they either pretend to believe what they say, or they really believe what they say. In the end it really does not matter...
Oh gosh, and I completely forgot the botched drone attack that Biden authorized in the days after Abbey Gate that murdered ten innocent Afghan civilians including seven children. The list is agonizing. I need to collect all of them in a list...so I never forget them and when someone tries to tell me that Biden was fine president, I have it close at hand. No more gaslighting about Biden.
This isn’t what you care about. You like Trump because you like Trump, for whatever reason that may be. It could’ve been JFK or FDR and you’d still be complaining. You aren’t holding them to the same standards.
Who said I like Trump? I just recounted all the abysmal failures of Biden. Telling me I like Trump is all you can say? You make the case for me. You just stand up for a Democrat based on nothing but how it makes you feel.
I liked the IRA because of the mental health provisions in the bill. It gave grants to rural communities for social workers to provide crisis intervention services. So instead of having a system in which police officers are making the call about whether to jail someone, take them to the hospital, or call their mother during a mental health crisis, social workers now make that call.
This a service that the government provides where I live now (Broward county, FL) but was not available in the smaller community I’m from (Glynn county, GA). Nowadays though, thanks to the IRA, there’s crisis intervention in my hometown! That’s huge for people that live there. Instead of jailing people for not taking their meds that day or having a crisis, now a social worker assesses the situation and makes a clinical decision. Now little Jonny or Tyrone with a bipolar diagnosis doesn’t have a criminal record just for being crazy. That’s why I supported the Biden administration.
Trump, on the other hand, is gutting similar services (gutting SAMHSA) and giving their resources back to the criminal justice system. This is idiotic, counterproductive, and will cost taxpayers more in the long run. It’s purely ideological nonsense that believes you can shame PTSD or Bi-Polar out of people. That’s not how that works. This is why I liked Biden and despise Trump.
If Obama or Biden had done this you’d be having a stroke. It’s just foreign countries pumping up the price of his cryptocurrency in order to curry favor. I hate that I even have to say this, but it is wrong for the President to grift 2.5 billion in cryptocurrency from foreign governments.
Er, the Afghanistan disaster was Trump's work. He's the one who gave away the store to the Taliban. Though to be fair to him, it was time and past time to get out of there, and once we did things were obviously going to go to hell in a handcart.
Bullshit. Trump set up the treaty, but did not make the Taliban break it. And when they broke it, Biden was not obliged to keep it. He was obliged to do what it took to make sure our people got out safely and the enemy did not get our crap. He FAILED. HE FAILED.
Quit the cope. He was in charge (but not really), and he failed. Deal with it, Jon.
The Taliban were not behind the suicide bombing. And if our nation cannot accept (while mourning of course) 13 deaths in our military we have become the flakiest of snowflakes. 450 Union soldiers died at First Bull Run, a battle with :green" troops which should never have been fought. Yes, the pundits howled like banshees over the defeat. Should Lincoln have resigned for the failure?
ACCEPT?!? Why should we "accept" them, during a withdrawal at that? The taliban broke the treaty and Biden sat on his useless thumbs. That bombing took place and you believe we should just "accept" it. Yet you are here trying to saddle Trump with all this. What is the matter with you? The Ciil War comparison is an entirely different conversation. Lincoln and his generals did manage to win the war, decisively. Biden could not manage a withdrawal. Apples and hand grenades. You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just running your mouth/keyboard.
Biden sucks. He sucked at the start and sucked so bad at the end, his own party coupled him out o there.
The Taliban didn't break the treaty. They refused to renegotiate the generous terms Trump had agreed to. Biden could of course have reneged on the treaty, but then we would have been at war with limited forces and our backs to the wall, because all that was left was a bit of Kabul.
So you land troops back and start killing until the job is done. The Taliban had given us all the right to o so.. It could be done. It should have been done. But Biden was a feeble incompetent coward. Stop making excuses for it
And they did break the treaty. The treaty did not allow them to do what they did. And I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Its clear that your experience is not in logistics, and you have given no thought to what it would have taken to land troops, or what casualties we would have taken. There was no good option -- GW Bush blew all the good options in the first six months after we went in. Once you withdraw, per the treaty signed almost a year before Trump left office, you not only have to ramp up troop strength and send back equipment, you have to retake ground ceded in the early stages of the treaty.
I'm no Trump fan, but this is quite wrongheaded. Biden was a puppet surrounded by ideologues. Trump may be a knucklehead but he's no ideologue, nor are those in his support team. Ideologues, right or left, tend to do far more damage than knuckleheads.
Of good grief, we had a goody two shoes in the Oval Office when Carter was president. Not a raging success. I don't give a flying fig about what people are doing in their personal life (you will never find me emoting over Trump's purely personal sins).
Your tidbit about Obama is nothing but malicious gossip-- AKA slander, You should go to confession for repeating it.
When there's that much smoke, there's usually some fire. I do not, however, believe Michelle Obama is really a man. But I do believe Obama probably experimented sexually in his youth. Something weird about how his cook, who was an expert swimmer, recently mysteriously drown in a pond in back of Obama's house, even though the pond was shallow. What did that guy know? More bodies on the Clinton body count I suppose.
Aside: I can't seem to get back to your response to my comment that CV was a hoax. It was a hoax in the following respect: Fauci created it, illegally, with help from Wuhan. Then he exxagerated its toxicity. And he prevented effective treatments from being administered (after all, the "big payload" was the toxic vax--if the CV didn't get you, the vax would, in time). What for? Well, best I can tell is Fauci felt the best way to prepare for a possible global pandemic was to cause one.
If you had CV 3 times, you probably got the vax, which damages the immune system (apparently, forever). I got CV as well, in June 2024 (Omnicron) and of course I knew from day 1 CV was a bioweapon and the vax was a bioweapon because (wait for it), I read Zero Hedge, which called it from Day 1 because they had access to a top scientist named Yeardon (something like that), who was Pfizer's former top scientist, and who said, from day 1 "The vax is lethal." And then there' Dr. Atlas, who said that the virus was a bioweapon and the vax is a bioweapon. It (my CV infection) felt "artificially awful" to me. That's how gain-of-function works. A little of this, a little of that, a little snippet of the AIDs virus coat in it, a little gasoline taste in the mouth gene splicing in, etc. Weirdest illness I have ever known. Fauci has committed crimes against humanity (with help). I call for Nuremberg II, prepare the gallows for those who murdered millions (probably eventually billions if we count out 20 years, including the vax deaths and disabilities). And he got away with it... so far. God says "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." May Fauci go to confession, and may God save his soul. He tortured beagles for God's sake!! Monster! He helped disrupt the 2020 election with his "shenanigans."
As someone who has been slandered by utterly false gossip (including a gay rumor in high school about me and my best friend) I don't buy the smoke-fire logic.
Okay, let's say he's not gay--he's "gay" adjacent. He "evolved" on gay marriage. Campaigning, marriage is between one man and one women. After election, not so much. How did his cook die? Very suspicious. Clinton hit job I assume. Obama helped steal the 2020 election, according to Biden's pre-2020-election "blurt out" on live TV that he and Obama were running a huge voter fraud operation. He caused massive damage by installing dementia Joe. And he does not care, because in his heart of heart, he hates regular people, in my opinion. That's what the Left does--hate of "normies."
My family used to tease me that me and my best childhood friend were lesbians. It happens to everyone at some point. Shrug.
Michelle Goldberg is a white-hating liberal. I've read some of her columns. If she could put to death all white Republicans, she would. She's a Jewish Whoopi Goldberg except she can form sentences and paragraphs which Whoopi can not.
Michelle Goldberg is virtue-signaling in her own way. If Joe Biden had stayed on the 2024 ballot and had won election over Donald Trump, you wouldn't be hearing any of this leftist moaning over Senile Joe. If Biden was in office right now, today, these same left-wing writers and journalists would be standing up for Biden and assuring the public that he was of sound mind and that the Republicans were evil for mentioning Biden's mental state.
I think we need a grown-up healthy skepticism of our "institutions", of which there are many, whilst avoiding kneejerk distrust. I think we should avoid hysteria, alarmism and hyperbole too, as boring as that sounds.
I might suggest that what you rightly describe as motivated reasoning is nevertheless not an equilateral equation. That is, we are being asked to evaluate Trump -- his actions and policies -- based on the picture that the very press who lied about Biden's acuity, BLM's "mostly peaceful demonstrations", COVID-19 masking, origin, and "science", transgender policies, economic news ... basically an entire untruthful narrative for the past decade.
Most of what we know of Trump -- his actions and policies -- still comes from the very sources that we know have lied about everything else. You even pointed out the Gell-Mann (sorry. I don't remember the spelling) Effect. We read something that we know about and realize that the story is wrong, then turn right around and read the story on a topic we're less familiar with and assume they got it right.
And then we look at the stories that tell us that Trump is doing the right thing... and THOSE we say are biased, right wing sources.
"They didn’t see it because they had a powerful, unconscious bias against seeing it."
Or consider an alternative. They did it because they crave power, they knew from 2019 that Biden would be the perfect front for their use of that power, and they tried to lie to us until, even with all their media protection, that lie could not stand even a minimal exposure to daylight.
Think of the quote from Orwell. Perhaps this is what they wanted:
'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'
Re the Dem-Mediacrats, I don't call them the Party of Corruption and Lies for nothing. They speak the language of lies. It's the only language they know. I'm far from an uncritical fan of Trump but there is zero moral equivalence between him and his enemies on the other side.
I think to avoid going with the flow and falling into the intellectual and psychological traps that Rod describes, two things are necessary; a) that your intellectual anchors be grounded not in persons, parties, or ideologies but rather in moral principles; and b) that your moral principles be grounded in Truth.
That's not gonna guarantee you'll never make a mistake or get something wrong. But it makes that less likely and it does guarantee that you'll have the moral integrity to recognize mistakes, own up to them, and learn from them.
The hard fact is that your average person on the street doesn't measure up to either of the two above standards, not because they're bad but because they're human. This is why we've seen such wild swings in voting patterns over the last 25 years...and why those swings will likely continue. People tend to be manipulable...and they tend to demand painless answers to painful questions.
Anyway, Rod uses the example of the Church scandals and it is apt in some ways. However, the fact is that many Catholics never shrank from the reality. In fact, if you were a reader of conservative Catholic publications like The Wanderer in the 1990's, you weren't even shocked by the reality. You knew about it far before 2002.
Finally, Rod's mention of Mark Shea. Blast from the past. I'd totally (and mercifully) forgotten about him. I engaged in a couple on-line debates with Mark, who ended up banning me from his blog, and I honestly came away thinking Mark had problems extending beyond his ideas on politics or religion. I hope he's gotten some help for them.
I'd forgotten about Shea as well. Some of his very early writing wasn't bad, but then he got the idea that he was some kind of Old Testament prophet figure who alone saw things as they truly were and had to expose 'error' (anything differing from his own views) with the contempt it deserved.
I was zotted from Free Republic in 2005 for criticizing Bush's wars in the Middle-East. It feels faintly rewarding that I earned such a distinction now that almost all Republicans not named Bush or Cheney agree that Bush's follies in the Middle-East were great failures.
He used to be pretty good, even in his exasperating "JP2 Secret Plan" mode, but at some point, not sure when, he just became insufferably shrill, and turned his mind off. He started shrieking his usual slogans instead of thinking. I quit reading him even before Francis became pope, but every now and then, Catholic friends would send me links, saying, "Can you believe what's happened to Mark Shea?" Not long ago somebody sent me a link in which he called me a fascist, etc. I laughed at first, but then seriously wondered if the poor guy had gone mental.
Yesterday I read where a group of university professors are leaving the country because, they say, it is becoming "fascist" under Trump. And they are pains to inform us that they know "fascism" because they are professors and have studied it.
There's a serious case of "mental" going around. And there's no cure. My own term for it is rabies of the soul.
Yup, and it wasn't just The Wanderer though that may have been the most prominent of the Catholic conservative publications.
The point is, for anyone paying attention there was enough information out there to well understand that the Catholic Church had a gay-priest problem, that some Bishops were corrupt and only too willing to engage in cover-ups, and that instances of sexual abuse had taken place.
I mean, OK, you may not have realized the dimensions of the issue but you knew enough...and were already disgusted enough...that you certainly weren't shocked when the entire bowl of shinola hit the fan.
All this said, it is also true that a goodly number of Catholics either chose not to know or were too hopelessly naive to process the evidence or simply didn't care. Personally, I was never a member of any of those groups...and still am not.
I gave up my subscription to The Wanderer, with some regret, after subscribing to it for over 40 years, simply because of advancing age, and the fact that no story in it in recent decades (or very few) was "news to me." But that in itself is not a comment in disparagement of The Wanderer, but on the many different means of obtaining information today. And the subscription was by no means cheap (although I gave them as a parting gift the equivalent of a year's subscription's price)
The days of taking what our institutions and their experts say at face value are over. Their behavior during Covid saw to that. We need to go full Regan. Trust but verify. Listen to opposing views, engage in critical thinking, ask ‘who benefits’ be prepared to stand alone.
To heck with Reagan. I'm full Rogan! ;)
To heck with Reagan and Rogan. I'm full Rogaine!
Well said. Trust but verify is a good rule for life. If someone makes a claim, evaluate it on the merits and respond with intelligence insofar as you disagree or add your own emendations to make it better. Will a sincere cultural resurrection of good-faith Socratic Dialectic take place? I am hopeful.
"If your mother says she loves you, check it out." -- journalistic bromide that needs dusting off and tatto'ing on the inner eyelids of every present-day journo.
Or , as B.B. King used to sing, "Only my mama love me, and she might be jivin too."
I was just going to say... but you already did. :)
In day-to-day interactions "trust but verify" is the way to go. But when it comes to politics and news media "remain cynical". The list of neutral, honest, journalists is pretty small. Good ones get duped all of the time. The sycophants who surround our political figures are lying if their lips are moving.....heck, they were running our country a few months ago.
And a good zeroeth rule: Ask "Does this really matter to me?" If it's no skin off your butt why bother to stress and obsess about it? We have enough on our plates, well, most of us, without getting torqued up about a lot of inside DC baseball.
Jon, I promised myself to give you a pass more often than not, but a senile drooler with access to the nuclear football is "inside DC baseball"? OK.
You are correct, but... most of what's being fed to us about even the most serious matters IS inside DC baseball. The only thing Dems care about is, will publishing this help Trump, while the only thing the GOP cares about is, will publishing this hurt Trump? There are other polarities, and they don't all involve Trump. But almost nobody in high places or with access to a platform is soberly examining the facts and following where they lead. Its all about scoring brownie points.
Dear Jon:
famous one with an incorrect attribution:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Keyes says that the quote has not been successfully traced:1
. . . which Kennedy attributed to Edmund Burke and which recently was judged the most popular quotation of modern times (in a poll conducted by editors of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). Even though it is clear by now that Burke is unlikely to have made this observation, no one has ever been able to determine who did.
reference: quoteinvestigator.com
Anne, we are given the conduct of our own lives to rule over only (OK, and parents have responsibility for children, and we have to keep our pets from too much mischief). I am not urging Anabaptist secession from the public sphere, as I believe we have a duty to participate in public life, albeit that should be more locally focused than it usually is (you might actually do some good close to home). But if you exhaust yourself over things you cannot change you will end up in despair, which is a grave sin. Have you seen the news about the beautiful Louisiana plantation house that burned to the ground? That's terribly sad, and the woke idiots rejoicing over it are anal orifices of some magnitude. But nothing I can do about that, or about the tornadoes that ripped across large areas of the country yesterday. Very often if only to keep my sanity (and I remind you I suffer from PTSD) I have to follow Vergil's advice to Dante concerning the punishment of certain sinners: Don't concern yourself with them, just look and move on.
Judgments about Good and Evil often surpass me. I am content to let God deal with all that. He knows what He is doing (so rarely true for us) and no one will escape Him.
Back when Donald Regan was White House chief of staff, it always irritated me that we had someone named Donald Regan working for someone named Ronald Reagan.
Has there ever been a time when "trust but verify" was not the only sensible approach to just about any account of anything?
This column, I think, is real wisdom that can only be gained by living life and being bitterly disappointed when we discover the fallibility and humanity of those around us.
There’s a terrible day when you discover that your father and mother are all too human. I’ve been visiting my parents recently and to see my 80-something father, physically frail, mentally diminished, reduced to whining and pleading where once he was this remote, driven, intellectual and intimidating man whose approval I chased and craved on some level for years—it’s shocking to me still although he’s been this way for some time now.
I remember him so vividly, the way he was decades ago. I sometimes expect that man to walk back into the room, and then I’m shocked all over again.
Can you really blame Jill Biden for looking at her husband and seeing the man he was decades ago?
And yet, you’re right—we have to look and see with clear eyes the truth of mortality in front of us. Our culture does not like to do this. We conceal death as much as we can so we can get on with living our lives, secure in the illusion that life will continue as it has for us.
Until it all comes crashing down one day and, thunderstruck, we are forced to confront the truth about ourselves. I used to laugh at the whole “mid life crisis” thing. I don’t anymore.
When we are young, we are afforded the luxury of having heroes to believe in. Eventually, we learn that their feet are made of clay. At that point we can double down, reject the testimony of our lyin’ eyes, and insist that the emperor is indeed wearing the finest cloth of gold. But then we have to live with ourselves.
Or we accept that the great man was always thus—hopelessly flawed. But that he deserves our respect and love anyway.
This is why I could never buy into the whole “Make America Great Again” slogan. America was never great, not in the way it’s being sold to us. She’s always been human, all too human. But I love her enough to see her, as well as I can, warts and all, having done wonderful and terrible things. I don’t need the illusion of a halcyon past that never was and never will be to understand that it’s still worth building and supporting.
There a huge difference between seeing your parents age and become feeble, and 80 million people being brainwashed so effectively that they would vote for that cadaver. The evil of people who perpetrated the myth of “sharp as a tack Joe” is difficulty to comprehend. It speaks to deranged gullibility on the part of his voters and a contempt for democracy on the part of those who enabled the autopen. People are outraged and disgusted over Trump? oh, boy, look in the mirror. And accept that a massive hoax was played on you and you sensed it, but played along. I can only wonder how our enemies did not do more than snicker at the fools who voted for him, how we weren’t attacked in some horrific way. It is fitting for the democrats to wander in the desert for 100 years.
Joe Biden wasn't Donald Trump so that's why he won the 2020 election. If a turnip was allowed to run as president as a Democrat, he would have won the presidency.
No, but she would have made somewhat of a contest of it, at least. Ask me how I know coff coff KAMELA HARRIS
Don't insult turnips by comparing them to Kamala Harris.
"if" is doing work here.
BIden also wasn't Bernie Sanders, the only strong candidate in the Dem field in 2020, but one who would have pulled the party much further left, which is why the party fixed the primaries to give Biden the nomination - thanks to years of Obama's ruthless gutting of the Dem's leadership (Obama, like Trump, valued loyalty over competence, and saw competence as a threat because competent people will disagree with you), the Dem bench had nobody else.
The Republican mid-term landslide elections of 2010 and 2014 decimated the Democrats, leaving them just the typical Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts, California and New York.
Charlie Rosenberg of this site believes that Bernie Sanders would have beaten Donald Trump in 2020. Sanders was ahead of Trump in the polls. Yet Sanders' self-declaration as a Socialist would have made him easier for Trump to attack than the basemented Joe Biden.
Sanders' past was a gold mine of quotes praising assorted Communist leaders which, taken out of context of course, would have provided the GOP with highly effective attack ads.
And Sanders was hardly a spring chicken either. What's wrong with us that we keep running these fossils and relics? Isn't it time for someone "young" (like maybe my and Rod's age) to move into the White House and congressional leadership?
Just honeymooning in the USSR would have been a stiletto to Bernie's throat. Like a Republican honeymooning in Pinochet's Chile or Franco's Spain.
I have a suspicion that the possibility of a Bernie victory is what got The Party machine to move on him. Think donors.
Of course. Likewise, they positioned Bloomberg to shake up the field just enough to insure Biden got the nomination, and Biden insured high level Wall Street support when he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate. Voters be damned, the money flowed in after Joe picked Kamala. Liberals hate it when I call her "Wall Street's darling," but at the time, she was.
Sanders' year was 2016. By 2020, he was better than a dubious field of alternatives, but he was aging and getting spun too. I don't think voters would have cared in large numbers about the socialist label -- everyone knew he was a self-declared socialist, and that sort of name-calling would have fallen on deaf ears. He said things people wanted to hear about doing things people wanted done. Trump attack ads crying "But Sanders is a socialist" would have been money down the drain.
Younger people were more in favor of Sanders. If he had been the candidate in 2016, there's a chance he might have won. But once the primary was rigged against him and then he turned around and supported Clinton, some of his supporters moved on.
Bernie might have had a chance in 2016 but he changed his positions to even more on the left for 2020. Such as supporting restriction on guns and being more in favor of illegal immigration when he was opposed to both in 2016.
I would say he moved right -- or rather into the wilderness of culture war issues. He was always mildly sympathetic to various Palestinian causes and factions over Israel, but he doubled down on it, and his 2020 campaign (as Rod reminded me with suitable links) veered sharply toward more LGBTQWERTY pandering. I refer to those as issues of non-class origin, which is why I consider them to be Bernie moving to the right. I used to know an old communist who asked of Yasser Arafat, "Would you buy a used camel from this man?" Nationalist, opportunistic, but not left. The only really left-wing Palestinian leader was Dr. George Habash, who was both a communicant Orthodox Christian and a Marxist-Leninist. And no, his way didn't succeed either.
I actually disagree with this and think Joe Biden had value as a figurehead, which is undoubtedly why everything was fixed for him to win the primary in 2020.
Here’s the thing. The Democrats’ branding problems are not that new. Most people simply do not like the new, IdPol Democrats (see Clinton, Hillary). They like the Democratic Party they remember, the one that was working class and populist, that looked out for the common man. Joe Biden was an avatar of that earlier era in Democratic politics. I believe that a lot of voters took comfort in that image and took him at his word when he promised to unite the country and move us past the divisions of the Trump era. Even Sanders harks back to much of what voters once liked about the Democrats.
I don’t think that most of the newer generation of Democrats could have managed the same feat, and that includes not just Harris but everyone else who was running too. For better or worse (mostly worse if you’re a Democratic partisan), younger Democratic politicians are all tarred with the toxic combination of progressive and neoliberal excesses of the last thirty years. The party is only really going to start to recover when some Democrat comes along and explicitly rejects the legacy of that era in more or less the same way that Trump rejected the legacy of the Bush-era Republican Party.
Generally true. After Biden stepped aside, there were articles about union industrial workers saying they had seen Biden as a friend, but weren't getting that vibe from Harris (who of course didn't have it). But its worth remembering that the "new" image the Dems cultivated was a reaction to the success of Reagan... the Clintonesque solution was to tone down the populism and come across with "moderate" personalities that also pandered to an elite crowd that appeared to be the wave of the future. After all, the factor jobs had already been shipped to China.
Likewise if the GOP had run a turnip against Clinton or Harris, the turnip would have won the presidency.
Just imagine a turnip negotiating with Putin.
Imagine Putin negotiating with a turnip.
It always clues me in when they use the phrase "our Democracy." Which means that it's theirs but not ours.
I agree with everything you say, NCMaureen, but you inadvertently diminish what was done here by calling it "a massive hoax." In fact, it was the greatest, longest-lasting, anti-democratic, anti-constitutional fraud ever perpetrated against the American people. There should be hell to pay.
Re: I think, is real wisdom that can only be gained by living life and being bitterly disappointed when we discover the fallibility and humanity of those around us.
Geoff, my default position is to maintain a certain degree of cynicism. That way I am seldom disappointed about things,. but sometimes I can be pleasantly surprised. A motto from an old sign at a place that didn't accept credit cards or checks where I once worked: In God We Trust-- All Others Pay Cash.
"Can you really blame Jill Biden for looking at her husband and seeing the man he was decades ago?"
Yes, sir. Because that's not what was going on here, and I believe you must know it.
Geoff Guth: America was Great, and CAN be great again. We saved Europe, twice in the 20th century (with help, of course). "America, America, God shed His grace of Thee, and crowned thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea." We are the new Jerusalem.
We saved Europe 3 times if you count the Cold war.
We shouldn't have gotten into World War I at all. Europe came out of it worse than they went into it, and it really wasn't our war, it was J.P. Morgan's war. We won World War II because the USSR tied down the majority of the Wehrmacht, killed a lot of Germans, and took 20 million deaths doing so. (They couldn't have done it without us either, but we didn't "save Europe" or the world.) One of the greatest lies ever told is "Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears..." In the context of world history, the USA doesn't come off half bad, but we've made some progress, we have seldom been "great."
Well, at some level: "All wars are banker's wars." I disagree that we shouldn't have gotten into WW1 because I agree with historian Max Hastings that the Germans had to be checked (twice--first WW, then second WW). Some historians point out it was really like one big war with a 20-year intermission period. I think we were great in those efforts (and others), but now we've been poisoned by a stolen election (2020) after a long slide after Reagan toward military interventionism and domestic overspending, from which we may not recover. SCOTUS is not helping. If we can't get the illegals out, we will not be able to true the vote. Not to mention that we cannot afford to be invaded by that many needy people all at once.
I see no reason whatsoever for thinking that "the Germans had to be checked" in WW1, no more than saying "the Brits had to be checked in WW1." No busininess or vital interests of ours whatsoever were at stake, and we could have gotten along well enough with whatever side emerged as exhaustedly victorious without our assistance.
I refer you to Max Hastings on the necessity of WW1. Now, you can still say "Let England sink, let Europe sink." But we have a special relationship with Britain that is only being shredded now, now that Keir Starmer has decided that it's okay to knife white Brits (including little girls at a party), and there ought to be jail for silent- prayer-sayers, and a two-tier justice system is the best (as long as the whites get the sword), and yeah, just keep mutilating the children and having little girls be gang assaulted (as long as the right criminals do the assaulting) and men rob women of their sports tropies.
I give you 3 minutes of Sir Max Hastings, with a lot of nearby links if you click in which he expands on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIPJs1htvKU
"But we have a special relationship with Britain ..."
That came after WW1. We almost went to war with old Blighty in the course of the Venezuelan Boundary Dispute of 1895-99 (and were certainly willing to go to war) just as France and the UK almost went to war over the Fashoda Incident in 1898. My point"
But we (might have had) a special relationship with (Germany).
Europe wouldn't have sunk, it would merely have been devastated, as it was anyway. But the rise of the Nazis was fueled in large part by England and France insisting on war-broken Germany somehow paying reparations to cover the full cost of the war -- which had been caused by all kinds of tangled ill-considered alliances and rivalries. While the US has clung to its "special relationship" with Britain ever since Churchill pandered to Roosevelt to cement it, its been crumbling at the same time. Even during WW II, General Stilwell found both the Brits and Chiang Kai Shek unwilling to prosecute the war against the Japanese in northern Burma. Chiang was hording all the American supplies flown "over the hump" and all his troops for the later battle against the communists (while Chao En Lai was saying "I would take General Stilwell's orders"), and the Brits were afraid to arm "native" levees for fear these would seek independence from colonial rule. Its amazing we got through WW II without turning our guns on the Brits, what with Churchill pushing for a pointless bloodbath in the Greek islands, and Montgomery pushing the disaster of Operation Market Garden.
Finally, if you want to make a point, please try to use what you have learned from reading any source to explain it yourself. If you are just saying "Read this book, its great," then you don't really understand the subject matter.
There was no point to us getting involved in WWI. And things only changed in WWII once Pearl Harbor happened and the U.S. had to respond.
We were making a difference in Russia and England even before Pearl Harbor. Well, we helped the allies win WW1, that's not nothing. 20th century was the American century. 21st century is the Chinese century, unless we in USA get our act together. SCOTUS has to get its head screwed on tight if we are to recover from the disasterous Biden presidency.
If all wars are bankers' wars, then we are not "great" getting into any of them. Even if the Germans had won WW I, they would have so exhausted themselves doing so that they wouldn't have posed much of a threat for decades. Of course I also consider, as I would and you wouldn't, that international socialism would have got a better break with an exhausted Germany imploding on its hollow victory, while England and France imploded on their defeat, and the Shop Stewards Councils might have emerged triumphant, while Lenin might have slipped and fallen given even a modest remaining German presence. Since German Jews were very much part of the patriotic war effort, Hitler's theories wouldn't have had the same traction after a victory, however unrewarding.
If you think Reagan was anything but a warmongering interventionist, I must ask what kind of mushrooms you have been consuming. George Bush's terrorists were Ronald Reagan's freedom fighters -- you can't blame it all on Charlie Wilson. Reagan was still bemoaning that we didn't win the Vietnam War.
It is not the constitutional role of the US Supreme Court to "help" any more than it is to make policy. It is the job of the judiciary to check the other two branches when, and only when, they step outside their constitutionally assigned and restrained powers.
Your obsession with stolen elections is pathetic -- not unlike the Democrats who briefly tried to claim that the 2024 election was stolen because "13 million votes don't just disappear." It was more like 8 million when the counting and verifying was completed but yes, 8 million people who voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump (albeit having to hold their nose) might very well sit it out when offered Donald Trump v. Kamala Harris.
America is NOT the New Jerusalem! As a Catholic, surely you know the Church is, not a secular nation. Only harm, both spiritual and moral, comes from identifying any secular nation as the new Jerusalem.
Remember Hillary Clinton's response when she first heard in 2016, "Make American Great Again." She said, "American's Already Great."
Now there's some delusion and poor politicking.
You know you've grown up the day you realize that while you may admire many, you are no longer in awe of anyone.
I never had that sense of near invincibility about my parents which you had about your father. I loved them but was aware of their fallibilities. Every time Bill O'Reilly talks about his father, he reminds me of mine. Everyone talks about The Greatest Generation, but few people talk much about the PTSD which half of them must have carried through life, incited by The Great Depression in their childhoods or early adulthoods, and inflamed by World War II on into the 1950s. O'Reilly's father remained taken advantage of because he was terrified of taking a chance on tossing away a secure job for one which paid much better but brought possible instability with it. My father had that exact psychology, which was lunatic because he was so good at what he did that at seventy, he was approached by a national company to work for them. The father of a kid I knew through Little League had that same insecurity. And weird as it was, our next door neighbor had it, as well. He sputtered along as a mildly successful insurance salesman, something you would not have expected of a man who had fought with The French Resistance.
My mother was sick most of her life.
You're wistful, I'm wistful, few people aren't, and usually, they are psychopaths.
The key to fording life is the understanding that we are sin cursed, corrupted creatures who inhabit a cursed and dying creation, that the life, death, and resurrection of The Lord God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, has made our redemption and rescue from death possible, and that believing in Him is our only and infinitely more than sufficient hope.
I’m in my early thirties, and at this rate, I’ll be casting third party protest votes and packing a sick bag to get me through every single Presidential term the rest of my life. Seriously, how do we go on when the Left is devoted to aggressively gaslighting the public so that they can run a revolting hybrid of Brave New World and 1984, while the Right’s best solution is to latch on to a tinpot dictator because hey, at least he knows how to meme on the libs! God help us, we are so screwed.
I wouldn't be so dramatic or worried. I think 2020 was a crisis year, the crisis was successfully averted, and everything is going to be fine moving forward
Run for office and help build a better future for your country if you can. That is what Trump did and is doing.
He needs a new party to run for -- the Dems and the GOP won't have him, they see their own doom in what he is saying.
I had thought we need a new party, too, but I will admit the crazy hodgepodge of parties in the UK and Germany is a turnoff.
Yes, we need a party correlated to build a substantial majority, not a pack of misfits trying to profit by a vacuum.
Well, those of us who feel that way need to organize a new party. Its a tall order, but someone has to begin it.
Wow after yesterday's bombshell this is quite a follow up. I live in Budapest ( yes we have met) and your comment on avoidance of decision making is spot on. Frustrating, pervasive and prevalent to say the least. Passive obstruction. Hope to grab a coffee on of these days.
Meh. The whole business is nothing but an effective tactic to take our sight off what's happening right now. F*** the past. Talk to me about the future-- that is something we might be able to change.
The past is prelude. Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat its errors (paraphrase).
A lesson from Greek myth and tragedy: Those who seek to rule the future very often bring about the very thing they fear.
So ignore the past? Is yesterday the past? Forgive student loans because they are in the past? Going to leave my wife, that wedding was in the past. Interesting concept.
What matters more, present day disasters and outrages or stuff that's done and over with?
As Billy Faulkner of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
That's one of those literary turns of phrase everyone loves to quote because it sounds so pithy until someone asks "What the Sam Hill does that really even mean anyway?"
I've always took it to mean that the past isn't dead. What happened back then affects us to this very day.
If it didn't, the srudy of history would not be so important.
It is obviously true that the past impacts the present -- what world we were born into, what options we have to change it, at what cost, whether the changes we are motivated to try are in the long run good or bad... all is determined by the history of everything that came before us. But if that was all he meant, he hardly needed to say anything. The phrase rings like a profound revelation, and it isn't one.
In particular "It's not even past" strikes me as definitely false, and therefore a kind of mock profound hollow turn of phrase. Burning witches at the stake is past, not present. For the USA, establishment of religion is past, not present. Slavery as a universally accepted and legal practice is past, not present. Are there echoes and consequences and residues that continue to this day? Sure -- but its not certain that these will ALWAYS be with us. We could have reduced them a good deal except for some well intentioned wrong turns. So the phrase seems false to me.
Not just what to change, but what to preserve, what works.''
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Trump Derangement Syndrome! It is the proper term to use against vindictive leftist bigots who cannot acknowledge any Trump success. The term fits when the left media claims Trump and his supporters are racist, misogynist, religious nuts, and right wing extremists. Trump Derangement Syndrome even causes a Speaker of the House to disrespectfully tear up a President’s State of the Union speech on National television. TDS does not apply to persons using reasonable debate and holding mere differences of opinion. TDS applies to those that display pure HATRED!
Its a sideshow. All it does is generate pointless circular arguments about what is or is not "Trump Derangement Syndrome."
One side effect of having a population that has trouble doing math and doesn't comprehend how scientific things work is that people are left to trust what they are being told by "experts". Forgive me for beating the same drum over and over, but so many of the numbers and statistics that were being thrown out about Covid from the very beginning were so preposterous that it was plain that they couldn't be true. Yet "Fauci said" was supposed to be our newly revealed gospel or something. Reasonable conclusions from information that was out there was deemed heresy and "heretics" were to be punished. It is a lot harder to fool people who have actually learned things and had to apply them in their life. Once upon a time, not all that long ago, finishing 8th grade gave a person a minimum of functional knowledge to be able to live; now we're lucky if our college graduates do.
My grandparents had eighth grade rural educations. Yes, the famed one-room schoolhouse. They could do math in their heads, especially fractions and area conversions. Read poetry and I dare say knew and lived their Catechism better than some of today's bishops. They were about as functionally self-supporting as circumstances allowed.
To Katja's larger point, there's an interesting 1989 book "Innumeracy", where a math professor points out the social cost of a society incapable of grasping the basics of probability, statistics and plausibility in general.
In short, the public is easily hoodwinked by advertisers, activists and novelty pushers. People would be ashamed to be illiterate, but the number who wear their distain of mathematics as evidence of emotional intelligence, 'deepness' or otherwise being more perfectly human than their presumedly soulless Vulcan-like math-capable neighbors does the Republic no favors.
Many of us have likely seen an eighth grade graduation exam from the early 1900s that most graduate students today (myself included!), wouldn't be able to pass. And schools today are notorious for passing students barely able to read and write.
I've been binge-listening to personal finance stuff recently and one thing that absolutely blows my mind are the number of people who are broke, can't pay for a $1500-$2500 car repair, and then get themselves a new car with a payment of $750/month for 7 years or so because in their mind, it's somehow a wash mathematically in their heads. Over and over and over again.
Sure, that car that needs $1500 in repairs may not last another seven years, but a new vehicle isn't maintenance-free either. AND it seems like a lot of these people weren't doing the routine maintenance on the car in the first place, which is why they end up in a crisis situation to begin with. My car is nearly nine years old. It's paid for, and it's running well. I'm also taking care of it because I know that keeping up on oil changes, tires, brakes, and other routine maintenance is a lot cheaper than having a car payment again. Last year, the car needed a new water pump and new tires, which helped bring the total maintenance cost to $2617. I cannot imagine thinking that $750 a month would somehow be a deal.
We need to teach math with this framework. Otherwise we just get idiots demanding to know "When did I ever have any use for algebra?"
These days kids get in trouble for doing math in their heads. You can only pass if you can "show your work," and that hurts a lot of kids and keeps them from advancing in the subject and mastering it.
The problem is that many educated people also believe in credentialism and that people with medical and science degrees are experts who cannot be questioned and can never be wrong. So whether the population is educated or not didn’t really matter, because if you aren’t educated in that specific field you have no right to an opinion. But also folks who were educated in those fields but had different opinions were shunned as well, so fighting the narrative at the time was pretty futile.
I'm pretty well "credentialed" in my field, and I know other things as well. All that, however, is tiny compared to what I don't know, even to those things that I know I don't know. But I mostly know when I should keep my mouth shut (or my fingers quiet), lest I embarrass myself. Others should learn to do (or not to do) likewise.
Re: people are left to trust what they are being told by "experts".
Except they don;t. All sorts of pseudoscientific nonsense and tinfoil hattery flourishes. Trust in this country took a huge hit when I was a young child due to Vietnam and Watergate and it has never recovered.
Re: Once upon a time, not all that long ago, finishing 8th grade gave a person a minimum of functional knowledge to be able to live
Not sure I agree. If we're just talking about living one's personal life we do not need expert advice for that (and often enough those experts disagree with each other), unless you count the auto mechanics, electricians, plumbers and of course doctors to deal with things that surpass our abilities. As for Covid, it was a Great Unknown at first and all sorts of contradictory ideas were being thrown out about it. Still, vastly less nonsense than was bruited around in major epidemics of the more distant past. And there's a very old tendency to overestimate casualties from a disaster before hard numbers can be found. As of this morning they're still counting the dead after the tornadoes in KY and MO, and trying to figure out if the destructive storm that hit parts of Baltimore and its suburbs was or was not a tornado. These things can take time and in meanwhile rumor flourishes. Hence on 9-11 early estimates posited ten thousand dead or more-- and fears about everything from nerve gas to dirty bombs. (And we are still dealing with the 9-11 Truthers)
The early 2020 Diamond Princess's voyage of the damned revealed how the pandemic would play out. That cruise ship was a veritable Petri dish of Covid virus transmission and lethality. Over 3700 passengers and crew, of which 19 percent came down with Covid, with 12 or so fatalities, all over 65 years of age. As many virologists pointed pointed out at the time -- at least those willing to speak in public-- pandemics begin with less transmissibility and more virulence and end with more transmissibility and less virulence. The "science" of this particular pathogen was fairly clear from the get go -- and then duly ignored. What followed in many states were draconian lockdowns and the criminal act of closing schools when there was no reason to do so.
What you say about pandemics is not true. As counter examples I give you the plague and smallpox
We knew from there start that we were dealing with an airborne upper-respiratory virus. Who's talking about bubonic plague or smallpox? You're being intentionally dense.
Air borne respiratory virus have killed millions.You are stating disinformation about the Pandemic ion its earliest days, and looking for scapegoats because the world did not go as you would have had it go. I have no patience at the moment for that sort of darkness and will not continue this thread.
So you're OK with school closures that went on for far too long, closures that affected kids in the most vulnerable communities, because the "science" wasn't clear enough? Got it.
The old McCuffey’s Eclectic Readers had an essay from Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England in the last volume, level or grade 7, I think. I have heard that many first year Law students these days struggle with it. Of course modern law professors dismiss Blackstone’s (in my mind correct) view that the Ten Commandments were the basis for the common law.
I remember being told that Holmes County Ohio had one of the highest literacy rates in the whole state. Many residents of Holmes County are Amish and only remain in school until 8th Grade.
When I taught at James Madison University (1981-82) the only bookstore in Harrisonburg VA was owned and operated by Mennonites. (Eastern Mennonite College was across the street from my residence.) I went there to order a book that had recently been reviewed in the Wash. Post, titled The Art of Biblical Criticism. I forget the author’s name. I had cut the review out of the Post to make sure they would order the correct book. They giggled like crazy when I showed them the review because its title was “The Bible Tells me so.” They apparently did not bath often, given the way the store smelled.
Some Mennonites (like the ones near Tuscaloosa AL) stop education at the 7th or 8th grade.
But others not. There was an economics professor at East Carolina who was from a Mennonite group that stopped at 7th grade, but he had convinced his father it would not make him prideful. Which in his case was definitely true.
Holmes County is the heart of Ohio's Amish country.
Spot on Katja.
Katja, you must have a new record at the Dreher site. 65 likes.
A record for me on a single comment, I think, but I don't think Rod in general. However, anything over 50 here is quite good. :) (Not that I'm counting or anything! 😂) A lot of it was the luck of the timing... Comments within the first 100 posted always have a better chance of doing well, and Rod posted at an odd time, and I woke up in the middle of the night because I was so exhausted I fell asleep in a chair downstairs at about 8pm. It wasn't terribly comfortable, and I woke up sometime after 2, knowing I would hurt even more if I didn't get some sleep in bed. I dragged myself to bed, and just happened to check over here, because, if it's the middle of the night and if you're barely awake enough to make it to bed, the *logical* thing to do is to check if Rod has posted something new, right?
Reliance on experts is way out of hand -- but we have to learn to do math and be reasonably informed about facts on the table if we want to break free. I remember basic history curriculum actually proclaiming 'government by experts' as one of the great contributions of the over-hyped Progressive Era. Experts have their place -- my own senses do not tell me how much mercury is in my drinking water, nor what level, if any, is safe for me. But experts needs to explain their findings in terms the average citizen (or juror) can understand and evaluate. We should never trust someone who says "I'm an expert, take my word for it, you wouldn't understand." Experts need to live up to the Albert Einstein rule: If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself.
Agreed. My parents generation often only went to eighth grade and then it was off to work. Yet almost all of them had successful careers in something, albeit labor oriented.
You are too kind Rod. This was more evil than motivated reasoning. Repeat after me: DEMOCRATS LIE.
Yeah, I used to think they were just mistaken too, but I’ve watched them for decades. And if 2020 doesn’t tell you that they will push any number of big lies to keep power, including running a rigged fraudulent election, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Charles Krauthammer once wrote that Republicans think Democrats are stupid while Democrats think Republicans are evil. He was partly wrong. Most Republicans think Democrats are not only stupid but evil as well. Democrats are Satan's contribution to American politics.
Today’s Democrats sure are. I’m old enough to remember when they were a mixed party with a lot of good people.
The Democrats certainly are not the party of Roosevelt and Truman. However, had they lived long enough, I think Kennedy, Johnson and Humphrey would have evolved into your typical mentally ill leftist.
Interesting speculation. LBJ yes. He was a horrible corrupt opportunist. I say that as a Texan. I think Kennedy and Humphrey had more decency.
I think both Kennedy and Humphrey would have evolved on questions like abortion. I think Humphrey already had evolved but he died in 1977 when the issue just began. You are right on Johnson. He was morally corrupt and would have backed abortion had he lived long enough. I think if Johnson had lived long enough, his politics would have been the same as Jack Brooks and Jim Wright.
Same.
The first time it's happenstance, the second time coincidence, the third time enemy action.
1. Biden from the basement 2020
2. Media running blocks 2020-2024
3. Biden admin running blocks 2020-2024
Re: Repeat after me: DEMOCRATS LIE.
Repeat after me: Human beings lie, and Money, Power and Sex are the prime motivators.
See also: Donald Trump.
Agreed. Republicans lie just as much, they just lie about different things.
Dem lies kill -- Ukraine war, CV vax, CV lockdowns (useless), transgenderism, an infant emerging from its mother's body is still "a fetus," and not a person.
So do GOP lies -- they just do it more slowly. "Free trade," globalist expansionism, spreading "democracy" via war, exporting multiculturalism and other anti-traditional claptrap, economically steamrolling smaller countries who won't "get with the program," turning a blind eye to ecological ravage related to the above, etc., etc.
Val: So what if we make it to the rocks, we'll be dead in three days anyway.
Earl: Yeah, but I wanna live for the three days!
“It’s all too human. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least five cases known to me in which this kind of motivated reasoning carried the day in various crises — personal and institutional — with seriously bad results. We all are susceptible to this. All of us.”
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality”. The quote is from Eliot but he was drawing on a major theme in ancient Greek mythology and literature: hubris, to which all human beings are tragically prone, leads to loss of touch with reality - atē - which is followed, inevitably, by nemesis (there wasn’t much room for mercy in the ancient Greek view of things).
Interesting. I didn't know that was from Eliot (I assume T. S.?), because Herbert used it in the third Dune book, I believe.
Republicans lie too.
What an exposure of Scarborough. I wonder if he has publicly reflected on this?
Scarborough will do as his wife tells him to do.
They're both paid liars. So are Joy Behar and other hostesses on "The View."
I honestly just don’t care if he was half way demented. I’d still rather have a half demented Biden than the complete and total grift we’re getting from Trump. The scale of the corruption and incompetence is just not even close. I wish he’d have had the self awareness to only stay in office for one term, and come to terms with that in 2022 as opposed to 2024, but that’s not the timeline we got unfortunately.
On the other hand, I also believe that Trump is going to leave office in a similar manner to George W Bush, despised and recognized for his failures with an approval rating around 28-29%. That sets us up for a Mayor Pete, Wes Moore, Chris Murphy style presidency. That’s an outcome I can live with.
Live not by lies.
Read “People of the Lie” by M. Scott Peck. Another great book from the past.
Yes, a great book, but grim.
I'm with you there. The current Trump is more of a liability than aged Joe B.
Yeah, hundreds of billions of Biden-initiated grift and bribery is what we need to keep us afloat. We need 10 million illiterate illegals to take our places in rental housing, hospital beds and the welfare rolls. Ukraine war is great--emptied our Treasury and filled up the morgues of Europe. For what? And all those murdered young women! Wonderful. Did we really need a person like nurse Laken Riley to graduate and serve the public anyway? (Well, maybe her mother needed her.) And all those sexually mutilated children! So much grist for the mentally-tormented-for-life mill. I sleep better knowing Hunter Biden will never have to work a day in his life, nor his progeny because he got his cut from "the big guy".
The defence of a democracy. And the fight against tyranny.
As A European, I'm grateful for American support for European security. I also believe Europe should rearm, as it is doing so.
Defence of democracy? As long as you're not the AfD, a Romanian populist, or anyone else not onboard with so-called European values.
I was referring specifically to the defence of Ukraine from Russia's invasion.
Got it. In which case you guys should bankroll Ukraine's military, leave us out of it.
DOGE has exceeded my wildest expectations for cutting our bureaucracy. I’m grateful taxpayers aren’t on the hook for Pride parades in Chile anymore (or anywhere else).
I’m glad that the grift of both Dem and Rep admins is now being exposed.
Not even close. Wow. All in on transgenders. Afghanistan disaster. Let me count the ways.
“Currently, the $TRUMP coin is trading at approximately $12.87, with a circulating supply of 200 million tokens, resulting in a market capitalization of about $2.5 billion. The total supply is capped at 1 billion tokens, with 800 million held by Trump-affiliated entities.”
He’s made 2.5 BILLION off of the office of the presidency. This isn’t “Oh Hunter got this job because of who his daddy is” type shit, this is Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, Bashar Al-Assad level corruption. He is everything that the right accuses Biden or the Clinton Foundation of being.
You completely ignored the comment and went off in a new direction that is largely irrelevant. Here are few of Joe's accomplishments. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was worse than botched, it was tragic. Thirteen young Americans killed with many more injured. Many other Afghans who worked with us were abandoned. Over seven billion in military equipment was left behind for the Taliban to use or to sell on the black market. Profligate government spending into a healthy economy that set off inflation levels not seen in 40 years. A Secretary of Defense that went AWOL, literally, with no accountability. A Secretary of Transportation who did nothing with the shambles of our air traffic control system. Appointments of bizarre men who have mental illnesses into positions of authority. Dithering on Israel after October 7th. Forcing a Ukrainian official who was about to investigate Burisma out of his job by threatening to withhold US aid, and then bragging about it on camera. Holding classified documents in cardboard boxes in a garage near the door. Lying about influence peddling by family members, who had no business experience or interests other than influence peddling. Having a fawning corrupt media perpetuating the lies about his health, well being and dignity. These are just a few and just off the top of my head. Biden was a disaster. He makes Trump look like a genius.
Pretty good list. I'd add that in his one successful speech, the speech in the fiery cavern before the 2022 mid-terms, he declared forty-five percent of the country reprobates worthy of expulsion into the outer darkness.
We’ll just never agree on this, which is ok! Joe Biden was a fine president, the IRA, CHIPS act, and the infrastructure bill were fantastic pieces of legislation that will continue to make America a better place for decades to come. Wasn’t perfect obviously, Afghanistan wasn’t ideal and he should’ve just been a one term president, but he did ok.
Trump is an incompetent moron who’s engaging in the most corruption we’ve ever seen from an American politician bar none, and it’s not even close. That’s what the evidence shows. The trade war was a disaster and was just an excuse for him and his friends to engage in a pump and dump scheme. Not to mention the human rights abuses in sending people to El Salvador. It’s monstrous.
Re: Joe Biden was a fine president
Biden started out well initially but as his abilities declined so did his performance. (No, I don't buy the claim that he was already dumber than a head of broccoli when he took office).
He had some symptoms of early dementia, but as anyone who's had to deal with early dementia knows, it's a slow fade.
Yes, would agree with this assessment.
He was pretty clueless the day he became vice president.
You just give the same tired assertions without any facts. I quoted for you nearly a dozen factual failures and disaster and all you have come back with is that Trump is a moron and corrupt.
Which is true.
The assertions being stated here about Biden are also "tired assertions" without a shred of actual medical evidence.
Meanwhile Biden successfully campaigned for the Democratic nomination in 2020, and acquitted himself well in debates against Trump. The beginning of his administration was rather energetic, with a number of major bills passed, You may think that legislation was bad and wrong, but getting such stuff accomplished is not a thing a leader utterly lost in dementia could accomplish.
See my comment here about Afghanistan. Donald Trump, and really the American people who were sick of us being in Afghanistan (which we should have left years ago), are responsible for that fiasco. Given the imperative of getting the hell out of that mess there was no other way it would end except in a huge mess.
Oh and let's not forget the disaster in East Palestine Ohio, that never was addressed. And then there is the disaster in Western North Carolina, that Biden left unsolved. The more I think about these things the more contemptible I realize Biden was. By far he was the worst President of my lifetime. I was born under Eisenhower...
A train derailed with toxic chemicals. A bad accident. How is the President of the United States responsible for that?
The disaster in North Carolina was due to a (by then weakened) hurricane-- which hit us in St Pete first causing huge storm surge and vast flooding, along with a number of deaths. If presidents are responsible for hurricanes then can we also hold Trump responsible for the tornadoes that ripped across the country Friday?
The worst president of my lifetime remains George W Bush. The consequences of his flubs and follies have left us with far more long term damage than anything that happened 2021-2025. I reserve judgment on Trump until he is out of office.
He's responsible or his response. Which was inadequate at best.
What a shallow attempt to deflect my comment. He didn't cause the accident, as is obvious, but his heartless lack of response was painful. He waited a year before he even visited.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan was negotiated by Donald Trump. Biden tried to extend the timetable, but the Taliban insisted on the term agreed to. It was going to be a mess no matter who was in office. Conversely, Trump approved and funded Operation Warp Speed, but by the time the vaccine was ready to roll out on a mass scale, Biden was in office. I did know some Dems who said in the fall of 2020 "I'm not going to take a vaccine when Trump says to." But when Biden rolled it out, a lot of Trump loyalists did the reverse.
More... Biden pledged billions for student load debt relief and did so even after the Supreme Court ruled against its legality. Aside from the fact that is was never obvious why the debt accrued by an unemployable gender studies major was more sacrosanct and more deserving of government relief than say the debt incurred by a hard-working young tradesman buying tools and a truck, it was just the most egregious, unconstitutional and deliberate voting-buying scheme ever perpetrated on the American people.
Transgenders. Afghanistan failure. And we can go on, for the list is long.
And, Ketanji Brown Jackson a woman who "could not" define what a woman is because she was not a biologist, became a Supreme Court Justice because of her skin color. And, who knows how many illegal aliens (10 million, 15 million ?) were given a free pass into the country and resettled selectively for maximal Democrat advantage. The corruption was almost unfathomable under Biden.
The dumbest Justice since Gabriel Duvall.
Jackson is tied with Sotomayor.
A man with an external locus of identity is pointless to argue with. In other words, you don't argue right of way with the sheep, you have to argue with the shepherd.
This is like saying “You can’t argue with a Catholic, they all think the same thing”. No, identity, like most things, is a spectrum. Psychology is usually not a concrete set of constructs that you can just say “You are x” like in medicine or mathematics. That’s not at all how this works.
Most people are around 50/50 when it comes to internal vs external locus of control, identity, etc. No one is 100% one thing or the other. You’re always defined by your environment to some extent, whether you want to be or not.
Of course people are affected by their environment, but some people's need for belonging and external validation is a lot stronger than others. They'll be looking for someone to give them a framework to understand the world, and when confronted with an event will look to a thought leader, a peer group, a philosophical construct, or even a parent or spouse, to interpret the event.
Really? Hugo Chavez? I'd take Trump any day over Hugo Chavez; if Trump starts nationalizing vast swathes of the US economy, then yeah, I'll accept the comparison.
As I review all these failures, it is as if we did not have a president...while Biden was in office. The sheer gravity the failures is astonishing. And, yet, people still defend Biden, which is equally astonishing. What does it take for Democrat to admit to their failures? How much worse could a president be and still they will not give one inch? They are in a cultish mind set and as such they either pretend to believe what they say, or they really believe what they say. In the end it really does not matter...
Oh gosh, and I completely forgot the botched drone attack that Biden authorized in the days after Abbey Gate that murdered ten innocent Afghan civilians including seven children. The list is agonizing. I need to collect all of them in a list...so I never forget them and when someone tries to tell me that Biden was fine president, I have it close at hand. No more gaslighting about Biden.
This isn’t what you care about. You like Trump because you like Trump, for whatever reason that may be. It could’ve been JFK or FDR and you’d still be complaining. You aren’t holding them to the same standards.
Who said I like Trump? I just recounted all the abysmal failures of Biden. Telling me I like Trump is all you can say? You make the case for me. You just stand up for a Democrat based on nothing but how it makes you feel.
I liked the IRA because of the mental health provisions in the bill. It gave grants to rural communities for social workers to provide crisis intervention services. So instead of having a system in which police officers are making the call about whether to jail someone, take them to the hospital, or call their mother during a mental health crisis, social workers now make that call.
This a service that the government provides where I live now (Broward county, FL) but was not available in the smaller community I’m from (Glynn county, GA). Nowadays though, thanks to the IRA, there’s crisis intervention in my hometown! That’s huge for people that live there. Instead of jailing people for not taking their meds that day or having a crisis, now a social worker assesses the situation and makes a clinical decision. Now little Jonny or Tyrone with a bipolar diagnosis doesn’t have a criminal record just for being crazy. That’s why I supported the Biden administration.
Trump, on the other hand, is gutting similar services (gutting SAMHSA) and giving their resources back to the criminal justice system. This is idiotic, counterproductive, and will cost taxpayers more in the long run. It’s purely ideological nonsense that believes you can shame PTSD or Bi-Polar out of people. That’s not how that works. This is why I liked Biden and despise Trump.
People keep getting worked up over that meme coin, which is one of many.
Nobody was forced to buy that thing, right? Nor any of the others?
Most people are playing the greatest fool game, and many are going to make money at it.
If Obama or Biden had done this you’d be having a stroke. It’s just foreign countries pumping up the price of his cryptocurrency in order to curry favor. I hate that I even have to say this, but it is wrong for the President to grift 2.5 billion in cryptocurrency from foreign governments.
Er, the Afghanistan disaster was Trump's work. He's the one who gave away the store to the Taliban. Though to be fair to him, it was time and past time to get out of there, and once we did things were obviously going to go to hell in a handcart.
Bullshit. Trump set up the treaty, but did not make the Taliban break it. And when they broke it, Biden was not obliged to keep it. He was obliged to do what it took to make sure our people got out safely and the enemy did not get our crap. He FAILED. HE FAILED.
Quit the cope. He was in charge (but not really), and he failed. Deal with it, Jon.
The Taliban were not behind the suicide bombing. And if our nation cannot accept (while mourning of course) 13 deaths in our military we have become the flakiest of snowflakes. 450 Union soldiers died at First Bull Run, a battle with :green" troops which should never have been fought. Yes, the pundits howled like banshees over the defeat. Should Lincoln have resigned for the failure?
ACCEPT?!? Why should we "accept" them, during a withdrawal at that? The taliban broke the treaty and Biden sat on his useless thumbs. That bombing took place and you believe we should just "accept" it. Yet you are here trying to saddle Trump with all this. What is the matter with you? The Ciil War comparison is an entirely different conversation. Lincoln and his generals did manage to win the war, decisively. Biden could not manage a withdrawal. Apples and hand grenades. You have no idea what you are talking about. You are just running your mouth/keyboard.
Biden sucks. He sucked at the start and sucked so bad at the end, his own party coupled him out o there.
So we should have gone back to war with the Taliban? Stayed on Afghanistan until what, the end of time?
When Reagan was president 241 Marines died in a terrorist bombing in Beirut. Are you going scream about that as much, or even more?
The Taliban didn't have to break the treaty. They merely insisted on compliance and refused to be flexible on dates.
The Taliban didn't break the treaty. They refused to renegotiate the generous terms Trump had agreed to. Biden could of course have reneged on the treaty, but then we would have been at war with limited forces and our backs to the wall, because all that was left was a bit of Kabul.
So you land troops back and start killing until the job is done. The Taliban had given us all the right to o so.. It could be done. It should have been done. But Biden was a feeble incompetent coward. Stop making excuses for it
And they did break the treaty. The treaty did not allow them to do what they did. And I challenge you to prove otherwise.
Its clear that your experience is not in logistics, and you have given no thought to what it would have taken to land troops, or what casualties we would have taken. There was no good option -- GW Bush blew all the good options in the first six months after we went in. Once you withdraw, per the treaty signed almost a year before Trump left office, you not only have to ramp up troop strength and send back equipment, you have to retake ground ceded in the early stages of the treaty.
I'm no Trump fan, but this is quite wrongheaded. Biden was a puppet surrounded by ideologues. Trump may be a knucklehead but he's no ideologue, nor are those in his support team. Ideologues, right or left, tend to do far more damage than knuckleheads.
Mayor Pete? Because we always needed a sodomite in the White House. Oh, wait--Obama apparently was also "bathouse" type in his youth.
Of good grief, we had a goody two shoes in the Oval Office when Carter was president. Not a raging success. I don't give a flying fig about what people are doing in their personal life (you will never find me emoting over Trump's purely personal sins).
Your tidbit about Obama is nothing but malicious gossip-- AKA slander, You should go to confession for repeating it.
When there's that much smoke, there's usually some fire. I do not, however, believe Michelle Obama is really a man. But I do believe Obama probably experimented sexually in his youth. Something weird about how his cook, who was an expert swimmer, recently mysteriously drown in a pond in back of Obama's house, even though the pond was shallow. What did that guy know? More bodies on the Clinton body count I suppose.
Aside: I can't seem to get back to your response to my comment that CV was a hoax. It was a hoax in the following respect: Fauci created it, illegally, with help from Wuhan. Then he exxagerated its toxicity. And he prevented effective treatments from being administered (after all, the "big payload" was the toxic vax--if the CV didn't get you, the vax would, in time). What for? Well, best I can tell is Fauci felt the best way to prepare for a possible global pandemic was to cause one.
If you had CV 3 times, you probably got the vax, which damages the immune system (apparently, forever). I got CV as well, in June 2024 (Omnicron) and of course I knew from day 1 CV was a bioweapon and the vax was a bioweapon because (wait for it), I read Zero Hedge, which called it from Day 1 because they had access to a top scientist named Yeardon (something like that), who was Pfizer's former top scientist, and who said, from day 1 "The vax is lethal." And then there' Dr. Atlas, who said that the virus was a bioweapon and the vax is a bioweapon. It (my CV infection) felt "artificially awful" to me. That's how gain-of-function works. A little of this, a little of that, a little snippet of the AIDs virus coat in it, a little gasoline taste in the mouth gene splicing in, etc. Weirdest illness I have ever known. Fauci has committed crimes against humanity (with help). I call for Nuremberg II, prepare the gallows for those who murdered millions (probably eventually billions if we count out 20 years, including the vax deaths and disabilities). And he got away with it... so far. God says "Vengeance is mine, I will repay." May Fauci go to confession, and may God save his soul. He tortured beagles for God's sake!! Monster! He helped disrupt the 2020 election with his "shenanigans."
As someone who has been slandered by utterly false gossip (including a gay rumor in high school about me and my best friend) I don't buy the smoke-fire logic.
Okay, let's say he's not gay--he's "gay" adjacent. He "evolved" on gay marriage. Campaigning, marriage is between one man and one women. After election, not so much. How did his cook die? Very suspicious. Clinton hit job I assume. Obama helped steal the 2020 election, according to Biden's pre-2020-election "blurt out" on live TV that he and Obama were running a huge voter fraud operation. He caused massive damage by installing dementia Joe. And he does not care, because in his heart of heart, he hates regular people, in my opinion. That's what the Left does--hate of "normies."
My family used to tease me that me and my best childhood friend were lesbians. It happens to everyone at some point. Shrug.
He is literally "gay curious," admitting it in one of his books.
Wow, it's almost worse than Iraq. Integrity gone forever.
Now do “global warming,” Rod.
Nice lecture from Michelle Goldberg. One note of editing: replace "they" (the Democrats) with "us" and I'll take her seriously.
Michelle Goldberg is a white-hating liberal. I've read some of her columns. If she could put to death all white Republicans, she would. She's a Jewish Whoopi Goldberg except she can form sentences and paragraphs which Whoopi can not.
Which shows you the kind of actor she is, or was. That woman was also convincingly Guinan on NextGen. Actors are most definitely not their characters.
Michelle Goldberg is virtue-signaling in her own way. If Joe Biden had stayed on the 2024 ballot and had won election over Donald Trump, you wouldn't be hearing any of this leftist moaning over Senile Joe. If Biden was in office right now, today, these same left-wing writers and journalists would be standing up for Biden and assuring the public that he was of sound mind and that the Republicans were evil for mentioning Biden's mental state.
Yup. Not a damn thing would have changed. Just as not a damn thing has changed despite their ass kicking. Not policies, not attitudes, nothing.
What side if any is she pretending to be one?
I think we need a grown-up healthy skepticism of our "institutions", of which there are many, whilst avoiding kneejerk distrust. I think we should avoid hysteria, alarmism and hyperbole too, as boring as that sounds.
I might suggest that what you rightly describe as motivated reasoning is nevertheless not an equilateral equation. That is, we are being asked to evaluate Trump -- his actions and policies -- based on the picture that the very press who lied about Biden's acuity, BLM's "mostly peaceful demonstrations", COVID-19 masking, origin, and "science", transgender policies, economic news ... basically an entire untruthful narrative for the past decade.
Most of what we know of Trump -- his actions and policies -- still comes from the very sources that we know have lied about everything else. You even pointed out the Gell-Mann (sorry. I don't remember the spelling) Effect. We read something that we know about and realize that the story is wrong, then turn right around and read the story on a topic we're less familiar with and assume they got it right.
And then we look at the stories that tell us that Trump is doing the right thing... and THOSE we say are biased, right wing sources.
BUT WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
Be like a jury. Weigh everything.
Everything. Before you indict. And be certain the "respectable" are not giving you the whole story today. OR even the story at all.
"They didn’t see it because they had a powerful, unconscious bias against seeing it."
Or consider an alternative. They did it because they crave power, they knew from 2019 that Biden would be the perfect front for their use of that power, and they tried to lie to us until, even with all their media protection, that lie could not stand even a minimal exposure to daylight.
Think of the quote from Orwell. Perhaps this is what they wanted:
'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?'
Winston thought. 'By making him suffer,' he said.
'Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever.'
I just re-read "1984" a month ago. That is the most beautifully ugly paragraph ever written. What a horrific world O'Brien offers us.
North Korea.
As hard as they try, the Norks are pikers compared to The Party.
Re the Dem-Mediacrats, I don't call them the Party of Corruption and Lies for nothing. They speak the language of lies. It's the only language they know. I'm far from an uncritical fan of Trump but there is zero moral equivalence between him and his enemies on the other side.
I think to avoid going with the flow and falling into the intellectual and psychological traps that Rod describes, two things are necessary; a) that your intellectual anchors be grounded not in persons, parties, or ideologies but rather in moral principles; and b) that your moral principles be grounded in Truth.
That's not gonna guarantee you'll never make a mistake or get something wrong. But it makes that less likely and it does guarantee that you'll have the moral integrity to recognize mistakes, own up to them, and learn from them.
The hard fact is that your average person on the street doesn't measure up to either of the two above standards, not because they're bad but because they're human. This is why we've seen such wild swings in voting patterns over the last 25 years...and why those swings will likely continue. People tend to be manipulable...and they tend to demand painless answers to painful questions.
Anyway, Rod uses the example of the Church scandals and it is apt in some ways. However, the fact is that many Catholics never shrank from the reality. In fact, if you were a reader of conservative Catholic publications like The Wanderer in the 1990's, you weren't even shocked by the reality. You knew about it far before 2002.
Finally, Rod's mention of Mark Shea. Blast from the past. I'd totally (and mercifully) forgotten about him. I engaged in a couple on-line debates with Mark, who ended up banning me from his blog, and I honestly came away thinking Mark had problems extending beyond his ideas on politics or religion. I hope he's gotten some help for them.
I'd forgotten about Shea as well. Some of his very early writing wasn't bad, but then he got the idea that he was some kind of Old Testament prophet figure who alone saw things as they truly were and had to expose 'error' (anything differing from his own views) with the contempt it deserved.
Chronicles printed Mark Shea once about twenty years ago. But they bounced him.
I got banned also. He went from reasonable moderate, to shrieking leftist pretty quickly.
I was zotted from Free Republic in 2005 for criticizing Bush's wars in the Middle-East. It feels faintly rewarding that I earned such a distinction now that almost all Republicans not named Bush or Cheney agree that Bush's follies in the Middle-East were great failures.
Actually Peggy Noonan was worse on JPII's "secret plan".
Yes. The Pope was going to put the Vatican on double secret probation like in Animal House.
He used to be pretty good, even in his exasperating "JP2 Secret Plan" mode, but at some point, not sure when, he just became insufferably shrill, and turned his mind off. He started shrieking his usual slogans instead of thinking. I quit reading him even before Francis became pope, but every now and then, Catholic friends would send me links, saying, "Can you believe what's happened to Mark Shea?" Not long ago somebody sent me a link in which he called me a fascist, etc. I laughed at first, but then seriously wondered if the poor guy had gone mental.
Yesterday I read where a group of university professors are leaving the country because, they say, it is becoming "fascist" under Trump. And they are pains to inform us that they know "fascism" because they are professors and have studied it.
There's a serious case of "mental" going around. And there's no cure. My own term for it is rabies of the soul.
*at pains*
"In fact, if you were a reader of conservative Catholic publications like The Wanderer in the 1990's"
As I was (and the 80s as well, right up to three) months ago
"you weren't even shocked by the reality."
As I wasn't
"You knew about it far before 2002"
As I did
Yup, and it wasn't just The Wanderer though that may have been the most prominent of the Catholic conservative publications.
The point is, for anyone paying attention there was enough information out there to well understand that the Catholic Church had a gay-priest problem, that some Bishops were corrupt and only too willing to engage in cover-ups, and that instances of sexual abuse had taken place.
I mean, OK, you may not have realized the dimensions of the issue but you knew enough...and were already disgusted enough...that you certainly weren't shocked when the entire bowl of shinola hit the fan.
All this said, it is also true that a goodly number of Catholics either chose not to know or were too hopelessly naive to process the evidence or simply didn't care. Personally, I was never a member of any of those groups...and still am not.
I agree with you in all particulars.
I gave up my subscription to The Wanderer, with some regret, after subscribing to it for over 40 years, simply because of advancing age, and the fact that no story in it in recent decades (or very few) was "news to me." But that in itself is not a comment in disparagement of The Wanderer, but on the many different means of obtaining information today. And the subscription was by no means cheap (although I gave them as a parting gift the equivalent of a year's subscription's price)