More odds and ends:
- There’s an interview at Newsmax with Paul Gottfried, mostly about Israel, Jews and Western liberal weirdness, that strikes me as sensible. It’s intended to clear the air, especially on the Right, rather than propose one policy or another for the Middle East.
- For 30 years we’ve had one report after another like this, but they never seems to make much difference to what politicians and responsible officials think should be done: Seattle schools learn money doesn’t buy grades. The principle is simple enough, that education is primarily a matter of relationships among the people involved, but no-one wants to hear that because then there would have to be personal responsibility.
- The Supreme Court of Canada decided 6-3 that spanking isn’t per se a violation of children’s rights. Nonetheless, it created a new definition of the applicable legal standard, what’s “reasonable in the circumstances,” that is based on “[t]he weight of expert evidence and current social thinking” rather than on the common law standard of the judgment of an ordinarily prudent member of the community. Regardless of how the particular case comes out, technocracy wins in the Canadian courts.
- You can sign up for weekly e-mailings, mostly related to mainstream orthodox Catholic views on sexual, gender, family and life issues in the New World Order, with C-Fam and The Culture of Life Foundation & Institute. Their archives are also worth browsing.
- The American Renaissance website has gone to a daily format, with scads of references to news stories and articles relating to their concerns (immigration, race, multiculturalism, and so on). You don’t have to approve of the publication to find it a useful resource on topics people often won’t discuss.
- And finally—it’s seemed to me recently that people with decidedly nonliberal views are seeing more and more clearly that they have the better arguments, and are learning to make them calmly, confidently and persuasively. It’s more often their opponents who come off looking uninformed and irrational, and even frightened and bigoted. Is that a mirage or private fantasy, or is there something to it? I suppose part of what makes me feel there might be something to it is that lately Catholic bishops have started saying things like “pro-abortion Catholic politicians shouldn’t take communion” and “Catholic religious education stinks.” Even the Scottish hierarchy just sent around a forceful restatement of Catholic doctrine on sexual issues. (Sorry to use the bishops as weathervanes, but can anyone suggest what I should use instead?)
(concerning your final
(concerning your final thought)
It seems to me that you are correct.
Rather than top down – I believe this to be bottom up.
Orthodox & conservative thinking can reach critical mass as the new media (talkradio – the web – new cable outlets/& shows)allows thoughts to be expressed and therfore reinforced as legitimante.
Add to this the old blue/red state divide and what its reinforcement of the idea of a culture war.
Throw in Sept 11, and people start to pick sides.
Maybe these Bishops are just saying what they always wish the could but only now feel comfortable actually doing?
Thanks -Fitz
Excellent log entry.
Excellent log entry. Regarding the first item in it, I can’t adequately express in what high esteem I hold Prof. Paul Gottfried. He is a national treasure—and would be a national treasure for whatever nation he lived in, whether that nation be Israel, any European country at all, or the United States. (How blessed we are that he’s an American.)
WRT the Canadian court case,
WRT the Canadian court case, not only did the technocracy, despite not completely overturning the existing law permitting corporal punishment, win in terms of setting the terms of the debate, but they did score on several key points, banning striking the head or face (which would, I imagine, be interpreted as forbidding a mild slap on the face), and have forbidden using any objects such as a belt. Who above 30 isn’t familiar, if not personally, at least with the concept, of occassionally slapping a child’s face or whipping a child’s rear with a belt, or a wooden pot-spoon, as a normal, everyday means of discipline and punishment, rather than abuse? Certainly I don’t consider myself to have been abused… Thus the ratchet has turned, and once again, ordinary normal means of raising a child have been redefined as deviant. And as usual, neocon-ish twits like the Focus on the Family guy quoted in the news piece see this as “a victory for parental autonomy”, when it’s really quite a big defeat; we don’t need these Pyrrhic “victories”, thank you… It’s only a matter of time before the radicals win their case in Canada, and outlaw spanking altogether here. The Supreme Court justices aren’t fools, and know that they can’t get away with something quite so radical now; that will have to wait for another day. But a turn of the ratchet here, a turn there, and like the frog slowly boiled to death in gradually heated water (rather than one dropped in boiling water, which will jump out immediately), Canadians will suddenly wake up one day to have no freedoms left – save gay marriage and decriminalized pot smoking, of course…
excuse me, the last sentence
excuse me, the last sentence above should read, “…wake up one day to suddenly discover that they have no freedoms left – save gay marriage and decriminalized pot smoking, of course”.
From the last item in the
From the last item in the log entry:
“[I]t’s seemed to me recently that people with decidedly nonliberal views are seeing more and more clearly that they have the better arguments, and are learning to make them calmly, confidently and persuasively. […] Is that a mirage […]?”
It’s no mirage. A vocabulary is being developed and hard concepts worked out and enunciated—seemingly, as regards some of them, for the first time as far as anyone knows, maybe the first time ever. Together we’re figuring them out in our own heads, every blogger and correspondent on these discussion forums. We’ve no one to simply tell us the answers which we seek—no Locke, Voltaire, Diderot, or Montesquieu to go to, and just look them up, because the precise threats we face—things like radical racial/cultural neo-Marxism and its equivalent forms—didn’t actually directly confront those men as they do us. On these sites we’re doing something momentous: actually laying new groundwork for understanding tradition, the nation-state, the community, and other aspects of simple, ordinary normalness which certain forces are trying hard to distort, pervert, stifle and kill. We come away from our discussions with new weapons wherewith to mount defenses against forces that pose mortal danger to much of what we hold most dear in life.
Great posting and comments.
Great posting and comments. Really great!