I hate the expression “deep down”. Generally speaking, it sounds like the place where some asshat can project what they want for your life onto your subconscious. It’s acceptable if they’re well-meaning, but it feels like something that will stop a conversation dead, whether its political in nature, or if a friend is trying to tell you to do something that “you know deep down” is the right decision. 

But, as I am learning, there is a defense mechanism there, in that some behaviors are so irrational, that you must wonder if they know it to be such when they’re not behaving this way. My best example for this is usually the terminally online (or perpetually marching, when it’s warm out) political activist. Their language never changes; if it doesn’t fit in a tweet (or on a sign, when it’s warm out), they don’t say it. it’s where we get the NPC meme from. Further, they begin from a position of fiery, self-righteous anger and only seem capable of getting angrier, but incapable of thinking with depth and complexity. A writer for Vox managed to distill this kind of activist in a long screed against how online discourse has become extremely tiresome, with emotion that stands vastly out of proportion with its actual impact on the world. And so, after 2 election cycles that were vitriolic, divisive, full of sound and fury and changed nothing, one has to wonder if the activist is getting tired and simply doesn’t know how to stop, or if they’re having fun being horrible as the Lockdown Cult did in 2020 and most of 2021?

In other words, can they be made to stop being cruel, or is that just who they are now?

The political lessons of 2021 are a series of warnings that stem from the problems of 2020. This is entirely due to the ideology of Team Lockdown dominating the zeitgeist. Because that ideology can be seen, and I don’t mean this lightly, by every decent person as fundamentally evil, the lessons from life in its grasp are as follows

Continue reading Political Reflections: Lessons of Team Lockdown →

A bunch of random, sedimentary (except point 3) thoughts have come across my head in the last several days and I thought they’d either be interesting or show you that, while to other people’s random may be something trivial or something else about bacon or toast (nothing wrong with that, it’s probably preferable to have your random be more focused on levity), my random, incomplete thoughts look like this.

I don’t really care how well this reads, I just need to get back into writing and get my head on straight. I’ve felt “not myself” for the last few months and this feels like part of the way back. I’m sticking with what’s easier; political stuff first, then moving into a bit of religion and not even trying to write happy after that. I’ve been mentally stuck for the past several months.

Continue reading Wandering Mind 3 →

Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, let me take the speck out of your eye” when all the time, there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye” – Matthew 7:3-5

I find myself in a position that is generally antithetical to my being as a politico; I am feeling a calmness and a bit of disappointed resignation to where we are headed as a country. I am not happy about what’s coming, but I don’t see an alternative. We have a toxic, angry, partisan bubble completely devoid of complex thought or good faith conversation and nothing good can come from that. We’re seeing that cycle play itself out particularly in the field of racial injustice. Black Lives Matter, the organization, seems to be so-named as a semantic sleight of hand. Those who are against the organization can be said to be against Black people generally. In the same way, those against “the Affordable Care Act” were against “Affordable Care” or the “Patriot Act” dissenters were unpatriotic and so forth. The tactic of usurping the moral high-ground through the use of language is a simple, dirty trick. 

Continue reading “Evil Is Universal” →

There is a trend in politics today where the people who were ultimately wrong are only proven wrong after most people stopped paying attention and subsequently fall silent, one assumes this is because they are hoping the other people didn’t notice. This is true in most cases except one. First, it is obviously true in terms of the COVID lockdown where the people who were ranting about anything short of a full lockdown was killing grandma and everything else up to and including domestic abuse was effectively collateral compared to the viral wave that was fast approaching and yet always two weeks away before cresting on the shore with an anti-climactic shudder.

Continue reading Anger+Inertia →

Two of the most contemptible arguments right now, easily in the top 3, are the arguments in favor of the lockdown and the arguments in favor of gun control. On one hand, anyone in favor of the lockdown restrictions as they are in the Northeast is still looking at the damage being done to small businesses, domestic/child abuse victims, cancer patients and the like, to say nothing of drug abuse, suicide and how many people were sent into poverty over this and insisting that it will all be worth it in the end, once we get that magic vaccine…and once the vaccine is universally available, and then once the new vaccine is proven more than 90% effective, then, one imagines, when the vaccine is taken by 95% of the population. Only then will the lockdowns be able to end.

If you think I’m joking, the goalposts have jet engines on them that were just installed in April. Those things tend to last a while. Put nothing past the people under the sway of this “heroic” argument.

Continue reading A Sign of threes →

Continue reading Dangerous →

When I was at Point Park, our final English Comp 2 project was to craft an argument for or against some proposition. The same professor had given us the simple instruction to write a story about a friend of ours the year before. The objective was simple: write well, present well. No arbitrary page requirement, word count, nothing. Just make your case. Because it was a theater school primarily and a cinema school a close second, there weren’t many conservatives in the room save for me and a running theme of the presentations was always a conclusion of “what the government should do” to correct this or that societal malady. It’s a pattern that continues on the left, even in matters of the Constitution. The government needs to pass hate speech laws, the government needs to take away guns, the government needs to protect people and so on.

And I noticed a theme here in the discourse, everyone who disagrees any of the above is declared to be one who hates the poor, likes the status quo of people dying senselessly or some other emotional ploy.  But what I realized was that, like most things on the left, good intentions are used to hide intellectual cowardice or some other insidious agenda. Continue reading Abdication →

Our theme for the semester ties in with the theme for Jubilee about how “Everything Matters” and tonight, I am going to talk about community and relationships. I want to start with a strange paradox. We are more connected than any people in history, you can reach someone through Hangouts, Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat, iMessage, regular message, Hangouts, Skype, 50 different email accounts and God only knows what I’m missing, and yet survey after survey such as one from the HRSA seems to demonstrate that people here feel alone. Loneliness, especially long-term leads to depression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness and if you already have it, it’s likely to get worse. There are physical health risks as well, but the studies I found had comparisons to being alone is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, which that implies you need to be around people all the time, which as we’ll see isn’t really accurate, let alone realistic. We could say that “Community and relationships matter because loneliness is a serious health risk” and leave it alone. But that’s basically telling someone who is an introvert or has had bad experiences with people or just isn’t great socially to just “go out there and talk to people”, which is completely against what they think they’re capable of.  And it seems that Christian culture is more bent towards extroversion and being with all of the people, all of the time. In his book “Introverts in the Church”, Adam McHugh points to a 2004 study of Christian students to describe Jesus according to temperaments mentioned on the Myers-Briggs scale. Most showed a tendency to paint Jesus in their own image with one exception; regardless of where they were on that system, 97% of them said that Jesus was an extrovert.  McHugh writes that “the perception of an extroverted Jesus might reflect a tendency within American culture to value extroversion over introversion…the slant toward extroversion in the larger culture has infiltrated the church”. He goes on to say he interviewed Christians who identified as introverted who said they were having difficulty finding their place in their church. He tells the story of one friend who was intensely closed off and so even the positive relationships she did have came with a caveat. The “ideal” he says of intimacy with the community was that people were constantly together and deeply involved with what’s going on with each other, and the more engaged people were, the closer they were to God. Her level of faith became tied to how outgoing she was. That standard, to me is terrifying, I barely talk about what’s going on in my life, which I’m about to do that quite a bit but there’s a purpose behind it Continue reading WKSK →