Category: Culture

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Culture Religion

There is a lot

of action coming from a theistic front these days. And while it could be described as a sort of apologetics it is not the old, discredited apologetics of the early believers (as far back as the first century and continuing for 2,00 years)

No, this is a science- and statistics-based argument. One that shows that it is unreasonable to think that everything is merely a happy (but random) event. Not to get too “in the weeds” here, but the weak anthropomorphic principle is simply not holding much water these days. The “New atheists” have been pretty much discredited.

Twenty years after the new atheism coursed triumphantly across the West, its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar is upon us. No less than Deity-denier Richard Dawkins marked the transmutation last year, via a viral video in which he called himself a hymn-and-small-c-church-loving “cultural Christian.” 

Categories
Culture Current Events

Yeah, I listened to

a lot of Punk music when I was in high school. But back then I was not a big fan of Johnny Rotten.

I’m more of a fan now. Not of his music, but I like that he has retained the “Punker” ethos while others like “The Clash” and Billy Idol have turned into the simpering “elite” who would eagerly prostitute themselves for the money that they once railed against. I mean, Billy Idol is working for a price-per-snarl basis in commercials, now. “Kiss Me Deadly,” indeed!

What a HUGE disappointment they have been! When I was a youth, they railed against “the establishment.” And I thought they actually meant it. Now they are just another Lefty butt-boy for hire, and the scales have fallen from my eyes…

But not Johnny Rotten. He remains a punker. Good for him. Because most older punkers are no longer “counter-culture.” They are just warmed-over “culture.” Pure pablum.

Categories
Culture

Yes, it’s gonna

be a very expensive flop. Maybe Disney will learn the lesson: Get woke, go broke. Yeah, maybe…

Walt Disney studio chiefs might be feeling their own brand of flop sweat, as one indicator after another piles up that that company’s $300 million bet on a live-action “Snow White” is going down faster than the Titanic if the iceberg had been armed with torpedoes and antiship missiles. 

I think actresses and actors should also learn a big lesson, here: Shut up and act! You need to preserve your “Hollywood mystique.” And the writers should also learn that “woke” is usually not a great money-making strategy!

Categories
Culture Religion

So for the last

few decades, the numbers of people who identify as Christian has dropped. But it appears that the slide is coming to an end, and numbers are stabilizing.

Part of that is because, as is repeatedly shown in polls, generation Z or the younger generation is far more conservative than their generation X peers. And far more religious. Indeed, the strong tendency is that when a person is politically conservative they are more religiously oriented.

Those two things very much go together. It is virtually never seen that a person becomes more religious the more Lefty they become. That’s a very rare bird. And the opposite is a very reliable rule of thumb: They strongly tend to lose any religion they once had as they adhere more and more solidly to Leftism.

It’s like root beer and vanilla ice cream. They just go together. You could make a Pepsi float, but that is not nearly as common as a root beer float. And a traditionally religious Leftist is like at Pepsi float-certainly possible, but not at all likely or common.

So why is that? Mainly it is because Leftism is their religion–it has supplanted whatever religion they once had. They have converted to Leftism, and no amount of logical reasoning will disabuse them of that. Because Leftism has become their new, primary religion, and they hold those beliefs with religious intensity. Delusional intensity, actually.

The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. And the numbers now bear it out. You left the faith if you were a leftist. And not because conservatives were “mean” or “lacked winsomeness”, but because the belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.

… Why does Woke Socialism repel Christian belief? The answer is simple: the left’s worldview is completely incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.

The two just cannot live together well. One ends up loving one and hating the other!

But let’s put that another way. Have you ever met anyone who converted to orthodox Christianity and, as a result, suddenly started advocating for Drag Queen Story Hour, or abortion-on-demand, or the abolition of the nuclear family, or the deconstruction of the faith?

Read the whole article. It is quite worth the time and effort.

Categories
Culture

It’s true:

Kathleen Kennedy has done what I thought was impossible: She ruined the TWO most iconic and beloved film franchises in history.

She has been a one-woman wrecking crew, and has done an unbelievable amount of damage. She truly has made a dog’s breakfast of these two legendary franchises (Star Wars and Indiana Jones). What a nightmare she has been! So what screwed it up so badly?

In a word, DIDACTICISM. See, the truth is that didacticism kills art. Whenever you start to use some medium to “preach” a position, you lose the artistic value of what has been going on. That is not to say the great art and great music does not have a message, but the messages secondary to the great composition.

But in didacticism, the entire edifice exists mainly to teach a lesson. That verse never results in great art. Yeah, maybe there are a few exceptions now and then over the centuries, but in general, no. And even when it works, it is not exactly in your face–it is pretty subtle (see: The Gift of The Magi).

And Kennedy absolutely sacrificed artistic integrity in storytelling to her insufferable wokeism. The result is that the art stunk. It’s really even hard to elevate that to the status of art. And that is a pity.

The films stink because they are not art, they are merely vehicles for Kennedy’s sociopolitical rantings. And that is both tiresome and obnoxious. It is certainly no fun. And the magic of those first films was that they were fun. And Kennedy has replaced that fun with an eat-your-peas scolding schoolmarm-ism. Kennedy has become the embodiment of a despotic and power-mad HOA, and the films cannot help but be colored by that. And it’s a baaaad color!

Categories
Culture

The Democrat

baby-making trends pretty much doom them. David Hogg expressed that widespread Democrat avenue when he said that he would NOT reproduce.

The demographics just don’t predict good things for them.

And he and his colleagues found a clear effect: Starting after Trump’s election, through the end of 2018, 38,000 fewer babies than would otherwise be expected were conceived in Democratic counties. By contrast, 7,000 more than expected were conceived in Republican counties in that same period.

… Republicans have generally given birth to more kids than Democrats have. But during those first years of the first Trump administration, the partisan birth gap widened by 17 percent. “You see a clear and undeniable shift in who’s having babies,” Dahl told me.

Who prevails in politics? Those who show up. And right now, Democrats are just not showing up.

Go ahead, David Hogg and all wacky Leftists. Get surgically sterilized. Please, don’t have kids…

Categories
Culture Political philosophy

Here’s the other

issue: These mock elections are important because the kids by and large reflect the true opinions of their parents.

Sure, there WILL be some rebellion as kids deliberately think and act differently than their parents. But what we are seeing is to a large extent a reflection of parental base values.

But it also illuminates an interesting phenomenon–Let me give you an example from my own life:

I am a born rebel. I often say that I was born to be a burr under someone’s saddle. My late father (who was an intellectual prodigy farm boy who went on to get a doctorate from Berkeley and a career as a college professor) was a HUGE rebel who was deeply offended by anything he saw as “unfair.” He was a much more “raw,” open fighter than I am.

But in my long academic and clinical career, I (much like my father) always looked from the outside like a very conforming person. For example, as a Naval officer stationed with Marines, I cut my hair in a flat top “high and tight.” Other docs (with hair just slightly too long for regulations) would mock me and say that I was just trying to curry favor with the Marines. I would just act sheepish and say nothing.

But that accusation was not true. In my mind I would say, “You don’t get it–I am openly mocking YOU!”

In my graduate training, one professor (on her own) “got” what I was doing. And she supported me in it–and we laughed together about it. But most professors could or would not see beyond the veneer.

I loved doing a post-doc at Harvard because I could rebel by… looking and acting conventional. The Harvard folks didn’t get the joke, either–I was making fun of THEM!

So I’m glad that the German kids have something to rebel against. And that rebellion drives them straight into the AfD. Yes, rebel toward good sense.

Rebellion can be a good thing. For all its self-serving and showy talk, the Left simply can’t tolerate rebellion against them. And this shows that they have gone from being avant-garde to being just garden-variety garde. They have gone FAR astray from the ethos of Punk Rock and are now merely cringing curs hoping to get a scrap thrown to them from the master’s table.

Categories
Culture Political philosophy

Vance tells Euros

the truth; They melt down. See, Europe does not have the deep-seated (and rather transparent to us) expectation of civil rights. The governments were born, culturally, in a Monarchy. Of course there has been change, but their roots are in Monarchy. And so there is this bedrock, unspoken assumption that there are rulers and there are serfs.

Yes, there has been change, but those fundamental European cultural assumptions are both powerful and transparent. In the USA, there is a quite different underlying set of cultural assumptions, one that just assumes individual civil rights–that the “rulers” are, in fact, no better than the rest of us. The USA was born in rebellion to Monarchy. Europe simply doesn’t have that same underlying cultural bedrock assumption. Britains and Frenchmen and Germans aren’t just Americans with funny accents. There are fundamental cultural differences–Europeans truly are foreign!

The Poles and Czechs are FAR more culturally aligned in that way with the United States than are the Germans or the French. But even then, there are major differences.

Sure, there is some lip service to civil rights (“A man’s home is his castle”), but it is just that–meaningless prancing and exhibiting–all hat and no cattle. I mean, ask if that man can have a firearm in his castle…

Do read the whole thing. It’s well worth the effort.

Categories
Culture

AZ is starting

to get it. And this is a HUGE benefits to DOGE. People in the several states are getting very much sick of the HUGE government spending.

It is essential to “claw back that heavy hand of government,” Steve Montenegro, speaker of the Arizona State House of Representatives, said during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, discussing state-level Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts and more.

Now that DOGE is doing it, many states are, too. It is the sensation that is sweeping the nation!

Categories
Culture Lefty Political Strategy

I dunno,

there sure are a lot of soy boys! Fetterman makes Conservative noises now and then. But of course he is FAR from reliable. So when he does or says a decent thing, I will cheer. But that is just gravy.

In a new interview with Puck’s Tara Palmieri, Fetterman offered a stark assessment of the Democrats’ ability to regain support among white male voters. Asked about how the party could win white men “like himself” back, Fetterman responded: “I’m not sure if that’s possible, to be honest.” He then warned that support among that demographic had been “seriously eroding for a while”. What’s more, “In some cases, people don’t even want to say it publicly […] but they just feel like the other side seems to be saying, ‘Men are the problem.’”