Kids!

Posted on Facebook but worth re-posting. There is a serious lesson to be learned in this mess, and I hope no one overstates or misinterprets the seriousness of the situation. As serious as it is, this is nontheless simply a situation of a foolish, impulsive child doing a foolish thing which had serious consequences in the real world. Now it’s time to correct the error and for everyone to heal. That’s really all there is here.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/09/30/us/virginia-girl-fake-story-about-cut-dreadlocks/index.html?r=https%3A%2F%2Fapple.news%2FAE-eIecOlQeiVG9LKMTi4Lw

Facebook post:
I feel sorry for everyone who was hurt by this, including her family. Which leaves the question, is there any deep lesson contained in this? If there is one, it would be that you should always remember when listening to stories by kids is that kids are notorious for making up stories and for doing really foolish things without any consideration of the consequences. As I said so many times, kids are idiots. The good news is, they tend to grow out of it.

I will repeat the story that was told to a group of us intern teachers by our superintendent as we started our first job. He recalled when he was a young teacher he was told the story as well. There was, once upon a time, a long long time ago, a teacher who started every year by sending a note home for parents which said, “I won’t believe everything your children tell me about you if you won’t believe everything your children tell you about me.“ Good advice.
😏

Rational Is As Rational Does

Once again Dawkins presents himself as a rational moderate individual on the subject of religion. Of course, he is nothing of the kind.

Dawkins is not offering people the choice and letting them choose for themselves. When being interviewed by Lawrence Krauss, he bullied Krauss into agreeing with him that anyone who believes in anything spiritual should be banned from being a member of any profession. That means that a person who believed in anything other than absolute materialism would not be allowed to be a teacher, Doctor, Professor, lawyer, or any other profession. He wants to make this the law of the land.

I refer to this as the Atheist Inquisition.

I have no problem with atheists. I have no problem with theists. I have a problem with extremists. Dawkins loves present himself in moderate dress, but beneath the stage make up, he is an intolerant fanatic bigot.

https://apple.news/AYyaW_zMFTUGIOWJmoc-rOQ

Permit me to also note that under Dawkins’ inquisitorial rule, Albert Einstein would have been banned from being a physicist. After all, Einstein believed in something spiritual, if he wasn’t exactly sure what it was himself. He said much on the topic, the following three quotes making my point clearly.

“A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty - it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” (Albert Einstein)

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” (Albert Einstein, 1954)

“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.” (Albert Einstein)

Remember, Dawkins was insistent that any belief in anything other than absolute materialism is cause for banning membership in any profession. Einstein’s conviction that mere materialism was not an adequate explanation for the entirety of reality, while not religious in the ordinary sense, was certainly not absolutely and rigidly materialistic.

Self-destruction: An Overview

From The Atlantic.  This article appears in the July 2019 print edition with the headline “George Orwell’s Unheeded Warning.”

I hope people will find the bits I have quoted from this article sufficiently intriguing and provoking to go to the source and read it in its entirety.   It is well worth the time for both right and left wingers.   

Unlike the author of this article, I loved 1984 much more than Brave New World from the beginning.  I have always realized that the answer to the question, “How did he know?” lies in an error in the question itself. It’s not how did he know what would happen in politics, it’s how did he know the nature of human beings.   There is so much that is so very obvious if you step outside of your culture and your society for even a moment or two. But doing so is profoundly difficult for the vast majority of people.  >“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” Orwell wrote.<

Today it doesn’t take much to make either the right or the left surrender their freedom and even their intelligence.  Rationality is not a valued commodity under any circumstances and in today’s fetid atmosphere of passions it has almost entirely vanished from public discourse. >Unfreedom today is voluntary. It comes from the bottom up.<

>Orwell didn’t foresee “that the common man and woman would embrace doublethink as enthusiastically as the intellectuals and, without the need for terror or torture, would choose to believe that two plus two was whatever they wanted it to be.”<

While the right wing’s abandonment of sanity is based almost entirely on fear and the resultant rage and so is easy to understand, the left wing’s movement in this direction is rooted in the desire for a perfect utopian justice. >Progressive doublethink—which has grown worse in reaction to the right-wing kind—creates a more insidious unreality because it operates in the name of all that is good. Its key word is justice—a word no one should want to live without. But today the demand for justice forces you to accept contradictions that are the essence of doublethink.

For example, many on the left now share an unacknowledged but common assumption that a good work of art is made of good politics and that good politics is a matter of identity. The progressive view of a book or play depends on its political stance, and its stance—even its subject matter—is scrutinized in light of the group affiliation of the artist: Personal identity plus political position equals aesthetic value.<

The articles author points out that today >...intelligent people do the work of eliminating their own unorthodoxy without the Thought Police<

Finally,  I must agree with his conclusion that >Good art doesn’t come from wokeness, and social problems starved of debate can’t find real solutions. ...Orwell wrote in 1946. “What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.” Not much has changed since the 1940s. The will to power still passes through hatred on the right and virtue on the left.

Again, I suggest you read the original article, Conservative or Liberal, it is well worth your time.  As for me, to quote an old and rather silly parody song about the days of the Troubles in Ireland, “Me, being strictly neutral, I bashed everyone in sight.”

Note: my apologies for the poor proofreading. My health is really not good at the moment and I’m just not up to the effort.

A Pox On Both Their Tweets

In response to the hysteria over the movie American Sniper:

Sorry it took me so long to respond. But I think a response on this particular debate is essential. Both sides have chosen extreme positions presenting a typical forced choice-false dichotomy situation. The truth lies between the two extremist positions.

What did Michael Moore actually tweet? Here are the quotes: "My uncle killed by sniper in WW2. We were taught snipers were cowards. Will shoot u in the back. Snipers aren't heroes, and invaders r worse."  And later, "What would Jesus do? Oh, I know what he would do – hide on top of the roof and shoot people in the back!"

While fully supporting Mr. Moore's right to say whatever he wants, I have a right to respond.  My response is:  My uncle killed by a submarine in World War II. Submariners are cowards. Or, my uncle killed by artillery in World War II. Artillerymen are cowards. Or my uncle killed by bomb in World War II. Bombardiers are cowards.  

Exactly the same logic applies.  Each one of these individuals killed from a distance without being directly open to return fire from the individual killed. Does Mr. Moore suggest that all these men are cowards? What about men who fire a missile? What about men who plant a landmine and are long gone by the time it explodes? Tankers who fire from an armored vehicle?

I don't like Michael Moore. I haven't liked Michael Moore ever since I first heard of him. He reminds me of a liberal, although admittedly quite a bit milder, Rush Limbaugh. My opinion of him has not improved in this current debate.

Soldiers do their duty. Sometimes that duty is ugly, cruel, and brutal.  The justification for such actions is that they are done to protect our country, and our loved ones at home, from the forces of evil. War is an evil which is sometimes the lesser of two evils. As long as we do need to go to war, war will be ugly. 

Yes, it would be nice if we would all be so perfectly Christian we would never need to go to war.  I am certain Jesus would refuse to go to war. Does Mr. Moore suggest that we should never go to war even if attacked as we were in World War II? I doubt it.  His uncle certainly went to war, even though that's not what Jesus would do.

Moore is is just as much an emotionalist as are his Republican opponents. Facts don't matter. Only what feels right to them in their guts is correct.  

I must add that Mr. Eastwood pointed out that a movie about how soldiers suffer when they come home and how their families suffer from the horrors of war can't really be called a movie that glorifies war.  Mr. Eastwood's political opinions are childishly naïve, but I have to agree with him on this one. By the way, I haven't seen the movie, so I don't have an opinion about it. I do have an opinion about extremists who take a movie and turn it into a huge sociopolitical issue.

I don't like them.