Playing the Indian Card

Thursday, March 28, 2024

Shanahan In

 


I knew nothing about her until her name came up as a possible RFK VP pick, but I think Nicole Shanahan was a good choice for that ticket. That she has no political experience, in the current climate, is a plus. RFK is running to change things. She can at least pose as a “tech entrepreneur,” and that’s a background demonstrated to be marketable by such figures as Andrew Yang and Vivek Ramaswamy. Tech entrepreneurs are modern culture heroes. Her youth contrasts well with old Joe Biden and old Donald Trump. She is a glamorous figure, which plays into the Kennedy brand: “return to Camelot.”

The immediate criticism from the right is that she is too left-wing. I don’t think most voters think in those terms. They simply either want change or the status quo. She introduces an issue which is neither obviously left nor right, but could appeal across the spectrum: chronic disease and what is causing it. This dovetails with Kennedy’s concern over vaccines and the environment to make what looks like a coherent ticket and platform. Which speaks of sincerity, an important part of RFK Jr.’s appeal. And it serves to shift the political discourse, which is the whole point of a third-party effort.

Something else occurs to me: she looks like a replacement for Tulsi Gabbard. She ticks a number of the same boxes. As if Kennedy had his mind set on Gabbard, had his strategies worked out assuming she was his running mate, and then could not get her; so he went for a reasonable facsimile. There were indeed early rumours that Gabbard would be his pick; at one point he went to Honolulu, in her home state, to make some rumoured announcement that did not happen. I thought Kennedy-Gabbard would be a dream ticket.

Perhaps a planned announcement was called off because Gabbard got a better offer. Perhaps Trump, seeing this about to happen, picked up the phone and told Gabbard to hold off, and she would be his own VP pick. There are recent rumours that Ramaswamy is out of contention, and Gabbard has recently publicly said she would be honoured. This is not something a politician usually says if they do not expect to be selected—it makes them look needy and embarrasses them when they are not chose.

Gabbard makes excellent sense for Trump as well. If Trump does not pick a woman, when both Biden and Kennedy have, that could hurt his image with women, a huge voting block. Especially in the face of prior claims by his Democrat opponents that Trump is anti-woman. As a Samoan and a Hindu, she also blunts charges of racism or “Christian nationalism” against Trump. But as a woman of faith, she is probably also viewed favourably by his Christian supporters. As an independent and former Democrat, she could broaden appeal to independent voters and disaffected Democrats. She is, like Trump, an anti-establishment figure; this would send a reassuring message to his supporters that he is not going to be controlled by the existing party bosses. Because Trump’s appeal is always that he will stand up to the “uniparty” and the beltway mafia.


Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Owens Out

 


There is now a feud going on between Candace Owens and the Daily Wire. They recently “parted ways.” And the matter has split the entire right wing. 

My own take is that Daily Wire is consistently right in this dispute, and Owens is consistently wrong—that is, on her veiled antisemitism and her criticism of Israel in Gaza. Moreover, in the current context of rising antisemitism everywhere, Owens’s comments are dangerous.

I think what is really going on is that Candace Owens loves a fight, and fighting has always been, after all, good for her ratings. It is her established MO. She has waded unprovoked into big public spats with Steven Crowder, Cardi B, Megyn Kelly.

She has been trying to provoke Boring and Shapiro. Tweeting “Christ is King” to a Jew in the middle of an unrelated argument may not be antisemitic, but it is deliberately provocative.

We want people like Owens around. Every now and then, we need a cat belled, or someone to notice the Emperor is naked. 

On the other hand, while courage is the essential virtue, it does not ensure the presence of other virtues. Courage was Hitler’s one great virtue. Because he had this virtue, he was not the worst of men; but because he had this virtue, he did the worst of harm.

Were I the Daily Wire, I believe I too would have “parted ways” with Candace Owens. Not that I want to silence her; and the Daily Wire is certainly not silencing her by doing so. They are probably giving her free publicity. But I would not want to be associated with her; for I cannot see her principles.


Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Signs of the Times


 


Catholicism Is Growing in Korea

 




Canada Seen from Abroad

 




Peace at Any Price

 



The current fate of the left reminds me of the fable of the Boy Who Cried “Wolf.” They have gotten themselves into this situation, of nobody any longer taking them seriously, either because they were never taught this wisdom growing up, out of hubris, or out of desperation. They have repeatedly stirred up imaginary crises and called everyone to the barricades: the “climate crisis”; the Covid lockdowns and the urgency of vaccination; describing January 6 as an insurrection; pulling the cord on the Emergency Act over the truckers’ protest; declaring a sudden assault on and urgent need to protect aboriginal rights, gay rights, trans rights; warning of a white supremacist or a Nazi under every bed; and so on and on seemingly ad infinitem. The latest being the charge that Trump, if not elected, will somehow launch a “bloodbath.”

It worked so well for them, they kept doing it. Now I feel the general public is fed up. The general public wants peace and quiet. When appeasing the left’s concerns looked like the easiest path, they appeased. But they are never appeased; appeasement has not worked. There is always a new, and more extreme, demand. 

Right about now, the general public is deciding that the only way to restore social peace is to turn decisively away from the left and refuse any more demands.

They should have stopped at the Sudetenland.


Monday, March 25, 2024

Now We're All Far Right

 



https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1771934645380100570?s=20


The Potter's Hands

 



Elon Musk predicts that soon, AI will replace all human jobs. He says this does not mean we all go on Universal Basic Income—rather, on Universal High Income. “There will be no shortage of goods and services.”

I have some trouble getting my head around how this can work. And just because Musk is the world’s proven leading expert on technological futures does not mean his prediction is right. Experts are usually wrong about the future. But if he is right, what will people actually end up doing all day?

It seems to me there is one area of human endeavour that AI cannot ever automate. Create genuine art. Sure, it can create commercial art, Hallmark card level “art,” doggerel. But AI cannot, after all, be inspired. All it is every doing is recycling what has already been done by someone somewhere. In writing terms, it will always be boilerplate and cliché. One way to understand art and the aesthetic experience is that it is a direct Vulcan mind tap, a revelation that one is listening to a fellow intelligent soul. You’re never going to get that, and anyone with a functioning sense of beauty will find this apparent. You will get only the soulless suburbs. You will get endless Star Wars sequels. You will get formula. You will get mere prettiness or, at best, mere entertainment.

That said, it is also true that very few real people can generate genuine art either.

Be that as it may, given the apparent fact that everything else can do can be done as well by machines, it seems to follow that the reason we are here on Earth, the reason God created man, is to create art, to produce beauty. Or at least to all do our best to do so. To sit on the clouds or hilltops with our harps or lyres, and sing. It is fairly obvious that this is just what Jesus and the Bible says:

“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

That “city on a hill” is the New Jerusalem:

“The city shone like a precious stone, like a jasper, clear as crystal. … The city was perfectly square, as wide as it was long. … The wall was made of jasper, and the city itself was made of pure gold, as clear as glass. 19 The foundation stones of the city wall were adorned with all kinds of precious stones. The first foundation stone was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh yellow quartz, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chalcedony, the eleventh turquoise, the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls; each gate was made from a single pearl. The street of the city was of pure gold, transparent as glass.”

The completed cosmos is a vast and perfect work of art. God has given us nature, and the potter’s wheel, our minds. We are to perfect it as co-creators, and that is what art is.

If we can’t do it, we can at least try.


Sunday, March 24, 2024

The Single Bullet

 

Because humans are herd animals, like dogs, our instinct is to defer to authority, and assume that those in power are smarter and more honest than we are. We see this in the Stockholm syndrome when people are kidnapped. Of course it also applies to authorities and governments in general.

Every now and then, the curtain gets ripped away.

It was torn badly in 1963 when JFK was assassinated. Just about everyone felt it did not smell right. Conspiracy theories abounded. The young at least briefly adopted the slogan “question authority.” And widely bucked the call to fight in Vietnam. Trust was lost.

Over time, this settled down, at least to a large extent. In Sixties terms, we all sold out. For one thing, Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” came along, and was so unconvincing in its claims that, intentionally or not, the entire enterprise of questioning the Warren Commission findings was discredited. The cool kids weren’t supposed to believe in “conspiracy theories” any more. Blaming the CIA for anything domestic was “tinfoil hat” stuff, compelling evidence of mental illness.

That alone should make us suspicious—whenever a given position is ruled out of public or polite discourse, it is probably because it is inconveniently true.

Now even the JFK assassination is hot again. Now people are again asking questions. Because recent events have caused another collapse in trust in the government and in authorities generally. I think a bigger one than we saw in the Sixties.

In light of the draconian Covid lockdowns, the fixing of the primary process in the US, the Chinese election interference in Canada, the Epstein affair, the lies about the vaccine, the attempts to silence free speech, to shut down truckers and farmers, the lawfare against Trump and the obvious persecution of protesters on January 6 in the US and the Freedom Convoy in Canada, the charge that the “Deep State” actually staged a silent coup in 1963 sounds plausible, even likely. 

We all know nefarious things are going on. How far do they extend?

And how, short of revolution, do we re-establish social trust?


Catholicism and the Bible

 


A friend of mine who is a Protestant minister put a post critical of Catholicism up on Facebook a few days ago. It has now disappeared from her feed. It listed a series of Catholic dogmas which were purportedly “not in the Bible.” 

I assume she got some pushback from Catholics, or even from fellow Protestant ministers, and thought better of it. 

Catholic teaching is always Biblical, in the sense that the Bible is the primary evidence for the teaching. It is always an inference from the text. One can, no doubt, have other interpretations. But if your interpretation is different, you need to make your argument.

But there is a more fundamental problem with this charge: it assumes the doctrine of “sola scriptura,” that all truth comes from scripture. This is a Protestant tenet, not a Catholic one. It is from Martin Luther. So even if you could establish that some Catholic teaching is not “in the Bible,” you have only proven that Catholicism is not Protestantism. Science is also not Protestantism. This does not prove that it is wrong.  

And, for Protestants, from whence comes the assurance that the Bible as we have it is complete, accurate, and authoritative? What gives them such assurance? Private revelation?

The Catholic answer is that its accuracy is certified by the Catholic Church, which selected and preserved this canon. Jesus gave his mandate to the church, not to a book of writings. “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” (Granted, this itself is recorded in the Bible) So the Bible cannot logically disprove Catholicism; Catholicism proves the Bible.


Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Real Genocide

 



In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.


Friday, March 22, 2024

The Loss of Beauty

 


“In evangelization,” Bishop Baron has said, “start with beauty.”

There is a problem with this. Bishop Barron is assuming that beauty, unlike ethics, is accessible to everyone. Many people do not get beauty. Perhaps as many as do not get ethics.

Attending a writers’ meet last evening, I was disappointed that nobody else pointed out the beautiful turns of phrase the featured writer used. “Warmoon.” “None of man, none of nonsense.” “Only the steel husk of empires.” 

“He really ought to be a poet,” I observed.

“Why? You can have beautiful language in prose.” 

You can, up to a point, but then what is the difference between prose and poetry? Poetry is, definitively, beautiful language: “the best words in the best order,” per Coleridge. If the beauty of the language is the focus, that is poetry, not prose.

I gather that poetry was invisible to those present, because beauty in language was invisible to those present—none of them, after all, noticed it in the passage. To them, although writers, writing was apparently about entertainment—an exciting and captivating plot.

One can, of course, have an exciting or captivating plot in either poetry or prose. See Beowulf, or the Odyssey. But put it in beautiful language, and it is poetry.

Even in a supposed poetry group I attended a week ago, a group of published poets, I found no sensitivity to beauty of language. All were to submit a poem on the theme, “on Earth we are all briefly gorgeous.” All submitted, with no special elegance, an expression of some trauma they experienced personally; as if poetry was about venting emotions or grievances. It was only a matter of “my suffering is greater than your suffering.”

This is psychotherapy, not poetry. 

Worse, psychotherapy doesn’t work. It leads only to narcissism.

When I remarked to a well-intentioned friend that I found a particular woman unutterably beautiful, he assumed I wanted to hook up with her. Despite being married. 

We seem to commonly associate beauty with mere sexual attractiveness. With a physical rather than a spiritual pleasure.

Most people say they get a sunset. I wonder… do they? Or do they just know they are supposed to?

Most people seem to like music. But are they reacting only to some physical sensation, like the urge to move your body and feel the healthy stretch of muscles and deep breathing?

Entire religions seem not to get beauty: Islam, with its iconoclasm, banning visual representations. Protestantism, wanting once to ban dancing, the theatre, and celebrations like Christmas. Such things were, according to the Puritans, if not idolatrous, sinfully frivolous. 

This is disturbing, because beauty is one of the three transcendentals, along with the true and the good, from which value itself comes. God himself is definitely, as St. Augustine formulated it, perfect beauty, perfect truth or being, and perfect good.

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!”

To be insensitive to beauty is to turn away from God. 

And I think we are losing our sense of beauty in recent years. The world is getting uglier. The arts seem moribund. 

Perhaps Bishop Barron is right, however. Jesus did not come for everyone; he makes this clear in the Beatitudes. Perhaps sensitivity to beauty is the sign that you are of his flock.

Cultures differ widely in their ability to appreciate beauty. The English, Germans, and Americans have no sense of beauty. The Romance nations, France, Spain, Italy, are good at it. So are the Slavs, and the Celts. The Koreans are much better at it than the Japanese or Chinese. 

In Canada, it is easy to see the difference. Toronto has little beauty. Even the people are slovenly in dress. In Montreal or Quebec City, there is beauty around every corner. The beauty in Ontario is only in small towns settled by the Irish or Scots: Westport, Perth, Elora. Saint John, heavily settled by the Irish, is awash in beauty, the houses brightly coloured.

Why the difference? To some extent, no doubt, religion—the difference between Catholic and Protestant—has its influence. But it also seems to me that the ability to appreciate beauty is related in some mysterious way to the experience of suffering. Jesus more or less says this in the Beatitudes.