Author: Ted

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned. A partial answer is that the media are to blame. Back in 1993, a cover story in the Nation identified the gay rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right. Tying the gay rights cause to the civil rights movement was a strategic masterstroke. Though homosexuality and race are two very different phenomena, the media took the equivalence for granted and rarely if ever gave opposing voices a chance to be heard. Though the unrelenting media campaign on behalf of same-sex marriage was critically important to its success, it wasn’t the most important thing. Americans accepted gay marriage so quickly because it resonated with what they had already come to believe about the meaning of heterosexual sex and marriage.

The Benedict Option, Rob Dreher

From Alan Sokal’s parody article in Social Text (1996):

“The π of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity; and the putative observer becomes fatally de-centered, disconnected from any epistemic link to a space-time point that can no longer be defined by geometry alone.”

The objective of social justice is to deconstruct liberal societies and reconstruct them as social justice societies, where [critical theorists] determine what is right and what is wrong for everybody. Here’s another truth: They tell us constantly the way that they’ll get the revolution is to apply and teach critical theory as widely as possible. What the theorists, ranging from the Frankfurt school to the radical New Left in the 50s and 60s to the postmodern deconstructionists to today’s Social Justice Warriors all understand and count on everyone not understanding is one simple truth: constant cynical criticism is a solvent that can dissolve liberal societies. This lets us start telling the truth about their tactics. Their tactics are simple: cynical criticism, doing it and teaching other people to do it, all the time, everywhere, about anything. It doesn’t matter whether your criticism is based in genuine understanding of what you’re complaining about. The point is to complain. And to criticize everything—even when it doesn’t make sense and, especially at times, when it is unfair.

The Truth about Critical Methods, James Lindsay

This may be my favorite show ending of all time. (From an episode of the Swedish detective series Beck)

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows. So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.

Matthew 10:28–33

How my 9-yo has been processing life in the time of Covid-19.

Continue reading “A Child’s Perspective on Life during Covid” →

Afternoon coffee
Wakes me from my workday dream—
A fleeting escape

Birdsong has replaced
The white noise of the office.
I do not miss it.

Augustine says that by making the Greek gods imperfect, Homer is actually attributing divine attributes to sinful men (not the other way around)—so that men can commit the same sins and say they are just imitating the gods.

But woe unto you, O torrent of human custom! Who shall stay your course? When will you ever run dry? How long will you carry down the sons of Eve into that vast and hideous ocean, which even those who have the Tree (for an ark) can scarcely pass over? Do I not read in you the stories of Jove the thunderer—and the adulterer? How could he be both? But so it says, and the sham thunder served as a cloak for him to play at real adultery. Yet which of our gowned masters will give a tempered hearing to a man trained in their own schools who cries out and says: “These were Homer’s fictions; he transfers things human to the gods. I could have wished that he would transfer divine things to us.” But it would have been more true if he said, “These are, indeed, his fictions, but he attributed divine attributes to sinful men, that crimes might not be accounted crimes, and that whoever committed such crimes might appear to imitate the celestial gods and not abandoned men.”