Social Issues – Page 6 – Blogs For Victory

How Much Nonsense Do You Believe?

April 15, 2012April 14, 2012Mark Noonan95 Comments

Just a little test here, folks – a challenge, if you will. It is my contention that most of us believe a series of falsehoods which distort our ability to make rational decisions. This is far more prevalent on the left than on the right, but all of us are immersed in a sea of lies and thus even when we’re trying to get it right, we can often get it wrong because some facet of our action is motivated by a lie. So, here’s something to think about – how many times have you heard the phrase, “believe in yourself”? Ten thousand times? A million? I’ll bet that 100% of us have heard it and that 99% of us believe it. If you just believe in yourself, you can get on. Just this past Saturday morning I was watching the TV for a few minutes and there was Donald Trump saying “I believe in myself”. But, is there anything to it? A quote:

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, “That man will get on; he believes in himself.” And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written “Hanwell.”(the name of a lunatic asylum – ed.) I said to him, “Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.” He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. “Yes, there are,” I retorted, “and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote: the man who has it has ‘Hanwell’ written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.” And to all this my friend the publisher made this very deep and effective reply, “Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?” After a long pause I replied, “I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.” This is the book that I have written in answer to it. – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter II, The Maniac

Kind of puts a new perspective on it, doesn’t it? The phrase “believe in yourself” has been entirely ingrained in your existence (I speak here to the 99% who currently believe in the notion – if you are of the 1% who saw through it all along, then you may skip this). It is just part of your mental make-up…it is a dogma you not only don’t question, but don’t even see a reason to question. If you bother to read the rest of the book, you’ll find the answer to what you should believe in instead of yourself: God. If you believe in God then you’ve taken that first step to wisdom (and if you maintain a genuine belief in God while you believed that you should “believe in yourself” then you avoided the worst errors attendant upon believing in yourself). To believe in yourself is a form of idolatry – it is part of the first lie of hell (“you shall be as gods”). And it leads to all sorts of errors – like, just for one in ten thousand examples, the man who will leave his wife and children so that he can pursue some dream or other…breaking his word and destroying a family because he “believes in himself”.

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Are You a Racist?

April 14, 2012April 14, 2012Retired Spook115 Comments

Back when I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s, the term “racist” actually meant something. Today we throw the word around so casually that it’s virtually lost its meaning for most people. So just exactly what is a “racist”?

Webster defines racism as follows:

1
: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race

2
: racial prejudice or discrimination

I’ve NEVER thought of myself as a racist, and yet I’ve been accused of being one on this blog when I’ve written that I believed blacks in America have been duped and suckered into voting in virtual lockstep for Democrats in exchange for affirmative action programs and free “stuff”. I don’t know how any casual observer could perceive it any other way. If that makes me a racist, well then I wear that as a badge of honor. It hasn’t changed the way I look at blacks as individuals. I’ve been hoping for nearly half a century that MLK’s dream would come true, and we would get to a point where everyone would judge others by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. I’m still waiting for that to happen, and, in fact, it appears we’re drifting farther away from that ideal rather than toward it. Much of our current problems, IMO, can be laid at the feet of the current administration. Never in my lifetime has there been a president who has been more divisive, particularly along racial lines, than this president. What a poor record for one who was touted as being the first “post racial president.

As I said in a comment in a previous thread, my overall experience with other races, particular blacks, has been pretty good. I graduated from high school in 1963, a year before the Civil Rights Act was passed. Democrats held substantial majorities in Congress back then, and it wouldn’t have passed had not a substantial majority of Republicans voted for it. All that was eclipsed a year or two later with LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty, two of the most massive government wealth transfer mechanisms every seen at that time. Those two programs were the lynch pins in the Left’s effort to destroy the black family. OK, let me rephrase that and give Progressives the benefit of the doubt that their initial goal was not to destroy the black family. The destruction of the black family was simply an unintended consequence of the Left’s effort to create a solid block of reliable votes. Regardless of the initial motivation, the destruction of the black family is the root of many of our current societal problems.

Prior to high school graduation, I’ll have to admit, my exposure to interaction with blacks was pretty limited. I didn’t dislike them or not get along with them; I just didn’t interact with them much. Most of the blacks in Fort Wayne, Indiana where I grew up went to one inner-city high school – Central High (since converted into a vocational center for the Fort Wayne Community Schools) We played them in basketball — they beat us — we shook their hands, end of story. As I got out into world, I began to interact more with other races, but still I don’t recall ever encountering any of the types of problems we see today. It just never dawned on me to treat someone differently because of the color of his or her skin.

So just exactly what is racism in modern terms? Is it something that can eventually be overcome. Will our kids do a better job than we’ve done, or is it going to take a race war before we finally move on? It’s pretty obvious, from discussions about the recent Trayvon Martin incident, that our resident Progressives see it through a completely different lens than do our Conservatives and Libertarians. Let’s see if we can have a civilized discussion about it.

Thou Shalt Not Have Strange gods…

March 9, 2012March 9, 2012Leo Pusateri76 Comments

Eleven million taxpayer-funded dollars. Supposedly to help 400 people in Detroit find jobs. Even if every one of those 4o0 people found a job, that would be $27,500 in taxpayer money spent, per job. Ludicrous enough, no?

Well, what if only TWO (2) of those 400 people found jobs?

A chunk of an $11 million stimulus grant meant to provide low-income Detroit residents with clothing for job interviews reportedly aided just two people — far short of the 400 job-seekers the money was meant to help.

The findings were part of a new audit on the city’s Department of Human Services, according to The Detroit News.

That, my friends, comes to a cost of $5.5 MILLION dollars. Per job. Nice return on investment there, Barry.

Fast forward to yesterday (emphases added):

In the wake of lobbying by President Obama and Senate Democratic leaders, the Senate Thursday defeated legislation to speed up construction of a U-S.-Canadian oil pipeline.The White House victory came after the president started personally calling Democratic senators Wednesday night. The vote underscored the extent to which rising gas prices and energy supply have become a central political issue.

So, to Barack Obama, a stimulus program that costs taxpayers hundreds of millions, and which is a failure by any clear-thinking person’s standards is hailed as a success; while killing a program that creates at least 25,000 jobs, all without a dime of taxpayer money, is somehow considered a ‘victory.’

To Barack Hussein Obama, nothing can be successful; nothing can be true and real unless it is a direct machination of government. No matter how big the failure a government program is, it is still a success, because to a statist like Obama, nothing is possible, nothing is real unless it has its underpinnings in government.

To Obama, Government is reality. The government is the source of all that is good and just in the world. The private sector is what is contrived. To Obama, the private sector is an anomaly; an abomination that must be controlled so as not to infringe upon the government’s influence in people’s lives. The god of Government is a jealous god. Thou shalt not have strange Gods before it. Even religion itself takes a back seat to Obama’s real religion.

(image credit here)

After all, in order to appease the god of Government and to gain its good graces, one must certainly give alms:

More than half of Obama’s 47 biggest fundraisers, those who collected at least $500,000 for his campaign, have been given administration jobs. Nine more have been appointed to presidential boards and committees.

At least 24 Obama bundlers were given posts as foreign ambassadors, including in Finland, Australia, Portugal and Luxembourg. Among them is Don Beyer, a former Virginia lieutenant governor who serves as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

….

Obama has appointed 59 ambassadors who were not career Foreign Service officers, and of those, 40 percent were bundlers.

Welcome to the church of Obama.

God help its heretics.

Can I Hear An AMEN?

February 6, 2012February 6, 2012Leo Pusateri57 Comments

I am a Catholic– A fallen-away Catholic, but a Catholic, to be sure. I believe in the infallible tenets of the Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, Transubstantiation, and other Church doctrine; but I could no longer abide the turn for the worse in these past four decades in how the middle-heirarchy of the Church, mainly Bishops (and errant Priests) led the Flock astray, by promoting a godless, unattainable socialist utopia on earth via the “social justice” movement. They would get in bed with anyone to make it happen, including the most pro-abortion President in the history of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama. They were more than willing to walk over the corpses of dead babies if it were to achieve their godless, earthly dream–

And then I saw this article, on Red State this morning, and I said AMEN!!! Someone gets it and isn’t afraid to excoriate the Bishops who have led their flock astray–

These are just a few of the paragraphs– I encourage everyone to read the whole enchilada– this NEEDS to be said to save the Catholic Church!

Quote:

Back when there was a New Ledger, I wrote a now long-forgotten piece excoriating the Bishops in this country for complicity in its passage, for not speaking up, for not excommunicating the public officials who actively fight for the abortion license despite the infallible teachings of our Church — and by extension, for enabling a culture of license that enables the Culture of Death. (Piece stolen here; TNL no longer publishes essays.)I stand by every word, and would like to add a few things. Let me start with the most basic one.

You can all, each of you, and I say this after a week of prayerful meditation and with all of the respect I can give, go straight to the darkest pit in the lowest valley of the Ninth Layer of Hell and burn there.

It was easy to sell out the unborn, wasn’t it? To just wish away an infallible teaching that — let’s be honest — has been such a headache since a Catholic Supreme Court Justice helped its mass breaking, and Catholic Democrats abandoned everything else to protect that breach, right? To let others commit a sin that our Church treats as so grave that it incurs the automatic sanction of excommunication? All in return for a goal you’ve shared with your Democrat masters since the 1940s — a chance to drive healthcare costs through the roof with the fig leaf of social caring. All so you could work with the sorts of people who are elected to office by publicly calling you theocrats and misogynists for more-or-less upholding the two-thousand-year-old Tradition of our Church.

Thirty pieces of silver must buy one Hell of a lot more for you than it does for me.

Who among you has stepped forward to say, Whoops! Or, We are infallible on matters of faith expressed through the Tradition or through an ecumenical Council, but we can err on policy, and hoo-boy, did we blow this one. Who among you spoke out last week and said, Attention my flock: I must now inform you that the Democratic Party has proven once and for all that if you vote for a Democrat in this country, you engage in material cooperation with evil. We will now be holding weekly mass Confession to handle the backlog until it clears.

Because that is truth. In 2009 and 2010, nominally faithful Catholics who value all of the policy choices you do — labor unions, forced charity, high rates of taxation, urban ghettoes, and of course, universal “health care” — and who claimed to be ardent defenders of the unborn sold out to a one, sacrificed millions of babies and betrayed the infallible teaching of their faith so they could get one gigantic step closer to the social justice you so crave.

And for that, for that moment when they put aside their baptismal and confirmation vows, repeated every Easter, and their recitation of whatever version of the Nicene Creed you’ve settled on this week, your response was … applause. Silence. Satisfaction. A professed willingness to work with the Administration.

You made all of this possible. For almost my entire life, you have given my fellow Catholics every reason to believe they can freely sin, and hey, no problem, so long as they favor higher taxation and government spending. They can murder the unborn, and I have had all of two homilies, two, in my entire time as a Catholic, which is to say from birth and for the thirty-five years after, in parishes and dioceses across the country, in which a priest has said, If you have had, caused, or aided in obtaining an abortion, and you take communion today, you will go to Hell. You look out into your emptying pews, terrified of the wood you see and the flesh you don’t, through families of one, two, or sometimes amazingly three children, and think, Well, at least they’re still coming, as if you do not understand the connection between these things.

This–the ENTIRE ARTICLE– is what should be read from EVERY pulpit this Sunday!

Sex Ed In Schools: Good or Bad

October 24, 2011Matt Margolis38 Comments

It seems like everyday I find new reasons to want to send my own kids (when I have them) to private school one day. In a time when teachers aren’t adequately teaching kids the stuff they should learn (reading, writing, math, history, etc.) it’s hard to imagine why any parent would want their kid to go through sex ed in school.

But to me, there’s a bigger problem. Sexual education is no longer about the basics for sake of having the knowledge… there’s actual incidents where there’s a clear violation of parents’ rights and the sexualization and indoctrination of young kids.

IMAGINE you have a 10- or 11-year-old child, just entering a public middle school. How would you feel if, as part of a class ostensibly about the risk of sexually transmitted diseases, he and his classmates were given “risk cards” that graphically named a variety of solitary and mutual sex acts? Or if, in another lesson, he was encouraged to disregard what you told him about sex, and to rely instead on teachers and health clinic staff members?

That prospect would horrify most parents. But such lessons are part of a middle-school curriculum that Dennis M. Walcott, the New York City schools chancellor, has recommended for his system’s newly mandated sex-education classes. There is a parental “opt out,” but it is very limited, covering classes on contraception and birth control.

Observers can quarrel about the extent to which what is being mandated is an effect, or a contributing cause, of the sexualization of children in our society at younger ages. But no one can plausibly claim that teaching middle-schoolers about mutual masturbation is “neutral” between competing views of morality; the idea of “value free” sex education was exploded as a myth long ago. The effect of such lessons is as much to promote a certain sexual ideology among the young as it is to protect their health.

So, what do the parents in our readership think? What do you about things like this. Is sex ed good or bad? Is it the job of the school (read: the government) to determine what your kids should and shouldn’t know about the facts of life?

We Have Bigger Issues Than Bullying To Deal With

October 23, 2011October 23, 2011Matt Margolis120 Comments

Actually, enough with any anti-bullying laws.

You know how bullying was handled when I was in school? It wasn’t by an act of Congress. You either stood up for yourself, or you didn’t. Your choice.

I’m not saying bullying should be tolerated, but it’s not a Washington issue. It’s a parent issue. Parents have to either teach their kids to stand up for themselves, or take up the issue with the school.

But, what’s really bugging me these days is how a single incident can cause a national movement (so to speak) to curb anti-gay bullying in schools.

A history teacher amends his lessons on the civil rights movement to include the push for gay equality. A high school removes Internet filters blocking gay advocacy websites. Six gay students sue their district, saying officials failed to protect them from bullies.

After anti-gay bullying led to a spate of teen suicides last year, school districts across the country are stepping up efforts to prevent such incidents, while more students are coming forward to report bullies.

“It’s an issue that has taken over the public consciousness since last fall,” said Jill Marcellus, spokeswoman for the Gay-Straight Alliance Network. “People realize it doesn’t have to be this way. We can make it better.”

Awareness of anti-gay bullying is increasing as acceptance of gay people has grown in society. Gay marriage is legal in several states, gays are now permitted to serve openly in the military and, in California, schools will soon have to teach gay-rights history.

Kids, even as young as middle school age, feel more emboldened to openly express their sexual or gender orientation, but many are not prepared for a possible backlash, gay-rights advocates say.

As much as I hate all this attention being given to curb bullying, it really bugs me that there are apparently enough people who seem to think anti-gay bullying is the only bullying that is worth addressing. You know what, school sucks for a lot of people. Kids get picked on for all sorts of reasons, but you don’t see such specific attention being given to bullying based on social or economic factors, fashion, or weight, etc. etc. etc.

When did we get so soft that the immediate response to an act of bullying is community action, and inevitably government action?

I’m not a parent yet, but when I am, if my kid gets bullying, my response would be to teach him to stand up for himself. Bullies prey on the weak because they feel they can manipulate them. If we teach kids that they don’t have to handle their own problem, that the government will come in and solve it all for them, then things are just going to get a lot worse. It’s bad enough so many rely on the government for monetary handouts… do we really need the government fighting our schoolyard battles too?

So let me get this straight.. Translators of the CHRISTIAN Bible are now leaving out the terms “Father” and “Son of God” from new translations of the BIBLE because– now get this… it is offensive to– MUSLIMS.