The war will be over by Christmas

Posted on 02/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

A reader has asked me to comment on the widespread phenomenon of “shruggers.” The term refers to that majority of people who downplay the significance of our situation: the suspension of the world’s economy for what is, in dispassionate terms, a run of the mill novel virus, a shut-down presaging what may be the deepest recession in historic memory; and riots which openly seek to overturn the entire basis of western civilization and its history, which leaders in politics, communication, business and even the church seem to encourage. The worst future shruggers anticipate is expressed in their mumbling about a “reboot” of society that may well, they say, turn out to be more just and compassionate.

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Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Three non-Amazon book plugs

Posted on 01/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

As the title suggests, there are three interesting new books which, at this time, are not available from Amazon.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Believe governments

Posted on 29/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Lord Putnam (famous as the Director of the film Chariots of Fire) was on the Beeb this morning in his role as leadetr of a government all-party commission on misinformation. He was bemoaning delays in the government’s getting a bill passed to outlaw such “misinformation.”

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Things in the news are not always as they seem…

Posted on 27/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

The first UK street protests over the George Floyd killing, in which many police were injured and statues damaged, occurred on 6-7 June. The very next day, a private limited company called Black Lives Matter (UK) Ltd was registered at Companies House, by a white guy from the middle-class ghettoes of Wallingford, Surrey, named David Wilks-Carmichael, its sole director.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 9 Comments

How many fingers am I holding up?

Posted on 24/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of an English forensic psychiatrist. Way back in 2005, in an interview, he spoke about the end-stage of propaganda in a totalitarian state – the stage when it no longer matters that you know what you’re being told is the opposite of the truth:

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

New Commandments I give unto you

Posted on 22/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Only last year (and I’ve no doubt it’s still the case throughout the media) the Independent dismissed the concept of Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions” as a far-right conspiracy theory. This may be the case, but if so we are seeing this month exactly the same phenomenon made starkly manifest under whatever name you choose to give it.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

Twenty percent infallible

Posted on 20/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

I heard an interesting quotation from Pastor Mike Bickle, to the effect that over forty years of charismatic ministry he considered that 80% of the prophecies and miracles he’d witnessed were false, but that 20% were genuinely from the Lord. Let’s look at that idea, which roughly matches my own, more limited, experience… or to be brutally honest, is a lot more optimistic than my experience.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Post-(modern-)millennialism

Posted on 16/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Post-millennialism is the interpretation of the Book of Revelation that holds that the Church, empowered by Christ, will bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth, after which Christ will return to a world already fitted for his reign. The main alternative views are pre-millennialism, in which Christ returns climactically to a world in chaos and establishes an earthly kingdom for a thousand years before the new creation; and a-millennialism, which interprets the “thousand years” as the “already but not yet” rule of Christ in the Church Age, prior to the Great Rebellion and his triumphant return to transform the cosmos.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

Aposematism again

Posted on 14/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

I just like the word, actually, but over the years the local caterpillars have given me several opportunities to take pretty pictures and think about their presumably defensive, or maybe just creative, colouration.

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Posted in Creation, Science, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Weasel Communities and weasel identity

Posted on 11/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

Just a couple of days after the police let rioters destroy a statue of the 17th century philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, I saw on the BBC website that the Canal and River Trust, apparently under instruction from the Museum of London Docklands, removed a statue of Robert Milligan that it owns in London, outside the museum.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 7 Comments