Monthly Archives: September 2022

Help me out here

These points were agreed by a number of friends, in a single conversation yesterday: You can’t trust the mainstream news – it’s all propaganda. We know Putin is evil incarnate, and it would be a good thing if God, or some good people, “took him out.” Everything we know about Putin comes from the mainstream news, and we haven’t tried to read other sources, or listened to Putin explain himself. Tell me, how do those ideas actually fit together in people’s minds?

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The bureaucratisation of virtue

From one viewpoint, the whole woke movement can be seen as an attempt to produce virtue through bureaucracy. Forget for a moment the political undercurrents at play, and the resulting redefinition of virtues into novel categories like “transphobia”: let us charitably suppose that the less ideological people at PayPal and so on, cancelling organisations and individuals’ accounts, are genuinely aiming to “stop hate” by preventing its expression.

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How the West undermines Christian mission

Most Christians are not absolute pacifists, though they see war as an evil. There are exceptions, of course, including Mennonites like Merv Bitkofer, who used to be an author on The Hump, and even more famously Quakers, who went into captivity in the World Wars rather than take up arms. But without having a theoretical grasp of Just War theory, most ordinary believers will accept the sad necessity for fighting to defend one’s own nation (and family, of course) against foreign aggression.

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The selfish greed of the poor

Quite a few people now have compared the hatred of humanity (“parasites on the earth” etc) evident in much environmentalism with original sin in Christianity. Gaia is dying, or in some renditions biting back, because of the rapacity of mankind, much as in theology creation is said to be fallen and yielding thorns and thistles because of Adam’s sin.

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

Come back moth and rust – all is forgiven

Toby Young, writing in the Daily Sceptic yesterday, revealed how the Paypal accounts of the Sceptic itself, Young’s Free Speech Union with around 9,000 members, and even his personal, seldom used account, have been closed without. An e-mail in my inbox this morning shows that the same has happened to UsForThem, an organisation set up to campaign on behalf of children, particularly as victims of misguided COVID policies.

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Disinformation

Isn’t it funny how words nowadays rapidly come to have a specialist meaning entirely divorced from their origin? For example, “far-right” is now very seldom used for actual fascists or Neo-nazis. Our press does not use it for the Ukrainian Krakens, the out-and-out Nazis who advertised in advance that they were going to hunt down “collaborators” and who are now showing pictures of the mutilated bodies of civilian victims of “Russian War Crimes” in the villages they have “liberated,” just like they did when they regained the village of Bucha months ago. “Far right” now means “having family values and telling the truth,” so it really ought to be embraced … Continue reading

Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

But how do you know?

In my now highly-dated e-book Seeing Through Smoke I wrote about how, once propaganda becomes the basis of a society, even the most sceptical will be fooled much of the time: In a society like the late Soviet Union, it may have been the case that everyone knew fifty percent of what they read in Pravda (ironically meaning “truth”!) to be false. But in a totalitarian state there was no independent way for them to know which fifty percent they should discount. I have no doubt that canny Russian dissidents who rightly rejected news reports on one issue were hoodwinked into believing other falsehoods, or indeed were dismissive of propaganda … Continue reading

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Is no theory as misleading as the wrong theory?

In an address I heard by the head of a theological college recently, he spoke of how people have come to believe in conspiracy theories, citing three: the existence of lizard people, the existence of a deep state, and the belief that SARS-CoV2 does not exist.

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Bias to the people

There are many examples of the way that the modern cult of “victimhood” produces evils in today’s society. One very current instance is the trend, newly arrived in the UK from America, for black mobs to to rampage through shopping centres inspired by some idea that looting is OK if you’re in an oppressed minority group. A second is the inability of the State to deal with male gangsters with guns, newly arrived in the UK from Albania in small boats, on the basis that there is no such thing as an illegal immigrant. A third is the abject apology of the Pope for the murder and mass-graves of First … Continue reading

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Evil, King Arthur and Oliver’s army

The Scottish archaeology and history presenter Neil Oliver got “red-pilled,” largely it appears through dialogues with Mike Graham on Talk Radio during COVID. There is, as we know, no going back once one sees behind the curtain, so in his own cliche (always amusing to my wife and me) the process has “changed Neil Oliverr forr everr.”

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