The Tennessee Tragedy

As a person of faith, I believe that yesterday’s school shooting in Tennessee was not only an act of evil in itself:  it was also the inevitable result of allowing inaccurate, untrue, deviant perspectives and “woke” opinions to deny and defy reality.  If one does that for long enough, eventually (I believe) one becomes mentally, spiritually and morally divorced from reality . . . with the result we saw yesterday.

Source: The Tennessee Tragedy

The Reality War

 

The ancient War between reality and fantasy continues…

As James Lindsay points out, science is “by definition anti-Gnostic,” because – if practiced as intended – it seeks to describe nature as it is through empirical reason. That is, science observes evidence in the physical world, and only then bases its theoretical conclusions – its Knowledge – on those observations of reality. After which we can then use it to achieve some relative progress by “better according our lives with reality as it is and thus doing better in reality.”

In contrast, Lindsay identifies “the general madness of the world at the present” as resulting from the “parasitic bugbear” of Gnosticism, and specifically what he categorizes as “Scientific Gnosticism.” What makes Scientific Gnosticism different from science is that it inverts the above process: it puts the conclusions of Theory (its Gnosis) ahead of empirical observation of the world.…

…And if the world does not accord with Theory, then the world is wrong, and it “must seek to call truths things which are not.”

Source: The Reality War

 

Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same | City Journal

It’s Stone Age magical thinking:

Based on his study of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea, Bronisław Malinowski argued that when people face uncertainty, they turn to magic to propitiate the capricious spirits responsible for their incomprehensible misfortune. Being ever-so-sophisticated people who attended business school, corporate executives don’t hire shamans to replenish fisheries or to avoid a storm. Instead, they bring in consultants to help the firm embrace best practices. But as Charles Fain Lehman explains, John Meyer and Brian Rowan’s 1977 paper in the American Journal of Sociology, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” argues that this distinction is a farce—that much behavior as practiced by modern corporations, NGOs, and government agencies is not about technical efficacy that rationally orients means to ends but ritual, vaguely intended to elicit good fortune by achieving legitimacy with the firm’s “environment.”
So “wokeism” is the new Stone Age “magical thinking.” I’m reminded of a quote from Walden by Henry David Thoreau:
“The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
He was talking about clothing fashions but it works for social fashions too. Just substitute ‘government’ for Paris and ‘corporations’ for America.

Source: Why Woke Organizations All Sound the Same | City Journal

Woman accused of using sex toy and masturbating in public

 

Traditionally, those with a ‘penis’ were called ‘men.’ I still follow that tradition. The news? Not so much…
Teesside woman accused of exposing penis, using sex toy and masturbating in public
This is why I have nothing but contempt for the ‘news’ and ‘journalists.’

Source: Woman accused of using sex toy and masturbating in public

Progressives Against Progress

Experts and supermen. Experts are people I hire for their specialized knowledge… like (in order of importance) a plumber, electrician, dentist, or doctor. They don’t tell me how to run my life… and shouldn’t tell us how to run our country.
 
And supermen don’t exist.
 
In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Source: Progressives Against Progress