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The Utterly Delicious Humiliation of Our Intelligentsia
From Elizabeth Nickson's Substack- MAGA is America's hidden brains trust
December 21, 2024
 
 
We n Silicon Valley were floored that Trump got nominated. Then that 10Xed when he won, 10Xed again with the Steele Dossier, 10Xed again with Charlottesville, 10Xed again with impeachment, and again with both Covid and BLM.

It was like this incredible ramping up of emotion and drama and change.”

(It was then that Andreessen took a step back and considered.)

“I don’t understand what’s happening on the left and I don’t understand these purges.”

-Honestly podcast - Bari Weiss and Marc Andreessen

It’s the voice that drives me crazy. The drawl, the self-satisfied well-fed glottal stop, layers of expensive fat choking the windpipe, I can even hear that. Even the quickness of speech annoys me. So certain, no pause for reflection, just words unfurling from a 3 Sigma intelligence. Never missed a meal, anxiety curbed by privilege so entrenched they can’t even imagine. Thin, carefully enhanced thirty year old women, the cynicism of a bored aristocrat bleeding from their voices, that vocal fry drawling, knowing it all, having seen it all, never having left their Ivy colleges, their leafy suburbs, never going without anything, much less a desperately needed holiday, rent money, food, dentistry for their kids. My fingers itch to slap them.

They bankrupted us. They ruined the lives of the bottom 70%. They spent ALL the money. They then proceeded to bankrupt the world. And, realizing the money was all gone, their gamemasters tried to kill us off, first with an engineered virus that failed, then with a vaccine that didn’t. Then they ran up $10 trillion in four years trying to keep the vegetable in power, to get to that point where the Green New Deal paid off in torrents of lovely other people’s money. Which was such a stupid idea that clearly IQ has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with wisdom.

Every time you hear one of these ghastly regime-puppets-opinionated-fatuous-gym hardened-glossed-up made-up gargoyles speak, think: you bastards bankrupted the world. And you don’t even know it. This character demonstrates how legalistic, how extractive, how unprincipled this class is. I mean, just yuck.

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People like this idiot stole everything. Everything. And then they prance around with a substitute set of values: DEI and ESG, and force them on the people already ruined. And those moronic ideas destroyed the little they hadn’t taken.

Back when I was a Bolshevik I was fretting to my geneticist cousin (world renowned for the credentialed) about my brilliant daughter and her brilliant father, and the breeding of the brilliant creating an oligarchy of the brilliant, so detached from nature and culture they bring down the world. (Which is today)

Nope, said Bob. First, genius is a freak occurrence and evenly distributed across the population. Further a genius in the working or middle class is likely to be possessed of so much ambition and energy it will repel them out of their environment so fast, they will forget where they came from.

He didn’t say that last phrase. I added it because that is where we are today. Marc Andreeesen, Netscape inventor and insanely successful digital investor, is instructive. I don’t want to pick on him particularly, because he seems like a jolly fellow, but he admits to being totally bowled over by Trump’s win in 2016, despite the fact he comes from a rural Wisconsin farming community.

“It’s all staunch Trump country. Farmer world was in for Trump early and hard.”

I’d lost touch with the culture.

I tried to reset my own psychology and I need to read a lot. I had to rebuild my world view.”

How the actual fuck (I’m sorry there is no other appropriate word) did someone so (apparently) brilliant miss what was happening in his home town? I knew it was happening by 2007 and they weren’t my people. But it was happening to his family. To his people. This bespeaks an arrogance and pride and blindness worthy of Charles 1 and he was beheaded in the public square.

Again, Andreessen is one of the honest ones. I can’t read the others. I don’t know what treat I would have to promise myself to read the Atlantic. David Frum? I couldn’t afford the freight - a Rolex? Instead I’d be racking my metaphorical shotgun. I cannot for the life of me understand the forbearance of the deplorables with these ghastly people and their ability to write 15,000 insanely boring words demanding the confiscation of the lives of their tax slaves.

I grew up in the Wasp oligarchy. that skein of families that runs down the east coast of the U.S. and Canada, who started arriving with their Puritan views, their Christian ecstasies, their city on a hill in 1630, which marked the first flood of ships. This was starting to die in the 1970’s, about to be overwhelmed then drowned by people like Andreessen and his crowd in Silicon Valley, his ultra-credentialed cohorts in government, in the corporate world, in the Great Game. All the geniuses from the working and obscure middle class flooded into the centres of power and were well entrenched by 2010, so brilliant they got all the glittering prizes.

But we lasted 400 years. They lasted 50. We will see their death, their gasping flapping on the dock, their floundering around for wreckage to cling to, their slinking over to the side of the people they called garbage. Their attempt to find a berth using ideas they have been trained to loathe. They won’t come back. It’s over for them. They have failed. Wednesday’s Continuing Resolution illustrates their retreat pattern.

They were giving themselves a 35% raise, for one. They were continuing the pandemic/WHO biometric tracking regime, and they were funding the International Censorship Regime. There were billions of dollars going to various pet projects, a last lovely looting of the public purse before it all came to a crashing end.

And Republicans were going to vote for it. Of course they were, they were getting another $60K a year.

The deplorables rose up in a great wave and defeated it. Oh I know the blithering morons think it was Trump and Musk, but trust me on this, Trump and Musk are a symptom, not a cause. The blowback, the underlying thinking had been developing for forty years among the garbage people. Trump is our weapon. So is Musk. They. Follow. Us. They are using our ideas. We are the brains trust.

  

And Ukraine! You know that was a bunch of stupid entitled women, specifically Samantha Powers, Anne Applebaum, Victoria Nuland who decided, backed by the ghastly freaks at the Atlantic Council and Atlantic Magazine, and David freaking Frum, that girrrrls can play the Great Game of Empire, and decided to put it to that far too male Putin, by refusing to ratify Minsk, by creating a color revolution on his doorstep, by threatening to anchor NATO on his doorstep. And then, when Putin invaded, proceeded to finance enough weaponry to kill 500,000 people.

Don’t forget that. No one stopped them. The whole contraption that forms the “world government”, their “rules-based order”, went along with it. What’s another half a million dead, a million families ruined, the devastation of one of the world’s bread baskets, not to mention abrogating a signed treaty with a nuclear power? We got to be equal with men! We started a war! We put it to the testosterone-rich Marauder Putin, spawn of Ghenghis Khan and a wolf, but not a wolf that needs protection, yet another mindblowingly stupid idiocy of the class visited on the people who feed them.

The same contraption allowed for the incremental invasion of the Chinese Communist Party and its ancillary cartels to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans with fentanyl. It allowed the once great cities to become clogged with human refuse and crime. It allowed education to become unaffordable, housing to become unaffordable, health care to become unaffordable. It allowed an entire state government to be taken over by Mexican cartels - Arizona.

It’s the ignorance that annoys me most. It appears that not one member of the Atlantic staff or in fact, any left-of-centre-public intellectual preening on Youtube, MSNBC, any of the Alphabets, the New York Times, the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, NPR, knows anything about the hundreds of thousands of missing migrant children. They know nothing about the 100,000,000 Americans walking around with incipient vaccine-caused myocarditis, they know nothing about the Pfizer trials that were kept secret, especially the miscarriage and infertility data. They know nothing about election theft which is wholesale hand-over-fist looting of the public interest. They know nothing about migrant crime where in Auburn, Colorado this week police found an American couple in their 60’s, bound and gagged in their apartment by Venezuelan gangs. They know nothing about green energy causing elderly women not able to pay to heat their homes in the winter - the incidence of which is tearing up the British public at the moment. They know nothing about the outright persecution of rural workers who feed them, they know nothing about the wholesale confiscation of property rights in America to the point where government owns 40% of all land and tightly controls the rest, taking orders from the Ivy-League staffed NGO’s funded by the clever rich to destroy rural activity because “climate change” and “Sixth Great Extinction”, two more bonkers madnesses it would be hard to find.

This is the stupidest intelligentsia since the Regency. Which prefaced the loss of America, and let’s call that the dumbest economic decision made in the last 2,000 years.

And then, this week, we discovered that the Biden administration gamed the GDP of the U.S. And the employment numbers, both very much worse than hitherto stated. In September, the U.S. added 750,000 government jobs. That’s called buying votes. Just recently we discovered that every regulator destroys 158 jobs. In September, Biden’s economic team, anxious to fake the jobs total, created enough government jobs to destroy 118,500,000 jobs. Not all bureaucrats are regulators, but being a regulator is where the power is. That’s their end goal.

  

Canada’s Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, another female Ukraine war lordette, resigned on Monday, to run Trudeau off the road and then take over the party herself. Too late, little Nazi babe, you destroyed our economy. Your deficit is $68 billion. You and your Laurentian elite cohort literally doubled the national debt inside of 15 years. You added $1.1 trillion attempting carbon neutrality in a country with so many trees, we are already carbon neutral. Here’s a cookie, you’re worse than useless. Go away.

Instead of showering you with terrible economic stats, here is a real politician:

  
link to speech excerpt

“I talked to a guy at the Labatt’s Brewery and he told me ‘We’ve given up on ever having a home. We can barely make it. I have three jobs. I feel ashamed when I talk to my kids. They ask why I’m never around. Why we can’t afford a house. I feel like a failure.’

“He didn’t fail, he has been failed. He has been robbed of the promise of Canada. It was a very simple promise, that if you worked hard, you got a good life. It wasn’t fancy or extravagant. You got a house. With a yard. Where you could have kids playing safely. And you could have a nice dog you could afford to feed. And your kids could play safely in the streets. That was the promise….”

Our wretched intelligentsia stole that. Hand over fist stole. Every penny to feather their nests, to inflate their egos, to preen and pose at international conferences in whatever field they decided to exploit. Their “democracy”, their “institutions”, their “rules-based order” that requires war after war after war, stole our lives.

Germany’s government fell after the finance minister flamed out. Romania’s superior court cancelled the election because a populist won. France’s new government will probably last a few months, the UK is fit to be tied. Labour, who won the “most seats ever”, but lost the popular vote to the Conservatives and Reform combined, almost certainly gamed those seats and stole them using bundled immigrant votes. Stolen elections cause anger. And so they are.

  

Equally listen to Eric Weinstein, another refugee from the criminal conspiracy that is polite leftism, about his gobsmackness at the Trump regime. He says this was the common sentiment among his peers. Weinstein, in case you forgot, is a pioneer in “new economic thinking”, as well as a very successful investor and a physicist. This is the kind of person that says things like: “well, right and wrong, these are very simplistic concepts.” He is also not accepting that this is a major hinge in history. He thinks all we need is reform, vis

What we really don’t know is whether this is going to be a disaster or whether it’s going to be a new Golden Age. Trump is going to renegotiate the world and that is really dangerous stuff. We needed to shake this up but this is going up to 11.

In the first Trump term Trump just made stuff up. It was totally idiosyncratic of the moment, and he's the only person who can do Trump. Right?

It's just this completely erratic, drunken boxing routine. Elon is another version of this. He just constantly comes up with new weird things.

You never know what he's going to do next. So that's a terrible situation if you have to hire 10,000 people to run a town that runs the country that influences the world. I think this time around, he knows that.”

Trump is going to break a lot of structure.

Yeah buddy, that’s right. Structure that is sucking the life out of the planet like some deep dark black hole of voracious need. Which is the core identity of our elite, our intelligentsia, a voracious hole of need for recognition, for praise, for prizes and more and more and more money. Like the cousin of one of my best friends, who left with a massive government pension, but more importantly his own “institution” which sucks tens of millions out of the public purse every damned year until he falls off his perch. All it does is feed his outrageous vanity.

Look, out here in the hinterland of misery you have created, people have to rely on their God, and their virtue. There is no ambitious over-riding of principle possible for us out here, like there is for you. You have overridden principle so many times, you don't recognize it anymore. We do. We see you. And we refuse your way of life. Out here in the world we let you create, it’s bare survival, three jobs if we’re lucky. It’s like the founding and instead of bloodthirsty angry Indians and hostile nature, we have government and you lot to fight. We needed God and we needed virtue.

The reason the Wasp oligarchy lasted for four hundred years wasn’t because of the despicable behaviour of the Bushies and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It was because the base, the 95%, believed in the divine and sought to integrate it into their lives. Yes, our leaders were often venal, but we kept them leashed, for the most part. Expect that going forward. These people were different from you in that they practiced virtue at home and in their cities. They created American prosperity, the hope of every individual on the planet, not random brainiacs stuffed up to the nose holes with their own grand selves. Virtue aligned with principle enhances intelligence, grounds and empowers it. It beats everything.

My cousin was wrong about geniuses propelling themselves out of their home places into world centres. Not today. The centers are polluted and so corrupt they turn the stomach. The new leaders, replete with virtue and developed, balanced minds, are staying home and forcing change. That’s why the deplorables are the secret brains trust of America. And, I would argue, the world.

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Welcome to Absurdistan is not pay-walled, but if you have been here a while, please consider an inexpensive annual subscription. The four years ahead are going to blow off the heads of our sickening corrupt elites and the structure they have built to impoverish us and benefit them. Absurdistan is 100% here for it.

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Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists,,How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. She is a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Center for Public Policy, fcpp.org. You can read in depth policy papers about various elements of the environmental junta here: https://independent.academia.edu/ElizabethNickson.

Her essay on the catastrophic failings of Canada's CBC is included in Michael Walsh’s Against the Corporate Media, 42 Ways the Press Hates You, published in September 2024.

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Inaugural Mass homily of Pope Leo the XIV with some commentary by yours truly
Signs of Hope

Good day all,

      My thoughts on the Holy Father's homily in bold print.  I see many signs of hopefulness in his homily and I am praying greater clarity and unity from Pope Leo.  The world will reject his clarity since it likes spiritual ambiguity and moral relativism, but I am hoping for a less divisive Pope than Francis.  - Fr. Tom

Dear Brother Cardinals, Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, and those who traveled here for the Jubilee of Confraternities, Brothers and Sisters:

I greet all of you with a heart full of gratitude at the beginning of the ministry that has been entrusted to me. St. Augustine wrote: “Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Confessions, I: 1,1).

In these days, we have experienced intense emotions. The death of Pope Francis filled our hearts with sadness. In those difficult hours, we felt like the crowds that the Gospel says were “like sheep without a shepherd” (Matthew 9:36). Yet on Easter Sunday, we received his final blessing and, in the light of the Resurrection, we experienced the days that followed in the certainty that the Lord never abandons his people, but gathers them when they are scattered and guards them “as a shepherd guards his flock” (Jeremiah 31:10).

In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals met for the conclave. Coming from different backgrounds and experiences, we placed in God’s hands our desire to elect the new Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, a shepherd capable of preserving the rich heritage of the Christian faith and, at the same time, looking to the future, in order to confront the questions, concerns and challenges of today’s world.   I never got the impression that Pope Francis considered it a rich heritage, but often just an interpretation and exposition of the faith for a given time and culture.  I am probably too harsh on the past Pope, but he was not one known for clarity.  I am hoping that the use of the word heritage indicates a more positive few of the past as a treasury of faith to be preserved rather than a liability to be dismissed.

Accompanied by your prayers, we could feel the working of the Holy Spirit, who was able to bring us into harmony, like musical instruments, so that our heartstrings could vibrate in a single melody. I was chosen, without any merit of my own, and now, with fear and trembling, I come to you as a brother, who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of God’s love, for he wants us all to be united in one family. The Holy Father uses phrase from St. Clement of Rome (Pope #3) and seems to borrow some additional imagery from St. Augustine like he did in his opening remarks.

Love and unity: These are the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus. We see this in today’s Gospel, which takes us to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus began the mission he received from the Father: to be a “fisher” of humanity in order to draw it up from the waters of evil and death. Walking along the shore, he had called Peter and the other first disciples to be, like him, “fishers of men.” 

Now, after the Resurrection, it is up to them to carry on this mission, to cast their nets again and again, to bring the hope of the Gospel into the “waters” of the world, to sail the seas of life so that all may experience God’s embrace. Pope Benedict used the image of sailing the seas of life at the dawn of the digital age after his election as Pope.  I suspect Pope Francis might have as well, but when you stop paying too much attention you miss little details.  I prayed for Pope Francis his entire pontificate, but I didn’t give him much active attention.

How can Peter carry out this task? The Gospel tells us that it is possible only because his own life was touched by the infinite and unconditional love of God, even in the hour of his failure and denial. For this reason, when Jesus addresses Peter, the Gospel uses the Greek verb agapáo, which refers to the love that God has for us, to the offering of himself without reserve and without calculation. Whereas the verb used in Peter’s response describes the love of friendship that we have for one another.

Consequently, when Jesus asks Peter, “Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?” (John 21:16), he is referring to the love of the Father. It is as if Jesus said to him, “Only if you have known and experienced this love of God, which never fails, will you be able to feed my lambs. Only in the love of God the Father will you be able to love your brothers and sisters with that same ‘more,’ that is, by offering your life for your brothers and sisters.”

Peter is thus entrusted with the task of “loving more” and giving his life for the flock. The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by this self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity, and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda, or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did.  The 21st chapter of John is so rich. It is one of my favorite passages to reflect upon.  It is how God heals us of our sins.  It is both a healing moment and a recommissioning of sorts.  Jesus can’t have Peter moping through life as a the denier, Jesus is calling him to shepherd the flock.

The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus “is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstone” (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Peter 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters and to walk alongside them, for all of us are “living stones” (1 Peter 2:5), called through our baptism to build God’s house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of St. Augustine: “The Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their
brothers and sisters and who love their neighbour” (Sermons 359, 9).

Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. In our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earth’s resources and marginalizes the poorest. 

For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: In the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves, but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of goodwill, in order to build a new world where peace reigns! Look to Christ! Pope Leo goes right into the invitation to listen and reflect upon the word of God. The invitation is unity through conversion.

This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer God’s love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity that does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. The church is always missionary. Conversion to Christ does not annihilate all differences, but rather is a process of refinement, keeping what can be of service to the Gospel and losing what is opposed to it or hinders it. Getting rid of sin is just the beginning, putting on the mind and heart of Christ is the challenge.  I pray for our new Holy Father that he may be faithful, courageous and genuinely kind.

Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love! The heart of the Gospel is the love of God that makes us brothers and sisters. With my predecessor Leo XIII, we can ask ourselves today: If this criterion “were to prevail in the world, would not every conflict cease and peace return?” (Rerum Novarum, 21).

With the light and the strength of the Holy Spirit, let us build a Church founded on God’s love, a sign of unity, a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made “restless” by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity. Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another. Surprisingly short homily, bishops can often go on forever.

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Practice Gratitude - A reprint and expanded post
Gratitude changes everything

Good Morning Digital Neighbors! Happy Wednesday Friends & Refugees, Early Birds and Later Dayers, Conversants and Lurkers, Phamily & Misfits, ADD Irregulars, WSN Curators, and Curmudgeons!  Today's reflection is one of my favorite ones from the past.  David Whyte's wonderful book Consolations - The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.  It is a treasure trove of reflection on the gift of language and the power of words.  His reflection on gratitude is outstanding.

GRATITUDE is not a passive response to something we have been given; gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event; it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege, that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the colour blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full, miraculous essentiality of the colour blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participant and witness all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

Paying attention- LOVE IT. One of my most frequent reminders in my preaching. We get more out of life by paying attention and not simply existing. a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life. The gifted nature of life- hold on to that thought, the gifted nature of life makes all the difference in what we think about our story.

that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege - EVERY SINGLE PERSON IS PRIVILEGED - some more than others, but every single one of us. A personal philosophy built on the dialectic of privilege & victimology will lead to legions of unhappy and resentful souls, and not because they lack privilege, but because they lack the appreciation of the gift of living. To focus on what you lack will never help you discover what you possess and what is unique about you. To be a someone amongst all other someones - welcome to LIFE, Digital Neighbor. 😁 The people I love the most and care for the least are still someone amongst someones. It is not always easy to remember that when thinking ill of those you care for the least.

We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Amen.

Thank you all for allowing me to sit and share at your table.  I have been so blessed by the people God or fate has placed on my life path and I have been delighted that these digital paths have opened up my horizon so wonderfully.  I greatly appreciate the personal sharing, the cultural commentary, the political ranting and wrangling, and above all the shared laughter and memes.

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Gratitude for freedom
Gratitude changes everything

Easter Monday – Gratitude for Freedom

Good morning, Digital Neighbors!  Happy Monday and Blessed Easter Friends to all you good souls on Locals and Substack.   Yesterday ended up being a catch-up day after Mass and brunch with my sister’s family. It was a great day to celebrate the joy of the Risen Lord.   I caught up on some sleep and some of the issues I missed while away from the time drain that was my typical internet habit.  I am sure I will return to some active consumption, hopefully with a more intentional attitude than I had before my Lenten media abstinence.

I caught up on some of the Douglas Murray – Dave Smith JRE and much of the debate that followed on it.  I have read a couple of Douglas Murray books, and I watched many hours of his interviews and appreciate his common sense and insightful commentary.   The internet, as divisive and drama driven as it I always is, seems to have fallen into the Dave Smith is dunce and Douglas is right or Murray is an elitist and credentialist who doesn’t believe in free speech.

I will still have to take some time before I have a more comprehensive understanding of this, but I tend to tilt towards free speech absolutism in the arena of public discourse and debate.  I am a fan of self-determined groups deciding among themselves the degree of free speech that they want to share within their group.  After all it is a voluntary group, and one is free to leave the group if you disagree.  If you don’t have freedom of association then you have even bigger problems than lack of freedom of speech. *cough* *cough* All the proponents of groupthink and herd feel demand conformity of thought or silence of opinion.

I have added this clip from the Darkhorse Podcast which has always remained one of my favorites for honest and critical thought.

I think Brett and Heather are very fair minded in this clip.  Can one admit they are ever wrong, mistaken or ignorant on a topic?   Brett and Heather fall into the circle of based conversationalists like Gad Saad, Scott Adams, and our gracious hosts at RR and Phetasy. Each has their own style but are all directionally pointed towards freedom rather than compulsion.  There are many others, but Scott is an adamant critic of calling out the arrogance of the experts. Some experts are reliable because they keep asking questions and offering critical thought. They are not only knowledgeable about their subject, but they are also capable of self-criticism and humble admission of error. It makes one more credible, not damaged goods. If someone has repeated and consistent errors most of us will stop listening to them. Some experts are not reliable because their commitment is to their preconceived and pre-committed ideas.  Such idealogues can be charismatic and convincing, but in the end, they champion a cause and not the honest discussion of the topic. It happens in every field. It used to just be religious institutions that compelled thought and behavior for centuries, now it can be any group with real or perceived authority and power. Just ask the Enemedia and Academia.

Arriving at approximate truths in public discourse takes time, is messy and requires some humility to admit when you went down the wrong path and committed too much energy to being in error.  I don’t know that most of humanity can embrace such raw honesty and humility. Imagine spending years on a particular cause to find out you are wrong? It is too easy to think that one has wasted their time and effort, but if you are honestly seeking is it ever a waste of time?  I don’t think so.   5 years down the road and I am happy that I asked questions during Covid. It opened the door to more questions and patience.  

·       I appreciate experts, but I don’t take their opinions as Gospel.

·       I appreciate questions asked in a critical manner.

·       No one and no idea are above question or criticism.

·       Yes, even dumbasses can ask critical questions of experts and should not be dismissed because they are a dumbass.  One can acknowledge their history of error, incompetency or ignorance, but if they have an honest question, its dismissal reveals the dishonesty of the expert.

·       Experts can be blind to their bias just like any of us. Experts can lie just like any of us.  Experts can be joyfully mistaken.

·       Arriving at the shores of understanding and approximate truth/testable reality takes time.  I am suspicious of anyone demanding immediate compulsion of thought and subsequent behavior.

Sorry, more than I wanted to write on a Monday morning.  Thank you if you took the time to real. Comment always welcome.  

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