New week, new ramblings

Another splendid spring morning here in SF. Bright sun, blue sky.

I note that in at least 2 places, SF and Santa Cruz, the anti-Arizona crowds demonstrating yesterday engaged in violence against people and property. Where are the denunciations of the haters? Oh, right. It's the Tea Partiers that are haters. Sometimes I let facts derail the Correct Narrative.

I do like working out. I've been at it five days a week, sometimes more, for the last eight years. The results have been far better than I could have expected, especially at my age. (I only wish I had done this far earlier in my life.) And it is an anchor for whatever mental health I have; gives me a sense of accomplishment even when the rest of a day is barren of that. Plus my gym is homey and has lots of light and air, so even on a gorgeous day, you don't have to sacrifice being out for working out.

I have opined before that each of the Seven Pillars of Progressivism is really a kind of political complex, driven by an intense feeling connected to an image. Listening to supporters of the May Day demos against Arizona, I sense this. And reading about an interview by a liberal Dutch reporter about Islam, it is even clearer.

A feminist society cannot tolerate the existence of men. Manhood and feminism are inherent enemies. A multicultural society must eventually reduce whites to the status of a criminal class.
Redistributionism must include either de facto or de jure government control of the economy and an evisceration of the right to own property (and hence, to own yourself.). A secular(ist) society must seek to destroy traditional Christianity by pathologizing it in public and reducing it to a private vice. Etc.

As much as I have given time and energy to understanding myself, I am sure that, when all is said and done, there will be dominant themes and patterns very powerful in my life that I will die completely unaware of.

Having watched what life can be like for people over 80, my parents and other family members, I am now thinking that dying in your 70's is really ok. One of the unintended outcomes of our medical science and care is that we live far longer than we ought to and thus with greatly reduced quality. There were two times when my dad could have been carried off by infections, but was fixed up so he could go back and be an unspeaking paralyzed shadow of himself for another couple of years. He really should have died years before he did. Keeping him alive was done out of love, but its effect was cruel.

If you want to get a scary sense of the human race, read the comments on YouTube, on just about anything. Folks from all over the world, with internet access. On another level, just barbarians.

One of American liberal Catholicism's lights is nun Joan Chittester. She recently wrote that the Pope's allowance to use the traditional Latin liturgy was a disaster because the new liturgy and the old liturgy are for different churches. I think she spoke the truth for her and folks like her.
Vatican II provoked a repeat of the Protestant Reformation with a psychological but not an institutional break. Her real religion, I suspect, is liberalism: feminism first of all, and then all the associated isms of the Seven Pillars. And if you pushed it, I suspect that you'd find way more common ground between Luther and Rome than between Chittester and Rome. As I wrote to the guy who runs the website this appeared on, "Don't you get exhausted year after year being the angry unloved son? Unless that's what you really like."

As for ordaining women like her, does she not understand that the Vatican understands that that would never be the end of it? Women like her having access to hierachical power would just be a foothold in the beginning of another war against actual historical Catholicism. What makes her think that ordaining people who engage in a constant campaign of public disobedience makes any sense at all? You don't have to be a theologian or a believer to get that.

One of the Enlightenment's great flaws was its attempt to create truth and value supposedly utterly unconnected to local particular life. In many ways, this ultra-European project was essentially infected with de-racination. You now have many of its descendants passionately holding on to highminded values in utter ignorance of their own real and local interests, to say nothing of local reality. That Dutch reporter is a classic example. Head right up her ass, and feeling totally superior about it.

The sad truth is that human groups of all kinds --racial, religious, political, economic, etc.--- have always warred on and will always war on one another. How many groups do not have problems with their neighbors? It may in fact be one of the unpleasant survival strategies built into our species. And if you do not hold that your group is better than all the others --whether it is or not-- you will lose to those who do.

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