Lessons of History

In 1958, full orbed hot war threatened to break out after dogfights over the Taiwan straights that saw a breakthrough use of Sidewinder missiles that brought down several Red Chinese Migs. We may be contemplating that brink again, if a current report on a claimed, leaked audiotape of discussions by Chinese authorities is credible. (The audiotape is in a Chinese dialect, likely Mandarin but possibly Cantonese.) As the first linked reports: In the past week, in response to the instruction of the “Central Military Commission of the State Council” in Beijing on “transitioning to a war time system,” a meeting took place involving senior officers of the People Liberation Army’s Guangdong Military Region of the Southern Command and the principal Read More ›

April 30: Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves. As with most slippery slopes, it all began with a strongly worded denial that it exists. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed 22 years of its own jurisprudence by striking down the country’s ban on assisted suicide as unconstitutional, blithely dismissing fears that the ruling would ‘initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide’ Read More ›

Breitbart, as I just saw: After a two-week battle against opposition from the platform’s board members, self-declared free speech absolutist Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and currently the richest man in the world, has succeeded in his bid to buy Twitter. In a press release, the Twitter board announced that they had reached an agreement with the multi-billionaire to sell 100 percent of the company at Musk’s original price of $54.20 per share. Where does this point? DEVELOPING. U/D April 29, Followership jumps per Daily mail: A chart of followership shifts from the verge:

We can adapt Francis Schaeffer’s themes, looking back to the Christian Synthesis of the heritage of Jerusalem, Greece and Rome, and the onward flow of ideas and cultural agendas since Paul of Tarsus: Schaeffer thought that once there was an upper/lower storey approach that in effect gave up on solving the problem of the one and the many, the lower storey would eat up the upper one, unity and coherence would disintegrate: Schaeffer and others also thought in terms of the seven mountains picture of the span of culture, how the dominant view sets the agenda and how cultures therefore change. This has been championed by Wallnau and others in recent years. I adapt: We may carry this onward to Read More ›

to control the change, set the agenda and control thought to a thesis, an antithesis and your desired synthesis. So, we see, in a cartoon: Where, let us recall the change challenge: . . . thus the fallacy of the false dilemma pushing a simplistic dichotomy of choices: . . . and the Overton Window context, where one has to open up space to pull policy, likely incrementally — thus we see a slippery slope ratchet: so, we see how a slippery slope slide into lawless oligarchy can be created: Are we facing a march of the Lemmings? Food for thought as we contemplate technoplutocracy. END

We see in current news: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has activated measures to drastically restrict the availability of Christian content on the internet, Open Doors reported this week. Last December, China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) announced its upcoming “Measures for the Administration of Internet Religious Information Services,” a series of regulations designed to eliminate any online religious message that fails to conform to the principles of the CCP. Without express government permission, no organization or individual “shall preach on the Internet, carry out religious education and training, publish sermon content, forward or link to related content, organize and conduct religious activities on the Internet, or live broadcast or post recorded videos of religious rituals,” the CCP declared Read More ›

According to Gateway Pundit (a handy source not an endorsement): On Friday, the largest group, ‘The People’s Convoy,’ merged with another massive group when it arrived at its final rest stop in Hagerstown, Maryland, which is just 75 miles (90 minutes) away from the nation’s capital. The convoy is now well over 10,000 vehicles long, including thousands of trucks. There are so many participants in the caravan that it has taken over three hours for them to get off the highway, and there is still no end in sight. We will monitor, including watching out for a riot that can conveniently be made into a further Reichstag fire framing incident. DEVELOPING

If you needed a case study on loaded language driven slanted reporting, here is a case study that deserves to be headlined: For context, see the de-spin chart: Remember, this has been with lives on the line. END

In one of the classics, in the Minor Prophets, we read a strange-seeming tale: Amos 5:18 Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD!Why would you have the day of the LORD?It is darkness, and not light,19 as if a man fled from a lion,and a bear met him,or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,and a serpent bit him.20 Is not the day of the LORD darkness, and not light,and gloom with no brightness in it? [ESV] Switching metaphors, we can imagine being caught in a thorny thicket, or facing the horns of a many-pronged “multi-lemma” or even feeling that we have gone over a cliff, and are trying to cope with battered Read More ›

UD sometimes hosts guest posts, some by request, some by promotion of comments. This is one of the latter. A key point is his note that the toll of our living posterity in the womb is now two billions (I can readily show 800+ millions and can plausibly support the 1.4 billion statistics I have seen). Similarly, the mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic shows sobering disregard for life and duties of care. We need to ask how we have come to this, within living memory of the Nuremberg trials. Without endorsing beyond “this is food for thought” we need to consider Harry’s concerns and considerations: >>The outrageous corruption of the godless elite is finally coming into the light of day. Read More ›

In a given time and culture, characteristic fashionable fallacies too often gain persuasive power by mutual reinforcement, and/or by swinging from one extreme to another; bypassing the point of responsible balance. So, too, we end up in a thorny thicket of errors, a hard-to-escape problematique. And yes, that often includes the [neo-]marxist version of the Hegelian triad, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, repeat. Where, too, babylonian captivity to the spirit of the age or the community . . . nowadays, strongly shaped by relativism . . . is of the very essence of ill advised worldly, destructive false “conventional wisdom.” We must ask, then, what are the crooked yardsticks that we have substituted for what is truly straight, accurate, upright? (Have we Read More ›

In the current thread on an unfortunate event with a newborn, there is an exchange of comments: BA, 45: Suppose the overwhelming majority regarded dumping newborns in dumpsters as good. Would it then be good? Sev, 56: Presumably, it would be good in the minds of the majority who approved of it. It would not be a good thing from my perspective. This, of course reflects the core relativist thesis that rejects objective, warranted, generally knowable moral truth, and so I commented, 57: “thereby hangs the fatal error of relativising and undermining knowable, warranted, objective moral truth reducing it to clash of opinions backed by power. Justice evaporates.” Such brings us back to a core issue, legitimate, morally anchored authority Read More ›

As we continue to explore the issue of the marginalisation of moral knowledge, let us highlight from 48b, Willard’s (incomplete) list of key causes: (2). How did this disappearance [of moral knowledge] come to be the case? Not through a discovery of some kind: e.g. that there was no such knowledge. But through a lengthy historical process of idea change. Some components: (A). The dismissal of theology from the domain of knowledge [i.e. the study and systematic knowledge of God, cf Rom 1:28 – 32], and the failure to find a secular basis for ethics [–> how can evolutionary materialism found ethics?].(B). Disappearance of the human self and knowledge of the self from “respectable” knowledge. (The “soul” from Plato on.) Read More ›

In the course of exploring the marginalisation/disappear-ING of moral knowledge, Professor Dallas Willard gave an expanded definition of knowledge that also draws out the legitimate authority of knowledge; including, moral knowledge, i.e. knowledge of duty to right conduct etc. As we can see from his handout for a 2010 video lecture: What is knowledge and what does it do? Knowledge is the capacity to represent something as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. It and it alone confers the right and perhaps the responsibility to act, direct action, formulate policy and supervise its implementation, and teach. This helps us see what disappears along with “moral knowledge.” He goes on to note on the “[f]ear or resentment Read More ›

The natural, built in law framework in 48g culminates: . . . in civil society with government, justice is a principal task of legitimate government. In short, nihilistic will to power untempered by the primacy of justice is its own refutation in any type of state. Where, justice is the due balance of rights, freedoms and responsibilities. (In Aristotle’s terms as cited by Hooker: “because we would take no harm, we must therefore do none; That since we would not be in any thing extremely dealt with, we must ourselves avoid all extremity in our dealings; That from all violence and wrong we are utterly to abstain, with such-like .”) Thus also, 11] Eleventh, that as the US DoI, 1776 Read More ›