About Those Lawns

 Recently, when asked *specifically* what she intended to do to "bring down prices and mak[e] life more affordable", Kamala "Sutra" Harris went into word-salad mode ... and never got close to answering the question.  As she meandered her way to no-where, she said that she "grew up in a neighborhood of folks who were very proud of their lawn ...".  What, you may wonder, is that all about?

What it's about is that she's trying to tell black "folks" that, "See! I'm just like you!"

Recall that Kamala "Sutra" Harris grew up in Canada, and has little to none of the "lived-experience" of black Americans.  BUT, she has heard of the old stereotype within "the black community" of the "lawn-proud" black man.  So, she's making reference to that stereotype to say to black "folks" that, "See! I'm just like you!" ... probably without realizing that the "lawn-proud" black man was a figure of both amusement and bemusement.

By the way, in the black neighborhood in which I grew up, only the very few white households (my family were the only white household with children for blocks around) had lawns.  The reason for this is that in the black households, the lady of the house *swept* the lawn with a broom on a daily basis.

EDIT (2024/09/02):

Isn't it odd that Kamala Sutra was raised in a middle-class neighborhood, where people were proud of their lawns, and simultaneously grew up living in an apartment above a "child-care center", with the business being owned by a woman who lived "two doors down [the hall]"?

Liberals ... and Speed Limits

Seen on the internet -- "Conservatives are just liberals doing the speed limit."

My response --

True enough in the cases of most people.

Meanwhile, "liberals" are just unprincipled leftists. That is, "liberals" are people who subscribe to leftist presuppositions, they just don't like some of the destinations logically entailed in those presuppositions. BUT, as they have no *principle* by which to reject the logic, and thus the entailed destination, they will always eventually fold when the open leftists demand it.

In the meantime. unless your proffered alternative to leftism is Jesus Christ, then you are also just another variant of leftist.

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The late Andrew Breitbart famously said, "Politics is downstream of culture."

And, while that is true, it is incomplete. A more complete statement is expressed by my internet friend Kristor: "Politics is downstream of culture, and culture is downstream of cult." 'Cult' is not here a pejorative, as the word is commonly erroneously used in present-day English.

Or, as as (Calvinist) pastor and blogger, Douglas Wilson, points out: "There is always a god of the system." There is no such thing as metaphysical/religious neutrality (*); there is always some metaphysical underpinning of the social system, and which will be expressed in its politics. There are always blasphemy laws, but what is counted "sacred", and thus not to be blasphemed, depends upon the underlying metaphysics.

(*) The secularist promise of "religious neutrality" was a deliberate bait-and-switch lie. The goal was not "religious neutrality", which is impossible, but rather to disarm the general Christian(ish) populace long enough to install their anti-Christian metaphysics as the organizing principle of Western societies. It worked because most people were merely "cultural Christians", who wanted to enjoy the fruits of a Christian culture, while bulldozing the orchard.

Zeus ... and the 'atheist'

A recent thread on the 'Shadow to Light' blog ("Atheist Tries to Defend Atheist Talking Point") concerns the common attempt by 'atheists' to avoid actually making arguments, and actually defending their position, by (falsely) asserting that atheism is merely a "lack of belief in gods".

The commenter, MP, remarked, "For that matter, it can also be interesting to observe an atheist who has to deal with the fact that some Roman and Japanese emperors were considered to be gods. Given what atheists claim to believe, they would have to say that those emperors did not exist, as “there is no evidence for them”. Yet, somehow, that does not really happen…"

The commenter, TFBW, replied, "That raises the question, “what is a god?” What is the statement “Roman emperors were not gods” denying, exactly?"

After further comments by others, here is my attempt to comment on the sum of comments --

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Even aside from the important, though almost always overlooked, point of nailing down just what an 'atheist' means by the word 'god', atheism offers 'atheists' no rational principle by which deny the reality either of Christ or of Zeus ... nor of any of the miracles recorded in the Bible.

Zeus, like the 'atheist', is an effect of "the universe". Zeus, like the 'atheist', is the off-spring of a previously existing living entity, and ultimately descends from an original living entity which "came alive", all by itself, from non-living matter; and which non-living matter ultimately "came into ordered being" (i.e "Cosmos"), all by itself, from non-ordered Chaos. And again, Zeus' rationality, like that of the 'atheist', is an effect of "the universe", and "arose" from non-rationality.

But, what of Zeus' "supernatural" nature? In that regard, too, the 'atheist' has no rational principle by which to reject the possibility that Zeus could "break the laws of nature", for "scientific atheism" denies that there are any "laws of nature" in the first place.

Please bear with me that I have quoted this before, but it is important -- in 'The Demon-Haunted World', Carl Sagan said:

"Consider this claim: as I walk along, time -as measured by my wristwatch or my ageing process -slows down. Also, I shrink in the direction of motion. Also, I get more massive. Who has ever witnessed such a thing? It's easy to dismiss it out of hand. Here's another: matter and antimatter are all the time, throughout the universe, being created from nothing. Here's a third: once in a very great while, your car will spontaneously ooze through the brick wall of your garage and be found the next morning on the street. They're all absurd! But the first is a statement of special relativity, and the other two are consequences of quantum mechanics (vacuum fluctuations and barrier tunnelling,* they're called). Like it or not, that's the way the world is. If you insist it's ridiculous, you'll be forever closed to some of the major findings on the rules that govern the Universe.

*The average waiting time per stochastic ooze is much longer than the age of the Universe since the Big Bang. But, however improbable, in principle it might happen tomorrow."

What this means, is that, according to 'Science!', anything at all might happen at any time at all without any cause at all. That is, despite passing mention of "rules that govern the Universe", Sagan is really saying that there are no "laws of nature" in the first place for Zeus (or YHWH) to "violate" when causing a "supernatural event", or a miracle, to occur.

According to the 'atheist', Zeus just happens to be a rational living being, like himself, who, like himself, ultimately "arose" from non-rational non-living matter, which self-organized from disorganization. The difference between Zeus and the 'atheist' is that Zeus is able, whether innately or via study, to manipulate to his advantage "some of the major findings on the rules [sic] that govern the Universe."
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