The made-up pronoun game

All the recent made-up pronouns, just like all the recent made-up "genders" -- and the on-going efforts to criminalize the refusal of sane persons to go along with it -- are leftist passive-aggressive assertions, heavy on the aggression, of power over the language, thoughts, and minds of others.

In a recent post, Who needs truth?, Vox Day quotes from a Washington Post article, including this snippet

To Haidt’s point, a scandal erupted in the fall in Canada when Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate teaching assistant for an introductory communications course at Wilfrid Laurier University, played a video clip in which Jordan Peterson, a controversial professor, declared his refusal to address trans students by their preferred gender-neutral pronouns.

The thing to which I wish to draw Gentle Reader's attention is the fact that even if one insanely agrees to go along with the leftist power-play scam, one does not *address* another person by any of these made-up pronouns. In English, the pronouns by which one *addresses* other persons are either the second person singular ('you') or the second person plural ('you') ... both or which are, as one can clearly see, already and intrinsically "gender-neutral pronouns".

Even centuries ago, when English did still have multiple second person pronouns, those pronouns were already "gender-neutral"; the distinctions they drew were not between sex, but between number on the one hand, and social status -- formality vs familiarity -- on the other.

The struggle is real

Wilbur Hassenfus observes at Dalrock's blog:

[UMC] Bishop [sic] Oliveto deserves a lot of credit. In the old days, bishops used to struggle to be more like Christ, but now Christ is apparently struggling — with, to His credit, some qualified success — to be more like her.

These are the kind of improvements you see when you put women in charge of your institution. Very impressive!

The observation is a comment about this -- PJMedia: Lesbian Bishop [sic] Calls Jesus a Bigot

United Methodist Church bishop [sic] Dr. Karen Oliveto is not only a lesbian, she also believes (and publicly teaches) that Jesus was a bigot filled with prejudices. She does say that Jesus grew and changed, and that’s her point. Bishop [sic] Oliveto admonishes, “If Jesus can change, if he can give up his bigotries and prejudices, if he can realize that he had made his life too small, and if, in this realization, he grew closer to others and closer to God, than so can we.”

The struggle which is real is, of course, the same old one it has always been -- to plant one's own ass on God's throne.

Living In A Madhouse

K T Cat: Living In A Madhouse

Well, No

The Wichita Eagle: 'Swatting' led to fatal shooting of Andrew Finch, [bureaucrats-with-guns] say

Well, no. The hoax call to the "Swat Team" supplied the spark, but the tinder was already there ... in the form, and mindset, of *having* a "Swat Team".

Still, I must give the rest of the cops credit, in that the trigger-happy cop's fatal shot didn't set off the rest of them.

"What Happened"

OR: Too Clever By Half

One of the reasons that Trump is in the White House ... and, God willing, Hillary "What Happened" Clinton will be in the Big House ... is that multiple thousands, perhaps even millions, of Democrats helped put him there. I'm not talking about the ones who voted for him in the general election; I'm talking about the ones who cynically "crossed party lines" in the primaries to vote for Trump on the assurance of their Too Clever By Half leftist puppet-masters that getting Trump nominated as the Republican candidate would *help* Crooked Hillary win the general election.

Think about this for a minute -- these Democrat voters fully expected that the Republican establishment would honor their official rules ... even as it was a not-so-secret "open secret" that the Democrat establishment had rigged their primary, so that Democrat voters' votes were total shams.

The Second Coming ...

... of Reagan (*)

No matter what Trump says or does, the leftists are going to act as though he were The Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. So, while he's at it, he might as well out-Reagan Reagan.


(*) While I was not a "Never-Trumper", in the end I didn't vote for him (to be more precise, as I am passed tired of voting for "the lesser of two evils", I couldn't bring myself to vote for him). I voted for Darrell Castle of the Constitution Party. My second choice would have been the Conservative Party; but the Constitution Party's planks were more explicitly "socially conservative" and, indeed, unashamedly Christian, so I voted for them.

While I am still registered as a Republican, I have for many years despised the establishment GOP almost as much as I do the Dems, and for much the same reason -- they do not love America, and they do not see it as Job One to further the true, and long-term, interests of actual Americans over undocumented Democrats.

But, Trump, for all his faults, comes across as someone who really does love America and is working for the interests of Americans, rather than of foreigners.

And that, by the way, was Reagan's "secret" -- he loved America and Americans. He disagreed with the "big thinkers" in both parties that it was America's fate to be overrun by the Marxists (and, as far as most Dems were and still are concerned, that we *deserved* to be).

A Perfect Example

This post -- A Dishonest Church Disguised as a Nation -- is a perfect example of the America-hating "neo-reactionary" fools who populate "The Orthoshpere". And, because they hate America and its foundational principles, some of them even imagine they can ally with "the old left".

They won't allow me to post criticisms on their site of the foolish things they say --

Chesterton said that America was “a nation with the soul of a church” because it was not a natural, historical nation, formed over time by blood and custom, but was a theoretical nation formed around a creed.

This assertion is as false-to-reality as Vox Day's opposite assertion that America is *nothing but* a "natural, historical nation, formed over time by blood and custom".

In truth, America is *both* simultaneously.

The creed of this “nation with the soul of a church” is not the Nicene Creed, which means that this “nation with the soul of a church” is a rival church.

The State is not The Nation, however much a state ultimately reflects the society it rules: the American State has long (longer than any of us have been alive) been co-opted by anti-Christian secularists and leftists (*). But, even now, after more than a century, that is a different matter to what America *is*.

(*) And one of the main reasons they are able to do this is because most Americans just aren't that interested in running the lives of other people ... and so, those aberrant individuals who do have that interest face less competition in the public/political sphere than one could wish.

And it is not in any honest sense of the word a nation, since confessing the same creed is not at all the same thing as descending from the same forefathers. The phrase “creedal nation” is a blatant oxymoron, because to say that a nation is a church is as asinine as to say that a baby is a Bible.

So, is that very Bible to which J.M.Smith refers also blatantly oxymoronic in referring to the totality of Christians, confessing the same creed, as a "nation" and a "holy nation" on the basis of that common confession of allegiance to one Lord?

Compare and Contrast

The Telegraph: [Girl] Guides allows boys who identify as female to shower with girls

The Girl Guides will allow boys [aged up to 25] who identify as female to shower with girls, it has emerged.

The Girl Guides is the UK incarnation of the Girl Scouts.

Girl Scouts Reminder: She Doesn’t Owe Anyone a Hug. Not Even at the Holidays.

Think of it this way, telling your child that she owes someone a hug either just because she hasn’t seen this person in a while or because they gave her a gift can set the stage for her questioning whether she “owes” another person any type of physical affection when they’ve bought her dinner or done something else seemingly nice for her later in life.

If Gentle Reader really thinks that these two stances by these two lesbian-controlled organizations are really all that different -- or that the US Girl Scouts won't soon also be openly putting naked men into the same showers with little girls -- then he has not been paying attention to the world around him.

Eyelessness in Blind Cave Fish is Due to Epigenetics

Cornelius Hunter at Darwin's God: Blindness in Cave Fish is Due to Epigenetics

I have long wondered whether this were the case. Specifically, I phrased the wonderment as: "If Mexican Blind Cave Fish were to be bred for some generations in a lighted environment, would they "spontaneously" "evolve" functional eyes?" So far as I know, no one is even attempting such an experiment. But, if the eyelessness of Mexican Blind Cave Fish is indeed controlled by epigenetic factors, as the recent paper purports to show, then the answer to my question is "Yes".

Post-Modern Science: The Illusion of Consciousness Sees Through Itself

Denyse O'Leary: Post-Modern Science: The Illusion of Consciousness Sees Through Itself

...
Naturalist philosopher Patricia Churchland puts the proposition most starkly: Evolution selects for survival and “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.”

“Truth, whatever that is”? One sees into the soul of post-modern science here.
...
Gobry [previously quoted concerning the self-evident absurdity of the Naturalists' "consciousness is an illusion" assertion] seems not to grasp that absurdity is no longer an issue. We are animals and animals are never absurd; they live and then they die.

Similarly, literary critic Leon Wieseltier [echoing Darwin (*), whether or not he realizes it] writes, “If reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? … Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it.” Yes, it can. The power invoked is not reason but the rhetoric of reason, a weapon for those who do not believe in the concept against those who do.

(*) This is referred to as "Darwin's Doubt"

“But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind? [To William Graham 3 July 1881]”

“But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?”

And -- just as his disciples today -- he didn't let the knowledge that his programme logically entails the denial that we even can reason truly/soundly and acquire real/true knowledge get in his way.