I've been pondering this concept for a while and the shocking assassination of Charlie Kirk yesterday forced it to the surface.
What is the next logical step after this?
How about the radicalization of the Democrats?
The Democrats get a large percent of their money from small donors which means the base. As their popularity declines, so does their pool of donors. As their popularity declines, their base becomes more and more radical because the squishier ones leave. Their popularity is now at historic lows.
As their popularity decreases, they are forced to spiral in towards their far-left base which means their rhetoric has to become more and more frenzied and hateful to keep the money flowing. Hence "the end of Democracy" and "fascists" and all the rest.
If their starting point was that everyone who disagreed with them was a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe, a fascist and more, where else can they go as their base moves farther and farther left?
How do you appeal to psychotics?
Addendum
It is nearly impossible to be a conservative and not understand the left's positions because we marinate in them every day. They permeate our entertainment, schools and news media. We bathe in the water of the left.
It is very common for the progressives to have no idea why conservatives think like they do because people like Charlie Kirk have been edited out of their world. I can't tell you how many news sources and public figures described Charlie as "divisive" and then cherry-picked some of his positions, putting them in the worst light possible. They deliberately removed all neutral reference points. They wanted you to hate him.
As the left spirals down into their base, their base stays whipped into a frenzy of ignorant, self-reinforced hate. That's a recipe for more and more violence.
More than that, Charlie Kirk along with Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh and lots of other thought leaders on the right make it a habit to speak in large, public forums and then make sure the progressives in the audience get an unedited, uninterrupted chance to challenge them in the Q&A.
That dialog was precisely what Charlie was doing when they shot him.
You punish the things you don't want repeated. If you're going to punish free and open conversations about politics, be prepared for the alternative.
One more thing. Ben Shapiro made a typically brilliant observation about Charlie's assassination. This spells the end of open-air presentations like this. From now on, the venues for these things will be enclosed, tightly controlled and necessarily smaller. If you saw photos of Charlie's event yesterday, you'll see why this is a bad thing for all Americans. That crowd was huge.
I know this is a detour from my series on Be Nice, Don't Judge in the Diocese of San Diego, but I just got a brain wave on a topic I've been pondering for years.
What will the world be like for us when Europe and Canada become Islamic? Given demographic trends, we're on track for that.
What if the end result is a 1950s America where we prosper because our competition has been bombed into the Stone Age and we're the only ones with a functional, advanced economy? The analogy isn't perfect as we would share the spoils with Asia in a way we didn't in the 1950s, but the idea might be the same.
Is there a difference between the 8th Air Force and Islam?
Think about this: there isn't a single Muslim country where there are significant manufacturing, software development or investment industries. Quick, name an automobile brand that comes from an Islamic country. You can't because there isn't one.
It's not that they don't have resources, manpower or cash. There are plenty of Islamic countries awash in all three. It must be something cultural. I won't go into it here, but if you have read What Went Wrong by Bernard Lewis, it makes sense. Here's the book's blurb from Amazon.
For centuries, the world of Islam was in the forefront of human achievement -- the foremost military and economic power in the world, the leader in the arts and sciences of civilization. Christian Europe was seen as an outer darkness of barbarism and unbelief from which there was nothing to learn or to fear. And then everything changed. The West won victory after victory, first on the battlefield and then in the marketplace.
In this elegantly written volume, Bernard Lewis, a renowned authority an Islamic affairs, examines the anguished reaction of the Islamic world as it tried to make sense of how it had been overtaken, overshadowed, and dominated by the West. In a fascinating portrait of a culture in turmoil, Lewis shows how the Middle East turned its attention to understanding European weaponry, industry, government, education, and culture. He also describes how some Middle Easterners fastened blame on a series of scapegoats, while others asked not "Who did this to us?" but rather "Where did we go wrong?"
A lot of things went right for America in the 1950s. One of the chief among them was the fact that Europe and Japan were skeletons of their former economic selves. Are we headed back to those halcyon days once Britain, France, Germany and Canada become Islamic Republics?
After Bishop Devouring Mother smothered us with treacle at the recent Synodality Meeting, we got another earful about the marginalized from the pulpit on Sunday.
Who are the marginalized? Well, the homeless, the addicts, the migrants, the LGBTQWERTY crew, non-whites and women in general.
Recently, an illegal got a trucker's license from a deep blue state where they love the marginalized. Illiterate and ignorant of traffic laws or signs, he made a U-turn on an expressway from the right-hand lane and killed three people.
Illegal took the lives of three people by making an illegal U-Turn with a truck in Florida on Tuesday.
Harjinder Singh faces state charges then’ll be deported.
He entered the US illegally in 2018 and got his CDL in California even though an illegal.
He is the marginalized. The people he killed are not the marginalized. Get that through your head, you judgmental bigot.
In Milan, a North African migrant beat and raped an 18-year old girl. I'm not going to post the details here, they are simply too horrible. He is the marginalized, not the girl.
The Marginalized Are Fetish Porn
Thinking about this, I came up with a definition of pornography. It is exaggerated sensory input designed to stimulate your particular desires. The porn star who is hung like a horse, the porn star with a D-cup, the family of migrants with eyes like anime characters, the homeless man who lost his job, they're all porn, some for the pervert, some for the be nice, don't judge crowd. The be nice, don't judge type love the way the marginalized excite their devouring mother fetish and give them a fantasy about cuddling and protecting and uplifting the weak and needy.
Here, we see two migrants, a transgender, a homeless person and a gay dude.
One of the worst things you can do to someone who is enjoying porn is to mess with their inputs. Imagine having a wonderful session with your laptop and someone presses the F11 key and your browser pans out to show you the camera and sound crew filming whatever filth you're enjoying. What a total buzzkill!
That's who we are to the Catholic Charities people, the bishops, the Church of England, Lutheran Charities and the race-obsessed progressives when we ask about the people killed by the illegal trucker or the girl raped by the North African. It's also why the churches and politicians are so silent about the victims. No one wants to be that guy, the one that wonders aloud if all this thrilling content featuring the "marginalized" is just so much porn.
The Real Penalty For Apostasy
Dig this. It gives you the true penalty for pulling back the camera on the porn - social isolation for you and yours.
🚨 Graham Linehan discusses the effects on his life of going against the trans lobby. 👇👇 pic.twitter.com/4kp25pnock
That was Graham Linehan, a British comedy writer who got arrested coming off the plane at Heathrow. His story can be found here. It's worth a read to get a good sense of the direction the Elites are taking us all.
Here's one more post in my be nice, don't judge series discussing how and why the Church has become pathologically feminine, a near-perfect instantiation of Carl Jung's devouring mother.
Way back in 2023, 10 days after the diabolical Hamas attack on Israel, I wrote this post with the following excerpt.
I worked part of a men's retreat weekend on Thursday and Friday and heard another "God loves you" sermon. In light of what had happened in Israel and what is happening in our own children's hospitals and then the protests on campuses supporting both, that sermon was an obscenity. It's taken me a while to figure out what it is that makes them inappropriate and tasteless. I've come to the conclusion that they are childish. Not innocent and naive, but sickeningly infantile and weak in their blindness and dishonesty.
One of the priests who was on the retreat saying Mass has a habit of saying, "It's x o'clock and you are loved" with a simpering smile. I've always felt that to be a little creepy, talking to me like I'm an anxious child. This time it was sickening.
We're at war. Evil is no longer talking in euphemisms. It is livestreaming its rapes. It is shouting and dancing about its abortions. It is marching in the streets chanting, "Gas the Jews!" It is flashing swastikas from its cell phones at Jews in the streets. It is proudly talking about genital mutilation and mastectomies for children.
In this environment, prancing around and saying, "It's 11:30 and you are loved!" is an obscenity. It is a denial of the pain and loss of the innocent. There is no pain, there is no loss, there is just gooey goodness and love all around. There is no need to fight and argue and stand for what is good because there isn't any existential threat around us. Evil is nowhere to be seen, we can all go back to our soft beds and go back to sleep.
Synodal Nausea
At the diocesan synod meeting last weekend, we were given handouts where the slogan for the synod was "Pilgrims of Hope." It was nauseating in exactly the same way. It was infantilizing and condescending and useless in its utter emasculation of the participants.
I'm facing a major decision in my life right now. I'm aging out of the chance to achieve one of my life's goals - a vacation home in Alabama. I'll soon be too old to enjoy it if I buy it, but at the same time I have significant financial commitments to our extended family that must be met before I can spend money on myself. Outside of a DeLorean some 30 years ago and a few trips to sporting events, I've not spent much on myself. Throughout my adult life, my time and money have all gone to parents, wives, children and others.
That's not a complaint, it's simply part of being a man. The decision is right there in front of me every day. At the same time, my employment situation is uncertain. I worked about 60% this last fiscal year and am only 60% funded for the coming year. I'm working hard to land new clients and get to full time, but I've got nothing but prospects right now. I don't feel comfortable taking a plunge on a Fish River house at 60%.
Simultaneously, I'm fighting the bottle, just like almost everyone else in my family has, particularly on my mother's side, for generations. That battle has been up and down for years. Right now it's mostly up, but I know it will never go away completely. It's hand-to-hand combat with demons every single afternoon.
Into that situation comes my church, oozing docility and creepiness, saying things like, "It's x o'clock and you are loved" and "Pilgrims of Hope." It prattles on about uplifting the marginalized and amplifying their voices. The marginalized face the same choices and temptations I do, that we all do. We're freaking adults, not pouty toddlers.
This is how my Church sees me and everyone else, too.
After the Synod, trying to put my finger on just what was sickening me about this, I listened to this talk by Jordan Peterson summarizing his outstanding book, 12 Rules for Life. Here it is, queued up to one of its many good points.
Jordan is useful, the Church prelates are not. More tellingly, Jordan loves me, the Church prelates love themselves.
The Bishops Love Themselves
In Matthew 7:12, Jesus famously says, “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the law and the prophets."
I want, heck, I need my friends, family and church to treat me like an adult and not a disturbed child. I am a fallible, sinful person and only by changing myself will my life improve. A friend wouldn't pat me on the head and tell me they were going to uplift me because I was marginalized. If I'm marginalized, it's because I did it to myself.
Hello, double Elijah Craig Old Fashioned. And a refill after this one, please. I'm on the Highway to Marginalization, as AC/DC might say.
Last night, I began to think what it would be like if I talked, in a treacly voice, to the bishop or the pansy priest the way they talked to me.
“Father… oh Father… I can see the strain in your eyes. Do you need to be uplifted? Don’t worry, I’ll hold the space for you. Your poor little voice hasn’t been heard, has it? I’ll amplify it. I’ll be your megaphone of hope. You’ve carried such burdens, haven’t you? So heavy, so unfair. And yet you keep smiling—oh, how brave! But Father, you don’t need to be brave with me. Not anymore. You can put it all down. You can weep if you need to weep, wail if you must. Don’t hide behind your vestments. It’s going to be alright. I will nurture you, protect you, love you into wholeness. Shhh… there now. Let go. Let me be strong for you.”
Vomito de gato.
This isn't love, it's moral masturbation. The Church prelates don't talk to us like this because they love us, they do it because they get a virtue orgasm out of it. They couldn't care less about us, we're just 2-dimensional pornographic images to them.
The scene where I condescend to the priest is plainly wrong because both the priest and I know our relative positions in the Church. It is inappropriate for me to talk to him like an infant. However, both the priest and I know our relative and utterly equal positions in the eyes of God and it is inappropriate for him to speak to me that way, too.
Further, and more obviously, we're both freaking adults, man. No one talks to an adult that way, not if they want to keep all their teeth. It's beyond insulting.
I think I'll stop here as this one is getting a bit long and I still want to go to the gym before the Newcastle game at 0930.
Maybe, while I'm at the gym, someone will uplift my weights for me. That's what Jesus would want - for me to go to the gym, but not lift anything and have me sit there and watch others lift for me.
This was so breathtaking that it is practically the whole of my post today.
Shorter version: "They rape little, white girls because raping little, white girls is what they do and who they are."
Meanwhile, Church prelates, deliberately blind to such cultural differences, lecture us dirty, bigoted laity about being tolerant and inclusive while Church NGOs, devoted to "uplifting the marginalized" at any cost, provide the manpower for importing massive numbers of "people from other cultures" who lack "proper cultural awareness."
Mental Exercise: Imagine the amount of "cultural awareness training" required to make respecting women second nature to the fellow below given his starting point and the amount of "cultural training" he has received since boyhood in his native land. How long might it take? Who would administer it? What culture would he be trained in when the West hates its legacy culture?
UK: Islamic migrant in London explains that the rape of an English 12-year-old isn’t actually rape as Sharia does not limit the permissible age for sex nor does it confer rights on in infidels. pic.twitter.com/GICILUba0S
The feminine pathology that has take over the West in general and the Catholic Church in particular simply dismisses such complications as it plays out a massive, collective instantiation of Carl Jung's devouring mother.
Every problem is a baby and every solution is cuddling.
Super Extra Special Number One Plus Good Bonus Content
Look, everyone! The migrants are receiving cultural awareness training! We're saved!
A migrant staying at the Wethersfield asylum centre in north Essex says there is “almost nightly fighting” between different nationalities.
The BBC has seen video footage that appeared to show a fight involving several men in a canteen where chairs were thrown and one man had a bloodied face...
The asylum seeker, whose identity we are protecting, says the asylum centre on the former military base “has many, many problems".
He told the BBC there was “almost nightly fighting with another nationality, because the number of people is many”.
He said he did not know why the migrants were fighting.
The BBC understands that some of the minibuses that take migrants to the nearby centres of Braintree, Colchester and Chelmsford have had their windows smashed and vandalised on the base.
Of all the various organizations, governments and institutions in the world, two of the very few whose mission is to pursue the Truth are the Catholic Church and empirical science*. Political parties exist to get elected. Private enterprise institutions, including our universities, exist to get funding. Only the Church and true science need to justify changes through reconciliation or argument with past doctrines and beliefs. Protestant Christianity isn't included because it lives in a no-man's land with its preference for personal interpretation over dogma.
True science doesn't have an institution that defends it. The ethical collapse of Scientific American and the capitulation of most of our top universities to cultural Marxism shows that clearly.
That only leaves the Catholic Church institutionally defending Truth. When we falter or fail, civilization loses its last guardrail and all bets are off.
Europe and Canada are decaying under the weight of mass migration from Africa and Islam. If you haven't seen it yet, check out this video of a 14-year-old Scottish girl defending herself from harassing migrants. She's brandishing a knife and an axe because the police and the men in her town cower in the face of the migrants. Naturally, the authorities arrested her and left the migrants alone.
I really dislike swearing in prose, but this meme captured what is going on in Europe perfectly.
The whole model of the world God made is effectively, while not utterly, Darwinian. Violent competition is a part of life at all levels. It is into that world that Jesus came. It is that world that gives us the dramatic conflicts of our lives, conflict being a necessary element of any story. Our lives are art expressed through our bodies and our actions and that expression forms the story we author with our lives.
It is in such a world, deliberately and purposefully created this way, that we are called to serve God, love our neighbors, forgive each other and care for the least among us.
The Church and its associated NGOs have been behind mass migration everywhere, actively enabling it by supplying the manpower necessary to bring the migrants into the various countries. The Church and the NGOs have received contractual payments in the hundreds of millions of dollars to do just that.
The Church has utterly disregarded the Truth and the reality of the world in favor of a pathologically feminine world view that insists that the only thing Christ really taught was be nice, don't judge. The end result is perfectly summarized by the meme above. The "Jesus Christ" may be inappropriate language, but only technically. It speaks a truth deeper than the simple exclamation suggests.
And now we live in a world where the countries that have brought in these migrants are on the verge of widespread sectarian violence. This was perfectly predictable for anyone who was honest and clear-eyed about the cultures being imported.
France Used To Be Catholic
In France, several cities are turning to teen curfews to suppress the growing violence and drug trade being perpetrated by the African newcomers.
Several French cities have this summer introduced a curfew for teenagers in a bid to curb youth violence, but even some mayors are not sure if the ban should be enforced. While some experts say that curfews for minors do not reduce crime, one French mayor begs to disagree. "It's become very quiet," said Cédric Aoun, the mayor of Triel-sur-Seine located 35 kilometers west of Paris.
It may seem racist to suggest that the violence and crime is not being perpetrated by the native French, but the data suggests otherwise.
In Catholicism, observable, empirical data must be folded into our holistic model of the world God created for us. Paraphrasing St. Thomas Aquinas, if empirical data conflicts with Church behavior, then Church behavior must be wrong and be reformed. Be nice, don't judge has led to massive increases in rape across the West. That tells us that be nice, don't judge is not Christ's sole commandment.
The rape is bad enough. Wait for the sectarian violence to kick off in earnest and see just how effective be nice, don't judge is then.
* - I'm using empirical science as a shorthand for physics, chemistry, engineering, mathematics and similar fields. It's early and the coffee hasn't kicked in yet. This is the best I can do. Feel free to suggest alternate formulations in the comments.
I've been pondering this for quite a while now. It's been a hard one to pin down and organize in my head so instead of simply posting slop, I've sat back and thought. None of it was worked out with AI because I sometimes find my thoughts too influenced, too guided when I do that.
Aside: I heard someone recently say that public intellectuals (of which I am not one) who have podcasts never have the time to ponder and think deep thoughts once they start their podcast careers. The demands of constant content creation take away their quiet, ruminative time.
I went to our Diocesan synod meeting last weekend. I thought it was horrendous. I don't think the idea of synodal processes - listening to each other and having deep discussions within our parishes about this or that important topic - is a bad idea at all. It can lead to all kinds of good things. No, it was the overall zeitgeist of the event and the people that made my flesh crawl.
I'll need a few posts to assemble the whole argument and this is just the opening salvo.
The Diocese's Fake Virtue
Practically every aspect of the meeting and the discussions at our table were utterly saturated with "be nice, don't judge." There was a wildly exaggerated emphasis on niceness and forgiveness and kindness and kissy-kissy love-love.
It was all performative.
Thanks to the progs here in California, statutes of limitations and previous bankruptcies were ignored so we could undergo yet another round of lawsuits regarding the sex abuse scandal. Everyone who had committed those acts is now dead and there have been no new accusations, so this was simply gratuitous beating by the same progressives our bishops all worship.
Here's Matthew 5:38-42, a passage that is clearly influential in our diocese and should have been fundamental to our response to the lawsuit given our progressive nature.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well."
"If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow."
Emphasis mine.
When it became clear we were going to get sued again, the diocese pulled a stunt and separated the parishes from the diocese both legally and financially. When the suit went through, the diocese declared bankruptcy and lost everything, but all the parishes were spared. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand your cloak to your cousin and tell everyone you've never seen it before in your life.
I thought it was a clever trick and perfectly reasonable given the treachery of the State of California. However, if you do that and then come and morally masturbate in front of us all about giving and love and not judging and be niceness, I'm going to need some Pepto.
They didn't mean a word of it. They were simply indulging in virtue pornography with each other. It wasn't real, but, by God, it felt real. It felt real, real goooooood.
God Doesn't Make Mistakes
The topic of LGBTQWERTY came up at our table in our discussions. Be nice, don't judge ruled here as well. "God doesn't make mistakes" so we should not even suggest that there might be sin associated with LGBTQWERTY.
I sat there wishing I'd brought a hip flask and trying not to rip some of the others to shreds verbally. Still, I had some questions.
I like to drink. I fight that every day. My family is shot through with drunks. I've become a firm believer that there is a genetic aspect to alcoholism. If God didn't make mistakes with the LGBTQWERTY crew, then he didn't make a mistake with me. I planned on having two double Old Fashioneds when I got home.
Hey, don't judge, man. Be nice.
And then there are the people (me, for one) who seem predestined to be judgmental and argumentative. Illogic drives me bonkers. If that's genetic, which it must be because it's strongly linked to an analytic nature, then being judgmental isn't a sin, either.
The entire structure of be nice, don't judge dissolves under its own weight. It's perfectly OK for me to judge because God made me that way, right?
Don't judge the judgmental people.
Or maybe it's, "Don't judge, you probably aren't good at it. Leave that to the experts."
Random Meme
I'm going to stop here. I need to ponder a bit more before continuing. In the meantime, its memetime.
This seems apropos. Also, sometimes liberal, white women include your bishop.
