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Dispatches From Dystopia

~ "What man by worrying can add one cubit to his span of years?"

Dispatches From Dystopia

Category Archives: Politics

I Am Up

05 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by David in Politics, Uncategorized

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#Progressivism #Moral_Depravity

It is Election Day in Virginia. Both houses of the General Assembly are up for election. I suppose I will go vote at some point. Having lost all faith in Human Progress, I find the entreaties of politicians to be the language of hollow and icy seductions. They will say anything to attain political power or to hold on to that power.

The lie of progress is a sweet one. It works particularly well in America. Absent a faith in a transcendent, omnipotent and omniscient Being, who is The Source of Truth, Justice and Love, Human Progress is about all we have to look forward to. Given that secular agnostics run education, our ears are trained to listen for it. And whatever they say is progress is progress. Artificial contraception, abortion, infanticide, euthanasia are all signs of progress, not moral depravity. We don’t want to overpopulate The Planet, you know, Good Old Mother Earth. As you can tell, I’m not in the best of moods right now.

My head aches. I want to go back to sleep. I slept for a fairly long time, but I guess I need more sleep. I am still emotionally fragile. I guess I will be til I’m not any more.

Just On The Practical Side…

20 Saturday Apr 2019

Posted by David in Politics

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#POTUS

I notice these talking head media types and politicians from both parties all talk about a 400 page report (The Mueller Investigation Report) as if they are intimately familiar with it. They all read a 400 page report in a matter of hours. Really? I know they’re smart, but they have other stuff to do, especially the Congress members.

And it distills down to this, I suspect that more than a few of them are just flat out bluffing about what they actually know. Whether one likes President Trump or loathes him passionately, a little suspicion directed toward the major and minor players and observers should be present.

Is it Safe To Go Back In The Water?

08 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by David in Politics, Tolerance

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Thank Heaven this election is over.   The full out assault on the intellect and the raw emotional pandering was more than I could handle. Party affiliation is irrelevant. This is is how the politics game is played these days.  Absent any real religious or spiritual connections that characterize our culture today, politics serves to give a veneer of cosmic right and wrong to our lives.  My beliefs are those of ultimate good. the politicians I like are the warriors of virtue. The other guys, the opposition,  in our polarized little universe, are the bad guys. They can burn in Hell, if we believed there was a Hell.

I gave up on The News years ago. It is all manipulation and propaganda.  So how do we find out what is factual, what isn’t?  I don’t know.  That’s the vexing part.  Consider that we have Congress Members who don’t even read the bills they vote on, and it doesn’t matter whether the Congress Member/Slacker is one we support or not. That is dysfunctional.

I was watching the line at the polls the other day. Our congressional race was close.  There was nothing that indicated who the voter was going to vote for just by looking at them superficially. And if we opened up their body cavities , we could not identify their political affiliation, and surgically excise it.

Maybe a little more tolerance is in order.  And the more we dislike a given politician, the more we should accept the people we know who support that politician.  And I specifically mean the people we know that like whom we consider the “bad guys”.  We all get manipulated into hating and the more virtuous you think you are, the more susceptible you are to manipulation. Think about that.

Project Veritas

21 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by David in Politics

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#Project Veritas

I have been binge-watching James O’Keefe and Project Veritas videos on YouTube.

The Deep State videos on operatives in the Federal Government now being published on YouTube show that bad actors are subverting the Trump Administration through doing political work on the job, violating the Hatch Act, for starters. O’Keefe’s work is nothing short of heroic, in addition to being pretty funny at moments.

Never Again

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by David in Politics

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#Timothy Kaine (D-VA), #Walk Away

I can’t help but think that if duelling were still legal in this country, both Houses of Congress, would face serious challenges finding a quorum to commence deliberations. Lies and insults appear to rule the day, the more “esteemed” the Congress Member, the more scurrilous the lie.

The bald-faced lies about Judge Brett Kavanaugh, foisted by the octogenarian Anti-Catholic bigot Diane Feinstein, sicken me. They have strengthened my resolve to NEVER vote for a Democrat again.

I was already soured on the party I regularly supported by the antics of James Comey, and the rest of the Department of Justice personnel who sought to overturn a lawful election through the promotion of the spurious Steele Dossier and subsequent deception of the FISA courts.They lied to violate the Civil Rights of an innocent American, Carter Page. That is just for starters.

If I lose followers, I don’t care. I changed the name of the blog to Dispatches From Dystopia, because the Leftists (Marxists) who run the mainstream media and academia, have rendered America into precisely that state, a dystopia. They have nearly taken control of the Democratic Party, I suspect.

Sen Timothy Kaine, I earnestly desire your complete political demise. I will support Corey Stewart because he isn’t you.

Party On, Puritans!

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by David in Family, Politics

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birth control, Politics

H L Mencken once famously defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”

I thought of the Mencken quote because of our propensity to peg our happiness to the political situation. Our cultural Puritanism has two competing and conflicting schools of thought, both attached to conflicting and competing schools of moral progress.

Look at values around artificial contraception as just one example. One idea of moral progress can include a belief in artificial birth control and limitation of family size. Attached to this tenet, is the belief that women have the freedom to decide individually when, if at all, to become mothers. Another school of moral progress can reject artificial birth control with no limit on family size. Emphasis is on “family”, not family size. That no moral progress is attainable if the most basic social structure, the family, is derided or devalued. Concomitant with this value is the value that families consist of two parents, male and female, mother and father.

One Puritan school fears that there are people out there making babies with no thought to the strained resources of our fragile and limited planet. The other school fears that people are out there happily fornicating and copulating, with no thought to any principle besides hedonistic pleasure-seeking.

Our Puritanism has us wed to the goal of progressing toward, if not outright establishing, a political Utopia, with “Liberty and Justice for all”, but with competing ideas of what Liberty and Justice may be. We stumble along our road of Progress, never really happy unless we control the toll gates.

This is what a free society looks like. It carries a tension between competing ideas, both committed to a notion of The Common Good.

The Nihilism Of Our Present Age

07 Thursday Jun 2018

Posted by David in Existential Despair, Family, Politics

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#National Anthem # American Civil War # Donald Trump

Journalism has become little more than a head game. For both sides. One media commentator has just called the National Anthem “problematic” , thus changing the trajectory of the seemingly perpetual protest over the transgressions, real or imagined, of the ruling class to the words of Francis Scott Key’s poem itself. It’s the second verse, don’t you see? What? You don’t know it? You don’t care one whit about it? It doesn’t define you as an American? The idea is to give self-hatred a deeper cut, rubbing salt in the wounds.

Believe it or not, we still have a free exchange of ideas, and unrestricted breadth and depth of intellectual inquiry in this country. However, we often get the impression that one school of thought dominates the scholarship. The dominant paradigm in academic thought for about 100 years has been some permutation or another on the Class Struggle, e.g. workers vs capitalists,”have-nots” vs “haves”, Slaves vs Masters, oppressed vs oppressors.. The historiography of the American Civil War is a case in point. Any analysis that suggests abolition and/or perpetuation of slavery as merely one reason for the war is suspect. Dogma by the Marxist historians, admitted (as in the case of WEB Dubois) or de facto, has been promulgated. Dogma slides easily into myth. The search for truth is not the same as proclaiming a new popular mythology. Symbols of the old mythology thus become problematic; those attached to the old symbols are obviously not with the New Mythology, (insert Truth for Mythology).

What does this have to do with Nihilism? Nihilism is the devaluation and obliteration of all ideals, no matter how noble, such that nothing but a baseness of human motive and aspiration is left.

We come to live for gratification of appetite, sexual, sensual, gustatory. We have, as a culture, come to value feelings, particularly pleasurable ones, as the end of human pursuits. The adrenalin rush is the greatest aspiration in our culture. We seek it from sex, roller coasters, computer games, and tragically, war itself.

Saint Paul addressed this in one sentence, in describing the prevalent Roman culture of the First Century.

“Their God is the belly.”- Phillipians 3:19

The noble aspirations that distinguish the American character are largely devalued. I am speaking not merely of values expressed by Jefferson, Lincoln, Douglass, Anthony or King, but even more basic values, like fathers and mothers committed to the survival and integrity of their families. This isn’t only economic well-being, but the preservation of values that keep families and, by extension, societies, together. A father, in living the value that violence is wrong, makes a stronger point to his children than all the rhetoric of politicians on gun control. But where are fathers today? Where are families, for that matter?

So, in a world where there are no values, how can we even presume to Make America Great Again? The Trump revolution, you see, is bigger than its obviously flawed champion. Americans need to aspire to more. And that more, extends beyond the goals of both leftist nihilists and capitalist materialists.

The Truth

04 Friday May 2018

Posted by David in Politics, Relationships, Sexual Identity

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I have been hiding out for about ten weeks. The Lenten sabbatical worked well, but not posting frequently when Ascension Day is one week away requires an explanation.

Here It Is

About ten weeks ago, a man whom I counted as a friend for thirtynine years ended our friendship because I told him that I really didn’t care what Donald Trump says or tweets. I still don’t. For someone who has followed politics since I was thirteen, this is a radical departure. Truth is I am burned out.

When that friendship ended, part of me died. I had deluded myself into thinking friendships are some sort of indisolvable bond. They are not. After two failed marriages, I should have known better. So my enthusiasm for life has faded. Maybe it will return.

I can no longer fly “under the radar”, pretending that adultery doesn’t contradict my values. The fact that many of the blogs I follow are from bloggers in sexually unconventional arrangement may seem hypocritical on my part. Maybe it is. But by now, after a couple of years of reading, I’m rather engaged by the narratives.

So I’m a hypocrite. At least I won’t die of loneliness.

Phishing, Etc.

11 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by David in Big Business, Bloggers, Politics, Smartphones

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#Phishing, #Surveillance Marketing

So somebody was phishing and trying to get information from me. That’s bad. Then I consider all the information I give out and Google, among others, tracks. It’s called “Surveillance Marketing”. Google records all kinds of metadata about us that we innocently provide, legally, through those User Agreements that we never read. Then we get ads on our Smartphone pages from merchants we’ve used both online and/or brick and mortar. We become super-customers. We reassure ourselves that this isn’t creepy, or only just a little bit. Yet we know that this is merely Big Brother Watching Us version 2.0

The truth is the Internet is anything but anonymous, anything but private. Like God, the Internet never forgets. Unlike God, it never forgives. Whatever we put there, wherever we go, that click is always there.

The Information Age plutocrats, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc. are all in bed with the politicians, so don’t expect your Internet privacy to suddenly be respected if these tycoons can make money off of you. They work campaign “contributions” into their cost structures.

This begs the question, “How do I go dark?” Will I have to end this blog, as much as I enjoy writing it? I feel like The Google people are digitally groping my “junk” and squeezing my ass every time I go online. And I’ve had enough.

Approval/Disapproval

06 Tuesday Feb 2018

Posted by David in Politics, Relationships, Tolerance

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#Openness. #Tolerance

How do we listen? What filters do we have activated at all times? When we hear or read something that raises our hackles, are we quick to decry what bothers or offends us, then dismiss the speaker or author as undeserving of our attention and respect? Do we consider a point of view that disturbs us to be as valid as our own? The person holding such a view may be unable to consider any other option. For example, a person may base a prejudice on a fear. That fear, unless dealt with constructively and lovingly, will continue to shape a viewpoint until the person holding that viewpoint abandons it. We can’t change the way other people think. Only those “other people” can change their way of thinking. Do we help or hinder that process by the way we react? Then again, maybe we are the ones where the change needs to occur. It is a disturbing paradox that our intolerance of intolerance may be precisely what perpetuates such intolerance.

Where did we learn to think the way that we think? If we consider ourselves open-minded, are we even aware when or how often we close our minds?

Hanging out with outlaws and outcasts is no big deal anymore. How do we assess the respectable people of this world? Do we give the full measure of respect to the worthy bourgeoisie whose tithes to the church where the AA group meets do more to keep the doors open than our relatively paltry rent does?

Contemplate how and why you determine a person’s worthiness.

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