Light Engaging Darkness – 6
Sometimes I am writing this I feel as though I am writing a comic satire. It must be so hard for satirists in the modern Western world because the ‘reality’ is so surreal that it is beyond satire. Anyway here are a few gems from this past week.
1) Back to Uni –
It’s the time of year when students head off to university – to have their minds stretched, their ideas challenged and to learn new things. No – sorry – that is so 19th Century. Now students head to Uni to have their minds closed, their ideas protected and their debt increased. The shutting down of the student mind is continuing apace, as the Liberals in the UK follow their nutty counterparts in the USA. Brendan O’Neill in this article in the Spectator – sums it up superbly.
If our censorious students are going to import America’s campus insanity, they need to know that means they will also import its consequences. And those consequences are dire. No one can imagine that it’s a good thing to create a generation unable to stomach things it dislikes or disagrees with. How are they to survive in a pluralistic democracy? It’s vital to be able to hear people out, to have civilised disagreement, to engage in debate, to change your mind.
The ‘safe space’, by guarding students from the disagreeable, is churning out an army of hypersensitive dogmatists. We can see this in the US with the current outburst of statue-smashing. And we can see it in Europe with the alarming revelation that fewer and fewer young people believe in freedom of speech and democracy.
2) Robert E Lee-
Lets talk about removing statues. In the Ukraine over 2000 statues of Lenin are being removed. In the UK our loony left are falling into line with this latest virtue signalling fashion – according to this article in the Guardian Nelson’s column must go – Never one to miss a trick, the Scottish Green leader Patrick Harvie wants statutes pulled down as well I wonder if anything will be left standing!
In America the liberal left are going hysterical about monuments to Confederate generals – especially Robert E Lee. The irony is that they know nothing about Lee – they are just virtue signalling. Lee himself was opposed to the breakup of the Union and was also apparently opposed to slavery. In 1856 he wrote to his wife – “in this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country.” He set up an illegal school for slaves at Arlington and all the slaves they were freed in 1862. Lee has become the latest victim of “identity politics”. The irony is that he did not think statues of himself should be erected and he hoped that the wounds of the civil war would be healed. “I think it wiser not to keep open the source of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured to obliterated the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”
But if the fashion of the day is statue destroying – can I suggest others?
Statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce should be destroyed. After all they were slaveholders – at least in the sense that serfs were slaves. One of the reasons that Wallace went to war was to maintain the right of the Scottish nobles to have their own 
Meanwhile can anyone tell me the substantive difference between ISIS and the Taleban
pulling down monuments to ideologies they don’t like and Antifa doing the same thing in the US? It strikes me that once you start removing a nation’s history you end up being as bad as the people you are trying to replace.
3) Natural Disasters –
There has been a tremendous fuss about the flooding in Houston. It has been the number one item on British news for the past couple of days. And of course it is a significant event. But is it any more significant than the storms which swept Poland or the drought and flash flooding in Ethiopia? In Poland the storms which struck the north and west of 
4) Abortion –
“On the issue of reproductive rights, I shared our perspective that reproductive rights for women are integral to women’s rights in general and women’s rights are human rights and I encouraged him to look at it as a question of fundamental rights for women and we had a good discussion on that.”
Yes – you got it – every liberals favourite dishy politician, Justin Trudeau, is at it again. Seeking in his nice imperialistic way to impose his liberal values on the rest of the world – this time in Ireland.
Canada has an abortion policy which allows abortion on demand up to full term at any point. It is crass and callous murder of the weakest members of society. The fact that those who defend it call themselves liberal, progressive and compassionate does not make them so. The Nazis and the Communists all said that they were fighting for freedom – that did not make them freedom fighters. Our society is not only becoming more dumbed down but it is becoming more illiberal and less compassionate.
Take this horrendous tweet that I received from somebody who then went on to accuse me of a lack of empathy. These are the reasons he gave for abortion:
“Abortions help reduce crime rates when offered in areas of poverty. Aborting unwanted or unplanned pregnancies reduces carbon footprint.”
This is the way to reduce crime! This is the way to stop global warming! Kill the babies of the poor in the womb! This is the kind of eugenics that is making a comeback, decades after Hitler gave it a bad name.
The incredible thing is how people who claim to scientific and evidence based in their beliefs, throw all that away when it comes to their ideology as regards abortion. Trudeau speaks on behalf of millions of liberal fascists when he talks about this being about human rights because it is about human rights. Yet he ignores the elephant in the room that there are other human beings involved here – the girls and boys (
5) Australian SSM Vote –
The Australian SSM vote is bringing up some fascinating scenarios. For example there is this fascinating article from Katherine Harper in The Sydney Morning Herald which demonstrates the abuse, intimidation and intolerance towards anyone who dares to question the liberal zeitgeist.
Even more chilling is this testimony from Caroline Marcus – an Australian journalist, sympathetic to SSM who dared even to question the tactics of the SSM mob – “I was well-acquainted with Twitter lynch mobs after years of writing columns, but even I was taken aback by the ferocity of the online attacks that ensued. This was more brutal than the times I’d argued the merits of capital punishment, written in support of Israel and taken on bloodthirsty jihadists put together.”
This is how the liberal authoritarians work in our culture. They decide that something is right. They decide that no reasonable person can be against what they have decided. Therefore anyone who is against reserve to be treated with the same contempt as if they were a racist Nazi. They reserve particular vitriol for any of their own tribe who seem to be anything less than 1% behind the faith. And, whilst complaining about fake news, they lie.
The Australian News Channel – Network Ten – carried a report about a poster ‘ God Hates Fags’ on a Melbourne bus-stop to illustrate the toxic nature of the SSM debate. The only trouble was they made it up. It was a an online homophobic image digitally imposed on a bus-stop which went viral because of a tweet by an activist and was even cited by Prime Minister Turnbull. Network Ten called it ‘a creative error’! But it is sadly all too typical of how the mainstream media run – they have an agenda and they look for stories and images to fit that agenda. In these era of social media and smart phones it should not actually be that difficult to get the image you want from some fringe eccentric and then portray it as the norm. The only surprising thing here is not just that they made it up, but they got caught.
Meanwhile there is some good stuff coming out in this debate, if you can hear it above the mob intimidation, fake news and noise. Take this excellent article from Professor Margaret Sommerville, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Notre-Dame –
“Deciding whether to legalize same-sex marriage involves dealing with a clash between adults’ claims and children’s needs and rights. In such cases, a truly humane ethics requires choosing in favour of the weakest, most in need, most vulnerable persons. Clearly children belong to this category and they need marriage to remain the union of one man and one woman. It’s argued that children in same-sex households also need married parents, but that is not possible if the rights of children, in general, with respect to their parents and family structure are to be upheld.”
6) Macron’s Hubris –
French President Emmanuel Macron is in trouble with a lower approval rating that any of his immediate successors. In July he compared himself to the Roman god Jupiter, refuses to do interviews, and tried to create an official position for his wife Brigitte. I note the silence from those who were bombarding me with tweets commenting on how wonderful the EU was and how Macron was a great example of this. Indeed he is!
7) Secular Insanity Continues –
in Tower Hamlets the Times reports that a five-year old white girl from a Christian background has been fostered by a Muslim couple, where she has been encouraged to learn Alan Arabic, her necklace with a Christian cross has been removed and after six months with her new family she is reportedly told her birth mother that “Christmas and Easter are stupid” and that “European women are stupid and alcoholic”.
I think of the couple who in an area where there was a desperate need for people to adopt, offered to adopt children from the most desperate of circumstances – and when they were visited by the local social work department for assessment the first question they were asked was what they thought about homosexuality! The first question! This is how their suitability is to be judged? The thought crosses my mind – were the Muslim couple in Tower Hamlets asked the same question?
All the above illustrates the inconsistency, illogicality and intolerance of our secularist society. They have replaced God with themselves and it ain’t working out so well….We pray for a return to sanity – and plead with the Lord not to leave us to our own devices!