So QAnon is real then.

Posted on July 28, 2020 by JC

https://twitter.com/TwitterSafety/status/1285726277719199746?s=20

I’ve followed the QAnon on and off but never obsessively. I occasionally check the extensive coverage on Neon Revolt but I would never say I was on board with it as a whole. Similar with many current goings-on, there are commentators I respect who take it seriously and those who think it is an extremely elaborate LARP. Call me a coward but I am not confident to come to an opinion either way. There just isn’t enough information for me to commit.

Then Twitter went and posted a series tweets starting with the one quoted above.

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Fisking Fletcher on the Latin Mass

Posted on July 18, 2020 by JC

I love reading a good fisking but I’ve seldom done one on the blog with only this one coming up in a search. The following article about the Latin Mass appeared in the National Catholic Register in November last year and I can not believe it was published. It is a series of assertions, anecdotes and hearsay with almost no substance to back any of it up. It is worth going through the article as a whole because it really is something else. Sections of the article will be quoted in italics and the rest will be my own.

The full article can be found here.

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The Bridge of Dreams

Posted on July 12, 2020 by JC

A few months ago I finished reading The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikubu. At over a thousand dense pages with plenty of footnotes, it was no small undertaking but absolutely worth the effort. This post will be something of a review along with my thoughts and observations. It won’t be academic but it will be quite long. The included images are all taken from this Tuttle edition of The Pillow Book by Sei Shonagon which was contemporary to the novel (and just as well known), which I hope the publisher won’t mind me reproducing here.

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Your silence isn’t enough.

Posted on July 4, 2020 by JC

More: The maxim of the law is: ‘Silence Gives Consent’. If therefore, you wish to construe what my silence ‘betokened’, you must construe that I consented, not that I denied.

Cromwell: Is that what the world in fact construes from it? Do you pretend that is what you wish the world to construe from it?

More: The world must construe according to its wits. This Court must construe according to the law.

Cromwell: I put it to the Court that the prisoner is perverting the law — making smoky what should be a clear light to discover to the Court his own wrongdoing!

More: The law is not a ‘light’ for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely.

This is a selection from a scene in A Man for All Seasons in which Saint Thomas More is being tried. He had refused to take the oath of supremacy, recognising the Pope as the head of the Church. He had kept carefully silent on his own views but Cromwell was determined to condemn him anyway. Silence didn’t save him. Silence wasn’t enough.

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Nobles and Peasants

Posted on June 27, 2020 by JC

I used to occasionally see an opinion article appear in the newspaper lamenting the democratic process because of the kind of people that were allowed to have a say. This was usually written by a some leftist who’d just seen another election not go quite his way, but there was the odd right-winger who wrote the same thing from time to time too. I used to be quite disgusted at this sort of talk even though I am rarely in agreement with the general public. It wasn’t about whether the public was right or wrong that bothered me, it was that this person thought they knew better than everyone else.

Though his is not a sentiment that I would say I have abandoned, I have begun wondering whether or not the hierarchical systems were better suited to humanity despite their flaws. What follows will be a collection of thoughts why.

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Let Sodom Burn Sodom

Posted on June 20, 2020 by JC

There are two jokes about places like San Francisco that I like. One is that if God doesn’t destroy it soon, he is going to owe Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.  The other is mischievously observing that there must still be more than ten good men there. Both compliment each other and while there are still good people in many of the worst cities in the world, that number must be declining all the time.

Despite the tongue-in-cheek aspect of what I wrote above, I have seriously wondered why God is holding back his wrath from us. We deserve it and I very much include myself in this “we”. This is in mind particularly because of current events in the United States which has now eclipsed the mass hysteria of the previous three months.

If you are in any sense morally sane, you are probably wondering how these events could possibly end well and I have been doing the same. My efforts to look on the bright side have had me pondering whether God could be letting Sodom burn itself this time.

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Battlestar Galactica: Rewatching the Reimagining

Posted on June 14, 2020 by JC

Late last month I finished a re-watching of the Battlestar Galactica reimagining which began as a miniseries in late 2003 and ran for four seasons from 2004 until 2009. I often mention that I don’t watch TV on this blog but it is probably more correct to state that I don’t sit down and watch commercial television and haven’t for about twenty years. I still watch television shows here and there though and this was one I was more fond of at the time. I also remembered disliking the direction the show went towards the end but it has been long enough since I watched it that I had forgotten why.

At the same time as I was re-watching the show, I also tried to watch the original series from 1978 but only got through about four episodes before I couldn’t watch anymore. It was the casino secretly run by bug monsters that got me in the end. I felt I should at least try though as the reimagining was all I knew of the series and wanted to have a serious look at the inspiration.

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The 30-Day Video Game Music Challenge

Posted on June 6, 2020 by JC

Game Sack covered this on the most recent episode and since I’m particularly fond of video game music, I thought I’d join in too. I’m not on Twitter or any social media and I usually avoid low-effort content here so I will do this a bit differently. I’m going to do all thirty in one post rather than every day and include links and a litle commentary to go with each.

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Compliance & Competence

Posted on May 30, 2020 by JC

When I moved back to Australia, I began working for a school in a system I’d been out of for a decade and barely in before that. I was only a few years out of university when I moved to Japan so I didn’t spend a long period in Australian education. This makes my perspective somewhat unique as I worked in it for long enough to understand it and had a long enough time out of it to notice changes more so than those who experienced them gradually.

What I’m writing here will somewhat overlap a previous post but this will be more general and based on my experiences over the last few years since being back.

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It’s a guy thing. Totally normal.

Posted on May 23, 2020 by JC

UPDATE (29/9/21): I was fixing up old blog posts and Molyneux’s channel was completely removed later in 2020.

Back in 2013 when YouTube’s name still reflected it’s content, I watched this video by Stefan Molyneux on the death of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman. This introduced me to his channel (which is still very good), and also opened my and I believe many people’s eyes to the reality of the corporate media. This along with the death of Michael Brown the following year brought changes that are still reverberating today and when the history is written, not only these events but the responses to these events will be seen as significant in the twilight of our society.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF-Ax5E8EJc

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