Another layer of politics, and more to the point I wish to make, had to do with traditional foxhunts. One aspect of English upper-class leisure was having hunts in which a large number of people on horses would try to hunt a fox. It has famously been called "the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable." And it has got to be one of the most inefficient and man-hour-consuming ways to kill a fox, although I am not really sure that is the point.

There were people trying to abolish such hunts, but when I talked about this with a British friend, he commented that he did not object in principle to keeping fox hunts, and he did not object in principle to abolishing fox hunts, but the political campaign was not single-layered; the big push to abolish fox hunts was a point of debate chosen in furthering an agenda of destroying the upper-class English way of life. His refraining from offering a verdict in terms of what is permissible on animal welfare grounds was part of pointing out to me that the issue was not the welfare of a few foxes, but finding a political fulcrum to help dislodge the upper-class English way of life.

In one conversation, I commented that master politicians, like master chess players and master martial artists, do not make single-layered moves. They cannot afford to do such things. This has the corollary that if you have a single-layered understanding of something that is going on politically, you do not understand what is going on.

Speaking as a Northerner momentarily in the South and admittedly one who is trying to tread lightly (I am looking forward to the monastery moving so I will no longer be a Yankee who comes to stay), I have since before setting foot at this monastery in the South that there was something multi-layered to certain developments of political correctness. I was shocked at the consummate rudeness of removing statues; and I have been inclined to regard how the Confederate flag has been treated (with people saying, for instance, that it belongs in a museum, next to the Nazi flag). Now I know I am skating on thin ice, and I acknowledge that to many Americans the Confederate flag is offensive and is becoming treated as moreso, but may I point out a flag that is far more offensive to many more people worldwide?

One response might be that the U.S. flag is not flown to flip the bird at U.S. haters worldwide. But that principle may shed a little light on the Confederate flag; none of the people I know who value the Confederate flag value it as a way to flip the bird. The Nazi flag is only flown for the purpose of loudly advancing white nationalism. I admit that the racist right has taken to flying the Confederate flag alongside the Nazi flag but... I'm getting slightly ahead of myself.

When I was studying French at the Sorbonne, my professor said that he would not forgive a particular previous and more liberal prime minister. (I might comment that political comments from this professor were pretty sporadic.) In the French equivalent of the U.S. electoral college, the biggest vote-getter wins, and that means that if you have 40% of the votes and your opponent has 60%, and you can split the 60% into two factions receiving less than 40%, you win the election. And the liberal prime minister, whom the professor compared to Machiavelli, was active in openly giving real or imagined privileges and preferential treatment to immigrants, in a way that would grate on many people's nerves, and then insisting that a candidate who would today be called white nationalist be given time to speak, and airtime, and coverages. It worked in the short term and won an election. It also worked in the long term in splitting the French right into a right and a racist right.

For decades in the U.S., open racism has had a bad reputation among conservatives; conservatives may object to "racist" meaning "white" and "black" meaning "not racist," and try to pull racism into the domain of moral agents, but racism is not broadly treated as cool. But may I ask what is going to happen if people are told that a flag that represents to them heritage is on par with the Nazi flag, and people on the racist right fly the Confederate flag alongside the Nazi one and make clear that Southerners are going to be welcomed with open arms? I do not condone people going to someone who does not spit on their flag, but honestly, what is the intended political effect of approving of flying the U.S. flag but equating the Confederate flag with condoned oppression?

The state of race relations in the U.S. is a shame, and a weeping shame at that. I remember my one black uncle taking a microphone at a celebration of my grandfather and giving the standard narrative of black-white U.S. race relations and charging my grandfather and his father-in-law with racism. I remember, on the other side, living in the Bronx when I studied at Fordham and seeing black and Hispanic locals bombarded by ads from Planned Parenthood saying a perfectly politically correct declension of Yo, [N-word]! Yous ain’t fit to breed! “Take CONTROL of your life!” with a picture of a black man and a list of contraceptives. The state of race relations are a mess, and what goes under the banner of improving race relations makes the mess Machiavellianly worse.

And there is one other detail I really should mention. The South really was, in the Civil War, fighting for States’ rights, but slavery was not one right among others for States’ rights. I haven’t seen someone who wants to fly the Confederate flag take responsibility for the terrible black-white race relations that reigned in the South. But to be fair I haven’t heard of someone who wants to fly Old Glory take account of U.S. citizens being comfortable at the expense of preventable human misery in Third World sweatshops. Or our consistent meddling in other country’s politics, making our American values of gay marriage and abortion a requirement to receive U.S. foreign aid even when it is highly offensive. Possibly neither is justification to forbid flying a flag, and that has implications.

And I might comment: the race relations argument of whites in the South as it critiqued Northern race relations stated that in the North whites had to do the bummer jobs, while in the South there was a white equality founded on black inequality, with rationalization that this was best for everyone, including slaves. I might suggest that the phenomenon has repeated in that a high American standard of living is based on the potent inequality Third World sweatshops, although here there is not rationalization: with one profoundly morally confused exception, I have never seen anything approaching an argument that today’s arrangement is best for everyone.

Perhaps we should remove the in-your-face Pride flag before either.

Political moves are layered, and I have never seen an honest presentation of all layers to attempts to make the Confederate flag an obscenity.

There are other things to be said; for one nuance, a Southerner I know suggested that the South would have won the Civil War (you know, the War of Northern Aggression) if they had not attacked the North first. Until then, Northerners were more of a public opinion that if the South wanted out that badly, let them. But I don’t want to write a long treatise.

Treating the Confederate flag as an obscenity is one component of an attempt at killing a culture, and it should be recognized that the real purpose is not to remove things that needlessly offend some blacks (and, by the way, one Northern friend I knew had a Confederate flag in his military cell; blacks were not offended any more than anyone else, and perhaps they picked up on the point that he was genuinely happy to see blacks as much as anyone else).

I am no fan of the underhanded killing of cultures.

Own it in Paper!

Adapted from a mailing list discussion. The discussion helped me formulate and see things I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

I am profoundly grateful to "Bravo" in particular for her permission to include what she wrote; her willingness tremendously enriches the discussion.

Alpha: I'm not sure if I'm going to lose people by posting this, but I posted, A Conservative Soliloquy.

Bravo: I’m not sure there is a difference between a soliloquy and a rant. Needing to get something off one’s chest is not so much an exchange of information as a medicinal purge that provides relief. Maybe like the lancing of some festering boil.

However, let’s not hope that anybody anywhere ever changes their opinion of political figures because they have heard the rant, they may however change their opinion of the ranter.

Myself and other Trump supporters find ourselves in a dark place after the election but one thing we have learned is that talking about him with non supporters is futile as we automatically write each other off as lacking in intelligence and understanding.

The only question I ask myself is ”do I care if the person I engage with continues as a friend”

From the bible I have learned that a few words can start a forest fire that cannot be controlled.

So if a relationship is worth being preserved, do not engage, do not even send clues about your opinion. The temperature is too high. It could be costly in every sense of that word.

If a continued friendship is not important then a polite rant might may serve as a relief valve, for simply medicinal purpose of course.

In that vein there are several old friends that I have contentedly let go their own way and I’m sure they feel the same.

It’s all a great shame and sad when expressing your personal opinions is an act of war.

I will certainly not however, engage in church or anywhere important.

I’m not even an American but I can see that what might be considered as the greatest and most influential nation on earth is divided so dangerously with the fault lines running through all aspects of society including the family structure.

Alpha: Thank you for information about how my post will be received.

I do not think it is a rant that G.K. Chesterton said in his "A Defense of Patriotism,"

‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying. It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'

The question of whether Donald Trump would knowingly incite violence to reverse an election against him is a question of this magnitude. It has been said that violence is in the U.S. political constitution (https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2021/01/americas-history-of-political-violence). I retweeted a tweet saying "This is the worst thing that happened in U.S. history unless you've read a book on U.S. political history." Nonetheless, I see a difference between "Donald Trump, assuming he follows American political tradition of recognizing an election went against him," and "Donald Trump, with or without civil war."

However, I would see Confucius's "It is useless to take counsel with those who follow a different Tao" as applying not only to "Against Donald Trump by any means necessary," but people who will not accept that a Trump supporter says he has gone too far.

It is consonant with the verdict of history to say that the United States lost the nineteenth century civil war.

I expect that the verdict of history will be that the world lost this civil war...

It is a matter of historical fact that General Lee ceased hostilities first, and today all the states that seceded are legally part of the United States.

But talking about who won that war is a bit like talking about who won the earthquake in Lisbon that shook the Enlightenment.

Bravo: Hi again Alpha,

In calling your comments a rant I in no way meant to imply that what you said was without a thoughtful basis. However , in this day and age the stakes are much higher and with social media, opinions burn much brighter and are more widespread.

Being retired and largely independent of external pressures I am free to express whatever ideas I have. They can’t take my job away.

There is however something that needs to be addressed .The thought that corruption is alive and well at the highest levels of American society is no longer confined to some isolated extremists hiding in the mountains of Montana.

I realize that violence is an historical building block of the American experience but, the only reason that the country overcomes this violence is the belief that the democratic process is solid and largely without corruption.

Approximately half the country however, now has doubts that the democratic exercise is healthy and at the same time the judicial process is viewed with similar suspicion.

The overly technical, clumsy and drawn out voting procedures leave so many thinking, if we don’t have fair elections, what do we have? The answer is obvious.

I know that for constitutional reasons the USA population is armed to the teeth but it also may reveal that the population has always had a general distrust of it’s own institutions.

As a Canadian we have much to be concerned about in our own political process but the suggestion of widespread fraud never comes up.

But we are though so dependant on the USA for many things , democracy being number one and if you stumble and there is widespread distrust of your institutions all democracies are at risk.

The social media is of course a catalyst for all manner of social change. Some good some very scary.

Of course many of us outside your country love you and wish you well not just for your sakes but most importantly for ours.

God Speed

Alpha: I agree with most of this, and am concerned about a downward spiral. Republicans and Democrats alike are contributing in large amounts.

Charlie: Good morning.

We conservatives have been struggling with an imperfect vessel of our faith, to say the least, in Trump. One common meme was that he used the same playbook they wrote to take down American culture against them. (Rules for Radicals, dedicated to Lucifer by the author Saul Alinsky, who was also a mentor of Hillary Clinton). This comes down to the game theory of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The way to get someone who has been hitting you for five decades to stop hitting you is to hit them back in the same way, every time, until hitting you no longer benefits them. It was cathartic to see the weapons they forged against us turned back on them. It had a certain scriptural precedent in that Hammon in the book of Ester is hung on the gallows he prepares for the Jews. Or Gideon blowing trumpets outside an enemy camp and all the armies within the camp killing each other in confusion.

They certainly have insanely low expectations of their own morality, and embody Borderline Personality Disorder. Add to that the origins of these policies in people wanting to bring down the country and destroy it (Frankfort School, etc), coupled with globalist feudal concepts like the so-called "Great Reset", and you can see our concerns. We've seen this play before where some Germanic deadbeat rants some grand plan for humanity (Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, or now Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum) and next thing you know, we are being marched off to death camps for disagreeing. Or getting our communications channels shut down, or possibly getting our online assets frozen. In each case, we are called conspiracy theorists for reading the books where they lay out their plans in their own words.

But that's all politics. What about faith?

I keep coming back to this verse....
"Do not repay evil with evil, but overcome evil with good."

I suspect if we ever see another conservative leader in this nation, it will have to be someone who isolates the ideologies rather than the individuals, as Trump did following the Alinsky rules. It may also be the only way we survive this whole purge or open any communications whatsoever outside this wall. If communicating with relatives, don't attack the relatives. Attack the ideas if you must, but present better ones in full light and let them either come to the light or run from it. They will tend to internalize and regard as "in group" people like Pelosi, who endorsed the Jim Jones cult prior to the mass suicide back when they were still in California. Jones seems to be the role model of big tech, in terms of isolating their membership and only feeding them one story, constantly, at high volume. Any attempt to question the leader or exit the compound is met with harsh threats and condemnation, just as it was with Jonestown. This won't end well. It may involve a Pygmalian Effect of separating the person and your expectations of them from their actions and opinions, in hope of drawing them to their better angels, in a positive feedback loop. One of my best friends is a leftist atheist, who was hardcore Michael Moore and Bush Derangement Syndrome two decades ago, who now is a Trump supporter who loves Jordan Peterson. Baby steps, I guess, but certainly unexpected. I've always loved her dearly, accepted her confessions of past crazy things, and treated her soul like a treasure. And shockingly, she's felt the same towards me. That should be what America is all about. It once was. For us, it still is.

Scripture makes it clear we are to present the light and let them either come or go when they see it. We should of course pray first, during, and after for the seeds to fall on good soil. But the sower isn't responsible for improving the soil. Only scattering the seed. We shouldn't do things, either in culture or in our own hearts and souls, that make our own soil more stony. We can cancel out of institutions that hate us. The converse of "don't bite the hand that feeds you" is "don't feed the mouths that bite you". Some seeds may take time to grow, so we maintain kindness in those situations. We overcome evil with good, as we were told.

So... how?
I'm feeling deeply called to re-read the New Testament to see how the church did last time a tiny group of eleven people got cut off by a global government who wanted them all dead. A big part of that was that the disciples were the only light in a world that had gotten very, very, very dark. In such a world, not everyone is blind, but all eyes are equally useless until someone comes into the caves with a lantern lifted up to get their attention and held low to show the path. That may involve shaking the dust from our clothes as we exit Facebook groups or what not. It's been bitterly disappointing seeing people I once regarded as mentors or at least role models go full Herodian.

Tomorrow can be as dark as it dang well please, because we don't live there yet. Each day has enough trouble of its own, as Jesus said. As a pastor once said, there is as much darkness a foot ahead of God as there is a mile behind. Prepare for what may come, but focus on the wisdom God gives you in what to do each day. The days ahead will separate wheat from chaff, so grow your wheat and starve your chaff while you still have roots to draw from and sunlight to grow in. Night is coming, when no man can work.

I also come back to a few other verses.
Matthew 10:16
“I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."
Do not neglect feeding your innocence, the starving of your guilt, nor observing with wisdom the things around you.

2 Chronicles 7:14
"if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."

Alpha: Thank you. I disagree with you on many points, but I appreciate your taking the time and effort to seriously address the question.

One thing I might mention is a sort of "ethnocentric compliment" to the GOP. I haven't pressed points against the left as much as the right, and it's not because I think the left is better than the right (I am expecting disaster to unfold further with where Trump has placed the left, and we're due to have a president Assume Emergency Powers), but because post-Truth Republican politics represent a greater failure to live up to conservative principles than post-Truth liberals politics fail to live up to liberal principles (unless you want to go along the same lines as Chesterton did in saying, "As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals." or Fr. [Richard John] Neuhaus in saying that insofar as extending the franchise is bedrock to liberalism, the pro-life position is "in fact the liberal one").

I'm also reading the New Testament and trying to focus my gaze on the Christ who is Truth.

One other thought: Kallistos Ware, in The Orthodox Church (the standard English-language introduction to the Orthodox Church) comments briefly that the position of Christians today as being perhaps more like the Early Church than anything else. (The book is a must-read for certain audiences, but I am not offering it as directly how one ought to handle the things we have been discussing.)

Orthodoxy is not really involved in reconstructing the Early Church, but you might take a cue from oca.org/saints, with different saints' lives each day of the year and Early Christian martyrs as one type of regularly recurring figure.

Our role might not be to bring out a situation where we would be citizens of the Christian, Byzantine Empire where the society was Christian, but to be sacrifices who, like the Early Church, shone the light of one candle rather than curse the darkness (and, eventually, triumphed over the Empire that wanted them dead).

When the Roman persecutions ended, one saint complained that easy living robs the Church of her saints.

Monasticism, called "white martyrdom" where what you would ordinarily call martyrdom is called "red martyrdom," is essentially a surrogate for in peaceful times how you can obtain the spiritual profit known in the Early Church, persecuted in the Roman Empire.

Delta: Hi all

I have been following the correspondence with interest, although not being in North America some of the allusions pass me by!

What worries me is not so much the politics as the situation. Whatever their views, when large social media companies can disenfranchise bits of the population, life is getting dangerous. When some of those disenfranchised then set up their own platform, only to have it closed by a large retailer (Amazon), then I am really worried! At that point government has become irrelevant and it doesn't matter much who is "in power", because they are not.

Bravo: Yes Delta,

We are entering uncharted territory. It is no joke when power is vested in totally unelected corporate entities and the government sees them as allies rather than the “robber barons“ of yesteryear.

On social media we should be very wary . How many people could be losing jobs, or more, because of incorrect positions on Facebook?

We are rapidly approaching the same system already in effect in China and elsewhere , where citizens obtain scores based on evaluation through social networks.

This system of public exposure and correction is already playing a part in a small local network used in our municipality.

We cannot even be sure that this forum will always be free and available.

Social media has put the excesses of the Middle Ages on steroids.

A bit scary?

Alpha: As the world bares its teeth, God the Spiritual Father becomes more relevant.

An old hymn runs,

Keep your eyes on Jesus,
Look full in his wonderful face,
And the things of this world will grow strangely dim,
In the light of his glory and grace.

It's been some time that Twitter has had people seeing that at least some strains of conservative tweets (regarding LGBTQ+) were artificially censored from showing up from trending on Twitter.

Do We Have Rights? applies here. It may be helpful to see that what we have been deprived of has never been our right to begin with.

Meanwhile, in what truly counts, all of us have God's ear, and his Providence.

To go to literal ancient history, I would like to look at economic policy under two emperors who persecuted Christians.

Decius created short-term convenience by devaluing the currency; in the ancient world, the value of (coin) currency was precious metal content, and he took in coins that were a third silver and paid out coins that were just dipped in silver.

Diocletian faced spiralling inflation, and (the one point where I remember the text expressing astonishment that an emperor thought something would work) assumed that inflation was just due to merchant greed, and placed signs by marketplaces announcing maximum prices and forbidding merchants on pain of death from charging more. Unfortunately for everyone, these prices were below cost for merchants, and legal merchants stopped selling things... which ended up driving prices even higher.

Now to more recent history in Wheaton, one move that was taken to curb Wheaton going liberal was to require professors to sign a Statement of Faith that said, among other things, that Adam and Eve were created from earth and not from hominids. I remember speaking with one psychology professor who interviewed with Wheaton and said she didn't really believe that Adam and Eve were not made from hominids. She met with an answer of, "None of us really believe that," and she responded with an astonished, "Then don't sign it!"

The intent in the move was to curb liberalizing movements by selecting for people such as Wheaton attracts who believe in literal creation of humans not from any other life form but straight from earth. Unfortunately, such people exist but they are few and far between. The actual effect was to select for people such as Wheaton attracts who would perhaps openly cross their fingers in signing a major commitment to belief, which may have accelerated feminism's becoming dominant at Wheaton.

I think, rightly or wrongly, that some of Donald Trump's actions may accelerate things which have a nasty backswing. And that maybe going tit-for-tat won't solve the problem.

I'm not sure my last email was constructive.

I would like to give a link to the Sermon on the Mount, which is if anything the Constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven:

https://powerbible.info/?passage=Matthew+5-7

I'm returning to the Gospel after an overdose in current events.

I was winding down for sleep when I had something come to mind. I am usually wary when I meet surprising cultural finds that alter the plain sense of a Biblical text significantly, but I post from Blessed Are the Peacemakers, the oldest work on my site:

Jesus said “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” (Matt. 5:39) This is not a command to act as if you have no rights and passively let yourself be regarded as subhuman, but rather an insistence on the fact that you do have rights. In the society of that time, a slap on the cheek was not intended as a physical injury but rather as an insult, putting an inferior back in his or her place. The strength of that insult depended greatly upon which hand dealt it: as the left hand was seen as unclean, a slap with the left hand was the insult far greater than one dealt with the right hand. This was reflected in the legal penalties for an inappropriate slap: the penalty for slapping a peer with your left hand was a fine one hundred times the penalty for slapping a peer with your right hand; the penalty for slapping a better with your right hand was a fine while the penalty for slapping a better with your left hand was death. The people Jesus was speaking to most directly were, by and large, slaves and the downtrodden. A slap on the right cheek was dealt with the left hand. To turn the other cheek would leave the master with two options. The first would be to slap the slave again, but this time with the right hand (therefore declaring the slave a peer). The second would be not to slap the slave again (therefore effectively rescinding the first slap). Now, such impudence and sauciness would often tend to bring punishment, but it none the less says “Hey, I’m a human. I have rights. You can’t treat me like this.” It is not an action without suffering for oneself, nor does it inflict suffering on the “enemy”: but it does say and do something in a powerful way.

"Go the extra mile" was commanded in reference to compulsion to carry a soldier' pack (same term in some language as would be used for military conscription), on Rome's decisively good roads, with mile markers (in more or less the same sense as some countries have mile markers today).

A Roman soldier could conscript civilians to carry his pack for one mile but not more, and he faced stiff punishment if he required someone to carry his pack for more than a mile. The expected civilian behavior would be to carry an onerous pack until the next mile and then get away from it as quickly as possible. An entirely unexpected behavior would be to carry the soldier's pack for one mile, and then keep on walking to try to carry it to two miles.

As Orthodox now, I have accepted communion with warrior-saints like St. George and St. Mercurius, and people who did not raise a finger in self-defense, like St. Boris and St. Gleb. Meaning that I do not get to pick and choose who is pleasing to God. I also have dropped my assumption that we have rights.

I'm wondering, though, if there might be some pearls in the sand in Blessed Are the Peacemakers. Christ was, at least on the account I mentioned (which I heard in a pacifist church), giving an effective and unexpected outline of resistance to be used by the poor and downtrodden. Some people have said they liked the article, and one veteran I asked for feedback on it said that there are precious few articulations of a pacifist position (and I did specifically engage soldiers for feedback). It's fairly easy to find an articulation of just war; explaining how pacifism could make sense is not so easily found.

FWIW.

St. Basil the Great's life story includes the following:

The emperor Valens, mercilessly sending into exile any bishop who displeased him, and having implanted Arianism into other Asia Minor provinces, suddenly appeared in Cappadocia for this same purpose. He sent the prefect Modestus to Saint Basil. He began to threaten the saint with the confiscation of his property, banishment, beatings, and even death.

Saint Basil said, “If you take away my possessions, you will not enrich yourself, nor will you make me a pauper. You have no need of my old worn-out clothing, nor of my few books, of which the entirety of my wealth is comprised. Exile means nothing to me, since I am bound to no particular place. This place in which I now dwell is not mine, and any place you send me shall be mine. Better to say: every place is God’s. Where would I be neither a stranger and sojourner (Ps. 38/39:13)? Who can torture me? I am so weak, that the very first blow would render me insensible. Death would be a kindness to me, for it will bring me all the sooner to God, for Whom I live and labor, and to Whom I hasten.”

The official was stunned by his answer. “No one has ever spoken so audaciously to me,” he said.

“Perhaps,” the saint remarked, “that is because you’ve never spoken to a bishop before. In all else we are meek, the most humble of all. But when it concerns God, and people rise up against Him, then we, counting everything else as naught, look to Him alone. Then fire, sword, wild beasts and iron rods that rend the body, serve to fill us with joy, rather than fear.”

Reporting to Valens that Saint Basil was not to be intimidated, Modestus said, “Emperor, we stand defeated by a leader of the Church.” Basil the Great again showed firmness before the emperor and his retinue and made such a strong impression on Valens that the emperor dared not give in to the Arians demanding Basil’s exile.

It was also in my heart to post a link to Tong Fior Blackbelt and also Two Victories in Tong Fior: Following the Lord of the Dance.

(to Bravo:) I really appreciate how you have spoken about the U.S.

I know that Canadians can get weary of being regarded like the fifty-first state, and one Canadian roommate compared the relationship between our countries as "a mouse in bed with an elephant: the elephant does not know if the mouse is there, but if it rolls over, the mouse is squashed."

If I had lived in the days of Whigs and Tories among the colonies, I might have fled to Canada.

Bravo: Growing up in war torn England and walking the graveyards of dead Americans gave me an appreciation for the “Yanks”. Also living within walking distance of the border and having spent considerable amount of time in the States gave me a genuine affinity for Americans and their zest for life and freedom.

Canada is also a great but somewhat different country, however to use another analogy of our relationship.

”Living in Canada is like living above an apartment one where they are having a rowdy but fun party.” Maybe you could turn it down a touch.

Thanks for being you.

Bravo

Alpha: You are very welcome!

Own it in Paper!

At various points in Trump's presidency, my mother would sit down with me and condescend to enlighten me from my naive views of politics, and explain to me Trump's feet of clay. At one point I told her that she had never during Barack Obama's eight years of presidency sat down with me to enlighten me about President Obama's weaknesses. She seemed shocked that I spoke of Barack Obama as having weaknesses, and said that he was so eloquent. I simply said that I had never and nowhere heard a conservative impugn Barack Obama's abilities as a public speaker. She positively bristled when I said he had ties to Islam. (I held my peace about a bumper sticker I saw a few times that depicted Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama side-by-side and said, "They both gave great speeches.")

The one possible critique I can think of Obama's public speaking performance is that he held his cards too close to his vest. When in debates between him and McCain both candidates were asked when life begins, Obama answered, "Go to Hell!" poetically refused to answer the question, saying that that was a question for scientists and theologians that was simply above his pay grade. (Obama retains a master diplomat's ability to tell you to go to Hell in such a way that you will look forward to the trip.) McCain answered the question: "Conception." By so doing he doubtless lost a number of people, but McCain answered the question instead of throwing sand in his audience's eyes. Much of the American public take campaign promises with a 40 pound block of salt, and the term "campaign promises" connotes that promises made when campaigning are not taken seriously as binding moral commitments. However, one of the pillars of political campaign speeches is an obligation to disclose what programs, policies, priorities, and positions a vote for the candidate will be voting for. But that is still the only objection I can even now think of to Barack Obama's public speaking performance; I suppose that if I watched Fox News (I usually try to avoid all television news and all television), I could find some criticism somewhere that Obama was not charismatic enough or that he failed to give electrifying speeches that drew many people in. However, as far as I am concerned, alleging incompetence in writing, crafting, and delivering speeches that drew people in is off the agenda for serious discussion on the right, left, and center. I may have heard a monk express a criticism during Obama's presidency of "I still don't know what he believes." Denying that Obama made well-executed speeches that attracted people is simply off the agenda, and I have never heard a conservative argue that Obama was not charismatic enough as a speaker or leader.

On the question of origins, which I really only bring in for analogy, concerns origins positions among conservative Orthodox. As far as origins goes (see QUICK! What's Your Opinion About Chemistry?), I regard my position as having liabilities. I have run into people who have to have a perfect origins positions without liabilities, and they end up convinced that the position they settle on has no faults at all, and in my opinion usually a worse origins position needing, perhaps, that the universe be only a few thousand years old in a position that comes unglued if you become convinced that the universe is billions of years old. If you know that your position on origins has liabilities, you can meet challenges without becoming unglued; you may change your mind about certain things, but there is much less danger that a rough blow may make you lose all faith.

I have never issued a vote meant to declare which candidate was the angel and which was the demon, and I have tended to assume that a vote for anyone I genuinely favored could only be a (de facto) protest vote, with scarcely more nor less traction in the electoral college than voting for Kermit the Frog. All of the elections I have faced have been a matter of finite choices, between two or possibly three candidates that have a fighting chance of winning the election, both of whom have strengths and liabilities.

If you want to know when I mentally checked out from my mother's condescension to enlighten me about Trump's faults, it was right after the election, when she recounted with white-hot anger (when she is beyond furious, she has a big unhappy smile, and she had a big unhappy smile then) about how Hilary Clinton had won the popular vote even if the electoral college had gone with Trump, down to reciting the exact count of popular votes for each candidate, down to the last digits. (This is part of why I jurisprudentially accept the electoral college, but I really wince when a Democrat wins the popular vote while a Republican wins the electoral vote.) After that point with my Mom, it simply didn't occur to me that her attempts to enlighten me about Trump's feet of clay corresponded to anything out of the ordinary; I would have been more able to take such condescensions seriously if she acknowledged legitimate faults on the part of Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama, like an allegation I had heard that President Obama used the Internal Revenue Service as an Infernal Revenue Service that made Christian charities waste millions of dollars on legal self-defense to keep out of to jail. So far, however, I never remember her owning up to a fault or downside to a Democratic president or candidate, even on a small scale. And I have seen the same white-hot smiling anger that her educated brother believes that what he believes to be literal murder on an epic scale is simply not one political issue among others.

I now hope that Trump is successfully impeached; my pro-life convictions do not allow me to regard a willingness to start a civil war to hold on to power as anything but beyond the pall. I note with sadness that while only one Republican publicly opposed a unanimous consent for Pence to invoke the 25th amendment, a majority (or for that matter anything more than a small handful) appear to be failing to push for Trump's impeachment. I have a bit of political, jurisprudential squeamishness about invoking the 25th amendment as suggested, as I had political, jurisprudential squeamishness about Illinois handling Blavojevich's impeachment as being driven by concerns of tremendous unpopularity and not by what would make good precedent legally. I am wary of invoking the 25th amendment to do the job impeachment was made for. But I do believe impeachment is called for, and I am if not especially surprised, at least saddened that after only one Republican blocked unanimous consent for 25th amendment applications, most Republicans are failing to push for impeachment.

Alexander Solzhinitsyn, on the way to seeing the limits of what revolution can accomplish, wrote, "Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil." (source—seemingly worth reading).

My next post after reading about Trump's inciting the riot was:

What Is Wrong With the World

G.K. Chesterton wrote a letter to the editor after a newspaper requested answers to the question, "What is wrong with the world?"

His answer, "Sir, I am." was the shortest letter to the editor in newspaper history.

St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Seraphim of Sarov said, "Acquire a spirit of peace within yourself, and ten thousand around you will be saved."

Everybody has an opinion about what needs to change after the riot.

Fortunately, with me the one political necessity is within my power: to recognize that "It is a trustworthy saying, 'Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief,'" and to repent of my sins and take them to confession.

(It may be noted that a book contest to come up with the most politically incorrect book was won by a book about Orthodox priest and monk Fr. Seraphim of Plantina: Not of This World, which was pointed out to be barely political enough to be politically incorrect: but the best politics are in fact not of this world.)

But I am preparing for something tomorrow that is more political than my voting.

I am going to confession and own up to my sin as best as I can. And try to do better.

I said to my family, after a Sunday afternoon session where I had been the minority voice, that in the last election Hilary Clinton had always been portrayed with photographs that caught her at her most photogenic, and Donald Trump had always been portrayed in singularly unflattering photographs that looked to me like still photographs from speeches (people who have normal facial and verbal expression have their faces briefly contort to odd-looking expressions, and this is not a specific phenomenon of right, left, or center: a high-quality capture of anyone giving a normal speech on any topic—political or Toastmasters—will have some awfully unflattering still images). Afterwards, I wished I had not said such at the time, and to partly wipe a stain off my face wrote afterwards:

The recent events have been sinking in, and I am now with the Republicans as well as Democrats who broke out in applause after the vote was officially registered.

I now hope Trump is successfully impeached.

Some people may wonder why it took me so long for me to figure out that Trump was not high enough quality to step down after losing an election. The main thing I would say is this:

After attending a liberal Roman university, I commented to the monk I mentioned earlier that I had read First Things, a Roman neo-conservative journal of religion and public life, and I also heard what liberal Romans asserted about Roman neo-conservatives, and I could not deny any individual assertion, really, but they nonetheless gave a roadmap that I couldn't really connect with any of my reading neo-conservatives in their own words. The monk I was speaking with commented that it's easier to write off the other party's members if you stereotype them.

I have noticed that certain candidates rightly perceived as threats by the left (Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump), not long after receiving mainstream attention, had journalism consistently portraying them as stupid. It is His Majesty's loyal opposition's sworn duty to oppose, and it is mainstream journalism's unsworn duty to make conservative politicians who represent a threat look stupid. So when Donald Trump started getting an incredibly hostile reception in the media, my thought was simply "I don't know what his strengths and weaknesses are; I haven't seen the minority report."

That there was hostile coverage of the present conservative President was not any kind of useful information.

I had a conversation with my brother who was and wanted to be somewhat left of center, but wanted to be a bit of an omnivore as far as his intake on current events, and he said with some sadness that on the left he could find coverage almost anywhere from centrist left to far left, but on the right it is difficult to find media coverage between the center and the far right. He can presumably watch Fox any time he wants, but he wants to be able to understand moderate conservative positions and understand what other people think.

I wrote to him after that conversation:

You said that you try to get something of a representative sampling of newspapers, and you have lots of options for journalism on the left, but fewer options for representation on the right that is not far right.

That may be because the main conservative way of understanding is not on relying on journalism, even right-slanted journalism, but reading books and studying history (N.B. I [requested an inter-library loan] and ordered a copy of The Medieval Experience: Foundations of Western Cultural Singularity). [My sister-in-law, my brother's wife] may be liberal, but she and her Mom's reservations about using Amazon for all purchasing is not based on just-exposed journalistic findings; it's based on a knowledge of history and a history-paced argument.

I am reading History of the Byzantine Empire and finding some relief in it; there's a lot of politics and it is a political history, and seeing some of the bad things that happened there help me be not dismayed at how bad some things are now.

I had also, perhaps in another case of "right lesson, wrong time," talked about discussion in a book about how a newspaper had given front-page coverage to an alleged gang of black militants taking over a hotel, and continuing to cover police casualties as the shootout unfolded, and then eventually having a buried clarification that there was not a gang of multiple black militants; there was one mentally ill black person who had been dead for a while, and the police casualties were a matter of police continuing to hit each other with their own ricochets. On that point I emailed my brother about the book that discussed this sort of thing happening in journalism and why one might choose not to get bearings from journalism:

One book which you might read, if for nothing else than a slice of [what has informed] my thought, is the ?1974? Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, written by an advertising executive who lost his faith in advertising and then lost his faith in television (Jerry Mander).

I did not mention First Things as conservative journalism, not exactly because I wanted to withhold information, but because I wanted to stress the difference between getting one's bearings from journalism and getting them from books. (Social media may well be a step below journalism, but I did not explore that; I never in the discussion discussed getting one's bearings from social media, from which I have mostly checked out.) Mention of that one journal might be helpful after talking about getting one's bearings from classic, non-current-bestseller books.

I went to spiritual direction and my spiritual director said something that challenged me to go one step further: get my bearings from the Gospel. I mentioned that one article said that a monastic leader had "cryptically" said, "It's better to read the Bible than the Internet," which I did not find cryptic at all. He was talking about where it is best to get one's bearings, even if one should pay attention to secular authorities about what simple quarantine measures may be advisable. And I was advised to back away from an unintended dip into social media.

It has also, incidentally, been commented that people who consume large amounts of (secular) media tend to be more secular.

When the Rush Limbaugh Show went big, I found it an embarrassment and I never found myself speaking with a fellow conservative who did not share that embarrassment.

I am still waiting to find a liberal who finds The Daily Show to be anything but a good dose of clear thinking about today's events.

I have mentioned earlier, not terribly impressed, that my Mom was shocked when I suggested she should have been able to tell the same sorts of things about Barack Obama as she was telling me about Donald Trump. In the interests of "Turnabout's fair play," I'd like to mention a couple of things I don't respect about Donald Trump, whom I held in light esteem for ages before his political rise. (To take an unlikely quote from Dorothy Parker, "If you'd like to know what God thinks about money, look at the people he gave it to.")

There is some talent reflected in his being a billionaire, but he reached that status through his casinos, and the vice of gambling is highly destructive. That's not an honorable way to reach billionaire status, even if it is legal.

I was also aghast at his having police clear the way by any means necessary for him to have a photo opportunity.

There was a long time where politics would be discussed at family dinner, and I would spend long stretches of time with something to say, looking for a social opportunity and quite often with my hand raised and emoting "I have something to contribute," and I was always, always shut out of the discussion by being socially strong-armed. I eventually sent an email asking people to either let me contribute to the discussion or stop discussing politics in my presence. They mostly stopped discussing politics in my presence at all.

There is some intimidation that comes with being profoundly gifted, especially an outlier, and I might briefly mention that while my whole family is very bright... but my SAT scores were higher than my father's SAT scores as a high school senior... when I took the SAT in seventh grade! Their social behavior conveyed that they were afraid of letting me speak, afraid that what I had to say might make sense. And that social exclusion helped me tune out what they had to say politically, because whatever they had to say, they were so intimidated, perhaps partly due to giftedness, that they abandoned simple good manners and completely shut me out of getting a word in edgewise at a social function specifically intended for family togetherness.

I might also mention briefly that after I was received into the Orthodox Church, at my next social function my uncle, a Protestant, "Orthodox Presbyterian" pastor, kept on telling me about "agreement" on all "essentials," and I simply kept my mouth shut. The minor reason was simply that I was tired, and my nonverbal communication should have been "I am not up for this," but the major reason was that even if I could summon plenty of energy, pushing and having him push back would not have been preferred Orthodox behavior on my part. He was intimidated, and even if I had plenty of energy for a lively discussion I believe I would have still been wisest to act as I did. After that single one-way conversation, he did not press me further.

It has, incidentally, been said that profoundly gifted individuals tend to be "very, very conservative, or at least populist." As far as why, I at least have had multiple cases of what a sociologist would call a "secondary socialization," and at least two of them have been secondary socializations that produce strong liberals. My best take on it now is that the standard ways of recruiting someone to the left work very well far into the gifted range, but are less effective in dealing with the profoundly gifted. It tends to run aground. Biblical Egalitarianism recruits via shady rhetoric and, sometimes, loaded language; the average gifted response is to be drawn in, but one possible profoundly gifted response tends towards, "That's loaded language," and shady rhetoric does not always catch the profoundly in its noose; sometimes it repels. The usual methods of getting someone to "get with the program" are often shady and often repel. Not specifically that all profoundly gifted are conservative; but profoundly gifted liberals and radicals will be more likely to be formulating tomorrow's political correctness than passionately caught up in today's political correctness. And neither do others' repellent attempts to get me to "get with the program" come from the left alone; see The Seraphinians for a response to a conservative camp that applied a lot of pressure to get me to get with the program.

In connection with asking my mother not to sit down with me and condescend to enlighten me about politics, I made a comment that "Master politicians, like master martial artists, like master chess players, do not take single layered actions. They can't afford to. This has the [consequence] that if you only understand one layer of a politician's action, you do not understand the politician's action."

When I was at the Sorbonne, my grammar professor commented that he absolutely could not forgive Mitterrand, whom he compared with Niccolo Machiavelli. (Under French electoral conditions, the person with the largest share of the votes wins, which means that if you have 40% of the vote and your opponent has 60%, you can win if you split your opponent's camp in half.) He talked about how Mitterrand split the right into the right and the far right, and effectively created Le Pen (in other words, a powerful ALT-right candidate who makes Trump look moderate by comparison; one comedy show said, "100% of the votes for Le Pen are bullet holes."), as a live and politically powerful figure. The specific means he used was to openly give real or imagined preferential treatment and privileged to immigrants, and when people were incensed, insisted that Le Pen be allowed to speak and that his speeches would be covered.

Hello, can we talk about the consummate rudeness of removing statues as a way to give the bolt of lightning needed to bring the Frankenstein of a vigorous and openly racist right-wing faction to power and life? The program to capitally insult Confederate flags and statues is not a single-layered set of decisions!

Some people may be wondering, "How can we get through to you people?" Not everything will work at all times, but I do have advice for ways to limit liabilities to your persuasive power:

1. Don't cry "Wolf!".
   Furthermore, don't be surprised if our ears are deafened if you do cry, "Wolf!"

   White-hot anger at Hilary winning the popular vote but losing the electoral college is not advisable if you want credibility in drawing attention to Donald Trump's having feet of clay. And more broadly, if every candidate who represents a live threat to the Democrats' goals comes across in the media smelling like manure, be prepared for tune-out if you need to draw attention to something that smells like manure.

2. Don't assume that political views you don't respect are born out of naivete.

   There was a profound degree of naivete in assuming I just needed an adult to show me a bit of perspective. I had carefully thought out views. Never mind if they were right or wrong; there was essentially nothing in my political perspective that was just because I didn't have someone prompt me to reach a better thought out decision. Also, if you condescend to enlighten someone politically, be prepared to be socially received as condescending to enlighten, and not have your points entertained even if the other party is polite in response to your rudeness.

3. Don't point out which candidate is the angel and which is the demon, and furthermore, if you do, expect turnabout to be fair play.

   If you're trying to help someone see Donald Trump's weaknesses, be willing to be asked to see Hilary Clinton's or Barack Obama's weaknesses. If you're not willing, be prepared to lose credibility. Furthermore, if you want to disqualify Donald Trump for his sexual adventures, be prepared to disqualify Bill Clinton for his sexual adventures. You don't want to come across as believing that numerous cases of sexual assault are not significant to you in themselves, and only represent a card in your hand to play against a conservative when a conservative commits sexual misconduct. I held and hold a great deal of respect for the one self-identified feminist I met who was dismissive of Bill Clinton because of his sexual misconduct.

4. Don't try to manipulate. If you do manipulate, prepare it to backfire, with results other than what you expected.

   The rumor has it that profoundly gifted people have a compensating weakness of "not picking up on social cues." I do not wish to state whether I agree with that overall, but I will say that to at least some of us, others' attempts to manipulate us stick out like a fifteen foot high sign in blinking neon. In short, some of us do pick up on social cues when the person we're communicating with is doing an absolute best to draw our attention away from picking up on social cues.

   I've dealt with people who have it stuck in their head that I'm "not picking up on social cues," and who don't have any light bulb go on over their heads when I explain the social cues I am acting on. (Normally, when I am told I am "not picking up on social cues" I have been acting on at least one major social cue that the person criticizing me was oblivious to, and my actions make sense given the fuller picture.) I, at least sometimes, am very adept at picking up on social cues that something is wrong socially and that the other person is trying to manipulate me or the like. I do not always do this instantly, but something sits wrong with me when I am being treated manipulatively, and the effect is to drive me away from whatever position you were trying to draw me towards.

5. Don't misuse narrow social channels of rebuke.

   There are a couple of male friends at a group that read children's books aloud that shut me down by misusing trusted channels of social correction when I was profoundly uncomfortable with our reading Patricia Wrede's feminist fairy tales (I would call them more precisely "anti-fairy tales" in that their whole purpose in being written is to attack what is right, good, and wholesome about real fairy tales.) Later on, the male friend who was closer to me had a live warning about something that was genuinely dangerous and problematic about something I was writing. He used, in what would ordinarily have been a socially appropriate fashion, a trusted channel of communication and was completely caught off guard when I blew him off. But it was a legitimate, trusted manner of communication that he had previously betrayed.

I would underscore "Don't cry wolf!" Everything I remained wrong about Trump on was an a point where someone had previously cried, "Wolf!" or otherwise destroyed credibility, but assumed full and unimpaired credibility before me when it counted.

Furthermore, if you do have something to say where cries of "Wolf!" have deafened our ears, you would do well to show humility and concede points. Don't condescend to enlighten a poor sap. Don't take charge of the other person getting with the program. Don't show shock at how horrible the other person's beliefs are. Cries of "Wolf!" get tuned out, and so does taking the posture of a superior straightening out or enlightening a backwards subordinate.

The one more liberal person who affected me most in my views on Trump was the same brother who expressed frustration that he couldn't find center-right journalism and felt he was missing understanding of how a more moderate conservative might see things. He expressed opinions, including that Trump was "an idiot," but even that was without deafening pride. More basically, he came over on some other business after I had sent the email expressing hope that Trump was impeached, and offered to be available for conversation, and conversation was precisely what he gave me. Warm conversation that was willing to disagree, but respected me as a human being and never tarred me as an enemy or half-wit. He asked me to understand a couple of points, including that Trump's efforts to foment a civil war to let him (let's call a spade a spade) Assume Emergency Powers, but he was open and presented his own perspectives as imperfect. He was the person I approached about getting one's bearings from media versus classic books, and I don't know whether my email was taken as convincing, but I did send it with a live hope that he would consider an adjustment to his approach to understanding people he disagreed with, and possibly even investigate non-journalistic sources where he wants to understand how moderate conservatives understand things. (Please note that I am not purporting to be merely a moderate conservative. My point was merely to suggest an adjustment of what kind of resources to research when he genuinely wanted to understand another camp, and complained about slim pickings that were not extremist.)

And if you aren't willing or able to do that, consider keeping your mouth shut. It's not just a good policy for outnumbered conservatives. Liberals who have kept their mouths shut achieved this: they did not drive me away or deafen my ears. And compared to people who have condescended to enlighten and straighten out my naive and backwards assumptions, that is really something!