Madness
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
There are masses of people employed in the non-profit sector who should not be given discretionary authority over a Chia pet.
Comment of the week Art! Take ‘er away Sam!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeIxtI–uc&t=11s
I guess it’s curtains now for Van Cliburn, who won the Tchaikovsky Prize in Russia, and Bobby Fischer, who played chess there. 🤦🏻♂️
A variation on the communist tactic of declaring someone Persona non Grata. They are simply erased from existence and from memory Our culture has adopted this practice albeit in a slightly varied form. I hope that as our Holy Father and the bishops consecrate Russia, and the Ukraine we recall that Our Lady’s request was in part, so that the errors of Russia, i.e. Communism would not spread. Sadly these ideas have spread widely to the West, at least in modified form It’s not just the errors of present day Russia that should concern us. We in the West are steeped in those errors of which the Blessed Mother warned. We need this consecration as much as Russia does.
The evil perpetrated by modern Leftists is only limited by their power.
I’ve said it before. My fear is that, in any future conflict, we will get to play the role traditionally reserved for the Germans. We are no longer the good guys.
Good guys and bad guys often come down to a matter of comparison. Compared to what Putin is attempting to accomplish in Ukraine we are the good guys.
I’ve said it before. My fear is that, in any future conflict, we will get to play the role traditionally reserved for the Germans. We are no longer the good guys.
What, our war aims will be to liquidate some subpopulation and flood a huge swath of Europe with colonists?
Ideological colonization is still colonization, and the rainbow LGBTQ murals we left behind in Afghanistan are testimony to that colonization, don’t you think?
Ideological colonization is still colonization,
It isn’t
Social media utterly broke the average person’s mind, but the elites didn’t realize this until their COVID propaganda was more successful than they had thought possible. The Ukraine conflict is the first time that they are intentionally using this power from the outset.
The Space Foundation dropped his name from a fundraiser. I’m not saying everyone’s sane out there, but that’s just sound marketing.
It isn’t
Stating your opinion dogmatically doesn’t make it fact. The point is, there’s a difference between being the “good” guys and the “better than the alternative” guys.
Yuri Gagarin was a hero. It doesn’t matter what side you’re on. What he did was positively heroic. Let’s remember his heroism instead of squabbling over who’s more evil: pro-abortion Biden or megalomaniac Putin.
And PS, I am unapologetically American. Yes, we’ve got a geriatric senile imbecile in office right now. But he’s NOT America. We are. And it’s time we act like it, honoring both our own heroic astronauts and even those heroic cosmonauts of the USSR who were on the opposite side of the fence. When I was in the submarine service in the late 70s and early 80s, we knew crazy Ivan was the enemy, but none of us ever wanted to torpedo a Russian sub. Our respective leaders might be idiots (Jimmy Carter certainly was), but we – Russian and American submarine sailors – had something in common, being denizens of the deep. As Robert Heinlein once wrote:
“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly.”
This rare moment of sanity and lucidity will now pass as I return to being a surly curmudgeon foul-mouthed submarine sailor.
Stating your opinion dogmatically doesn’t make it fact.
Have a look in the mirror.
There is an article on Newsmax about the recent crewed Russian Soyuz mission to the ISS. The three cosmonauts were wearing flight suits with the yellow and blue colors of the Ukrainian flag. I wonder what Dmitry Rogozin, director-general of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, thinks of this. He has been making threatening remarks and actions since the start of the Ukraine conflict.
*
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russian-cosmonauts-wear-ukrainian/2022/03/19/id/1061949/
Fortunately not everyone is mad. New Russian Cosmonauts Arrive on Space Station Wearing Ukrainian Flag Colors.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/russian-cosmonauts-wear-ukrainian/2022/03/19/id/1061949/
Darn, I duplicated your post, GregB. My apologies.
Okay, so anything with the word Russian doesn’t engender many ticket sales, but it is stupid to erase history. We become them doing that.
They’re not just purging the long-dead like Gagarin. Various Russian classical music performers have been sacked. For example, the Metropolitan Opera has fired star soprano Anna Netrebko for “insufficiently distancing” herself from Putin. That is, while she had gone onto social media to deplore the war in Ukraine, she refused to go online and condemn either her homeland or Putin.
As Netrebko stated on her Instagram before taking her account private, “Forcing artists, or any public figure, to voice their political opinions in public or to denounce their homeland is not right. This should be a free choice. Like many of my colleagues, I am not a political person, I am not an expert in politics. I am an artist an my purpose is to unite people across political divides.”
In a similar move, the Munich Philharmonic fired its chief conductor, Valery Gergiev for refusing to denounce his homeland.
I’m not sure of Gergiev’s ethnic background, but I do know that Netrebko has Kuban Cossack ancestry, i.e., she would have a mix of Tatar and Ukrainian blood— and I’d bet my mortgage she (like many, many Russians) has Ukrainian family— especially with a Ukrainian-sounding name like ‘Netrebko’.
It’s just another example of the politicization of everything. It’s not going to stop until the people doing it are put out on the curb.
Art Deco is 100% right: “It’s not going to stop until the people doing it are put out on the curb.”
Canceling folks because they’re from X country– especially if they’re already dead and this is a different government– is stupid.
I have noticed, though, that when I dig into the eye-catching stories, they tend to evaporate.
For example, there was a thing on Italian colleges no longer teaching Dostoevsky.
Go look at Italian news, turns out that one lecturer got one email about one free class that ASKED he consider adding a couple of Ukrainian authors, and he decided to cancel the free lecture mini-series he was going to do, via social media.
The college head was very upset, and last I saw they were fussing over if he’d flounce or not.
Given Russia’s not-at-all hidden history of applying pressure to public figures for propaganda purposes? It’s likely that some of the delays are humanitarian in nature.
That just adds into the marketing choices, and when you pile on the faintly-inspired-by-a-true-story instances and the known tendency of the Progressives to swarm like sharks around blood…..