The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Self-Esteem and Other Deadly Evils

Posted on | April 3, 2019 | 4 Comments

‘Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
Just to take Him at His Word.
Just to rest upon His promise,
Just to know, “Thus saith the Lord!”

Many years ago, I spoke at a national Christian home-schooling conference and my speech was more political than religious, addressing the issues of liberty involved in educational freedom. During the Q-and-A afterwards, I was asked: “How does your faith affect your political views?” Having not anticipated such a question, I was silent for a moment before answering: “I think it’s about that ‘Thou shalt not steal’ thing.”

From there, I went on to explain how the fiscal action of the Welfare State amounts to theft on a grand scale, taking money from the people who earned it and giving it to other people who didn’t. This is immoral, and our participation in this immoral system corrupts us. The government school system is a huge part of this corruption. Whereas the Bible commands parents to teach their children, Americans have outsourced this duty to government, and the education of our nation’s children is entrusted to bureaucrats whose loyalty is to the system that employs them, rather than to the parents whose children are being taught.

Perhaps I rambled on for 10 minutes in that vein, but my point is how that question made me think of something simple: “Thou shalt not steal.”

That’s not my rule. That’s God’s rule.

Part of what has gone so badly wrong in our educational system over the past half-century is that the ideology of self-esteem has completely suffused itself into the curriculum and pedagogy. Quite the opposite attitude inspired my old-fashioned teachers, who frequently punished as impudence my own excessive “self-esteem.” Back in the day, children were expected to be silent and obedient, and I was loud and disruptive, and my teachers were united in a determination to suppress my exuberance by the most direct and forcible measures.

None of my teachers gave a damn about my “self-esteem,” or else I would not have been paddled so regularly, and sent out into the hallway to write 500 times: “I will not talk in class,” etc. However much I resented this harsh treatment at the time, in retrospect I am grateful to have been among the last generation of American children who were taught with old-fashioned discipline, before the cult of self-esteem took hold in teachers’ colleges and utterly ruined our educational system.

“Self-esteem” is an ideology that values emotion over reason, and tells people that our feelings are more important than facts. Furthermore, the cult of self-esteem tends toward a denial of mankind’s sinful nature and thereby fosters atheism or, when self-esteem ideology seeps into religious teaching, results in an antinomian tendency that turns Christianity into a sort of gooey, effeminate, feel-good emotionalism.

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” — Christian belief begins with the confession that we are sinners, helpless without God’s grace, and in need of the atonement of Christ. If we don’t believe that our sin condemns us, we have no need of a Saviour, and thus the suffering and death of Jesus was in vain, nor are we dependent on God’s continued mercy. You see how the cult of self-esteem, which tells us we are naturally good people, and therefore deserve to feel good about ourselves, is antithetical to Christian belief. “Self-esteem” begets a neo-Gnosticism that can be found everywhere now in popular culture, as in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker, on his final run at the Death Star, hears the voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Luke, trust your feelings.”

What happens when people ignore God’s law and trust their feelings?

 

The Battle of Stalingrad was the largest and bloodiest battle in all human history. The Soviets lost nearly half a million men killed in this epic battle, while losses in the Axis army (including not only Germans, but also troops from Italy, Hungary and Romania) amounted to nearly 800,000 killed, wounded and captured. All of this bloodshed between two totalitarian armies resulted from the godless evil that arises when nations reject divine law and trust instead in human ideologies.

What inspired this lengthy examination of moral theology was something to which Mark Tapscott called attention: Christian evangelist Ravi Zacharias was speaking at the University of Pennsylvania in 2014, and a young man asked this question:

“Why are you so afraid of subjective moral reasoning? Do you think we all are just going to start raping and pillaging just because we don’t have a book telling us what to do?”

Do you perceive the “self-esteem” required to ask such a question? When we know what happened in history — there are still people alive who survived the Battle of Stalingrad — we know very well what atrocities are possible if “we don’t have a book telling us what to do.” However, Christians don’t think of the Bible as merely a book, but rather an expression of the mind of God. As wretched sinners, we understand that our own “subjective moral reasoning” is infinitely inferior to the perfection of the Creator of the universe, which is why the old hymn speaks with pleasure of trusting His judgment: “Thus saith the Lord!”

It is a sinful sort of “self-esteem” that makes people think they don’t need the Word of God, but are qualified to substitute their own preferences — their “subjective moral reasoning” — for divine law. In this sense, they impudently assert their authority to stand in judgment of God.

A sinful people, full of such “self-esteem,” will endorse a government that disregards God’s law (e.g., “Thou shalt not steal”) and will also soon do away with “Thou shalt not kill.” Had that young man at the University of Pennsylvania read The Black Book of Communism? Does he know how many millions of people were murdered by Marxist-Leninist regimes in the 20th century? We recoil in horror to think of the bloodshed at Stalingrad, where the two armies lost in a single battle about twice as many men killed as the U.S. lost during the entire war. But even that dreadful death toll was a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of millions who died under Stalin’s dictatorship, and the even larger number killed by Mao’s murderous regime in China.

Answering the young man’s question at Penn, Ravi Zacarias made mention of this bloody history and said: “We killed more people in the 20th century than in the previous 19 put together.” Watch:

 

As horrible as the 20th century was, my fear is that we are headed toward even greater evils in the 21st century, simply because so many young people are so puffed-up with “self-esteem.”



 

Category: History, Religion

In The Mailbox: 04.02.19

Posted on | April 2, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 04.02.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: This Is CNN – Ana Navarro is A Big Fat Idiot
Twitchy: Rick Wilson Has Some Seriously Bad News For Dems Hoping To Capitalize On Trump’s Puerto Rico Comments
Louder With Crowder: If You Support Joe Biden, Spare Me Your #MeToo Bullshit

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Deny Access
American Power: D.C. McAllister Update, also, Second Woman Comes Forward With Allegations Of “Gropin’ Joe” Biden’s Bad Touch
American Thinker: Should Spain Apologize To Muslims?
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Flat Earth Cruise News
Babalu Blog: Socialist Cubanization Of Venezuela Reaches Its Peak, also, A Venezuelan Calls On The US Left To Stop Sanitizing Maduro’s Dictatorship
BattleSwarm: Mueller Video Reactions Roundup
CDR Salamander: Hey, Captain…Got A Minute?
Da Tech Guy: Who Needed That Wheel Thingy Anyway? also, Lenten Reflections – The Price Of Scripture
Don Surber: Press Goes Code Avocado Against Trump
Dustbury:  Surely You Congest
First Street Journal: I Referred To “Chelsea” Manning With Masculine Pronouns. How Soon Will I Get Banned From Twitter?
Fred On Everything: Out & About, And Here And There In Jalisco
The Geller Report: Muslim Army Steals $10.5 Billion From UK Taxpayers In Fraud Schemes To Fund Jihad, also, Jew-Hating Muslima Doctor Lisa Kollab Given Residency In California
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Asteroid (6478) Gault
Hollywood In Toto: Batman At 80 – Why The Dark Knight Endures
Joe For America: VP Pence Lays Down The Law To Congress – Calls For Ilhan Omar’s Removal From Foreign Affairs Committee
JustOneMinute: AOC Doubles Down On Dumb
Legal Insurrection: Palestinian Terrorist Odeh Leaves Germany After Court Rejects Her Deportation Appeal, also, Following Christchurch Shootings, Kiwis Turn In 37 Guns – Out Of Estimated 1.2 Million
The PanAm Post: What Did Socialists Use Before Candles? Electricity
Power Line: Biden Reportedly Forced Ouster Of Prosecutor Investigating Son’s Firm, also, Slimed By The New Yorker
Shot In The Dark: Graphing Madness
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Spitting Into The Wind In IL And More
The Political Hat: How The Terrorists Won In New Zealand
This Ain’t Hell: “Navy Sergeant” Gets Prison Time For Lies, also, Tanks Again For All The Heavy Stuff!
Victory Girls: Baltimore Mayor Takes Leave Of Absence As Scandal Grows, also, Soros’ “Democracy Integrity Project” Was Key Funder Of Steele Dossier
Volokh Conspiracy: District Court Allows Challenge To School’s Locker Room Of Your Choice Policy
Weasel Zippers: Panic! MSNBC Fears Avocado Crisis If Trump Closes Border, also, California Police & Sheriffs In Revolt – Ignoring New State Sanctuary Law
Mark Steyn: Naked Gun 33 1/3 – The Final Insult, also, Ministry Of All The Fools


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Category: Linkagery

The Fake ‘Hate’ Epidemic

Posted on | April 2, 2019 | Comments Off on The Fake ‘Hate’ Epidemic

 

Political paranoia:

Portland, Oregon, is a deep-blue city in a deep-blue state — in 2016, Hillary Clinton got 73% of the vote in Multnomah County, carrying Oregon by an 11-point margin — and therefore would seem to be an unlikely place to find anti-LGBT violence. So when activists in Portland claimed they had been the targets of hate crimes in February, Andy Ngo was skeptical. A transgender activist’s claim to have been attacked by assailants wielding a baseball bat? Portland’s anti-bias crime unit dropped the investigation for lack of evidence. When “a self-described fat-queer activist” claimed on Facebook that her girlfriend “was attacked by ‘two young white men’ in a maroon SUV”? Portland police don’t even have a record of a report for such an incident, according to Ngo. The good news, then, is that Portland’s LGBT community has no reason to fear they’re being targeted by an epidemic of hate crimes, but the bad news is, some activists are apparently willing to invent such incidents to support the Left’s narrative that President Trump’s election has unleashed the forces of “hate.”
In the wake of Jussie Smollett’s hoax in Chicago — another deep-blue stronghold where Trump-inspired violence would seem unlikely — Americans are increasingly suspicious toward similar claims. . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.



 

Category: Crime, Gays, Oregon, Racism

Got It Covered Like Jimmy’s Hat

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Got It Covered Like Jimmy’s Hat

by Smitty

Category: Uncategorized

Violence Against Women Update

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

A story feminists are ignoring for some reason:

The man accused of kidnapping and murdering a woman who got into his car thinking it was her Uber ride had activated the child locks in his backseat so the doors could be opened only from the outside, police in South Carolina revealed.
Nathaniel David Rowland , 24, was charged Saturday in the death of 21-year-old Samantha Josephson, a University of South Carolina student from Robbinsville, New Jersey. Rowland decided not to appear at a hearing in Richland County jail Sunday.
Rowland is charged with kidnapping and murder, Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said. . . .
Investigators would not say what they thought Rowland did to Josephson from the time she got into his black Chevrolet Impala in Columbia’s Five Points entertainment district around 1:30 a.m. Friday until her body was dumped in woods off a dirt road in Clarendon County about 65 miles away.
Josephson had numerous wounds to her head, neck, face, upper body, leg and foot, according to arrest warrants released Sunday by the State Law Enforcement Division. Holbrook also said investigators found her blood in Rowland’s vehicle. . . .
Josephson’s blood was found in the trunk and inside Rowland’s car along with her phone, bleach, window cleaner and cleaning wipes, Holbrook said.
“This was a bad scene,” the police chief said at a news conference late Saturday.
Hunters found Josephson’s body Friday afternoon just hours after it was dumped, despite being left in an area that was “very difficult to get to unless you knew how to get there,” Holbrook said.
Rowland recently has lived in the area, he said.
The night after Josephson was kidnapped, a Columbia police officer noticed a black Chevrolet Impala about two blocks from the Five Points bars where Josephson was kidnapped.
The driver ran, but was arrested after a short chase, Holbrook said.

I actually spent some time this evening checking feminist web sites and scrolling down the Twitter feeds of various feminist writers, and guess what? None of them has said a word about the kidnapping and murder of Samantha Josephson. You’d think they’d mention this kind of violence against women, but they don’t, for some reason.

(Hat-tip: Kirby McCain on Twitter.)



 

Category: Violence Against Women

In The Mailbox: 04.01.19

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links last month.


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Spaghetti Harvest In Ticino
Twitchy: Minimum Wage Expert Occasional Cortex Forgets To Check Herself Before She Wrecks Herself
Louder With Crowder: Chris Rock Uses Awards Show Speech To Mock Jussie Smollett

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Homeless
American Power: What The Hell Happened To Rachel Maddow? also, DC McAllister Fired From Federalist
American Thinker: Democrats, The Media, & The Big Lie
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Socialism, The Delusional Fantasy That Always Ends In A Nightmare, also, For The Next Time Someone Tells You “You Don’t Look Cuban”
BattleSwarm: Democratic Operatives With Bylines, also, Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update
Camp Of The Saints:
CDR Salamander: Who Will Run The Navy Of The 2020s?
Da Tech Guy: Not Russia & Not Trump, also, How Kim Foxx Happened
Don Surber: Reporters Fear Retribution. They Should.
Dustbury: Strange Search Engine Queries, also, And The Wild Waters Flow
First Street Journal:  What Really Happened To The Planet Krypton
The Geller Report: Ilhan Omar Facing Campaign Finance Violation Probe, also, Netanyahu Says Soros Behind Likud Libel
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post Of the Day, also, The Unravelling
Hollywood In Toto: Unplanned Perfectly Captures Culture War Fight
Joe For America: Socialist Beta O’Rourke Pledges To “Break Apart” American Wealth & Power
JustOneMinute: A Man For All Other Seasons
Legal Insurrection: U. Az. Students To Be Charged After Disrupting Border Patrol Event, also, Occasional Cortex Goes To War With The DCCC
The PanAm Post: Venezuela Then And Now – The Achievements Of Chavista Socialism
Power Line: Occasional Cortex’s History Lesson, also, Facebook Calls For Censorship
Shot In The Dark: Just Can’t Win
STUMP: Foolery For 2019 – I Hate The NY State Legislature
The Political Hat: News Of The Week
This Ain’t Hell: Three More Return, also, The Dicks At Dick’s
Victory Girls: Occasional Cortex – Stop The Name Calling, You Xenophobic Bigots!
Volokh Conspiracy: Feldman & Siegel On Court-Packing
Weasel Zippers: AP Says Beta Spoke At Campaign Rally In “His Native Spanish”, also, Greg Gutfeld Takes On Media Meltdown Over Mueller Report
Mark Steyn: Lighting Out For The Territory, also, April Fools


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Category: Linkagery

Don’t Say Nobody Tried to Warn You

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | Comments Off on Don’t Say Nobody Tried to Warn You

 

Gosh, who could have possibly foreseen this?

Students at Hofstra University protested a statue of Thomas Jefferson on Friday at the second annual event, titled “Jefferson Has Gotta Go!”
The statue has been the center of controversy on the campus and has been defaced with “DECOLONIZE” and “Black Lives Matter” signs and stickers. According to a media advisory sent by the Jefferson Has Gotta Go (JGG) campaign, the protest was held outside Hofstra Breslin Hall at the statue. Organizers included “students of Hofstra University, staff from Planned Parenthood of Nassau County, and supporters of Hempstead community.”
The group gathered on campus to “expose the culture of bias and discrimination,” as stated in the media advisory, and to demand “the statue of Thomas Jefferson is removed.”
Hofstra College Democrats “want the statue to be removed and [we] stand with the Jefferson Has Gotta Go Campaign,” the group’s president, Brynne Levine, told Campus Reform.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) The idea that Democrats would be protesting a statue of the founder of their party is perhaps rather astonishing, but a near-total ignorance of history has become so common among college students that we now expect such idiotic gestures on campus.

There are many ironies involved in this, including my memory of how absurd it seemed 25 years ago when certain neo-Confederate friends warned that if efforts to erase public tributes to the Confederacy succeeded, they would be followed, in due time, by attacks upon monuments to the Founding Fathers.  Certainly, I could not imagine the memories of Washington, Jefferson, et al., would face eradication in my own lifetime, and yet this radicalism has proceeded so far and so fast that even the celebration of Columbus Day has become controversial.

What my prophetic friends perceived — a fact I was reluctant to acknowledge for many years — was that radicalism has no feasible limit. The radical is ultimately totalitarian in his ambition, and any attempt to placate the radical is therefore impossible. This is the true lesson of Munich, after all. Neville Chamberlain made the mistake in September 1938 of thinking that ceding the Sudetenland to Hitler would bring “peace for our time” In March 1939, however, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia and, in September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, beginning World War II. Appeasement was always an illusion; Hitler exploited pacifist sentiment in the West, promising “peace” while rapidly building his military until he was strong enough to risk open war, and this is how it always is with totalitarians, a category that includes our soi-disant “progressives.” The Left now makes demands that would have seemed preposterous 25 or 30 years ago, but where is the evidence that anyone is seriously determined to say “no” to such demands? Why shouldn’t the Left keep ratcheting up their demands, given how they have already been granted nearly everything they ever could have hoped for?

You can never appease such people! Give them everything they demand today, and tomorrow they’ll be back with a new list of demands.

When the agitation against the Confederate symbol in the Georgia state flag began ramping up in the early 1990s, a lot of people — including many conservatives — shrugged off this controversy as insignificant, and would not listen to those who warned that this agitation was indicative of a dangerous radicalism. Why this complacency? Well, those people had lived through the great ascendancy of conservatism in U.S. politics. Beginning with Goldwater in 1964, they had seen the steady build-up of the Right until, in 1980, Reagan won the White House, a victory followed by a series of triumphs, culminating in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Having witnessed this tremendous success, most conservatives circa 1991 were understandably optimistic about their movement’s future, and could not imagine how the Left might so revive itself and gain power as has been the case in recent decades. This optimism among movement conservatives begat overconfidence, which was why those prophets who warned of danger emerging on the Left were viewed as “extremists” by many respectable Republican types. Almost no one would listen to those who explained that the fight over Confederate symbols was just one element of a much broader campaign of Cultural Marxism, and is anyone surprised that now we see radical students assaulting a monument to the author of the Declaration of Independence? Well, I for one am not the least bit surprised, and I only wish more of my conservative friends had paid attention to what those neo-Confederate “extremists” were trying to explain 25 years ago. And thinking back to what they were saying then, I have every reason to believe that the radical Left will only become more militant in years to come. Be afraid. Be very afraid.



 

Category: Education, History, Racism

Rule 5 Monday: Tania Mallet, RIP

Posted on | April 1, 2019 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Tania Mallet, Helen Mirren’s cousin, played Tilly Masterson in Goldfinger, and had been considered for the role of Tatiana Romanova in From Russia With Love. Ironically, despite her Russian ancestry, she lost out due to her heavy English accent, and Italian actress Daniela Bianchi got the role – whereupon Bianchi’s voice parts were dubbed. Mallet was unhappy with the pay she received and the onerous restrictions on her personal life, and went back to modeling, where the money was a lot better and nobody cared what she did in her off hours.

Goodbye to another Bond Girl.

Ninety Miles From Tyranny begins with Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #573, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.













Animal Magnetism presents Rule Five Schadenfreudelicious Friday and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL’s smorgasbord of beauty includes Spinach, Sun Ra, Paella, Fabiana Rosales, Texas bluebonnets, Drunk History Womens’ Baseball, and Sara Matos.

Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe is Catherine Lough Haggquist and his Vintage Babe is Sari Maritza. At Dustbury, it’s Gabrielle Union and Miranda Kerr.

Thanks to everyone for the luscious linkagery!

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