Thursday 26th of December 2024
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after the mardi-gras, may as well wave the white flag...

flaggo

From Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin to Boris Johnson and Jair Bolsonaro, we are living in the age of the strong man. I also suspect that Scott Morrison is succumbing to this political style. Of course, not all men exhibit muscular masculinity. This is because there are many masculinities, which are subject to change and shaped by culture and personal context. Nonetheless, the problem with strong man politics is that it is inherently divisive and infrequently violent. In this politics, there are few winners and many losers.


So, what is the political “strong man” like?

The strong man finds it difficult to consider alternative perspectives. This is particularly apparent on issues around climate change. That is, the strong man knows better than climate scientists and retired fire commissioners. The strong man’s hubris — a mix of charm and conceit — means he is the exclusive guardian of truth. He knows the facts. Everything else is fake news, and only he can tell the difference. This constitutes the engine, which drives him forward.

...

Strong man politics is inherently violent. Obviously, the relationship between violence and masculinity is complex. As Raewynn Connell argues, “Most violence is not a matter of individual pathology.” There are structural connections and institutional layers here. However, the widespread vilification, imprisonment, disappearance and murder of journalists demonstrates the lengths to which the strong man will go in order to maintain his entitlements. Certainly, the AFP raids on the ABC are not on this scale. But the raids raise important, yet unanswered, political questions.

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The Christian Church is not immune to strong man politics. Indeed, we had to learn the hard way from our own abuses of power. Initially, we struggled to see the problems — partly because we simultaneously venerated our strong men as we sanctified obedience. Moreover, how could you challenge our princes, who have been called by God? Inadvertently, the Church fostered a culture of deference where obedience was rewarded, often at the expense of others (such as children, women, LGBTIQ persons).

It is imperative for the Church, then, to enter the public square with others as equals, to critique and denounce the hubris and violence of strong man politics. After all, our common life, and our planet, depend on it.

Steven Ogden is Research Fellow in the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University. His most recent book is The Church, Authority, and Foucault.


Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/strong-man-politics/12060722

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"After all, our common life, and our planet, depend on it?" What a lot of rot... SCIENCES are what we need not religious mumbo-jumbo, nor politics...

May as well wave the white flag…

Politics isn’t for the faint-hearted — or the sheep… We all need to do our bit. The motto for this website is “Democracy isn’t a spectator sport”. So. But, we have to deal with a multitude of conflicting view-points, half-baked delusions, prejudices, stupidity (possibly our own) and deceit. So, do we have to accept the decisions of the majority — even if they are totally stupid — and shut up? Or make a noise, shake the apple tree or revolt? At some stage in this democratic debate, some people are more skilled at motivating a majority of people, through various populistic means in a system that is mostly hierarchical and archaic. Unless we’re all part of the ubersicht committee, without delegation to a representative, we thus can express a direct point of view, then be voted upon by all of us, for whatever actions to take, regardless of the consequences. 

Is there room for some revisionism down the road? 

Presently due to a natural event called shittocrapustovirus19, some financiers (say Soros) who were betting for “globalisation”, are taking a bath. But do not shed tears for these fake jewish money-bags, as we know they edge their bets… They work the financial market like a complex set of pipes and evaporators which, like a kero-fridge on heat, will bring the cold cash at the end. Soros is still smiling, unless the picture used by the media is a stock foto that does not show his present mood.

Actions we democratically take can vary from baking a communal Sunday cake to going to war, building a new toilet block in a national Park or destroying the planet — or demand isolation. There will be argy-bargy. The main issues are peace, happiness and freedom. The secondary issues are the architecture: obtrusive, modern, classic, high, low, moralistically, like being churchy? Watch it. The religious mobs want to place more moralistic restrictions on the already tightened secular laws designed to fight “terrorism”....

The “strong men" of politics only got there because all the other candidates are (were) wishy-washy, more corrupt or the system is crooked to allow such lunatics becoming leaders. One caution though, Putin is a “strong man” of politics but he is more understanding and respectful of the dynamics of the system — which he helped create and now wants to change in his favour through the democratic process — than say a mad Johnson and a deceitful Morrison.

For Trump, the verdict is open. The Donald is a loony, but he understands from his own unsavoury adventures that the system is crooked with its many levels of deep states to be fought, which he equated to draining the swamp… So far it seems he has become one of the swamp's creature, though it could be a tactic to get closer to the other crooks. 

So, in regard to Steven Ogden’s most recent book The Church, Authority, and Foucault, be prepared for yet another boring second rate level of philosophical discourse about the same haystack that Aristotle and his mates studied to find the needless needle of human meaning… Don’t bother read it. No pessimism here, but a simple time saving (as if time could be saved!): enjoy life for what it is and the proteins you can steal.

For Gus, Foucault was a boring imprecise old fart, though as a French philosopher and historian, he has been described as one of the most influential and controversial scholars of post-World War II. His main controversial occupation was to make a mess at reinventing the wheels of philosophy with twigs, rubbish and rusty pipes borrowed from more serious thinkers. 

Foucault's sexual life as a gay French male and his work on sexuality suggests that Foucault's scholarly study of his methodological interpretation of his own sophistic roundabouts, made it possible for him to be both the object and the subject of his investigations of the history of homosexuality. Wonderful. Nothing wrong with this… But one can see why he was trying to reset all the parameters in his favour.

The gays, LGBTi’s, have now got their rights. Good. We voted for equality in marriage, good... as long as your partner isn’t a dog, a goat or a cat... but it can be a log of wood. Eventually the dollbots will demand equality… But here we need to mention that sometimes (often) gay people overstep their station and tend to become “strong men” (or women). Place them in charge of something and only gay people will pass the doors of the gizmo… The super-talented heteros will be filtered out. I know I should not bitch here. But I know too much… Whether you’re a painter, a musician or a trapeze artist, the gay mafia will get behind their person that managed to get his/her mitten on the officialdom levers and vice-versa to make sure you’re out… You’re buggered if you don’t wan’t to be buggered… Pardon my Frenchy… This isn’t not universal though, but it seems to be the rule rather than the exception… So this is a friendly advice to the rainbow flag-waivers, be more accepting of the weirdos like us who are heterosexuals. Homosexuality isn’t the new normal, but a small equal part of the gamut of whom we are together.

Then we’ll wave the rainbow flag as we’ve done so far, but it’s a flag amongst many… Bugger, I just realised that we, heterosexuals, do not have a dedicated pennant...  We should design one forthwith, and fly it high above all else for the sheer number of us. Here we need to be careful as not to fly something that the navy has already used to signify quarantine like Lima — a yellow and black flag… In the time of coronusvirulus, flying the full yellow flag might let us into the harbours… And we can use the Romeo flag for social distancing. 

So after much consideration of the palette, the flag for the heterosexuals might be uncompromising brown and beige upright stripes… Safe.


GL.
Atheist flag-waiver...

blame trump for the epidemic...

The coronavirus epidemic is shaking humanity and turning the world upside down. Quick, somebody alert the media.

The Washington press corps is covering one of the largest, continuing stories in recent history the same way it has covered the Trump administration since Day One.

The formula is simple: Whatever the president does is not just wrong, it’s borderline evil. Details at 11.

In the real world, events are unfolding at a pace and scale impossible to comprehend. But at too many news outlets, the aim is not to inform. It’s to render the harshest possible judgment on the man journalists love to hate.

Already The New York Times has twice called the White House response “calamitous,” including once in a supposedly straight-news article.

This is beyond shameful. When antagonists like Sen. Chuck Schumer finally are working with Trump and when the Democratic governors of New York and California swap praise with the president over their partnerships, the media ought to take a hint that this time is different and there is no place for biased journalism-as-usual.

 

Read more:

https://nypost.com/2020/03/21/shameful-media-still-slamming-donald-trump...

brilliant display of philanthropic gender re-assignment...

In an August 2018 New Yorker article, Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “Are today’s donor classes solving problems or creating new ones?” Kolbert describes a form of charity that aims to not just help people but to improve them. This “improvement” aligns with the giver’s particular vision of what constitutes improvement, of course. And the people who need to be improved are treated as children—for whom the donor, naturally, gets to decide what is best. 

Kolbert describes how this form of giving becomes exploitation. We might add: not just exploitation, but elite-driven, highly self-interested social engineering. We see these characteristics on brilliant display in the philanthropy behind the modern LGBT movement.  

 

The gay-rights movements and organizations that emerged during America’s sexual revolution in the 1960s bear little resemblance to the behemoth LGBT NGO juggernauts operating today. What started out as grassroots support for the legal and social acceptance of same-sex relations has turned into an effort at full-blown social transformation, with the addition of a fetish of adult men, known as transsexualism, to the LGB human-rights rainbow banner. Along with the rebranding of transsexualism as transgenderism, this movement has also successfully normalized disorders of sexual development, otherwise known as intersex conditions. We have come a long way from Stonewall.

Perhaps the most insidious idea to be advanced under the LGBT banner today is the amorphous concept of “gender identity.” Gender identity refers to the way people see themselves with respect to socially constructed sex-role stereotypes. But is not just a descriptive term; it is also prescriptive—one has the right, according to advocates, to force others to recognize one’s chosen identity. And one has the right to change one’s body medically so that it better maps on to one’s gender identity. Given that the pharmaceutical lobby is the largest in Congress, and given that some of the most important philanthropists behind the modern LGBT movement have close ties to Big Pharma, this medical component is important to note. 

“Gender identity” and “transgender” ideology emerged on the Western cultural landscape not more than a decade ago, but they have spread across the globe with the speed and ferocity of the SARS COVID pandemic—and they have created nearly as much havoc. Yet the massive concomitant changes we have already seen in language, law, medical and crime statistics, women’s safety zones, sports, accomplishments and educational opportunities, the medicalization of healthy children’s bodies, and K–12 curricula have not been driven by grassroots enthusiasm. Quite the contrary. They have been driven by the philanthropic funding provided by billionaires who are themselves invested in this radical ideology’s greatest beneficiaries: Big Pharma. Many of the most important philanthropists behind the transgender and gender-identity movements stand to make huge profits from body dissociation and the commoditization of human sex into medical identities. 

Take Martine Rothblatt, a self-described transsexual and transhumanist who was the first individual to create a legal document supporting the idea that feelings of dissociation from our sexed bodies is normal. This legal document, later to become the International Gender Bill of Rights, legally normalizes body dissociation. Rothblatt later went on to become the top earning CEO in the biopharmaceutical industry, using his money and influence to promote the ideology and normalization of transgenderism. He believes that sexual dimorphism is morally equivalent to South African apartheid and must be dismantled.


Jennifer Pritzker [born James Nicholas Pritzker, American investor, philanthropist, retired lieutenant colonel from the United States Army in 2001, and made an honorary Colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard], along with his [her] family, one of the wealthiest in the United States, has poured huge sums of money into American institutions in order to advance the concept of body dissociation under the euphemism of “gender identity.” The Pritzker family has made vast investments in the medical industrial complex.

In 2000, another billionaire, Jon Stryker, heir to a multi-billion-dollar medical corporation, created another mammoth LGBT NGO, the Arcus Foundation. Stryker created such a global goliath of philanthropic funding with the stocks from his medical corporation that he had to create another organization to keep track of it all. In 2006 Arcus funded the creation of MAP, or Movement Advancement Project, to track the complex system of advocacy and funding that had already developed as a way of insinuating gender identity and transgender ideology into the culture.

Arcus deploys millions of philanthropic dollars each year to filter gender identity and transgender ideology into American law through their training of leaders in political activism, political leadership, transgender law, religious liberty, education, and civil rights. Some of its favored organizations include the Victory Fund, the Center for American Progress, the ACLU the Council for Global Equality, the Transgender Law Center, Trans Justice Funding Project, OutRight Action International, Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and GLSEN. In fact, Arcus is recorded to have given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010  alone (it is far more than that now), making it the largest LGBT funder in the world. Jon Stryker gave over $30 million to the foundation himself in that period, through his stock in Stryker Medical Corporation.

Translation: A medical corporation with a vested interest in encouraging people to identify as transgender is directly funneling money and assets to its philanthropic foundation so that the foundation will do that encouraging on its behalf, thereby bringing more money and more clients (for life) to that corporation.

Arcus has funneled millions into other philanthropy organizations, such as Tides, Proteus and Borealis. There is no way to track whether these organizations are using Arcus money for the purpose of normalizing transgenderism, but one might surmise that the cause so dear to Arcus’s heart is not entirely ignored.

Along with the Pritzker family, Arcus has sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to colleges and universities, including Columbia, Yale, Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, the University of Southern California, the University of Washington, and many others. Arcus grants have gone to black coalitions in the U.S. and Africa, Latino organizations, Native American organizations, youth and teen organizations, the military, and Public Broadcasting Radio. Millions have been given to lesbian organizations, including in Africa, with the lion’s share going to Astrea Foundationfor a special focus on its trans fund. Arcus funds sports organizations such as Athlete Alley and Youth Can Play. Hundreds of thousands have gone to Planned Parenthood. Arcus has made a significant grant to Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a dubious character in the transgender arena. The foundation has funded prison projects and immigration organizations with a focus on normalizing transgenderism in children. Arcus funds religious organizations across the world.

In 2015, together with the Novo Foundation, a philanthropic NGO run by Peter Buffet (son of Warren, who helped launch the project with a $90 million gift), Arcus earmarked $20 million for transgender causes specifically. In 2018 Arcus funded the Council For Global Equality, a coalition of 30 U.S. groups advocating for inclusion of LGBT issues in foreign affairs and development policies.

Whew. This is no small operation! And every Arcus grant is contingent upon the recipient’s affirmation of “diversity and inclusion policies”—policies that, of course, very much include the affirmation of gender-identity ideology and transgenderism.

Many more philanthropic actors are working to prop up the transgender and gender-identity movements, including Tim Gill and his Gill Foundation and George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. Like Martine Rothblatt, Jennifer Pritzker, and Jon Stryker, Gill, who is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, and Soros, who has broad investments in Big Pharma, stand to benefit financially from the demand for altered bodies and brains that they hope is the fruit of their philanthropic activity.

It is striking that this conflict of interest has been so little discussed. Even the American Psychological Association (APA), the leading scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States, with more than 118,000 members, is funded by Arcus philanthropy. In 2005 the APA created INET, to help member psychological organizations improve the well-being of sexual orientation and “gender diverse people.” Prior to the addition of gender identity and the arrival of Arcus money, the APA INET was solely focused on LGB issues. In 2008 the APA created the Task Force On Gender Identity and Gender Variance, and in 2015 it developed guidelines to assist psychologists in the provision of culturally competent, developmentally appropriate, and trans-affirmative psychological practice with “transgender” and “gender non-conforming” people. Psychologists were “encouraged“ to modify their understanding of gender, broadening the range of variation viewed as healthy and normative.

Can democracy withstand such philanthropy-driven “encouragement”? Can there be genuine democracy when, via the taxpayer-subsidized fig leaf of philanthropy, billionaires can so quickly and easily dismantle the reality of biological sex by suborning charities, politicians, researchers, and professional associations? We are in the midst of finding out.


Jennifer Bilek is an investigative journalist, artist, and concerned citizen. She has been following the money behind the transgender agenda for six years. She blogs at the 11th Hour. 

 

 

 

Read more:


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-lgbt-nonprofits-and-their-billionaire-patrons-are-reshaping-the-world/

 

 

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the gay police...

A controversial bid to remove police and prison officer floats from Sydney’s pride parade has fallen short at the annual general meeting of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

But in a strong anti-police statement, Saturday’s motion attracted 44 per cent of the votes, drawing 261 votes in favour. Three hundred and twenty-seven members voted against it.

The motion was put forward by activist group Pride in Protest, which wants the world-famous event to return to its radical roots.

They say police’s presence in the march makes Indigenous people feel unsafe to participate, in light of the high rates of incarceration and over-policing that are the focus of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Other Pride in Protest proposals, including one to sever a sponsorship relationship with Qantas over its role in facilitating deportations and another to ban the Liberal Party from the parade, also failed.

The proposal to exclude the police float was opposed by the Mardi Gras board, who said it ran counter to their core value of inclusion, and the NSW Police Force.

But those supporting it argued the presence of police excluded First Nations people from the parade.

An open letter supporting the bid to exclude police signed by more than 1000 people including artists and performers Tom Ballard and Montaigne, was published in October.

Similar motions have failed at two previous AGMs but Pride in Protest says this is the closest they’ve come to winning a majority.

The activist group is also seeking to expand its share of the organisation’s eight board positions after winning a spot in 2019.

Four candidates are running under the group’s branding. Results from the vote are due to be counted later on Saturday.

The annual general meeting was held on Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

-AAP

 

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/nsw/2020/12/05/move-to-ban-police-from-mardi-gras-fails/

 

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