Author: HV Voogd

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Quotes #17

“Today as every day, [God’s] Spirit demands from us an answer to this question: What is as yet unfinished, uncreated, unprecedented, uncompromised in the vicious circle of our thinking? And we shall always find that the future of Christianity is present here and now as long as two or three Christians believe in it, and answer. And they answer, these poor timeful creatures, by contracting time to a point of most fruitful faith and love, and in this contraction, the suddenness of the end of the world and the endlessness of a first beginning are coupled and bear witness to the timelessness of our origin and our destiny.”

~from The Christian Future, page 91

Stop Talking About It

“We know Canada isn’t immune to racist violence & hate. We condemn it in all its forms & send support to the victims in Charlottesville.”
~Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Excerpt from a recent CTV Canada news article….

Last weekend’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., has thrust America’s racism, violence and toxic political climate into the global spotlight.

But experts warn that right-wing extremist views are also on the rise in Canada, and should not be ignored.

“The far right is becoming very bold in Canada as well and we’ve seen that in the run-up to the last (federal) election and right after that as well,” Barbara Perry, a global crime expert at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told CTV’s Your Morning on Tuesday.

In Cambodia, in the 1970s, Khmer Rouge soldiers were a bunch of young men who were angry at the upper class. The thing is, they didn’t know they were angry at the upper class until Pol Pot came and convinced them of it. There are a lot of angry people in Canada. They don’t necessarily know why they’re angry, but they have no way to express it and so are looking for a cause/group they can attach their anger to. It doesn’t matter if the cause does not line up with the reason they’re angry (if they even know it). The cause becomes an outlet for the anger and it gives the person a sense of purpose in life. So, if we want to see an uprise in racism in Canada, then by all means, talk about it incessantly. Convince people that they need to be outraged and afraid of it. Good leaders will find angry people and attach them to good causes. Foolish leaders will attach them to evil causes. Canada has foolish leaders.

Related reading…. Fuelling White Nationalism

Flash-Drive Babies

flashdrive baby

Below is a video that’s making the rounds this week….

Now, setting aside the insane and laughable circular “logic” this unfortunate professor is using, the real argument she’s making is that unborn babies have little to no worth.

If I go out and buy myself a 16GB flash-drive for $10, and realize when I get home that it has fallen out of my bag and is lost, I’ll be ticked off, but I’ve really only lost $10 and the time it took me to buy the thing. However, if I get the flash-drive home and plug into my computer and transfer all my kids’ baby photos, my wedding photos, video of my kids’ first steps, photos of the last vacation I spent with my dad before he passed away, and the novel I’ve been working on for the last ten years and is 99% finished, and erase my computer as I’m going to sell it, and then lose the flash-drive…. Well, that would be a tragedy.

The nutty professor in the video sees human beings in the same way. A person only has worth if he or she has experiences, memories, and relationships. An unborn fetus has none of that and is therefore quite worthless and easy to replace.

IMG_3390And this is the true evil of abortion: the low opinion that pro-abortionists have of the intrinsic worth of human life (i.e. being created in the image of God). They love to say they have a high opinion of women’s rights, but that’s complete BS. There are few people who hate women more than pro-abortionists.

So who is God according to this result-of-affirmative-action professor? The pregnant woman is — she alone can arbitrarily decide if the unborn person has worth or not simply by choosing to have an abortion or to not have one. And when she chooses not to have an abortion, the future experiences and so forth of the child will retroactively give the unborn baby the value it needs in order to make the abortion of it wrong…. or something like that…..

Propaganda (Brief Book Review)

propaganda

“Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group”
~Edward Bernays

I recently finished reading Propaganda by Edward Bernays. It’s a short book written in the late 1920s describing the methods used by anyone who wishes to push their ideas and agenda onto a large group of people. The methods described in the book are still in use today.

Propaganda is a neutral term; it is neither good nor evil in and of itself. It can be used for good and used for evil, but mostly it is a vessel used to push an idea.

If I were a newsman who recently read a report done by some major university on the annual financial earnings of men and women and wanted to do a story on it, I could choose a couple of different ways to present the report. If I have no agenda but to present the report to the public for their own scrutiny, my headline would look something like: New Report on the Financial Income of Men and Women Released by U of T. However, if I’m a feminist, and do have a strong agenda, and I see in the report that men, due to more frequently working full time, putting in more overtime, and taking jobs in higher paying fields, are earning more money on an annual basis than women, I can use that information to push my agenda, and my headline would look more like this: Women Only Make Seventy Cents for Every Dollar a Man Makes New Study Shows. And that headline would be propaganda. It’s not an outright lie; it’s just that I am presenting the information to the reader so as to sway his or her opinion toward my agenda (which, for the feminist, is to convince the public that women are oppressed by men).

propSo, even though propaganda is neutral (and should not be mistaken with opinion writing), I would argue that it will most often lean towards dishonesty as the presenter of the propaganda is most likely not being sincere in his or her propagation of the information, even when the cause behind the propaganda is a good one.

I gave the book 3/5 stars.