An angel came to me and said, "Ok, here's our best offer: Biden wins the presidency, and the Republicans keep the Senate."
I didn't have to think for very long. No more Trump craziness, from Trump himself, from his enemies, from his supporters. And the damage the Democrats can do will be severely limited.
"I'll take it," I said.
"That's good," said the angel. "Because we weren't actually going to listen to you anyway.
There you go.
AMDG
I’m so appalled by Biden, I can’t believe this would work out ok.
I’m with your angel. The worst thing possible would have been a sweep (by either party).
My highest possible political aspiration at the moment is gridlock.
I have non-political aspirations that are better than that. 😉
Pray for Biden that he will be surrounded by the graces of his baptism, and all of the times he received Communion in a state of grace, and his Confirmation. Pray that the truth that he learned in his Catholic schools will start nagging him. Pray the prayer that Jesus told St. Faustina to pray for conversions: O blood and water which gushed forth from the heart of Jesus as a fount of mercy for us, I trust in You.
AMDG
Louise, “ok” is relative. Very.
“Pray that the truth that he learned in his Catholic schools will start nagging him.” Therein may lie the problem.
I dread what will happen to the cities if by some miracle Trump pulls off a victory. I think he has the right to try, although I question the prudence of doing so.
Robert, I did specify truth. That wasn’t an accident. Also, he graduated from high school before Vatican II, so he may have actually had some decent formation. I don’t know.
AMDG
“Prudence” is not a word in the Trump vocabulary, Robert. Maybe he has a copy of the White Album with the song “Dear Prudence” though.
I know all of you dislike Biden for whatever personal reasons you have that I’m sure are good ones, but having a person in the WH that will not be constantly attacking and goading seems quite wonderful to me. All of that vitriol just flows downward and affects the populace negatively. After the last four years, some sense of decorum is really all I want from a president.
I do agree with Rob G that it is preferable to have divided government, and not one party controlling presidency/senate/house. They should be forced to work with each other, and our country is at its best when this happens.
It’s not personal, although I don’t “like” Biden. He’s pretty nasty in his own way although obviously not as spectacularly unpleasant as Trump, and I’ll be relieved to see an end of that. It’s his party and the things it’s likely to pursue.
As far as the results of the election are concerned, I’ve been assuming Trump’s attempts to contest it are not going to work. But I have not been following it closely at all.
By the way I pray the Divine Mercy prayers every day (well, most days), prefaced with a fairly long list of petitions. I’ve always included the current president in that and am including Biden now. With Trump I always included a prayer that the grace of Melania’s Catholic baptism would…somehow help. Maybe things would have been worse if I hadn’t. 🙂
It isn’t personal for me, either. Biden seems like a nice guy. And I will be glad when we can be rid of Trump’s poisonous rhetoric.
It is just that Biden and Harris stand for the legal protection of using medical tools to sever the sacred bond between mother and child and thus injuring both mother and child physically and the mother and the father and society spiritually as well. Such an attack on motherhood (and fatherhood) is too grievous for me to ever even think about supporting a candidate who defends legal abortion.
And it won’t do to counter with some kind of tu quoque argument. I get it and am grieved by some the other things as well–just not profoundly and comprehensively in the same way.
Yes, and she really stands for it.
Does anyone know why lots of people are leaving Facebook? I guess it has something to do with the election, but I don’t know.
AMDG
I do understand, Robert. I have no counter argument. I am certainly 100% against abortion, but in a different way than most who comment on this blog.
I have also noticed that, Janet. I post nothing political at all, so I don’t think I am being unfriended. Maybe it is people that feel political but are too upset to be on social media?
I was about to quit Facebook last night primarily out of anger at Fb itself, the constant nagging about the election and the very selective fact-checking. I may still.
From what I see, it’s a bunch of conservatives switching to other social media sites.
AMDG
Maclin, The election stuff is driving me crazy, and I think that is one issue on which there is no division.
AMDG
Re leaving Facebook. It seems to be because Facebook banned a “Stop the Steal” group:
Trump’s supporters followed his claims [that the election was rigged] and a social media movement started developing over at Facebook through the ‘Stop The Steal’ page which garnered over 300K members under 48 hours since its launch. However, Facebook ended up deleting the page and stating the reason that it was trying to delegitimize the result of the elections also stating that it witnessed some ‘worrying’ calls of violence from the members of the ‘Stop The Steal’ community.
Meaning everybody hates it? I guess so, but probably conservatives hate it more, because we know what fb’s intentions are.
It’s that nobody likes to be nagged.
AMDG
Marianne, that can only be a part of it. I’d never heard of that and I have several extremely…let’s say excitable…right-wing Facebook friends. And at least one not-so-excitable and not-really-right-wing person who’s been annoyed by other Facebook interventions.
People have been talking about leaving Facebook and/or Twitter for something called Parler and another one, the name of which I can’t remember, for months now. Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden story and Facebook’s obvious advocacy have no doubt helped to push some people into following through.
I guess I’m a hipster. I got off Facebook before it was cool.
🙂
https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/11/go-deep-not-broad/
Rather timely, methinks. I was formerly in the habit of ignoring the news, mostly; I’d check the headlines twice a day and that’s it, unless there was something of particular interest to follow up on. But between COVID and the election I fell away from that practice and started to watch the news somewhat more closely. I noticed my attitude towards things changing and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that “being informed” is bad for the soul. Now that the election is over I’m going to try to get back to my old practice.
What would ya’ll recommend as the best place to go for long form journalism? What are your go-to sites and sources? The only one I have a subscription to is First Things. I need to bookmark some good sites.
That is exactly what happened to me, Rob, and I have come to the same conclusion.
AMDG
I really never have followed the news very closely–not the actual news. In the normal run of things I don’t go much past the headlines. What I do read too much of is commentary. I read things like the web sites of National Review and American Conservative, and those will lead me to other things, but typically not to straight news. That’s not a good habit, I know.
I used to hit Google News once or more a day for the headlines, but I got disgusted with them for their relentless anti-Trump-ness. The last straw was a couple of weeks ago when the Hunter Biden laptop story broke and there was not a single mention of it to be seen on Google News, while there were half a dozen Trump-critical things, more opinion than news, as the main stories. And as you all know I’m not exactly pro-Trump myself. Google News originally billed itself as mere aggregator of stories based on page views. I suppose that could be true, if more anti-Trumpers than Trumpers read news on the web, but I’m skeptical.
I read the Quadrant piece and agree. A related phenomenon I see often is the “what you know that ain’t so” syndrome. I know a few people who very avidly follow some news outlets, but the scope of what they follow is very partisan and so they seem decidedly blinkered.
To answer your question, Robert, I don’t have much of an answer. I subscribed to FT digital for a year or two recently, but it was a digital-only subscription and I found that I rarely read it. That was mostly due to the format, I think. I was reading it on a Kindle and I kind of have to make an effort to use it. If the print mag had been sitting around I would have read it more. I subscribe to The New Criterion, sort of general arts and culture from a conservative point of view. And Touchstone, which as you probably know is an “ecumenically orthodox” magazine. And Front Porch Republic’s new magazine, which I have received but not read a word of.
Robert, I get Front Porch Republic’s print journal, which comes twice a year, and I usually check their site once a day. They do some good pieces, both long and short, some being of more interest to me than others, obviously. They also do a list every Saturday, with links, of pieces from other journals that may be of interest to their readers. Very helpful.
I also look at The Kirk Center’s University Bookman once a week for book reviews. Generally they put up two or three new ones every weekend. I used to get Modern Age, a broadly conservative quarterly, but I let than one lapse a few years back. Now that Trump appears to be gone I may start taking it again, as I’m interested in seeing where the conservative movement goes from here. Ironically, the last issue I received before my subs. lapsed last time is from 2016 and is called “Conservatives in the Year of Trump” or something like that. I never read it but it may be somewhat instructive to do so now. I like Modern Age because it was more cultural/philosophical than straight political. The latter is something I’m not much interested in.
I have read a couple of interesting articles at churchlife.nd.edu. I don’t know what they are like overall, or if this is the kind of thing you are looking for, but it might be worth checking out.
AMDG
I was going to mention them, too, although it’s a bit dishonest for me to do so because I haven’t read many of their pieces, and it’s for a bad reason: they’re too good for reading on the web. They tend to be both substantial and somewhat lengthy for the web.
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/
Long-form journalism? Like, over 280 characters? Who has time for that?
Those who do try to make the time experience a sensation of desperate struggle of which in time they grow very weary, feeling that it would be a huge relief to surrender. It’s much like the description I’ve heard of people freezing to death, who grow overwhelmingly sleepy and eventually just give in to it.
That’s why I get all my news from memes.
They are frequently more truthful than Pravda.
Interesting that you bring up Pravda, because I was having a discussion last night in which I was talking about how we used to hear about Pravda when we we were young, and how the people in the USSR could not get accurate news, and now we are in pretty much the same situation.
AMDG
Yes. By “Pravda” I actually meant our “mainstream” media. I mean, I wasn’t just making a snide remark, I was flat-out equating them at least in moral terms. Of course there are some huge differences. Our Pravda is not government-run, for instance. But they have truly gone all the way over into suppression and distortion. At this point one has to pretty much be blind not to see it. The Hunter Biden laptop thing was astonishing. Perhaps it was in fact not what it appeared to be. But it’s just ridiculous to think that such a story having to do with a Republican would not have received massive non-stop coverage.
As we were saying a few weeks ago, yeah, people have been griping about media bias for a long time. Especially conservatives about liberal bias. You can say it’s basically the same thing, but it’s so much more extensive and pretty clearly intentional that it’s really not. To deny it is like those people who, when they hear someone express shock and dismay at the extremely crude lyrics of current pop music, scoff and say “Oh, you’re just like those puritans who thought Elvis was bad.” But if you can’t see a big difference between Elvis’s gyrations and a certain “song” that’s had a lot of publicity over the past couple of months, and if you think that doesn’t represent a big social change (whether you think it’s good or bad), you’re in denial.
I figured that’s what you meant, and I am curious whether that is being said by others, or just a connection you made.
I don’t even know about the HB laptop thing except that there was one.
AMDG
What song, Mac? Or were you just making a point?
Hunter Biden’s laptop and liberal media bias notwithstanding, I believe that “Hillary’s emails” may have ended up being the deciding point in Trump’s 2016 win.
Perhaps the liberal media is so busy reporting on Trump (just the way he wants it) that they have not had time for Biden family members. This past week has been blessedly free of Trump news, and I could really get used to that.
All of that said, I read and/or watch very little news. So I tend to get it from internet headlines, and I browse multiple sources. While I like to think that Kevin Williamson and a few others at NR are relatively reasonable, they of course have a big conservative bias I have to overcome. Very little is being said on that website about the current toddler temper tantrum going on in the WH.
Apparently we do need to re-think the constitution and everything else, since it is clearly not working. However, I do not feel very passionate about this at all. I really don’t care as long as things do not affect me, it takes way too much emotion that I would rather give to things I have a modicum of control over. They can have 25 supreme court justices for all I care, or none! 🙂
The song is “WAP”. I have not heard it, just seen the lyrics reported, either in horror by conservatives or “ooo that’s so empowering” from feminists. The performer is Cardi B. Please don’t anybody link to the video. Not that I think I’ll be contaminated, but I’m afraid it may actually be kind of catchy and then it might get stuck in my head, gross lyric and all.
I’m not going to argue the media bias thing. As I said, it just seems incontestable to me, and if someone doesn’t see it my arguments aren’t going to matter.
Janet, the laptop thing, very briefly, is that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, abandoned at a repair shop, is said to contain all sorts of stuff that’s evidence of corruption and/or very shocking. I just cannot doubt that if it had been, say, Donald Trump Jr, it would have been the story of recent weeks.
Yikes, I do not think I will listen to “WAP”, or read the lyrics.
I can sort of see where this guy is coming from:
https://babylonbee.com/news/local-man-wouldnt-believe-there-was-election-fraud-except-media-big-tech-corporations-keep-screaming-at-him-that-there-wasnt
Before the election, I hoped for a blow out on either side, so that there could be no fraudulent claims about a stolen election. But what we have got (if we have got it), is actually the opposite and better – gridlock and ridiculous claims about a stolen election.
Robert Gotcher, for long form journalism check out the Church Life Journal. It is often very good. They publish something new nearly every day, so it’s not always genius, but when its good its very good.
That is, if we actually do get gridlock, and Trump pretending the election has been stolen in order to steal the election, do not lead to Georgia’s two senate run-offs going to the Dems.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I voted for Trump this time (after voting 3rd party in 2016) solely because of the Democrats’ scheme for cheating the electoral college in the event of a popular vote win and e.c. loss, as in 2016. If Trump was going to win, I wanted to do my part to avoid that scheme being triggered. At least that didn’t happen. Here’s hoping relatively conservative voters are still a majority in Georgia.
That is, if we actually do get gridlock, and Trump pretending the election has been stolen in order to steal the election, do not lead to Georgia’s two senate run-offs going to the Dems.
That thought had crossed my mind.
And all those people in the streets of D.C.!
AMDG
Oh, you mean these dangerous nutcases:
‘The “Million MAGA March” announced its notable attendees would include conspiracy theorists and others like podcaster Nick Fuentes, who participated in the deadly 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, and Mike Cernovich, who pushed the “pizza gate” conspiracy theory.’
CNN, making sure we stay on the right page informed.
Light On Dark Water 
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