Tag: men and women

The Desperate Search for Meaning

The Portly Politico22 Comments

Despite this post’s lofty title, the focus is somewhat narrow.  Many Christians and other people of faith believe there is an innate desire in all humans to believe in something higher than themselves—God.  I’ve heard this desire inelegantly (but accurately) described as a “God-hole,” a hole that cannot be filled with anything other than the Divine.

The West today is awash in cynicism and nihilism, and an aggressive form of anti-religious sentiment.  Just witness the amusing, angry lengths to which strident Internet atheists will go to denounce religious (almost always specifically Christian) beliefs.  It’s pedantic to write, but it bears repeating:  atheists ironically fill their “God-hole” with the religion of hating and/or denying God’s Existence.

The net effect of this existential nihilism is manifest in abundant ways:  high suicide rates, debased morality and behavior, the destruction of the family, and spiritual emptiness and confusion.  We overthrew God—or at least, we tried to remove Him from our lives—but the void, the “God-hole,” within us remains.

Nature abhors a vacuum, so something is going to fill that hole.  It was with interest, then, that I read this piece from The Daily Dot that I stumbled upon while mindlessly scrolling through Facebook one day.  The piece is about a “healer” and lifestyle blogger named Audrey Kitching, who by all accounts is a duplicitous fraud:  she resells cheap Chinese jewelry at a huge markup, billing them as “energy crystals” and the like, and her gullible followers/victims eagerly lap it up.

What caught my attention, though, was not that a woman was trading on her looks and Instagram filters to build an online business, but rather the women who sacrificed their lives and good sense to someone who is, essentially, a bubblegum-haired freak with a penchant for codependent, psychologically abusive relationships.  Kitching convinced one of her employees to sever all ties with her family for a full year, and essentially used the poor, misguided woman as slave labor.

Men seem to succumb to the supposed “logic” of atheism, priding themselves on their assumed intellectual superiority for refusing to believe in anything beyond themselves.  Women, on the other hand, love quasi-spiritual garbage like Kitching’s baubles (it’s humorous reading how allegedly “legitimate” healers are opposed to Kitching for diminishing their corner on the medium/spiritualist market—I guess she’s not in their Scammers Guild).

Kitchings and her ilk—palm readers, dime-store oracles, astrologers, “good witches,” etc.—offer spirituality on the cheap:  all the “feel-good” stuff about loving other people and being part of the Universe, without any of the obligations—forming a family, living chastely and soberly, etc.  In the absence of strong men and strong institutions—namely the Church—and in an age of #MeToo feminism and “you go grrrrrl”-ism, women are easy prey for bubbly charlatans (if you’ve followed Hulu’s Into the Dark horror anthology, the fourth installment, “New Year, New You,” beautifully satirizes this kind of Instagram-friendly quasi-spirituality—and its horrifying consequences).

Don’t get me wrong:  I don’t discount this stuff out of hand.  Indeed, I believe we’re always struggling against principalities and demonic forces, which is precisely why we should take this seriously.  Witchcraft and its associated branches are a real spiritual threat, and we’re losing a generation of women (and soy-boyish men) to a new wave of New Age spirituality and feel-good bullcrap.  It’s most insidious in the Church (by which I mean broadly all of Christianity, although I think High Protestant churches are particularly susceptible to this kind of infiltration), where its pernicious influence is far more subtle.

But the rise of witchcraft and other forms of knock-off spiritualism represent physical and metaphysical dangers.  Metaphysically, we shouldn’t be messing around with the spiritual world outside of our relationship with Christ.  Just look at what happened to King Saul when he consulted with the witch at Endor.

Physically, men and women are debasing themselves in the name of a “if it feels good, do it” mentality in a desperate attempt to fill their empty “God-holes.”  Women are literally prostituting themselves via Instagram—a terrifying intersection of online media attention-whoring and real-life whoring.  That kind of cheapness only comes in a culture that discourages traditional values and encourages riotousness and spiritual rebellion.

I always warn my students—I’m sure they occasionally roll their eyes—not to mess around with the spiritual world.  Angels are real—but so are demons.  And Satan always comes clothed in light—and shiny Snapchat filters.

Babes for Trump

The Portly Politico5 Comments

We’ve all heard how President Trump struggles to gain support among women, and the clucking classes of SJW harpies certainly exert an out-sized influence on our politics. Feel-good, soft-Left Oprah-ites in tony suburbs represent a larger threat to Trumpism and Making America Great Again than even the boundless seas of lawless, Third World immigrants, at least in the short term.

That said, there is encouraging news: President Trump enjoys a 93% approval rating among Republican women, the Wall Street Journal reports. That bodes well for the President going forward. It also suggests that, contra the radical feminists, women are not motivated politically just by their sex, but that their views, like men’s, are shaped by a plethora of factors.

Readers will recall then-Governor Mitt Romney’s support from married women in the 2012 election. In essence, married women were more likely to support Romney, while unmarried women of the same age were more likely to support President Obama. That the number of young, unmarried women is on the rise—as is the tragic trend towards single motherhood—presents a problem for conservatives, one that has to be addressed culturally before it can be addressed politically.

In the meantime, though, it’s good to know that there are plenty of babes for Trump out there. No doubt the president’s masculine alpha-ness helps.

Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings

The Portly Politico30 Comments

The Internet has been all atwitter with talk of the Kavanaugh hearings, particularly Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s vocal-fry inflected testimony, as well as Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s, and Senator Lindsey Graham’s fiery, righteous outburst.

My general policy with such hot-button current events is to withhold comment until the facts are known.  That’s not a savvy move for a blogger, but it gives me time to make an informed judgment on what the Truth is likely to be.

Below are comments I posted on the Portly Politico Facebook page (which I encourage you to “like,” “follow,” and whatever else one has to do to get notifications these days) about the hearings.  What troubles me the most about the (it seems baseless) accusations against Judge Kavanaugh is the utter breakdown of logical thinking—and the utter willingness of his critics to throw due process and the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” under the bus.

But, we all know it’s political theatre.  The Democrats are attempting to delay or derail the confirmation process until after the 2018 midterm elections.  They could care less about Dr. Ford’s alleged sexual assault.  I also wrote that Judge Kavanaugh would be in for a thorough Borking, so we all knew this was coming; still, I naively did not fathom the depths to which the Left would descend.

As for Dr. Ford, she could very well have suffered some trauma—or some imagined, “recovered” memory.  The old “what-does-she-have-to-gain” defense is as baseless as her claims:  $100,000 (and counting) in GoFundMe money, the kudos of the “Resistance,” probably a book deal, a political career if she wants it—she will be richly rewarded for her role in the potential takedown of an eminently qualified, eminently respectable constitutional originalist.

Submitted for your edification—and the good of the Republic and logical thinking—my reflections:

Some logic re: the Kavanaugh hearings.

1.) Women (and men) are sometimes the victims of sexual assault, rape, etc. That’s bad–evil!

2.) Brett Kavanaugh can be innocent and #1 can still be true.

Just because evil things happen to some people doesn’t mean that Brett Kavanaugh did anything evil, or what he has been accused of doing.

Further:  I keep reading and hearing that Dr. Ford’s testimony is “credible.” Based on what evidence? As far as I can tell, there is NO evidence to support her claim, and a great deal to refute or challenge it. Being emotionally compelling is not the same thing as having substantial evidence.

Maybe something happened to her, maybe not. It’s hard to imagine someone subjecting themselves to this scrutiny for light and transient reasons. That said, the “Resistance” is real. So are recovered memories, or flawed ones.

The Democrats in the Senate don’t care (in general) about Dr. Ford’s allegations or about what’s allegedly happened to other women. They care about delaying the vote on confirmation until after the election so they can scuttle the deal. They’re using women to further their own political agenda, and as much as they’ll protest to the contrary, they know all-too-well the dangerous game they’re playing.

They’ve been running this playbook for decades. Senator Lindsey Graham’s righteous outburst demonstrates that the scales have fallen away from Establishment Republicans’ eyes–the old Marquis of Queensbury rules don’t work when the other side will destroy you when it’s politically expedient to do so.

Baseless, misdirected, and/or politically-motivated accusations don’t help anyone. They harm real victims of sexual assault and rape, as well as men who may be entirely innocent. Further, in the Kavanaugh case, they undermine the legitimacy of our already-ossified institutions.