Trump bugs me but so does the identity politics of the Democratic left. The spasms of self loathing are being kept mainly to the US but what happens when they spill out to the rest of the World which is not nearly as ‘progressive’? Wait till the next Olympics when the US enter a load of blokes into the women’s events – see how much the rest of the planet will appreciate the Democratic left. If they focussed on jobs, wages, wealth inequality they could be very effective but why the constant focus on issues that only serve to tear apart the population?
capetowngirl18
3 years ago
Trump will win. Get over it.
Chuck Burns
3 years ago
President Trump is the last gasp for the free America designed by the founding fathers. His second term will likely be the last four years of the Constitutional Republic. The problem for America is complacency. For decades “We the People” have not recognized the Left as our mortal enemy. We allowed the Leftists to take control of the education system. The result being an endless hatch of brainwashed anti-America useful idiots. The teaching of a Cultural Marxist agenda to divide, disrupt, and cause chaos in our society and government has resulted in an environment for change for the worst. With the endless influx of undocumented Democrats across our borders and the relentless assault by the Left on the Constitution it is just a matter of time. Once the Demographics change results in a White minority of Representatives in Congress then the fundamental transformation will rapidly replace Capitalism with some form of Marxist system.
That would be awful indeed. But I am reminded of the TEA party that spontaneously arose in 2009 in response to big government, high tax Obama. We may suffer through a decade of inflated socialism, but eventually it will be overturned. I am more fearful that this will result in a despot who is less restrained and more competent at manipulating the levers of power than Trump.
Luca Marx
3 years ago
Popular music, just like gospel music, in churches is all about the Emotions and Me. That is OK in its place: on the telly, in clubs, etc, as entertainment. But not when in search of the Divine.
Peter KE
3 years ago
Drivel, these people be they blm or twitter thugs are just that thugs and need to be dealt within law. Twitter if it cannot perform and deal with woke thuggery should be taken down like huawei.
Kind of makes you want to nail your manifesto to the door of a church… Or maybe to the forehead of the most influential Wokey… Yes it’s official the singular of the woke is a wokey.
Alan B
3 years ago
The best critiques of “wokism” are theological, not secular-rational. “Wokeness” is hopeless and denies redemption, making it a quite terrifying “religion”. Its noxious blend of puritanical enthusiasm and secular-rational Machiavellianism is nothing new. Robespierre wrote its first catechism, Nechayev its second. Let there not be a third.
opn
3 years ago
And it’s FREE
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
So Al Jahiz wondered “whether it was permissible for women to groan with pleasure during sex.” And what was his verdict?
Neil Colledge
3 years ago
Of course America COULD be great again! This is the nation that blessed the world with a Constitution both magnificent and mercurial, a United Nations (blessed by so many great workers, sincere and honest at grass-roots level), phenomenal leaders like Charlie Munger, John Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Charlton Heston, Walter Kronkite, Shirley Maclean, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Steven Sondheim, George Washington, Mark Twain, Humphrey Bogart, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Gore Vidal, Arnold Copeland, George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Robert, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Wayne …. a list almost without end. At face value EUCOM seems like a rational decision. Russia is not going to invade Europe. Russia is busy making lucrative deals with countries like Syria, Iran, Turkey, Isreal, China & Saudi Arabia. Why would they need to invade anyone? They’re doing fine!!! Rather than continuing to try & provoke The BRICS, perhaps we should learn from what they are doing. They are winning, where we are losing. If President Trump is good to his word, and doing this for intelligent economic & business reasons …. trying to save money, reduce tensions and create balance, then he deserves a certain amount of credit. An expansionist American Empire, threatening, coercing, bribing and bullying, cannot stand long-term. Far better to close bases, stop protracted, un-winnable wars, drone killings and instead gradually navigate the national mindset towards engendering a new international climate of negotiation and mutual respect. Empires are expensive. They are a drain on resources. The American model seems to be inspiring disproportionate resentment and hatred, which can only increase. Far better to engineer a face-saving transition to a commonwealth of nations (as Britain did), considerably preferable to degenerating into a horrible, execrable dictatorship, where the most intelligent people escape to other countries. I disagree with President Trump over climate change. I think he talks a lot of nonsense and find myself myself cringing at some of his quasi-Hegelian rubbish. Yet IF he is sincerely trying to reduce tension In the world & create an atmosphere for more equitable, friendly, peaceful dialogue, this should be allowed to continue. Rather than inventing fairy-stories about POTUS/digging up old prostitutes he slept with twenty years ago, these intransigent old neo-liberal, neo-conservative billionaires should perhaps consider two things : If there is a war in Asia, between US Proxies against Russia and China, this would risk going nuclear (possibly through miscalculation or hubris) and we would ALL be destroyed. This destruction would effect the grandchildren of wealthy families as well as poor families.
Steve Weeks
3 years ago
There’s a time element to this. As a 16 year old in 1970 I entered Christianity and its slightest expressions of popular culture were a key to opening that door. I didn’t want to abandon the exciting modern trajectory of rebellion, new ideas, brightness and fun in design and music. Contemporary worship gave me a possible hybrid of ancient faith expressed through my own generation’s creativity.
I’m a musician and my children and I participated over the next 40 years of change. Out with the pews; out with the choirs. In come the carpets; bands with drum kits in acrylic boxes.
The new styles definitely work for the unchurched who walk in ‘off the street’ and are deeply struck that a familiar musical language might be applicable in approaching a God who they assumed was as distant from ordinary life as a Bach cantata.
But for me the superficialities were wearing thin. I’d grown up and developed a need for more nuanced theology, and deeper expressions of a wider range of experiences.
Like me, many people grow up and change. Switching to a different musical style is not the only way to access different messages from music, to support our changing needs in worship, but it can be a shortcut.
Me, I like a nice cantata these days!
bocalance
3 years ago
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.” -Karl Marx It is ironic that Marxian wokeness fits the definition and fulfills the religious impulse. But then it would be difficult from Marx’s time to comprehend that the actual outcome of his proposal is given in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
titan0
3 years ago
Excommunication and the burning of heretics is what woke is all about. Now woke needs codifying or no one will know who to obey or how to avoid transgressing. What with the sheer numbers of so called woke practitioners, good luck with that. Will we see woke wars along the lines of the Catholic Crusades against the Mohammedans to sort it all out? I might suggest a prayer: Lead us not into temptation to forgive those that trespass against us. (Us being the woke, of course).
Lydia R
3 years ago
It seems like the awful regimes throughout Communist Eastern Europe and the mass slaughter in the Soviet Union and China have not killed off the Marxist ideologues who want to inflict it on the Free World. I guess we will have to go through it again only for it to be overthrown once more. What is puzzling is that journalists who should know better seem awfully keen on it too.
Lydia R
3 years ago
It’s not for the likes of us is very much an attitude of this country. In Italy, opera is for the people and national TV put on an opera every night during lockdown.
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
If the Left wins in America, cultural relativism will predominate and consequently we will see cultural infighting amongst the Left as to which group should dominate.
Biden will play a Starmer like role trying to quell the infighting and the country will divide along state lines. A Roosevelt economic recovery package might help but the infighting will mean constant indecision as to where help will go.
The likelihood of a Left meltdown may well mean the people of America will choose the least worst option, that being Trump.
Trump bugs me but so does the identity politics of the Democratic left. The spasms of self loathing are being kept mainly to the US but what happens when they spill out to the rest of the World which is not nearly as ‘progressive’? Wait till the next Olympics when the US enter a load of blokes into the women’s events – see how much the rest of the planet will appreciate the Democratic left. If they focussed on jobs, wages, wealth inequality they could be very effective but why the constant focus on issues that only serve to tear apart the population?
Trump will win. Get over it.
President Trump is the last gasp for the free America designed by the founding fathers. His second term will likely be the last four years of the Constitutional Republic. The problem for America is complacency. For decades “We the People” have not recognized the Left as our mortal enemy. We allowed the Leftists to take control of the education system. The result being an endless hatch of brainwashed anti-America useful idiots. The teaching of a Cultural Marxist agenda to divide, disrupt, and cause chaos in our society and government has resulted in an environment for change for the worst. With the endless influx of undocumented Democrats across our borders and the relentless assault by the Left on the Constitution it is just a matter of time. Once the Demographics change results in a White minority of Representatives in Congress then the fundamental transformation will rapidly replace Capitalism with some form of Marxist system.
That would be awful indeed. But I am reminded of the TEA party that spontaneously arose in 2009 in response to big government, high tax Obama. We may suffer through a decade of inflated socialism, but eventually it will be overturned. I am more fearful that this will result in a despot who is less restrained and more competent at manipulating the levers of power than Trump.
Popular music, just like gospel music, in churches is all about the Emotions and Me. That is OK in its place: on the telly, in clubs, etc, as entertainment. But not when in search of the Divine.
Drivel, these people be they blm or twitter thugs are just that thugs and need to be dealt within law. Twitter if it cannot perform and deal with woke thuggery should be taken down like huawei.
Kind of makes you want to nail your manifesto to the door of a church… Or maybe to the forehead of the most influential Wokey… Yes it’s official the singular of the woke is a wokey.
The best critiques of “wokism” are theological, not secular-rational. “Wokeness” is hopeless and denies redemption, making it a quite terrifying “religion”. Its noxious blend of puritanical enthusiasm and secular-rational Machiavellianism is nothing new. Robespierre wrote its first catechism, Nechayev its second. Let there not be a third.
And it’s FREE
So Al Jahiz wondered “whether it was permissible for women to groan with pleasure during sex.” And what was his verdict?
Of course America COULD be great again! This is the nation that blessed the world with a Constitution both magnificent and mercurial, a United Nations (blessed by so many great workers, sincere and honest at grass-roots level), phenomenal leaders like Charlie Munger, John Kennedy, Noam Chomsky, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Charlton Heston, Walter Kronkite, Shirley Maclean, Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, Steven Sondheim, George Washington, Mark Twain, Humphrey Bogart, Muhammad Ali, Henry Kissinger, Billy Graham, Elvis Presley, Gore Vidal, Arnold Copeland, George Gershwin, Charlie Chaplin, Billy Wilder, Robert, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Graham, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Wayne …. a list almost without end.
At face value EUCOM seems like a rational decision. Russia is not going to invade Europe. Russia is busy making lucrative deals with countries like Syria, Iran, Turkey, Isreal, China & Saudi Arabia. Why would they need to invade anyone? They’re doing fine!!!
Rather than continuing to try & provoke The BRICS, perhaps we should learn from what they are doing. They are winning, where we are losing.
If President Trump is good to his word, and doing this for intelligent economic & business reasons …. trying to save money, reduce tensions and create balance, then he deserves a certain amount of credit.
An expansionist American Empire, threatening, coercing, bribing and bullying, cannot stand long-term. Far better to close bases, stop protracted, un-winnable wars, drone killings and instead gradually navigate the national mindset towards engendering a new international climate of negotiation and mutual respect.
Empires are expensive. They are a drain on resources. The American model seems to be inspiring disproportionate resentment and hatred, which can only increase. Far better to engineer a face-saving transition to a commonwealth of nations (as Britain did), considerably preferable to degenerating into a horrible, execrable dictatorship, where the most intelligent people escape to other countries.
I disagree with President Trump over climate change. I think he talks a lot of nonsense and find myself myself cringing at some of his quasi-Hegelian rubbish. Yet IF he is sincerely trying to reduce tension In the world & create an atmosphere for more equitable, friendly, peaceful dialogue, this should be allowed to continue.
Rather than inventing fairy-stories about POTUS/digging up old prostitutes he slept with twenty years ago, these intransigent old neo-liberal, neo-conservative billionaires should perhaps consider two things :
If there is a war in Asia, between US Proxies against Russia and China, this would risk going nuclear (possibly through miscalculation or hubris) and we would ALL be destroyed.
This destruction would effect the grandchildren of wealthy families as well as poor families.
There’s a time element to this. As a 16 year old in 1970 I entered Christianity and its slightest expressions of popular culture were a key to opening that door. I didn’t want to abandon the exciting modern trajectory of rebellion, new ideas, brightness and fun in design and music. Contemporary worship gave me a possible hybrid of ancient faith expressed through my own generation’s creativity.
I’m a musician and my children and I participated over the next 40 years of change. Out with the pews; out with the choirs. In come the carpets; bands with drum kits in acrylic boxes.
The new styles definitely work for the unchurched who walk in ‘off the street’ and are deeply struck that a familiar musical language might be applicable in approaching a God who they assumed was as distant from ordinary life as a Bach cantata.
But for me the superficialities were wearing thin. I’d grown up and developed a need for more nuanced theology, and deeper expressions of a wider range of experiences.
Like me, many people grow up and change. Switching to a different musical style is not the only way to access different messages from music, to support our changing needs in worship, but it can be a shortcut.
Me, I like a nice cantata these days!
“Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.” -Karl Marx
It is ironic that Marxian wokeness fits the definition and fulfills the religious impulse. But then it would be difficult from Marx’s time to comprehend that the actual outcome of his proposal is given in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
Excommunication and the burning of heretics is what woke is all about.
Now woke needs codifying or no one will know who to obey or how to avoid transgressing.
What with the sheer numbers of so called woke practitioners, good luck with that. Will we see woke wars along the lines of the Catholic Crusades against the Mohammedans to sort it all out?
I might suggest a prayer: Lead us not into temptation to forgive those that trespass against us. (Us being the woke, of course).
It seems like the awful regimes throughout Communist Eastern Europe and the mass slaughter in the Soviet Union and China have not killed off the Marxist ideologues who want to inflict it on the Free World. I guess we will have to go through it again only for it to be overthrown once more. What is puzzling is that journalists who should know better seem awfully keen on it too.
It’s not for the likes of us is very much an attitude of this country. In Italy, opera is for the people and national TV put on an opera every night during lockdown.
If the Left wins in America, cultural relativism will predominate and consequently we will see cultural infighting amongst the Left as to which group should dominate.
Biden will play a Starmer like role trying to quell the infighting and the country will divide along state lines. A Roosevelt economic recovery package might help but the infighting will mean constant indecision as to where help will go.
The likelihood of a Left meltdown may well mean the people of America will choose the least worst option, that being Trump.