Reflections on faith, culture and current affairs from a conservative contrarian desperately seeking to recover a sense of sacred enchantment
New Zealand
Joined January 2016
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Left Foot Media retweeted
That's what Plato warned democracy tends to collapse into, except it won't be never-ending but rather climaxes in tyranny when a sufficiently ruthless demagogue and his following take advantage of the chaos.
Could be that American politics for the rest of our lives will be parties switching power, engaging in ever more flagrant corruption and grifting, then prosecuting the other side for crimes and non-crimes, in just a never ending cycle - all while the intelligent people we want to steer politics are so bored with the Jerry Springer quality of things that they just check out.
LISTEN: thecounterculture.substack.c…
💀 Last week, Christian commentator @conservmillen sparked an online debate by suggesting that the horror genre is not compatible with Christianity. In this episode I dissect the question of whether Christians should watch horror and offer some key principles that I believe can help us to think more deeply about this matter.
Ad hoc governments hastily formed according to a needless arbitrary deadline thar increases the risk of poor outcomes for the NZ people - yet another reason to hate MMP.
The fact he even made this pledge makes Hipkins look like a man without the necessary prudence to lead a country #nzpol #NZPolitics
Once you realize that much of modern politics is just empty suits uttering performative talking points, the mess we’re in starts to make a lot more sense. #nzpol
There’s only 2 questions you need to ask about any footage of MPs with gang members:
1. Was the footage taken at a gang pad or gang event?
2. Was the MP campaigning for votes or making promises to the gangs in the footage?
If the answer to these questions is ‘no’, then the footage is an irrelevant distraction. #NZPolitics #nzpol
READ:
thecounterculture.substack.c…
🗳️ It would not be unusual to hear people suggesting something like: ‘you need to weigh a candidate’s staunch support for abortion against their other policies - like the ones focused on homelessness, addressing income disparity, or fixing child poverty’, and the candidate with the most policy positives is considered to be an acceptable voting choice under the guise of the consistent ethic of life. The problem here is that this is not actually the consistent ethic of life at all, and the chief architect of the ethic denounced it as abhorrent.
#NZPolitics #nzpol
“I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular. But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless.”
- Whitney M. Young Jr. -
LISTEN NOW:
thecounterculture.substack.c…
🚨 Houston we have a problem... and none of our leaders seem to want, or even know how to talk about it despite the gravity of the issue we are now facing. In this episode we explore the collapsing global fertility rate that the leaders of both of New Zealand’s major political parties struggled to give compelling answers to during last week’s leaders debate. We also discuss the suggestion, made by a senior economist, that NZ should import 125,000 young people from Europe each year to try and solve our fertility crisis👇 #nzpol
I’m not sure whether it’s a symptom of the mainstream media’s failure to do basic factchecking, or of the modern media’s illiteracy when it comes to the basic facts of the Christian faith, but this headline is untrue - this priest was NOT killed during his sermon. The sermon had concluded long before he died will praying the prayers of the Mass.
This is farcical. A survey of only 616 people that produces such an absurdly disproportionate result is clearly not representative of reality. If this were accurate, there is no way that National and Labour would be polling neck-and-neck in the party vote right now (and have been for weeks). #nzpol
💯 THIS! 👇
Ironically, Christopher Hitchens contributed to the very problem he bemoaned. His dogmatic promotion of irrational fundamentalist atheism was the cultural equivalent of someone urging a sick patient to fight against ill health while at the same time ridiculing and pouring the very life-saving medicine they need down the drain.
By all means resist, but if you resist in the name of the false gods of liberalism, Enlightenment, ethnic purity, jingoistic nostalgia, or anything other than return to the Christian faith that built our civilization, you will not get to the root of the problem and ultimately you will fail. What Islamists understand that too many Westerners, left and right, do not understand is that in the long run you cannot defeat religion except with religion. And they do not understand it because they are in their different ways blinded by attachment to the things of this world – economic wellbeing, political power, freedom, pleasure, security, national pride – things which have their place but have become idols. Hence, again and again, they flail about looking for some secular political solution, whether left-wing or right-wing, to a problem that is at bottom theological.
Left Foot Media retweeted
Welcoming immigrants, providing health care and shelter, feeding the hungry and visiting prisoners are the worthy and necessary tasks of Christians, but they are not equivalent to, nor are they substitutes for evangelization.
This isn’t journalism, it has all the hallmarks of a shameless attempt by the media to create a gotcha moment in an effort to garner more votes for TOP. #nzpol
Looking forward to this - ‘The Bones of Saint Peter’ was a phenomenal book. I started it reading it one night and didn’t stop until I was finished at dawn the next day.
Left Foot Media retweeted
“I have often said during my 20 years as a bishop that I am not interested in a private education for the privileged as an apostolate of the Church. The Archdiocese of Portland should not be operating schools whose institutional priorities and plans are dominated by a secular, utilitarian vision of academic excellence and great sports programs, while remaining inaccessible to so many of our families because of high tuition costs. To do so would be wholly inconsistent with the history and purpose of Catholic education. Our first job is not to prepare children eventually to get into a great college or university, but to help them get into heaven!”
Portland Archbishop Alexander King Sample
