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Saturday, April 03, 2021

News Weakly - 4/3/21

Jesus Wept
RZIM, Ravi Zacharias's organization, will no longer do apologetics. Mind you, when Ravi was alive, his apologetics ministry was dazzling. Both from his clear logic and from his kind demeanor, Christ's name was advanced. After his death, his sins found him out and RZIM will be no more. They are not just dropping the name; they are dropping the ministry. They are, ironically, committing a standard logical fallacy, the Ad Hominem fallacy, where the person making the argument is wrong because of their personal character. RZIM is saying they can't continue defending the faith because Ravi sinned.

Hate Crime
The horrific, racially-based attack on an Asian American woman was caught on video this week. It was bad enough that the guy assaulted a 65-year-old woman out of the blue, stomping on her head several times after knocking her down. It was made worse that he was hurling anti-Asian epithets while he did it. To top it all off, although several onlookers were there, no one stopped to help, and the security guard in the building outside of which it occurred simply closed the door. What no one appears to be upset about is that the perpetrator was a black man. News outlets are quick to seize on "white" when they do something wrong, but avoid entirely people of color Why is it that "racially-motivated" does not translate to "racist" when it's a person of color doing it?.

The Pink Panther Strikes Again
Taken From The Pink Panther Strikes Again, but with different characters.
Staffer: [gesturing to the president's dog] Does your dog bite?
Agent Dog Walker: No.
[Staffer bends down to pet the dog; it attacks and viciously bites him.]
Staffer: I thought you said your dog did not bite!
Agent Dog Walker: That is not my dog.
Fiendishly Clever
We have a big problem in America. It's in one word -- infrastructure. Dating back to 1956 when so much of today's roads, bridges, and pipes began all the way to today's broadband, things are doing what things do -- decaying -- and now we need to do repairs ... a lot of repairs. Mr. President has a plan. A $2 trillion plan. All he has to do is charge the nation's corporations $2 trillion in additional taxes and -- poof -- problem solved. It is a clever plan. Working on "infrastructure" which is required for workers to go to work looks good, but doing it by taxing to death the corporations for which people go to work will eliminate the problem. No work, no need for infrastructure. Either way the problem gets solved. Ingenious.

Fair is Fair
In 2020 Democrats used filibusters 327 times while the GOP used it once. But now another Democrat has come out in support of ending the filibuster. "If we can use it to stop the GOP, it is a fair and righteous tool. If they can use it to stop us, it is evil and must be eliminated. Fair is fair. What double standard are you referring to?" But if, as the Dems are claiming, the filibuster is racist, what does that say about the 327 times they used it versus the one time the GOP did?

When Defending Women is Hate
Recently Arkansas, Tennessee, and South Dakota signed bills that ban transgender athletes from playing in female sports teams. CNN assured us that "It's not possible to know a person's gender identity at birth, and for some people, the sex listed on their original birth certificate is a misleading way of describing the body they have." I would like to point out to CNN that "gender" and "sex" are technically not the same thing. Gender refers to masculinity and femininity -- traits and mannerisms and such that correspond to male and/or female. "Sex" refers to biology, which is pretty much fixed. Take a so-called "transgender woman" and do an XY chromosome test and that person's sex will be XY -- male -- because biology says so. It's not ambiguous. You can determine sex at birth. Remember? "Believe the science." Oh, right. "Not so much when we don't approve." I forgot.

Working for a Promotion
President Biden got promoted to from ex-VP to president in January. Since then he's managed to lock up 18,000 children from south of the border among other things. Now he's hoping for a promotion. Biden is trying to figure out how to get legal authority to cancel student debt. Student debt is largely owned by third-party loan companies like Wells Fargo or Discover as well as quasi-government groups like Sallie Mae, so if the president can require the private sector to take the $1.6 trillion student debt loss, I think he'll be officially "Emperor Biden."

Sex Bias
Turns out that animal lovers are sexist to the extreme. A comprehensive study from natural history collections of birds and mammals shows that more males are collected than females. (Hmm, that can't possibly be because in much of the animal kingdom male specimens are more colorful than female specimens, could it? Nah!)

They're At It Again
Those closed-minded Southerners are at it again. First it was limitations to dismembering children in the womb. Now it's being haters of someone trapped in the wrong body. Arkansas has passed a law banning chopping off a little girl's legs if she thinks she's a mermaid. Of all the narrow-minded, bigoted ideas.

In other news, CNN is reporting that apples and oranges are a social construct and there is no difference between them except in the minds of the culture of the day. Any suggestion that "You're comparing apples and oranges" is the product of binary thinking, limited to mere biology. CNN says, "You know you can't trust the science, right?"

5 comments:

Craig said...

It's sad to hear the news about RZIM, there were/some really talented people there and I hope they find other opportunities to use their gifts for apologetics.

Amazingly enough, there are multiple people seriously pushing the idea that the beating of the 65 year old you mention, and other hate crimes against Asians committed by blacks are actually the fault of "whiteness".

On a side note, some of the most historically racist societies on earth have been Asian, but I guess they get a pass on their past.



Stan said...

Historically human beings have been racist. History tells us that "peace loving Native Americans" were among the most violent people on the planet in their inter-tribal conflicts. Today, many of the anti-Asian attacks are by people of color. The extreme anti-white racism in vogue today is blind to reality that humans are, by nature, xenophobic. We naturally tend to shun that which is not our comfort zone. Regardless of what color we are.

Craig said...

100% if one looks at history, things like racism, violence, slavery, and the like have been the norm up until fairly recently. It might be interesting to look at the timeline of history to see if there is any events that might have influenced how large numbers of people thought about those practices and started pushing toward a different way of thinking.

Stan said...

In the current Critical Race Theory world, "racism" is defined as "those in power." So the Japanese in Japan, for instance, back when they were anti-white, were racist because they were in power. And now it's whites in power in European and American societies, so they are racist. Interestingly, in places where the power is held by blacks, the rule suddenly changes. I can't figure out how that works.

And it WOULD be interesting to see what produced that shift toward thinking differently about race.

Craig said...

It could be argued that one tribe selling other tribes into slavery in Africa was the equivalent of racism, or at least a belief that tribe A is inherently superior to tribe B.

Yes, it would. It would need to be a worldview that was based on the underlying principle that everyone was of equal inherent value.