Tag: SJW

Mailvox: A church, converged

This is what it looks like. Step by step, the world reels in one congregation after another, simply because the members would not abide by the Scripture.

The church that I grew up in was a place that I loved. My family spent a lot of time volunteering at various functions to help the place run right: setting up for lunch after the service, helping pass out food at funeral services, spending time getting it set up for vacation bible school, etc. A lot of good memories were made in that place that are still cherished to this day. Then came time to go away to college and I spent less time at that church, simply stopping in when I came home.

Looking back and thinking about the things that Vox has brought up, I realize all the signs of a growing convergence were there that we didn’t see. It started with the little things that we went along with because, how much could it hurt right? We no longer sang just the old hymns, and moved onto a mix of contemporary worship songs. Then there were no more hymns. Heaven forbid if the sound system crashed as the congregation would just have to stand there in shock and silence now. Then came the eradication of the clauses in the Bylaws about prohibiting members of the Masons to be elders, because that was simply “an old, archaic thing that didn’t matter anymore”. Then came the church vote on installing women deacons and elders, as both of them had “just done so much for the church”. Then came the hiring of a “new, dynamic pastor” who was certainly going to revitalize the numbers of people that were for some odd reason starting to drift to other churches. He certainly wasn’t Reformed, but that really didn’t matter did it? During the meeting with him before the vote, he was amazed that there was this document called the Heidelberg Catechism and had never heard of it, but promised to go read it when he was able. And finally there came the raiding of the saving account that the giving of the faithful had stored up over a hundred and twenty five years. Now it was all needed to build a “community outreach center” for the “vibrant growth of the unchurched” that would be our new church building and revitalize the area to new heights for God.

Now, I drive through the streets of my hometown out towards the crossroads of the highway to look at that God-forsaken temple to man’s arrogance. It is a grand, new building designed by some snooty architectural firm that is pretty much a mirror image of a movie theater the next town over. No real identifying marks on it, unless you drive around back and stumble upon where there is a cross. Or I guess if you can decode the “Faith Center” or whatever it is called now, and recognize it as a church. I have snuck in once or twice to see the new reality, just to sate my curiosity. After the light show and the semi-professional band is done playing, there is a fifteen minute self-help service that tells us how good we are and cherished we are. People are encouraged to bring their own Bibles, though I can’t see why, as there is no mention of God’s Holy Writ during the service. Must be for show. Or maybe something to rest your gourmet coffee on so as not to stain the new carpet.

Convergence killing NASCAR

TV ratings are “plummeting” and attendance is down more than 50 percent at some tracks:

NASCAR has seen crowds shrink at virtually every track, many of which have removed seats, and its television ratings have plummeted. At Richmond, which once routinely seated more than 100,000 fans for races in the premier Cup series, only 60,000 seats remain and they were not close to full for Sunday’s 400-lap race.

“We’re not isolated here,” France said. “Every sport is trying to unlock the new consumption levels and fan interest by a younger demographic. Of course we love our core fan and everyone does, but every sport is thinking carefully about how to reach the millennial fan to get them excited about their sport.”

He said NASCAR will convene a summit next month in Charlotte, North Carolina, bringing in experts from various fields, to discuss the issue.

France also downplayed the difficulty that some teams are having securing sponsorship for next season.

Many NASCAR fans warned of this when NASCAR decided to stop focusing on its core audience in order to reach out to the new fans who, as many predicted, proved to be almost entirely imaginary. And if you think NASCAR’s management is going to learn from their catastrophic failure, then you really don’t understand how SJW convergence works.

The NFL is about to go the same way, I strongly suspect. Notice how, whether it is a sport or a church, the desire for growth combined with a disdain for traditional supporters always results in the same consequence, a rapid and unexpected decline.

That’s something that I was discussing yesterday with Markku. Is it better to restrict the comments and only permit the old school Dread Ilk to participate? That could be done through requiring registration, but doing so might be of limited value since others could still read them, unlike the current separate system. Or is it better to go to the other extreme and permit the sort of free-for-all we witnessed yesterday?

Feel free to express your opinion. I’m not currently planning to change anything, but it would be foolish to assume that VP and Castalia House are immune from the same pattern we observe everywhere from the Episcopalian Church to NASCAR.

Of course, it’s also possible that we are several orders of magnitude away from it being even a potential problem.

Busting Black Bloc

The first of 212 Black Bloc protesters arrested on Inauguration Day has pleaded guilty.

A Florida man with the radical “black bloc” protest network has pleaded guilty to felony rioting and assault for his role in the Inauguration Day chaos in the District. Dane Powell, 31, of Tampa, was the first to enter a guilty plea on felony charges brought against 212 protesters accused of rioting and vandalizing property during the Jan. 20 melee surrounding President Trump’s swearing-in ceremony.

Scheduled to be sentenced July 7, he faces a possible six years in prison for breaking windows and throwing a “brick, large rock or piece of concrete” at officers after joining a mob of masked black bloc protesters who moved en masse across 16 blocks in about 30 minutes, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

The God-Emperor should, in his mercy, offer him the option of a nice helicopter ride in lieu of spending so much time in prison.

The authorities, they are no longer uniformly amenable.

Failure at Fox News

As a general rule, when your management decisions are being met by the news that your competitors “smell blood in the water” and “are moving to take advantage”, you should probably rethink your overall strategy:

The profitable, influential, seemingly impregnable Fox News is suddenly vulnerable.

In a massive disruption for right-wing media, Fox talent is on the market, the purge of the old-boy clique may continue, and there’s huge internal paranoia about further lawsuits and revelations.

On top of that, there are episodic pushes from the next generation of Murdoch leadership for changes in culture and personality.

So at a time when all of cable is vulnerable as viewer habits change, Fox is caught between the America-first instincts of its base viewers, and the globalist impulses for Rupert Murdoch’s sons.

A woman to run Fox News? The Hollywood Reporter reports that James and Lachlan Murdoch have quietly put out feelers for a new head of Fox News to replace Bill Shine, the Roger Ailes consigliere.

“[T]he preference … is that the new leader be female.”

And competitors are moving to take advantage.

Perhaps they could hire Marissa Mayer. I understand she is available these days.

Dear white sports fans

Please to go away now. We neither want nor need you.

Love,
ESPN

For comparative purposes, I recently reviewed a few SportsCenter episodes from the past couple of decades, and it is indeed noticeable how little politics and culture intruded into the tsunami of highlights and witty banter that once marked that show. That was reflective of the overall newsier focus ESPN had in those days….

A scan of The Undefeated on most days shows a range of content that extends far beyond sports. When The Undefeated put together its list of the 44 most influential black Americans in history, only five — Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson and Serena Williams — made their mark as athletes. Scanning the list of Undefeated pieces commemorating Black History Month, less than half were about sports.

These observations are not criticisms; they just show how The Undefeated — and, by extension, ESPN — is willing to stray from sports…. There is no denying that culture, sports and politics are fused together more today than at any time in recent memory, and there’s an argument to be made that ESPN is rightfully taking advantage of that trend. But there’s also no denying the presence of a fervent fan base that prefers the ESPN of old, meaning these worlds will continue to collide.

One thing is clear: Those of you who have not held your tongue about ESPN’s move away from an all-sports-all-the-time mantra also should not hold your breath waiting for a change.

ESPN has made it clear: It’s not sticking to sports.

Apparently as many as 90 percent of the 100 on-air people let go this week were white men. Longtime NFL and NHL reporters are gone, while clueless, no-talent SJWs like Jemele Hill are not only safe, but are being increasingly promoted.

It’s a straightforward case of SJW convergence in action. ESPN is no longer capable of fulfilling its primary purpose, because the pushing the SJW Narrative is more important.

I quit watching ESPN a long, long time ago, although I had watched it from the early days of late night World’s Strongest Man competitions and Australian Rules Football. It is somewhat fascinating to observe such a large organization so resolutely commit suicide in this fashion.

Dear ESPN,


Roger that. 


Adios,
America




UPDATE: for those of you who, like me, neither read nor watch ESPN anymore, it’s worse than you imagine. A LOT worse. Believe it or not, this was featured on ESPN yesterday.

Four poets on the new feminism

Apr 27, 2017
espnW Poetry Month Feminism Women

In honor of National Poetry month, espnW asked four poets to reflect on their definitions of feminism, and the importance of movement.

What Leaps from a Storm’s Throat, by Patricia Smith

Postcard from Diana Prince on Themyscira, by Tracie Dawson

Start Here, by Carrie Ann Welsh

My Struggle with Feminism is Black, by DéLana R.A. Dameron

PUNCHLINE: (Editor’s note: An earlier version of “Five Poets on the New Feminism” featured Revolution by Dr. DaMaris Hill. We have decided it is not an appropriate selection for our site, and have removed it from the feature.) 


It only took 18 years to go to that from this.

Blame the blameworthy

JM is disappointed in Ann Coulter’s decision to cancel her speech at Berkeley:

Ann Coulter has proven herself to be Ted Cruz; acts tough, promises to be a general and lead the charge, yet when the troops have their arms ready and are awaiting the command she chickens out. It’s not that people like her can’t be an ally, it’s that they can’t be trusted to stand their ground when things get tough. So if she doesn’t want to lead the charge others will just take over that responsibility from her.

TLM, on the other hand, is not:

I consider this a tactical retreat. Anne has been a more than a worthy adversary to Satan and his minions. I do not begrudge her for not being a point man in a scenario that had a very good probability of seeing violence. Anne is scrawny and probably represents Double XP to some antifata coward. We need some one like Mike to go there. Some that can take and give a punch. 

My perspective is closer to Q’s:

I don’t know, if you emphatically, publicly. state over and over that the speech will go on, no matter the cancellation, then the speech should go on. Hire Blackwater if need be, but to cancel like this at the last minute, really does give victory to mere threats of violence. To claim it doesn’t is to lie to oneself, or others…. ANTIFA was just handed a victory of enormous value. They punked the entire right, that is how they will see it. They were allowed to do so because the right has no real leadership at this time. My goodness, David French at NRO is simply beside himself with the possible ramifications of all this..he might do something rash, and tweet out a cuss word or something. Vox was absolutely right, Ann was betrayed by “conservatives”, until they are pushed out of the way, the left will continue to advance. Even with the GOP holding complete power over the federal govt, the left advances…while “conservatives” cower. Every site today on the right is lit up with: ought to, should be, there needs to be, why isn’t, how come, where is..” People are still in a state of mind that leads them to believe there is an “authority” that will stop all this unrest. they voted for law & order after all. When the entire point of ANTIFA is to make their vote meaningless.

That being said, I don’t blame Ann in the slightest for cancelling after being betrayed by her so-called allies who invited her. She’s not a general, she doesn’t promise to be, and while she is somewhat of an opinion leader, she has never built any sort of organization around her like the Proud Boys, the Dread Ilk, or Violent Solutions.

Did she talk a little tougher than she was able to back up? Yes, but then, what do you expect? She’s a woman, and women should not be leading these things. They will always tend to shrink from potential violence and fail to anticipate it because it is not really part of their world. Moldilocks wouldn’t have been out to collect 100 Nazi scalps if she’d believed for a second that a man might retaliate and hit her back.

In the meantime, I’m glad to see Gavin, Brittany, and the others are going to make an appearance and take on Antifa. I expect the VFM and Ilk who will be there to have their backs.

The Media Bubble is real

However, the author’s attempts to blame geography and economics notwithstanding, the reality of the geographic concentration of the media in the big Left-dominated cities in no way excuses their dishonesty, partisanship, and attempts to enforce their ever-mutating narratives.

To some conservatives, Trump’s surprise win on November 8 simply bore out what they had suspected, that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly in the tank for Clinton all along. The media, in this view, was guilty not just of confirmation bias but of complicity. But the knowing-bias charge never added up: No news organization ignored the Clinton emails story, and everybody feasted on the damaging John Podesta email cache that WikiLeaks served up buffet-style. Practically speaking, you’re not pushing Clinton to victory if you’re pantsing her and her party to voters almost daily.

The answer to the press’ myopia lies elsewhere, and nobody has produced a better argument for how the national media missed the Trump story than FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who pointed out that the ideological clustering in top newsrooms led to groupthink. “As of 2013, only 7 percent of [journalists] identified as Republicans,” Silver wrote in March, chiding the press for its political homogeneity. Just after the election, presidential strategist Steve Bannon savaged the press on the same point but with a heartier vocabulary. “The media bubble is the ultimate symbol of what’s wrong with this country,” Bannon said. “It’s just a circle of people talking to themselves who have no fucking idea what’s going on.”

But journalistic groupthink is a symptom, not a cause. And when it comes to the cause, there’s another, blunter way to think about the question than screaming “bias” and “conspiracy,” or counting D’s and R’s. That’s to ask a simple question about the map. Where do journalists work, and how much has that changed in recent years? To determine this, my colleague Tucker Doherty excavated labor statistics and cross-referenced them against voting patterns and Census data to figure out just what the American media landscape looks like, and how much it has changed.

The results read like a revelation. The national media really does work in a bubble, something that wasn’t true as recently as 2008. And the bubble is growing more extreme. Concentrated heavily along the coasts, the bubble is both geographic and political. If you’re a working journalist, odds aren’t just that you work in a pro-Clinton county—odds are that you reside in one of the nation’s most pro-Clinton counties. And you’ve got company: If you’re a typical reader of Politico, chances are you’re a citizen of bubbleville, too.

It’s not an Either/Or situation. The media concentration on the coastal urban centers is real. As is the fact that the Democrat-infested press was knowingly and proudly in the tank for Clinton all along. This is just another attempt to deceive the public and reshape the narrative through half-truths.

The article is an exhibition of the very thing it seeks to disprove.

Invasion and convergence

Apparently we’ll soon discover how completely converged the Methodists are:

Karen Oliveto clutched a friend’s hand, closed her eyes and wept when she learned last year she had been elected a bishop of the United Methodist Church. Oliveto, who is married to another woman, had become the denomination’s first openly gay bishop.

Within minutes, a formal complaint was filed challenging her election as contrary to the church ban on clergy who are “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” – a petition that the highest Methodist judicial authorities agreed to consider. On Tuesday, the court will take up the closely watched case, the latest flashpoint over LGBT rights in a denomination splintering over the Bible and homosexuality.

“It highlights very greatly that we are two different churches and that the real difference is whether or not we’re going to live by the covenant that we each have agreed to,” said the Rev. Rob Renfroe, who leads Good News, a caucus of evangelical Methodists that has lobbied to uphold current teaching. Said Oliveto, “I’m in deep prayer, reminding myself of what God has called me to do.”

Oliveto, who is based in the Denver area, will attend the hearing in Newark, New Jersey, accompanied by fellow bishops from the church’s Western Jurisdiction, her wife, mother and childhood pastor. LGBT clergy and their supporters plan to pray outside and wear T-shirts listing the first names only of gay clergy who would risk losing their ministerial credentials by coming out.

The goal is to underscore the human cost of church policy, said the Rev. Lea Matthews of the LGBT advocacy group Methodists in New Directions. Prayer vigils are planned in the Methodist Mountain Sky Area region, which Oliveto leads, while others will join a prayer vigil online.

The court, or Judicial Council, is expected to issue a ruling a few days later.

The 12.8 million-member church, the third-largest in the U.S., was already in turmoil over same-sex relationships when Oliveto was elected. Methodists approved language in 1972 calling same-gender relationships “incompatible with Christian teaching.” The top church policy-making body, or General Conference, has upheld that policy ever since, even as LGBT rights gained acceptance and other mainline Protestants, including the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), approved same-sex marriage. In recent years, the Methodists have seen their greatest growth overseas, especially in Africa, among more theologically conservative people, who have been standing with U.S. evangelical Methodists against recognizing same-gender relationships.

Deeply frustrated, Methodist LGBT advocates have stepped up pressure for new policies, holding same-sex weddings in defiance of church prohibitions and coming out as gay and lesbian from the pulpit. Conservatives responded by intensifying demands for church discipline over such actions. In one high-profile case, the Rev. Frank Schaefer was tried by a church court and defrocked for presiding at the wedding of his son to another man. Schaefer was later reinstated as a minister on an appeal of the ruling.

This really isn’t that hard. Any acceptance of same-sex relationships is sufficient to not only defrock a minister or a deacon, much less a bishop, but merits immediate expulsion from the church. Any so-called “Christian” church that embraces formalized sin, of any kind, is clearly nothing of the sort. This is not even remotely debatable.

Conservatives need to understand that the infiltrators are not seeking acceptance, and that they are not misguided, but they are there to destroy the organization from within. It’s not as if Christians weren’t warned of these “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, after all.

And furthermore, from a practical standpoint alone, it should be obvious that every single church that accepts female ministers, in direct contradiction to Scripture, has set itself on the wide and easy path that leads to worldly approval, declining attendance, societal irrelevance, and eventual destruction.

If those who wish to formally embrace everything from same-sex relationships to gluttony wish to set up their own organizations to pretend to worship the gods in whom they obviously don’t believe, there is nothing stopping them from doing so. So, ask yourself this: why is it so very important to them that they not only be permitted to join existing churches, but assume leadership of them and change their long-standing policies?

This is why you ID the enemy

The violent antifa ID’d by /pol/ is scared and on the run. Ivan Throne observes a desperate reddit post by his “really good friend”:

“False proof”. That’s a good one, by which he means “photo and video evidence of my really good friend, aka me, repeatedly striking people with a bike lock”.
Never hesitate to identify antifa and SJWs, and to publicize their activities. They greatly fear it because they rely upon being able to operate without their friends, families, and employers knowing what they are doing. And remember that even Facebook and Twitter posts often go unnoticed until attention is drawn to them.

A message to antifa

From Iron Mike, a US infantryman:

Alright fucksticks, this circus has gone on long enough and the audience has gotten tired of the clowns doing the same act for months on end. Your special snowflake brand of socialist revolution (black masks and tipped over trash cans) is sputtering out from underneath you. You’re not any more dedicated and disciplined at seeing this through than you were moving out of your parents’ guest bedroom after your “one semester off” 4 years ago. It’s time to take off the Doc Martins, wash your dreadlocks, remove the 9 facial piercings, and go get a job. You are not a revolutionary. You’re not changing the world. You WILL NOT win. All of your goals are stupid and you should do what you do best…quit. Until at least January 20th, 2020 Donald Trump is still going to be President; America is going to have a Capitalist, Market Economy; and working-class people are not going to fall in line with a bunch of spoiled middle-class college pussies LARP-ing as communist insurgents. 

And that’s just the beginning. It’s an impressive rant. Let’s just say that when the choice comes down to antifa or Alt-Right, America is going to side with the latter.