{The following have been excerpted from longer articles which can be accessed via the links provided. The Little Red Blog does not necessarily endorse the views of the various authors, although who am I to disagree with Anne Applebaum?}
Carl Trueman explains why he does not say "thank you" to inanimate objects:
Gratitude is an interesting, potent thing. My mother taught me always to say “thank you” whenever I was given anything, even by somebody paid to do so, such as a waiter in a restaurant. And when your mother tells you something, it tends to be inscribed on your character forever. To this day I immediately look with some contempt upon those who do not express thanks for even the smallest services provided by others. But the example of a waiter raises the fascinating question: Why should I express gratitude to someone who is merely doing something for which he is paid? I feel no such need to thank the ATM that delivers cash on demand or the website that issues my theater tickets. The answer is that in expressing gratitude even to someone who is required to act toward me in a certain way, I acknowledge that person as a person, a fellow human being. That is why I thank the cashier in the booth who issues my rail ticket but do not thank the machine in the wall that does the same. The former is a person. By expressing gratitude to someone even if it is simply for the work they are paid to do, I acknowledge them as a person, not merely a thing or an instrument or an automaton. And in acknowledging them as person I act as a person too.
The Reconsecration of Man | Carl R. Trueman | First Things
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Jeff Minick tells traditionalists to be the resistance to change they want to see in the world:
How many of us have said or heard during the last four years, “I can’t believe how fast everything has changed, how fast things have been destroyed.” The truth is, the typhoon causing our present-day cultural and political ruination—the sorry mess at our southern border, the assaults on the family, the rewriting of our history, the self-inflicted racism, the twisted ideas of gender—is a storm that gathered strength over the course of decades.
With that realization there should come another revelation. American values and institutions and those transcendentals we call truth, goodness, and beauty will take at least as many decades to restore as were required for their destruction. To imagine that a particular political party or candidate will magically bring about immediate rehabilitation is to live in delusion.
Instead, we ourselves must be the rehab crew for this crucial project. We should remain engaged politically, yes, but most of all we should frame our lives with the faith and the moral codes long associated with the West and its culture. Parents and grandparents must teach our children those verities, as so many I know are doing now. Only if we commit to the long haul in this culture war do we stand a chance of victory.
As an old proverb has it, “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.” Time to plant.
It Is Up to Us to Begin the End of Our Culture’s Insanity - Chronicles (chroniclesmagazine.org)
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Anne Applebaum suggests that "MAGA" might well stand for "Make Authoritarianism Great Again":
Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.
Because the American extreme right and (more rarely) the extreme left benefit from the spread of antidemocratic narratives, they have an interest in silencing or hobbling any group that wants to stop, or even identify, foreign campaigns. Senator Mark Warner, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that “we are actually less prepared today than we were four years ago” for foreign attempts to influence the 2024 election. This is not only because authoritarian propaganda campaigns have become more sophisticated as they begin to use AI, or because “you obviously have a political environment here where there’s a lot more Americans who are more distrustful of all institutions.” It’s also because the lawsuits, threats, and smear tactics have chilled government, academic, and tech-company responses.
One could call this a secret authoritarian “plot” to preserve the ability to spread antidemocratic conspiracy theories, except that it’s not a secret. It’s all visible, right on the surface. Russia, China, and sometimes other state actors—Venezuela, Iran, Hungary—work with Americans to discredit democracy, to undermine the credibility of democratic leaders, to mock the rule of law. They do so with the goal of electing Trump, whose second presidency would damage the image of democracy around the world, as well as the stability of democracy in America, even further.
Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War – Anne Applebaum {A benefit of going to Anne Applebaum’s website is that it allows you access to her articles that would be blocked by paywalls elsewhere.}
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