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The Wrong Approach to Wokeism.

/ toseealife / Leave a comment

I’m back finally!

I’ve been so busy with classes and work and other stuff, it always feels like blogging is at the bottom of my to-do list.

Might be a short post today anyway.

So…what should we talk about?

Something controversial?

You know me.

Well, since I’ve been working at my college, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to meet people who have views I don’t agree with…which is a constant source of frustration.

I know that we have to allow other people to have their opinions, but they don’t seem to feel the same way. It’s annoying to be silenced so quickly if I even start to poke the big balloon of hot air that is most of the opinion people spout off.

I know the truth is never popular, but the alternative is just scary.

I guess I confuse people. I’m 24 and half and I live in a Blue state. I shouldn’t have the opinions I do. I should prefer traditional teachings to progressive ones and I shouldn’t prefer the opinion of God to the one of Man.

But the thing is, before I ever cared about fitting in with my peer group, I cared about truth.

I feel sorry for my generation, and it’s not just because of the mental health crisis, or the total depravity of sex and everything else that can be corrupted.

It’s also because I can’t imagine being raised without truth being put first and seeking out the right way to live being a priority.

What shocks me the most often about other people my age is not that they’re wrong, isn’t that to them, it doesn’t matter whether they are good or not. They have some vague sense that there is astandabe, but they prefer not to care about it.

I know that’s not new, but that it is so prevalent and no one seems to even feel the need to excuse it now, that is what’s scary.

I remember when I read the Mr. Miracle Comics by Jack Kirby, one thing that stuck out was when the character in it who ends up waking Scott Free (Mr. Miracle) up to his brainwashed existence mentions to him that he doesn’t really think or have any right to be respected because all he does is have a programmed response to be angry when someone says a certain word or phrase to him, and he doesn’t question it.

It’s interesting to think of what Kirby probably thought was a dystopian view of society becoming almost the reality for many though not all, people.

It’s not new to the world, but it is new to us to see it happen in our lifetimes, and I think it’s always shocking to those outside it just how deep it goes.

Here’s the thing, Wokeism, or whatever you want to call it, is not new.

It’s not even a creative spin on old ideas.

It’s just slapping a bunch of new labels on things that have been around for thousands of years and have always tried to defend themselves with whatever words or excuses they could.

People think that being LGBTQ supportive is a new thing, but the Greeks would use it as part of worship to gods, they’d go even further than we do–at least I hope.

And rejecting religion is nothing new, it is the movement that has happened before every single fall of a country since history began to be recorded.

Not a popular fact to point out.

What always frustrates those of us who see this happen and warn people is that no matter what we do, they will act surprised when it happens. We always think we’re so right, till we’re so wrong.

“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death,”

But I am learning a few things about how to reach people like this from having to work around them.

While it’s only small changes for now, it’s good to learn.

See, I also find the approach that many people on my side of the politics and faith issue take to be unsatisfying.

We condemn the people who believe these delusions for believing them, but neglect to remember that they’ve been taught only this most of their lives. That media and schools are on the side of it, and that the government itself is in the back pocket of those groups.

Considering the weight of societal pressure to agree with them, and the inability to get away from it even in our homes often enough, it’s easy to see why so many people are afraid to disagree.

Even those who have questions are afraid to voice them.

And those who scream the loudest tend to drown them out anyway.

Public protests are our right as citizens I suppose, but I don’t think they work. They might get a few people thinking, but most will only scream louder.

And now for some truth that no one on my side is going to want to hear:

In the long run, it’s not going to matter how much we protest.

The vast majority of young people are indoctrinated by the schools and don’t know how to even reason at all about what they think, because they are not taught to do so.

I live in it. I would know.

Even the critical thinking and philosophy classes at colleges are always slanted one way, usually to the Left.

I notice how the examples they gave us to analyze for logical fallacies were always very weak incomplete or even inaccurate examples of right wing thinking that wouldn’t be what was present by the most educated or well thought out speakers for the side. Probably just college level stuff by people who haven’t learned how to argue yet.

Which is fine, but then on the Left side, there’s only a very small example of fallacious logic provided and if students aren’t that hard on it, the professors often don’t care.

And if you dared to ask for errors to be found in hot topic issues…oh forget it. You’d get fired.

So let’s be realistic people, we’re not going to be able to out yell them.

The older generation is going to die out and there’s only a minority in the younger one who has different opinions, and a lot of them are too neutered by the culture to even stand up for anything, they’re afraid.

(Which is so deeply unattractive in the dating pool I might add.)

But I also don’t think being angry is going to help anything in the long run.

I’d be the first to say we all have reason to be angry. There’s never any lack of reason to be angry.

But my question is will it help?

I think that often, Left or Right, we’d really rather just be able to point at someone else and say they’re stupid and it’s all their fault, then ever try to help them.

I don’t think we need to apologize for being right, either policitally or literally, and I hate it when people do that.

But we don’t need to be arrogant about it either.

Unfortunately, I find just as many poor thinkers on my side of the issue as I do on the other side. Many very smart people buy into the Left because they have never heard the Right presented in an intelligent or compelling way.

And then you have people who are too smart to really buy it, but too well aware of the consequences of disagreeing to dare to voice that thought to anyone who does support the Left Wing agenda.

All this together means I think that we really need to reconsider our approach.

Really on either side, what good is rage doing us?

The difference is that the Left outnumbers the Right now in America at least, so they don’t need to worry about getting the power, only about keeping it and that’s why they hold us in such contempt. They know we can’t beat them by sheer force. Though they are terrified of going anywhere where we might outnumber them and then they might need a therapy session to deal with the emotional stress of being talked down to.

(If I needed therapy after every time someone disparaged my worldviews, I’d never be able to work in this country.)

Anger is justified, but it is not helpful. Foolish people know all about anger, and if you stoop to their level, they’ll drag you down with them.

I think we should be striking where these young people are actually vulnerable.

Their opinions may be strong, though ill informed, but that’s about all that is.

Once you turn someone into nothing more than a mouth for your ideology that you’re pushing them to have no choice but to believe, you take out any kind of self reliance or self respect or courage.

Anger is a poor replacement for happiness.

What’s going to get to them is not our reason or logic, because they can’t understand that, they’ve never been taught to.

But what might get through is if we’re happier and more confident people.

I’ve stood out among my peers as the person who’s sure of herself, and while some of them have openly despised me for it, they know it’s not like them.

While I never set out to really be this person on purpose, once I realized I am that person for better or worse, I had to ask why.

I consider the way I live to be normal. Trying to come to the right conclusions about things and to live in a way that promotes the most happiness in myself and the least regrets about my actions.

In other words to do as I think God has said we should do, and hope for the best, while preparing for the worst when necessary.

I never thought that was novel till I heard other people talk about their lives.

I never realized that what I believe made me happier just because I really believe it, and conviction gives you a sense of purpose that other people don’t have.

And I think I’d like to ask this generation some questions now that I feel are going unasked.

  1. Why do you believe what you do?

And I mean why do you really believe it?

Most of us who call ourselves born again Christians had a conversion experience where we had a realization that it was true and that we needed it or we wouldn’t be able to live freely, or live at all in some cases. So many of us are pulled back from the brink of suicide or self destructive lifestyle.

I would like to know where this is in the secular side of things. Why do you feel so strongly that it’s true.

If you had to pick a reason other than it’s what everyone teaches and supports and assumes it’s true what would you pick?

  1. How does your belief make you a better person?

Do your beliefs prompt you to think about who you are? Do you make people’s lives better? Would you say you’re a more gracious or forgiving person? Do you do more nice things for others? Do you defend people who are being picked on, no matter who they are or what their beliefs are?

Do you try to be fair, do you try to be honest, do you have any ideals that are about personal excellence and ot public approval?

Because it is so easy to get by in the world if you just give it lip service. It doesn’t care about your heart. The world will not be there for you if you are miserable and downcast and in financial trouble.

There’s not one jot of charity in the LGBT movement to anyone but themselves, unless it’s just as a bonus because some people in it who care about other things too (and I won’t say it’s not good when there is, it’s just rare.)

The Pride movement doesn’t promote better grades or better understanding of hard subjects. They promote acceptance, but often can’t even define what it is.

It’s more like a void is trying to be filled with morals and ethics, but when you look at it, the actual guidance for ethical living is pretty small.

3. What in your worldview tells you how to be a good person?

    I mean a really good one. Not just accepting and supportive.

    • What comforts you when you go through something hard? And what meaning is there in pain or suffering?
    • What is the best reason to believe what you believe in?
    • What should people care most about in life?
    • What world would you want to grow up in, if you could?

    All of these questions are the ones that we really need answered.

    My conclusion is that only by teaching people love and truth together can we really teach them at all.

    Truth is precious but very little valued by people unless they think it benefits them.

    And my generation is practical.

    They know that deviating from the norm gets you insults, ostracized, and more and more often fired and failed, if people have enough power over you.

    They know also you will be publicly flogged by the media who does not care about justice or fairness or spreading kindness.

    Until they want something other than the security of the world’s favor, they will never want God or even man’s wisdom.

    So our best defense is, as it’s always been, living to the best of our ability to embody the principles of God’s ways and our freedom in them.

    Or, if we really think we are smarter, we must try to use that to benefit other people.

    As a tutor/teacher I look at students a lot who seem like idiots to me, but my job is to make them as smart as possible. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I want to cry for this generation.

    But it’s for the few who we can save that we have to try.

    And at least, in my faith, I have the assurance that my fate does not depend on them anyway, and the longer I live, the more glad I am of that. The world is too fickle to rely on.

    People will attack me for that, but I really care very little because I know that in the long run, the world will betray them, as it always does and always has, but God will never betray me, because He is what He is.

    And no that does not mean I’m never discouraged, but thank God, all my hope is not in other people.

    I can’t promise you that it will get better, things usually get worse before they get better.

    But I can promise you that trying to live by the world or the culture is a useless exercise, and no one can keep up with it.

    Find hope in something else, and cling to it.

    Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

    The Oh Hellos–The Truth is a Cave.
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    What A Dating Novice Knows…

    / toseealife / Leave a comment

    I know it’s been a really long time.

    Sorry, I had the busiest semester I’ve ever had, so blogging kind of got pushed to the back burner.

    I’m not sure I’ll have a whole lot to say today, but I wanted to write about relationships again.

    Mainly because I finally started dating.

    Yay!!!!

    Yeah in a culture where thousands of people are saying that dating and relationships are a waste of time, and a lot more are obsessed with calling people toxic, and just overall acting entitled…I’m trying to find someone I can actually get along with.

    I think sometimes being “not crazy” can actually make it harder.

    I guess that sounds kind of like being a pick-me, so maybe I’m wrong about that.

    But the thing is, I don’t know what guys want…and honestly, I’m not sure they know either.

    I’ve met a couple of them from a dating website, and got ghosted by a few already.

    And the ones I have met up with who are still int ouch, it’s hard to gauge interest.

    See everybody is different.

    Is it a bad sign if they hardly text me between meet-ups, or is just normal guy stuff.

    I mean all you get on the internet is other people’s opinions, right?

    Being what I am, a not feminist, not woke, not liberal, 24 year old woman who just wants to find love and start a family–is surprisingly had to match, hard to define.

    Because beyond principals, I don’t know what works with me.

    I liked a guy for years only to realize he was stringing me along for attention, and didn’t actually like me back…and he was a Christian who was supposed to know better. Amazes me how selfish even Chrsitians can be.

    I’m also the type of chick who thinks that sweating the little details is stupid. If I can get around a difficulty by adjusting myself to it, I will. I’d rather change my approach than give up on something if I’m interested in.

    And that has made me good at doing anything that depends solely on me. I’ll find a way if I want to do it bad enough.

    My siblings and parents like to agonize over details, I just roll with the punches.

    I would think that would make dating a cinch for me. I never run out of conversation topics, I’m willing to listen to other people’s interests, and I’m not picky about where to eat or go for fun.

    And in some ways, it is easy to do the basic parts of dating.

    But the thing is, I still have no idea what I’m doing, right?

    I’m coming to realize that most people don’t.

    We’re all insecure, we all are under the pressure to be liked.

    I think there’s truth in that it used to be easier. I mean, love has never been easy.

    It’s a common theme of most tragedies and sad ballads for most of Time, it’s not easy. If it was easy, it wouldn’t be valuable.

    But that said, I do think that we’ve made it harder to just get past the stage of being strangers, by being so isolated in our lives. I have the same problem with friends.

    I mean, sine we rely on phones now, I get paranoid if I don’t hear from someone within 10 minutes of messaging or calling them.

    Part of that is my abandonment complex, thanks Dad, and part of it is just me, being someone who’s quick to worry. I want to get better, but there’s just something about phones that makes it so hard to control your anxiety, ever notice that?

    I don’t want to bring my baggage into a new relationship…but if I’m honest, I really can’t help it.

    I mean, we all do it.

    And let’s face it, when you’ve been mistreated, it’s hard not to look for it again. Like when you have a sore place on your body and you keep touching it to see if it still hurts…yeah it still does.

    Before, I spent a lot of time being nice to people I wanted to be friends with. But apparently, that’s a turn off.

    You seem too eager, and it’s like your friendship and respect is cheap.

    And I think thanks to being both a tough woman with high standards, and ordinary girl who wants love, I ended up this odd mix of easygoing and also sensitive.

    Many things don’t bother me, maybe some of you ladies can relate.

    Maybe you don’t care about the toilet seat, the restaurant or the size of the rock, right?

    But if you feel ignored, or used, it starts to feel so familiar.

    And when nothing is wrong you look for something to be wrong.

    I don’t like being this way, but I got addicted to it.

    My father, being the manipulative person that he was, was the king of scaring you if you thought things were all right.

    If I was having a good day, or we hadn’t fought in say, 5 days straight, he simply felt the need to start a fight so that his quota of tension could be met. He fed off of it.

    I want to talk about antyi, and he bing up the unpelasnt isde of it.

    He used to change our bedtime stories to psychotic tales of people yelling and hurting each other, no matter how innocent the story was.

    I mean, it was funny, he had good delivery…but you always felt kind of icky for laughing.

    One of my therapists was the first t point out that that’s kind of messed up…who knew?

    I had no idea until she said it, how much my paranoia could be influenced by my father’s insistence on making everything dark, suspicious, or perverse. Or just gross.

    I don’t mean to say everything is his fault…but the thing is, I can’t account for my personality quirks any other way.

    I was fearless mostly when I was a very little child, but my father scared me. Overtime I developed other anxieties.

    But now that most of those are gone, I still have the habit of being anxious in my mind.

    And par of that is my father filled my head with the idea that things are always about to go wrong.

    I actually handle stress well, usually. I stay calm, I know how to take a moment and just let it out…yet I feel this pressure to despair, to think “this is just how my life always goes” and blow things out of proportion.

    Some of that I had long before I knew my father was like that…but kids do copy what they see.

    And I find his voice in my head a lot, even now.

    The thing is, I feel like I have to apologize for that to whoever I’m with.

    Like: I‘m sorry, my father messed me up, and I really want to be better, but I don’t know if you’re safe yet…so can you bear with me wile I try to get past it?

    Therapy was no help in this area. They just kept making me focus even more on what could go wrong.

    Like do I really need to hear this again?

    My last one was a real gem, he told me I had a lot of blame for people in my past.

    This was after weeks of him not given me any constructive feedback, so I would just keep telling him different stories, hoping he’d figure out something helpful that I was missing. Apparently not…and hey, at any point he could have asked me why I focused n that so much and worked out a solution. Instead he got mad the first time I acted out a little bit because of my issues, and that was it for me.

    I’m perfectly willing to admit, I’m not perfect. I do rude things sometimes…who doesn’t?

    But that is no excuse to jump on me and make all kinds of claims about my character that you have no way to know from one thing I said.

    I mean, I know I’m defensive…

    You know why that is? I used to be open to feedback when I was younger, I did my best to embrace it…but it was never good enough.

    I learned the hard way then that people don’t always care about helping you, they just want to control you. It’s not about who’s right, it’s about you not being exactly how they want.

    Yes it’s hard for me to trust anyone who criticizes me, because so often I cannot please them even after taking their advice, so I gave up.

    I literally stopped speaking to my father for years for most of the time I was around him because nothing I ever said to him got me anything but hatred, or was at all pleasant to being with.

    I did the same to other adults I knew, and I never heard the end of it from him: “You offend people so much, why do you not answer them?”

    You know what happened once my father moved out? And just once I was at a church he didn’t go to? I miraculously stopped doing that.

    I now never go silent on people like that, at least, very very rarely, and only when it wasn’t a remark I was sure they wanted an answer to.

    Great right?

    But it freaks you out to realize how much one person can change your personality.

    My sisters even confirmed it.

    I used to have “freak outs” or as I called them “moments” when my ahter was around.

    Not always to do with him, but I’d be so stressed, I’d just wig out for several minutes, talking too fast and almost crying and laughing at the same time. I twas weird, looking back, I can’t understand it.

    But once he was gone, it just stopped. I no longer had the urge to do that.

    I do think I project this image of being more together than I really am, but who doesn’t do that if they want to remain employed?

    It’s not wrong to act professional…but at some point, with someone, you have to let your guard down.

    We can only talk about impersonal things for so long, you know what I mean?

    Also, you can’t just trauma dump, that’s not good either.

    But really, other people don’t know what works for you.

    I’ll say there are guidelines.

    In my limited experience with men, I’ve worked out at least a few real red flags. And they aren’t the ones most women talk about.

    1. A guy who makes you do all the work. You text first, you decide everything, he never disagrees with you.

    I don’t mean that a guy who is easygoing is bad, I mean that he shows no interest whatsoever in getting to know you, but he craves your attention. I spent years hoping that both my dad, and other men I knew would change their minds about me…it doesn’t work.

    2. Someone who never asks you about yourself.

    This can also be social awkwardness, but if you’ve been talking for a while and you know more about them and they don’t ever ask about you, bad sign.

    But those both are ones other people point out, what baffles me is how rarely anyone I know mentions this one:

    3. The guy is just a jerk to you.

    There was a really hot guy in my dance class who definitely knew he was hot, and my classmates seemed to think he was into me.

    I think he would have if I was interested, but the guy would just be a jerk to me and to my friend in the class. Like he’d say things that seemed like they were to deliberately make me uncomfortable. It freaked me out. Also he was creepy in other ways.

    I’m sure he thought it was smooth–and hey, in highschool, maybe it was. Girls have low self esteem in their teenage years. I’m sure being hot and cocky was all you needed back then.

    But for a mature woman, who actually has thinks she looks for, like compassion and considerateness, it was unattractive. Canceled out the hot part.

    I mean, was I attracted to him? Physically yes, but i was rep by his personality, and not in a “you get on my nerves but I still like you” kind of way.

    Nothing ever happened between us, and I’m glad of that. But I was surprised later when one of the other guys I knew in class expressed surprise that I thought the hot one was a creep. This guy was on the uglier side, and said he thought I thought he was the creep.

    Other than the obvious play for a compliment, I thought that was kind of a weird thing to say.

    This guy didn’t hit on me or anything, really, like I know every one reading this is going to think, he just seemed to want female attention.

    I enjoyed the male attention I got in the class, but I felt kind of like it was just about me being a girl, and not personality.

    However, it’s worked the other way too, I’ve hit it off with guys over personality, who never asked me out.

    I can’t explain it except that there must be some other reason they weren’t interested…and it wasn’t that they weren’t into dating, they were ones who went through multiple girlfriends.

    Maybe I just give off the vibe too much of a girl who’s ride or die about love.

    I do mange to get a rep for being feisty and opiniated everywhere I go.

    Hey, at least I’m not forgettable.

    But maybe it’s not me, or maybe it’s something I can’t guess. You know, I get sick of asking.

    I impressed the guy I’m currently seeing by being able to tell him how I came to Christ…so that was new.

    I can’t explain exactly why people don’t click these days.

    But one thing I have learned is that it’s a waste of your time to go after anyone who has such wildly different views of life than you.

    Even if they say they are in your religion, don’t believe it if it’s not in their actions.

    I saw a man on YouTube say that we shouldn’t have low expectations, we should have realistic ones.

    He’s right.

    I can get the numbers of plenty of men if I want to, but it’s not worth it if they aren’t ones I’d want the heart of.

    I know that’s chessy, but it’s true.

    Love is not all magic and thrills, but it is about being entrusted with someone else’s well being, and we should take that seriously.

    I’d rather feel safe with a man than feel thrilled for a short time only to feel empty later.

    And I encourage men to think the same way, hopefully many of them already do.

    Don’t settle for someone who has no respect for you.

    And don’t dump someone for stupid reasons, there’s a lot of that going around too.

    See, having the past I do makes me want something better, not the same old thing. I’m not comfortable with being mistreated, and I intend to stick to that.

    So yeah, I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I know that much..

    Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

    Paragon of Virtue

    / toseealife / Leave a comment
    “For it is in passing that we achieve immortality. Through this, we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all. Infinite in distance and unbound by death, I release your soul, and by my shoulder, protect thee.“
    Pyrrha Nkos

    It’s no secret if you’ve followed me for a while that I was originally a big fan of RWBY.

    And that I’m still a fan of the first 3 volumes, at least. Possibly the 4-5 ones also.

    I’m also a fan of the Justice League Animated show (and recently I watched the Snyder cut of the live action movie, and holy cow was it like watching a different film! One I actually lied. I think we should burn the theatrical cut and pretend it never happened.)

    So I was talking to my sister about both these things and comparing the characters, and she specifically requested I blog about this topic.

    So here we go:

    What is a Paragon?

    Let’s look at the web’s definition, though most weebs already know what it is, sort of:

    “A paragon means someone or something that is the very best. The English noun paragon comes from the Italian word paragone, which is a touchstone, a black stone that is used to tell the quality of gold. You rub the gold on the touchstone and you can find out how good the gold is.” (vocabulary.com)

    Most people acknowledge that the main character of any given kids show or movie is supposed to be the paragon. And if I name names, you’ll see a pattern.

    Anime has a paragon almost as a requirement, with a few exceptions, like the Shield Hero.

    Midoriya (My Hero Academia)

    Naruto (Naruto)

    Tohru (Fruits Basket)

    Natsu (Fairy Tale, Erza would also be one)

    Hiro (Darling in the Franx)

    Not all of these are perfect examples, the first two are the closest. But you know the characters who stand above the rest, who everyone wants to be like, who they trust to lead them, who they think has some moral insight that they don’t.

    Outside of anime, the paragon is less worshiped, but still present.

    Captain America (Avengers)

    Xavier (X-men, often Logan also fulfills this role)

    Mickey Mouse (any Micky Mouse media)

    Aang (Avatar the Last Airbender)

    So you see paragons are everywhere. That’s why it’s considered a trope.

    For a better explanation of how it is used in a story and the pros and cons, I refer you to Overly Sarcastic Productions excellent video:

    Love Red’s videos about tropes

    So, of course, the two paragons I wanted to talk about are Ruby, from the show RWBY, and Superman, from the DC Universe. Particularly his recent shows and movie renditions.

    I’m going to argue that neither of these characters are good paragons, though they are treated like paragons by their writers and fellow characters, and the fans, by and large.

    But my unpopular opinion is that they both suck at fulfilling this role, and that is because people lack understanding of what makes a paragon really work.

    I think it goes back to our culture’s lack of understanding of what makes a righteous person to begin with.

    (I’ve argued that Gaara should be the protagonist of Naruto also, and a protagonist and paragon do not have to be the same thing but they usually are in anime, however I think Gaara fulfills both roles better.)

    It’s easy to see why Superman would be considered the best of the best, who can be better than Superman?

    Yet, it’s interesting that in every version of the Justice League that’s written where they turn to the dark side, Superman is the first to fall.

    I now the premise is that he is the only one holding the league together, so if he falls, they all fall.

    I’m going to argue now that that is actually one of the signs of a bad paragon.

    1. Instead of people being inspired by the paragon, they instead rely on them, both intellectually and physically.

    Ruby is the bigger offender here, but so is Superman.

    Lazy thinking is the bane of every group in real life, but it’s also one of the main things that kills fictional teams.

    The whole team relies on thsi one person to know what’s right and to know what to do.

    Sample:

    Yang from RWBY: “She (Ruby) always knows what to do, so I’m going to follow her.”

    Flash from JL animated series: We don’t do that to our enemies.

    Diana: Speak for yourself.

    Flash: I was trying to speak for Superman.”

    This is just one of many examples from the shows where the other characters rely on the example of the paragon…to a point where it seems they may not actually agree with them.

    I’m against murder, of course, but Diana stopping herself only because Superman would say to, and not out of any mercy of her own, seems like a red flag.

    And it’s made more poignant when we consider that both in the Justice Lords episode of this show, and in the video game and movie versions of the Dark Justice League, Diana goes dark once Superman has led the way. Implying she never had any root in herself and her own ideals to resist the pull of power.

    Diana’s weakness is not thinking for herself. Flash, who we learn died before the League went full on power mad in the alternate world, would have been the only person to resist the corruption, and he is the only one to stop Diana in the regular timeline.

    J’onn, the Maritian, also expresses how he wonders if they can still be a league, how many battles did they win just because Superman was there, he asks.

    [I actually think he’s less necessary than they think based on the show at least, but not in the movies.]

    On RWBY, Ruby is followed by her sister, Yang, but also by Ozpin, who insists that victory is in the simpler things. Even the theme song says ‘victory is in a simple soul.’

    The problem is, Ruby is not a simple soul.

    Actually she is full of insecurities, questions, and later on, she resorts to deception and misleading her allies, just because she’s not sure what they will do with the truth, even though she was angry at Ozpin for doing the same thing.

    Whereas Oscar, a much better character, is against ding this, but gets ignored because no one respects him.

    And Superman, despite Flash’s well meaning optimism, is not the paragon of mercy Flash thinks he is.

    Flash didn’t witness the two times Superman tried to kill Darkseid, a villain who humiliated him more than even Lex Luthor, who he just barely holds himself back from killing as it is. But Superman actually had zero hesitation to try to kill Darkseid, and was only stopped, one by Supergirl using reason, and once by Batman, who used brute force (sort of, he got lucky with a boom tube.)

    The issue I have with both Supes and Ruby isn’t that they make these mistakes, while being the leaders, but it’s actually my second point:

    2. The paragon lacks humility.

    A good paragon has flaws, that’s not the problem. The problem is when they pretend that they don’t.

    Ruby makes a crap ton of mistakes, but notably, she never once admits it.

    As far back as volume 1, Weiss goes off on Ruby for being reckless and a show-off, but then admits that she herself can be a little ‘demanding’ and offers to compromise.

    I might be missing something, but I don’t recall Ruby ever owning up to Weiss having a point. She’s just blindly confident that she’ll impress everyone with her skills. Which she does, but that doesn’t make her a good leader.

    Weiss also complains that Ruby is the leader of their team, and offers some valid reasons, which in my mind were proven entirely right by Ruby herself several times, and then some, and while Weiss is hardly perfect, Ruby never tries to amend her actions to give Weiss more confidence in her, or acknowledge Weiss might have a point.

    “I’m not perfect! Not yet, but I’m still a hundred times better than you.” Weiss, volume one. (I may have paraphrased slightly)

    All the way up to Volumes 6-8, which were all horrible train wrecks, including the actual train wreck that happened in volume 6, where Ruby actually says she never needed her uncle’s help, after he saved her butt like 3 times just since his reintroduction in vol 4, and the other times people bailed her out.

    Ruby, much like Naruto and Deku on their shows, doesn’t one off win nay fights on her own after volume 2, and that was a draw. Yet she has the idea that she’s independent somehow…why?

    Let’s look at Superman for a moment.

    In one of the worst episodes of the first JL show (but still far better than the last season of the Unlimited follow up show) Secret Society, Superman pisses off Flash and Hawk Girl by saying:

    “At the end of the day, I’m the invulnerable one. Every hit I take is one someone else doesn’t have to.”

    While they get mad at this, no one makes the pretty obvious come back: “Sure, until someone has Kryptonite or Red Sun Radiation.”

    Something multiple people have had access to, in the show alone, and on his own show.

    Superman may be tough, but everyone knows his weaknesses! He’s not invulnerable or invincible. Plus, even Lois Lane has had to save him, not once, but at least 2 or 3 times on his show, and the others saved him many times on the Justice League show.

    So where does he get off suggesting that he’s somehow less subject to peril than they are? If he was less reckless about his own safety, they’d actually win their fights faster because they might employ this thing called strategy.

    And this leads into point number 3

    3. A paragon that never learns

    Because of people worshiping them, and their big head, often bad paragons never learn anything from their mistakes.

    The entire show of RWBY is proof of that for Ruby, but Superman is a little less obvious.

    However, if we consider what happens in the Justice League show, it’s kind of unnerving.

    One episode, Patriot Act, points out that after the League got called into question for having a weapon that was worse than a bomb would have been in their watchtower, and Cadmus has issues with them, instead of losing power, the League gains a second base on the earth, but doesn’t’ dismantle their watchtower.

    And the only group that was capable of competing with them has been so publicly shamed that they are no longer a threat. Meaning the League is freer from criticism than ever.

    Yet the League is still caught off guard by the villains unifying, and almost loses yet again to Darkseid. Superman, rather than show more caution, seems to be overly confident, and has to be saved, ultimately, by Lex Luthor, the most humiliating choice yet.

    I can’t blame Superman entirely for that, but he didn’t really back off after the Cadmus incident. I don’t see how getting more power is learning his lesson about hubris and controlling things too much.

    What really stands in the way of the League becoming the Justice Lords by the end of the show? Only Flash, anything could still happen to him. How have they learned and become stronger?

    This is a problem with the show overall, but especially with Superman. Everyone else changes and evolves over time at least a little, but he stays the same. The same pride and anger under the surface, and willingness to compromise what he claims he upholds.

    And finally, one last point

    4. A paragon who is only an example when everyone is looking or they have something to prove.

    What I detest about both Ruby and Superman, not because I’d hate them as people if it was true, but because they are hailed as such paragons of virtue, is their lack of consideration for anyone else.

    If no one is looking, Ruby never gives a crap about helping anyboyd but herself, if shes’ not playint he hor.

    Ruby herself is helped both by Blake and Jaune just on her first day at Beacon Academy, but we see her help no one else, nor try to.

    While others stand up to the racism against Faunus, Ruby does nothing.

    And when Oscar gets beat on for unfair reasons later in the show, Ruby only steps in one time, and that’s when it’s someone who she’d not get much flack for calling out, but not when her uncle or sister also abuse Oscar.

    Ruby is nice to Oscar, because she has a crush on him, and once or twice she is nice to Jaune. So she’s not the worst, but she never goes out of her way to help anybody. Nor is she ever more open-minded than anyone else in the team.

    But Superman has to be even worse.

    I was reading someone else’s post about Wonder Woman the other day, and they brought up a scene where Diana teaches a little girl how to fight to help her have confidence about playing with the boys. The author commented that she couldn’t see Superman or Batman doing this.

    I think Batman actually does demonstrate compassion more often, in his own way, when he helps Ace, one of the villains Cadmus created, as well as Baby Doll, one of his sadder villains, and many others. Actually it’s why he and Diana are good together.

    But I agree, I can’t see Superman doing it.

    Superman is the type of guy who’d say he has to focus on the big problems, fly around and help people, and the little things aren’t ones he can afford to spend time on.

    Yet those things are what make us the most human and help us to stay grounded. If you’d take time to help a kid, even if it’s just over something small, then you will remember what’s really important.

    He keeps Lois, the closest relationship he has, at arm’s length. At the end of the show, she still doesn’t know his real identity, that we know of. She knows freaking Batman’s, but not his!

    I’ve never seen Superman help a kid, outside of his old comics, and then it was to prove a point, that he was Superman…he still helped either way, and I’m not saying he wouldn’t have anyhow, but he got invested primarily for that reason.

    Contrast it with Flash, who is a great guy on and off the job, based on how his coworkers treat him. And is a great guy even to the other League members.

    Can you see Superman getting Hawk Girl a coffee and blanket? Or giving an old coot an actual fair chance to explain his magic crystal and have a job later? Or painting someone’s fence?

    Me neither. The fact that I wouldn’t even imagine it says a lot.

    Oh and RWBY has an example of this too. Pyrrha freaking Nikos!

    And that’s the perfect cue for me to launch into why Pyrrha is a way better paragon than Ruby, and why many people would be a better one than Superman.

    Ironically, almost any member of the 7 would be better than Superman, but most of them lack the leadership drive to be so.

    Good Paragon traits

    Basically just turn all the bad ones on thier head.

    Let’s star twith the last one and work backwards.

    Instead of only dong good when it’s beneficial for them also, good Paragons do good when no one thanks them for it.

    On Naruto, Gaara sticks up for the rights of people to have life, and for the ideals of mercy, long before he gets made the leader of the army. He works for years to reform Sand Village, to the point where assassination attempt on him by the elders who think he’s crazy or wrong happen so often that his siblings no longer even react to having to save him and each other’s lives at any given moment.

    On RWBY, Pyrrha sticks up for Faunus though it gets her little thanks from her classmates. She also helps Jaune with his problems, even when it would get her the opposite of what she wants, or when he gets mad at her.

    But what I love is that she’s got bit of a temper too. When Jaune forsakes his team because Cardin blackmails him, instead of coming to them for help, she makes her sentiment clear until he finally apologizes, but she still bails him out of a tight spot.

    Pyrrha helps Jaune for his own sake, even when she’s not getting anyth out of it.

    She also is nice to team RWBY, paying for their meal and is generally kind and caring to everyone.

    Jaune also is a decent paragon, he has more of the traits of pursuing excellence that they have in anime, but he also sticks up for his team and helps people even when he doesn’t have to, as I mentioned above.

    Turning back to Justice League, Wonder Woman is far more compassionate than Superman, and Batman is less arrogant. Flash however is the best example, since he combines both those traits at the same time.

    Often the traits of a good paragon would be better if they rested on two or three character’s instead of just one, since few people are that virtuous, but if we want to find who’d be a better starting point, those are our choices.

    Hawk Girl has the most integrity of everyone in the League, but lacks the confidence to lead, or she might make the better choice.

    Point number 2, all of these other characters learn more than the actual paragon characters do.

    Granted, not that much, in Batman’s case.

    But Batman has a healthy respect for people with different qualities than himself, whereas Superman doesn’t.

    Pyrrha is not given the chance to learn much since she (SPOILER ALERT) dies before she really can. But based on her overall humility, it seems like she would have.

    Jaune we see does learn from his mistakes and improve, becoming more of a peacemaker in the group and a protector.

    And of course, that includes having humility.

    One of my favorite things about Pyrrha’s character, as I got more mature about looking at her, was that she isn’t above improving. She has a power that makes it easy for her to win fights by hardly doing anything, but only uses it to give her a bit of an edge, she still trains like crazy to hone her skills. She still thinks she needs to practice. Shes’ willing to team up with less skilled people like Jaune just because she likes his attitude, and to take orders from him despite his lack of experience, unlike Weiss’s attitude towards Ruby.

    Pyrrha could roll her eyes😒at Jaune, but instead she builds him up. And he becomes the kind of leader she believed in, as he even acknowledges in vole 5 when he said she told him something once, and he believed her.

    Pyrrha and Jaune

    Pyrrha could win more on a different team, or if she asserted herself over Juane, but she doesn’t. Instead she embraces being treated like a normal person by him, and doesn’t see herself as the invincible, untouchable warrior.

    And last bu not least, back to point 1.

    A good paragon is not worshiped, they are imitated and respected.

    Perhaps this is where Pyrrha, Flash, and the others I mentioned shine most clearly beyond their competition of the canon paragons.

    While people talk about imitating Ruby, or Superman, no one actually does it. Or when they do, it’s usually the worst parts of them. Because people always copy your underlying attitude more than your professed one.

    Flash copies Superman’s reckless actions more than his selfless ones, the Flash is selfless on his own, that’s why he can take that out of Superman’s example, but Superman never really has any interaction with Flash about this, nor do we see any one moment where Flash is inspired by him to be selfless when he’s actually there.

    In contrast, Batman is moved by Flash’es compassion towards his foe the Trickster, in the episode about Flash. And tells Orion that he does not understand him.

    Batman actually never talks Flash down, notably, and hes’ shown to be a closet fan of the Flash even in other renditions of the League.

    So Flash inspires respect from people it’s worthwhile to earn the respect of, and he is looked up to by kids and regular citizens also just for being so good hearted.

    Even if not everyone imitates Flash, they respect his heart.

    Pyrrha on the other hand has admiration from her peers and superiors alike, but it’s interesting that in her closet ring of friends, she doesn’t inspire the hero worship that Ruby does.

    People don’t look up to Pyrrha to lead them, they want to be like her, because she follows the right thing not just in her words, but in her actions.

    Ruby and Superman tell people what the right thing is, Pyrrha and Flash show them what it is.

    This doesn’t even mean that I’m arguing for Pyrrha and Flash to be the leader of their teams, I don’t think either of them are suited to that, in fact I thin paragons often don’t make good leaders because of their lack of putting themselves first. A leader ha to have some self confidence.

    But like Jaune, and like Batman, the best leaders are the ones who are following the example of a paragon who isn’t the leader, but isn’t a blind follower either, who makes their own choices, but i willing to work with others also.

    Pyrrha never turns down help, and Flash is the first to ask for it again after the League breaks up.

    Every leader I know of who is also a paragon is the most boring and frustrating kind of protagonist, the most engaging leaders are the ones who learn from paragons as they go.

    Like the show My Little Pony’s MC Twilight, who has to learn from all her friends in order to become the Princess of Friendship.

    Pyrrha’s influence is felt in volume 4 and 6 especially when we see that Juane, as well as her other teammates, all want to be more like her, they do not say that about Ruby.

    Ruby can lead, but she can not exemplify. That’s the problem.

    Like Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Luke might be the leader, but he’s following Obi Wan’s example.

    Once in a great while, a paragon may make a good protagonist, Twilight Sparkle sort of grows into being a paragon by the end of MLP, usually it’s done best when it’s like that, one character growing into being one over time.

    Which is where Pyrrha having struggles and an arc in volume 3 made her much more like a protagonist than Ruby has ever been, fight me.

    A paragon can also become a protagonist over time, it’s usually very satisfying to see that actually.

    But the starting point has to be them working together, or it just doesn’t feel right, at least to me, it feels fake.

    We are all protagonists in our own lives, but we all should want to be paragons, and if we find people looking up to us like ones, we should never forget to be protagonists also, always able to learn from others.

    But when you divorce these two characters from helping each other, your story falls apart, because that’s not real life.

    And with that, I think I’ll end this post, until next time–Natasha.

    Transphobic

    / toseealife / Leave a comment

    I watched a video this morning by a Christian Lady saying that this whole Trans craze is the reason she’s finally pulling her kids out of school and homeschooling them.

    Hurray!

    I was homeschooled all up till college. I do have trouble making friends, but it beats not having a brain.

    Not that there aren’t some very smart kids in Public school, the problem is the systme istelf sucks the IQ out of these kids as fast as possible.

    I learned something from this video that I should have realized before, I just never had gone to school enough to know it.

    The schools slip this LGBT+ whatever stuff ito the curriculum because they clasify is as “anit-bullying” training

    See, a very powerful lie because it’s mized with a small amount of truth, alwasy the most effective.

    Sure, you can point to the whole pride community and say “They do get bullied”

    True…but every community gets bullied. I don’t care who you are, you just have to live around jerks who are from a different circle, or be in the minority in your neighborhood.

    The lady made an excellent point, that no other kind of bullying is the solution to pressure everyone else into being this thing.

    Just about everyone mainstream had a label in the Pride community now, just because it makes them cool. Just ike everyone has a mental illness.

    Humans are infamous for promoting trends that are unhealthy to ourselves, without knowing it. But I never thought I’d see the day, even in my short life, where promoting being unhealthy itself would be popular.

    What the heck?

    I have a cousin who’s already fallen under this spell, who was always a very normal girl before she got Tiktok. But, of course, she wants to fit in.

    The kid is too young to drive, but according to the YouTube lady, that doesn’t mean she can’t get hormones and change her pronouns, without parental consent.

    It’s bizarre and insane, you have to get parental consent to treat kids in the freaking Emergency room just in case you give them something they are allergic to, but you don’t have to get it to give them body altering hormones?

    That’s nuts.

    Even parents who support the rights of this community have an issue with this, but the kids are being taught to ignore their parents, to see them as the enemy if they don’t support this.

    I see no real doubt about this being a cult, but I didn’t understand how it got slipped into school so fast until the anti-bullying connection was made for me, now I get it.

    Because I hear kids defends this so vehemently, the way they’d say it’s not right to bully someone else, and they never stop to think that maybe it’s not the same thing, because a kid doesn’t understand the nuances between preventing bullying and pushing an agenda.

    Hey, China did this once. They said everyone should stop being bullied by the oppressive landlords. Anyone who owned land and wealth had to be stropped of it.

    So they made their whole population poor, and completely dependent on the government, which was pretty broke also, and just the most high ranking people had wealth. People turned on each other, because there was no need for proof, you just had to make an accusation. All the most spiteful people are in charge in a society like that.

    It didn’t end well for China.

    It’s not rocket science to most of us that all this is not going to end well, but how do we stop it?

    I figure that in some ways, it can’t be stopped. AS long as parents are willing to allow it, some kids are bound to be victimes of it.

    Homeschooling is the best option, to be sure, but not everyone can do it. Still one could pay for a tutor, or try a different kind of school.

    But it’s not just schoool, it’s the internet.

    No kid should have a tiktok, that’s just common sense. They don’t need to be exposing themselves on line to people when they can’t even legally sign an information release form yet, not that hard to figure out.

    I didn’t start my YouTube channel till I was 17 or 18 I think, and I never gave personal information out on it.

    I know I’m not saying anything new here, but we just need as many people to be saying it as possible. To do our best to have a counter movement.

    But in answer to the guy who commented asking why people feel the need to prove themselves right, and they can’t just live and let live.

    This is why, Sir. This freaking crap is why!

    Because when we give up trying to prove ourselves right, you know who takes the hit? It’s not us, not right away, not the adults. It’s the kids. They don’t get a choice. They don’t know any better.

    And if we adults who do are too lazy, cowardly, or indifferent to speak our piece to these other people and contest them, they will own our kids. Literally, before too long.

    It won’t be long before even being an adult won’t be any protection anymore, at this rate. But let’s talk about htat.

    I know people at my college who will applaud slipping this propaganda into everything, because they don’t think.

    You see, if we thought about it, would we relaly beokay with this?

    I know exaclty how it works.

    People may call me transphobic for not agreeing with this, but I prefer to think of it as Pride-phobic. I am terrified by anyone exulting pride as something we all should be aiming for. Pride is deadly.

    Hubris is the deadly Pride that says “I can do better than God/gods” depending on what religion you are, but it’s pride in oneself and their own wisdom above everything else.

    Playing God, we call it.

    I can’t think of any more blatant example of this than saying you can change the gender someone was born with, especially before they are old enough to understand what that truly means.

    Some people say that doctors play God, to be sure, in some cases.

    Yeah, that might be true…so change the laws there, but that doesn’t justify letting kids make these choices, or letting mentally unstable people make them either.

    Now if a stable, grown adult wants to transition, I may disagree, but I wouldn’t stop them, because the y have the right to choose what they will do. They have the right to choose to do anything…and reap the consequences.

    But that’s not the majority of cases here, that’s the problem.

    I know why people take isue with sotpin it.

    They say that whatever negative things happen it’s still important to promote this because these people need to feel accepted and loved.

    That sounds good.

    Until…

    Think about it, what culture has ever had trure and complete acceptance of every kind of person?

    That would be zero.

    But the ones that got closest were the Nazis.

    Yeah you could be from any background, if you join the nazi party you were in. You were the cool kids.

    All you had to do was be willing to crush anyone outside the party who was in your way. Anyone who as not Germany,or anyone who was German but was loyal to the enemy, that is tot say, the people you were murdering en masse.

    Some people will say Gitler wasn’t evn worn now.

    I heard the Whoopi Goldberg even said that the Holocaust wasn’t about Race.

    I guess all those books the Germans wrote about superior genetics being in the German line, and all that propaganda they put out about black people (you know, ones like Whoopi Goldberg) and Jews was all about something other than race.

    I can’t imagine what it would be, if not race, must be something only enlighten people like Goldberg know.

    I remember the Rwanda Holocuast really united the country, as long as you weren’t Tutsi. And as long as you didn’t look Tutsi, even if you were Hutu, you were fine.

    Yeah…you know mass acceptance comes at a price. Because when people are individuals, some of them will not fit in, they will not be accepted, so you have to sacrifice your individuality in order to be accepted.

    Put on their label, dye your hair, wear the make up, wear your pride sticker. Now you’re cool.

    But if you want to do anything for yourself, without putting that label on it you can’t get away from it.

    Remember that gay ice skater in the Olympics a few yeas ago. The news couldn’t get enough of him, though he was not the best skater in the team, and the one who was didn’t get interview as much. (And I mean by the scores, he wasn’t the best, not my personal opinion).

    I really would care if a gay man was the best ice skater, because to me being gay and having talent are two things that have nothing to do with each other, why would they? Does being straight give you talent? No? Does sex give you talent period? No.

    But he gets attention just for that.

    You know it kind of sucks even if you are gay, because you may have hobbies that you’d like to get acclaim for, and you’ll never know if people are just praising you because you’re gay, or because you’re talented. Since the general public really can’t recognize talent and skill that well to begin with, that makes it even worse. Charisma goes a long way with the masses, but if you say you’re gay, that’s an automatic win.

    A lot of people are milking it on purpose to get famous, or more famous, Like Demi Lovato.

    But if you genuinely do feel gay, you may not really want that to be all there is to you. I read an article by someone like that once in college.

    And it’s sad. Really. Talent is talent, whoever has it, shouldn’t it be acknowledged as such?

    I’ve watched a gay youtuber for years now, because he has talent. But sadly, he has leaned more and more into using his gay label to make content, instead of actually using his creative talents to do it. He used to be real clever, but he doesn’t need to be now. He’s got talent still…but he no longer needs to use it, so he doesn’t.

    That’s going to happen to kids right and left at this rate. Why be a scientist if you can get famous by being a sexual orientation, it’s not like that takes work.

    I saw this ad for a new show where this Trans person is saying that they hate it when people say they are brave for transition so young, and someone replies “its not brave to be who you are.”

    While I wholly disagree with the premise of that sentiment, it’s interesting in one way.

    By their own logic, why is this anything to applaud? If it’s just who they are, that’s like applauding someone for liking the color blue. What does my merits as a person have to do with it? Nothing.

    Some of them will say t his.

    The thing is, the people who are getting into this because it’s popular are really the ones who will ignore that.

    Nevermind if it actually hurts the exact people you’re trying to help.

    A gay person might like to write a play about something other than being gay, you know, just for once. But they aren’t allowed to, are they? Name one, I’ll wait.

    Anyway, I need to wrap this up.

    In short, I think pushing this agenda is hurting the gay and whatever else is in the spectrum people just as much as anyone else, and it’s hurting kids too.

    And before we decide to ride this train because everyone else is doing it, we should ask if we want to be responsible for that kind of damage.

    Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

    My Own Devices

    / toseealife / Leave a comment

    I’d like to start this post with a song:

    I was left to my own devices.

    Many days fell away with nothing to show.

    … But if you close your eyes Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all? And if you close your eyes Does it almost feel like you’ve been here before? How am I gonna be an optimist about this? How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

    We were caught up and lost in all of our vices In your pose as the dust settled around us

    Eh-oh, eh-oh Eh-eh-oh, eh-oh Eh-eh-oh, eh-oh Eh-eh-oh, eh-oh

    Oh, where do we begin? The rubble or our sins?

    The rough draft of this post got erased somehow…I guess I shouldn’t leave things on this site…

    So starting over from scratch, what would be a good thing to write about?

    I know that my original point was how well this song describes us now. I mean us in the Western World.

    You know it’s funny how much depression runs rampant in our cultures, considering we have more benefits than we ever have.

    But that’s actually something we have in common with animals.

    A study was done on rats, where they were given everything they needed, all the time, never had to work for it.

    The rats developed depression, as well as other unhealthy habits, for rats…and for humans.

    But you might see the same thing with dogs. They’re bred for work, and when they’re kept as pets but not exercised properly or given any tasks to do, they will also get depressed.

    And so do humans.

    This life of staring at screens and working from home, and not getting outside and having to really work to solve problems that many of us have is making us depressed. We feel like we have no meaning, because there is no effort.

    We don’t have to be fighting for survival, to feel accomplished, any creative goal can help, but most especially if it’s necessary.

    I know each generation has its issues with how the younger one has it easier and isn’t disciplined.

    I do think there’s some truth in that, though. Even I feel less invested in homework assignments since I had to do them digitally, and it’s just a little too easy now. I know it doesn’t prove I’m smart now, if I succeed, it just proves I knew what the teacher wanted. Many times I could have done way more if left to my own devices.

    But the education system encourages me not to be creative, because my grade will suffer if I don’t meet the exact requirements of the assignment. Ever get in trouble for going over the page limit? Yeah…

    But anyway, my point is, we don’t have to really work. There are people who do, but the ones who are the face and voice of our culture don’t.

    And that is every race, gender, and whatever else.

    i think that’s part of the reason we spend so much time fighting each other, really. While history shows people would fight each other no matter what, it doesn’t help that we really have all the time in the world to do it now, instead of having to set aside time to go to war.

    All this has got me to thinking.

    About how few people under 30 even know history now, they really don’t know that much period. Not science, or religion, or how people work.

    You have your outliers, like my cousin, who like to do their own research, but they’re not the majority.

    Not that this is unusual, in pampered societies, it’s pretty normal, actually…and then they crumble.

    That’s what the song Pompeii is about, really. How when we’re left to ourselves, to follow our own whims, we get buried in our sins, until disaster strikes, and freezes us that way forever.

    And how can you be an optimist about this? When there is only one outcome ever to societies in moral decay like that.

     “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” (Judges 21:25, 17:6)

    Both those instance talk about someone doing something pretty stupid and wrong. And also it says:

    “Be not wise in your own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.” (Proverbs 3:7)

    We are wise in our own eyes now aren’t we?

    Like all this prattle about not getting married and staying single that I wrote about before. What is that but being wise in our own eyes.

    And we don’t seem to care what generations of humans before us said or thought. We’ve got it figued out now.

    I mean because with zero experience, zero study, and only the corrupt examples of current culture to go by, clearly we’re well informed on these issues.

    But the depression of this age has gone so far now, that a lot of kids don’t even care anymore if they’re right.

    Case in point, just yesterday, I was in YT comment thread with someone who said that truth doesn’t matter tot ehm.

    I was asking them why they bothered to watch the whole video of a debate if they didn’t care about the truth or what was right.

    I got no answer to that so far. I probably never will.

    At this point, admitting you hunger for a definitive truth is like a weakness to our relativistic young people–and some older people also.

    Of course the dismissive attitude of older people isn’t helping.

    I mean, who let the kids watch PBS and Disney Channel and Cartoon network? I noticed the bad messages of those channels when I was a kid. I’m not surprised the people who never questioned it have now swallowed it hook line and sinker.

    I mean, you take a whole show like Dora the Explorer, and you go on a quest through a fake map, looking fora fake item, learn a few Spanish words…and you call that exploring?

    Nothing against Dora personally, it’s an okay show for entertainment–but it’s not really educational. And it’s not even the worst one.

    It’s hard to blame the young, they’re just doing what they were taught to do, and by the time they realize it wasn’t right, they’ll have a lot of regrets.

    Still we have our own responsibility. And they do choose not to think, not to try, not to explore for real. And that’s on them.

    I bring all this up, but do I have a solution?

    I think the solution is the same as it’s always been.

    Person by person, the only thing to do is try to get people to understand the condition they’er in.

    Debate isn’t always the best way to do that, I admit. Though it works for some.

    I’ve had most people just duck out of arguments when they realized I was going to win because I was better informed than them, or just straight up insult me.

    But people can’t always be so quick to dismiss if you touch them on a personal level.

    We need both.

    But it’s hard, there’s so few people fighting these battles compared to the people who are casualties in them.

    But that’s how it usually goes. We preserve a remnant of the people. The majority of them don’t want to be helped.

    Some will literally say so, I have grandparents who would say that.

    We love our sin so much.

    We love being able to do what we wnat.

    And now it’s not a secret, you’d even hear it hailed from the streets and the theaters and political campaigns that we’d rather die doing what we’d prefer to do, right or wrong, then live submitting to God’s will.

    I saw this comment today, it was like this: I don’t believe in God because there’s nothing about same sex relationship in the bible and He’s not okay with them.

    First: There’s actually plenty about homosexuality in the Bible, Sodom and Gomorrah, the books of the Law, and Romans 1 all talk about it. (It’s called Sodomy in the old Testament)

    Second: I find that these types of objections completely misunderstand the nature of God’s existence.

    You see, if God exists does not depend on our personal preferences. He either does, or He doesn’t.

    If He does exist, He is the final say on what is right and wrong. You, as His creation, don’t get an opinion.

    Sure, against other humans, you do. But not against God. If God was in front of you and He told you, that would be the last word. And if you saw God, in His Glory, the last thing you would dream of doing is arguing with Him.

    See, the point of contention is not if God supports what we feel is right.

    If God is the Reality, then that is the reality we have to deal with. Even if He was the bloodthirsty God of many religions, cruel and spiteful, which would be bad for us. But it would be Reality, there’d be nothing we can do about it.

    Thankfully, God is not like that. But He’s still unchangeable. Your preferences donesn’t come into it.

    You may not like it….and God has never said we have to like doing what He says…but He does say we need to do it.

    As a Christian, I do find that the rewards of serving God is that if you do it long enough, you will start to like it, and then eventually, you won’t be able to do without it. But that’s sort of an insider bonus. The bible promises that one day everyone will have to submit to God’s will, whether they like it or not.

    It’s a bit like Gravity. Many of us wish we could fly, and though we can sort of, using machines, we have to borrow that from things God made that can defy gravity, we ourselves can’t defy gravity more than a few feet in the air before it yanks us back down.

    In the same way, we can’t defy God’s design for very far in our moral lives. Maybe if we had the “help” from the devil, we can go farther…gross.

    But that’s short lived, and on our own, the consequences of our actions will always pull us back down to the ground eventually.

    Christians believe that one day God will set us free form the law of Gravity, just as one day, we don’t need the Law of morality anymore…because we’ll become things that don’t need gravity, and things that don’t need law. We’ll have a new nature.

    Like a caterpillar turns into a butterfly.

    But until then, this is what we’ve got. We have to work with it.

    I’m not an optimist about Mans’ ability to fix this world. I think we’re as doomed as Pompeii.

    But I always knew that.

    But I still have hope. I hope in God’s ability to always save some people, as He promises to do. And in that hope, we keep trying to be a part of that.

    I think that’s about all for now.

    Until next time, stay honest–Natasha.

    Loving Ourselves

    / toseealife / Leave a comment

    Well my last post seems to have gone over well, so I trust I’m striking a chord with some people at least.

    I talked a lot about being arrogant in that post.

    What I don’t want to do is come off like I’m blaming Gen Z and Millennials for this.

    While I do blame them in some capacity for making their own decision to embrace all this insanity, I can’t say they’re particularly stupid or evil compared to the rest of humanity.

    It’s been pointed out by smarter people than me that the age of Moral Standards we’ve lived in for the last 200 years in the West, give or take a few decades or centuries depending on the country, was not a usual thing for humans. It’s the anomaly.

    From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Revolution era, it was a very unusual period in history compared to before, especially the pre-Christian era.

    Up till then, the general consensus from all people’s was that everyone else was corrupt, and only their culture stood out, and some of them didn’t even go that far.

    If you read what the Bible describes people doing, it would shock you how sick it was. Even now, we haven’t gone that far–as a whole–though some of us have.

    And God somehow still had hope for those people. It boggles my mind. But He was always looking for the Remnant.

    What big movement preachers tend to overlook, though they mean well, and I wish what they talked about was more frequent than it is–is that Positive Change, as well as Ethics being Preserved, is usually the work of small amounts of people.

    A few thousand out of many thousands, is usually the biggest amount of people who work together on it.

    It can be as few as 8, like the story of Noah (the legend is found in almost every culture in the world by the way, often with the same number of people surviving as the Bible says.)

    God has His eyes always on the few.

    Jesus even told us “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way to Life, and few will there be that find it.” (Matthew 7:14)

    Which seems harsh…but Jesus is just telling us how this works.

    The Masses of people are not concerned with morality that much, and if they ever are concerned about a few things in general, it was the phenomenon of the past thousand years to see that, it wasn’t common before.

    That’s why some historians have the idea that Man’s Consciousness is evolving. They look at our moving toward higher and higher ethical standards, and or at least more discussion about them, and they say we improved.

    But if you look at the bare facts of history, you’ll see each age has its own problems, and they repeat. We’re not smarter as a whole, it’s isl that those of us in each generation that do See Clearly, see a little more, because wise men learn form history and they build off of it, but foolish ones ignore it and they always have.

    That was part of the thought that’s been rolling around in my head for several months, which is just this:

    Things that people predict will happen if a country doesn’t change it’s course always do actually happen.

    And no one listens because no one ever has listened.

    You see, a lot of social commentators say that the problem is people just don’t realize what is happening.

    But that is not true.

    Sure there’s secrete scandals still, there probably always will be as long as mankind is in power.

    But the problems that are eating away at us are ones people predicted and called to attention for years, and decades, and even centuries.

    Just like in the Bible the Prophets told the Israelites what was happening. And the Israelites didn’t listen.

    It’s so hard for us to admit this, isn’t it? That we do what we do, knowing exactly what will happen, and we do it anyway.

    Example:

    If you got any person to answer you honestly on the subject of depicting violent in movies directed at kids as much as we do, they’d have to acknowledge that statistics do point to violence in entertainment having a bad effect on kids and their development.

    [See articles here: https://www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-And-TV-Violence-013.aspx#:~:text=Extensive%20viewing%20of%20television%20violence,to%20imitate%20what%20they%20see.

    https://www.bartleby.com/essay/effects-of-tv-violence-on-children-F3CEVXSZTC%5D

    But would they stop promoting that stuff by watching it, talking about it, reviewing it, and in many cases, showing it to their own kids.

    My father did, and he’d be one of the ones to say it was a problem.

    You see? We know…we just don’t care.

    That’s always the way.

    I’m glad that my faith was never in humanity to begin with, because living in a world where everyone’s corruption is exposed so much via internet would kill anyone’s faith in humanity.

    We hope for the best from people, but we cannot depend on it, unless we know them very well.

    But that’s not really mean to be a depressing thought. The Bible has said that for years. All these angsty pop culture hot take people are just agreeing with an old teaching, that’s all.

    It’s like G. K. Chesterton said, if we try to hit on anything original an good, we’ll only find it was Orthodoxy the entire time.

    Even the idea of Self Worth is Christian, though it’s been taken way, way out of it’s proper context, as always.

    I don’t know if there’s a better or worse thing to worship other than God. One could make the case for it, but it’s kind of a matter of opinion whether the worship of success and domination of a few hundred years ago is really better or worse than the worship of tribalism and self fulfillment is now. Often both at the same time.

    Humans are not better or worse than we’ve been in the past.

    But we are regressing out of the progress the last centuries brought us in at least realizing how messed up we were.

    People used to admit that there was a lot wrong with human nature, even if they didn’t see it in themselves.

    But now we’re really trying to deny that Human Nature is corrupt.

    Telling people to “Be themselves” no matter what.

    Yes,the message to be genuine is a good one.

    But predictably, since other messages were neglected, it’s become “be yourself even if that you is a terrible person.”

    Women will admit to be aggressive b—-s publicly now. Like ti’s something to brag about.

    “I’m so mean, yay!”

    Or “so evil” I hear that one a lot.

    “I have no soul” guys say that one too.

    “no heart.”

    Wow, so brave of all of you to admit to being inhuman. Hip hip hurrah.

    I think actual people who are jerks have always been proud of it, if they weren’t arrogant, they probably would be jerks.

    But at least it wasn’t approved of by the entire culture before, not for a long time, but we’re swinging back that direction.

    Let’s just remember that in Greek Culture, which is where we get a lot of our ideas, rape and kidnapping were normalized parts of their mythology that no one thought twice about. It’s possible to be completely blind to the obvious.

    Actually we’re blind to the obvious most often, because we just don’t want to see it.

    2 Timothy 3 says this about it:

    “But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: 2 For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, 4 traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power.”

    Even if we ignore the ones I didn’t emphasize, though they are still prevalent, look at how much those words sum up not just our complaints at a culture, but the things we actually praise.

    Romans 1 says that people, known such thins are wrong, not only practice them but approve of those who do.

    In 2000 years, nothing has changed.

    Ecclesiastes says there is “nothing new under the sun.”

    It’s been dawning on me that while I appeal to people’s desire for morality when I debate them, I am assuming they care at all.

    But I think less and less of them do.

    Aside from the SJW crap that they are programmed to react to, without understanding it at all, they really don’t care about higher thought.

    These things have no value to them. They live for entertainment and pleasure. For Self. And no one tells them this is unacceptable.

    It’s not a mystery why the Media promotes this. Selfish people buy more things, and care less if you exploit others to provide them with those things.

    But it’s sad how the schools and churches have promoted it so much also.

    They have us so much under their spell, the Overlords’, that we can be told this point blank, even by our own commercials on TV, and we simply don’t care. Just keep distracting me. The world is a dark place.

    Well in Quasimodo’s words to Frollo “Well now I see the only thing that’s dark about it is people like you!”

    See, the people who tell us to stay away form the world because of its evil are the same ones making it evil. They don’t want us to catch on, do they? Called Gaslighting.

    Because if we did catch on, we might stop them, and evil men fear having their deeds exposed, don’t they?

    They hate and fear those of us who know better and have pure hearts. And like Fagan from Oliver Twist, they want to make sure anyone who does is corrupted.

    A lot of anime has this theme also. What is Japan trying to tell us, huh? That people who are naturally more inclined to do good than the rest of us are feared the most.

    Don’t you fear someone who seems like a better person than you, sometimes? I know I have.

    I’ve mostly given up thinking of it that way, we’re all human. But I can do that because I have grace, the people who don’t are still afraid, we remind them of their own death the Bible says.

    People have accused Christians of that ever since they first appeared.

    I have to recognize as I write this that a lot of people may not even be ready to hear what I’m saying.

    They may not even be to where they see a piot ot all this.

    I can hope it resonates with someone who is ready, who needs it.

    Like “wow I’m not crazy!”

    My advice, if i’m qualified to give it, is if you have found yourself noticing all these problems, don’t waste time being chocked by them.

    Try to find that remnant of people who still believe in the old values, and stick with them.

    And reach who you can. There’s always some wheat among the tares of each generation, perhaps more than we realize, since many of us give up trying to reach them.

    It’s not our job to decide who can receive truth and salvation, we are supposed to shoot our shot, and let God choose how it lands.

    I don’t know what all our fates will be, and I ‘m not suppose dot know, but I know that we can’t control destiny, only how much we want to take an active role in it. There are still things that will happen no matter what, but there’s a lot we can change also. So we are still supposed to try.

    That said, for now I’m done, so until next time, stay honest–Natasha