quartering the quadrant...

pell vanila

The Catholics are in a tizzy. Some of their writers are rattled but won’t admit to it, thus they have become bitter. Take for example Michael Warren Davis who writes for various conservative outlets including Quadrant.

The conviction of Cardinal Pell by a jury, of sexual offences, has shaken the beliefs of people like Michael, not in the belief of the god of the big floods — where Noah and his family were the only survivors of the human species because the other humans were idolising the golden beef instead of Himself (god is a male with an ego the size of eternity) — but in the obvious bogan jury justice system. They can’t believe that their beloved Cardinal had it off with choirboys. Who knows. Catholics like Michael Warren Davis "can" accept that Cardinal Pell "did not do enough" to discover some his priests were fucking young boys and girls. Yes he should have known. But is unknowledge of a crime a crime in itself?

So Michael Warren Davis still writes about conservatism because all he knows is that the “other side” is full of shit — like collectivism, Keynesian economics, and secularism. Sure, Michael Warren Davis does not say shit because he is polite. This is why he writes in the American Conservative about William F Buckley (junior) in glorious, yet sometimes subconsciously sourpuss terms.

Buckley was a famous Catholic advisor to President Reagan. He was also a powerful media communicator male pushing his godly conservative ideals with vigour, in the days of Graham (Billy). In one of his book: God and Man at Yale (1951), Buckley argued that the Yale charter assigns oversight authority of the university to the alumni, and that because most alumni of Yale believed in God, Yale was failing to serve its "masters" by teaching course content like collectivism, Keynesian economics, and secularism, in a matter inconsistent with alumni beliefs. Buckley was a leading character in the American conservative movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

So Michael Warren Davis elegises Buckley with a caveat on the way conservatism went:

When Buckley died in 2008 (requiescat in pace), American conservatism bore virtually no resemblance to its old 1955 self. Some change is good, but often the pendulum swings entirely to the opposite extreme. A magazine that once declared that “the South must prevail” against desegregation now calls for states to “mothball” statues of Confederate war heroes.

Other changes were, perhaps, less than desirable from the get-go. This High Tory could do without the increasing defeatism on social issues and the pivot towards radical free-market economics. I prefer diplomacy to war; even more than diplomacy. I prefer keeping my nose out of other countries’ business. And I don’t appreciate being called “unpatriotic” for doing so.

Annoyed? Yes Michael Warren Davis sees his precious conservatism eroded into derision by a succession of liberal (pseudo-liberal shall we say) policies in the USA, now gone to Trump-la-la-land. Back in August 2016 Michael told us:

Trump has been known to threaten lawsuits over anything approaching defamation, so I won’t give my own opinion here. I won’t, that is, say whether he’s sinking into senility or just turning into a politically correct putz. That’s entirely up to you, dear reader. But whatever conclusion you arrive at, it might be best to keep your opinion to yourself. Unless, that is, you have a few million dollars to chuck at a libel suit, or are willing to risk making fun of a demented old man.

The note below his article told us: "Michael Warren Davis is in the US, not quite knowing whether to be bemused or appalled by the presidential choice confronting American voters"…

Yes Michael Warren Davis is a Yank, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, who came to Sydney University to do his studies in English and of course became more Pommy than the Aussie Poms trying to flee the silly royal family, to become "the Australian Monarchist League’s university liaison". He is now the assistant editor to the US edition of the Catholic Herald.

We are told by this publication that G.K. Chesterton, the great essayist and creator of the fictional detective Father Brown, described the Catholic Herald as the only newspaper he trusted. (CH was a newspaper for the first 126 years of its existence, before becoming a magazine in 2014).

Holy Molly.

But is is with sadness that Michael saw the sacking of Professor Barry Spurr, as described in the Quadrant…

What’s the difference between the two humorists? One’s publicly committed to the radical ideological orthodoxy, and the other isn’t. As Hobbes wrote in Leviathan, “The passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the infirmity of others.” What you and I can see is that Hobbes has no sense of humour. But, sadly, neither does the far Left. For them, so long as you’re on the books as a leftist, you can get your yucks however you like. Sadly Professor Spurr was too discreet about his personal life. The New Matilda’s hacker put an end to that.

Nor can we fail to return again and again to the fact that this Professor Barry Spurr isn’t just a straw man, a hollow man. He’s a flesh-and-blood human being. That’s who Socialist Alternative and their ally, New South Wales Greens candidate for Newtown Jenny Leong, burned in effigy. Professor Barry Spurr is one of the finest Eliot scholars, frankly, ever. He’s contributed more to the field than perhaps any single intellectual. He’s one of the last professors in any major university still committed to the formal technique of poetry (“poetics”, as it were). And then there are the more nostalgic aspects: he was the last lecturer in Australia to cease wearing academic robes during class. He was a close friend and correspondent of the late Mrs Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow.

The New Matilda tells us that:

Professor Spurr [was] based at the University of Sydney, and served as a consultant on the Abbott Government's review of the National School Curriculum.

This would be enough to sack the guy… NM continues:

The emails were sent to friends and colleagues at the University of Sydney over a two year period, from September 2012 to late 2014.

Professor Spurr has maintained that the emails were a 'whimsical linguistic game', and that they were largely restricted to a bit of 'oneupmanship' between himself and an old friend.

https://newmatilda.com/2014/10/19/transcripts-partial-works-professor-barry-spurr-poet-racist-misogynist/

These emails are not to be read on the news before 22:30 on the tele. They do express a colourful language about risqué situations that would make Aphra Behn, the 17th century female writer of bawdy stories, blush. The point was that did Barry Spurr believe what he wrote or was it low grade pissant comedic crap? Few believed that it was a oneupmanship correspondence as it was going down the sewers at lightning speed, and most people thought this was Barry Spurr's position on topics. Either way, it exuded bad taste, bad opinions and had an injurious possibility towards females and disabled.

So, Michael Warren Davis is at sea, still pushing what he believes in, which, on proper scientific analysis, is senseless and infantile like fairies and Father Xmas.

The idea of scientific knowledge is hard work. Believing the idea of god is a piece of cake, though on the recount, only one third of the human inhabitants on this planet believe in monotheism. About one third prays to the gods, the other third knows this godly bullshit is often used as a foil to sanitise colonialism and engender their misery.

Gus Leonisky
Atheistic generalissimo

By Gus Leonisky at 7 Mar 2019 - 1:31pm
Gus Leonisky's blog
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godly inspiration to produce a world that’s never existed...

A Catholic designer has spoken about how God and his faith inform his work. As a visual set designer at Pixar Animation Studios, Philip Metschan helped create the environment of “Incredibles 2,” most notably, the superhero Parr family’s new home.

Metschan told CNA that one of his favorite parts of being an environment builder is getting to take inspiration from the real world, filtering it through his own experience “to produce a world that’s never existed – fantastic things that no one has ever seen before.”

“I am definitely someone who likes to be out in nature and out in the world and experiencing it, because I think there are strong narratives that are created just from the existence of these places,” he said, adding that for him it is not possible to separate creation from the Creator.

switching from opium to ecstasy...

Die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes
----------------
Karl Marx:
... Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. . .

http://yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/9258#comment-12173

—————————————
Gus:

Like bored drug addicts, the obsessed evangelicals need to increase the dose of religious beliefs. Believing in god is not enough anymore. Hell and heaven aren’t catchy enough. The obsessed evangelicals need an improved intellectualisation of their faith, like graduating from an ordinary plastic looking glass to a golden-framed mirror to look at their arsehole.

The faith has to be reinforced with strange antics and pseudo-psychologidiotistical language like “convergenge”, used by Theillard de Chardin back in the days of quantum mechanics emergence to the latest mathematical word “exponential” as used by the modern preachers who would like to get rid of their body to free their soul…

It’s perverse. May I point out to these idiots that their soul, their spirit, their words, their mind, their brainfarts only come to life because of the construct of their evolved (I wish) brain that creates a memory of the past, to give them an illusion of the future, while modifying by interactions in the present. No god, no soul.

The noted church planter asked God to “please, kill my flesh, kill anything of Francis Chan,” adding that “I want Francis Chan crucified.”

And the crowd of out-of-their-mind faith addicts applauded…

“Say bad stuff about me. I don’t like Francis, either. OK? I want him crucified. I really want Christ to live through me.”

And the crowd of faith addicts applauded this crap some more — as if these crazy words HAD TO BE added to the gospel pronto…

The occasion was a brainfart meeting called “Exponential 2019”

Join thousands of leaders for inspiration, encouragement and equipping at Exponential 2019 in Orlando, FL. The conference features over 200 speakers, 200 workshops, 20 pre-conference intensives, and 75+ networks and denominations.

Wow! And Christ was alone preaching to a few Jews in the desert, in sandals… The spectacle has come a long way… Because all this is spectacle, distractions, a change of loony landscape from the traditional churches to the more specialised ones, as we are told that:

However, Cooperman points out that attrition was most substantial among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, who have declined in absolute numbers and as a share of the population since 2007 … “Not all religions or even Christian traditions declined so markedly,” he said. “The number of evangelical Protestants dipped only slightly as a share of the population, by 1 percentage point, and actually increased in raw numbers.”

https://exponential.org/is-it-the-big-drop-or-is-the-u-s-church-becoming...

But the dosage of opium is still not enough. More ecstatic loonitude needs to be added and it’s yours for only US$49.95…

The Mobilization Flywheel

The Mobilization Flywheel provides a fresh framework for church leaders to create a culture of Biblical mobilization. As one of the core resources for the 2019 theme Made for More, The Mobilization Flywheel introduces Exponential’s newest framework to help churches pursue Level 4 Reproduction and Level 5 Multiplication.

Fuck!... More maths! What would Jesus think of all this systemic trickery — and of taking ecstasy instead of opium? Chase those merchants of faiths out of his temple of doom?

Gus is a mad atheist.

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By Gus Leonisky at 8 Mar 2019 - 5:37am
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playing with choirboys...

Cardinal George Pell has been give a maximum six-year jail sentence after being convicted of sexually abusing two boys in Australia.

The former Vatican treasurer is the most senior Catholic figure ever to be found guilty of sexual offences against children.

Pell abused the choir boys in Melbourne in 1996, a jury ruled last year.

The cardinal, 77, maintains his innocence and is appealing against his convictions.

This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.

You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App.You can also follow @BBCBreaking on Twitter to get the latest alerts.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47549297

By Gus Leonisky at 13 Mar 2019 - 10:15am
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about the poet of bunyah...

By MICHAEL WARREN DAVIS

I like to say that I worked with Les Murray at Australia’s Quadrant magazine. He was literary editor; I was an editorial assistant to John O’Sullivan. In fact, I never interacted with him once. You see, Murray rarely left his hometown of Bunyah, a bush borough with a population of about 150. He didn’t own a computer—he typed all his proofs on a typewriter—and we were only allowed to call him on the phone in emergencies.

So writers would mail their short stories and poems to the office in Sydney, and we’d ship them to Bunyah in a big parcel once a month. Those he chose for publication were returned to the office. The rest he sent off in their their self-addressed, stamped envelopes. The rejected manuscripts would return to their writers with the margins covered in suggestions and encouragements from the man The Atlantic called “the greatest poet alive.” Quite the consolation prize.

To me, that was all part of the irresistible charm of Les Murray. The morons at the Nobel Committee excepted, nobody would disagree with The Atlantic’s descriptor—certainly not since the death of Geoffrey Hill in 2016. And yet Murray wasn’t a windswept, romantic figure. He wasn’t a tweedy professorial type or a cosmopolitan in a dark turtleneck. He was a proud bumpkin and an avowed Luddite with bad teeth and a penchant for ugly sweaters. He suffered from depression, the sexiest of mental illnesses; he was also probably autistic, which is more prosaic. Never has such an extraordinary soul carried such an ordinary corpse, as Marcus might have said.

It wasn’t an affectation, either. Since T.S. Eliot, English-language poetry has been almost totally inaccessible. Hill, a disciple of Eliot, defended the difficulty of modern poetry, telling the Paris Review: “We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other.” Nevertheless, this difficulty has made poetry an elite (perhaps an elitist) hobby.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/on-the-passing-of-les-m...

...

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

The Meaning Of Existence (extract) - Poem by Les Murray

The "morons" of the Nobel Prize voted for ...

Bob Dylan won this year’s Nobel Prize, ‘for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.’ Which basically tells you everything you need to know about the 21st century. Where the 20th century gave us the lilting romanticism of Yeats, the haunting modernity of Eliot, and the wintry stoicism of Bunin, we answered with… Dylan: a whinging, narcissistic hippie who sounds always to be in the throes of a minor stroke.

les murray was no voltaire...

By Rod Dreher

The other day I was in Sydney, thinking about this Alan Jacobs post about the recently deceased Australian poet Les Murray, and this 2015 essay by Jacobs about Les Murray. In it, Jacobs wrote:

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has argued that France produces, from time to time, a peculiar kind of figure whom he calls the “consecrated heretic.” Voltaire is one example; Rousseau another; Sartre a third. The consecrated heretic is an artist or intellectual who plants his feet firmly in the riverbed and faces the social current upstream, refusing to be carried along by it. He mocks conventional wisdom; he scandalizes ordinary people by what he believes, what he says, how he acts. Of course, many people do this, but only a tiny handful are celebrated for it, are seen as indispensable threads in the social fabric. The passionate earnestness of these few is acknowledged; they are clearly dedicated in their own perverse way to the common good. Eventually the nation’s major institutions seek to bestow high honors on such heretics, who of course turn aside disdainfully, which makes them treasured all the more. Les Murray is the chief consecrated heretic of Australia.

One thing that made Les Murray a heretic in Australia is that he was a convert to Catholicism, a real believer who dedicated most of his books “To the glory of God.”

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/les-murray-is-australia/

Gus:

BULLSHIT ! Les Murray was no Voltaire. Les Murray was a reactionary, not a revolutionary (read above comment). He was skilled with words, rich in emotions and poor in intellectual foresight. His religious bent killed his status of "consecrated heretic." He was no Voltaire. Even that bastard Rouseau, and Sartre stirred the present to give an ideal of the future — as difficult these ideals were away from the comfort of delusions. Les Murray was just a fat conservative who wallowed in the dying delusive ideas of the past with a skill at transcribing the emotional moment. This is fair enough. But Voltaire? Hell no...

With Les Murray we end up with a Liberal (CONservative) government alla Scummo, who claims "god bless Australia" to which Gus says "fuck you". The way you, Scummo, have treated people stink of hypocrisy and have sold so many lies as Gospel with a silly grin on your face, you should recall an election forthwith and apologise to the Australian people...

But you won't. Les Murray is dead. And Scummo will screw the poor...

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By Gus Leonisky at 21 May 2019 - 8:57am
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"demo" bullshit from rod and les...

Rod Dreher offers us more views on "saint" Les Murray...

I read from The Collected Poems of Les Murray on my long flight home today — a gift from one of my new Australian friends. This poem really hit me hard. Murray was terribly bullied in his teenage years. Kids taunted him by making fun of his weight. I was bullied too, though surely not as bad as Murray was. Anyway, Murray articulated in this poem, “Demo,” why I have never, ever wanted to join a demonstration, even when I agree with the cause.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/against-the-mob-les-murray/

Gus:

A bit rich from Rod Dreher who has been harping about people joining his "Benedict" solution for a while now... But though on some occasions I would agree with not joining a "mob", some changes have happened BECAUSE mobs have protested in the streets, starting with the US Revolution, the French Revolution and the save the Rabbitohs (the South Sydney football team) from annihilation by a system of criteria devised by our Uncle Rupe which protected some of his own "super-league" team from becoming extinct. There were 30,000 people at first "demo" at Sydney Town Hall more than 50,000 at a second "demo", plus a famous court case lost by Uncle Rupe (Rupert Murdoch) on appeal. Rabbits one—Uncle Rupe nil...The bias from Murdoch on this occasion was huge, akin to that shown about the last election of Scummo. Other "demos" saved a few trees and a river —the Franklin — while a few other "demos" eventually helped end the carnage in Vietnam...

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By Gus Leonisky at 24 May 2019 - 12:56am
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