UK’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigned earlier this week after a revolt from within the conservative party. I thought it might be a good idea to read something about the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, because America and the UK have a “special relationship”. We certainly can’t depend on Canada for anything. Anyway, in this post, we’re going to see what the new UK PM is like.
Nile Gardiner writes about her in Fox News: (H/T Carla)
Truss, who previously served as Foreign Secretary and International Trade Secretary, succeeds Boris Johnson, who resigned as Prime Minister following a rebellion among Conservative Members of Parliament. She faces immense challenges, from soaring inflation and a large-scale energy crisis, to the continuing war in Ukraine and growing aggression from the enemies of the free world, including Russia, China and Iran.
Truss is the right leader for Britain at this moment. She models herself on Thatcher’s leadership and is a self-described “Thatcherite,” who believes in cutting taxes, reducing government spending, and shrinking the size of the state.
If she is another Thatcher, then she will be more than enough to face these challengers. And so far, so good:
A born-again Brexiteer (after originally opposing Brexit in the 2016 referendum), she is a strong defender of British national sovereignty and self-determination, and has resolved to stand up to the European Union on vital areas of British national interest, including amending the hugely flawed Northern Ireland Protocol.
Her early actions are promising:
Truss is already off to a flying start, appointing a strongly conservative cabinet, many of whom are on the right of the Conservative Party. It includes rising stars Suella Braverman as the new Home Secretary in charge of securing Britain’s borders and ending illegal migration from France, as well as Kemi Badenoch in the position of International Trade Secretary, overseeing Britain’s drive to secure a trade deal with the United States. Both Braverman and Badenoch have also been at the forefront of Britain’s culture wars, and key figures in combating the left’s nefarious “woke” agenda.
In addition, leading free-marketeers Kwasi Kwarteng and Jacob Rees-Mogg have been appointed to the key positions of Chancellor of the Exchequer and Business Secretary respectively, with vital roles at a time when Britain’s economy is under great duress. Ben Wallace, who has been an outstanding Defence Secretary, remains in his post, and will be a major thorn in the side of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s barbaric efforts to invade Ukraine.
[…]Encouragingly, she has called for an aspiration-based society, one that champions individual freedom over government handouts, and celebrates the free market instead of tying its hands.
Jacob Rees-Mogg is my favorite UK MP, so I’m glad to see him getting promoted. Keep an eye on the UK. It looks like they could be more free, prosperous and secure than they have been.
I’m always very surprised when people accuse religious people of “hate” merely for disagreeing with LGBT activism. If anything, it seems to me like the LGBT activists hate the religious people. Today’s post is interesting because you might have thought that only Christians ever got attacked by the LGBT activists. But actually, Orthodox Jews get attacked, too.
This week, New York’s Yeshiva University — an Orthodox Jewish university — filed an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court after a state supreme court judge ordered the school to recognize an LGBT student group in violation of its religious beliefs regarding sexual morality. Yeshiva has asked for a stay of the lower court decision’s ruling pending their appeal. In the alternative, it has asked for a petition for writ of certiorari so the high court can order briefing and arguments and consider the full case on its merits.
Yeshiva maintains that the “message of Torah on [the LGBT] issue is nuanced, both accepting each individual with love and affirming its timeless prescriptions.” Accordingly, although Yeshiva admits LGBT students, as it is “wholly committed to and guided by Halacha and Torah values,” it cannot lend its “own name or seal of approval” to clubs that appear “[in]consistent with [its] Torah values.”
I thought the part in bold was interesting:
The plaintiffs argued that Yeshiva had violated the law by refusing to recognize their student group, admitting that in the creation of the group, they sought to alter Yeshiva’s religious environment. Yeshiva countered that it was a “religious corporation incorporated under the education law” as defined in section 8-102 of the human rights law, making it exempt. YU Pride disagreed, and State Supreme Court Justice Lynn Kotler sided with the student group.
I looked up Lynn Kotler and she’s a Democrat, which is hardly surprising.
So you can see that the LGBT students were the aggressors. They wanted to change the university’s religious traditions, even though they could have gone to any of the other universities in the country.
Yeshiva’s motto — “Torah Umadda” — reflects its core mission: the pursuit of rigorous religious and secular studies. All students engage in high-level study of Hebrew scripture, the Talmud, and the vast corpus of Jewish texts. The academic calendar is in harmony with the Jewish calendar, observing the Sabbath and all Jewish holy days. The campuses are sex-segregated in accordance with Jewish law, the food offered is strictly kosher, doorways have mezuzot affixed, and each student has a mashgiach ruchani (spiritual advisor).
This reminds me of the Canadian case where a Christian university wanted to have standards for sexual behavior. The university required students to abstain from sexuality activity of any kind before marriage.
The Ontario Court of Appeal ruled Wednesday that a Christian University can be denied accreditation because of its opposition to homosexuality.
[…]At specific issue is the university’s community covenant, which requires students and faculty to “voluntarily abstain” from “sexual intimacy that violates the sacredness of marriage between a man and a woman.”
“The university’s mission, core values, curriculum and community life are formed by a firm commitment to the person and work of Jesus Christ as declared in the Bible,” reads the covenant.
“The community covenant is a solemn pledge in which members place themselves under obligations on the part of the institution to its members, the members to the institution, and the members to one another.”
I think we should have views about LGBT activists that take into account their actions against people who take the Bible seriously. If you try to use the law to force your beliefs on me, that doesn’t seem neutral. No one is forcing students to attend these religious universities. But the LGBT activists are forcing these universities to go against the Bible. Which one is guilty of hate? Seems to me that forcing someone to go against their conscience is hateful.
Can a person be postmodern and a Christian? Not for long
Famous analytical philosopher John Searle has written a book “Mind, Language And Society: Philosophy In The Real World”, explaining what’s factually wrong with postmodernism. In the introduction, he explains what postmodernism is, and what motivates people to accept postmodernism.
He writes:
[…][W]hen we act or think or talk in the following sorts of ways we take a lot for granted: when we hammer a nail, or order a takeout meal from a restaurant, or conduct a lab experiment, or wonder where to go on vacation, we take the following for granted: there exists a real world that is totally independent of human beings and of what they think or say about it, and statements about objects and states of affairs in that world are true or false depending on whether things in the world really are the way we say they are. So, for example, if in pondering my vacation plans I wonder whether Greece is hotter in the summer than Italy, I simply take it for granted that there exists a real world containing places like Greece and Italy and that they have various temperatures. Furthermore, if I read in a travel book that the average summer temperature in Greece is hotter than in Italy, I know that what the book says will be true if and only if it really is hotter on average in the summer in Greece than in Italy. This is because I take it for granted that such statements are true only if there is something independent of the statement in virtue of which, or because of which, it is true.
[…]These two Background presuppositions have long histories and various famous names. The first, that there is a real world existing independently of us, I like to call “external realism.” “Realism,” because it asserts the existence of the real world, and “external” to distinguish it from other sorts of realism-for example, realism about mathematical objects (mathematical realism) or realism about ethical facts (ethical realism). The second view, that a statement is true if things in the world are the way the statement says they are, and false otherwise, is called “the correspondence theory of truth.” This theory comes in a lot of different versions, but the basic idea is that statements are true if they correspond to, or describe, or fit, how things really are in the world, and false if they do not.
The “correspondence theory of truth” is the view of truth assumed in books of the Bible whose genre is such that that they were intended by the authors to be taken literally, (with allowances for symbolism, figures of speech, metaphors, hyperbole, etc.).
But what about the postmodernists, who seek to deny the objectivity of external reality?
More Searle:
Thinkers who wish to deny the correspondence theory of truth or the referential theory of thought and language typically find it embarrassing to have to concede external realism. Often they would rather not talk about it at all, or they have some more or less subtle reason for rejecting it. In fact, very few thinkers come right out and say that there is no such thing as a real world existing absolutely, objectively, and totally independently of us. Some do. Some come right out and say that the so-called real world is a “social construct.”
What is behind the denial of objective reality, and statements about external reality that are warranted by evidence?
It is not easy to get a fix on what drives contemporary antirealism, but if we had to pick out a thread that runs through the wide variety of arguments, it would be what is sometimes called “perspectivism.” Perspectivism is the idea that our knowledge of reality is never “unmediated,” that it is always mediated by a point of view, by a particular set of predilections, or, worse yet by sinister political motives, such as an allegiance to a political group or ideology. And because we can never have unmediated knowledge of the world, then perhaps there is no real world, or perhaps it is useless to even talk about it, or perhaps it is not even interesting.
Searle is going to refute anti-realism in the rest of the book, but here is his guess at what is motivating the anti-realists:
I have to confess, however, that I think there is a much deeper reason for the persistent appeal of all forms of antirealism, and this has become obvious in the twentieth century: it satisfies a basic urge to power. It just seems too disgusting, somehow, that we should have to be at the mercy of the “real world.” It seems too awful that our representations should have to be answerable to anything but us. This is why people who hold contemporary versions of antirealism and reject the correspondence theory of truth typically sneer at the opposing view.
[…]I don’t think it is the argument that is actually driving the impulse to deny realism. I think that as a matter of contemporary cultural and intellectual history, the attacks on realism are not driven by arguments, because the arguments are more or less obviously feeble, for reasons I will explain in detail in a moment. Rather, as I suggested earlier, the motivation for denying realism is a kind of will to power, and it manifests itself in a number of ways. In universities, most notably in various humanities disciplines, it is assumed that, if there is no real world, then science is on the same footing as the humanities. They both deal with social constructs, not with independent realities. From this assumption, forms of postmodernism, deconstruction, and so on, are easily developed, having been completely turned loose from the tiresome moorings and constraints of having to confront the real world. If the real world is just an invention-a social construct designed to oppress the marginalized elements of society-then let’s get rid of the real world and construct the world we want. That, I think, is the real driving psychological force behind antirealism at the end of the twentieth century.
Now, I’ll go one step further than Searle.
People, from the Fall, have had the desire to step into the place of God. It’s true that we creatures exist in a universe created and designed by God. But, there is a way to work around the fact that God made the universe and the laws that the universe runs on, including logic, mathematics and natural laws. And that way is to deny logic, mathematics and natural laws. Postmodernists simply deny that there is any way to construct rational arguments and support the premises with evidence from the real world. That way, they imagine, they are free to escape a God-designed world, including a God-designed specification for how they ought to live. The postmoderns deny the reliable methods of knowing about the God-created reality because logic and evidence can be used to point to God’s existence, God’s character, and God’s actions in history.
And that’s why there is this effort to make reality “optional” and perspectival. Everyone can be their own God, and escape any accountability to the real God – the God who is easily discovered through the use of logic and evidence. I believe that this is also behind the rise of atheists, who feign allegiance to logic and science, but then express “skepticism” about the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, objective morality, the minimal facts concerning the historical Jesus, and other undeniables.
WINTERY KNIGHT 