Does anyone still blog anymore? About the time that I had stopped blogging, Facebook and Twitter were well on their way to eating up the internet. What horrible platforms they turned out to be. There was plenty of trolling in the blogs back in the day, for sure, but they were a far better avenue for substantive discussions than Facebook ever turned out to be. As for Twitter, it's pure evil. I never even bothered to sign up for Twitter, because I knew I wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to just throw some soul-killing snark at one high-profile blue-check personality after another. What a usesless time-suck that would be.
As I look over some of these old posts, it's astonishing to me how much this country and how much the world has changed since 2013. I could see trouble on the way according the the degree of polarization we had already reached, but I had stopped doing this well before the Trump and Woke movements gave us any real indications they were on the way. Mama Mia...
As for the blog itself, it's been so long that I've actually had to look at HTML that I find myself rather rusty with the adhoc commands I used to commonly make here. I tried to ditch this dark color scheme, which was truthfully already out of date by the late aughts, but with a white background it was too hard to read, considering the various color schemes I used for blockquotes in the past, so I'm sticking with a modified (updated) version of the simple dark template. I thought of dead-ending this blog and starting another, but hey, why the hubris? Who even knows if anyone will notice this?
At one time a couple of years ago, I actually did start another blog on Wordpress called The China Threat.
Spiritually speaking, as I said above, I never gave up the faith. If you are still following, I don't know if I can say to you that my views are all the same as they were before. Looking over some of these old posts, I still think I was right about a lot of things, but I also think I was wrong about a few things. I also could have been more generous in spirit, less isolated, and more respectful of other Catholic bloggers who'd been around doing this a lot longer than I had.
Politically speaking, well... I've often pointed out here that I was a business school graduate in the 1980's. I still hear some of my old classmates talking about their libertarian views, which they like to call Eisenhower Republicanism. They say "I'm socially liberal and fiscally conservative..." I'm not sure how much of a market there still is out there for that. Eisenhower's term ended 62 years ago. I felt like a fish out of water in that college because I was the exact opposite. I tended towards social conservatism and fiscal liberalism. I figured that a civilized society should have a social safety net, but that we'd be better off building a culture that dis-incentivized the kinds of behaviors that caused people to fall into it.
Anyway, one of the original purposes of the blog was to kind of carve out a space for pro-lifers in the Democratic Pary, which was once the natural home for a lot of Catholics in this country. That has clearly gone off the boards, if there was ever even really any chance at all, but something else has happened since 2013. I used to think of myself as a socially conservative Democrat, but in the wake of the 2016 election I found out that such a person is actually called a "populist," and that being a "populist" is a very bad thing, whether it is populism on the Right or on the Left. In fact, this "populism" might even be considered "fascist," or at least "fascist-adjacent." So, I'm inclined to stay rather quiet about politics these days, or at least be very careful in the way I speak about it.
In any case, I was exemplified into the Knight of Columbus today, so I figured it would be a good day to reappear, so to speak.
