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On Tuesdays episode of The Ben Shapiro Show, the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about a New York Times article that raises the issue of self-coupling. Video and partial transcript below:

This is why the culture wars matter so much I present to you, as Exhibit A in the pitch that the Left is making, this article from yesterday in The New York Times by an associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College, Bradley Onishi, [who asks], Could I be my own soulmate?

Are you your own soulmate? The article describes Emma Watson, the actress, and Lizzo, the rapper and flautist, who are both saying that they are their own One that they are self-coupling. This religion, Professor Onishi, he says:

For most people, the idea of self-coupling may be jarring, but a closer look might reveal it to be more of an end point of a trend. Marriage rates have been declining steadily since the 1970s. Many of us are dating more, but somehow going on fewer dates. Sex is safer and less burdened with shame than in the past, and seemingly more available, but were having less of it than we were a generation ago. And despite all these mixed signals, most of us are still looking for The One

According to Stephanie Coontz, the author of the 2005 book Marriage: A History, finding The One used to be about completion. In the 19th century, the rise of the market economy divided the sexes men into the world of bread-winning work and women into that of unpaid domestic labor. When these two spheres were brought together in marriage, Ms. Coontz wrote, they produced a perfect well-rounded hole.

Thats ignoring the several thousand years before that, where marriage was actually a pretty congenial relationship.

This approach to partnership, wherein two members of opposite sex complete each other, was essentially religious in origin complementarianism, for the theologians out there a well-known example being the biblical adage that two shall become one. It also recalls Platos Symposium one of the earliest purveyors of the soul mate myth where the comic poet Aristophanes explains that humans were once united in pairs, but were then split into unhappy halves by Zeus

The ideal of completion hearkens to a time when women were economically and socially dependent on men and marriage was reserved for heterosexual couples. Today, instead of a life-defining relationship, many of us now see partnership as one part of a puzzle that includes a career (which often demands geographic mobility), family, a social life, personal wellness, volunteer work and creative or recreational outlets. A relationship is not the foundation of selfhood, but only a piece.

The redefinition of marriage into one choice among many, just something that you do if you feel like it the problem is that that may work for a very, I would say very, very limited coterie of people who read The New York Times. It does not work broadly across the United States. But our cultural institutions are all nationalized: Hollywood is nationalized, Netflix is nationalized, The New York Times is nationalized, Facebook is nationalized, and that means that the social bleed over effect, the social trickle-down effect of leftist social policy, which, by the way, is not even engaged in by people at the upper echelons in places like New York and California.

One of the peculiar things youll find about Hollywood is the same people who are routinely preaching the virtues of bleeding-edge social leftism get rid of marriage, have any relationship you want, open marriages, polyamory those same people tend to get married at higher rates than a lot of people who are actually not living in those areas. They tend not to have kids out of wedlock, particularly a lot, and if they do have kids out of wedlock, they can afford it because theyre very wealthy. Those social messages do not apply equally to everyone.

In other words, just as with every other policy in human life, not all policies affect everybody equally. The fact that folks on the Left seem to think that policies undertaken by liberal elites over at The New York Times or in Hollywood, that those policies affect people in downtrodden economic areas the same way that they do in upper/elite establishments that discarded religion as a social fabric decades ago, just demonstrates a tremendous level of ignorance. Trying to re-shift these definitions of fundamental institutions that is indeed creating a phenomenon in which the United States is dividing. These [three] phenomena income inequality rising, the changes in the economy, and the bleed over of social liberalism this is leading to a toxic brew.

Now, there are people on the Right and the Left who think that the way to fix this is to fix the economic side. The way were gonna do this with redistributionism! Youve got Andrew Yang proposing universal basic income on the Democratic side, or you have people like as Ive said Tucker Carlson talking about regulating out of existence self-driving cars, stopping economic progress, limiting trade, bringing back all these jobs to manufacturing areas, as though thats ever really going to happen. I have serious doubts about that, considering the technology has basically put a lot of these jobs out of commission.

Then, there is the stuff that is actually in the control of the people who are living today, and that is making the next right decision. The fact is that there are certain factors in your life that are fundamentally going to guarantee [that you] have a better shot at life finishing high school, not having kids out of wedlock, getting married. These things actually change your life in ways for the better, and the fact that our culture is so focused in on a sort of Marxist materialism, in which if we solve your economic circumstance, that this will solve all of your other problems this is not right.

Solving the problem of making right and moral decisions that better your life that is how your life gets better. That means taking seriously the fundamental social institutions that [have] been broken by the Left since the 1960s, focusing on restoring those because those are things you can do. Not things that you have to wait for some government savior to do and, by the way, those government saviors aint showing up.

Income inequality is breaking out in major blue cities, where theyve gotten rid of the social institutions and where the ladder to success doesnt exist even for the underclass in those cities themselves. Forget about red areas versus blue areas in the cities themselves. You need a restoration of personal responsibility in order to lead to a restoration of the ladder to success that does exist for people who make the best possible decision.

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SHAPIRO: 'Self-Coupling': The Newest Frontier On The Culture War - The Daily Wire

War (noun) 1. a state of open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations

2. a state of hostility, conflict, or antagonism Merriam-Webster Dictionary

I give up. I surrender. Better yet, can we just declare a truce in the so-called War on Christmas?

Yes, its back, like that ugly Christmas sweater Uncle Jack always wears to the party. Like the 24-hour Christmas movie marathon thats been running on the Hallmark TV channel since July 5th. Like the Christmas decorations that show up on the shelves at the local CVS the day after Halloween. I hope and pray every December that this yearly chapter in the culture wars might just fade away, but no such luck.

This war stubbornly and annoyingly returns every December.

Politicians from the President on down declare that the war is on, that we fight because some want to threaten treasured holiday traditions. We cant say Merry Christmas anymore! We cant sing Christmas carols in school anymore! We cant go to Macys or JC Penney for a Christmas sale anymore because they now have the gall call it a holiday sale! We go to Starbucks and their annual holiday cup says Merry Coffee! We have to call the Christmas parade the Holiday parade!?

Forgive me for not getting all huffed and puffed up about this attack on Christmas. I mean, I kind of know Christmas, and really well. I have been in the business of Christmas, of preaching Christmas and teaching Christmas and declaring Christmas for more than 30 years as a local church pastor. Id like to think that if there was an actual war on the sacred traditions of my faith or on the birth story we so love or the hymns we so enjoy singing in December: Id know it.

In three-plus decades, not once have my religious freedoms around Christmas been threatened or taken away, not for me, not for my church, not for one person of my faith that I know. Not once have folks complained to me that they cant put a candle in the window or sing Silent Night or set up a home nativity set or light Advent candles or serve the poor on behalf of a poor little boy born some 2,000 years ago.

Yet still the war rages on in places like Charleston, West Va. The mayor of that city recently decided to rename the Christmas Parade down there the Holiday Parade, in her words, to make it more inclusive and reflective of the religious diversity in that place. Not everyone celebrates Christmas as a holy day or even a holiday, right? Is it really such a bad thing to recognize this truth?

Apparently, yes, at least according to the aggrieved and angry and rage-filled folks who overwhelmed the mayors office with nasty phone calls and filled up her Facebook page with diatribes and threats of recall, who so overwhelmed her with fierce opposition that she relented and went back to the old name for the parade.

As one group of red-hot righteous state senators wrote in a press release protesting the mayors decision, Radical liberals in Charleston want to eliminate Christ from our Capitol Citys annual Christmas Parade [they] renamed the longtime Christmas Parade to Winter Parade and banned the Freedom of Religion for parade participants in an outright assault on our Constitution. We are calling on Mayor Goodwin and her liberal allies to end this madness and allow our citizens to freely and fully exercise their Freedom of Religion with a CHRISTMAS PARADE.

Wow. Its hard to know how to respond to such a harsh screed. I can see why the Mayor finally gave up and surrendered.

Heres the irony of this whole war. Its being waged on behalf of one who is called the prince of peace by those who embrace that religious tradition. One whose birth was heralded by a choir of angels, who sung for all to hear, of Peace on earth and goodwill to all people. The war is being fought in the name of one, whom some believe, came not for the kings or the politicians or the power brokers but instead to love the least of these: the poor and the lonely and the war torn and the orphans and the widows and the lost.

If you think about it, a war on Christmas is actually against everything Christmas is supposed to mean. So, my advice: ignore the war. Its more heat than flame, more smoke than fire, and more bluster than truth.

A war? No. But peace? Yes.

I surrender.

The Rev. John F. Hudson is senior pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn (pilgrimsherborn.org). If you have a word or idea youd like defined in a future column or have comments, please send them to pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org or in care of the Dover-Sherborn Press (Dover-Sherborn@wickedlocal.com).

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Spiritually Speaking: Surrender to peace in this war on Christmas - Wicked Local Sharon

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese is sharply critical of Facebook for failing to remove false material, in a speech on democracy in which he condemns the echo chambers created by social media.

Albanese recounts his own recent experience to highlight Facebooks intransigence, saying when he complained about an image altered from his page they shrugged, saying it wasnt a breach of community guidelines.

The speech, Albaneses third vision statement, was released ahead of its Saturday delivery.

Condemning online platforms for being unwilling to filter out false information, he rejects the arguments they use.

[Facebook chief executive] Mark Zuckerberg says he thinks people should be able to see what politicians are saying. But what happens when it turns out that what politicians are saying isnt real at all?

"Facebook usually wont do anything at all. That happened to me just last week, when self-described mens rights activist Leith Erikson doctored a social media image from my Facebook page.

"What was originally a graphic supporting Australians right to protest became a graphic pushing Mr Eriksons loopy campaign against the Family Court.

But Facebook was dismissive when the matter was raised.

This is a far-right candidate, creating a fake graphic fraudulently purporting to be from a progressive party, and Facebook sees no issue. Well, I do.

"And it begs the question: if this doesnt breach community standards, then what does?

"And perhaps more importantly why do Facebooks laws of the jungle trump Australias laws of the land?

"What then happens when platforms become so complacent with misinformation that they become unable to filter it out?

In his address Albanese declares war on the culture wars, calls for more constructive national conversations about the big issues such as climate change, and urges a toning down of the anger and outrage in public debate.

This increased volume of anger and misinformation is robbing our political debates of civility and making the publics poor opinion of our political system much, much worse.

"Its something we cant afford. Surveys are finding that fewer and fewer people are satisfied with the way our democracy works and that some are losing faith in democracy altogether.

"The University of Canberra has found that satisfaction with our democracy has more than halved in the last decade, down from 86% to 41%.

Albanese criticises the government for attacking freedom of the press and the right to protest, calling for changes to protect press freedom to be enshrined in a bipartisan way.

He also says there should be a requirement for a parliamentary debate when Australia is committing to participate in a war, although he does not argue parliamentary approval should be required.

I understand there are those who passionately believe that a parliamentary vote should precede the deployment of our troops in conflict overseas. I also understand there is a long tradition of the executive making these decisions alone.

"Our parliamentarians should, at the very least, be given the chance to express their view following a cabinet decision to go to war.

He points to the two days of parliamentary debate the Hawke government allowed after its cabinet decided to join the first Gulf War.

At their best these debates in parliament are an exercise in transparency and accountability. And this is a practice that should continue.

"Many democratic nations have parliamentary debate and transparency around their deployments. Including in the United Kingdom, where there is now a higher parliamentary threshold for decisions to go to war.

"And after all, our greatest ally, the United States, has a war powers act.

"We cant ask people to put their lives on the line if we as legislators are too afraid to put our arguments on the line.

Canvassing reforms to parliament, he suggests an independent speaker and a parliamentary integrity commissioner to align the conduct of our parliamentarians with community expectations.

On indigenous recognition, Albanese reasserts Labors view that the indigenous voice to parliament should be enshrined in the constitution, a position rejected by Scott Morrison.

The government has ruled out constitutional enshrinement from the beginning and deliberately misrepresented the concept to turn Australians against each other. Thats incredibly disappointing.

"But the best way to proceed, as in most circumstances, is to

keep talking, keep working, keep progressing. Thats what we intend to do until a voice that can heal and unify is finally achieved, he says.

Next week Albanese will tour regional Queensland where he will visit mining and aluminium smelting enterprises, underlining the contrast between him and his predecessor Bill Shorten. In his speech he stresses that advocates of change need to understand the viewpoints of those who will feel insecure by that change. He says the anti-Adani convoy into the coal mining town of Clermont was not helpful.

The rest is here:
Albanese accuses Facebook of shrugging off fakery - The Conversation AU

A recent study from Argentina has shown a dramatic decline in the Church in Pope Franciss homeland. The Conicet survey showed that 62.9 per cent of the population identified as Catholic, next to 76.5 per cent in a comparable 2008 study.

Even more striking shifts are seen in public attitudes towards the Church, with three quarters of respondents saying that the state should not give financial support to religion, and almost half saying that religion should not be taught in schools. These attitudes will influence the outcome of any attempt by the new left-wing government to liberalise the abortion law.

Pope Francis himself was ranked fourth in a list of people or institutions trusted by the public, after universities, the Church as a whole and the armed forces.

In terms of where the missing Catholics have gone, Argentina seems midway between European secularisation and the Pentecostal surge in other Latin American countries. More than 15 per cent of Argentines now identify as Protestant, with almost 20 per cent saying they have no religion. Although the survey does not measure religious observance, it is known that Mass attendance is low, while Protestants are significantly more likely to practise their faith.

Secular commentators commonly attribute the decline to the Churchs conservative position in the culture wars of the last two decades, where it has usually been on the losing side. Although Pope Francis, then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, was not part of the Churchs conservative faction, he clashed regularly with former president and incoming vice-president Cristina Kirchner over such issues as compulsory sex education, contraception and same-sex unions.

In a broader sense, what is happening mirrors a trend across Latin America. For centuries, Catholic dominance was so overwhelming that the Church had no serious competition for cultural influence. Most of the controversies have therefore been between Catholics such as in Argentinas Dirty War of the 1970s, where some bishops backed the military dictatorship while some priests, particularly Jesuits, threw in their lot with the communist guerrillas.

Those disputes still matter today. Even Cristina Kirchner, when president, identified as Catholic, while rejecting much of the Churchs moral teaching.

What has changed in recent decades is that the Church no longer has a cultural monopoly but is simply the largest participant in the marketplace. Although Pope Franciss keynote issue was poverty, there is little evidence of a Catholic surge among the poor of Buenos Aires. The Churchs competitors, either left-wing Peronist politicians or Pentecostal preachers, are having increased success at its expense.

There is a possibility of the Church reorienting itself, understanding that it can no longer assume dominance and that Latin America is now mission territory.

The alternative scenario is the Irish example, where long-term complacency was followed by decline and then collapse. Given how central Latin America is to global Catholicism, that would indeed be devastating.

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The stunning decline in Catholicism in the Pope's homeland - Catholic Herald Online

Updated December 07, 2019 08:48:06

Shortly after the federal election, I had a conversation with a figure at the very centre of the Government.

As we raked over where the election had left the political conversation, I noted the Prime Minister's repeated emphasis on getting on with delivering services to Australians in his public statements.

Did this suggest that a politician so driven by marketing memes had detected a weariness with the ideological wars of politics among disconnected voters, and recognised political self-interest in shaping both the Government's message, and its agenda, around the basics of government service delivery?

Did this mean the Government might abandon some of its ideological warfare against institutions?

"Don't be ridiculous," this person snorted. "If anything, this Government is more ideologically driven than Abbott. They want to win the culture wars they see in education, in the public service, in all of our institutions, and they'll come for the ABC too, of course. There will be a big cleanout at the top of the public service, but Morrison will wait for a while to do that. They believe the Left has been winning the war for the last 20 years and are determined to turn the tables. Morrison will just be craftier about the way he goes about it."

There have been many occasions to remember this conversation and its rather extraordinary reflection on who seems to have been winning the ideological battle over the intervening six months.

No more so than amid the anger expressed about the Government's move on Thursday to slash the number of government departments and sack five departmental secretaries.

The arts community, in particular, are angry and alarmed that there won't be a department with "arts" in the title.

But it is important to go beyond just the symbolism of what the Prime Minister announced this week, and also to put it in the context of the contempt for accountability that he and his ministers have shown since their re-election, particularly in the Angus Taylor affair.

First, a bit of boring old process. The Government commissioned a comprehensive review of the public service last year, headed by former Telstra boss David Thodey.

The Government received the review's final report in September. It hasn't yet gone to Cabinet. Yet, this week, the Government embarked on a major overhaul of the structure, personnel and purpose of the public service which it says "hits the theme" of the review. No, no-one mentioned the vibe of the thing.

So having spent a great deal of experts' time, and taxpayer money, the Government announces huge changes in the public service without linking them directly to recommendations from the body it established itself.

Oh, except, sorry, it was the same Government that started the review but, you guessed it, a different prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

Among the many contributions made to, and by, the Thodey review was a paper on the relationship between the public service and ministers and their advisers.

And while people have talked about the growing role of ministerial offices and advisers for decades, this week's announcement really crystallises a trend to the sidelining of the public service as a frontline provider of policy advice.

Listen to the language of Scott Morrison from Thursday's press conference.

The Prime Minister reflected on how he had told public servants soon after the election "about having a very strong focus on the delivery of services because that's what Government is there to do".

"I want a public service that's very much focussed on implementation....Whether... they're preparing research, the policy they're developing, services they're delivering on the ground and ensuring that could be done efficiently and keep Australians connected to them in the work they do each day."

Now, there are references to the development of policy in his words. But the clear message was really about improving the way services are delivered to the public.

This is an admirable goal. And, of itself, merging different parts of the bureaucracy isn't a bad idea.

But it is really unclear that "silos" in the "Canberra bubble" are necessarily the real issue here.

And the fact that the number of departments was slashed from 18 to 14, with five department heads losing their jobs while the number of ministers remains unchanged is very telling, and not just because of the bad optics.

The underlying message from the Prime Minister is really a reflection of the fact that policy is largely driven by ministers and their offices these days, rather than a clear line of process that involves public servants, and/or the people who have been commissioned by the Government itself to advise it. The Thodey Review itself is a stunning example of this.

Once things are decided in a minister's office, the scope for even the parliament to find out what has happened is immediately constrained, particularly in an administration that thinks it is okay for one minister to decline to be interviewed by the police, or for another minister to retain his job while unable to explain how he appears to have spectacularly misled parliament, and is subject to a police investigation into forged documents.

Or for the role of ministerial advisers in various scandals to remain unclear, while they hold on to their jobs.

If these new changes mean even less policy flows out of the public service, what hope have we of knowing who is making the decisions, and on what rationale, in areas that the Government doesn't feel like talking about or prioritising, like the arts? It is hard to see any discussion coming up in Estimates, for starters.

Public servants are now supposed to be the facilitators of policy rather than its authors, but, in fact, particularly under Coalition governments, they have often become little more than post boxes for the outsourcing of contracts to the private sector.

But think of all the bad contractual arrangements that have been exposed just this year from the Paladin contracts in Papua New Guinea to (yet another) case of a minister distributing regional grants out of their office, outside the guidelines of the grants program and how little transparency there is about what goes on.

A telling remark from an unnamed "senior government source" in The Australian on Friday was that "there is also a big wake-up call coming for the IT and tech public servants who have spent 20 years making contractors and IT companies rich by signing up for fragmented, sub-scale tech systems".

For those of us with any memory, it's hard not to laugh out loud here.

It was the Howard government who oversaw the disastrous outsourcing of the government's IT program which was scathingly reviewed by the Auditor-General.

The institutional memory of how systems had previously been set up to try to do exactly what the Prime Minister says he wants the public service to do has never recovered.

Thank goodness there is the public service to blame for this, rather than actually considering what impact slogan-driven policy, lacking in any real idea or interest in how to run a government, may be playing.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

Topics:government-and-politics,federal-government,public-sector,australia

First posted December 07, 2019 05:00:33

Continued here:
Inside the public service shakeup: what it really says about Morrison's Government - ABC News