“Ineffective discipline is a way of disowning, rejecting, or hating your children. God does not do that with us, and we must not do that with our children”
David French and the Chimerical Flibbertigibbet
Introduction: The United States has a written Constitution, as in, written down, which has been a wonderful firewall and blessing. But America also has, as all nations do, an unwritten constitution. ...
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On Being the Hero in Your Own Show
“The idea of a counterculture is ultimately based on a mistake. At best, countercultural rebellion: a set of dramatic gestures that are devoid of any progressive political or economic consequences and that detract from the urgent task of building a more just society. In other words, it is rebellion that provides entertainment for the rebels, and nothing much else”
Nation of Rebels, p. 65
And Do You Really Want To?
“If someone loses his temper, and you clean up after him, regardless of whether he is a two-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old, you are going to have to do it again . . . You get more of what you subsidize and less of what you penalize.”
Stands to Reason
There’s That Also
“The idea that marijuana liberates the mind is something that only someone who is stoned could believe.”
Nation of Rebels, p. 61
Rasputin in Jammies
“Many time, parents are reluctant to discipline when it is needed, because they think their child is feeble-minded when it comes to godly cause and effect. A mom says, ‘I don’t think my little baa-lamb’—known to outsiders as the wailing tornado, and to his siblings as Rasputin in footie jammies—“understands the connection between the whining and the spanking. He looks so sad and bewildered.’ Doesn’t understand disciplinary cause and effect, you say? But how can this be, when he is a veritable genius when it comes to ungodly cause and effect? Tell me, does he understand the connection between whining and getting whatever it is he wants”.
The Rebels That Aren’t
“With this theory of co-optation in place, the counterculture itself becomes a ‘total ideology,’ a completely closed system of thought immune to falsification, in which every apparent exception simply confirms the rule. For generations now, countercultural rebels have been pumping out ‘subversive’ music, ‘subversive’ art, ‘subversive’ literature, ‘subversive’ clothing, while universities have been packed full of professors disseminating ‘subversive’ ideas to their students. So much subversion, and yet the system seems to tolerate it quite well. Does this suggest that the system is perhaps not so repressive after all? ‘On the contrary,’ says the countercultural rebel. ‘It shows that the system is even more repressive than we thought—look at how skillfully it co-opts all of this subversion!’ Back in 1965, Herbert Marcuse coined a term to describe this peculiar sort of repression. He called it ‘repressive tolerance.’ It’s an idea that makes about as much sense now as it did then”
Nation of Rebels, p. 35
God’s Word Done God’s Way . . .
“We live in a time when a number of very foolish Christian parents have attempted to discipline foolishly, found out that that does not work, and concluded that the problem must be with God’s Word, and not with their own inept applications of it”
Post Lucem Tenebrae
Introduction: A week ago, my wife and I just finished a delightful vacation in France and Switzerland, and it was really something. There was wine, and there was cheese, and historical sites, and there was wine, and then some food, and then a cheese course. It was a time. I am still full. Among the …
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