Romance, Like Public Health Policy, Is Dead Without Virtue

LinkedIn says I was there for a year, but it doesn’t feel like that long a time in terms of enjoyability, and it doesn’t feel that short a time in terms of how much I’ve learned and enjoyed building relationships with the team here in the DJ Basin.

Compared with my departure from some places, Chevron practically threw me a ticker tape parade my last few weeks on the job.

A place I worked previous to this, my boss – who was home sick with COVID when I turned in my resignation letter with 2-weeks’ notice – wanted me taken home that day, or the next; and he definitely wanted me gone before he got back from sick leave. They weren’t even going to tell me until the following Monday of the last week I was planning to work, but my alternate had heard and let it slip to me. So I had to call my boss’s boss to ask him about it, and sure enough. He still wanted me to come in that Monday to check in all my tools, truck, laptop, and credit card.

Here, after a year of Systems Integration work, and despite bracing for abuse and contempt when my departure was announced, the embarrassment has been of riches.

On my way out, everyone I worked for, with, and alongside complimented my intelligence, skill, professionalism, courteousness, enjoyability, perceptiveness, and potential. Everyone said they were sad to see me go, and that I would be greatly missed, and that it’s been an absolute pleasure working with me. Both foremen in the Automation department even went so far as to tell me I am very welcome to come back and work there again if I ever want to, or if things don’t work out with the next opportunity.

But on the topic off things not working out, in ‘Why Bros Failed at the Box Office,’ Carl Trueman writes for First Things that romance is dead, and the sexual revolutionaries killed it.

Romance depends on virtue and morality, and cannot exist in an environment where these things are abolished and scoffed at. This makes a lot of sense, and it is encouraging to hear a counter to the smear that everyone is obligated to watch a movie about gay men flirting with and seducing one another, or else they’re bigots.

Speaking of both gay romantic comedies and being accused of bigotry, I watched all of Amazon’s ‘The Rings of Power’ series this week, in large part because it felt wrong to merely repeat the criticisms of others, though I did recently pass along what some of those were from a review Daniel Coates published at Not the Bee.

Some things are written as though they’re supposed to sound very profound, like they’re inspired by lines from the movies and books; but they have a clunkiness and lack of elegance if you consider them in more than a brief and superficial way.

I’m inclined to agree with Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh on this point, that Amazon just flat isn’t capable of doing justice to Tolkien today, given their precommitments philosophically, politically, and culturally. The best they can do is imitate, but they cannot replicate. The result is more a caricature than a continuation in many places.

The casting of ethnically diverse actors need make sense only along one very obvious line. Woke culture and politics demands racial diversity in casting. But a clearly white character can have a person of color for their mother or daughter or son, and the audience is expected to say nothing negative or critical about it on pain of denunciation for racism. This is a cheap trick, and an abuse of both the audience and source material.

While we’re on the topic of abuse, the CDC is making the COVID vaccine mandatory for Public School attendance nationwide here in the U.S. Meanwhile, Boston University has developed a Covid strain that has an 80% kill rate in mice. That is to say that the idea that the original virus was engineered and released on a schedule is proven conclusively in my mind.

Stories weekly of totally healthy people abruptly dying for no apparent reason. That is highly suspicious, and I’m going to say the quiet part out loud. But are these abrupt deaths due to the COVID vaccine? And is this just the beginning of a wave of significant population decrease?

In the meantime, Megan Basham at The Daily Wire keeps on writing about how Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci waged a propaganda war to discredit and smear scientists and experts – like epidemiologists Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford – when they spoke out against the lockdowns, and mandates for masks and vaccines.

For their part, prominent figures in American Evangelicalism corresponded and coordinated with Francis Collins behind the scenes through it all, and were willing accomplices in maligning the integrity, maturity, and sincerity of American Christians who attempted to express dissent with COVID policies. Insinuations representing a one-sided conversation were the go-to stand-in for substantive, robust discussions, and the Church is owed an apology for the corrosive effect this had on the fellowship, witness, and mission of the bride of Christ.

In short, American Christians need a civics lesson. They may get one by reading works like ‘Reflections on the Revolution in France’ by Edmund Burke, or ‘Democracy in America’ by Alexis de Tocqueville. And they should.

—

This episode is sponsored by

· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

—

Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/garrett-ashley-mullet/message

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/garrett-ashley-mullet/support