Also on today’s menu:
Crashes May Be Related
Individualism And Religion
Censorship And Deception
There was barely enough ice to allow the 44th annual Great Meredith Rotary Fishing Derby to take place, but it did, with Charles Buhrman of Enfield taking the $15,000 first prize for a 2.42-pound white perch caught on Squam Lake. Second prize went to Cody Chellis of Contoocook for a 9.3-pound laker, and third went to Jonathan Abear of Holderness for a 1.67-pound yellow perch.
The lack of snow, on the other hand, has led to the cancellation of the World Championship Sled Dog Derby, which was to take place next weekend. The Lakes Region Sled Dog Club, which holds the derby, still plans to hold its fundraising raffle, with tickets drawn live on Facebook on Sunday, February 19. Money raised through the raffle and an auction held last month will be held for next year’s race.
Club President Jennifer Hollows said she and the club’s trail boss had delayed a decision on holding the sled dog derby in the hope that a “surprise snowstorm” would allow the event to take place. By Monday, with no snowstorm and a forecast for temperatures in the 50s this week, it was clear the trail would be unusable.
Crashes May Be Related
State Troopers believe two vehicle crashes that occurred on February 12 are related. The first occurred shortly after 7 p.m. at Exit 1 of Interstate 93 when a vehicle struck the exit sign and a light pole, leaving metal debris that caused some 10 vehicles coming upon the scene to experience flat tires. The debris strewn across the ramp and interstate forced the closing of the northbound lanes in Salem for around 30 minutes while police and fire personnel cleared the area.
Around 7:20 p.m., there was another vehicle crash in Londonderry, where a vehicle had struck the left guardrail and came to rest in the two left lanes of the interstate highway. The operator of the 2012 Volkswagen Tiguan fled into woods. Troopers found alcohol inside the vehicle. The debris on the highway forced a half-hour closing of the northbound lanes. Police conducted an unsuccessful searched for the missing driver with a K9 unit.
No further updates have been provided.
Individualism And Religion
Whether due to algorithms or simple coincidence, shortly after posting yesterday’s News Café, I came across an article discussing the social and spiritual aspects of religion. Timothy Keller’s article referred to the 1985 book Habits of the Heart, in which the sociologist Robert Bellah and his co-authors “showed that the social history of the United States made it the most individualistic culture in the world” by elevating the interests of the individual over those of family, community, and nation. “Yet for two centuries, Americans’ religious devotion counterbalanced this individualism with denunciations of self-centeredness and calls to love your neighbor,” Keller wrote. “The Church demanded charity and compassion for the needy, it encouraged young people to confine sexual expression to marriage, and it encouraged spouses to stick to their vows. Bellah wrote that American individualism, now largely freed from the counterbalance of religion, is headed toward social fragmentation, economic inequality, family breakdown, and many other dysfunctions.”
He continued, “At a local level, churches provide community and support to people in their congregations who lack strong family ties or other kinds of emotional and social support. They also serve neighbors who do not attend church, particularly in poorer neighborhoods….
“While a revival of the Church would benefit society, that will never happen if the Church thinks of itself as just another social-service agency. Christians seek spiritual renewal of the Church not because they see religion as having social utility, nor because they want to shore up their own institutions. First and foremost, Christianity helps society because its metaphysical claims are true; they are not true because Christianity helps society. When Christians lose sight of this, the Church’s power and durability are lost….
“White Protestant churches in America tend to pick one or the other. Liberal mainline Protestantism stresses justice but has largely jettisoned ancient affirmations of the Christian creeds…. Evangelicalism stresses righteousness and traditional values, but many congregations are indifferent or even hostile toward work against injustice. However, if the Church at large could combine these two ideas the way the Black Church has, it can begin to rebuild both credibility and relevance, rebutting the charge that it is merely another political power broker. A church that unites justice and righteousness does not fit with the left on abortion and sexual ethics or with the right on race and justice. Instead it is a community that addresses the timeless longings of all people for meaning, hope, love, and salvation.”
Censorship And Deception
Matt Taibbi, one of the reporters who reviewed Twitter emails showing how the government collaborated with programmers to censor information that it deemed “misinformation” at the expense of freedom of expression, is asking other investigative reporters and experts to delve deeper into propaganda and government censorship. His post noted that, since the end of the Obama presidency, the U.S. government has provided funding for “an elaborate network of NGOs and think-tanks whose researchers call themselves independent ‘disinformation experts’” who, in truth, “aggressively court both the domestic news media and platforms like Twitter, often becoming both the sources for news stories and/or the referring authorities for censorship requests.”
“The end result,” he writes, “has been relentless censorship of, and mountains of (often deceptive) state-sponsored propaganda about, legitimate American political activity. In the Twitter Files we see correspondence from state agencies and state-sponsored research entities describing everything from support of the Free Palestine movement to opposition to vaccine passports as illicit foreign propaganda. Some of this messaging devolves into outright smear campaigns, with efforts to denounce the organic #WalkAway hashtag as a Russian ‘psychological operation’ serving as a particularly lurid example. The Hamilton 68 story (about which more is coming) hints at this dynamic.”
Hamilton 68, for those who are unaware, was behind the “Russia collusion” myth, labeling posts by Americans who raised concerns about government action as Russian propaganda. Taibbi says, “The irony is the entire field of ‘disinformation studies’ itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation ‘labs’ cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.
“Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about ‘threats to democracy.’ I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time,” he writes.
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