Rod Dreher continues his relentless exposure of the deep corruption in the Roman Catholic Church.
In his latest installment, The Cancer of the Cover-Up Mentality, Dreher reports on the unsolved 1969 murder of the young nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik.
In his August 11th entry, The Church's Coming Catastrophe, we find in Update 2 good advice from a priest on what is to be done:
Continue reading “Corruption in the Roman Church: What is to be Done?”
I just now encountered this strange expression in Graham Oppy's review of Owen Anderson's, The Clarity of God's Existence: The Ethics of Belief after the Enlightenment. The phrase occurs in this passage:
On the one hand, given that Anderson insists that he cannot be satisfied with ‘a sound proof that is extremely difficult to understand and that is knowable by only a few’ (123), it seems clear that his ‘program’ is bound to fail: for surely it is London to a brick that, if his ‘program’ could be successfully carried out, it would yield a proof that is ‘extremely difficult to understand and knowable only by a few’.
The phrase, apparently not in use in the U. K., is Australian and New Zealand slang for 'it is certain.' Explanation here.
I should think so. The right to procreate is one; the right not to procreate is another. But no one has the right to kill an innocent human being. So no one has the right to kill an innocent human recently born, not even the mother. Infanticide cannot count as a reproductive right. Now if there can be no right to infanticide, how can there be a right to kill an innocent pre-natal human being? (The 'innocent' is of course redundant but helps underscore the obvious for the inattentive.)
The point is more easily digested if you think of a third trimester fetus. (By the way, contrary to what some conservative zealots think, 'fetus' is not a question-begging or derogatory term. In fact, its emotional neutrality recommends it.)
The natal -prenatal difference is not a difference that makes a moral difference. Or do you think that a difference in spatial location makes a moral difference? There is a difference between killing me in my house and killing me outside my house, but that difference in spatial location does not a moral difference make.
You will tell me that there is a temporal difference between the pre-natal and the natal. True. The difference may be a day, a week, a month, a trimester. These temporal differences do not make a moral difference either: they do not justify a difference in treatment. Compare the temporal difference between the neonate and the two-year-old. That is not a difference that translates into a difference in rights or a difference in the moral gravity of maltreatment.
I invite you to think of the other differences and reflect on whether they make a moral difference. For example, the neonate breathes on its own whereas it did not while in the mother. Is that a difference that makes a moral difference? If it does, then is the right to life of an adult on a ventilator in any way impaired by his having to use such a device to breathe?
You say a woman has a right to do anything she wants with her own body? I'll grant you that if you grant me that the healthy human individual developing within her is not her body. It is not her body nor a part of her body in any sense of 'part' that could justify her doing anything she wants with it. For those who cannot think without a pictorial aid:
So yes, women have reproductive rights. But it cannot be assumed that the right to an abortion is automatically one of them, or even that there is a right to an abortion. There is a grave moral issue here that Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and others of their ilk do not want you to see. But it is not going to go away and you need to address it as honestly as you can.
Yoko Ono. The only thing good about it is that it lasts only 44 seconds. YouTuber comment: "Sounds like a cat, with its nuts trapped in a vice."
Warzone is less awful, but still crap.
Paul McCartney's comment: Get back, Jojo (Yoko), get back to where you once belonged. Go home. Wikipedia:
In an interview in Playboy magazine in 1980, Lennon described "Get Back" as "… a better version of 'Lady Madonna'. You know, a potboiler rewrite." Lennon also said that "there's some underlying thing about Yoko in there", saying that McCartney looked at Yoko Ono in the studio every time he sang "Get back to where you once belonged."[7]
Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement quotes an NYT commenter:
One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”
Suppose that good and evil are not absolute but are culturally relative. Why should we recognize this? And why shouldn't we impose our Western values on benighted jihadis?
For the argument in full dress, see A Relativist Cannot Rationally Object to the Imposition of One's Values on Others.
Conservatives take a sober and realistic view of the world and the people in it. They are reality-based, and put no faith in utopian schemes. Like good Aristotelians, they take the actualities of the present and the past as a reliable guide to what is possible, rather than the future-oriented fabrications of a high-flying reason cut loose from experience. They admit the reality of evil and the corruption of human nature. Liberals and leftists, by contrast, tend to believe that people are basically good and that it is only extraneous factors that corrupt them. Evil has no purchase in reality for them but is merely a word we apply to those whose beliefs and values differ from ours.
Immanuel Kant wisely wrote of the "crooked timber of humanity of which no straight thing has ever been made." For liberals and leftists, however, the warpage is not inherent in the timber but comes from without, from contingent social arrangements that can and must be changed.
People who live this delusion sometimes come to a very bad end. Performance artist Pippa Bacca is a case in point. She and a friend hitchiked from Italy to the Balkans to the Middle East in wedding dresses to promote global harmony. Just three weeks into the trip she was raped and murdered in Turkey by a driver who offered her a ride.
The refusal to face reality is a mark of the leftist who prefers his u-topian view of the world to the world.
To live well, one must take risks. To live long they must be calculated in a calculus informed by knowledge of self and knowledge of world. Let the romantic in one be tempered by the realist to avoid the fates of Christopher McCandless, Timothy Treadwell, and Jay Austin and Lauren Geoghegan:
Asked why they had quit their office jobs and set off on a biking journey around the world, the young American couple offered a simple explanation: They had grown tired of the meetings and teleconferences, of the time sheets and password changes.
“There’s magic out there, in this great big beautiful world,” wrote Jay Austin who, along with his partner, Lauren Geoghegan, gave his two weeks’ notice last year before shipping his bicycle to Africa.
They were often proved right.
[. . .]
Then came Day 369, when the couple was biking in formation with a group of other tourists on a panoramic stretch of road in southwestern Tajikistan. It was there, on July 29, that a carload of men who are believed to have recorded a video pledging allegiance to the Islamic State spotted them.
Bruce Bawer in Death by Entitlement offers astute commentary (bolding added)
Their naivete is nothing less than breathtaking. “You watch the news and you read the papers and you're led to believe that the world is a big, scary place,” wrote Austin during their trek. “People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted….I don't buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we've invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.” This rosy view of humanity suffuses Austin's blog: “Malawians and Zambians are fantastically friendly people.” And: “All throughout western Europe, when folks asked us where we were headed and we'd say Albania, their faces would drop and they'd start muttering 'Oh, no, no, no.' Albania, they'd tell us, is dangerous. The people of Albania will steal your spleen….The Albanians we come across are perhaps the warmest, friendliest, smiliest…people we've met on the continent.”
Austin's blog also provides a window on his (and presumably her) hippie-dippy worldview and ultra-PC politics. Elephants, writes Austin, “may very well be a smarter, wiser, more thoughtful being[s] than homo sapiens sapiens.” When white South Africans tell them “that the nation and its redistributionist government are making poor, ignorant choices,” Austin sneers at their “Eurocentric values” and their failure to realize that “[n]otions like private property” are culturally relative. This is apparently a comment on the South African government's current expropriation of white farmers' land without compensation. (To be sure, when a friendly Afrikaans man advises Austin and Geoghegan to move their tent because they've pitched it too close to a black settlement and may antagonize the locals, they're quick to let him lead them to a safer spot.)
[. . .]
The Times article about Austin and Geoghegan drew hundreds of reader comments.
[. . .]
Perusing all the reader comments, I found exactly two that mentioned Islam critically. Here's one: “Tajikistan is 96.7% Islamic. It is a dangerous place for American tourists….This is not Islamophobia. It is common sense.” Here's the other: “As a Western woman I have no desire to visit a majority Muslim country because of the religious and cultural bias regarding their treatment of women.” Both of these comments attracted outraged replies. (“Many parts of the US are not so kind to women either, particularly those states that have managed to close just about all their Planned Parenthood clinics.”) Several readers railed against “religion” generally, as if terrorism by Quakers and Episcopalians were a worldwide problem.
Indeed, this being the New York Times, moral equivalency was rampant (“Yes, they [the ISIS murderers]were brutal….But what about our treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay?”), as was a readiness to blame Islamic terrorism on America (“There are consequences to our nation's decision to murder Muslim civilians by the hundreds of thousands”) or, specifically, on Donald Trump. One reader comment, a “Times Pick,” read, in part, as follows: “A great story and an admirable couple. But those who condemn their killers as evil probably fail to recognize that ISIS fighters see themselves as being on the side of good. For them, these young Americans were an embodiment of the Great Satan….Instead of bandying around moral absolutes, perhaps we should recognize that good and evil are relative categories, dependent on your culture and your values.”
[. . .]
Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple's story? In the last analysis, it's a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin's word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child's fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.
Rod Dreher continues his commentary on the deep corruption within the Roman Catholic Church.
Here is Sipe's website.
And if you can stomach it, Frank Keating on the Catholic Bishops Today.
Related: Abortion and the Wages of Concupiscence Unrestrained
Leftists play the Frame Game. For example, they frame the gun issue as if if they want gun control and conservatives don't. This is a piece of utter mendacity and they must know it. Everyone apart from criminals wants gun control. The issue is not whether, but how much and of what kinds.
Another example is the framing of the abortion question as merely a reproductive rights or women's rights or women's health issue. That too is a piece of utter mendacity of the extreme sort that one would expect from Hillary herself.
More later. Think about this 'frame game' business and find more examples.
Here are three very important points. Please pay attention.
1) Barack Obama, you will recall, made light of the suggestion that U. S. elections could be rigged or stolen back in October of 2016. You can hear his own words here. He and almost everyone else was sure Hillary would win a couple of weeks later. That is what all the pundits were saying, and anyway how could such an obnoxious cretin as Trump who had insulted so many people possibly become president? When Hillary lost in the electoral college, lefties couldn't believe it. It shocked them deeply. You can see the depth of their reaction if you watch the many videos from election night depicting the tears of anguish and the tears of rage. And so it is very easy to understand how lefties, who never stray from their enclaves, and never sully their precious minds with conservative commentary, and have no contact with the unwashed deplorables who stink of Wal-Mart and the barnyard, could believe that Trump just had to have colluded with the Russians to secure his victory. To their minds, there is no other possible explanation.
I heard Rosie O'Donnell say the other night that she "firmly believed" that Trump's win was due to Russian help. I don't doubt that Rosie and her fellow travellers firmly believe it in a way that admits of no possible disconfirmation. It has become an idée fixe in their benighted brains. They can't help it. They see themselves as good people, as progressive, bien-pensant, caring people, on the right side of history. It is simply incomprehensible to them that Trump won fair and square.
The reversal of position from 'no possible rigging' to 'Russian rigging' is very easy to understand: it's all about getting Trump out of office by any means. The only reason the Dems care about election integrity now when they didn't before is that it aids and abets their drive toward impeachment.
2) Democrats support open borders, sanctuary cities, the sanctuary state of California, and the awarding of the franchise to illegal aliens. All of this is a giant middle finger in the face of the rule of law. Their grand strategy is perfectly obvious: to advance leftism and destroy America as she was founded to be, and to do so by demographic means. If you don't see that you need the services of that proctologist I mentioned in an earlier post, the one who specializes in head injuries and especially difficult extractions.
3) And then there is the business about photo ID that Dems insanely oppose. The reason they oppose it is obvious: they intend to make the polling places safe for voter fraud. It is part of their demographic grand strategy. You will enjoy this YouTube video in which white liberals claim that blacks lack ID and blacks on the street react to the absurd claim.
On Thursday, June 21, 2012 I heard Dennis Prager on his nationally-syndicated radio show use 'beg the question' when what he meant was 'raise the question.' This is a very common mistake nowadays.
I correct Mr. Prager because I love him.
The visage of Jeff Dunham's 'Walter' signals that a language rant is in the offing should you be averse to such things.
To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.
Suppose A poses the question, 'Does Allah exist?' B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists.
The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.
Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.
Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto. The battle has already been lost. So why do I write things like the above? Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises.
And perhaps there is a bit of virtue-signaling going on.
Here:
According to [Cesare] Beccaria, punishment has two fundamental objectives: to restrain the criminal from committing additional crimes and to deter other members of society from committing the same crime. The first purpose is served by imprisonment, so we are left with the issue of deterrence.
Not so fast! Imprisonment obviously does not prevent criminals from committing additional crimes since criminals continue to commit all sorts of crimes in prison, including murder. Execution of murderers, however, is a most effective means of restraining them from committing additional crimes. It works every time.
Just as dead men tell no tales, dead men commit no crimes. Does it follow that we ought to exterminate humanity to prevent crime? I don't think so!
The topic of deterrence raises the following question. Suppose the execution of a murderer has no deterrent effect whatsoever. Would the execution be nonetheless morally justified? I should think so, on retributivist grounds. Retribution, impartially administered by the state apparatus, is not revenge, but a form of justice. Immanuel Kant takes this line in perhaps its most rigoristic form.
Justice demands capital punishment in certain cases, and it doesn't matter what it costs, or whether there is any benefit to society, or even whether there is any society to benefit. Recall Kant's last man scenario from Metaphysics of Morals, Part II (emphasis added):
[6] But whoever has committed murder, must die. There is, in this case, no juridical substitute or surrogate, that can be given or taken for the satisfaction of justice. There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable. Even if a civil society resolved to dissolve itself with the consent of all its members–as might be supposed in the case of a people inhabiting an island resolving to separate and scatter themselves throughout the whole world–the last murderer lying in prison ought to be executed before the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done in order that every one may realize the desert of his deeds, and that blood-guiltiness may not remain upon the people; for otherwise they might all be regarded as participators in the murder as a public violation of justice.
Kant's view in this passage is that capital punishment of murderers is not just morally permissible, but morally obligatory. (Note that whatever is morally obligatory is morally permissible, though not conversely, and that 'morally justified' just means 'morally permissible.')
Here is another interesting question. The U. S Constitution grants a near-plenary power of pardon to the president. (Here I go again, alliterating.) Does this extend to convicted mass murderers such as Timothy McVeigh? If yes, then Kant would not be pleased. The president would be violating the demands of retributive justice! This of course is a secular analog of the old theological problem of justice and mercy.
Memo to self: bone up on this! See what Carl Schmitt has to say about it specifically. Cf. his Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 56:
All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology.
Despite the term's largely pejorative connotation, propaganda is not by definition false or misleading or harmful. Propaganda is anything of a verbal or pictorial nature that is propagated to influence behavior. Propaganda can consist of truths or falsehoods, good advice or bad, exhortation to good behavior or subornation of bad. Anti-smoking and anti-drug messaging are propaganda but the messages are salutary. Leftist propaganda is destructive while conservative propaganda inspires ameliorative action.
Here is a very good collection of visual propaganda from yesteryear.
Stories the liberal press will not report because of their lack of fit with the leftist anti-liberty, anti-personal-responsibility agenda. Part of what is meant by 'fake news' is the non-reporting and under-reporting of newsworthy events.
