Quote of the Day

Hoping Newt’s conversion starts to take, Mark passes on this tidbit from The American Conservative:

Newt: “…waterboarding is not torture. Waterboarding has been routinely used to train American pilots in the military to understand what interrogation techniques they might encounter.”

John Schwenkler:

By extension:

•Having sex with a woman is not raping her. Sex is routinely had between men and women as an expression of love and a means to pleasure and procreation.
•Punching a man in the face is not assaulting him. Men routinely punch one another in the face in the boxing ring as a test of athletic prowess.
•Driving 75 miles an hour on a residential street is not speeding. Cars routinely drive 75 miles an hour or more on the highway.

He encourages others to add their own. Some good ones, but my favorite crass-but-funny one:

“Giving people atomic wedgies is not bullying. Underwear rides up peoples’ asses all the time on its own.”

Patching the hole in the Titanic with torpedoes.

A few months ago I’m at a dinner party, when afterwards I got to try out Guitar Hero World Tour. Naturally, as a real musician, I tried my best to be snobby while completely tanking on the game. After embarrassing myself on Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” and Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”, one of the youngsters tried to get us to play some song no one knew with male singing best described as whiny. It turns out this was a feature and not a bug:

As the reviewer notes, “For every ‘Living on a Prayer’ or ‘Band on the Run’ there are two shitty emo rock warblers that no one has ever heard of.” I was going to tell you which song it was, but from looking at the songlist, picking it out would be like picking out gnat poop from pepper. We’ll call that What’s Wrong With the World Exhibit A.

Which brings me to the prostitutes. I have recently started delivering newspapers for some extra bread for the family. Meaning I get up at O’Dark-thirty and drive through the…ahem…colorful part of town. Eventually I get to the revitalized part of downtown where the white people go to bars and pretend they are slumming. In the 80’s I used to live in Washington D.C. and had made several trips to NYC. It was easy to pick out the streetwalkers. Now everyone dresses the same and just like the shitty emo rock warbler, I couldn’t pick out the prostitute from the average bar patron in my small city in a somewhat conservative state. Exhibit B.

So on my route I pull into the convenience store for some orange juice and those awesome cheese-cake things with the cinnamon on top. Guess what is blaring over the speakers at 2:00 AM? Yep. Some shitty emo rock warbler. At the counter is a grey-haired black man. “You don’t get to pick the music, do you?”, I ask as a friendly joke. He laughed and said no and emphasized the point to let me know he wouldn’t pick such music even at gunpoint. So I ask, “How about the thermostat? Are you allowed to adjust it?” (I’m in an investigative mood apparently) “No.” he said. “I can turn it off or on, but that’s it.” Radio and thermostat dictators. Exhibits C and D.

While delivering the newspapers, I sometimes accidently read some of it, sense some parts of my brain falling out, and stop reading. Just like when on the route and the radio is on scan and it stops on NPR and I scream, “Scan faster!” I notice many subscriptions on my route stopping and a paper that gets thinner and thinner. Then I read James Bowman asking, “Hm, I wonder if the tedium of opening one’s morning paper to see the umpteenth story about the plight of the morning paper could have anything to do with that fall-off in readership?” He quotes a journalist bemoaning that anti-death-penalty advocacy will be more difficult without print media. Bowman lays it out:

In other words, the partisan effectiveness of the newspapers in working for the abolition of capital punishment is diminished by their loss of profitability as news sources, as if this were self-evidently a bad thing. Mr Arango admits that “Some news organizations are reluctant to join the effort out of fear of blurring the line between advocate and objective collector of the news,” but he makes this sound like a quaint scruple from a vanished age to the vast majority of our ever more enthusiastic media advocates. He quotes Maurice Possley, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, as saying that “I think the more you link up” — that is journalists and advocacy groups like the Innocence Project, a group of lawyers against the death penalty — “people will think you have a bias or an agenda,”

Golly! Is it possible? You get from passages like this a sense that it never occurs to these writers and activists that someone who doesn’t agree with them could possibly be reading their words.

Ok. That’s not a musical example, but emo is more than just music, and media whining about their self-inflicted demise counts, so Exhibit E.

So it’s Memorial day and I’m having lunch with the Guitar-World-shitty-emo-rock-warbler picker and her sister. She wants to study public policy at Berkeley, CA. Exhibit F. It’s the emo stupid!

The VRWCC–The Vast Right-Wing Catholic Conspiracy.

I am convinced that the GOP’s recipe for victory is to take where progressives are now, bury it in a time capsule, dig it up 20-30 years later and make it your platform.

So I read with amusement that those of us with the quaint notion that deliberately killing the innocent is wrong are really Republican shills. Enter Carl Olsen to help blow away the fog: What’s the difference between Hillary Clinton and Fr. Thomas Reese?

Put that in your pipe and smoke it

Fr. Z comments on Archbisop Burke’s address. The whole thing is worth it, but I want to highlight:

23. An important part of our moral reflection must include a clear understanding of the principles regarding cooperation in evil, especially by the act of voting. Too often, in our time, our inability to accomplish all that we should for the sake of the defense of the right to life and of the protection of the integrity of the family is used to justify the direct choice of a political leader who espouses a position or positions in violation of the natural moral law. The Servant of God Pope John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, addresses at length the question of cooperation in evil which violates the dignity of innocent human life. He offers as an example the case of a legislator who has the possibility of voting for a law which would restrict the evil of procured abortion, even though it would not eradicate it completely. He concludes that the legislator could vote for the legislation, while his own opposition to procured abortion remains clear, for his vote does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects (Pope John Paul II, Encylical Letter Evangelium vitae , On the Good and Inviolability of Human Life, 25 March 1995, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 87 [1995], 487, no. 73).

In an analogous manner, as voters, we are often faced with a choice among candidates who do not fully oppose unjust laws. In such a case, we must choose the candidate who will most limit the evil effects of unjust laws. But, there is no element of the common good, no morally good practice, which a candidate may promote and to which a voter may be dedicated, which could justify voting for a candidate who also endorses and supports the deliberate killing of the unborn, euthanasia or the recognition of a same-sex relationship as a legal marriage. The respect for the inviolable dignity of innocent human life and for the integrity of marriage and the family are so fundamental to the common good that they cannot be subordinated to any other cause, no matter how good it may be.

As you can guess, this was met with poo-pooing about how RvW will never be overturned and we might as well get used to it and natural law arguments are bogus. A poster named “michigancatholic” bats that grapefruit out of the park:

Natural law applies to all living beings, even those too ignorant or deluded (or just plain stupid) to realize it. Never forget that. What is, is.

The ignorant need to be educated. The evil (and stupid) need to be bound by the rule of law in accord with natural law. Putative law that violates natural law is no law at all. Rather, it is flawed by impediments of the most original sort. It’s mere injunction by force. You’d ought to know that.

For instance, if a law were passed that said that I should fly Icarus-like to work every morning (on my own steam) to save energy, votes could be tallied and sentences could be written. The president could applaud it to the skies. But would it make flying on my own steam possible? No. Of course not. It’s always possible to enact things that are truly idiotic because they’re in violation with natural law. This is because there are always people who are utterly clueless about natural law. It’s a sort of monumental organic stupidity to which people in large groups with grand aspirations are prone to. Call it a cosmetically engineered veneer. Pseudo-progress at it’s finest.

However, this phenomenal sort of stupidity, even at its grandest, still doesn’t make natural law impotent. Natural law is always still there, underneath everything. What is, is, regardless of what anyone might say about it. I will not fly using my own arms anytime soon, just as abortion will not be morally right anytime soon (or ever). So, balthasar, restrain your pessimism—it’s unbecoming, short-sighted and makes you look like someone who hasn’t looked in the mirror at their own humanity in 20 years.

It’s an immemorial feature of existence: Natural law always wins. Don’t be caught on the wrong side or you will suffer, sooner or later… The longer it takes the harder the hammer falls. That’s how it is and always will be, like it or not.

PS, I’m a scientist and I’m well aware that most people think science is what it is not. Science tells you how (always within the scope of natural law), not why. Why is the business of revelation. Natural law is the business of normalization and enforcement of the rules of existence. You defy it at your peril. It’s stronger than anything you’ve ever known and you don’t want to mess with it. It doesn’t “dialogue.” It’s mean and kind all at once and you have no control over it. Rather, it regulates YOU.

Fr. Corapi on the Notre Dame scandal

WARNING: Avoid the comments section. It’s full of the usual anonymous bile.

ND grad recalls a “choice devours itself” moment

Hat tip to Diogenes for linking this article from First Things. A sample:

My boyfriend was a different story. He was also a Notre Dame senior. When I told him that he was to be a father, he tried to pressure me into having an abortion. Like so many women in similar circumstances, I found out the kind of man the father of my child was at precisely the moment I needed him most. “All that talk about abortion is just dining-room talk,” he said. “When it’s really you in the situation, it’s different. I will drive you to Chicago and pay for a good doctor.”

I tried telling him this was not an option. He said he was pro-choice. I responded by informing him that my choice was life. And I learned, as so many pregnant women have before and since, that life is the one choice that pro-choicers won’t support.

In case you have been living in a cave…hope has been busting out all over…

Mary Ann Glendon *turns down* Notre Dame Laetare Medal:

http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/flash-mary-ann-glendon-turns-down-notre.html

Alumni stops sending in its ISK:

http://www.americanpapist.com/2009/04/black-monday-group-confirms-nd-alumni.html

Quote of the Day

John C Wright:

Let me explain that I regard political correctness as worse than a lie.

A lie is a straightforward attempt to deceive a victim. It [is] almost honest by contrast. Political Correctness is a corrupt attempt to poison thought and speech, and to impose upon the nobility and courtesy of its victims to get them to deceive themselves. A frequent side effect of PC jargon is that it renders rational conversation difficult, indirect, or even impossible.

Innocent and well meaning people are actually fooled by this simple trick. Sad to say, most people think like magicians. They believe in the rule of true names. They think (or rather, they feel) that when they are calling one thing by another name, that the actual nature of reality changes. They put themselves in a position where they can no longer talk about real things. Words are severed from referents.

Anti-Catholic bigotry on parade Exhibit C

The title says it all: Pell rides papal bandwagon of death and concludes with, “Safe sex campaigns have strong political backing. But how many good Catholics will die in Africa and the Philippines before they learn that in the 21st century disobeying the Vatican line is a matter of life and death?”

Uncle Di responds:

How many people would contract AIDS (or any venereal disease) if Church teaching were followed? Zero. Yet when actions of those who hold her in contempt boomerang back upon them, she is blamed for the effects of their recklessness. As I’ve said before: other institutions are held responsible for hardships resulting from obedience to their teachings; the Church is held responsible for hardships resulting from defiance of hers…Just curious. I have no way of checking Marr’s claim that Australia waged the world’s most successful war on AIDS, but if his grasp of public health is as reliable as his history of Christian doctrine, one is — how to put it? — ill-advised to accept a clean syringe from his hands.

Those on the take from the ones saying, “there’s no one but us chickens in here” and, “As long as it promotes dialog…”

James Bowman comments on what us in the blogsphere encounter all the time: defenders of The Same Old Crap demonstrating incredulity that, well, defies credulity:

 There must be some significance to the fact that, for the moment at any rate, while we in America have moved on from random shootings of schoolchildren and young adults to random shootings of old people the school shootings have started turning up in Europe. The most recent example happened in Germany a couple of weeks ago. Though not extensively reported in the American press, the latest massacre got a lot of attention in Europe, as did the fact that the murderer was a keen player of violent video games — which naturally led to an effort in the anti-”censorship” media to exonerate such games from any culpability in the massacre. Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, Michael Deacon wrote:

It puzzles me, this implication that violent “low art” is to blame. “High art” often contains shocking violence, too, yet one never reads an article that implies a connection between “high art” and murder. Nobody, I feel fairly sure, would suggest that Shakespeare is a dangerous influence on the young. Nobody would fret that reading Hamlet might encourage an adolescent loner to murder his uncle, or that Titus Andronicus might prompt him to butcher two men, bake their remains in a pie and feed it to the men’s mother. Nobody is campaigning for the removal from the national curriculum of Romeo and Juliet on the grounds that it glamorises suicide. Like video games, literature has a habit of presenting vile characters in a favourable light. The narrator of A Clockwork Orange is a rapist – a witty, intelligent rapist. The narrator of Lolita is a paedophile — a witty, intelligent paedophile. While I was a teenager, I managed to read both these books without a horrified teacher, parent or indeed journalist dashing them from my hand.

I can’t decide just how disingenuous Mr Deacon is being, or if he really can’t see the very obvious differences between Hamlet and Grand Theft Auto IV — now available, as I mentioned in a post last week, in a version for the Nintendo DS, the successor to the Game Boy. In case he can’t, it is this. The violence of what he calls “high art” — at least that which includes Shakespeare, Anthony Burgess and Vladimir Nabokov among its practitioners — has a moral context and that of video games has none. Is it credible that there could be no connection between a boy’s training himself up to a taste for contextless violence, violence for the mere thrill of it, and his obvious failure to have seen any moral context to his decision to gun down 15 of his classmates?

He also highlights something easily applied to the recent Notre Dame nonsense:

Though police found a cache of weapons in the Nevada man’s parents’ house, where he lived, including many of the same guns used by his hero, he hadn’t actually harmed anyone, and his lawyer argued that the e-mails, which only implied a threat instead of making one directly, had only been his way of “initiating a discussion on causes of school violence.”

Boy! You can get away with anything, so long as it initiates a discussion.

Full entry here: http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=265