What’s Wrong with the World

The free speech clause to the first amendment to the United States Constitution is a bit of a mystery. It holds that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. That's it. No frills, no clarifications. Yet we know, if we are originalists about Constitutional meaning, that it can't actually mean free speech absolutism. We know this if for no other reason than that federal legislation against pornography was not considered unconstitutional until much later--at least not on First Amendment grounds. (Back when the 10th amendment was taken seriously, such legislation might have required some justification in that connection.) Even the court's upholding of the Sedition Act of 1918 is some evidence that, the farther back you go, the less likely it is that you will find free speech absolutism as the interpretation of the First Amendment. On the other hand, the fierce and very early controversy over the even more restrictive speech provisions of the Alien and Sedition Act in 1798 does provide evidence that the Founders did intend to protect political speech and criticism of government activities, just as one would naturally assume.

But by the early 21st century, extreme conclusions by SCOTUS about the First Amendment had become commonplace. In the Ashcroft decision (2002) SCOTUS even went so far as to conclude that child pornography could not be banned by content but only in virtue of its having actually been produced by the abuse of real minors. That this was anything like the intent (or for you textualists, the understanding) of the original First Amendment is ludicrous.

As things now stand, flag burning, strip dancing, and virtually all pornography are all treated as first-amendment-protected free speech. (Yes, I know about the "local values" supposed exception on obscenity. In practice, what it means is that the local strip joint and dirty book store threatened to sue my city for any attempt to get rid of it, and the most the city could do was to induce the business to move to a different neighborhood.)

Continue reading "Whither the First Amendment?" »

In case you haven’t been paying attention to world events (a lot has been happening right here at home!) there have been some nasty protests and riots in the capital of Indonesia recently:

Indonesia's President Joko Widodo postponed a visit to Australia on Saturday after a mass protest in Jakarta that briefly turned violent as Muslim extremists pressed for the resignation of the capital's governor, a Christian they say insulted the Koran.

Widodo has faced criticism for failing to rein in hardline groups that had promised for weeks to bring tens of thousands onto the streets of the capital, and during Friday's protest his office said he was inspecting a rail project at the airport.

At a news conference after midnight on Friday, he blamed "political actors" for fanning popular anger over city Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, who is standing for re-election in February, competing with two Muslims for the job.

The governorship of the capital is a powerful position and one held by Widodo before he became president two years ago.

Widodo had planned to use his Nov. 6-8 visit to Australia to cement improving ties, with a focus on economic and maritime cooperation and efforts to counter Islamist militancy.

"Looking at the latest situation and condition in Indonesia that require the presence of the president, President Joko Widodo decided to postpone his scheduled state visit to Australia," a statement from his office said.

The protest against Purnama, the first ethnic Chinese to hold the position of Jakarta governor, was largely peaceful but in the evening the crowd grew restive and police restrained them with tear gas and water cannon fire.

One person died and more than 100 were injured in the violence, many of them police officers. Three vehicles were torched and 18 were damaged, national police spokesman Boy Rafli Amar told a news conference on Saturday.

Clashes broke out in a north Jakarta area where there are large communities of non-Muslims and about 15 people were arrested there for looting a minimart, Amar said.

Some Chinese-owned shops and restaurants were shuttered in northern Jakarta on Saturday, while security officers guarded a temple and a school, according to a resident.

A spokesman for the Islamic Defenders Front, a group that led the protest, denied responsibility for the violence and said the "provocateurs" were the police who fired tear gas.

The group may organize another protest if the legal process against Purnama for his Koran comments is not allowed to run its course, said Munarman, who goes by one name. "If the law is ignored ... then we will call for similar action."

Later, Reuters tells us what has Munarman and his fellow Islamists riled up:

About a dozen Muslim groups have accused Purnama of insulting Islam after he jokingly said his opponents had used a verse from the Koran to deceive voters. The verse implies that Muslims should not choose non-Muslims as leaders.

Police are investigating the case against Purnama, who has apologized for his remarks, insisting he was not criticizing the Koranic verse but those who used it to attack him.

Notice that droll “about a dozen Muslim groups” – I thought Indonesia was the place with the moderate, live and let live peaceful Muslims? I used to comment back in the day here at W4 on posts about Islam; holding up Indonesia as a model for the future and suggested that their brand of Islam, which was promoted by two large national organizations known as Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, might be a model for the rest of the Islamic world. Instead, it appears that more sinister (or normal?) Islamic forces are capturing the imagination of Indonesian youth and just like Islam around the world, we find increasing intolerance for other religions and violence at any perceived threats to any challenges to Islamic honor or ideology. It is all depressingly familiar.

Continue reading "So Much For Moderate Islam" »

Rod Dreher reports on dramatic recent events at Providence College where Professor Tony Esolen teaches literature.

Esolen wrote three articles (here, here and here) for Crisis Magazine, which have been the cause of all the stir.

The first piece this fall, published in late September, is an eloquent plea for the humane learning of a Catholic liberal arts education. Esolen's chief theme in this piece is the homosexual agenda and the attacks from the left upon any organization that continues to maintain its distinctively Catholic identity in the realm of sexuality. He is particularly concerned about the abuse of the word "diversity" in this way at his own college. The editor at Crisis gave the article the very slightly provocative title, "My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult."

Continue reading "The bad guys vs. Prof. Esolen" »

Something to lighten up the day.

Consider the following argument:

1. God does not have a preference as to whether the Cubs or the Indians wins the World Series.

2. The committed Christian should try to unite his will with God's will.

Therefore,

3. The committed Christian who realizes that God has no preference about who wins the World Series should try to achieve a state of indifference within himself concerning who wins the World Series.

It seems like there must be something wrong with this argument, but I'm not sure what it is. Thoughts?

Occasionally liberals (or other people who are clueless about economics) will say that we should just "make such-and-such free." They will even imply that, if it weren't for the "profit motive" (which is seen as per se a bad thing, a manifestation of greed), all sorts of things could just "be free."

Patiently, the free market advocate will attempt to explain that nothing is free. If you "make" some particular medication "free," that just means that the cost of researching it, developing it, manufacturing it, prescribing it properly, shipping it, etc., are spread around somewhere else--to people paying higher insurance premiums, for example.

Just occasionally, though, someone will actually try their best to "make something free." This might take the form of volunteers who give their time and money to hand out food to the homeless. Or it might take the form of a university that, having developed on-line courses and having a lot of bandwidth, tells the public at large that they may avail themselves of the on-line material of the courses.

Continue reading "This is why we can't have nice things" »

The bad guys are always up to more badness in the world of bioethics. Several weeks ago Wesley J. Smith highlighted some of the worst points in a "consensus statement" by a group of bioethicists. The topic was forcing doctors to participate in abortions and euthanasia. (I say "the topic," though neither of these is named in the statement. However, the statement is filed on the blog under "abortion," and in the social context this is clearly what the participants have in mind. The comments are somewhat interesting. One commentator points out that the much-maligned "reparative therapy" would have fallen within the ambit of the "services" that doctors can be punished for not referring for or providing, right up until the time that it was disavowed by the medical profession.) The statement was published by Oxford University and is available en toto here. It represented conclusions drawn by participants in a bioethics conference in Geneva in June of this year.

Some highlights:

In the event of a conflict between practitioners’ conscience and a patient’s desire for a legal, professionally sanctioned medical service, healthcare practitioners should always ensure that patients receive timely medical care.

The assumption is that any "legal, professionally sanctioned medical service" is a form of necessary "medical care" that the patient must receive.

Continue reading "Attacks on life and medical conscience and the importance of the states" »

I am not offering advice (directly) on who to vote for, or whether to vote. Rather, I am offering comments on various bad ideas to avoid in formulating your choice of whether to vote and who to vote for. As a public service, I offer these critiques of stupid, false, or pernicious errors about voting. The first is stupid, others may be merely wrong, YMMV. This list is not exhaustive – there can be others that should be mentioned. So mention them, OK?

1. A vote for X (insert one of: Castle, Johnson, Mickey Mouse, other) is a vote for Hillary.

No. Direct proof: A vote for Castle is a vote for Castle. Castle is not Hillary. So a vote for Castle is not a vote for Hillary. End of story. The logic really is as simple as it looks. It’s the silly-clevers who want to distort it.

Reductio Proof: Assume the logic of the premise “a vote for X is a vote for Y” is valid.

Person A thinks that Castle is the best candidate, while his friend B thinks Trump is. Person B points out to A “a vote for Castle is a vote for Hillary.”

Person A thinks that Castle is the best candidate, while his friend C thinks Hillary is. Person C points out to A “a vote for Castle is a vote for Trump.”

Consequently, if A votes for Castle it is both a vote for Trump and a vote for Hillary. Which is absurd. Therefore, the premise is invalid. QED

Continue reading "Bad Voting Ideas" »

Bob Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not everyone is happy about it. For some it remains an absurdity to present his art as an example of excellence. For others, while the excellence is undeniable, its categorization as literature remains problematic. These questions are not my chief concern here.

I confess that don’t know a great deal about the details of the Nobel Laureates in Literature. I also confess that this want of knowledge doesn’t much bother me. If one were to build a list of greatness in literature for all time, how many of these particular writers, dating back to 1901, would even merit consideration?

Put another way, when I look over the Nobel Laureate list, I feel somewhat in the kind predicament that Bilbo, delivering his farewell speech in Hobbiton, dealt with by means of this obscurity: “I don't know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.”

Now, I do know this for a solid fact. Nobel Committee has, more than a few times, well and truly beclowned itself with this Award. A clear illustration: It would appear upon even cursory glance, that more tiresome and superstitious propounders of socialism have earned the Award, than brave dissenters seeking to break free and expose socialist tyranny.

In light of that knowledge, I can say emphatically that the Nobel Committee did not, this time at least, beclown itself by bestowing its Award on another tiresome and superstitious socialist. That a large mass of Bob Dylan fans, especially of the academic sort, would like folks to think the Committee has done this . . . well, let’s just say that speaks to the level of tiresome, superstitious socialism still dominant among American elites.

But Bob Dylan is not a socialist. (If he ever was one, he obligingly shook off that superstition well before I was born, and I’m almost 40 years old — just to illustrate how behind the times these aging fellow travelers are.) Scouring for suitable descriptors of the political variety, I’d go with patriot and traditionalist; though I would make haste to add that political descriptions are ill-fitting on this troubadour.

Bob Dylan is surely still a Christian as well. Every time he’s in the news I run into a common phrase along the lines of “but Dylan eventually renounced organized religion.”

No, he didn’t. I have searched for the source of this pernicious platitude more than once; and have concluded that its origin can only lie in the imagination of certain interested journalists. Call it the elegy of discomfited secularists.

So it is only natural that the odious utterance creeps into quite a number of the write-ups of Dylan the Nobel Laureate. Again, take it from me, in the bluntest terms I can muster without breaking our “no profanity” rule: It just ain’t so.

Continue reading "NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE AWARDED TO AMERICAN JUDEO-CHRISTIAN" »

This is interesting news:

You may remember Jahi McMath, who was declared brain dead almost three years ago now. Three years. I've written about her case here, here, and here. Her family was able to keep her on life support, her body has not deteriorated or decayed, and her heart has continued to beat. If your brain stem really is completely dead, this is highly unlikely. Her family says that she has even gone through puberty during this time.

They are suing the hospital where her original surgery was, and a court has ruled that they can bring evidence that she is alive (despite the fact that a death certificate was issued), as this makes a big difference to how much the original hospital can be sued for in malpractice.

Now the family has put up a video purporting to show that she is beginning to breathe on her own. The video shows a breathing monitor with numbers that counts her breaths per minute and purportedly shows her getting up to sixteen self-generated breaths in a minute, while her mother cheers her on. If true, this absolutely refutes any claim of whole-brain death. Without an operating brain stem, this is not possible. It now remains for the family to show this to "outsiders," because it isn't going to be deemed relevant in a court if the only people who claim to have seen it are already family members and friends of the family. If it's happening, they need to bring in some sort of agreed-upon witness to testify to it.

Continue reading "Is Jahi McMath breathing on her own?" »

This will be short. I plan to write more later on the despicable defenses of Trump's behavior. But for right now let me just say that the defense that "all men talk that way" comes straight from the pit of hell.

It normalizes evil and the degradation of women and of sex. If you are a non-Christian man with relatively mediocre standards of discourse and behavior, I point you to the pithy comment of Iowahawk. If you have a higher standard of behavior and discourse, either because you are a Christian or belong to some other religion that doesn't normalize such things or because you are a noble pagan, then you will be even more disgusted, and not only because of the assault aspect.

And in both cases, you should be outraged at the shrugging claim that everybody talks like this.

In the olden days, when one man insulted another's honor or integrity, the second man challenged him to a duel. Therefore, I suggest a metaphorical challenge in response to this gross insult to all decent men. You can throw down this challenge by posting

#gauntlet

on Facebook or Twitter.

If you want something self-explanatory, post

#realmendontTrumptalk

Or both!

Yes, you should do this even if you are (hopefully reluctantly) voting for that particular lizard.

Because real men don't Trump talk. Whoever you are, whomever you are voting for, resist the corruption that this candidacy is producing in our concept of manhood.

In addition to the excellent points Lydia made about the flap over philosopher Richard Swinburne's talk at an SCP conference and Michael Rea's “apology” afterwards, our good friend Professor Feser made some pretty significant observations in his comments, here. Some of the most interesting were quotes from gays from the late 1980's, which I am going to reproduce here because they deserve a wider audience. Actually, they should be shouted from the rooftops.

To pretend (as some Christian philosophers I know do) that this sort of thing is essentially just a regrettable but understandable overreaction on the part of wounded souls who have had some bad experiences with obnoxious religious people is naiveté. It is often rather a calculated political tactic aimed at making public dissent from liberal conventional wisdom on sexuality practically difficult or impossible. Some activists admit this. For example, in their 1989 book After the Ball, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen called for a long-term propaganda campaign to change attitudes about homosexuality by shaming, social ostracization, and other tactics deliberately aimed at manipulating emotions rather than appealing to reason. They write:

The trick is to get the bigot into the position of feeling a conflicting twinge of shame… This can be accomplished in a variety of ways, all making use of repeated exposure to pictorial images or verbal statements that are incompatible with his self-image as a well-liked person, one who fits in with the rest of the crowd. Thus, propagandistic advertisement can depict homophobic and homohating bigots as crude loudmouths and assholes… who are 'not Christian.' It can show them being criticized, hated, shunned… It can, in short, link homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess, and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary…

Continue reading "Propaganda" »

We have news:

Timo Miller was "deported" from Nicaragua (which I'm sure he, in a sense, didn't mind, having been arrested there and kept in a foul prison for several weeks) and "arrested" when he arrived on U.S. soil. In other words, an extradition by another name. The Department of Justice states that he "is due to appear in the Western District of New York at a later date." At least in the U.S. he can't be held indefinitely without trial.

It's a horribly depressing thought that we have come to such a pass in the United States that this is good news. It's good news that a kindly, gentle, harmless Mennonite missionary has been arrested and is going to be tried and (in all probability) sent to federal prison merely for helping a woman who fled to Nicaragua to save her child from being given over to her former lesbian lover. All of his "crimes" were committed on Nicaraguan soil (you know, giving Lisa and Isabella a place to stay and introducing them to the Mennonite community), but apparently the U.S. Congress asserts jurisdiction over such acts committed abroad by U.S. citizens in so-called "international kidnapping" cases. It is a grave injustice that this is a crime at all. Yet I admit to being relieved (as I'm sure his family is) that he is not being held indefinitely without trial in Nicaragua, as seemed a real possibility at one time.

This reminds me of something once said over lunch to me and some others by someone who had lived as a child under Communism in Poland. He said something like this (paraphrased): "We had due process in Poland at that time. There were many crimes that shouldn't have been crimes, but they still had to get evidence to convict you of them."

That's pretty much where we're getting to in the U.S. now.

Continue reading "Timo Miller and Philip Zodhiates update" »

Here's a rather odd development in the SCP/Swinburne flap. Readers will recall from my previous posts the insanely nasty comment by non-Christian philosopher Rebecca Kukla and her defiant self-defense.

Kukla has since taken that self-defense non-public, but it was public for several days (I read it myself) and garnered many "likes" and expressions of solidarity with her. While it was public, Rod Dreher copied it, and I'll be quoting it below.

Suffice it to say that, though Kukla wasn't viciously cussing out everybody who disagreed with her right in that status update, she was proudly defending herself for having done so, and the only nice things she had to say were about all her "supporters" at Georgetown and about others who have tried to appease her side of the political spectrum. She also complained about the so-called "attack" on her by the Georgetown conservative blogger. The only thing in that post that could remotely be called an "attack" was putting a link to her e-mail along with links to about a gazillion other people's e-mails, tacitly suggesting that readers contact her, which could have (and in this day and age probably did) result in her getting abusive e-mails. I raised a demurral about that in my own post on the subject. But the actual content of the Georgetown Academy post was accurate and non-abusive and raised entirely legitimate concerns about her outrageous behavior and her future relationship to conservative students at Georgetown.

Continue reading "What is a Christian leader thinking?" »

One of the several (non-Christian) philosophers recently posting vile insult towards moral traditionalists on social media in the wake of the flap about Prof. Swinburne's paper was one Rebecca Kukla, a philosopher at a university "in the Jesuit tradition"--namely, Georgetown. She's a specialist in ethics.

Because I try to keep my posts as family-friendly as possible, I won't repeat her words, but you can find them in Ed Feser's post on this subject (gotta love his picture of the bust of Socrates with its caption).

In response to Kukla's highly unprofessional behavior on social media, a conservative blog site loosely affiliated with Georgetown put up this post (language warning--this post keeps repeating Kukla's language). It includes speculations about how Georgetown would respond if Kukla's political inclinations were the opposite of what they are and if she were directing her despicable ire toward a different group with which the administration sympathizes.

Continue reading ""The only people I meant to insult viciously were the ones who disagree with me"" »

This is going to be a rather long, philosophical post, so I'm going to put some comments right up front so that people can get this gist even if they don't have the time to read the whole post.

By now my readers have probably heard about the flap concerning a regional meeting of the Society for Christian Philosophers. If not, you can get up to speed on the facts via Maverick Philosopher, Ed Feser, or Rod Dreher.

Extremely eminent British, Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne presented a paper at a regional SCP meeting (an invited paper) on Christian sexual ethics and morality. In the course thereof he stated that people with homosexual orientation are disabled and that it would be good if they could be cured of this disability, and the left, including some so-called Christians, went hysterical, insane with rage. The President of the SCP, philosopher of religion Michael Rea, then publicly issued a brief and highly ambiguous semi-apology for the "hurt" caused by Swinburne's talk, implying that it did not properly advance the goals of "diversity and inclusion." Others have then called for Rea to apologize to Swinburne for this unprecedented move of apologizing for an eminent philosopher's invited talk just because it was controversial and also to "clarify" that a defense of traditional Christian sexual views is still welcome within the SCP.

Continue reading "You are not allowed to fill in the lacuna in anti-homosexual reasoning" »