Blogworthies XIV

Because The Blog from the Core simply can't cover everything.

Noteworthy entries @ Mere Comments, ut unum sint, Catholic Analysis, Envoy Encore, Catholic and Enjoying It!, Discriminations, Yourish.com, Cor ad cor loquitur, AnalPhilosopher, INDC Journal, Irish Elk, and Dyspeptic Mutterings.

The Sacrament of Nihilism @ Mere Comments:

A reader wrote responding to Rod Dreher’s item in the Notebook section of the April issue:

In last month's issue I read the comments about what was apparently a homosexual who killed and ate his lover. I have had thoughts parallel to the author's when I see stories in the news about a mother killing her child(ren). I always wonder why the media are so shocked by this, but not about the hundreds of other cases that same day where the only difference was whether the child(ren) had completed the birth process. If one buys into the acceptability of abortion, on what logical ground can one be shocked by murder?

He is exactly right about the illogicality of the abortionists' position. (I use “abortionist” to mean those who hold the ideological position that abortion is not the murder of a human person but a legitimate exercise of personal freedom, not those who do them.)

The illogic is explained, I think, by the simple fact that abortion must be all right and the murder of the born must be wrong if many of them are to live as they wish....

Perspective: Who mourns for Tali? @ ut unum sint:

May 3. Arabs Brutally Murder Jewish Mother and Her 4 Children....

Iraqi Prisoner Abuse and the Corruption of Feminism @ Catholic Analysis:

The current media frenzy over the photos of the wanton humiliation of Iraqi prisoners — who I assume included people who attacked American troops — is justified because the behavior contradicts American identity and policy. Yet, as columnist Cal Thomas writes, the issue must be kept in the context of a Middle East in which brutal physical torture — not just non-physical humiliation — is still a daily reality imposed by Moslems upon other Moslems. One of the masters of such physical torture was Saddam Hussein himself whom American troops removed from power in about 21 days. Hussein would even film his torture of political opponents, just as Hitler filmed the brutal executions of those Germans who tried to assassinate him during World War II, in order to terrorize other potential opponents. Maybe, someone could dig up one of those films and publish excerpts of it in order to give a sense of realistic context to the current controversy.

It is undeniable that these acts of humiliation were rogue acts in defiance of American policy in Iraq. The physical torture of Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, was the anointed centerpiece of his regime's governance to which the United Nations for years turned a blind eye. The American public intuitively understands that, and so the Democratic attempt to gain political points from this scandal will come to nothing. Thus far these intolerable acts seem to be mostly non-physical and lacking the infliction of physical pain. Therefore, based on what we know now, they cannot be appropriately termed "torture" except by those with a pre-existing ideological axe to grind.

Yet, there is a deeper issue here from a Catholic perspective: the moral character of the soldiers who did this....

The Porn Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost: Musings on the pictures of the Iraqi prisoners and what they signify @ Envoy Encore:

This has been a story I've tried to ignore, at least insofar as I've not posted any comments about it. What's to say except to express one's revulsion and horror at the fact that our troops have commit such acts against their hapless Iraqi prisoners? Nothing — until now.

It ocurred to me this morning, as I logged onto the Drudge Report and saw the latest images of U.S. troops leering and mugging for the camera as they forced Iraqi men to stand naked and hooded, made them sprawl across one another on the floor in groups, simulating homosexual acts, etc., that the reason this is happening — and the reason our country may be shocked by shouldn't be in the least surprised that this is happening — is the following....

The thing I love about doing this blog is that you get such interesting and engaged readers writing you @ Catholic and Enjoying It!:

Case in point, this piece which is worth reading and re-reading: ....

Exorcising Racism (Or White Guilt) @ Discriminations (emphasis in original):

I'm sure Julie W. Sherbinin means well (Link may require subscription. If so, go find her article, "White Professors Can Help Uproot Racism," in the May 7, 2004, Chronicle of Higher Education.) Good intentions are important, but they're not everything, and her grim determination to extirpate racism root and branch reminds me of nothing so much as the unappealing zealotry of some of the prohibitionists as they wrapped themselves in the mantle of the Lord and set out to do battle with demon rum. A veneer of 12-step-like self-improvement psychologizing underlies her efforts and presents a more modern, up to date visage, but underneath it's the same crusading prohibitionism at work.

An associate professor of Russian at Colby College in Maine, Sherbinin says she was always concerned about race but thought she couldn't do anything about it. After receiving tenure, however, she became really concerned....

Meirav was two @ Yourish.com:

This is Rebecca. She is two years old. I see her frequently, usually every Thursday. Sarah and the twins and I run errands in the morning and have lunch in the afternoon. This picture was taken at one of our favorite spots in the West End of Richmond....

Why Sola Scriptura is Self-Defeating & False if it Isn't in the Bible @ Cor ad cor loquitur:

I've seen many Protestants deny the Catholic counter-reply that if sola Scriptura isn't taught in the Bible, it is a self-defeating belief, and therefore untrue. It certainly is self-defeating if in fact it can't be found in the Bible (as I maintain). The inexorable, unarguable reasoning works as follows: ....

Jingoism @ AnalPhilosopher:

One of my nonphilosophical colleagues at UTA used to accuse me of jingoism whenever I expressed love of country. He said it scornfully, as if patriotism were a sign of improper upbringing, philistinism, ignorance, or lack of intelligence....

INDC Science Series: Seasonal Moonbat IMF Migration, Part Two @ INDC Journal:

And, welcome back to the second and final chapter of INDC Journal's Science Series documenting the Seasonal Moonbat IMF Migration! By the end of our previous installment, we'd learned about some common moonbat species, explained some typical iconography and spotted some rare beauties. Let's rejoin the swarm!...

The victims of Fallujah asked for it, too, according to the UMass lefty who wrote the Tillman column @ Irish Elk:

Here's Rene Gonzalez in a previous article....

Boy Mocks Man. @ Dyspeptic Mutterings (brackets in original):

[Bad Language Alert.]

By now, you've probably heard about the creature called Rene Gonzalez, a UMass grad student, and his decision to piss on the memory and sacrifice of Pat Tillman.

As it so happens, I have some opinions about Mr. Gonzalez, too....

See also Blogworthies XIII and Blogworthies XV.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 01:56:46 PM
Categorized as Blogworthies.

"The Tyranny of Choice"

An excellent article by Barry Schwartz at Godspy:

The modern university has become a kind of intellectual shopping mall. Universities offer a wide array of different "goods" and allow, even encourage, students — the "customers" — to shop around until they find what they like. Individual customers are free to "purchase" whatever bundles of knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand. In some rather prestigious institutions, this shopping-mall view has been carried to an extreme. In the first few weeks of classes, students sample the merchandise. They go to a class, stay 10 minutes to see what the professor is like, then walk out, often in the middle of the professor's sentence, to try another class. Students come and go in and out of classes just as browsers go in and out of stores in a mall.

This explosion of choice in the university is a reflection of a pervasive social trend. Americans are awash in choice, not only in the courses they take, but also in the products they buy (300 kinds of cereal, 50 different cellphones, thousands of mutual funds) and in virtually all aspects of life. Increasingly, people are free to choose when and how they will work, how they will worship, where they will live, what they will look like (thanks to liposuction, Botox, and cosmetic surgery of every description), and what kind of romantic relationships they will have. Further, freedom of choice is greatly enhanced by increased affluence. In the last 40 years, the inflation-adjusted, per capita income of Americans has more than doubled. The proportion of homes with dishwashers has increased from 9 to 50 percent, with clothes dryers from 20 to 70 percent, and with air-conditioning from 15 to 73 percent. And of course, no one had cable TV, home computers, or the Internet in 1964. This increased affluence contributes to freedom of choice by giving people the means to act on their various goals and desires, whatever they may be.

Does increased affluence and increased choice mean we have more happy people? Not at all. Three recently published books — by the psychologist David Myers, the political scientist Robert E. Lane, and the journalist Gregg Easterbrook — point out how the growth of material affluence has not brought with it an increase in subjective well-being. Indeed, they argue that we are actually experiencing a decrease in well-being. In the last 30 years, the number of Americans describing themselves as "very happy" declined by 5 percent, which means that about 14 million fewer people report being very happy today than in 1974. And, as a recent study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association indicates, the rate of serious clinical depression has more than tripled over the last two generations, and increased by perhaps a factor of 10 from 1900 to 2000. Suicide rates are also up, not only in the United States, but in almost every developed country. And both serious depression and suicide are occurring among people younger than ever before. Deans at virtually every college and university in the United States can testify to this malaise, as they witness a demand for psychological services that they are unable to meet.

Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that increased choice may itself be part of the problem....

(Thanks, Jason.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 01:49:13 PM
Categorized as Social/Cultural.

Mental Pompeii

A fairly young Catholic blog.

By Clay Randall @ Pillar of Truth Online.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 01:38:58 PM
Categorized as Other.

Out of This Furnace

A young Catholic blog from another Pittsburgher.

Vide.

(Thanks, Nârwen.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 01:16:19 PM
Categorized as Other.

Journalists Stuck in Their Own Quagmire

Michael Barone writes at The London Telegraph yesterday:

Too many Americans and, so far as I can judge, Britons insist on seeing what is going on in Iraq through the prism of Vietnam. Eight days after military action began in Iraq last March, a front-page story in the New York Times used the dreaded word "quagmire". And when fighters began shooting at Americans in Fallujah and Moqtada al-Sadr led his "Mahdi army" into Najaf, American reporters and editorialists almost instantly compared the situation to the Tet offensive of January and February 1968. The abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison are routinely compared to My Lai.

Never mind that these comparisons to Vietnam are wildly disproportionate. The Abu Ghraib incidents did not constitute a massacre; My Lai did. Americans were fighting in large numbers in Vietnam from early 1965 until Tet, before analysts started opining that America was in a quagmire. Eight days versus 35 months: some quagmire. And the several thousand not very well organised fighters versus the more than 100,000 Viet Cong: some Tet. Plus, as we know now, the media's analysis of Tet was wrong: Tet was a huge defeat for the Viet Cong and largely cleared South Vietnam, for a time, of Communist fighters.

But never mind. For liberal Americans of a certain age, the American involvement in Vietnam is the paradigmatic event in human history. It demonstrated — or their warped view of it demonstrated — that America could be on the wrong side of a war, that American military action was dangerous (as the peacenik slogan had it) to children and other living things and could accomplish nothing positive. And to American journalists of that age and younger generations, Vietnam and the soon-to-follow disaster for the American presidency, Watergate, were proof that disbelieving American leaders and providing the most jaundiced coverage of their actions was the road to enormous success and wealth....

See also Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode: Why? and More Historical Perspective.

(Thanks, Big Trunk.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 05/08/04 07:35:07 AM
Categorized as Media.