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 Some jottings about the news .يا رب يسوع المسيح ابن اللّه الحيّ إرحمني أنا الخاطئ |
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Friday, May 05, 2006 From LRC Iraq as one big My Lai One in four rape accusations is false Marxist ideology says historically oppressed groups can commit crimes like perjury and get away with it; the Bible doesn’t agree, just like it says adultery and fornication are wrong (no secular double standard for the sexes). Anyway, being seduced and regretting it, and/or having consensual sex and then changing your mind, aren’t rape. The sharp and very funny (met her) Camille Paglia has rightly pointed that such evasion of individual responsibility (of adulthood really) is a huge step backward for women. She’s seen the trajectory from 1960s student protests (against paternalistic rules like curfews) saying how dare men try to protect women to ‘Take Back the Night’ rallies complaining how dangerous it is to go out at night (demanding that government make everything safe, a statism about as futile as trying to herd cats). As P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, fiat can’t make the sharp fang of (fallen) nature only catch Frisbees instead. (Like it’s stupid and arrogant — the attitude of an ‘entitled’ upper-middle-class girl — to expect to walk down a corridor full of drunken sailors or be alone in a room with a similarly sotted young man and not have anything unseemly tried.) ‘Star Trek’ cloaking device could work And before ‘Trek’, remember the Philadelphia Experiment during World War II? I first learnt of it in a 1970s book about the Bermuda Triangle: using an electric field (lots and lots of valves*) somebody tried to make a destroyer-type ship disappear, at least on radar. I also saw and enjoyed the 1980s science-fiction film of it where the ship literally became invisible. It travelled through time and stranded two sailors in the present day! *The first computer, ENIAC, also in Philadelphia, used 20,000 of them! 7:30 AM Thursday, May 04, 2006 On the call to boycott Da Vinci To me, it's all just silliness, and the less attention paid to it, the better.- Paul Goings This too shall pass. Remember The Celestine Prophecy? The Prayer of Jabez? (Sound of pin dropping.) Exactly. 8:49 PM From The Continuum Definitions • Orthodox: Someone who believes in Apophatic Ecclesiology; for example he is not Western.- Fr Robert Hart I'm sure I've heard of the Bible. I think it's a collection of quotations from the Missal, isn't it?- Richard Doney *Truer of America than England! **They’re actually an offshoot of the Methodists. 8:30 PM From Katolik Shinja Righting a wrong from World War I A war that was simply wrong. Montana posthumously pardons 78 for ‘sedition’... such as speaking German. Why Moussaoui deserves life in prison And not execution 2:42 PM From antiwar.com The Iraqi government is the Iraqis’ business 12:15 PM From Verbum ipsum Lord Acton, call your office Torture widespread under US custody Family values 11:32 AM From blog member Lee Penn Rod Dreher considers a crunchy-traditionalist option The Christian East, specifically the Orthodox tradition, at its best a refreshing, holistic, sacramental alternative to the Jansenism, worship of the 1950s and neocon Republican politics (the Protestant religious right with Marian devotions tacked on) of the conservative RC scene. (All the enemy has to do is say the right things about abortion and homosexuality and these people will vote in Brave New World.) Saving medicine for the whole church indeed. As Katolik Shinja quoted recently: It had a liturgical and communal vibe that "was so much more crunchy than any parish I'd been to," he says.True, but, as some belief.net comments point out, what about the sometimes insane anti-Westernism? I’ll add contraception. And many in the convert boomlet* are fans of Mr Bush (a transference from the cultus of the emperor?): the Protestant religious right (they don’t like the Pope and like contraception too) with a cool liturgy. That said, Mr Dreher is honest enough (rare indeed) to say what traditionalists say: on the ground where most of us are, the mainstream RC world is inimical to the Catholic faith! (As well as a real, physical threat to one’s children, it turns out.) In practice, Byzantine Catholic churches aren’t the ‘completion’ of Orthodoxy that some apologists paint them as. (Daithí Mac Lochlainn’s and Lee’s Russian Catholic Church — part of a tiny high-church minority — is an exception that proves the rule.) They’re the Novus Ordo with a costume change and they happen to be ethnic. In theory, nec plus, nec minus, nec aliter: there should be one universal church with its Eastern particular churches left undisturbed and not self-latinised. *50 years ago they would have been Newman-like Anglicans or RCs. 8:25 AM In Cæsar we trust Bush ... isn’t my idea of a conservative, but he’s the conservative liberals deserve; they’ve brought him on themselves, and I have no pity for them. Without them, he wouldn’t have been possible. For them to complain he’s violating the Constitution is a joke for the gods; whom do they think he learned from? Who has been teaching us that the Constitution is a “living document” that keeps “evolving”?Put another way, neocons and modern liberals (not classical liberals) are really the same thing. Also from LRC The great conservative hoax 7:28 AM Autism gene discovered in mice Wonderful! As problematic as genetic engineering is — Margaret Sanger/Nazi-style eugenics, possible Dr Moreau horrors and all that — I wouldn’t mind seeing this cause of suffering wiped out. Of course an ideal would be to retain the huge info capacities (‘brain hypertrophy’, like many gigabytes of memory in a computer to use Temple Grandin’s analogy) of the autistic-spectrum brain but give it normal executive function (by wiping out the gene?), a ‘Pentium processor’ like normal people’s instead of the slow ‘286’ one that spectrum people are stuck with. You’d have Renaissance people/super-geniuses who can use their talents and not be held back by this handicap. (No, they’d be held back by original sin and concupiscence just like normal people.) 7:13 AM From the LRC blog Good for the jury The al-Qaeda wannabe got what he probably deserves And for Mexico In some ways common-sensical about drugs ‘But we had to stop the Holocaust!’ Erm, you didn’t and that wasn’t the reason for the war 7:06 AM Wednesday, May 03, 2006 From TCR News The mixed legacy of the 1960s The revolution was an understandable reaction to some problems, a romantic one to a wrong idea of reason that turned into a revolt against reason itself 8:34 PM From Ship of Fools Redundant churches converted to secular use Sad and especially in this case because apparently the Orthodox don’t deconsecrate church buildings 7:03 PM Big Brother watches Britain 5:00 PM From The Waffling Anglican Second things The old catechisms and C.S. Lewis had this sussed 2:26 PM Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton on the Roman Rite and caving to secularism Milosz saw the ‘refuge in Byzantium’ phenom — something some people online* are ashamed of — and understood After all, our Latin liturgy is pretty good and holds up year after year, and the chant is, as far as I am concerned, inexhaustibly good. I defy them to replace that with anything one tenth as good.- Thomas Merton Sounds like the brilliant, saintly man who wrote The Seven-Storey Mountain and not the guru the ’60s neo-Modernists made him out to be. Even the apostate Joseph Campbell had enough sense to prefer the old. *The hatred there for a traditionalism that adopts and respects their rite is gobsmacking. 10:19 AM Quotation Pres. Clinton's bombing of Serbia in the 1990s did have (as many of us agree, and as cost Gen. Wesley Clark an election) Serbophobia/Pravoslavophobia* as one of the major attributing factors to our choosing sides in the Balkan wars of that decade (often against our interests, so as to ignore crimes of Muslim combatants who were committing war crimes and had connections already with Islamic fundamentalism). It is important to remember that stated causes and actual causes are rarely the same in speaking of the reasons for any human conflict, and that the opposite side has rarely if ever fought for the 'opposing' or dichotomous reasons.- Drake Adams *The ethnically related Serbs made good substitutes for the long hated and feared Russians with the advantage that they couldn’t really fight back. It was a proving-ground in demolishing national sovereignty. 9:25 AM |
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