I think I know why liberals don't mind radical Islam

This past weekend, my wife and I attended the conference run by the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education. The Institute was founded - and they organized the conference - to encourage and assist schools dedicated to providing a liberal education.

The word "liberal" here in this context must be understood properly. It does not mean what it means in contemporary politics. It means a broad (and in that sense free) and therefore liberating education. An education in how to live well as a free and complete human being. It contrasts with the prevalent utilitarian education ordered to making people nice, complacent workers in a worker state who obey the government and vote Democratic.

The foundation of a liberal education is Western Civilization. You know, going back to the ancient Greeks, studying Thucydides and Plato and Homer and Aristotle, and then working through the Romans Virgil and Cicero, and then going through history to the present, and learning from some of the greatest minds of human history. Learning about virtue, learning logic, grammar, rhetoric, math, geometry, music, and astronomy.

Now, this isn't to say that Eastern or other civilizations have nothing to offer. It is to say that there is an amazing richness in the great works of Western Civilization that actually civilizes a person. Lessons about virtue, clear thinking, being able to express oneself, the pursuit of Wisdom and the recognition and love of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.

Back in 1988, the Rev. Jesse Jackson - at the time a hopeful Democrat contender for the presidency - and no one complained about the separation of church and state with him - led a demonstration at Stamford University in which he and the demonstrators chanted, "Hey hey ho ho Western Civ has got to go!"

Here's one link on that wonderful point in history. Just google their rallying cry and see what turns up.

And now the so-called educational platform called the Common Core, which is ordered to creating a well-trained workforce, is depriving our students from access to great minds, great works of literature, and the capacity to think freely as mature and free and complete human beings.

Now compare that to what Boko Harum is doing in Nigeria.

Hmmm. Liberals and radical Isalm - both hate educations in Western Civilization!

Go figure.

But if there is anything, ANYTHING on the planet that suggests that an education in Western Civilization is THE THING TO GIVE OUR KIDS, it's that BOTH the liberals and radical Islam hates it.

I suppose if we really think about it, liberalism and radical Islam are both fundamentalist religions that thrive on keeping their adherents ignorant and dependent.

Knowledge and freedom are now subversive.

The state of ethical reasoning in our society

Here's a woman who was busted trying to hire a hit man to kill her husband.

It's really creepy to watch the video, knowing that this woman is talking about murdering her husband.

Anyway, why did she choose to go this route? It was "easier than divorce" and she wouldn't have to expose herself or her family to shame, and she wouldn't have to break his heart. Well, I guess all that backfired on her. She'll end up divorced, shamed, and having broken the guy's heart far, far worse than asking for a divorce.

The police believe she wanted his life insurance money. She is 21.

I mean, in the video, she believes she's talking to a hit man. Does she need a reason? Does she really have to explain herself? Why justify a hit man's job to the hit man? No need to and a hit man that asks is being, shall we say, unprofessional. "Look, I want the guy out of my life, stop asking questions, ok?" should have been her answer.

That is exactly what a heartless murderer would have said.

But she said what she said and she revealed herself big time in it. I believe that she wanted the money, realized that murder was the only way to get it, BUT she had to convince herself murder was something that she really wanted to do. She probably repeated those reasons like a mantra until she finally felt comfortable trying to find a real hit man.

And thus she rationalized herself into murder. She found plausible rationales that justify what she wanted to do. It's easier and quicker and probably cheaper than divorce, it saves on all the aggravation, disappointment, and heartbreak. Murder is good in this case, these reasons make it a good thing to do.

This is what utilitarianism and consequentialism end up in. If the practical value of an act determines its ethics, and not what the act itself consists in, then all you need to do is find a practical value in what you want to do, and voila! it's ethical.

All of the major bioethical issues of today do the same thing. Why is euthanasia ok? Because it ends the suffering of the patient, it saves money, it allows people to die with dignity, it preserves their autonomy - not saying any of these reasons are valid. But note: They are reasons, not arguments. There is no argument that killing an innocent person is ok. The difference between euthanasia and murder is, well, the reasons used to justify the act. And look at how similar they are. Suffering and heartbreak and practicality and money.

Her difficulty was that, ethics aside, murder is still illegal. Yet maybe one day, there will be no specific laws against murder. Murder will be defined as killing an innocent person without sufficient reason, and murder trials will be about not whodunit, but about establishing sufficient reason.

Brought to you by the religion of peace

Burning students alive because they had the audacity to study at a government school that provided a Western education.

Nothing more needs to be said. Except that the perpetrators - militant extremist rebels - "extremist?" - are hiding in the mountains, from which they emerge, like the braver warriors that they are, to attack unarmed schools and markets, and civilians in general, including health workers on vaccination campaigns, traders, teachers and government workers.

UPDATE: Alright, I think we can add all the upheaval and violence in places like Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and other places.

Now, Christians have been in various times in history guilty of violence and cruelty. I make this distinction, though. Such actions are only dubiously authorized by the Christian religion, and then not without severe machinations on the meaning of various passages of the Bible and rationalizations as to what it means to defend the innocent and preserve the public order and all that. In other words, unjust violence is a distortion or manipulation of the Christian religion, not part of it. In imitating Christ, it is hard to defend killing rather than dying for one's enemies, since he did the latter not the former. In that other religion, though, you have the opposite example.

What does "homophobic" mean, anyway?

Here's a story on FoxNews about Alec Baldwin. I am pretty out of touch when it comes to entertainment celebrities (failing to see why they are either entertaining or celebrated), so I don't know much more about this actor than when he's in the news headlines. And he recently got a bunch of headlines for some tweets in retaliation for bad publicity his wife got.

So, these tweets are called "homophobic." Here's how FoxNews quoted those tweets:

Baldwin’s controversial tweets read, “[I’d] put my foot up your f**king ass, George Stark, but I’m sure you’d dig it too much,” and “I’m gonna find you George Stark, you toxic little queen, and I’m gonna f**k you…up.”

This is "homophobic"? Does this word mean something other than "fear of homosexuals"? How can anyone tweet like that about an individual out of fear of the group the individual belongs to? Has the word come to mean simply "anything that people who call themselves gay deem as offensive"?

Now look, I do not advocate meanness, and I think Baldwin is just a mean person (based on the headlines he gets), and I honestly think it would be just if the only acting jobs he could find were in poorly attended community theater in some Chicago suburb.

On the other hand, when someone has unusual inclinations, and that person becomes a target of derision, it is common enough for that derision to take the form of "I'd do xyz to you, but you'd probably enjoy it." At least I remember the girls at school using that formula as a comeback to the boys who were being jerks to them.

If anything, Baldwin is guilty of playground-style retaliation rather than homophobia.

Well, that's the world we live in. It's far, far, far worse to offend homosexuals than it is to be an immature and all-around jerk.

Oh, and I don't know who George Stark even is. HIS immature little whinings about someone else's wife definitely deserve reprimand -  not agreeing with Baldwin's approach, however. But the point is, he's ultimately a nobody that Baldwin should have ignored if he were just a little more grown up.

The face of tolerance

Go check it out.

Now, the preachers who were brutally beaten by gay rights supporters were undoubtedly seen as "homophobic" - yet regardless of your position on these issues, you have to admit it takes great courage and not irrational fear to oppose a powerful force and get beaten up just for having an opposite opinion. Those who are truly homophobic are the ones who secretly agree with the preachers but lack the conviction to actually stand up for what they believe in for fear - phobia - of reprisals.

And that is what it boils down to. These preachers were beaten up for having the wrong opinion. For having an opinion that goes against the established doctrine of those in power. For being heretics against the dogmas of the establishment.

I find it interesting that with respect to the gay rights movement, our society has gone from a plea for tolerance of those different from the rest of society, to a coerced demand for praise and acceptance with brutal reprisals for those who disagree.

Who is bullying whom here? How long can gays claim to be the victims of prejudice? How many people have to be beaten up before we say that things have gone too far?

And I just want to point out, "if" I am a strong supporter of gay rights and oppose the tactics those preachers used, that I abhor what these gay pride demonstrators have done to these preachers just the same. If ever I sided with poor homosexuals who were beaten up out of bigotry, then now I side with the poor preachers for the same reason, and it would have nothing to do with any fundamental position on gay rights or the preachers' views.

It is all about who is beating up on whom and why.

It is a matter of justice.

If it is wrong to beat up on people or bully them for having views different from yours, then it doesn't matter who "people" are or who "you" are. If you're bullying people you're a bully. If you can't deal with people disagreeing with you and you get angry and violent, then you have a problem - and you undermine your own credibility. I don't care who you are or what you stand for.

By becoming the oppressors, the gay rights movement is sowing the seeds of their own demise. It is for them clearly about having power and not about establishing justice. If it were about justice, this kind of crap wouldn't happen.

The ethics of traffic cameras

I haven't posted anything for a while. I transferred to a new position at a sister company two months ago and I've been working very long hours.

Excuses, excuses.

Anyway, there's a little Ohio town that is in hot water for their traffic cameras that are racking big revenues for the town and upsetting people who live or travel through it.

Here's how advocates of the surveillance cameras supported the program in an AP story on Yahoo:

Supporters of camera enforcement say they stretch law enforcement resources, and they usually result in safer driving and thus save lives.

Fair enough. But things can stretch resources and save lives and be wrong to do just the same. This is consequentialism: Ethics determined by the effect achieved. Or, the end justifies the means. It has to be good in itself to photograph all drivers as they pass by a certain point and to store and use that data in a general sense, in order to do that.

I think traffic cams are just one more piece of evidence that we may be living in a totalitarian society. They are an invasion of privacy and a hindrance to freedom of movement and of association.

It is another piece of the puzzle that includes government surveillance of phone records, internet usage, economic transactions done electronically (buying with your debit or credit card, for instance). Yeah, the data are out there, and surveiling it saves lives and helps our fearless leaders thwart terrorist plots.

But it is still an invasion of privacy as far as I can tell, and just something that the government has no business knowing. Because the cameras record the license plates of everyone who comes by, but the system sends out tickets only to drivers who are speeding.

Now, if the cameras remain off unless an infraction occurs, and if there is sufficient warning that they are in use, and that the drivers are alerted that they are speeding and have a chance to slow down before hitting the photo check point, and that there is a tolerance for slight infractions - and I repeat, that the cameras do nothing if there is no infraction - then that might be ok.

Like for instance, an overpass on a highway might have speed limit signs facing oncoming traffic, a "YOUR SPEED" readout for each lane, and a sign saying "SPEEDERS WILL BE PHOTOGRAPHED" and the cameras are on the other side of the overpass to capture the back license plates of speeders only. That sort of thing might work for me.

There's a lot going on out in the world. The Supreme Court issued some interesting rulings. There's been an issue with a girl's lung transplant. The IRS and the NSA are in hot water. And I talk about traffic cams.

All in due time.

Here's How to Fight Abortion

I would like to call your attention to the altar. Read the whole story.

H/T to my lovely wife.