Irish pro-abort laws built on lies, like US pro-abort laws

Posted on by

Catholic Culture exposes the lies behind the media campaign to expand Ireland’s abortion laws, a replay of earlier fraudulent campaigns to institute legal abortion, campaigns against which the plaintiffs in the two landmark American cases later turned:

“In Ireland, as in the US, the legalization of abortion was accomplished by means of falsehoods. Norma McCorvey, the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade, was not raped, as she originally claimed. Sandra Cano, the named plaintiff in the companion Doe v. Bolton case, never even sought an abortion. Both women testify that they were manipulated by their lawyers. “Not only did I lie, but I was lied to,” McCorvey has stated.

In Ireland the event that triggered an avalanche of pro-abortion propaganda was the death of Savita Halappanavar. She died of septicemia, which her doctors did not detect in time. There is no record that she requested an abortion, let alone that doctors declined that request. If an abortion had been necessary in order to save her life, doctors could have performed it legally under existing Irish law. Nevertheless her death became the rallying-point for a massive campaign to end Ireland’s ban on abortion.

Writing in the Irish Independent, the perceptive David Quinn underlines the importance of this case:

A few days ago Justice Minister Alan Shatter perpetuated the myth. He said that Savita might well have been saved had the law been like the one they are about to pass.

But I would like to know what law would have caused Savita’s medical team to spot the signs of sepsis on time?For months Quinn and other pro-life voices in Ireland have been begging the media to publicize the facts of the Halappanavar case. To no avail. The myth—that she died because of restrictions on abortion—has prevailed, and strengthened support for the new law allowing abortion in cases when the mother’s life is in danger.

But, you might ask, didn’t Ireland’s laws already allow abortion if the mother’s life was in danger? Yes. There, too, the myth has prevailed over the facts. However the new law expands access to abortion by specifying that if a woman threatens suicide, her life is in danger. This policy invites abuse; it opens the way to legal abortion for any woman willing to claim that she is suicidal.

And by the way, if a woman really is suicidal, is there any evidence at all that abortion will be an appropriate medical intervention? Common sense suggests that the sudden and unnatural termination of a pregnancy—with the physical and psychological stress, the feelings of guilt and of separation, the disruption of bodily functions—would put additional burdens on a woman already in emotional distress. Many studies have shown a link between abortion and subsequent depression. True, proponents of abortion deny the validity of those studies. But here, without any supporting evidence, they make the far more ambitious claim that abortion is a cure for psychological problems!

As Ireland’s legislators moved toward the vote that would legalize abortion, journalists reported that the country’s Catholic bishops had threatened to excommunicate politicians who supported the bill. No such threat has been issued; that story, too, is simply false.

Still there were a few “excommunications” in this story line, as Quinn points out. Prime Minister Enda Kenny announced that he would not tolerate opposition to the abortion bill among his colleagues in the Fine Gael party. Lawmakers who opposed the bill were ousted from the party; a junior government minister, Lucinda Creighton, resigned her post to join the opposition.

So it was Kenny, not the Catholic bishops, who issued heavy-handed threats; it was Kenny who took reprisals against lawmakers who followed their consciences. Just a few years earlier, as a political candidate, Kenny had promised that his government would not legalize abortion in Ireland: one more in a long series of falsehoods.”

Why the left loves Twitter

Posted on by

James Delingpole distinguishes between being controversial because you have insight and truth on your side and being obnoxious because you’re more willing to call people foul names:

“But surely someone like James Delingpole, someone who writes so contentiously, ought to delight in a bit of Twitter argy-­bargy — no? It’s what lots of people assume. But the reason what I write is so provocative is not because I’ve set out to annoy as many people as possible. It’s provocative only because it fails to coincide with what Dr Johnson called ‘the Clamour of the Times’.

Which is to say that, as it says at the top of my Twitter account, I’m right about everything. My problem — shared with almost every other halfway decent libertarian/conservative commentator — is that most people are incapable of appreciating I’m right because their Weltanschauung has been so warped by the post-war, cultural Marxist consensus.

And with people like that there’s really no point arguing. Especially not in 140 characters, as I learned to my cost early on. Some minor comedian, a chap I’d never heard of before but who had accidentally become my Twitter friend, tweeted me to ask what it was that had first led me to doubt man-made global warming. This requires more than a sentence, but I did my best: ‘I guess I’ve always been quite good at sniffing out cant.’

Next thing I knew, what I thought had been a private reply had been incorporated into his stand-up set. It turned out that this comedian was an ardent believer in the AGW religion, as were his audience. So he worked up this routine where he imagined Newton basing his discoveries on his sense of smell. Sniffing, get it? Apparently it has them all in stitches every time.

Last week, I had more local difficulty over some new research from a Berkeley professor purportedly showing that the ‘sceptics’ are wrong and that the evidence for ‘global warming’ is stronger than ever. Actually it showed nothing of the kind. But again, there is not a plausible counterargument you can express in the space of 140 characters. That’s why anyone who goadingly tweeted me in the expectation that there was was rewarded with an instant block.

It’s not that I can’t fight my corner. I can and I very much enjoy doing so — but only on the terrain of my choosing. That terrain is usually an article or a blog where there is proper space to develop an argument, supported with evidence. Try to do the same on Twitter and all you achieve is to sound petulant, defensive, desperate: you can assert all you like but why should anyone believe what you’re saying is true?

This also, I think, goes some way towards explaining Twitter’s pronounced left-wing bias. As Rush Limbaugh and others have noted, the left doesn’t much like to engage in rational, fact-based arguments it knows it’s going to lose. That’s why it’s always so much more comfortable in the realm of the emotive slogan, the glib one-liner, the cheap shot, the ad hominem. Twitter is the ideal medium for all this, in a way that wordier parts of the internet just aren’t. The blog, for example, vastly favours the right because there’s so much more space for all that stuff that ­liberal-lefties so loathe and fear, such as logic and evidence and cross-references.”

The insanity of public debate in America

Posted on by

Consider the following,:

1. A woman has the absolute right to kill her baby until the moment it exits her uterus. She can also dismember it and torture it by burning it with saline fluid, plucking off its limbs, crushing its bones, or sucking its brains out.

These actions are guarded ferociously as her “right to privacy” by the entire intellectual establishment that silently blacks out or distorts descriptions of these killings. Some 50 million babies have been killed in the past few decades but this holocaust is left to private conscience only. Women or their doctors are not punished for it at all. In fact, they’re applauded and public funding is used to pay for it, even while that part of the public that doesn’t go along with abortion is demonized.

2. An eighty-year-old man makes a few untoward remarks to a girlfriend in the privacy of their bedroom. The tapes are recorded. and published. He is denounced as a disgusting racist with no right to his opinions and he is deprived of his property rights.

Leading “libertarian” activists  say nothing or defend the media’s position. They tell people they ought not to say anything in private they can’t say in public.  This is a thought-control much greater than that under Sharia law, which all these activists would denounce, correctly. None of them sees the contradiction.

No one thinks of simply ignoring and not linking the Sterling material. Instead, they all follow the media’s cue automatically, as though pulled by invisible strings. Then they call themselves “fiercely independent” and talk about “freedom,:” “free speech,” “free choice,” “self-ownership” and other flattering mythologies with a straight face.

Meanwhile, so-called “evil statists” are the only ones arguing that the the recordings are on their face illegal and should not be distributed in the public realm.

The parameters of debate in the much-vaunted “free press” are set by media barons who profit from cheap gossip and extortion (which lowers the cost of running a paper, since the public does the reporting for free or for small sums), pornographers, and paid operatives of the government posing as private actors.

No one considers this a gross conflict of interest. The media barons are presumed not to have political agendas and presumed not to manipulate in collusion.

Nor is this manipulation termed what it is – an extension of the state into the private sphere. It is all deemed “free market” unproblematically.

3. The same people attack anyone who criticizes a paid porn performer for her consciously public acts. They argue that she has a right to privacy even though she sold her porn pictures to a public company voluntarily.

I actually agree with that argument, but those who deny a Donald Sterling his privacy can surely have no justification for giving a Belle Knox hers.

With equal confusion, recording the private sexual behavior of Tyler Clementi (the gay Rutgers freshman who committed suicide)  is a vicious assault on his privacy and dignity (it is), but recording the speech of a Donald Sterling is a righteous act of public policing (it is not).

4. The same people who attack Donald Sterling’s private speech and hold it to an arbitrarily decided public standard also denounce theocracy (with its logically entailed blasphemy laws) as an insupportable and “medieval” intrusion into free speech and thought. And they declare themselves the embodiment of “reason” against the “irrationality” of the religious.

5. The same critics of Sterling who believe it is legitimate for him to lose his livelihood over private speech within his bedroom have a fit over the most minor constraint placed on their right to use speech in public to degrade, inflame, incite, defraud, mislead, or titillate. They even object to any constraint placed on their right to disseminate for commercial profit the vilest images, even where they would be accessible by minors.

They defend their right to view violent child pornography, even though that right supplies the demand that drives a global market of child abuse and murder and though the act of viewing itself has been deemed criminal.

But while the act of viewing child-porn is criminal, the act of dismembering a child is deemed “private” and protected.

The left also defends without any nuance or moderation the right to publish “art”  that inflames the public, even where major violence could result  as in the Danish cartoons of Mohammed, which, as it turns out, were a deliberate provocation from a neo-con flack.

Turn the lights on: legalize infanticide

Posted on by

Matt Walsh blog:

We are a nation in moral chaos. Why shouldn’t it look and feel like it? I think it should. I think it would be better if it did.

If I could go back to the slave days, I’d tell those hypocrites to repeal their laws against kidnapping and false imprisonment. I’d tell them to confront the fact that slavery IS false imprisonment — outlaw both or outlaw neither.

And that’s what I’m saying now to our own society of hypocrites; our culture of cowards; our nation of traitors who bat not an eye at the mass murder of the innocent. Either outlaw infanticide in all of its forms, or don’t outlaw it in any form.

This is how neo-liberal ideology survives. It has to erect all of these arbitrary guidelines, and distinctions without differences, and capricious rules and limits. It sets you on a path to Hell, but it takes you there slowly, and it sings you happy songs along the way. It plants the seeds of evil and self-worship into your heart, but it can not let the seeds blossom too quickly. Neo-liberals are only neo-liberals as long as they can hide from their own reflections.

It tells you that abortion is a wonderful expression of a woman’s “right to choose.” But killing newborns? That’s totally different! Or killing a pregnant woman? That’s clearly double homicide!

Let’s stop this madness. Turn the lights on. Neo-liberals, like mold, need darkness to thrive. So turn the lights on. You want legal infanticide? OK, have it your way.

And perhaps we shouldn’t stop there. If unborn humans are expendable, then newborn humans must be expendable; but if newborn humans are expendable, why shouldn’t older humans be seen expendable, too?”

Film to expose abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s serial infanticide

Posted on by

UPDATE

A conservative site has a list of other abortion facilities guilty of negligence, showing that the Gosnell case is not an outlier. This is the ugly, brutalizing industry that abortion activists try to prettify with touchy-feely movies.

ORIGINAL POST

A film-maker couple is intent on exposing the murderous career of Kermit Gosnell, the millionaire African-American Philadelphia abortionist who was found guilty of severing the spines of new-born babies whom he had failed to successfully abort. It has been called the most important story not being covered by the major media in America:

“It has been described as one of the most important stories never told: the case of Kermit Gosnell, an abortion doctor some believe killed thousands of babies over the span of three decades.

From the 1970s to early 2010, the sign on Gosnell’s West Philadelphia clinic read “Women’s Medical Society.” But in 2010, after investigating claims of an illegal prescription drug operation, federal agents discovered what they call a “house of horrors.”

Three years later, a jury found Gosnell guilty on three counts of murder for killing babies that were born alive. He was also convicted of manslaughter in the death of a 41-year-old Bhutanese immigrant who died from a botched abortion while under his care.”

Trying to work up funding for their project, the film-makers, Anne McElhinney and her husband Phelim McAleer, ran into problems with the supposedly independent crowd-sourcing site, Kickstarter, which they believe tried to censor the project.

Heritage.org reports that Gosnell  killed at least a hundred babies and it published gruesome photos of the body parts stored in the clinic:

Abortion doctor's 'house of horrors'

Gosnell’s assistants (including a 15 year old)  were untrained, but participated in the procedures and prescribed medicine; Gosnell’s instruments were rusty and old and the clinic was filthy.

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies … What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy – and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors …. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”

This was the number of reporters at this trial:

bench

This is the grand jury report on Gosnell’s house of horrors.

Some excerpts:

“Mrs. Mongar was just one of many patients victimized by Gosnell’s depravity. There were scores more. At least one other mother died following an abortion in which Gosnell punctured her uterus and then sent her home. He left an arm and a leg of a partially aborted fetus in the womb of another woman, and then told her he did not need to see her when she became sick days later, having developed a temperature of 106 degrees. He perforated bowels, cervixes, and uteruses. He left women sterile. He also killed live, viable, moving, breathing, crying babies. He killed them by cutting their spinal cords after their mothers had delivered them after receiving excessive amounts of medication designed to induce active labor. This report documents multiple murders of viable babies. The evidence makes a compelling case that many others were murdered.”

According to the report, Gosnell made $10-15,000 every night from a few hours of work.

Even more damning was his attitude:

“Gosnell routinely cracked jokes about babies whose necks he had just slit. He treated his patients with condescension – slapping them, providing abysmal care, and often refusing even to see or talk to them – unless they were Caucasian, or had money.”

Gosnell’s procedures were performed on babies that had been delivered, were viable, and  exhibited pain.

“After the baby was expelled, Cross noticed that he was breathing, though not for long. After about 10 to 20 seconds, while the mother was asleep, “the doctor just slit the neck,” said Cross. Gosnell put the boy’s body in a shoebox. Cross described the baby as so big that his feet and arms hung out over the sides of the container. Cross said that she saw the baby move after his neck was cut, and after the doctor placed it in the shoebox. Gosnell told her, “it’s the baby’s reflexes. It’s  not really moving.”

Gosnell crushed the skulls of babies that had been delivered and were viable:

“Under further questioning, Massof acknowledged that Gosnell and he almost al
ways cut the spinal cords, and sometimes suctioned skulls as well, after the babies were fully expelled by their mothers, when there was clearly no need or medical reason to collapse the skull. Tina Baldwin’s testimony also made it clear that Gosnell was not cutting spinal  cords, crushing babies’ skulls, or suctioning in order to allow the head to pass through the cervix. Even while claiming that Gosnell sometimes suctioned a fetus’s skull in order to
get  it through the birth canal, her description of his technique belied her claim: She said
that he would “crack” the neck after the head was out – when only the baby’s torso was
still inside the mother – and then suction the brain matter out.”

Her killed several of the women who came to him with over-dosages and bad medication, and, at least in one case, refrained from doing anything to reverse his actions:

“After returning several minutes later with the medicine case, however, Gosnell did not use any of the drugs in it to try to save Mrs. Mongar’ s life. O’Neill said that she tried to use the defibrillator “paddles” to revive Mrs. Mongar, but that they did not work. Still no one called 911. Even though an overdose was immediately suspected as the cause of Mrs. Mongar’s cardiac arrest, O’Neill testified that Gosnell instructed her not to administer Narcan, a drug that could have reversed the effects of the Demerol. She said that Gosnell told her it would not work on Demerol – which is not true according to the toxicology expert who appeared before the Grand Jury. O’Neill testified that Gosnell took the time to look through the case of medicines and that he was “thrilled” to find it was up-to-date. This is puzzling, since he seemed to have no intent of actually using the drugs to try to save Mrs. Mongar.”

In 2013, Population Research Institute reported on the suppressed story and blamed ideology for the media silence:

“The mainstream media has done an excellent job of completely ignoring the trial of Kermit Gosnell. As everyone knows by now, Gosnell was the Philadelphia abortionist famous for “snipping the spines” of newborns who happened to survive his efforts to abort them.

The state health authorities ignored his clinic for 17 long years. Then one of his patients died from a drug overdose. At long last, the authorities decided to come in and take a look around.

They were horrified by what they found. There was blood and animal feces everywhere and the stench of urine filled the air. Jars filled with the severed feet of babies lined the shelves, ghoulish “trophies” of Gosnell’s grisly work.

Then, when the investigators attempted to check the medical licenses of Gosnell’s employees, whom he referred to as his fellow “doctors,” they found that they had none. They were practicing medicine without a license.

After Gosnell’s arrest became public, present and past workers in his abortion mill began to come forward with their own stories. They spoke of babies crying after being born alive, only to be silenced by Gosnell’s scissors. They spoke of having to wrap up these tiny corpses in tissue and throw them in a deep freeze.

This trial should be making the headlines in every major paper, and be leading the news broadcasts each night. Every other mass murder story in America ignites a media frenzy, after all. Yet Gosnell’s trial has been greeted by silence. The national media is doing its best to pretend it doesn’t exist.

One Washington Post blog writer explains the lack of coverage in an article entitled Why Kermit Gosnell hasn’t been on page one: “I say we didn’t write more because the only abortion story most outlets ever cover in the news pages is every single threat or perceived threat to abortion rights. In fact, that is so fixed a view of what constitutes coverage of that issue that it’s genuinely hard, I think, for many journalists to see a story outside that paradigm as news.”

Again, a post on HuffPost Live echoed this sentiment: “For what it’s worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it’ll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there’s a direct connection between the media’s failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it’s a bad idea, I think it’s dangerous, but I think that’s the way it is.” In other words, the mainstream media, predominantly leftist, sees this case as detrimental to abortion “rights”, so they ignore abortion wrongs.”

Many pro-life activists believe Gosnell is only the tip of the iceberg:

“Prosecutors say Gosnell routinely cut live babies in the back of the neck to sever their spines. Pro-abortion groups have suggested Gosnell’s alleged murder of live children is the exception in the abortion industry.

But a video released by the pro-life group Live Action shows Washington, D.C., abortion doctor Cesare Santangelo telling a 24-weeks pregnant woman he will not give medical care to a baby born alive.”

Bastiat: Nations in devolution need catastrophe to learn

Posted on by

Frederic Bastiat:

“When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress, and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”

Heaven-Haven

Posted on by

A nun takes the veil

Heaven-Haven

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

I HAVE desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea

Mommy dearest makes snuff-movie, calls critics “haters”

Posted on by

UPDATE:

Please note that this piece is not intended to bash or mock women who have undergone abortions. That is a matter between a woman and her conscience, at least under current law.

The post is intended to deride an abortion-activist who turns a  matter that at all other times she claims is private into a public spectacle, even while branding critics as pure evil, for simply telling her what they think about it.

ORIGINAL POST

Yet another gloriously “humanitarian” feminist, not content with aborting her child,  goes viral with the deed so she can blot out her guilt.….

The malign mommy didn’t really film her first trimester abortion in gory detail, because that would put a crimp in her “you-go-girl” story.

She just filmed herself – the heroine of the episode.

A genuine aborti-flick would have shown the unpleasant reality behind the flattering fiction.

And, of course, this brand of feminism is all about spinning flattering fiction…. and erasing unflattering reality.

Mommy dearest writes:

“A first trimester abortion takes three to five minutes. It is safer than giving birth. There is no cutting, and risk of infertility is less than 1 percent. Yet women come into the clinic all the time terrified that they are going to be cut open, convinced that they won’t be able to have kids after the abortion. The misinformation is amazing, but think about it: They are still willing to sacrifice these things because they know that they can’t carry the child at this moment.

[Lila: To an objective observer, this “sacrifice” is nothing of the sort. It is sheer recklessness.]

“There are three options for a first-trimester abortion: medical abortion, which is the pill; a surgical abortion with IV sedation, where you’re asleep through the whole thing; and a surgical abortion with local anesthesia during which you’re awake. Women are most terrified of being awake.

[Lila: Indeed.]

“I could have taken the pill, but I wanted to do the one that women were most afraid of. I wanted to show it wasn’t scary — and that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story. It’s my story.

Everyone at the clinic was really supportive of filming it.”

[Lila:  Mass man is at his core a voyeur, a bored busy-body.  He seems never happier than when playing peeping- tom at your expense, or sharing more than you want to know, at his own.]

“At first they wanted to sit down and talk about the real consequences of this. There are a lot of politics involved. We knew we could have hundreds of protesters at our door; we could have bomb threats. Working at an abortion clinic, every once in awhile it feels like you’re working in a war zone.

[Lila:  Her self -dramatization takes away the focus from the real victims, her unborn baby.]

“But I said, “Bring it,” and they were on board.

I knew the cameras were in the room during the procedure, but I forgot about them almost immediately. I was focused on staying positive and feeling the love from everyone in the room. I am so lucky that I knew everyone involved, and I was so supported. I remember breathing and humming through it like I was giving birth. I know that sounds weird, but to me, this was as birth-like as it could be. It will always be a special memory for me. I still have my sonogram, and if my apartment were to catch fire, it would be the first thing I’d grab.

[Lila: If this were metaphysics, it would be excellent. As abortion documentary, it’s nothing more than delusion.]

“The first night I posted the video to my Facebook page, I couldn’t sleep. I went out with friends, and I was so paranoid people were looking at me a certain way because they saw my video. The intimacy of it made me nervous, even though I really wanted people to see it.

[Lila: Can anyone any more wonder why the population doesn’t object to its medical records being pawed through by the government? People simply have no sense of privacy. If the love of private life is the mark of the civilized man, then we must confront the truth that we are no longer civilized.]

“Then I looked at my Facebook wall. I was expecting this tsunami of hateful, scary things, but everyone was so breathtakingly supportive. People who I have never talked to started writing their own abortion stories.

[Lila: Bad taste, thy name is “sisterhood.”]

“I had one woman who messaged me saying she’d had an abortion that week and she was plagued with guilt. Her boyfriend called her a killer, but she said she was recovering well and appreciated the video. Another woman told me she’d had a miscarriage and that because of my video she felt like she could talk to me about it. Just all of these things started pouring out of women.

There were hateful responses, of course, which was the hardest part of this whole thing. When I put it up on YouTube, pro-lifers put it on their newscasts. And so I got, “You’re a Nazi,” “You deserve to die,” “You killed your baby.” Just so much blind hatred without knowing who I am or what I’m about.

[Lila: This so-called  “hatred” is far from blind. It’s the wide-awake anger of the sentient and the just, appalled by her self-absorption and indifference to what is, finally, a killing.

It is both natural and good to hate something hate-worthy, like  irresponsible killing.]

“Still, every time I watch the video, I love it. I love how positive it is. I think that there are just no positive abortion stories on video for everyone to see. But mine is.

I know there are women who feel great remorse. I have seen the tears. Grieving is an important part of a woman’s process, but what I really wanted to address in my video is guilt.

[Lila: Yes, guilt. That little voice from one’s conscience that says that abortion is not all fine-and-dandy.]

“Our society breeds this guilt. We inhale it from all directions. Even women who come to the clinic completely solid in their decision to have an abortion say they feel guilty for not feeling guilty. Even though they know 110 percent that this is the best decision for them, they pressure themselves to feel bad about it.

I didn’t feel bad. I do feel a little irresponsible and embarrassed about not using birth control. I mean, Emily, wake up! What are you doing? I was going against the advice I give to patients all the time. So I had them put an IUD in after the abortion. I was able to learn and move forward. And I am grateful that I can share my story and inspire other women to stop the guilt.”

Lila: Translation:

As long as you can make yourself feel good about it, go ahead and do what you want. Ignore anyone who suggests that, if not garden-variety murder, this is something less and more at the same time.

Above all, feel good, because feeling good is all that matters.

For that, keep tight control of the language and the images.

Don’t let either get out of your control.

As long as you can make yourself look good, through subversion of the language  you can feel good.

As long as you feel good, you are good.

And anyone who fails to go along with that self-portrait, why, they’re nothing more than haters.

In which I pat myself on the back for keeping out of it..

Posted on by

Over at Bob Wenzel’s entertaining blog, the libertarians are having it out with each other again – the thick libertarians and the thin.

(http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/which-political-party-is-best-for-america/question-2611731/?page=3&link=ibaf&q=&esrc=s)

First, Sheldon Richman took on Walter Block and Lew Rockwell.

He accused them of not supporting their arguments with evidence.

Bionic Mosquito zapped him.

The verdict from the gallery was a resounding win for the home-team.

Then it was Jeffrey Tucker’s turn to come out swinging against Thomas Aquinas,

who, being dead,  was ably defended by the learned David Gordon.

Next, N. Stephan Kinsella arm-wrestled with a minarchist and called him names like “loser,”

which is par for the course, when it comes to N. Stephan Kinsella.

I woman-fully restrained myself from throwing any sticks or stones, as part of my endless violated not-so-New Year’s resolution to “play nicer.”

[See, Mr. Tucker? I took your humanitarian advice to heart in spirit, even though I criticized it in letter.]

But I admit I missed drawing blood.

And I admit I enjoyed watching others draw blood:

http://johnkreng.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/review-of-bloodsport-1988/

But, honestly, I didn’t get much satisfaction from any of it.

A wee bit of Schadenfreude, maybe.

But, for a brutalist outcaste – a “hater” and a “bigot” –

….not bad at all.

Recommended reading: Jonathan Haidt: “Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics”

Tradition carries authority in itself

Posted on by

Thomas Fleming at Chronicles  – the link no longer works – (h/t to The Thinking Housewife) suggests that men, reasoning on their own, are likely to promote their own ends, when subverting traditional moral teaching:

“Let us never forget that white males created and promoted feminism, that feminism is a male ideology. The women feminists were inconsequential eccentrics-compare the negligible influence of Mary Wollstonecraft with that of her lover Godwin, for example. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the other harridans they cite so often were regarded as freaks by both sexes.

Why did men create feminism? If we put the question to Godwin, Laclos, and Sade, they would say-if they were honest-that liberating women from control of fathers and husbands made them more vulnerable to seduction and exploitation, and that was certainly the foundation of the Playboy philosophy, and it has been said explicitly. Capitalists would have added that by liberating women, they could lower wages and make more money-remember it was the Republicans and the Chamber of Commerce that came up with the equal rights amendment and “Equal pay for equal work.”

But libertinism and capitalist exploitation are not the root of the problem. Feminism is an outgrowth of Renaissance anti-Christian individualism that makes of every son, daughter, sister, brother, wife,. parent nothing more than an interchangeable algebraic entity. Throughout the 18th century, the unreflecting encyclopedists and their disciples asked stupid questions like, “Why should one religion be preferred to another,” and “Why should aristocrats have social privileges not enjoyed by peasants,” and “Why should men have rights that women don’t have?” The most obvious answers are the ones we give to children when they ask why they can’t stay out till midnight or eat in the living room. BECAUSE YOU CAN’T. Why, daddy? BECAUSE I SAID SO.

In other words, challenges to the natural order of things must be met with exertions of authority, not with ingenious arguments. But, no, stupid white European males who could not see beyond the end of their nose – or perhaps another organ – destroyed, one by one, the foundations of a decent and normal social order. So-called conservatives were content to wring their hands or, more often, go with the flow which they tried feebly to slow but never halt, much less reverse course.”

Thus, in arrangements that have endured more or less satisfactorily near-universally, over recorded time (and such is the physical and public dominance of men over women), the onus must be on the reformers to provide the evidence that the changes they propose will actually improve, rather than destroy, the social fabric:

“It is only natural to assume—and scientific research has gone a long way to verify this assumption—that in the evolution of mammalian, specifically primate species, males and females developed specialized roles:  Men became the experts in hunting large game and fighting the enemies of family and clan.  Because these specialties are associated with certain attributes of mind and spirit as well as with bodily functions, the nervous and hormonal systems of males and females develop somewhat differently.  The differences, in any individual cases, may be quite slight, but overall women are more verbal, men more analytical, women more inclined to what is now called “multi-tasking,” men more prone to concentrating on problems one at a time.  For a detailed survey of evidence down to the early 1980’s, see my book, The Politics of Human Nature. As human societies have grown and developed—often in strange and wonderful ways–they have always been shaped by these fundamental facts of sexual dimorphism. In a near-universal pattern of dominance, younger humans defer to their elders and females to males.”