Blog Round Up

A survey of recent blog posts provides some interesting reading.

First off is an excellent piece from Matt of MandM ruminating on the Pavlovian dog-like response by Athenian zealots against citizens of Jerusalem who are faithful to Scripture's declarations on such things as abortion and homosexuality. You know the drill--like the the mindless ad hominem attacks alleging Christians to be bigots.
Matt's conclusion:

I think there is a kind of irony here; often when someone accuses Theologians of bigotry they themselves are simply obstinately assuming that their position is true and their assumption leads them to castigate and refuse to tolerate the opinions or person who expresses dissent to the secular liberal orthodoxy. Here, as elsewhere, the accusation of bigotry is a form of Orwellian double-speak.

The whole post is worth careful reflection.

Next, a couple of pieces on the underlying causes of the horrendous murder of Nia Glassie. Garth George opines on the causal societal linkage between the murder of children in our society and its toleration and propagation of abortion. Garth cites Mother Theresa:

(Abortion)has aggravated the derogation of the father's role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts - a child - as a competitor, an intrusion and an inconvenience. Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching the people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want ... It is a very great poverty to decide that a child must die that you might live as you wish.

How apt. It is one of the great hypocrisies of wretched and bankrupt Athens that it refuses to allow any certain and unqualified physical, metaphysical, ethical, moral, conceptual or any other connection between the child in the womb and the child out of the womb. An example of such posturing inanity is provided by David Farrar who gravely informs us that the practice of abortion is not a cause of infanticide in New Zealand, but the lack of it. If only we had more abortions, reasons Farrar, Nia would not have died.

OK, so here's Farrar's position: It is morally and ethically appropriate to terminate Nia's life while she was still in Lisa Kuka's womb for the good of Nia in-utero, and for the good of infants and society in general, but it is murder if one kills Nia outside of her mother's womb. Go figure! Actually, within the warped and bankrupt ethics of Athens we believe there is more consistency and less humbug shown by Nia's killers. They at least could argue that with twenty thousand unwanted in-utero infants being murdered in New Zealand every year, what's wrong with one more who just happens to be outside the womb? In Athenian terms--nothing--nothing at all. Why is everyone so upset? It was only a matter of timing. After all, rugby games have been lost that way. And they don't send the All Blacks to prison because they got the timing wrong. Get over it.

Yes, wethinks the killers of Nia Glassie are simply being more consistent with the established religion of Athens than some of its more educated and intellectual devotees, such as David Farrar. We challenge any Athenian to come up with any coherent principle of morals, ethics, or law which justifies the killing of Nia in-utero, but condemns it ex-utero. (Matt of MandM in a separate post dissects Farrar's particular formal attempt to do so and demonstrates how it rests fundamentally on a non-sequitur. This is but one example, but it is typical of the incoherence of all Athenian arguments seeking to establish some arbitrary temporal point of personhood.)

And still on the tragedy of Nia, society continues to wring its hands searching for a reason for such horror. A modern Athenian prophet has not held back from sheeting home the truth to us all. John Minto, in a breathtaking execution of the fallacy of false cause, gravely advances a most intellectually sophisticated argument: Nia was killed because there were not enough jobs. We quote:

The links between economic policies on the one hand and social degradation, alienation and abuse in all forms on the other is crystal clear.

Those who demand vengeance for Nia Glassie’s death would be better to first set up a gallows outside Parliament and the Business Roundtable offices before they focus on the miserable men guilty of her murder.

The most important solution to ending child abuse is to make full employment the number one economic priority. Forty hours work on decent pay by which a breadwinner can support a family in dignity and respect must be at the heart of social and economic policy. Not surprisingly it was dropped as Labour Party policy back in the 1980s by the likes of Roger Douglas, Helen Clark and Phil Goff while it’s never been National Party policy.

Anything less than this is to cry crocodile tears for Nia Glassie and condemn more children to her fate.

There you have it folks. Jobs--or the lack of them. That's what is to blame. Actually, Minto has confirmed the status of Contra Celsum as a "prophet": we argued several days ago, here, that society would want to blame itself for Nia's tragic death, as part of its refusal to acknowledge the depravity of the heart. Nah, being proven a prophet is no big deal. Some things are as predictable and obvious as the sun rising tomorrow. Athens cannot help itself; it must and will remain true to its established religion. In Athens there is no such thing as true moral guilt or sin. There are only circumstantial gaps and shortfalls.

Now, on a different subject, Half Done goes all feral on us, and blogs on the danger of entering "gun free" zones in the United States. What a hilarious example of the law of unintended consequences: the risk of being shot in the United States increases appreciably if you enter a "gun free" zone.

Actually, the point is serious. The sociopaths who take their guns into public places and shoot unarmed innocent people usually have the goal of murdering as many people as possible in the shortest space of time, then they kill themselves. Quite understandably and rationally they deliberately target public areas where they know there will be no people with guns to terminate their murderous sprees quickly. Thus, the statistics show they prefer gun free shopping malls, gun free college campuses and so forth.

The conclusions of the debrief on the Virginia Tech shooting turned out to be a bit disconcerting--at least to the gun-ban ideologues: if you want to stop people being killed in such incidents, the nearest officer or person with a gun should move on the gunman as aggressively as possible, as soon as possible. It will save lives. Oh, but hold on, we forgot. We have overlooked Minto's higher way. It would be far better to make sure everyone had jobs--then such things would not happen in the first place.

And now a real hoot. The climate changers are getting desperate. Things are so bad that the destruction of the planet as we know it is inevitable--unless "we all" take radical action. How radical? We now need, wait for it, "total decarbonisation" according to Monbiot who are contends that things are now so hopelessly bad we have only one last chance to save the planet.

Yes, one shot--and it is the only shot now that will work. It is this or nothing. Only total decarbonisation now will save the planet. Have we any hope left? It turns out that the only time any economy has partially "decarbonised" was during times of economic and social upheaval--aka recession. For example, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, carbon output in that country fell by 5 percent a year. People starved in their unheated apartments, froze to death, died with illnesses untreated, and drunk themselves into an early grave during those years--but, hey, carbon went down--but only by 5 percent per annum. Now things are so bad we will need to remove all carbon output if we are to have a chance.

What can we do? wails Monbiot. He knows that the required programme will cause "a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale."

What can we do? Monbiot again:

Can we do it? Search me. Reviewing the new evidence, I have to admit that we might have left it too late. But there is another question I can answer more easily. Can we afford not to try? No we can’t.

Chill out matey. You are an absolute dreamer if you think you can save the planet. You and your ilk are just not that important. Have another drink--but make sure its not carbonated, now. But let us give you some helpful advice. If thousands died in the disintegrating Soviet Union, which achieved only a 5% per annum decrease in carbon output for a short time, we must be talking millions of deaths if we are to achieve total decarbonisation. You see, its not just achieving complete decarbonisation, we would have to keep it there, right?

Now, really, how on earth will you and your comrades persuade the world to accept willingly such degradation and suffering? You are no longer on planet earth. It's over. Give up. But, on the other hand, we can offer one suggestion. In Jerusalem we have a saying: the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. We think about the only shot you have of getting at least some attention from the world is for you to accept the calling of martyrdom. It's time to conduct a holy jihad of self-immolation against the infidels who continue to carbonate the atmosphere.

Take your stand with the suffering matyrs in post-Soviet Russia who paid the price for carbon reduction. Lie down in the snow in solidarity with them this winter and gently freeze to death. They say it's the best way to go. You could plan to say something really dramatic to enhance the nobility of your self-sacrifice for the rest of the world. Something like, "Goodbye my friends. I am going outside now. I think I shall be gone for some time." The world will hail the self-sacrifice of Monbiot, one of its great eco-martrys. Who knows thousands and possibly millions may follow your example--and that will kick start carbon reduction for sure. We had better ban cremation before you go, however. Only deep, deep burial of bodies now. It's the new hip form of carbon sequestration.

And, good news. It looks as though there is going to be plenty of snow in your part of the world soon. Apparently, the forecasters are saying that things are going to be unusually cold this winter in the Northern Hemisphere. But you get that when there's too much carbon around. So finding snow in which to expose yourself should be conveniently easy .