Category Archives: Ethics

Update IV: Another Democratic (Or Demonic) Uprising

Christianity, Democracy, Ethics, Objectivism, Pseudoscience, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, Reason, Sex

In 2008, on this space, I inquired naively, “Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the allegations and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued is American through-and-through.

But, two years hence, Americans can boast of one lucrative EXport, or shall I say SEXport!? The repressed memory mythology, and my priest-did-me syndrome have been adrift at sea, but have finally dropped an anchor across the pond.

My favorite Pope, Benedict XVI, has stood up admirably against the exported $2 billion lawsuit industry:

“Christ guides us towards goodness and does not let us be disarmed by ingratitude.” He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.

The Pope represents an aristocracy of the mind. The Catholic Church, in its wisdom, has put in place a much-needed hierarchy for the worshiping mass of humanity.

Against this, the religion of Democracy preaches the rule of the mob and the masses—in particular instituting the lowest common denominator in all spheres of life, from morals to aesthetics. The Catholic Church is among the last historical institutions where the masses are ministered to by their betters (mostly). The impetus and instinct to bleed it dry is a manifestation of a democratic—or is it demonic?—uprising. It is driven by those who’ve, in the Pope’s words, “fallen to the lowest, vulgar levels … into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”

Reread “SEX, GOD & GREED” by Daniel Lyons for a dissection of the veracity of the sexual abuse claims against the Church.

Update I: The “Another” of the post’s title alludes to the health care revolution, ushered in by the Obama coup.

Update II (March 30): What did I miss? Was there a priestly ritual murder? Plain murder? Boer murder? Evidence beyond hearsay of all the rest? You’d thinks so, wouldn’t you, at least from Schmidt’s hyperbole hereunder. I suggest, as I already have, the reading of Daniel Lyons’ “SEX, GOD & GREED.”

Update III: In reply to Hugo: Thanks for your always provocative posts. Still, it’s baffling to see an Objectivist poo-poo standards of evidence and due process—class action suits being but one legal emblem of the abuse of the principle of a case-by case adjudication.
Also perplexing is it to encounter an Objectivist, which I know Hugo to be, blame genocide in Rwanda on anyone other than the barbarians who, with malice aforethought, took machetes to their innocent neighbors (I was just revisiting that for my book).

Update IV (March 31): A discussion on Hardball with Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, of cover-ups and papal culpability. No discussion of the veracity and standards of the evidence, though.

A Government Motors Recall

Ethics, Government, Regulation, Socialism, Technology, The State

“General Motors Co is recalling 1.3 million compact cars in North America to address a power steering problem that has been linked to 14 crashes and one injury, the company said on Tuesday.”

Will Toyota’s inquisitors subject the state-owned manufacturer to the Rack? If they do, it’ll be for show—to stop tongues wagging. However, I don’t believe we can expect a Torquemada-style show-trial for GM.

Updated: Coakley’s Corrupt! What About Journalism?

Democrats, Ethics, Etiquette, IlanaMercer.com, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Media, Political Philosophy, Private Property

WE KNOW that Attorney General Martha Coakley, who lost Ted Kennedy’s U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, is at the very least philosophically corrupt. But what about the said omissions of those who’re supposed to check the “lady” and her posse? I mean the roving citizen journalists, endeavoring to expose her?

I watched the hereunder YouTube clip twice. Perhaps I missed something but, as far as I could see (and hear), nowhere did the “journalist” filming the Coakley goons’ crass conduct articulate for her viewers why they ought to be furious at the conduct of these fascistic public servants.

WATCH the clip. What lessons for citizens does it impart? How does this YouTube snippet help, or even convey, the cause of liberty? The answers to these questions: “Nada” to the first; “it doesn’t” to the second. Not unless you consider being polite and not calling journalists Nazis as contributions to liberty and freedom.

Goons say to journalist, “You are on private property.” Journalist replies softly, “We want some questions answered,” “Why so rude?,” and, “We’re on a public sidewalk.”

Unless “journalist” is able to append a principled tag to her gritty clip, the Democrat mafia appears merely impolite.

THE SHORT, SWEET instructive reply to these fattened fascists would have been this: “You are NOT on private property but on public, taxpayer-funded property. You and Coakley are civil servants, beholden to the public who pays your way.”

What service do you perform as a putative journalist if you cannot convey the only philosophical truth the viewer ought to take away from this snippet? None, as I am sure a Democrat journalist could easily film similar infractions.

All this journalist has done is add a tit to the other side’s tat.

I grow impatient with the “Age of the Idiot” activist. Resources such as this blog and its companion site, ilanamercer.com, can help the corrupt and the clueless (with attribution please) become acquainted with the now “defunct foundations of the republic.”

But to take instruction, one has to have courage and humility. Dream on, ilana.

Update (Jan. 24): Say the Democrat Party paid for the offices of this candidate. Is this property then accessible only to a select portion of the public? Was Coakley seeking to represent some constituents to the exclusion of others? At the very least, journalists ought to be able to pose such question, when a politician’s brown shirts turn them away from said premises on the grounds that the offices from which a candidate is operating are walled off from the individuals she is endevoring to represent.

What do you say?

Update III: Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values (Senegal Does It Right)

America, Celebrity, Christianity, Ethics, Foreign Aid, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Media, Morality, Political Economy, The West, UN

The excerpt is from my new, WND.COM column: “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values”:

“… in all its self-serving displays, humanitarianism is, overwhelmingly, a Western affair; a Judeo-Christian thing. It’s as simple as all that. Liberals like Angelina Jolie will trace Western generosity to the founding of the United Nations, to the League of Nations, or to some other supra-national structure.

I suspect that what is at play in Haiti, and in countless locales around the undeveloped world, began with the revolutionary, universal, elaborate moral and legal injunctions encoded first in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus – and, thereafter, throughout the Hebrew Bible – to protect and do justice by the poor, the weak, the defenseless, the widow and the stranger. The people of Israel were enjoined to practice what Christians later perfected.

That stuff stuck.

A different set of beliefs animates Haitian society, and helps explain its helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Haiti is not a Catholic country, Haiti is a Voodoo country,’ Erol Josue told National Public Radio. Josue is a Voodoo priest in a country whose former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, officially recognized Voodoo as a state religion.” …

The complete column is “Haiti: Trade In Voodoo For Values.”

And do read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material. Get your copy (or copies) now!

Update I (Jan. 22): Martin’s comment hereunder reminded me what I clean forgot: the Obamas’ very public giving. I’m also grateful to Martin for bringing to our attention the DIRECT injunction in the New Testament against showy charity. Martin quotes the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6: “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them.” How has this country forgotten something as foundational as that?

Self-righteousness has replaced righteousness and self-aggrandizement has supplanted simple goodness.

Update II (Jan. 23): CHILD SLAVERY still thrives in Haiti in the form of the “Restavec system.” Children are kept in grinding poverty and worked to the bone. In the West this would be considered perverse in the extreme; in Haiti owning a Restavek is a status symbol. CNN has done stories on Restavec children, but has never connected the dots, as the favorite phrase goes. The angle is, invariably one of, “Look how good I am [Dr. Gupta here]; I’m crying.” Coupled with, “This happens in the US too.

No it doesn’t. When a slave is discovered, usually in the home of immigrants who imported their bad habit, American society shames and punishes the offenders.

Update III (Jan. 24): SENEGAL DOES IT RIGHT. Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade has offered Haitian refugees a “parcels of land – even an entire region. It all depends on how many Haitians come. If it’s just a few individuals, then we will likely offer them housing or small pieces of land. If they come en masse we are ready to give them a region,’ he said.”

Wade “insisted that if a region is handed over it should be in a fertile area – not in the country’s parched deserts.”

Wade’s got the right idea, or at least the righteous one. He is offering Haitians a most generous chance at self-sufficiency; at working the land.

“Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher and codifier of Jewish law, holds that the most praiseworthy and effective means of fulfilling the commandment of Tzedakah [charity] is through offering an impoverished person a business partnership, a business loan or a job. … the Prime Minister and [former Finance Minister] of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, apparently understood this well. Speaking on the benefits of workfare reform in Israel, Netanyahu was once quoted in the press as saying that it is not enough to be a Thatcherite, a Jew should go even further and become a Maimonidite. [Excerpted from the monograph titled Judaism, Markets, and Capitalism: Separating Myth from Reality, by Corinne and Robert Sauer of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, with which I am affiliated.]

[SNIP]

Will Haitians be tempted by a chance at an honest living when hand-outs abound?