Category Archives: Morality

UPDATED: Mitt Romney: Elements Of A Tragic Figure

History, Literature, Morality, Nationhood, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans

Mitt Romney embodies some, not all, the elements in Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure:

* Character must be a person of stature. (Check)
* Character must neither be totally good or totally evil
* An error of judge or a weakness in character causes the misfortune. (Check)
* The character must be responsible for tragic events.
* Action involves a change in fortune from happiness to misery. (Check)
* Subject is serious. (Check)
* Tragic hero is of noble birth and displays a nobility of spirit. (Check)
* Protagonists pitted against forces beyond their control. (Check)
* Struggles courageously until his fall. (Check)
* Though defeated, gains a measure of increased wisdom.

Mr. Romney’s election concession speech speaks to these tragic elements, especially this man’s abiding faith in “this great nation.”

I so wish — I so wish that I had been able to fulfill your hopes to lead the country in a different direction, but the nation chose another leader. And so Ann and I join with you to earnestly pray for him and for this great nation.

UPDATE (11/7): We “left everything on the field,” Romney said, adding “we have given our all to this campaign.”

This comports with the prototypical Greek tragic figure who “struggles courageously until his fall.” Meantime, the snake in the grass coiled and hissed and spat venom, all the way to a victory.

When Looks Can Kill

Ethics, Family, Islam, Media, Middle East, Morality, Multiculturalism

When honor killings are mentioned in the moron media there is but one narrative: “bad man, good woman – Arab men refuse to let go of patriarchal privilege and power; Arab women are the besieged political class who desperately want to – but can’t – protect their daughters from this fate. But does this represent what is really going on in Arab cultures?”

BBC News reports that a couple in Pakistan-administered Kashmir was arrested for “killing their 15-year old daughter with acid,” for fear that “she would bring dishonour on their family.”

The couple told BBC that the girl had glanced at a boy. The father proceeded to beat the girl, while the mother fetched acid and poured it over her daughter Anusha, who sustained burns on 60% of her body.

Let these events be a lesson to those who think that parental love is a universally shared value.

From “THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL FEMINIST” (December 5, 2003):

Here’s what a “Palestinian” woman, Amira Abu Hanhan Qaoud, did to her child, after the girl – who had been raped and impregnated by her brothers – refused to commit suicide.
Plastic bag, razor, and wooden stick in hand, the mother entered her sleeping daughter’s room. “Tonight you die, Rofayda,” the wicked witch announced, before wrapping the bag tightly around the girl’s head. The murderess Qaoud then spent the next 20 minutes slicing away at Rofayda’s wrists, ignoring pleas of “No, mother, no!” Just to be sure, this alleged mother struck her daughter on the head with the stick after the poor child passed out. Yet members of Qaoud’s community are nonplussed – they see the woman as driven by devotion to both community and family.

Anthropologist Ilsa Glaser’s eye-opening work on female aggression in the Palestinian Authority more than confirmed that women were active in instigating the honor killings … yes, of their daughters.

Read on.

Fareed Zakaria Plagiarizer Is Back

Ethics, Journalism, Media, Morality

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is back from purgatory. Zakaria had been exposed for the second-hander I’ve long claimed he was—and worse. Front-and-center tonight—opining on the final presidential debate at Boca Raton, Fla.—Zakaria was found to have plagiarized another journalist’s work: the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore.

What’s more, plagiarism is a pattern for Fareed. Dan Amira provides a Zakaria background check, and with it evidence that “… this isn’t even the first time that Zakaria has been accused of taking ownership of another writer’s work.

If you’d imagined that a pathetic excuse for a writer, as is Zakaria, would be run out of town for his transgression—you’d be wrong. You’d be making a dodgy presumption of standards—moral and other.

Despite a pattern of plagiarisms, Zakaria’s employers were content to merely suspend his column for a month. (Someone called Tunku Varadarajan accuses everyone baying for Fareed’s journalistic blood of envy.)

Zombie Zakaria joins another by now infamous CNN friend, Candy Crowley, who helped tilt last week’s presidential debate in BHO’s favor.

What a lineup.

Ryan, Ayn And Rachel The Wretch

Capitalism, Elections, Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Morality, Objectivism, Political Philosophy, Republicans

The excerpt is from the current column, “Ryan, Ayn And Rachel The Wretch,” now on RT:

“… Unrelenting in maligning Ayn Rand, [Rachel] Maddow ended [her diatribe] on a loud moo:

‘In Ayn Rand’s novel, she leads her readers to see the wealthiest people as heroes, heroes that must be protected. The rich are heroes and everybody else is a taker. The more the rich have, the better. The better for everyone. That is not fiscal conservatism either. It is something else.’

Rubbish. Rand scorned those rich whose ill-gotten gains were derived by using the coercive power of the state—Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, George W. Bush, to mention a few. In Rand’s book, these men have not earned an honest crust.

Rand’s celebrated ‘rich’ were the men and women who bring to market the products and services without which life would be miserable, and for which Maddow is a walking ad.

The clothes she is kitted-out in, her coif; the devices she uses to communicate and transmit her sub-intelligent message, the food she buys cheaply to sustain her efforts—these are all produced, facilitated or brought to market by the invisible hand she labors to lop-off.

The ‘rich’ were voted into riches by the only democratic vote—the dollar power of the ungrateful masses, who, like Maddow, cannot do without the computers; software, hardware, hand-held devices, air conditioning, airplanes, apparel—on and on—the rich provide.

The Left treats ‘The Rich’ as a reified, rigid state-of-being. Ayn Rand—and all men and women of reason—understand that ‘rich’ is a work in progress.

Achieved through voluntary cooperation, riches are a reward for work well done. (Which is why this book is well-worth buying.)

Read the complete column, “Ryan, Ayn And Rachel The Wretch,” now on RT.

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