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Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Sarge, here is the news I mentioned to you on the phone: Border agent killed in gun battle in Arizona.
ABC: Agent Brian Terry Shot in Back with AK-47 During Gunfight, Family Says
Related: Jerome Corsi's Red Alert
ABC: Agent Brian Terry Shot in Back with AK-47 During Gunfight, Family Says
Related: Jerome Corsi's Red Alert
WHAT DOES JUSTICE LOOK LIKE?-FAIRLY LEGAL
WHAT DOES JUSTICE LOOK LIKE?-FAIRLY LEGAL: "One thing's for sure: It's never looked this good..."
Monday's Counterpunch
The Tax-Payers' Tab: a Cool $9 Trillion and Then Some
By PAM MARTENS
Fed Finally Forks Up Documents Showing It Funded Wall Street's Off-Balance Sheet Vehicle
Patrick Cockburn, Reprising US Fantasies in Vietnam
Bill Quigley, Cover-Ups, Coups and Drones
Mike Whitney, Korea Steps Back From the Brink
Paul Craig Roberts, Reaganonmics: a Defense
From the weekend edition:
Franklin Spinney, Obama's March to Folly:the Myth of Liberal Interventionism
Gareth Porter, The Brutal Price of Progress
Eric Stoner, Afghanistan: You Call This Progress?
Ron Jacobs, The Drug War That Never Ends
Charlotte Dennett, Wikileaks: Where's the Oil?
By PAM MARTENS
Fed Finally Forks Up Documents Showing It Funded Wall Street's Off-Balance Sheet Vehicle
Patrick Cockburn, Reprising US Fantasies in Vietnam
Bill Quigley, Cover-Ups, Coups and Drones
Mike Whitney, Korea Steps Back From the Brink
Paul Craig Roberts, Reaganonmics: a Defense
From the weekend edition:
Franklin Spinney, Obama's March to Folly:the Myth of Liberal Interventionism
Gareth Porter, The Brutal Price of Progress
Eric Stoner, Afghanistan: You Call This Progress?
Ron Jacobs, The Drug War That Never Ends
Charlotte Dennett, Wikileaks: Where's the Oil?
One last piece from Sandro Magister
Sandro Magister, With Maciel Buried, His Centurions' Fires Are Burning Out
The leaders who covered up the misdeeds of the "false prophet" continue to occupy their positions of command. But their end is in sight. Among the Legionaries of Christ, revolt is stirring. The slow but inexorable pace of the papal delegate
Life After RC: Course correction or headed for the shoals?
The leaders who covered up the misdeeds of the "false prophet" continue to occupy their positions of command. But their end is in sight. Among the Legionaries of Christ, revolt is stirring. The slow but inexorable pace of the papal delegate
Life After RC: Course correction or headed for the shoals?
Chiesa: Sexual Ethics. Six Professors Discuss the Ratzinger Case
Luke Gormally, of the Pontifical Academy for Life, replies to Martin Rhonheimer, of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Then two Italian Catholic philosophers. And an Argentinian. And George Weigel... All started by something the pope said
Luke Gormally, of the Pontifical Academy for Life, replies to Martin Rhonheimer, of the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross. Then two Italian Catholic philosophers. And an Argentinian. And George Weigel... All started by something the pope said
Chiesa: The Pope's Merry Christmas: "Only the Truth Saves"
In his pre-Christmas address to the curia, Benedict XVI is actually speaking to the whole world. Sexual abuse by the clergy, he says, is the effect of the inability to distinguish between good and evil. And he recalls the lesson of Newman: conscience is made to obey the truth
Benedict XVI's Christmas Greeting to Curia
"For All Its New Hopes and Possibilities, Our World Is ... Troubled"
In his pre-Christmas address to the curia, Benedict XVI is actually speaking to the whole world. Sexual abuse by the clergy, he says, is the effect of the inability to distinguish between good and evil. And he recalls the lesson of Newman: conscience is made to obey the truth
Benedict XVI's Christmas Greeting to Curia
"For All Its New Hopes and Possibilities, Our World Is ... Troubled"
Another oldie from Dalrymple
Why religion is good for us
Theodore Dalrymple
Theodore Dalrymple
Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred.
And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience.
Far from being humiliating, the humility of the religious person is deeply consolatory. The secularist is often embittered by the inevitable dissatisfactions of human existence, which are so much at variance with his infinite expectations; by contrast, the religious person appears to have a mature understanding and acceptance of disappointment and limitation. He is not like a child who is continually having his toys snatched from his hand.
Moreover, the religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.
The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.
Sharon Astyk critiques Richard Heinberg's recent video on the history of fossil fuels
300 years of fossil fuels and not one bad gal: Peak oil, women's history and everyone's future
by Sharon Astyk
(original)
While it might seem that Ms. Astyk is correcting one error of certain feminists (that women are pure and good) by being correct in asserting that we have to consider the choices of women, as well as those of men, that have led to our current political economy being heavily dependent on cheap energy, this piece is still feminist in so far as her criticism of Heinberg's history is rather petty -- a feminist complaint that the history ignores women, even if it is ignoring the "bad" choices that women have made (even if they had "good" intentions as Astyk would like to claim). What was Heinberg's purpose in creating a video? From what I remember of the video, his purpose was not to give a narrative of the social changes leading to greater use of cheap energy. Rather, it was to talk about how cheap energy become available, and how it is related to our patterns of consumption, including our use of other natural resources. One can fault him for being incomplete, in so far as he looked only at consumption and not at other political and social behaviors (and developments), but she mixes what is correct with her feminist viewpoint:
Feminists can continue to dream of a world in which equity is founded upon there being no sex differences, but it will never exist for long.
by Sharon Astyk
(original)
While it might seem that Ms. Astyk is correcting one error of certain feminists (that women are pure and good) by being correct in asserting that we have to consider the choices of women, as well as those of men, that have led to our current political economy being heavily dependent on cheap energy, this piece is still feminist in so far as her criticism of Heinberg's history is rather petty -- a feminist complaint that the history ignores women, even if it is ignoring the "bad" choices that women have made (even if they had "good" intentions as Astyk would like to claim). What was Heinberg's purpose in creating a video? From what I remember of the video, his purpose was not to give a narrative of the social changes leading to greater use of cheap energy. Rather, it was to talk about how cheap energy become available, and how it is related to our patterns of consumption, including our use of other natural resources. One can fault him for being incomplete, in so far as he looked only at consumption and not at other political and social behaviors (and developments), but she mixes what is correct with her feminist viewpoint:
I have a pretty good idea why Heinberg doesn't mention either the rise in the divorce rate that drove up the number of households, creating smaller and smaller units, each with their own stoves and cars and consumer goods, or the rise in women's consumer buying power, the requirements of workforce participation in clothes, outside meals, domestic labor replaced, etc.... There are two reasons. The first is that conventional histories of technology are progressive stories with heavy emphasis on heroic individualism - that is, they tend to be stories about men and single events in industrialization, rather than how technologies are used in daily life. These histories have been challenged but the dominant narrative, the one we all learned in school is about who invented the cotton gin, not about the black slaves that built and repaired them, or the hands that ran them, about who invented the spinning jenny, not the young women factory workers who made use of them. What Heinberg tells here, intentionally or unconsciously, is a conventional history of human technology, one in which our progress is (horribly) inevitable, and in which the only conscious actions are invention - everything else is a tidal wave that leads us in one direction. This is the critical version of the liberal myth of the inevitability of progress, but it takes the same underlying assumptions - that these are natural events in which there are no agents.Perhaps one could characterize industrial polities as "patriarchal" -- they would not represent the best version of patriarchy. It is not patriarchy per se that has devalued the household economy.
The second reason is more fraught - a narrative in which women's entry in the workforce is responsible for our dramatic rise in fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions can look superficially like a tool for those who would prefer that women go back home and come out of the workforce, and would like to blame feminists and feminism for our present ecological disaster. Indeed, if no one has come up with this ideological claim yet, I'm sure it is only a matter of time before someone explains earnestly to me how wimmen's rights are destroying the planet as well as all the other ills routinely attributed to feminism.
That is not, however, a justification for pretending that women's participation in the workforce has nothing to do with our energy consumption however - it is demonstrably true that our move away from the domestic sphere had an enormous impact on our energy usage. We may not like it, but the story of men as environmental bad guys simply doesn't match up to the reality - there are plenty of bad gals for the planet. False narratives are simply never better than true ones, and we all know that not acknowledging the truth won't prevent others from using the story how they choose.
The other problem with avoiding the subject is that it implies that the shallow, empty anti-feminist argument is right - that the only way to tell the truth is to blame women for killing the planet, and that's just nonsense. Feminism has never been one thing, and in the early days of American 2nd wave feminism, it was a lot less one thing than it is now - there were powerful debates about what kind of social changes women actually wanted. What happened, however, was that a particular version of feminism emerged from the debates, successful. As I've argued before in _Depletion and Abundance_ and other places, in fact, the version of feminism that emerged was one that succeeded precisely because it so well served the encompassing model of consumptive market capitalism.
Thus, when early feminists called for men to take up a full half of the domestic labor, and tried to organize collaborative, communal efforts in which domestic labor from cooking to childcare were taken up equitably in group organizations to reduce the total workload, while spreading it more fairly between men and women, what actually happened was an "every household for itself" ethic. With women now working full time while also doing the majority of childcare and housework, what emerged was the abandonment of much domestic labor that once reduced consumption and energy usage, a lot of conflict over what remained, and the replacement of household labor with lower income employees and public economy replacements - ie, instead of the wife one now had a lawn service, the dry cleaner, the daycare center and the stop at the fast food place, and all the corresponding car trips.
The argument is not "the women's movement caused our environmental degradation" - we know historically speaking that social equity can exist in low-input societies, and we know that there is more than one version of feminism. It is my contention that we should be suspicious of this version of feminism's success, rather than laudatory, and that modern industrial feminism has never fully considered the degree to which its assumptions of natural progress are premised on the availability of cheap energy. Instead, what we need to do is ask "If this feminism succeeded not because it was primarily good for women, but instead good for the economy and some women in power, what are the alternatives?"
If feminism (even in collaboration with industrial capitalism) was powerful enough to radically shift the landscape of our economy, doubling and redoubling our energy consumption, and changing definitions of women's roles, it may be that we very much need feminism to change the terms again.
We never seriously questioned the ideology (and it is an ideology) that argued that women and men are more free when they are employed by bosses in the workplace than when they are working for the greater good of their partners and family in the home. It is certainly true that money conveys a measure of freedom - but we have never seriously considered ways in which access to funds might be assured to women in partnership with others - or ways in which men might come to equitably bear the burden of the domestic economy. Some of these have emerged as critiques or as functional alternatives, but overwhelmingly modern feminism has focused heavily on an energy-intensive, environmentally destructive abandonment of the home for the formal economy, rather than a balancing of domestic labor or a reclamation of it. The emphasis on personal choice the primary form of freedom also drove this unconsidered consumption.
Modern industrial feminism (and its partner in crime, modern industrial capitalism) has also uncritically accepted the idea that the progressive narrative in which women can do whatever they want more or less whenever they want is an accomplishment of their will, rather than a result of a fossil-energy intensive infrastructure that includes electric breast pumps, refrigeration, cars, a huge body of people shunted from homes and farms into low paid service economy jobs, the offshoring of things that were once not needed due to available home labor or were made in the home to far away countries, etc.... As I say in _Depletion and Abundance_ you couldn't have come up with a better plan for a consumptive industrial capitalism if we'd spent decades studying the problem. No wonder it was successful.
The deepest failure of modern industrial feminism was that it accepted what a patriarchal society had said about women's work and household and family labor by both genders - that it was meaningless, valueless, drudgery and contemptable. This work, which substituted for fossil labor in a host of ways, and offered in many cases much better alternatives than can be produced by industrial society (Consider, for example, the food - manifestly we ate better when someone was cooking at home) was replaced by fossil energies in a narrative that regarded such a replacement as natural, progressive and inevitable. It built on degradation of women's traditional work and convinced women and men that traditional domestic labor was valueless. instead of men and women sharing domestic labor more equitably, everyone left the home except a few hold-outs, and those paid the price of being told their work was valueless. This abandonment of the home had enormous environmental costs, which we are paying now.
None of this is a new observation - remember, feminism isn't one thing and ecological feminists have been pointing this out for a long time. But what is new is the that the realization that the resources this version of feminism depends on are going to be limited by material realities means that the women's movement needs to grapple - and fast - with the version of feminism we've accepted as normative. This, however is not my primary subject this time.
Feminists can continue to dream of a world in which equity is founded upon there being no sex differences, but it will never exist for long.
Divorce for Catholics
Begun on December 20, 2010 at 11:12 A.M.
While I was in Houston last November, I was able to meet up with a Soompi friend, LP. We talked a bit (much of the conversation was about her experience with teaching), and then we touched upon the question of civil divorce, and how it differs from separation. Is divorce permissible for Catholics? While I was growing up, I heard that civil divorce for Catholics is ok as long as the two parties do not remarry. Is this the general pastoral attitude in the United States? (I have heard it repeated once more rather recently, in fact.)
There are differences between divorce and legal separation. Spouses may separate for grave reasons, such as physical abuse. The threat to one's life or health is evident to most people in the case of physical abuse. But what is "emotional abuse"? If a husband and wife cannot get along, is that sufficient reason for a divorce or separation? What does the inability to live with each other really mean? How much of our understanding of marriage is dominated by unrealistic companionate ideals?
What if one spouse refuses to get counseling? The reluctance of husbands to go into marriage counseling, when much of the
Is it better for them to separate, if they cannot live amicably together? How much should a wife put up? What about the example of St. Monica and her husband? And we should not forgot that women can be the "victim" of their own expectations. Who is more likely to stick a rocky marriage out these days, American men or women? Love conquers all -- but are there limits? What about differences in communication? If men should not expect women to be like men and adjust accordingly, should this not be required of women with respect to their men as well?
The vow to help one another includes behaving civilly, and fostering a good environment at home. If the home is not a welcoming place because of fighting, hostility, or ill feeling, it is understandable if one or both spouses want to get away.
But can divorce or legal separation release one from one's vows, one's duties to one another, mutual help, etc.? Especially when children are no longer involved? If one spouse is failing to live up to one's duties is the other then released from his or hers? Barring separation for the sake of physical (or, perhaps, mental health), what legitimate reasons can there be for allowing Catholics to divorce? Should a divorce between Catholics remain scandalous to other Catholics?
If divorce laws and courts are generally biased against men, is it better for men to separate? But what do they then do about women who refuse to pull their own weight and expect spousal support, instead of doing the honorable thing and getting some sort of work?
Did I mention that someone sitting next to us at Starbucks overheard our conversation and offered us a Protestant apologetics tract? The title of the tract was something along the lines of "Can you believe everything in the Bible?" I suspect that it might deal sola scriptura. He thought we were refusing because it might seem anti-Christian, the implicit answer being "no," but he assured us that the content wasn't what we expected. I tried to politely refuse; he was rather insistent so it took several replies.
Edit. September 1, 2011 - I think LP is getting married next weekend, if I understand her FB status correctly.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
My sister KK invited Br. B over for dinner and asked him to bless her family's house. He mentioned that he found my blog through a search for his name. I assumed he used Google--I should go back and edit his name, or disable the search engine for the blog. I don't think too many people read this blog, but when it comes to privacy and the internet, one can't be too careful.
Antony Beevor
I'm thinking of reading some of Antony Beevor's books on World War II... need to find some reviews though.
Historian reflects on Eastern Front battles
The Globe and Mail
Antony Beevor says D-Day bombing 'close to a war crime'
Antony Beevor: 'History has not emphasised enough the suffering of French civilians during the War'
Profile: Antony Beevor: It’s a full-blooded assault on D-Day
Historian reflects on Eastern Front battles
The Globe and Mail
Antony Beevor says D-Day bombing 'close to a war crime'
Antony Beevor: 'History has not emphasised enough the suffering of French civilians during the War'
Profile: Antony Beevor: It’s a full-blooded assault on D-Day
Posted last Wednesday at First Principles Journal-- Focusing on the Anti-Federalists on "Bill of Rights Day"
Bill Kauffman Gary L. Gregg II - 12/15/10
Bill Kauffman Gary L. Gregg II - 12/15/10
As today is “Bill of Rights Day,” perhaps it is worthwhile to focus on the Anti-Federalists, who, through their objections and efforts, greatly influenced the events that led to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights.video
With this in mind, why not draw attention to the following question: were the Anti-Federalists right to oppose the Constitution?
Gary Gregg and Bill Kauffman debated this question last year at the University of Colorado.
Regarding the signing of the Constitution, Gregg states: “There are particular times, there are particular moments in world history when great things, and good things are possible. This was one of those moments. I submit to you that the Anti-Federalists would have doomed our nation to lope along for decades if they would have rejected the Constitution. For this summer of 1787 may well have been the only real chance we had for the only kind of . . . conservative and reformed constitutionalism that we so needed.”
Kauffman responds by defending the Anti-Federalists and their contributions, noting that they “stood for decentralism, local solutions, anti-militarism, and a deep suspicion of far-off governments. And they stood on what they stood for, local attachments, local knowledge.”
Is Nullification Constitutional? A Debate (mp3)
Donald W. Livingston
Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
Allen C. Guelzo
Dean & Founder of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University
Donald W. Livingston
Professor of Philosophy, Emory University
Allen C. Guelzo
Dean & Founder of the Templeton Honors College at Eastern University
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