A question for anyone who has contemplated the notion that Benedict XVI retained some papal features after he resigned

 I'm not talking only to people who maintained this theory.  I'm just asking anyone who has thought about it enough to understand the contention.  For the record, this is a hypothetical question, it's been interesting to consider these past several years, but I both lean away from the notion and decline to take a stand--it seems to violate the intent of the Petrine office but it's a matter for experts to explain why my hunch would be right or wrong.

But I'm asking all of you anyway, just for curiosity.  Now that B16 has died, does his munus automatically devolve back to Francis?  Or does Francis not inherit it at all, since the bifurcation had already happened before his election?  If that's the case, would he just be pope without munus and only his successor would resume the power?  But what if Francis resigned too?  If he doesn't have it, he can't also give it up.

I know this is just a rabbit hole.  It's an interesting idea to play with.  But that should also tell us that maybe it's too bad of an idea to be true.

I'm confused...

 ...by people who, bemoaning the recent Dobbs decision, try to draw parallels between that "no, the Burger Court did not justify its claim that abortion is implicit in the Bill of Rights) and other non-fascist facts about our country like a lack of universal health care, universal child care, government regulated time off, and so on.  People who post such a laundry list and say it's proof that the people who don't want abortion or government control of health care and so on, are really just interested in "control."

Bish, who is in control under a regime of universal health care?  Who is in control when child care and work benefits are managed by the federal government?  When there is no monopoly on ownership of firearms (along side other means for committing violence, like riots and arson and vandalism, which we're now told is a necessary part of desperate democracy).

Do you even know what "control" is?

On the Custodians of Tradition

 I know the conspiracy theories, I know the charitable theories, I recognize the sliver of truth within the propaganda....

I started going to the Latin Mass a few years ago just to experience an aspect of our heritage that I had only read about.  Eucharistic adoration was another that I was drawn to.  Also, the fact that they had frequent times for confession was appealing, so I wouldn't have to worry about going to my own pastor and being too embarrassed to be forthcoming in front of someone I knew.

I went on occasion, but after a while I went to the Tridentine liturgy almost exclusively.  There are things I like about the Novus Ordo on paper, but--and I recognize that this is an emotional argument but I don't want to get lost in the weeds here--when I'm at the Latin mass, those things just don't hold up.

So I'm not thrilled about what was promulgated Friday.  But:

The pope is still the pope.  His policy is distasteful, and might not even be honest, but he's the pope and this is the Church.  There's really no where else to go.  You can get farther away by joining one of the Eastern rites, and still get a beautiful and reverent liturgy, but Rome is still there.

And eventually Francis will pass, and then as now, Christ will guide His Church through a history that holds no secrets from God.

I don't know what we'll have to adapt to, resist, or contend with.  But keep your rosaries in your hands and your knees behind Roman Catholic pews; we need the grace and faithfulness more than ever.

So, I'm going to be changing gears in the near future, getting back to my roots a bit....

Got one or two things in the pipe, and then I'm going to get away from politics for a bit.  It's still before the electoral vote acceptance thing when I write this, so I don't know how peaceful or violent things are going to stay, but there are other projects I want to work on, and I'm having trouble juggling this and the others.

Maybe my readers are too few and visit too rarely to notice the difference, but, y'know, just in case.

I'll still be around, reading and writing, but just not as much on here for a while.  But before you decide to stop coming back, make sure a few weeks have passed since I posted this, so you can be sure I've cleared out my queue.  I am interested in some scrutiny of my next religious post, which I plan to leave front and center for a time, for the sake of visibility, so if you haven't seen it come up yet, don't step out just yet.

But meanwhile...

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner, or why I haven't seen it much elsewhere, but you know how they've been talking about how Trump is dividing the nation and we need to heal and reconcile and whatnot now that he's on his way out?

You know who else they said that about?

Lincoln.  

Yes.  Abraham Lincoln.  The man who presided over an internal war that had been in the making since before our nation was founded.  The man who realized the war was all but inevitable, and instead of sacrificing a limb just to lose the patient anyway, decided he was not going to let its fate be dictated by people who didn't want to play by the Constitution anymore.

So, all you progressives out there who only attend to a few mutually approved news sources, be careful which historical parallels you choose to draw.  Don't like thinking of The Donald as a latter-day Freedmen's Party?  Then it's time to reconsider some of the things that led you to your current mindset.

What people don't want to look at

Every so often—too often, yes—there is a mass shooting, and usually it’s a massacre. And there is a cry to ban guns. And it is pointed out that banning guns won’t make violence just stop and it won’t stop would-be criminals from utilizing other weapons or improvised weapons.

And this is admitted, but it’s pointed out that at least it would help.

And conservatives point out it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the other problems that would come from flouting the second amendment and effectively taking guns away from law abiding citizens but not other criminals or the government.

These are worthwhile things to discuss, don’t get me wrong.

But there is an opportunity here, and I think the reason it is not taken advantage of is that it doesn’t actually achieve the real, unstated goal.

You want to make even modest efforts to restrict school violence? Okay. Gun rights advocates have pointed out things they think would work better than a gun ban. So you’re not going to get a ban rammed through Congress tomorrow. So why not try to achieve the things that nobody is opposing?

Maybe it won’t be as good as your pet project, sure, but you already admitted you’d rather achieve a partial victory than none.

So how about it? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Or do you want to keep blaming the other side for every failure that results from your preference for ideological purity?

Was browsing Pinterest and found something vaguely political I thought I might agree with partly but seemed nuanced enough to make me willing to consider some contrary opinions. Something that I thought showcased well the inherent problems of a large and intrusive government, even if you thought such a government was a good idea in general. Usually these opportunities are in the face of half baked arguments I could have countered in high school (even considering that was decades before the current situations developed) and I hope these people pushing them also do.

So I click through to the site and discover that it was icing on a shit cake, written by someone who apparently without any sense of irony thought those particular problems were in fact the desired outcomes: the rest of it was what I was used to and what I try to avoid just to keep the anger and frustration in my life at tolerable levels.

Then I saw the caveat: no conservative opinions allowed, go to some anti communist site to bitch about us instead; liberalism is an inherently inclusive philosophy.

Oooh....yeah, swing and a miss, buddy. Maybe you got burned by some rude or angry conservatives, but this wasn’t even pretending to honor your principles.

j'ever notice...

...Young single men and women will move to a new town for work or school and go on Craigslist or whatever to find a roommate, find one of the opposite sex, and make plans they swear up and down will be platonic as if they honestly believe it (or maybe it’s a friends with occasional benefits thing; I’m not sure how the younger generations rationalize such things these days)…

…but then when they talk about sources of angst in their lives, the men are like “I’m afraid a woman will make fun of me” and the women are like “I’m afraid a man will kill me?”

Really?

Not to trivialize violence and murder, and not to blame the victim—and not to even talk about how or if potential victims could or should protect themselves, and not to deny the asymmetry in what men and women fear from each other, but:

1. If your first thought whenever you meet someone is “I wonder if he’s going to kill me,” your biggest problem probably is not the potential violence of that person.  Your biggest problem is probably much more immediate and compelling, like the actual death threats you have already received that, yes, compelled you to consider the question so promptly; or your pathological distrust of all men, most of whom (let’s not trivialize this with a “don’t say ‘not all men’” counterrebuttal, shall we?) are not in fact prone to whatever flavor of violence you’re worrying about.  Sure, men are more violent than women, in terms of quantity and severity of injuries (not counting the woman who think it's okay to throw shoes at her beau whenever she's angry at him, on the grounds that her fists are small and his counterarguments are sound), but killing is rarely at the top of the list of intentions.
2. You don’t get to willingly enter living arrangements with complete strangers and then claim victim status just on principle.

I mean, not for nothing, but you can’t shoot yourself and then blame society for making you a victim of gun violence.

It’s awful that bad things happen like you talk about, but honestly:  what were you thinking?  “that’s not fair” and “you don’t understand” and “I’m sick of hearing that” aren’t answers.

This is why you hear more about how potential victims can avoid becoming actual victims, and less about how bad men can be less bad.  It’s not an either-or zero-sum game.  There are already laws and police and punishments that are supposed to limit that kind of behavior—setting aside the sufficiency or effectiveness of such measures for the time being--but not a trivial amount of that is to stop criminals from taking advantage of the people who not simply cannot but will not learn to take measures to avoid becoming a victim.

A lot of that is earmarked by soliloquies that start with “I should be able to….”  Well, yeah, you should, in a perfect world, and maybe even in a possible world, but it's not this world and we all need to learn to live in it…and sometimes that means learning to avoid criminal behavior and sometimes that means learning not to commit criminal behavior.

I repeat:  it’s not either-or, it’s not zero-sum.

The Orwellian language of inclusive corporate policy

So my employer was recently bought by a very large corporation.  One of the new perqs I enjoy *cough* is regular news e-mails from corporate.  A lot of it's just press releases or discussion of proxy fights, but sometimes they throw in something cultural.

All well and good, but it's usually about drumming up interest in one of their "employee resource groups," which interests me for almost two seconds before I realize there's no news there.

To be fair, they don't insist on joining any of these groups.  Some of the our-plant-only committees are always eager for fresh blood, but you can say no to their face and there are no repercussions.  I've heard of other large companies that take a dim view of people who hesitate too long before joining their more progressive employee groups, and I don't see that happening here.

Which is good, because the only groups are for veterans, professional women, Hispanics, and homosexuals.

I only need to point out that I don't really need to point out how odd this juxtaposition is.  I'm also a little surprised there are only four, but that's another matter.

Suffice it to say I'm not interested in any of them because I don't belong and I'm not much of a "join to cheerlead" type.

But then I saw one of these e-mails go out and while explaining how these groups are critical to our vitality as a company, they presented the statistic that 50.2% of employees' children are diverse.

What?  "Diverse" is a quantifiable thing that an individual person can be?

Uh, no, it's not.  You might say the group comprised of all employees' children is diverse, but I am suspicious of whatever survey they did that enabled them to calculate that 502 out of every thousand children raised by my coworkers wears some kind of "diversity" badge.

And when it's over half, aren't we getting to the point that whatever makes them distinctive from the traditional white male workforce no longer qualifies as a diversifying characteristic?  If they were all Hispanic lesbians, the group wouldn't be diverse at all.

For that matter, what are these criteria they're using?  50.2% might just be how many of the children we're talking about are girls. Not saying that doesn't count, but it is mundane.

My sneaking suspicion is that, if they're not just using the number of girls as a shortcut around statistical sampling, they're looking at race and making sure we know they mean homosexuals too when they say "diversity," so we have one more thing to look for in our own children, even if they're too young to know how they're oriented or what claiming to know really means.

I wonder what the veterans group thinks about that.

postscript:
Actually, I have more than a sneaking suspicion.  Some of the more recent postings have some nice, neutral jabber about how inclusiveness helps make sure ideas and perspectives we might not otherwise consider get brought to the table, as if this were an elementary school where that was a lesson that needed to be taught and was willing to be learned; but just so you know what they mean, the postings are all decorated in rainbows.

Can't just put the bullhorn down once so we can give your intentions the benefit of the doubt for a second, can you?

Some wisdom from Dan Lane, commenting over at According to Hoyt:

Why with all that extra time… [saved by having students memorize knowledge] You could actually *teach* instead of indoctrinate. ... Ah, heck, we can’t be having that, now can we?

Indeed not. Children who learn their lessons are harder to lie to. Children who are afforded a richer education for having memorized important/useful facts before they are mature enough to discern them from raw data and first principles are also going to be harder to confuse and mislead. In a word, they will be less gullible sheep than what our would-be betters would prefer to "take care of." Instead of just checking your kid's homework and making sure it's done and hopefully resisting the urge to "edit" the occasional mistake to make sure he gets a good grade, look at the curriculum itself. See what they're teaching and see what they're not teaching. Keep in mind that the weird things you see and the weird gaps you don't are not all just pedagogical fads.

It is a fact that slavery, as an institution, was first and most thoroughly stamped out of civilization, and most effectively remains at bay, by Christian nations.

This is not obvious from the New Testament, with Paul even admonishing slaves to be good servants and masters to treat their slaves as brothers; but at the same time these notions were planted as the seeds of slavery's demise.

There are some who may wish to point out that in the American Civil War, many Christians fought for the Confederacy, and so either formally supported retaining slavery or at least were willing to tolerate it even though the tide of history had shown that a nation supported by a class of imposed servitude was not inevitable.

Disregard these people.  They are trolls.

If they honestly don't see the difference, remind them of how the rest of the world did not oppose slavery in some form or other, and how even in the now-free Christian nations, it took time to win hearts and change laws and the ways of living.

If their only criticism is that, compared to a world full of slavery, only Christians abolished the practice, but had to struggle to do so, then what point do they think they can make instead?  Do they have any position to stand on but the anonymized residue of Christian values?

The next time someone comes to you with an argument about redistributing wealth, and you hedge a bit, and they retort with "Hey, we're not trying to take what you've got to punish you for being rich.  It's just that we want something off the top shelf, and you're the only one tall enough to get it!" Tell them that it's your shelf they want something off of.

I'm not going to say we shouldn't help the poor; we should.  But there is more than one way to give to them, and while they all have their place, redistributing wealth does not impart the same momentum to the economy as creating wealth does.

There is the preferential option for the poor, and there is the universal destination of goods.  But there is also private property because in this world we tend to be better at managing things we are directly responsible for.  The person who wants to give away stuff on your shelf doesn't understand that, and I don't want someone like that trying to run a charity.

Is there such a thing as truth, or just facts?

Has anyone noticed a pattern lately?

For the past several months, on and off in the marginally philosophical circles I occasionally run tangent to, I've seen a slight increase in the incidence of people distinguishing truth from facts, and it rubs me the wrong way.

I'm not saying I think there's a perfect correspondence between the two ideas.  There just seems, to me, to be a concerted effort to divorce truth and facts, a little undercurrent in human discourse that changes the direction of thought and discussion ever so subtly.

I'm not sure I can give an adequate definition of "truth" in this context; usually what I see is assertions or bald existential conclusions (perhaps justified by observation or reasoning somewhere, and not just presumed, but it's left as an exercise to the reader) that truth is unknowable or nonexistent and all we're left with are facts.

But when I learned what a fact was, I was taught that it was an objectively true idea or statement.  You can debate whether it's warm or cool, cold or hot--that would be a matter of opinion--but you can't argue that it's not winter on December 27 in the northern hemisphere.

There's some wiggle room, I get it--if there's a premature thaw and New Year's passes with highs in the 50s, then it's not really wintry weather--but we don't have to go there.  I could also say it's a fact that 2+2=4, that it's absolutely true, if we bar silly games with rounding and deviant numeral systems.  I'm not dealing with that right now; we can describe those situations with other facts.

There's truth and then there are facts?  Last I knew, if it wasn't true, it wasn't a fact.  Is the window open? It's true the window's open.  It's a fact that the window is open.  If the window were not open, it would not be true that it's open, and it wouldn't be a fact that the window was open.  You could say "It's open" anyway, but then you would simply be wrong.

It would be a fact that you said it's open, but that's not the same thing, and maybe therein lies the difference.  Still, it's a matter of the fact, the truth, being "You claimed, or believe, that the window is open," which if you're wrong could have nothing to do with the configuration of a window.  But then the fact is "someone asserted X," not "X" itself.  Sure, it's true someone asserted X, but I don't care about that any more than I care about how to label mild weather the week after Christmas; I care about X being true and what's going to happen to the snow.  Some things we can only have empirical evidence for, true (ha!), but some things are not empirical and nobody argues about it (see 2+2=4, above).

So, is the window open?  You say it's closed.  You're right, or you're wrong, or you define "closed" by some idiosyncratic criteria, or it's partway closed and you want to split hairs, but if you're not psychotic we can sort these things out.

You can claim any of these things.  Are they thereby facts?  No, the only facts are (1) whether the window is open or closed and (2) that you think something about it.  These things are true.  At first I gave the second as "what you think about it," but that's an opinion, not a fact.

The line between opinion and fact is getting blurred; all we're left with is what people think is going on around them, either poorly documented or uncamouflaged and called opinion or empirically documented and called a fact (even though the fact is not "well-documented X" but "we have observed X to be predominant condition," which is still contingent on statistics).

Anyone else noticing this?  Is it a recent development in philosophy that we can have "facts" with no truth value, or just some relativistic claptrap that has trickled down to the hoi polloi who consider themselves bright because they call themselves Bright?

I was annoyed enough when I first heard people making unequivocal assertions like "there is no objective truth," but this seems like an attack on the idea itself.  If we can no longer rise above the confusion to even conceive what "truth" would be, how could anyone claim there was such a thing, or that they had it?

Good question.  But I'm not playing.

"Just goes to show why you can't trust any magisterium"

Why not?  What alternative is there?

You certainly trust the engineering magisterium to make you reliable cars and trains and airplanes, not to mention buildings and roads and ships.  You trust the medical magisterium to diagnose and treat illnesses and injuries.

Oh, but maybe you mean we should only heap a larger than average portion of skepticism on people who attempt to understand and teach about Scripture and the Faith.

How does that pertain exclusively to Catholics?  Because we actively use the term "magisterium" in reference to a facet of part of our Church?  Then let every bishop and theologian be called Pastor or Brother or Evangelist, or just call him by his name, and let him continue his job.

Because the Magisterium tries to teach others on the grounds that it has read more or has understood more of the Bible?  Then let farmers and factory workers give up their trades to learn Hebrew and Greek.  But there's no pulling themselves up by their bootstraps; they would be trusting the magisteria of linguistics and history.  Can that be allowed?

Obviously it can.  Most who criticize the Magisterium for existing don't have day jobs that are in competition with the teaching authority of the Church, although the ones who did would be hypocrites and should also be approached with great caution because of the conflict of interest.

But where does that leave us?  Back where we started:  trust no teaching authority farther than you can throw it.  Read the Bible if you can, try to figure out how it applies to your life if you have the time and wit.  But don't listen to a bishop, and if you want to be consistent, don't listen to your pastor, because you can always listen to the Holy Spirit for yourself, whatever the Holy Spirit told someone else who reads Scripture be damned.

No thanks.  I'd rather be consistent in yielding to actual experts while they're acting in good faith in their field of expertise, especially when the alternative to Jesus guaranteeing indefectability is tens of thousands of traditions each claiming "No, we're extracted directly from the Gospels and Acts; it's all those guys over there who have it wrong."

I got a little sidetracked the other day.

I didn't mean to dwell on the notion that trusting the government to micromanage an entire society was foolhardy. I just wanted to bring that up as a compound example of how naive all attempts to date have been. Naive, or come-for-critics-in-the-night fascist. Usually the former morphs into the latter, given adequate time.

Since I am lazy, I will throw out some lyrics from the John Lennon song "Imagine," as it serves as a convenient manifesto-jingle for the pie-in-the-sky progressivism that established itself maybe around the same time the song was penned. Close enough, anyway; but it still possesses some inspirational power that I wish to quell.

Imagine there’s no heaven … imagine all the people living for today.”

The only positive way I can see to read this is “imagine people working on the immediate problems in the world, rather than ignoring them or rhetorically sacrificing the victims of these problems for more abstract goals.” Unfortunately, the reality, the importance, of a problem is not determined from its proximity.

“There’s no heaven” usually means “there’s no God, no moral balance sheet to account for after you die;” and “living for today” usually means not simply “today has enough problems; don’t worry about tomorrow’s until they come,” which is often stated instead as “take it one day at a time,” but also—and especially in this day and age—means “disregard the future; don’t bother planning or preparing for contingencies.” I guess if someone else is taking care of everything, then we can throw care to the wind, or we should throw care to the wind and try to ignore whatever little voices of charity in our head we might still hear.

Imagine there’s no countries … nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace

People don’t kill or get killed just for the sovereign abstraction of their home. They also don’t only kill and die in the name of religion. Animals have no religion or politics, yet they still fight and die for resources like food, for territory, for mates, to defend their young. We are not so different from animals that we would not do the same; and we should be smart enough that we can tell the difference between a war for resources honestly fought and a war for resources rationalized with patriotic or religious propaganda.

But, okay. Let’s say there are not countries, there’s no nation-state or anything. Maybe just local governments and then some kind of enhanced UN handling the things that benefit more from economies of scale than from a preference for subsidiarity. Are people just going to start getting along? It does seem like we’re learning to do that, which was why I said last time that I can understand some of the secprog optimism, but we’re really not trying hard enough to inspire people to look past the little differences that catalyze a thousand playground fights a day, to grow up and see that underneath our subtle and sundry differences we’re all just the same. The modern defender of Marx says his system has never worked because it’s never been tried with the right people in charge. I say there are not enough of the right people to go around for taking charge of such a system, or for filling the ranks thereof.

Same deal with not having any religion. You can’t just take away church and whatever fills the role of church in pagan countries; you have to deal with what and how people think about transcendent truths, about morality and if it were immutable or not, even about the meanings of holidays and the importance of giving honor to honorable people. Humans are spiritual beings, and nigh everything we do overlaps with overt spiritual traditions of one sort or another. How Lennon would propose to treat things that fit into a spiritual system without an overarching formality, things that are still important enough to actual people that they may be disinclined to take disagreements in stride, has never been addressed anywhere that I have seen. Maybe it could be done by those people of adequate virtue and conditioning who don’t actually exist (in anything but paltry numbers, at least).

Okay, starting to look like I'm fisking the whole song. Sorry. You know how I have brevity problems as well as you should have expected me to eventually get around to critiquing these lyrics.

Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood … sharing all the world

Can I imagine no possessions? Yes, and thanks for the vote of confidence. Or maybe John was speaking about the difficulty of living monastically while immersed in the material world. Do we have to have greed or hunger? No, not even now; they are inevitable only because we have not developed perfect economics. Well, hunger, at least; the problem with greed, being a capital sin, is that the greedy want more no matter how much they already have, whereas hunger can be sated. Now, it is more natural for a man to share with his blood brother than with any random stranger whom he, yes, should be charitable to as his own brother; but while I don’t count the cost when I provide for my family, I recognize how fruitless it would be to take everything I have, divide it into six billion parts, and distribute—or even just attempt!—it to everyone on the planet. In His infinite wisdom, God gave us specific families to care for, and we have personal property that is dedicated to our explicit responsibilities to the closest of our brother-neighbors: our children who need us, our spouses to whom we are pledged, our siblings with whom we must share as long as we are under our parents’ care, our parents who are responsible for us and benefit from our cooperation.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I and many others just aren’t capable of maintaining charity on the scale of an entire civilization. I’ve carved out my niche of needy people to care for directly, and I save some on the side to provide to others who have needs that seem important to me. I may get along well with the guy who lives next door to me, but if we share a car because neither of us needs one all the time, eventually one of us will need it to take someone to the hospital and the other will not be willing to postpone yet another trip to the grocery store, and it will take more than the gentle reminders of a prophet of “Be Excellent to Each Other” and goadings from some authority figure to Shut Up, Play Nice, and Stop Arguing.

Imagine sharing? Yeah, in the Kingdom of God. Before then? We ain’t even close to ready.

Sometimes I can understand how people get so excited about the idea that humanity can bootstrap itself into a secular utopia.

In some ways, we have made great strides. Widespread education, eradication (to the point of extinction) of some major diseases, et cetera et cetera.

But what still gets me is the belief so many often have that we've really come so far that we have more than an inkling about starting the heavy lifting on completely reinventing human society.

The government meddles with the automotive industry as if the strings they attach to bailout money as a matter of principle and of vanity would really help the businesses run better, as if the car market going soft was the result of auto executives needing some firm parenting and not being just a part of a larger economic crisis. The government forces banks to make bad loans, and when the loans default and banks suffer, the government blames the banks for being careless in the first place.

The government tries to give the economy a shot in the arm with "Cash for Clunkers," which is a much smaller scale matter that should have been easier to forecast, budget, and manage, but it still flops. The government can't even handle this, but it's supposed to be able to defy rational economic theory and save us all? Same people who made the first mistakes are going to be in there making new ones.

And that's just a few tangible concerns. The powers that be don't have the sense not to take bad advice and bad philosophy, but the people who come up with bad philosophies and give bad advice don't have the sense to see how disruptive, at the very least, it is to institutionalize the killing of unborn children, dissolve meaningful marriage, and negotiate with terrorists and other bully states that have nothing to offer but negative reinforcement.

You can't just give a severely injured person in cardiac arrest CPR. You have to find out where the bleeding is first and treat that or it won't matter whether everything else you're doing is helpful or harmful.

What's "Progress?"

The word indicates some sort of advancement toward a goal or improvement. In the sense of improvement, a particular goal isn't necessarily implied, but without one, it's difficult to make an objective judgment of the degree or utility of progress. It doesn't always have to be an overarching goal by which we can evaluate the whole of some human endeavor; we can look to science and slap an "understand how the universe works" sticker on it, but for the most part we can only look at how well we're answering specific questions along the way. We may be near the end or the beginning of scientific exploration, but which it is, is more a matter of speculation or philosophy than of empirical research and mathematical modeling.

What about non-scientific progress? I think we have the same problem, but there's no external yardstick or phenomenon to measure "progress" against. We end up taking some values we hold, or inventing some, and plotting a course to follow them, sometimes with little concern for other values, which other people who might have a stake in the matter might hold or which get subordinated to their crusade for inadequately explored reasons.

Let's look at social progress for a few moments.

What do we have? At the forefront is the idea of personal equality and freedom, that a person should be able to do more or less whatever he wants, regardless of circumstances that don't immediately ask for a tempered agenda, like the conflicting rights or desires of another person. Now, equality and freedom are fine things, things we should often err on the side of, but they can also be somewhat empty. Freedom isn't just a matter of "from," but one of "to" as well, and equality unchecked can smear some distinctions that are legitimate.

What we see a lot of in our society is a pattern of identifying social injustices, agitating to eliminate them, and then looking for new injustices. We're at a point now where activists look at the patterns of the past and try to map them onto the future, perhaps more out of a sense of Progress than out of a sense of certain things being just and certain things being unjust. It's a lot more complicated, but Progress itself as we've seen it in our civilization has become the value we use to judge things by, instead of a label for pursuing real virtues. Freeing real or artificial demographics from oppressive (by which I mean "distasteful to some") traditions becomes the primary means for keeping score of our society's virtue, so while achieving legally approved gay marriage and consequence-free sex for children everywhere are themselves lauded, the only price counted is the disappointment of the White Male Oppressors (and a little angsty uncertainty, which is categorized as a healthy disdain for undoubted (not unquestioned--if it'd really been questioned, then some answers might have been considered--authority), and Progress moves on to find the next social power struggle, since it seems to see nothing except demographic conflicts.

I think the problem is right there. For individuals, it boils down to "nobody should be prevented from doing whatever they feel like doing," and at higher societal levels, there's really...nothing. You get the occasional visionary like Marx or the fictional architects behind Orwell's Big Brother, but for them Progress is just a tool to achieve an equality and freedom that are the poorest imaginable.

Progress becomes, not an achievement of justice, but a speedometer by which we measure the rate of adoption of ideas no one remembers trying before.

At that point it's easy to get off track. It's not hard to imagine someone forgetting what the fullness of marriage is, especially when duty was emphasized at the expense of the joys of an intimate relationship and raising children, and be in favor of opening it to everyone who wants it since it can be such a source of joy. It's a little harder to imagine right now that pets should be afforded the franchise, but once they are bestowed with enough human rights? In California, pets are no longer owned by their keepers, so don't think no one's testing the waters. Maybe the slope isn't very slippery, but there are people out there advocating any crazy notion you can think of, so don't be too surprised.

"Progress" toward no real goal, or toward one that isn't particularly (or obviously) good, isn't progress. It's just change. Change can be good, sometimes even for its own sake to break up the monotony, but when someone asks "why not?" we should also ask "why?"

"Why not?" is not an answer that justifies change. It is the question.

Pagan (etc*) divorced mother denied custody of children

*Most of the stink being raised orbits the fact that the woman in question is some flavor of neo-pagan, most expressions of which involve libertine ritual (sometimes symbolic, sometimes actual) sex.

The level of discourse I've observed has for the most part been higher--at least a little--than what one normally expects from the Internet, especially on such topics as religion, morality, and politics. Still, for the most part, the discussion seems to glide over the most damning factor in the court's custody decision. From Volokh's excerpt of the decision:

[Mother] has undertaken to engage in a lifestyle that is extreme by normal social standards and [mother] testified that she is a devotee of sado-masochism; that she is bisexual; that she engages in paganism; that she has used illicit drugs on a semi-regular basis; and that she spends a great deal of time online where she has two to four websites of so-called "blogs."

Now, the mother has the right to raise her child as she sees fit, short of exposing the daughter to disproportionate harm by doing so (however the magnitude and type might be defined by legal minds), including raising her as a neo-pagan. One of the commenters at Volokh even points out that any number of legally permissible things can be considered in a custody hearing that push a judgment to disfavor one party or the other, since the question isn't about legality, or just about what's good for the child as what's best for the child within the court's purview.

So the mom has weird sex with a guy she hasn't quite married yet, and worships some sort of abstracted natural forces, and spends a lot of time online, probably writing about these activities.

However, they're all dodging--and perhaps it's because the decision doesn't emphasize it more, but the judge did write that it appears unlikely the mother and her fiance (not the father) will be able to adequately protect the daughter from her practices (like sadomasochism in the bedroom) that are, shall we say, difficult to explain to children. I think blogging is the slightest hazard of these three, but maybe the fear was that the mother spent too much time on the Internet relative to her working and parenting responsibilities, and that the daughter might find out about her mother's activities from exploring her mother's online activities.

Why is the judge fearful of these likely turns of events, and not just of the mother's fringe interests themselves?

For one thing, the mother also "has used illicit drugs on a semi-regular basis." Remember that bit from the ruling?

Stop the presses, people. I don't care what religion or orientation you are or what fetish you indulge or refrain from indulging. If you're a drug user, a big black mark goes into your "not fit for custody" column. You can pretend you're a victim of Christian heteronormative narrow-mindedness, but don't think for a second that your propensity to flout the law and use chemicals that are demonstrably harmful to users, people close to them, and society in general is merely the repressive work of some "sex-negative" people who can hardly help but violate your First Amendment rights with glee. No; first you have to step back and explain why lighting or shooting up or whatever is your reasonably harmless entitlement. Then we'll discuss if it's really a medieval/fundamentalist judge that has the chip on his shoulder.

Violent crime has been dropping in recent decades. Some attribute it to the relaxing of gun laws--law-abiding citizens becoming more able to protect themselves, and potential criminals either being stopped by them or deterred by this knowledge. Others attribute it to a corellary of the Roe Effect: more potential criminals are getting aborted, so they never grow up to cause trouble and put more stress on troubled homes to drive even more people into crimes of desperation.

I know the former is at least partly responsible. In states where personal defense is or has become more legally feasible, crime has dropped or been consistently lower than other places where the government spends a lot of time intimidating non-criminals into being docile, such as California.

The more I think about it, though, the more I think that the Roe Effect might have some a beneficial effect on crime in the short run. Bear with me for a moment.

Roe is an artifact of a sterile cultural philosophy. After abortion became legal, it started getting more difficult to make political hay out of the issue. In 1973, decades of propaganda had culminated in enough support and wooly-headedness to get SCOTUS to conjure up some quasi-Constitutional right to abortion and use flimsy reasoning to base it on an otherwise-sensible inferral of a right to privacy. Since then, though, the people who were in favor of abortion tended to have, advocate, and finance them. Pro-life people had children and taught them to value life; pro-abortion people didn't have the human resources to keep up and had only propaganda to fall back on for trying to convert pro-lifers and fence-sitters who see more and more historical evidence that abortion isn't really a solution to a problem.

God is life. God loves life. It's no accident that sterile and actively life-hating philosophies tend to be self-limiting in the long run. Why might abortion seem to yield a drop in crime?

On the one hand, well, the moral scales don't tip; we're just exchanging drugs and armed robbery for prenatal infanticide. On the other hand, yes, there are fewer potential criminals growing up in troubled homes. On an absolute scale, crime might be dropping, but the overall population is not rising when children aren't born. So, what about per capita crimes? Do pro-abortionists have an out there, at least?

Without having to look at statistics, I can say "yes, but no."

It's the 21st century. People are living longer. There are more people at greater ages than before--population rises due to a reduction in mortality, not an increase in fertility. In the short run, the former can overtake the latter, especially if most crimes are committed by people who are younger than the average career-holding, family-starting person. Take them away, and sure, crime will drop. It'll just be a few years before we see employment (and unemployment) drop, school enrollment drop, before we see population seriously drop. Unless you look at Europe, at least; they're a little ways ahead of us.

Abortion can reduce crime? Abortion reduces everything. Don't let one lesser evil amongst many distract you.

S.B. 351: stop federal funding of Planned Parenthood

I received in the mail today a survey from Fidelis about the propriety of PP receiving public funds for promoting abortion. Despite charging an average of $300 per abortion, taking private donations, and offering annuities to their supporters, someone apparently thinks PP needs more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year in order to defray the costs of the "sex education" (such as their teenwire.com site that provides at least as much information on--let's not equivocate--how to have more sex and try to constrain the hazards of heightened promiscuity, as it does to provide basic anatomical and epidemiological information).

Well, the survey's short, at seven questions. I just want to raise a couple points the survey brought up, or I thought were worth discussing just a little more explicitly.

PP apparently claims that the $272 million they get from the feds doesn't go to abortion, but rather goes to the aformentioned "education," contraceptives (read: free condoms for walk-ins), and 'other family planning purposes,' whatever they might be. It strikes me as a basic economic truth that if you give someone money to do something, they will be able to spend more money they already have on other things. I'm not going to sift through the Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and see how well they fit the $272 million implementation of Title X of the Public Health Services Act vis-a-vis PP, but morally, I don't think we can pretend that helping PP a little doesn't help it overall, even if they sent a wish list to the government and let Washington buy all the materials and such itself.

Precedents in other industries aside, I don't see any sense in divorcing the commission of abortion from the advocacy of it. Oh, they don't just promote abortion? Well, their medical clinics aren't only used to perform them, either, although anecdotal evidence doesn't suggest they like doing sonograms. Oh well.

PP isn't just the Pueblo, Colorado of sex; they're its Wal*Mart, and so their "education" isn't so much a public service as it is advertising...hmm; maybe a better comparison would be the Dairy Board or American Cattlemen's Association, or those informercials on late-night TV that provide only enough information about their subject matter to get people to buy the wares they really want to peddle. As such, I see no reason why it would be appropriate for the federal government to step in. Who else gets the government to pay their advertising? The military--not really a parallel situation. Everyone else is expected to be more or less self-sufficient and autonomous, except PP, which apparently provides some sort of medical service that is so important nobody else wants to do it.

Is it even appropriate for PP to target minors with this information? On the one hand, while parents have the right to instruct their children as they see fit, sometimes they don't teach the bare minimum, don't even teach them the truth, let alone the whole truth; the same is true for general education, which is why we have public schools and require all students to attend them or have their parents provide evidence of other, equivalent arrangements. On the other hand, like I said before, PP doesn't just educate; they like to run way across the line into advocacy and roll around there a while. Now, do legal minors with strange feelings need support and information they can't get at home? Sometimes, yes; however, there's a big difference between helping someone who's homosexual or observes a discrepancy between their anatomical and mental genders to understand what's going on and to come to terms with it, and to say "Hey, whatever you want to do is fine, go for it!" to legal minors in the first place.

"Do what you want" isn't parenting, or a substitute for it; indulgence is contrary to what parenthood needs to teach; PP should hardly be claiming to fill a parenting (let alone information) gap if they're confounding the function of forming healthy adults this way.

According to their 2002-2003 annual report, then-president Gloria Feldt was reimbursed to the tune of $379,788, all things factored in; further, seven other big cheeses pulled down more than $180,000. One of the questions in the survey was "Do you believe that, for an organization that receives taxpayer funding, this level of compensation is __too high __about right __undecided (?)"

I couldn't resist; I wrote in the margin "Not to mention, an organization that solicits private donations!" I understand that large organizations, even nominally volunteer ones, sometimes need full-time people managing things at the highest levels, and that it's not always expedient to have those positions filled by people who can afford to give away 40 hours a week, so they may need to put someone on a payroll.

Now, civilians get paid by the government all the time, not just as employees but through federal grants. I do think, though, that it's a serious misdirection of priorities for an outfit claiming to be desperately trying to help people have educated sex and no children. Maybe more of that $1.5+ million going to the top brass should be directed to, I don't know, hiring more doctors, or giving away better condoms, or hiring better animators for their cartoons or IT people for their web site; if their cause is so great, how hard could it be to find a crackerjack CEO-type who needs a job but is willing to make a contribution in the form of a modest salary?

I know if I found out that a group I gave money to, whether or not they got grants from elsewhere (private or public), I'd sure be feeling like my money was wasted if I found out the head honchoes were making six figures. No wonder you're in such need for a perpetual bailout; if money's getting blown on executives at a place that sells itself as a nonprofit service organization, how many other cuts has their financial philosophy made that they're bleeding from? Getting a quarter billion from the government and then throwing so much at just a handful of administrators says to me "Our cause is really important! We need federal assistance in addition to our revenue! Oh, but $272 million is enough to get the job done, so we'll give a lot to the pencil pushers at the top; oh, we'll still take donations too." Do they need help, or not, and if so, how much do they really think they need?

So they want to know if I'm willing, if I think it's even proper, to support an organization that not only does something immoral, but wants me to believe that it offers other services I shouldn't object to, and does so very badly? No thanks.

I don't know if an agency that performs evil efficiently is worse or better than one that does so inefficiently but also manages to retard good in the process, but I'd really want to have nothing to do with either.

The logical conclusion of the Fairness Doctrine

So, some people want the "Fairness Doctrine" made law (or at least part of FCC regs) because...well, mainly because Air America isn't really dominating the ratings like they assumed. For people new to the scene, the idea is that talk radio stations would have to have equal programming time for conservative and liberal shows.

I don't think it's what they really want. To really be fair, we'd have to have equal time for all broadcast programming, not just AM talk radio.

We'd have to do the regular news too. We wouldn't have just one Fox News channel, almost half of them would be Fox News or nearly identical in coverage. For every story about "yet more" fatalities in Iraq, there would have to be a story about Iraqi lives saved or attacks thwarted. For every story about phantom WMDs, there has to be a story about inspectors prevented from entering suspect facilities and people asking why Bush just didn't have them planted to vindicate himself. For every article about Bush being ineffective, evil, dishonest, and stupid, there would have to be one properly and thoroughly explaining his rationale for vetoing the ESCR bills. For every reference to alleged perpetual abortion clinic bombings, there would be footage of people pitching a fit at pro-lifers unobtrusively praying the rosary across the street and interviews with former mothers who regret what they did and what the complications of the procedure were. For every "Christ's Tomb" caliber expose, whether it's about Christ or about the military-industrial complex, there's one about the historical evidence supporting Christianity or about some hippie politico who abdicates basic human rights to gain some creature comforts. For every story on Abu Ghraib the New York Times has to give everyone a dollar.

Okay, I'm being a little facetious on that last one.

We'd also have to do entertainment television. For every sitcom about charistmatic homosexuals, there would have to be a drama about straight people who turned to homosexuality after growing up in an abusive household and showing how difficult it really is to find happiness in serial monogamy or a totally libertine lifestyle (gay or straight). For every show warning about overpopulation, there's one about destitute senior citizens. For every show about two friends or strangers who sleep together, there's one about a child they have (or maybe an STD that really cuts into their lifestyle, and not just because they're always getting those inconvenient treatments) who is both more inconvenient and more important to the main characters than an occasional plot element. For every show decrying the folly of guns or war, there's a show about the cops not making it to stop a home invasion in time or about large, defenseless populations being under seige by brutal neighbors. For every movie about a sympathetic terrorist, a normal guy who got caught up in unfortunate circumstances with persuasive European psychopaths, there's one about a guy who has a chip on his shoulder for no good reason and leaves his child in a car wired with explosives so no one will think to inspect it.

Sure; sometimes you hear about these things in passing, but they're never the "hot" stories, are they?