Five Things Meme

I've thought of a meme that might get me in trouble. Of course, if it's a meme and enough people do it, I won't be in trouble alone, which has always been my favourite kind of trouble to be in.

Five Things that Really Annoy You about Other Christians

in no particular order:

1 - Signing their emails, especially their professional emails, "for His kingdom" or "in His mercy" or with some other inappropriately personal piety;

2 - being possessed of a total inability to talk about anything but "the issues" (ie: abortion, the badness of Obama, the corruption of the bishops yadda yadda yadda) while you are trying to have a fun time at the pub. GET. A. LIFE. Please;

3 - (mostly women) equating being badly/frumpily dressed with holiness and personal piety;

4 - shrieking like a vampire caught in a sunroom when you praise some Officially Inappropriate film or TV show; (actually, I have to admit that I don't always hate this, and sometimes say that I like Boston Legal or Fight Club on purpose and then sit back and watch the fun, but I'm Notoriously Mean and a Bad Catholic, so it's probably just me.)

5 - using "I'll pray for you" as a tool of emotional blackmail;

...add your own.

The Bell Curve of Personhood

The pieces are moving into place.

Obama's new "health Czar",

Dr. Emmanuel has stated repeatedly in public forums such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that doctors were driving up health-care costs because they value the Hippocratic Oath as "an imperative to do everything for the patient regardless of cost or effect on others."

Dr. Emmanuel raises the possibility of a new ethical system, the "Complete Lives System" that would ration care away from the elderly, away from infants, and away from human beings judged unable to rationally participate in society (such as those with dementia), in favor of those aged 15-44, who have the best chance "to live a complete life.

Hmm..."Complete Lives System" huh?

Reading the above, I instanly recognised this as my good old Bell Curve of Personhood.

I think I told y'all about how I once gave a few talks to teenagers in Catholic schools. Kind of Life Issues 101.

In those talks, I developed what I called the Utilitarian Bell Curve of Personhood.

The Bell Curve of Personhood was a kind of diagram illustrating how the abortion/euthanasia/Bioethics logic works. Some years ago, bioethicists were having a grand time at conferences and in peer review journals trying to work out exactly how a human being qualifies for this ephemeral thing they invented called "personhood".

The Bioethics (cf. Utilitarianism) personhood theory assigns a certain amount of personhood according to a set of criteria. Who sets the criteria and what is on the list exactly is open to debate, as is the number of boxes a human must tick to qualify, but the essential gist is that personhood isn't something that comes automatically with the right type and number of genes.

You have to earn it.

You might think that the personhood clock starts at birth, but bioethicists are not so naive. They do, in fact, assign a modicum of personhood to embryos, even to the very first single-cell stage. It's just that it isn't enough personhood to prevent you being killed. You certainly get quite a lot of Personhood Points (PPs) for being born successfully. But lose them again if you have some kind of defect that makes it hard for you to get on in life without help.

You get the gist, I'm sure.

People who have very little of each of the items on the list were afforded a low level of personhood and were at the lowest parts of the curve. People with lots of them got to be right on the top of the curve.

Too far down on the curve and "society" should have the right to kill you for being too inconvenient or expensive, or if your parts are useful in some way.

But watch out! Being on the top of the curve doesn't make you safe. The highest point is one from which we slip all too soon and too easily.

Why, the $150,000 a year, white computer engineer could have a stroke from too much stress. He might find himself unable to communicate after his stroke and therefore unable to work. He slips down that curve and into the eugenicists' disintegration chambers before you can say 'socialised medicine'.

I see that Mr. Obama is moving the free world closer to that happy day when my utopian sci fi novel [that yes, I'm still working on, now and then] will come true in which the world is a much nicer place because illness, disability and even social discontent are dimly remembered myths of a long lost past. Medicine has abandoned its former and untenable dedication to treating ill and disabled people one at a time and trying to cure their illnesses and mollify their disabilities, and has been reformed to instead treat "illness" and "disability" by the much cheaper method of simply getting rid of sick and disabled people.

I like to work on the principle that the scariest fiction is the one closest to current reality.

Self-Identify

Steyn's having a fun time, tweaking that tail:

A female couple can choose to conceive. A male couple—Barrie and Tony from Chelmsford, England—can choose to conceive and both be registered as the biological fathers of their children not so much on the technical grounds that they had “co-mingled” their sperm before shipping it out to their Fallopian time-share in California but out of a more basic sympathy that this is how Barrie and Tony “self-identify” and it would be cruel to deny them.

A woman in Bend, Ore., can choose to become a man, and then a “pregnant man.” A man can choose to become a woman. A man can choose to get halfway to becoming a woman, and then decide it’s more fun to “live in the grey area.”

Biologically, Barrie or Tony, but not both, is the sole father of their child; the “pregnant man” is pregnant but not a man; the he/she living in “the grey area” is in reality black or white—at least according to what we used to call “the facts of life.” But issuers of passports, drivers’ licences, even birth certificates and no doubt one day U.S. Department of Homeland Security visas now defer to the principle of “self-identification.”

So, I think I get the logic here. If we all have to agree that Stan/Loretta can have not only the right to have babies, but the actual babies themselves, then reality really is a construct of the imagination and we can have anything we want and everyone else has to go along with it, right?

OK, index fingers on temples, eyes squeezed shut as tight as they will go, and concentrate...

I hereby self-identify as fabulously wealthy.

Oh, and that I look like a 23 year-old Diana Rigg.



~

Cardinal Rog weighs in

Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, who worked with Kennedy in an unsuccessful effort to achieve comprehensive immigration reform in 2007, said "the voiceless, the powerless and the most needy of our citizens have lost a great champion" with the senator's death.

It's Alive

Yep, I remember having exactly the same reaction as Kathy. I don't remember how old I was, maybe ten or eleven. But I certainly came to precisely the same conclusion as Final Girl:Babies are evil and being pregnant is weird!

But it was certainly helped along by the general cultural ambiance created by my mother's fem-bot hippie friends. I don't know if they realised what sort of interesting emotional and logical feedback loop it created in my head to hear so regularly that having children ruins women's lives.

Errr... should I apologise then?

If we explain it s l o w l y e n o u g h

maybe they will understand.

(What? It could happen)

L'Osservatore Romano just couldn't help itself, I guess:

Crediting Kennedy with being "constantly on the front line in battles over such matters as the protection of immigrants, arms control, the minimum wage," it adds that "but he also unfortunately took positions favorable to abortion."

The article does not mention that, in addition, the senator supported deadly embryonic stem cell research, "homosexual marriage," and the the funding of contraceptive distribution programs, all positions anathema to the Catholic Church.

Are you paying very close attention? Concentrating? Got that voice recorder running so you can review later?

OK, here we go:

Theologically speaking, the one characteristic that unites all the issues you mention, like arms control, minimum wage, immigration and "civil rights" (the black movement for those not accustomed to US journalese) is that these are all issues on which Catholics can disagree in good conscience. The Catholic Church does not rule on how Catholics must respond to them.

In addition, the solutions to poverty, immigration, taxation, wages, crime and "civil rights" offered by the left are not the same as the teaching of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

We get, for example, to say that the US winning the arms race against the Soviets was a categorically Good Thing.

We get to say that a Big Brother government imposing minimum wages, price controls and tax burdens on businesses is actually really bad for the economy and therefore bad for "The Poor" (TM).

We get to say that the death penalty is a good thing and that too many immigrants coming in from cultures that are radically different from that of the receiving country does great harm.

We get to say that the best way to get people out of poverty is to refuse to give them welfare.

We get to say that the Americans made a huge mistake in pulling out of Saigon and not pushing forward into North Korea in order to contain the red threat from the East.

We get to say that black people (and Indians) would be better off if we stopped telling them how hard done by they are and giving them welfare.

These are all perfectly legitimate opinions to be held by Catholics, supported by Catholic teahing.

Now, here's a quiz for you: what is the one defining characteristic of the other issues mentioned (and not mentioned) by L'Osservatore Romano (the Pope's Paper), which Ted "unfortunately" supported?

I'll give you a minute to think about it.

Oh, and one more point for L'Osservatore Romano, strictly about journalistic integrity: when you want to maintain a facade of objectivity, might be a good idea not to refer to Senator Edward Kennedy as "Ted". Mkay?

And speaking of speaking ill of the dead...

Binky again:

One aspect of his political past that has received scant attention is his hatred of Ronald Reagan. How much did he hate that Republican president? Enough to give information, advice, and to make visits to the USSR to help them oppose Reagan and his conservative agenda. Like so many shameful aspects of the Cold War, the memory-hole has kept his reputation rather more spotless than it deserves.

At best, he might be pardoned this crime as a useful idiot– but it seems that he was rather more than that, in cooperating with the KGB and Soviet Regime to undermine the democracy of his own country, by seeking to undermine and weaken the duly elected president, according to the overwhelming popular vote of Americans.

The Left is supremely skilled at forgetting, changing, or misrepresenting its own ugly history, support of tyrants and death-dealing regimes, and disloyalty and treason to its own side, whether for utopian or political reasons.

hey 'conservatives': time to put the money on the table

Good point Binks:

IT’S TIME FOR CONSERVATIVE PEOPLE to put up, or shut up. Support conservative causes, buy conservative books, subscribe to the magazines, donate to our various online causes, and do it now.

One thing liberals and radicals do is put their money where their mouth is. We need to develop a habit of doing that, along with supporting our religious and other essential charities as we find them near us.

But it might have been nice to get a direct plug. Everyone in the 'sphere seems to like LifeSite, but kind of start shuffling their feet and changing the subject when it comes to actually giving some money.

So it might have been nice to get a direct mention.

LifeSite is broke.

So cough it up, why dontcha?

If you're in the states, we'll give you a tax receipt.

Welcome aboard ladies,

And in the words of the great Anne Muggeridge,

here's your bucket, now start bailing.


BTW: Sure hope ECUSA lets you keep your lovely convent, but judging from their recent record of litigious spite against anyone who crosses them, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I for one, fully support the use of the Minotaur in questioning detainees

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

Thanks Steve.