- We don’t do hunger strikes any more.
- News that doesn’t stultify.
- The Specter of Military Defeat.
- Deja vu all over again, GM bailout edition.
- Robert George’s sour note.
- Abolitionist Feminism.
- Red Tory tax proposal.
We don’t do hunger strikes in America these days, said Martha White on NBCNews.com. Instead, we protest by eating fast food. Last month protesters in New York brought giant cups to the “Million Big Gulp March” to protest against a ban on large servings of fizzy drinks. And last week more than half a million people said they would attend a “chicken chow-down” at the Chick-fil-A sandwich chain in support of the firm’s CEO, Dan Cathy.
(Just imagine the jackboot on the other foot.)
Be it noted, by the way, that Dan Cathy said not a word about gay rights or same-sex marriage:
Some have opposed the company’s support of the traditional family. “Well, guilty as charged,” said Cathy when asked about the company’s position.
“We are very much supportive of the family — the biblical definition of the family unit. We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.
“We operate as a family business … our restaurants are typically led by families; some are single. We want to do anything we possibly can to strengthen families. We are very much committed to that,” Cathy emphasized.
Those words could have been opposition to the serial monogamy that has increased with no-fault divorce, and it’s pretty obvious that they were at least that.
My habitual vacation destination has been clobbered this year by the early warm-up, then hard freeze, to the “termination with extreme prejudice” of the tart cherry crop. The News Hour reported on it fairly extensively. Then they reported on commercial possibilities for Asian Carp – again at length.
Mrs. Tipsy agrees: unlike most TV news, The News Hour does not make you feel stupider than when you started, or as if you need to shower off the slime.
I intend to talk about the role of the US military in the downfall of American empire, and the suggestion I propose to offer is that one of the most likely triggers for an American imperial collapse is the experience of dramatic military defeat. I’m not suggesting, furthermore, that such an experience will happen in spite of the immense power of today’s US military machine; I’m suggesting that it will almost certainly happen because of that vast preponderance of force.
I’ve commented before that nothing seems so permanent as an empire on the verge of its final collapse, or as invulnerable as an army on the eve of total defeat …
[M]ilitary power is always contextual. What counts as overwhelming power in one context can be lethal weakness in another, and the shift from one context to another can take place without warning ….
President Obama is proud of his bailout of General Motors. That’s good, because, if he wins a second term, he is probably going to have to bail GM out again.
(Forbes)
I just came across this item from nearly a year ago. It’s a criticism of something Robert P. George said and, sadly, appears to believe:
While I respect Robert George as one of America’s preeminent Catholic intellectuals, the gentleman nonetheless erred gravely when he envisioned America as a “propositional nation.”
Of course in this error George and countless other Catholics merely follow the (ostensibly) progressive zeitgeist, which has long since condemned mere historic nations. Based as they are upon trivialities — i.e., shared experiences, heritage, language, blood, culture, and religion – historic nations are now seen as relics of a petty-minded past.
My point is not political, at least not in any partisan sense. The “propositional nation” is pretty thin gruel, it increasingly seems to me, while the “Place, Limits, Liberty” of Front Porch Republic seems thicker and more nourishing.
[O]fficial feminism has decided to solve the woman question by abolishing women. Make them the same as men, and there’s nothing further to talk about. Then we can get on with the real business of life: producers can produce, consumers can consume, businessmen can be busy, bureaucrats can sit in their bureaus, and so on. What could be simpler or better?
The idea goes back to Plato’s idea in the Republic of raising girls as well as boys to be warrior-athletes schooled in mathematics, music, and metaphysics. Today it’s employee-consumers instead of warrior-athletes, and political correctness does duty for more substantive studies, but the basic idea is the same: get rid of messy stuff like sex and the sexes for the sake of a rational system that does what those in charge want it to do.
With that as the implicit goal, almost all countries have ratified CEDAW, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, which requires governments totake all appropriate measures … to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women, with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all other practices which are based … on stereotyped roles for men and women.
So it is now formally recognized at the highest levels of law and politics that it is a duty of government to root out conduct that suggests that men and women differ in any way that matters. That duty is universal and comprehensive, and it means that if Belarus wants to have Mothers’ Day, or only 30% of Slovenian children are in daycare, it’s a problem under international human rights law.
Beyond its evident absurdity and inhumanity, such a situation is an obvious problem for the Church. Women priests are only the beginning. The “abolish women” theory of feminism, which is where the movement has ended up as a practical matter, gets rid of the natural law idea that the sexual aspects of the human body have intrinsic meaning ….
(James Kalb’s “Catholic Response to Abolitionist Feminism,” Crisis Magazine)
Please don’t just agree or disagree. If the subject seems important, engage Kolb’s evocative argument. Hint: Think about which side’s nominalist and which realist, and whether the nominalist side does have unintended consequences.
A “Red Tory” proposes some pro-Distributist tax policy changes to drive subsidiarity. “A core point of Distributism is that there is no better way to ensure one is not supporting injustice than by the law of subsidiarity: Nothing should be more complex than it needs to be in order to function.”
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 