The Blissfully Oblivious Libertarian*

Over at The Corner, Cato fellow Jerry Taylor asks a question for non-Libertarians:

"For those of you who don’t embrace freedom as your political lodestar... If we are to prevent people from engaging in what some deem to be self-destructive behavior (guys marrying guys, women joining a structured harem, whatever), on what principled basis do we decide what sort of self-destructive behavior is ripe for legal sanction as opposed to, say, other sorts of legalized self-destructive behavior like gambling, drinking, smoking, or watching Oprah?"

Is it really that difficult to understand the thinking of ordinary conservatives? Indeed, the vast majority of people who don't hold to an ideological libertarianism? The answer is we decide on the basis of considered pragmatic judgment. One weighs the good to be gained against the negative consequences. Pretty straightforward, really.

*Lest it be misinterpreted, I'm borrowing this from the nickname of Alex Rios, rightfielder for the Blue Jays: the "blissfully oblivious gazelle" - extremely talented but a trifle abstracted.

Rights for Me, Not for You

As I have noted previously, Gay rights activists often aim to bulldoze religious freedom to eliminate all opposition to their aims. The latest example: New Hampshire, where the State House is objecting to guarantees of religious freedom inserted into a gay marriage bill by the Governor.

Some Sacred Histories are More Sacred Than Others

A certain Denise Spellberg explains why she campaigned (successfully) to prevent the publication of a novel depicting the life of Aisha, favourite wife of Mohammed:

"I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."

So, this woman claims a courageous willingness to validate the attempted subversion of one religious tradition; but takes a leading role in suppressing a far less problematic portrayal of another. Is this what passes for principle in the academy these days?

The Hope of Unity

We know that God may write straight by crooked lines, bringing unexpected blessings to dire situations. Know is the time to hope for such a result for our Anglo-Catholic brethren. The Church of England has voted to "ordain" women to the episcopate, without providing any safeguards for catholic-minded Anglicans. Coming so soon after Gafcon, and just before the Lambeth Conference, I expect this action will have repercussions beyond England for Anglo-Catholics. The apparent end of Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England is bitter, even from the perspective of this unhyphenated Catholic.

The hope of Anglo-Catholicism was always foolishness to the world; but we Christians and particularly we Catholics should not regard it as foolishness, but as a divinely given impetus to recover the catholic faith within Anglicanism. Their view was that the Anglican Church was, after all the reforms and alterations and power struggles within the Anglican founding, left with a doctrine and practice embodied in the Book of Common Prayer and the formularies that was catholic, rather than protestant. Thus, the Anglican Church could be faithful to catholic Christian belief by recapturing what it innately was.

That hope has now been decisively disappointed- yet we should have faith that the efforts of the Oxford fathers (Keble, Pusey, Newman) and the Anglo-Catholic priests and laity that have followed their renewal have not been in vain, and may yet bear fruit beyond our imagining. I hope this occurs through reunion with the Holy See. The liturgical beauty of the Anglican heritage, their hard-fought faithfulness to historic Christianity, and their example in returning to unity are powerful forces.

Apparently, Anglo-Catholic leaders within the CofE have been having discussions with the Vatican and are confident a good result can be worked out, while the Traditional Anglican Communion, a sizeable grouping of Anglo-Catholics who had already left the Anglican Communion is anticipated to be received back into the fold of Peter in the near future. And, for what it's worth, there are rumours that an entire diocese of the Episcopal Church (USA) is considering swimming the Tiber.

All these developments indicate that there is no time better to be generous in seeking unity among Christians. In my view, unity is a matter of enormous importance. We should be willing to sacrifice all unneccessary things for unity. I hope the Holy See will respond generously, granting an independent hierarchy (perhaps even ordaining celibate Anglo-Catholic priests to be bishops); a broad allowance for traditional Anglican liturgy and parish structure; and allowing married men to be ordained for Anglo-Catholic communities. Perhaps it would be good to emphasize that the separate structure and the continued ordination of married men to the presbyterate are not necessarily permanent- after all, ideally, there should be but one bishop over a given area; and the continuation of married priests should perhaps be left on an ad experimentum basis.

Meme time- Top 106 “Unread” Books on LibraryThing

The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those you own but have not read.

The ultimate hitchhiker's guide by Douglas Adams
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
The kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Life of Pi : a novel by Yann Martel
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
One hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Vanity fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
Ulysses by James Joyce
War and peace by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
A tale of two cities by Charles Dickens
The satanic verses by Salman Rushdie
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books by Azar Nafisi
The name of the rose by Umberto Eco
The Kor'an
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Odyssey by Homer
The Canterbury tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
The historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
Foucault's pendulum by Umberto Eco
Atlas shrugged by Ayn Rand
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
The three musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
The sound and the fury by William Faulkner
The Iliad by Homer
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Emma by Jane Austen*
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence
Gulliver's travels by Jonathan Swift
The house of the seven gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies by Jared Diamond
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Lady Chatterley's lover by D.H. Lawrence
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius by Dave Eggers
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The once and future king by T. H. White
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
To the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen*
Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond
The corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The grapes of wrath by John Steinbeck
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
The divine comedy by Dante Alighieri
The inferno by Dante Alighieri
Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Swann's way by Marcel Proust
The poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
Sense and sensibility by Jane Austen*
The portrait of a lady by Henry James
Silas Marner by George Eliot
The picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The man in the iron mask by Alexandre Dumas
The god of small things by Arundhati Roy
The book thief by Markus Zusak
The confusion by Neal Stephenson
One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Ken Kesey
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
The system of the world by Neal Stephenson
The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
The known world by Edward P. Jones
The time traveler's wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The English patient by Michael Ondaatje
Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
Dubliners by James Joyce
Les misérables by Victor Hugo
The bonesetter's daughter by Amy Tan
Infinite jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Beloved : a novel by Toni Morrison
Persuasion by Jane Austen*
A clockwork orange by Anthony Burgess
The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Tropic of cancer by Henry Miller

Hitchcock & The Priesthood

I just had the chance to watch one of Alfred Hitchcock's lesser-known films, "I Confess". In it, a priest falls under suspicion for a murder. Hitchcock focuses a great deal on the mysterious nature of the priesthood, no doubt drawing upon his own faith- and the seal of the confessional plays an important role in the plot. A beautiful film.

Evangelical Monasticism


A fascinating story in the Los Angeles Times captures the spirit and challenges of a neo-monastic community of evangelicals in Montana. These men and women are urgently pursuing obedience to God and service to their neighbours.

It's particularly interesting to me as I've had a discussion about re-establishing monasticism with an evangelical friend of mine. There's information about the broader movement (yep, it's a broader movement) here.

Panic!!

Let's all for once pay heed to Lenin, alleged to have said "The worse it gets, the better." The markets are melting! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

And all this over a little worry about an American recession. Imagine what will happen when the markets wake up and realize that the United States has about $66 Trillion (not a mistake- Trillion) in unfunded liabilities relating to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. That means that the implicit & explicit debt of America is about 600% of GDP. How the U.S. economy can survive this burden is difficult to imagine. A massive collapse is in order, far more severe than this little bump, when the markets realize that there is no way to square the circle, and that taxes will have to rise enormously. Maybe not tommorrow, but it will happen.* When it does, we're all in deep trouble.

I gather there are similar problems confronting other developed nations surrounding the huge demographic shift that is slowly transforming the West, but I gather the United States has the biggest fiscal shortfall associated with this dramatic aging of society even though the United States has the smallest demographic problem in the West.

*I discount the possibility that American voters and politicians will actually rein in spending on Medicare and Social Security as incredibly unlikely.

Miracles

Rod Dreher is a wonderful writer, and has even been so kind as to link to this blog on occasion. Well, go and read about his experience with miracles- truly extraordinary, but he shows how his miracles led him to keep them in context.

Congratulations to the Romanian Orthodox Faithful on the Election of Patriarch Daniel

May he shepherd wisely & in the love of Christ.

The News

Rocco Palmo comments

I'm Happy, Because I'm (sort of) Going One for Two:

An interesting Marine Protected Areas announcement from the BC Government.

France & Iraq

Holding what appears, even to myself, as inextricably conflicted views about France, I was nonetheless wholly pleased to read of France's new diplomatic efforts in Iraq.

One of the options under consideration, the official said, would be a peace conference that would bring Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish representatives to one table, modeled on a similar gathering Mr. Kouchner organized for Lebanese factions last month. Such a conference could be organized in France or in one of Iraq’s neighbors, said the official, who declined to be identified because the issue was still under discussion.

It remains uncertain whether any diplomatic effort is capable of yielding a favourable result at this juncture, but France's apparent willingness to expend diplomatic toil and political capital to make the attempt reflects well on the nation, the Sarkozy administration, and, above all, Bernard Kouchner.

The State of the Culture

As is all too evident we live in societies which put up with enormous levels of cultural detritus. To give but the most straightforward example, we are inundated with the presence of pornography- be it in the corner store, in advertisements, on television. But church bells, well they're an entirely different kettle of fish. They're a public nuisance, which must be kept within strict limits.

The NDP & Family

We learn from the Globe & Mail of a controversial statement from Diane Ablonczy, who attempts an explanation for the low participation rate for women in politics:

“Women generally place a higher priority on caring for their family – either their own children, or sometimes grandchildren, and sometimes older parents.”

Now, I happen to agree with Ablonczy's argument, but certainly one can disagree. One can argue that more needs to be done to overcome this reticence. However, Irene Matheson of the NDP responds by saying of Ablonczy and the Tories that: “Now they're blaming women for having the wrong priorities.”

So, according to the NDP caring for children, grandchildren, for elderly parents are "the wrong priorities". Is it any wonder that the NDP are regarded as hostile to the family?

The Impact of Political Rhetoric

Demagogues have long been condemned by the great and wise of society for their appeal to the passions and prejudices of the citizenry, when what is needed is reason and deliberation. This is true enough, but demagoguery is an inevitable result of placing ultimate political power in the hands of the masses. As a result, the role of argumentation, debate and discussion has taken a secondary place to rhetoric and appeals to interest groups. The selection process for politicians thus suffers from a strong bias towards the vapid rhetoritician and demagogue, and a comparatively minor impetus for strong thinkers and debaters- and so, when involved in roles such as Parliamentary debate which are more suitable for debate, these politicians nevertheless tend to rely on their highest talents. This is, of course, exacerbated by the televised nature of Legislative proceedings and the soundbite quality of our news cycle.

As political rhetoric has decended from argumentation to demagoguery, the type of person attracted to running for office has changed as well, reinforcing the bias towards the demogogic character, and further eroding the quality of policy debate both in the public forum as a whole and in the Legislature in particular.

How might this problem be lessened? Smaller ridings would allow for political campaigns to rely more on argument and less on media strategies as candidates get closer to the average voter. In the legislatures themselves, cameras ought to be removed to eliminate the temptation to pontificate to the voters rather than engage in debate and discussion.

Of course, the principal problem is that the nature of public knowledge and engagement in politics ineluctably leads to success for those who engage in appeals to self-interest and group identity- but this problem is impossible to remediate structurally without substantially narrowing the franchise. The place of an unelected upper house may be difficult to justify in terms of representation, but it certainly provides a means for a generous degree of disputation that democratically responsible chambers lack.

Almost Amazing

One of the worst things to happen in sports is when a brilliant play gets nullified by a blown call. The one that jumps out in my memory was the Blue Jays being robbed of a triple play in the World Series when Kelly Gruber clipped the heel of Otis Nixon for the third out, but the umpire missed the call.


Yesterday's game against the Red Sox saw Troy Glaus have a magnificent game- he finished a triple short of the cycle. His first hit of the game was a shot off the Green Monster in left-centre field, and Glaus turned the corner for second base. Coco Crisp took the ball quickly off the carom and made a perfect throw to second, beating Glaus. The tag was laid down for Glaus to slide into, but instead, Glaus, sliding wide of the bag, lifted his arm up and over the tag, then back down onto the bag. It was a brilliant and unexpected play that I'd never seen before- but the umpire missed it entirely and called him out. Completely exasperating that such a great, great play would be nullified by an errant call.

Guilty?

And my opinion of the US justice system plummets to a new low. I've only been to the US once in the last nine years- and it looks as if that's wise right now.

The Feast of St. Benedict

St. Benedict is the father of Western Monasticism, which helped preserve Western civilization during the centuries following the fall of the Roman Empire. Not a few have noted that our civilization needs a rediscovery and a reimplementation of St. Benedict's intentional Christian communities to combat the growing cultural darkness about us.

Sancte Benedicte, Ora pro nobis!

Good Signs

Record numbers attend Benedict’s weekly audiences, and seven million people a year now visit St Peter’s, a rise of 20 per cent. Similar increases are recorded for pilgrimages to Catholic shrines at Assisi, Lourdes, Fatima in Portugal and Madonna di Guadalupe in Mexico. “This is a Ratzinger phenomenon,” reported La Repubblica.

Courtesy of the Times.

Sunk Costs & The War in Iraq

Sunk Costs denote the resources that have already been invested in a given project or effort. Usually, sunk costs act to induce further investment, as psychologically we don't wish to consider our already committed resources as wasted or lost. However, psychology can work both ways.

In the case of the War in Iraq, it is evident to the meanest intellect that the invasion was a mistake, based on poor intelligence. Moreover, it is now clear that the White House engaged in foolishly utopian thinking about the possibilities of a peaceful democratic transition while utterly neglecting to prepare for the hard work of securing the country and rebuilding a functional polity. As a result, over 3,500 American troops are dead, along with scores of Iraqi allies and untold numbers of civilians. Iraq remains a mess.

The reaction is to cut the losses- to recognize the error and remove oneself from it. Yet, I think this is not necessarily right. The loss of life is irrevocable. The resources are already lost. It is necessary to look at the situation always anew, though alive to the witness of history. At the moment, the effectiveness of the troop surge in Baghdad appears much in question- but it is not necessarily a failure. The once-hopeless Anbar Province, seat of the insurgency is now quiet and (relatively) peaceful. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has been pushed out of both Anbar Province and now Baqubah. In short, it may be the case that the military situation is finally taking a turn for the better. Moreover, even the political situation seems to have a whisper of hope about it now. Perhaps the Americans need to stay in a little longer, if only to leave Iraq less chaotic than it is now.