The agony of liberal Europe

When is gross child abuse approximately as serious as a spot of burglary? When it's a cultural thing, of course.

Whilst the defence that she was doing the right thing by her own lights evidently sufficed to relieve the abuser of most of the responsibility for her crimes, if that prompts the thought that they must be pretty dim lights you'd do well to keep your thoughts to yourself. Thoughts like that can get you into real trouble.

Beyond belief

RIP Richard Neuhaus

Sometimes I think the papers should give us previews of some of their obituaries, to alert us to people we should make the most of while they're still with us. I wish I'd been more than dimly aware of Father Richard Neuhaus, the American Lutheran-turned-Catholic theologian and activist, before reading his obit.

Neuhaus was a 'progressive' when he marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam war. He became a 'conservative' when he challenged the human rights record of Vietnam's victorious Stalinists, and still more so when he upheld the rights of the unborn child. So much for political tribalism as a moral guide.

Requiescat in pace.

In the beginning was the stuff: a creation myth for today's bourgeoisie

The lesson is found in the first chapter of the Book of Spectators, beginning to read at the first verse.

In the beginning there was nobody around to create anything, just stuff.
And the stuff was without form and void,
Only not quite, because there were some eddies in the stream of entropy.
Though obviously not because of anybody thinking they were a good idea.
And by a happy chance the eddies brought forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life etc. etc.
A day or two later the eddies created market economies, and every banker that jetteth over the earth after his kind, and the market economies brought forth bonuses abundantly,
And the bankers saw every thing that they had made, and, behold, it was very good.
On the next day things weren't looking quite so hot.
And the bankers said, this bottom-up business is all very well, but let's not get fanatical about it, so let the taxpayer bring forth bail-out packages.
And the bankers trousered the bail-outs, and behold, it was still reasonably satisfactory.

Here endeth the lesson.

[Footnote: dialectical materialism, the Leninist state religion, claimed that class struggle and revolution were inscribed in the natural order of things. Awarding the same status to market economies is probably less dangerous but certainly just as silly. Either way science is being misappropriated to provide an ideology with a mythology.]