A narrative of hate; or, unhappy Father's Day

Something sick and twisted has poisoned a segment of feminism. The picture to your left isn't representative of all feminists, or even necessarily a majority of feminists. But they're within the feminist camp, and their voices are getting louder.

I've never had a problem with feminism, so far as it has meant equal opportunity, equal pay and respect for women. I've thought that feminism went wrong in making women's equality dependent on their economic and political power; I believe women are intrinsically equal to men as created in the image of God (cf. Genesis 1:27). I've also believed that feminism went wrong in equating sexual license with empowerment. At one time, feminists and Christians were united against pornography as demeaning to, and exploitative of, women; that seems to have fallen by the wayside even as porn has become more explicitly degrading to women, to the point of catering to rape fantasies.

But this? These women's narrative of victimhood has become so paranoid and self-referential that they can't grant anything positive, anything to celebrate, about men let alone fathers. This goes way beyond the need to address sexual violence (and thanks again, George Will, for your obtuse, patronizing diminishment of the problem, you arrogant jackalope).

This. Is. HATE. 

Catholic Stand—The Century of the Self: We the Sheeple

If you’ve got about four hours to spare — better make it five, for the occasional break — watch all four parts of the 2002 BBC documentary miniseries The Century of the Self. Written and directed by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self explores the rise of public relations and marketing, as well as the influence of various members of the Freud family, especially Sigmund Freud himself.

Because CoS is a British documentary, the average American might never guess it was pushing an agenda. Instead of screaming “THOSE EVIL BASTARDS ARE MANIPULATING US!”, Curtis calmly, thoughtfully, dispassionately suggests that the corporations, which have used the techniques developed by Edward Bernays, Anna Freud and their successors, have subverted our critical thinking skills. Selfish, instinct-driven creatures, Curtis intones quietly, are “ideal consumers”, and consumerism is “a way of giving people the illusion of control while allowing a responsible elite to continue managing society.”

Although we feel we are free, in reality we … have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that, that there are other sides to human nature. (Curtis, A. [2002]. Century of the Self, Part 4: Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering [motion picture])

Although CoS is mild anti-big business agitprop, what it says about the subtly destructive effects of Freudian consumerism bears consideration.

Read the rest at Catholic Stand!

UPDATE: Archbishop Carlson and the "Reagan defense"... plus an apology

This update includes information that was released yesterday [H/T to Fr. John Zuhlsdorf!]. Ordinarily, I would publish a post of this length in Outside the Asylum; however, since the original version of this post was published in The Impractical Catholic, it's only fair I publish the update here as well.

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On May 23, 2014 Archbishop Robert J. Carlson of St. Louis gave his deposition in a predator-priest lawsuit in Minneapolis, where he had originally been incardinated in 1970 and served in a variety of capacities (including auxiliary bishop from 1984 to 1994). At this time, he is not a respondent in the case.

If you judge solely from the video clip released by Anderson Advocates — and, unfortunately, I did at first — Abp. Carlson must be either one of the most astounding, thundering idiots ever to wear a miter or an equally astounding liar. "I'm not sure whether I knew it was a crime" for a priest to have sex with a minor?! Really?!

Except that it appears the "Reagan defense" — lapses of memory — is actually an acceptable legal strategy. When Scott Eric Alt, from whom I picked up the link to Deacon Greg Kandra's page, asked his Facebook friends rhetorically, "Really, where does one begin with this?" Michael F. J. Lee replied:

I'd begin with the high likelihood that the archbishop worded his answer exactly as he was probably advised by archdiocesan attorneys who prepped him for the deposition. It's common for attorneys to advise the "I'm not sure I remember knowing..." disclaimer when going into a deposition. It's also not false; most of us are not "100% sure" of what we remember, or not. Thus, attorneys will tell you that it's perfectly fine to use the disclaimer. ...

I sat in on a deposition prep, and those exact words were prescribed. When the person said "I can't say that," the attorney said "Sure you can. Would you bet your life that the butter on your toast this morning wasn't really margarine? Your life?" The guy said "No." The attorney smiled.

There's more going on here, too, than Anderson Associates — the legal firm which released the clip — would like you to believe.

Dear Mr. Will: Please shut up about rape

To: George F. Will
Re: Sexual violence on campus

Dear Mr. Will:

Unlike many bloggers who right now are criticizing your op-ed piece, "Colleges become the victim of progressivism," I actually read it. The whole thing; I didn't stop after the bit about campus rape. Taken all together, the "campus liberals hoist on their own petard" theme might have worked.

However, you spoiled it by trivializing sexual assault on campus. That may not have been your intent (and I'll explain why I think so in a minute), but that's what you did. The road to Hell ....

The problem with the numbers the White House uses to justify federal intervention is that they're based on sloppy research. As your own Washington Post tells us in a story about the 2007 Campus Sexual Assault Study, the numbers were drawn from Web-based surveys conducted at two — two — "large public universities, one in the Midwest and one in the South". This is nowhere near a "random sampling" as understood by social scientists and statisticians, and the researchers themselves admit that the results can't be generalized onto the entire college populace.

So it's no wonder that, when you try to apply the figures to another school, like Ohio State, they don't necessarily add up (98 reports between 2009 and 2012 ≈ 817 × 12%; 817 ≈ 28,000 × 2.9%). And this is where you earned my willingness to grant you good intentions: While 2.9 percent is "nowhere near" 20 percent (1 in 5), you also said it's "too high". While anything above zero is "too high", I assume you mean it's much higher than the national figure given by the National Crime Victimization Survey, which was about 0.02% of all women in 2010.

Sunday Snippets—A Catholic Carnival (Vol. 4-24)

Welcome again to Sunday Snippets, your portal to a small collection of obscure but deserving Catholic writers on a wide range of topics. 

Yes, I know I haven't had one of these up for a while; despite my copious free time, I haven't produced a lot the last couple of months.

Anyway, here's how it works for those who are seeing this for the first time: Writers like me create a single post with links to the articles they've written for the week. This single post includes a link back to RAnn's blog This, That and the Other Thing, where the single post will be submitted as a link on the page. Follow the link back (I've provided two!), and it'll take you to RAnn's page, where you can find those other obscure but deserving writers I mentioned above.

What have I produced this week?

In Outside the Asylum I have two major posts, both of which touch on the topic of right-wing dissent, or conservative "cafeteria Catholics". The first is "'Mere Catholicism' vs. Real Catholicism™", in which I use a couple of pre-Vatican II sources to dispose of a false distinction and remind my fellow papist bloggers that we're granted neither the presumption of infallibility nor the power of excommunication. In the second, "Pope Francis and the libertarians", I take apart a couple of key free-market contentions held by libertarians, and argue that libertarianism places too much emphasis on the autonomy of the individual to be compatible with Catholic social doctrine.

In The Impractical Catholic (this blog what you're reading now), I started off with the musical question, "Has Ralph Nader become a Distributist?" It covers an article written by the consumer advocate and perennial presidential candidate, which reviews a book published in the 1930s by Herbert Agar and Alan Tate, Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence, and is adapted from Nader's own new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Stop the Corporate State. (Be on the lookout for a future review of this book by Your Humble Blogger!) The next, "Seventy years ago today" (actually published a day early), is a reflection upon the men who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, and on the few men and women still alive who served in all the theaters of World War II. Finally, there's "Separating truth from manufactured outrage in Galway", which takes apart the various strands of the story that became the myth of "800 babies thrown into a septic tank", and is based on an Irish Times interview with the historian who first brought the story to light.

Here you go, then! Follow the link back to RAnn's page, and happy reading!

Separating truth from manufactured outrage in Galway

Galway historian Catherine Corless. (Source: Irish Times)

"I never used that word 'dumped'," Catherine Corless told the The Irish Times. "I never said to anyone that 800 bodies were dumped in a septic tank. That did not come from me at any point. They are not my words."

Later on in the story, the County Galway historian repeats herself "with distress": "I never used that word 'dumped'. I just wanted those children to be remembered and for their names to go up on a plaque. That was why I did this project, and now it has taken [on] a life of its own."

Indeed it has ... an ugly life; through the process of sensationalism, the real story has spawned a Doppelgänger, an evil double who lives only to spark controversy and recriminations. Separate strands of the story were mashed together to create this undead creature.

Thread 1: From 1840 to about 1924 the township of Tuam operated a workhouse just off of what is now Dublin Road (R 332). A map reportedly from 1892 marked the building as "Children's Home"; however, the building didn't become a home for unwed mothers and their babies until it was taken over by the Sisters of Bons Secours in 1925. The home closed in 1961 and fell into disrepair.

Thread 2: In 1975, 10-year-old Barry Sweeney and his 12-year-old buddy, Frannie Hopkins, managed to climb over the two-and-a-half-meter wall into a part of the home's property. "We used to be in there playing regular. There was always this slab of concrete there," Sweeney told the Irish Times. On this occasion, the boys decided to pry up the 120 cm x 60 cm slab to look under it. "There were skeletons thrown in there. They were all this way and that way. They weren’t wrapped in anything, and there were no coffins. But there was no way there were 800 skeletons down that hole. Nothing like that number. I don’t know where the papers got that." [Bold type mine.—ASL] Sweeney puts the number at closer to twenty.

Seventy years ago today

There's so few of them left.

My father wasn't old enough to serve even with Grandpa's permission until after October 1945; by a fluke, he was still awarded the World War II Victory Medal (Harry S Truman, for reasons I don't know, didn't declare an official end of hostilities until 31 December 1946). However, my granduncle, Lt. Joseph P. Cronin, served with the 36th Infantry (Arrowhead) Division when the Seventh Army invaded southern France 15 August 1944; he was killed outside of Montélimar nine days later. And a fellow Knight of my council served as a platoon sergeant in the 23rd Infantry (Americal) Division in the South Pacific; I don't know how, because he doesn't talk about it, but he was awarded the Bronze Star. And I once lived by a man who'd flown B-24s — where and with which Air Force, I'll never know.

The real heroes usually don't talk about it. When they're with friends from their old units, they swap funny memories. And they're the first to deny that they're heroes. Almost to a man, they say: "The real heroes never left."

Has Ralph Nader become a Distributist?—UPDATED

A new Distributist triad?

Ralph Nader getting a whole article published in The American Conservative? Wow, who'da thunk it?

Really, it's not all that strange, as: 1) Nader's article, "Who Owns America?", is drawn from his new book Unstoppable: The Emerging Left/Right Alliance to Stop the Corporate State (Nation Books, $16.43 in hardcover from Amazon), 2) it centers on a group of political conservatives in the 1930s who advocated "decentralization", and 3) as The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named points out, The American Conservative has no qualms about printing common sense even if it comes from a ritually impure source.

What interests and even fascinates me is that the article, which outlines Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (eds. Herbert Agar and Alan Tate, ISI Books, $23.70 in hardback from Amazon), describes a position on economics, ownership and government that wouldn't be out of place in The Distributist Review. The decentralists held corporate ownership to be a corruption of private ownership, one that inevitably led to plutocracy and oligarchy. At the same time, they distrusted state ownership; whatever small faction controlled the capital resources of the country, the endgame would result in the death of liberty. The only way to stave such a result off, they believed, was to spread out the means of production, especially land ownership, as much as possible.

Who knew solving our energy needs could be so freakin’ COOL!?

Okay, I'll admit it: The first time I saw this video on Elite Daily, I went into "full geek" mode. As in screaming, “THIS IS FREAKIN’ COOL!” Or maybe it was that part of the Y chromosome that interprets such gadgets as “toys”, no matter how utilitarian they’re meant to be. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to find the Solar Roadways concept slathered in awesome sauce.

Catholic Stand: Dancing with the Devil — The Final Cut

This post is the final version of an essay I published on May 9, 2014 in Outside the Asylum, and updated twice with additional news and commentary. It was rewritten for Catholic Stand at the request of my editor, Diane McKelva.

“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.”

—Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

In today’s academic milieu, you should expect that a Black Mass performed by a group calling itself “The Satanic Temple” under the auspices of an Ivy League university to be a bold, daring exercise in transgressing boundaries, right? Especially if the celebrants use a consecrated Host for the ritual desecration that was retrieved at a legitimate Catholic Mass.

Well, not so much. For one thing, a spokesperson for the Temple, Priya Dua, officially denied the use of a real Host (after initially confirming it) in a conversation with Elizabeth Scalia (The Anchoress). Later, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club released a statement that read in part, “Our purpose is not to denigrate any religion or faith, which would be repugnant to our educational purposes, but instead to learn and experience the history of different cultural practices.” A still-later statement repeated the peaceful intent, albeit in the midst of a blither of revisionist history and boilerplate insults calling Catholic objections “closed-minded” and “based on intolerance and ignorance”. (See Thomas L. McDonald’s post in God and the Machine for an acerbic yet accurate outline of the relevant history.)

But Doug Mesner, aka “Lucien Greaves”, supposedly the head of The Satanic Temple, didn’t seem to be reading the same script. According to Kaitlyn Schallhorn of Campus Reform, Mesner asserted that the HECSC Black Mass “[would have] mock[ed] rituals of other mainstream religious rituals [sic]”, so Catholics wouldn’t be the only ones dissed. On the question of the consecrated host, Mesner was suspiciously coy, telling The Anchoress that he doubted anyone would “waste time going to all that trouble” to get one (Really? Only falling off a log would be less trouble), but telling Schallhorn “he couldn’t call it a ‘consecrated host’ as Catholics do” … which, The Anchoress pointed out, implied that Catholics could call their host consecrated.

On May 12, the event was “postponed indefinitely”; like Eliot’s hollow men, it ended not with a bang, but a whimper.

Read more at Catholic Stand!