It isn’t just that #PlannedParenthood and NAF are desperately trying to suppress the CMP videos from publication, but that in any discussion with pro-aborts devolves into an exercise of dealing with people who willfully avoid any discussion of what is happening on those tapes. The obfuscation, distraction, ad hominem — every tool of the school of yelling “SQUIRREL” is brought in.
This is, indeed, “willful ignorance” …
One of the most common reactions to the Planned Parenthood body parts scandal is along the lines of “I can’t bear to watch the videos of those horrible people laughing and talking about the sale of babies. It’s just too upsetting to see”. This exactly captures the reason why the videos are so dangerous: they have forced society at large to watch what many must have always suspected was true, but hoped never to confront directly.
The Center of Medical Progress has over 300 hours of undercover video which has been turned over to investigators. It looks like society is going to have to watch, whether it wants to or not.
Willful ignorance “is a term used in law to describe a situation in which a Person seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting him or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable.” Apart from its legal utility it has a lot of psychological usefulness because it allows society to put certain things where they don’t have to deal with it. […]
Now that the cat is out of the bag the objections to looking the issue straight in the face, without eupemism, must vanish. Even those who, like Geraldo Rivera, argue that the end justifies the means can have no further reason for refusing to tell us “what end in exchange for these means?”. And in that matter, handwaving will not suffice. If Geraldo’s so proud of “medical research”, surely our admiration for it can only grow after all 300 hours of undercover video have been broadcast.
In our modern, post-religious age society needs to know what ethical taboos, if any, remain. What won’t we do? Now that we have resolved to live without God and must perforce live under men that is all the more reason to know what those men believe. Sigmund Freud believed that the secular motives of “educated people and brain-workers” would be a reliable substitute for what was formerly regarded as natural law. Can these educated people spare a moment then to explain what their secular motives are? Besides money that is. […]
The trouble with 19th century atheism is that it had not completely freed itself from the sentiments of Christianity: in many subtle ways they assumed that man after God would still have limits. They failed to understand until the middle 20th century that man’s need for power did not necessarily contain limits. They learned, too late, that like the Bill of Rights understands, it is in the “won’ts” on men’s actions that earthly freedom lives.
The people who in the videos merrily describe the prices they can obtain for this or that body part may one day be old and as helpless as the infants they have dismembered. Then they will be in the care of men like themselves. And on that far day these young — then old — may want water. On what grounds will they demand it? On what basis will they ask for care, love or compassion?
Note Geraldo’s attempt to dismiss the issue because it is “legal.” (along with his assertion it is all politics that will cause the Republicans to lose).
Yes. Disgusting.
If not shutting up about this causes Republicans to lose, so be it.
When morality ceases to be transcendent and is limited only by what is personally expedient, anything is allowed for any reason . . . or no reason at all, simply because I want it and have the power to enforce my will. It’s either God’s pronouncements or Man’s power. You cannot have both.
>The decadent civilization senses inwardly that it has no future. It becomes obsessed with apocalypses. Its people are always fixated on the next great threat to their health individually and the next great disaster that will bring their civilization to its knees. While vigorous civilizations boldly stride forward into the unknown, decadents are nervous and unsure. They veer between comfort zones and ritualized displays of destructive behavior that accomplish nothing except the illusion of freedom.
Vigorous civilizations pursue meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment.
The decadent civilization obsessively manages risk. Its layers of government are mainly dedicated to that task. Accomplishment in a decadent civilization becomes a difficult task because of the many lawyers of corporate and government risk management standing in the way of getting anything done.
Fear is the true currency of the decadent civilization. A corrupted fear that is used to expand a vast bureaucracy that claims to manage risk, but in reality manages who is allowed to circumvent it. Groups are stampeded into accepting new tiers of fear government and fear authority based on the risk that something might happen. And yet the source of the fear is never dealt with.
A vigorous civilization rushes out to deal with threats. A decadent civilization imprisons itself out of fear.
Decadence in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted.
And even this deeper corruption is largely limited to the elites and the professional classes, while the rest of the civilization has experienced only a surface corruption that is easily wiped away.
The difficulty is however structural. A decadent civilization becomes more top-down with each year. And the source of the corruption is at the top. Removing the source of the corruption requires either removing all or almost all of the elites, and sizable sections of the professional classes as well. Or a campaign of ideas that transforms them as fundamentally as they were transformed.
<
link
This. This abomination that everyone–even those who say there is nothing to see here, move along–KNOWS is an abomination, is the natural, logical outcome of saying “There is no God, there are no moral absolutes.”
If your “rights” come from humankind, humankind can and WILL take them away.
“If you can’t abide what you do being called what it is, what it’s called isn’t the problem.”
Geraldo does not know it is legal, PP has just been getting away with so far with no one interested in investigating their practice. Gosnell could have been labeled as operating a legal practice as well.
The decadence is such that the Sorosbots on Twitter confidently and repeatedly affirm that consent to sex != consent to pregnancy or to carrying to term.
Get that? Consent to the act does not equal consent to the effect.
I can consent to aiming a gun at you and pulling the trigger while NOT consenting to the bullet ripping through your flesh.
Not guilty, your honor. I only consented to the first part, not the second.
I get to because bodily autonomy or something.
Consequence-free sex is a right! Kill the unwanted babies!
Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
Keep your eye on the sparrow.
I consented to being a worthless slacker at my job. I didn’t consent to getting my lazy ass fired.
i feel bad for Martha Plimpton she aborted all her babies
she would’ve had cool kids i bet
but we’ll never know i guess
she aborted all her babies
Martha Plimpton did
and now she has no babies
cause all them babies dead
never does she hear the sound
of babies kids or tots
she aborted all her babies
she used up all her shots
how sad is martha plimpton
as she ponders mighta beens
she aborted all her babies
lord forgive her of her sins
>she aborted all her babies<
-From G. K. Chesterton, a few apropos words: There is a healthy and an unhealthy love of animals: and the nearest definition of the difference is that the unhealthy love of animals is serious. I am quite prepared to love a rhinoceros, with reasonable precautions: he is, doubtless, a delightful father to the young rhinoceroses. But I will not promise not to laugh at a rhinoceros. . . . I will not worship an animal. That is, I will not take an animal quite seriously: and I know why. Wherever there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience. — G. K. Chesterton, “On Seriousness,” The Uses of Diversity (1920).-
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/421961/cecil-lion-planned-parenthood-g-k-chesterton
I stand by my position on abortion. There, that is out of the way.
I join the call to 1) defund Planned Parts Consortium; 2) I’d call for the arrest of the PPC people involved, but likely they have sufficient legal cover to get away with the selling of human body parts – whatever the cost or purpose of the funds. If they get away with any legal efforts to curtail their efforts, we will have people selling their family’s dead relative parts , to offset costs…..
The videos just told me that things I saw in dark alleys in the 70’s and 80’s has become mainstream. And I am not talking about abortion. Human depravity has no limits. This isn’t about rights, or even morality. If you think having prayer in school, God preached on every corner and laws that make the 10 Commandments look simplistic, will stop or even minimize that depravity – you are the fool in the room.
And having those things does not prevent a society from declining. I like Sultan Knish’s point (and I think newrouter used part of it before) about fear. Though not quite the same way he says it: fear drives people to seek either protection from the object of the fear or the removal of the object of the fear. Most people run and hide…the few that will step up and face it still exist in our society, in large numbers. But not in our leadership.
Most people fear being confronted with things they don’t know how to deal with (by their own lack or a lack of parental/society training). So, they’d rather hide from it. Rather than confronting it. That fear has many faces….
Experimentation on human tissue is the only way we are going to solve some medical issues. This was, and is, the absolutely wrong way. Until some way is found, people are going to find every nook and cranny of law to try and get what they want for good research and a whole lot of bad stuff.