Child Pornography As Art

In America, it's "spiritual marriages" or slut baby clothing. In Australia, it's "art". Either way, exploiting children seems to becoming more normed throughout Western civilization. Make sure to watch the news clip at the link. Even Australia's leftist Prime Minister is appalled.

My question, upon watching all this, is where are the parents? There are laws against child pornography, but there's no law that can stop parents from being complete morons. Why would a parent allow this? The child has no consent. The child will grow up some day and see these images and try to rationalize his parent's failure to protect him and worse, his parents cooperated.

Of course, the art community feels persecuted because police are investigating. Enter the obligatory Nazi references:

Commenting on the decision to shut down the Henson exhibition, he said it was "a sad day that an artist or a gallerist has to edit an exhibition on the basis of public fear".

"It's like Australia's way back in the 1950s again," he added. "It's a reminder that we still live very much in basically a philistine country."

Judy Annear, senior curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW, says artists like Henson need to continue to push the boundaries, despite public opinion.

"The day art museums and artists decide that the only thing they can do is react to public opinion is the day that we are in the same scenario as people were in the 1930s in Germany," she said.

So, the Nazi's were preventing children from being exploited? Why, if my cursory understanding of history serves, it was the Nazis who were doing the exploiting. Lampshades were art, no doubt. Hitler hated modernism and artists in general because of his own failings as an artist. What deep chasm in the modern public psyche accounts for the outrage at seeing children exploited?

It is never possible that the artist has crossed a inviolable moral line. Nope. The Australian populace are a bunch of Philistines. How open minded! Only if you agree with the art communities are you a free thinking genius, but if you disagree--you're a Philistine. To the true artist, there are no boundaries. To the average person, artists have no sense.

H/T Reader Dana Hanley

Pet Dog Cloning

Do you love your dog so much that you never want to live without him/her? Well, now you can order a clone from this Korean company:

A woman from the United States wants her dead pitbull terrier - called Booger - re-created.

RNL Bio is charging the woman, from California, $150,000 (£76,000) to clone the pitbull using tissue extracted from its ear before it died.

It doesn't sound so bad when talking about a dog. How would you feel about cloning a child who died?

Murder In The Least--Update

Has the rash of random violence overwhelmed a rational person's ability to integrate the evil? Aaron Hanscom writes an excellent commentary detailing examples of young people refusing to use condemning language for everything from Nazism to the Virginia Tech murderer (his name shall not be written) who killed 32 people in one day. Glenn Reynold's asks, "Is murder a victimless crime?" Even young people who should clearly know better get it wrong:

One wonders if Gutmann would have also found the humor in the Nazi costume Prince Harry wore to a party in 2005. Harry would have fit in perfectly in the class of one Harvard University professor, who has described his shock upon learning that the majority of his students didn’t believe anybody was to blame for the Holocaust. He referred to his students’ attitude about the past as “no-fault history.”

There are whose answer to the world's evil is to simply pretend it doesn't involve them. It is a supremely selfish perspective and an unthinking one. Some other acquaintances cannot or will not concede that evil exists.

How convenient! If evil doesn't exist, then there is no reason to fight injustice or wrong. It's really a perfect world view. It requires nothing of the believer and offers absolution for cowardice.

Changing the terms, defining down makes a society where no heinous action is condemned and may even be extolled:

Apparently murder isn’t even enough to retire the usage of the diminutive form of the murderer’s name. In fact, the reporter also referred to Hawkins as “Robby” when asking the friend questions like “What are you thinking about now that you know that Robby was involved in this shooting?” (The word “commit” can’t be used by the nonjudgmental.) It’s hard to disagree with talk show host Dennis Prager when he makes the case that such rhetoric is symbolic of society’s inability to make moral condemnations. But aren’t some crimes so horrific that everyone should abhor them?

The answer to the last question is "no". To abhor would be to judge and that would be wrong. The murderer simply acted the way he did because it made sense to him at the time. Our job is to understand his motivation so we can help little future murderers choose more helpful behavior.

Just when I think America is more cohesive than the media would have us believe, an article like this comes out. The divide in America may indeed be moral. Will every one of these relativistic people have to have a friend or family member raped, killed or dismembered to know evil exists? Or will they stay in the soft comfort of amorality even then?

Update: It occurs to me that the reason people deny evil exists is based in narcissism. These people don't want anyone telling them that what they're doing is morally repugnant or wrong, so they refuse to condemn any behavior no matter how heinous. The guiltless murder is all about them. This short-circuits empathy. It short-circuits the impulse for justice.

This doesn't bode well for the future. Wars started to end justice or for self-preservation will be forgone in favor of comfort food, entertainment and whatever self-centered pursuit is trendy.

The future won't be good men doing nothing. The future will be filled with amoral men doing nothing. There will just be a sliding scale of bad.

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." [Edmund Burke]

We need a more than a few good men.

Selling A Kidney: Utilitarianism and Health

Sell a kidney is the "radical" idea to save people who need kidney transplants, reports the Wall Street Journal. It's an interesting, if not very original, idea. It's also fairly easy to predict the consequences of allowing kidney sales because it's what already happens with sales of other, um, body parts and by-products:

1. College students would have another income stream besides plasma donation, sperm donation, egg donation, biopsy donation (medical experiments), psychology experiments, etc. As it is, their youth, vitality, idealism, and ignorance get exploited to help the world.
2. Poor people would sell kidneys to make money.
3. The market would have more kidneys.
   
4. Less sick people will die.
   
5. More people will die when they get older and their own ill health kicks in and they only have one kidney.
6. There will be a backlash.
7. People will stop donating and/or selling kidneys.

Number 7 will happen a generation or so from now. Maybe. One doctor is all for creating a free market kidney solution. His friend thinks it's a bad idea:

Among his opponents on the issue is a friend and colleague, Francis Delmonico. A Harvard University professor who has played a central role in shaping national transplant policy, the 62-year-old physician has several objections to organ sales. He fears such a system would attract the poor, vulnerable and unhealthy, and that altruistic donations might wither away.

"Payments eventually result in the exploitation of the individual," says Dr. Delmonico, who also worries about encouraging black-market sales both here and in developing countries. "It's the poor person who sells."

This would be my position. One might object, but you don't have a kidney problem. True enough. But I worry about the exploitation of people and to me, that seems inevitable. The greater concern, and it's one seldom looked at, is the effect that creating an organ market will have on society as a whole. To me, it will make the moral boundaries even more ambiguous.

Selling organs will commoditize (if that's a word) life.

Brain Function and Morality

Yes, there's a link. Consider this as reported in the Wall Street Journal:

In particular, these people had injured an area that links emotion to cognition, located in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex several inches behind the brow. The experiment underscores the pivotal part played by unconscious empathy and emotion in guiding decisions. "When that influence is missing," said USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, "pure reason is set free."

Pure reasoning--isn't that what some hope for? Why wouldn't pure reasoning be a good thing--logic undefiled by those whimsical emotions? Women have been dismissed in the days of yore for being "too emotional". That criticism has been unjustified. Men are just emotional about different things and express it in different ways. They often aren't as nuanced in their expression. They still feel emotional.

So what happens when emotions are derailed by brain damage?

All told, they considered 50 hypothetical moral dilemmas. Their responses were essentially identical to those of neurology patients who had different brain injuries and to healthy volunteers, except when a situation demanded they take one life to save others. For most, the thought of killing an innocent prompts a visceral revulsion, no matter how many other lives weigh in the balance. But if your prefrontal cortex has been impaired in the same small way by stroke or surgery, you would feel no such compunction in sacrificing one life for the good of all. The six patients certainly felt none. Any moral inhibition, whether learned or hereditary, had lost its influence.

The effort to understand the biology of morality is far from academic, said Georgetown University law professor John Mikhail. The search for an ethical balance of harm is central to medical debates on vaccine safety, organ transplants and clinical drug trials. It colors political disputes over embryonic stem-cell research, capital punishment and abortion. It is the essence of much military strategy and the underlying logic of terrorism.

For Harvard neuroscientist Marc Hauser, the moral-dilemma experiment is evidence the brain may be hard-wired for morality. Most moral intuitions, he said, are unconscious, involuntary and universal. To test the idea, he gathered data from thousands of people in hundreds of countries, all of whom display a remarkable unanimity in their basic moral choices. A shared innate capacity for morality may be responsible, he concluded.

I'm curious about this phenomenon. I have friends who have been brain injured and have noticed their obtuseness socially. They don't seem to recognize when they hurt other people's feelings. And they are very pedantic. Those affected acknowledge that they have changed, but they also don't seem to recognize their own change.

Additionally, I feel that my own personality, and perhaps morality, too, has changed since enduring chronic stress. I feel sensitized to suffering, but also feel the need to shut it out. I wonder if war vets feel this way, too.

There is a law in health that chiropractors especially repeat often: Structure affects function and function affects structure. I don't see why it wouldn't be true with the brain.

Virginia Tech Massacre Reveals A Sick and Tired Society

I haven't seen the controversial Cho videos--seeing the gun pointed at his own head picture on Drudge was enough for me. After watching the CNN interviews with Cho's roommates, I decided that I didn't want to watch any Cho anymore. And I haven't. I said this yesterday and it sounds like I'm not alone in my belief:

He was rational enough to use and manipulate the media. He knew what they would do, and they did. (More here.) They worked as a team, Cho and the media. In fact, other murderous (crazy? sick? evil?) terrorizers use the media in a cold and calculating way, too. They, too, justify their actions and blame the victims. None of these people appear insane. They seem consumed by hate--so much so that they value no life, including their own.

The parents are rightly outraged at the glorification of the criminal. The criminal is always glorified in the media. Even I have dedicated two long posts (here and here) dissecting the societal explanation for such murderous behavior. Two posts reported the news (here and here). Two posts covered the victim's families and remembering the heroes (here and here). And one post was philosophical. I'd like to think my blog has been balanced. If it were my child who had been shot, though, the notion of there even being "balance" would make me sick.

This is a story of one bad guy, a number of fallible authorities, many heroes, and scores of people who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the latter a scripture in Ecclesiastes 9 is helpful:

11I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all.

Does that mean it doesn't matter what we do with our gifts and talents cause we might die tomorrow? No. It does matter. And I, for one, believe a man like Professor Liviu Librescu, was meant to survive the Holocaust to save his fellow man. Everyone of his students lived because of his sacrifice. In his case, one life bought many. What a blessing he is to his family, his community and the world. His sacrifice mattered.

Still, as weak humans, we are all subject to time. We will all die eventually. Hebrews 9:27 says, "It is appointed for all men once to die; and then, the judgment." So, good or bad, we will all die and answer for the life we've lived. If, by time and chance, we're cut short by some evil-doer, it can be just a random evil. It doesn't have to be reason-filled to die in this way--we are all affected by chance.

And still, ALL things work together for good for those who love God, to those called according to His purpose. (Romans 8:28) So even something so despicable and evil can give rise to something good. For a start, it would be nice if the media would acknowledge their accomplice-like behavior in elevating the brutal, evil and criminal. These days, the media coverage, more than the elimination of a rival, is the goal of the killer. For the media to collectively ignore that fact is such self-serving willful stupidity.

Additionally, for the media to obsess over guns when the problem is clear to everyone with eyes to see is politically driven garbage. An evil, psychotic (take your pick), vengeful man externalized his hate in a murderous rampage. Gun, knife, car, plane, hands, pick the weapon. The problem was a person. He alone bears responsibility for his decision. Every moral American sees this obvious fact.

The American public has been subjected to a barrage of biased coverage painting acts of stupidity as earth-moving (Imus) and minimizing atrocities by validating a killer's externalizing of blame (Cho). And while Cho mowed down his fellow students at V-Tech, terrorist groups did the same thing in Iraq for the same reason: because they know that blood and guts gets the coverage. Americans are not stupid. They get where the press is coming from. Sometimes I think the MSM ups the amperage because they think that yelling will drive home the point. Everyone has got the point. They are just not buying it.

And the Press is not the only group who doesn't get it. Congress grilled Gonzoles yesterday. Big whup. Another guy who doesn't get it. Refuses to get it. (He sat there and defended the government's action about the border patrol agents sitting in prison for shooting a drug runner in the ass while smuggling tons of drugs over the border.) The Democrats and Republicans collude to obscure transparency in their hallowed halls. They want to continue using American's money without Americans knowing for what. Americans are sick of it and them.

Finally, under all these problems lies a foundation of politically correctness. No one can be labeled crazy or evil. That makes the powers that be nervous. Such concrete words. Such inflexible thinking. Well, there is evil in the world. In fact, the world is full of it and pretending it's not there just exposes the good people to harm. How much fear of being branded a bigot stopped people from dealing with the Cho problem? How afraid are people now of being perceived as close-minded that they'll ignore the evidence staring them in the face? Even more, how uncomfortable are we in the use of force that young, strong men are paralyzed in the face of evil? Yes. Men. A trained woman could have made a difference, too, but lets be real. A man, or men, of size and strength (or not, if he were armed) would need to use all of it to take down a killer hopped up on blood lust.

There seems to be a general contempt for moral clarity and those who practice it. Humble, used to be normal, American values are mushed up in a sea of nuanced swill. The leaders are awash in a narcissistic pursuit of power. The media glorifies evil and base behavior. But people watch it, they protest. Which people? Does their viewership represent the majority of Americans? I think they have deceived themselves into thinking they do.

I'm not sure the Virginia Tech tragedy (a bonifide, true tragedy in every sense of the word) will make any difference or improve our problematic leadership and media culture. The Press should be ashamed of their actions, but they seem beyond shame. Our government officials seem beyond shame. Our so-called thinkers seem beyond shame. I feel horrible, that in their time of grief, family and friends had to be the ones to push back against the press and reveal the shame, but there you go.

Here's hoping that good can come from the evil that's happened.

Embryo Rights

A woman who had ovarian cancer and split with her partner will not be able to carry the stored embryos to term. They will be destroyed. Her ex doesn't want a child around. She wants to have a child--probably any child given that her ovaries don't work anymore.

This story has so many levels of wrongness, it's almost impossible to sort it out.

1. No marriage.
2. Fornication.
3. Creating embryos.
4. Abandonment. (Can't call it divorce, can you?)
5. Infertility secondary to cancer.
6. Single motherhood by choice.
   
7. Forced parenthood for the man (and ostensibly the financial responsibility as well).
8. Abortion.

This is science in absence of morals, ethics, and the God given law of love: Love your neighbor as yourself. In the above example it's all about me, me, me.

Would You Kill Bambi? I Mean Knute?

Knute is a polar bear and if animal rights activists get their way, they'll go pro-choice on his soft, white, fuzzy butt. Knute isn't being raised by the "right" kind of family. His adoptive family is a different race, I mean species, and that's just not normal. His mother didn't want him, and when the abortion (okay food and love) failed, the activists say, "Kill 'im". Death is better than the pathetic, limited, deprived life at a zoo. It's like a life sentence, man! That's way worse than the death penalty.

Well, Knute wouldn't be the first adopted kid to survive, a bit scarred maybe, a bit weird possibly, but okay and at least, alive. And he could have a future as a "stud". How bad is that?

Preemies & Autism Controversies

What do you think of research that identifies "autism genes?" H/T Jeff Goldstein

What do you think of technology keeping babies like these alive?

Forgot to link to this.