Reflections From a Murky Pond

If you go to where the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) had pre-published the article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” you’ll find that it’s gone. They have apparently pulled the article in response to the outrage that it caused.

I don’t know if this means that the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics have had a rush of brains to the head and remembered that “ethics” is part of their rag’s title and that they won’t be publishing the pro-infanticide drivel by the would-be baby-killers, Giubilini and Minerva. One can certainly hope so though.

Ladies and gentlemen, this may only be small ethical victory and it may only end up being a temporary one, but it is a victory both for ethical behavior and for the power of the people in this information and near universal access age.

Savor it for what it’s worth but stay vigilant.

The article by Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva entitled “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?” recently published in the The Journal of Medical Ethics presents Mankind with an immediate and profound ethical quandary.

It is not the quandary of whether or not there is an ethical imperative for Giubilini and Minerva to be killed for advocating infanticide in a venue that could, as Ezekiel Emanuel’s opus proves, affect medical science and policies. The ethical imperative to kill these would-be baby-killers is so obvious that it almost goes without saying.

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’ health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Any society that will not protect its children and kill threats to those children is pointless, and exercise in futility, and eventually doomed to failure and dissolution. Hence, there is no quandary about whether or not Giubilini and Minerva need, from an ethical standpoint, to be hunted down and exterminated. It’s self-evident.

Would-Be Baby-Killers At Large

Alberto Giubilini

Monash University Centre for Human Bioethics
Room W925, West Wing, Level 9
Menzies Building (Building 11 & tallest on campus)
Wellington Rd, Clayton Victoria, AU
Alberto.Giubilini@monash.edu

Francesca Minerva

The University of Melbourne, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies
Room 1.23, East wing, Old Quad,
Parkville, Victoria VIC 3010 AU
francesca.minerva@unimelb.edu.au
Tel: +61 3 8344 9951

Nor would it be overly fruitful to dwell long upon the conflict between ethical imperatives and the strictures of mortal law. That’s a conflict that people resolve on a daily basis and is a normal part of living in a society where, perforce, law and justice cannot be the same thing and often widely diverge out of perceived necessity.

The True Man will make his decision as to either follow an ethical imperative or the law based upon his discernment of the overall risks and benefits to his people. The Low Man will decide what to do based upon the costs vs. benefits to himself. In either case though, these are decisions made daily and both True Men and Low Men may reach the same conclusions as to how to act on any given imperative.

No, the ethical quandary is whether or not there is an ethical imperative to exact punitive and deterring measures upon Julian Savulescu, Editor, Journal of Medical Ethics who provided them with a dangerously high profile venue, and Professor Sergio Bartolommei, University of Pisa, who provided Giubilini and Minerva aid and comfort in the actual writing of their treatise on infanticide.

The Would-Be Baby-Killers’ Enablers

Julian Savulescu (Left) & Sergio Bartolommei (Right)

Is there an ethical imperative to kill Savulescu and Bartolommei for the heinous acts of enabling the infanticidal vermin, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva to publish their advocacy of “Post-Birth Abortions” where it could potentially do the most harm? Will some lesser act or acts of retribution and defensive measure suffice? Does no action need to be taken against them? That’s the real ethical quandary in this case.

My first instincts are that there is certainly an ethical imperative to take harsh action against Giubilini’s and Minerva’s enablers and that their deaths might be required for the sake of society’s overall health. Savulescu willfully chose to publish the would-be baby-killer’s paper and Bartolommei had the opportunity to quell their efforts at the start but chose to abet them instead.

Yet both of these men have professional duties that might preclude their refusal to enable Giubilini’s and Minerva’s evil. They also may, as True Men must, have weighed the possible harm that what amounts to censorship might cause vs. what harm such a paper might cause.

Not knowing Savulescu’s and Bartolommei’s motivations for providing aid and comfort to Giubilini and Minerva, I can’t say for certain that there’s an ethical imperative to take any action at all against these two men. Yet, likewise, I cannot think ill of or speak out against anyone who, after consideration, arrived at the opposite decision and chose to kill them.

It’s an ethical quandary. All one can do is apply reason to it and follow one’s conscience wherever it leads them.

~*~

UPDATE: The Journal of Medical Ethics has deleted the online pre-publication of the would-be baby-killers’ article! It looks like the outrage of right-thinking people scored a small ethical victory.

Governmental aid policies, both foreign and domestic, are as much designed to foster gratitude as to alleviate any woes or sufferings. The problem is that, just as they consistently fail to end the woes and sufferings of the recipients, these aid program fail to generate any gratitude in those recipient as well.

This is to be expected. Charity rarely, if ever, breeds gratitude; it breeds resentment instead.

It’s not as if this wasn’t understood for a long time – well over a century, in point of existential fact.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

— Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spake Zarathustra, p. 93

Say what you want against Nietzsche – and there’s a lot to say against him – but he had a good and solid understanding of the baser instincts, reactions, beliefs, and behaviors of Man.

At a purely unconscious and visceral level – bermenschen they’re not – even the Liberals understand this basic truth. That’s why they couch their program in terms of “entitlements” and “rights.” They seek to deflect the anger of those their supporting unto their enemies by projecting the indebtedness onto those they seek to force to fund such largess.

Charity perforce spawns indebtedness and this will almost always result in the gnawing worm of resentment in the receiver which, like all infections, will fester and grow. One can, like the Liberals and Progressives, deflect it for one’s own gain but one cannot change the underlying sad truth of it.

Until this is fully realized, the government will continue, both foreign and domestically, through good money after bad to no beneficial effect beyond possibly keeping their own jobs for another term.

Much like the cries of racism and complaints about ad hominem attacks, recently we’ve been hearing a lot of cries for civility in political discourse. There’s a certain subset of the residents within America’s borders who want a more polite and staid approach to deciding the course of America.

It seems that politics has gotten too raw and real for some people.

This, of course, begs three related questions: who are these people crying for increased civility, what is it that they actually want, and why do they want it so much?

Who’s Crying For Civility

I see two disparate and unrelated general segments of America’s population crying out for an increase in civility in political speech and argument. They are respectively the apolitical drones and the Leftists, the Liberals and Progressives. Each makes similar outcries but for seemingly different reasons and with different real goals.

What Do They Really Want And Why?

The apolitical people just want things to go quietly. They’re uninvolved in politics, fervently wish to stay that way, and are both bothered and scared by the passion that is being shown by many others. Whether from cynicism or self-centeredness, they do not want to pull their heads out the oh-so-comfortable sand and become involved and the fire of current political discourse is preventing them from doing this.

The staid, stuffy, and easily ignored ways are what these drones want to return to because they don’t want to open their eyes and choose a side.

The Leftists, these Liberals and Progressives, are quite different.  They are awake, aware, involved in the political process, and they have a definite direction that they want to take America in. Their cries for civility are really two things: cynical attempts to silent their enemies and cries for validation and acceptance.

The willfully uninvolved will just have to stop their ears better and learn to keep their heads down.

For many of the Left, their cries are just dog-whistles for censoring the American people. They don’t really want civility, as their very cries for it often show, so much as they want to stop any dissent against their foundations of their agenda.

For others on the left it is a matter of crying out for acceptance and validation. They’re looking for some affirmation that, even though their enemies disagree with their core ethos, they are still respected and approved of.

~*~

Sadly for those who’re crying out for increased civility, I don’t see much chance of- or value in its return any time in the near future. The divide in America is not too deep; it’s to fundamental. It doesn’t allow for the luxury of civility anymore. It’s not a political divide; it’s an ethical and moral divide.

We’re not going to be silenced. We’re not going to engage in carefully managed debates over minutiae of methodology when we want to change the goals and systems. And we’re very much not going to respect our enemies when we find the core beliefs that underpin their goals and actions to be utterly abominable and abhorrent.

It’s probable that most people in America know of the disgusting events at Pennsylvania State University. It’s common knowledge that one of the institution’s football coaching staff, Jerry Sandusky was a pedophile which molested and raped young boys for decades, sometimes on Penn State’s property and that many of the coaching staff and the athletics department knew of this ongoing evil and did nothing about it.

Finally, after the police arrested the piece of filth, Jerry Sandusky and it the athletics departments complicity came to light, the university began to enact damage control measures. These included firing those members of the football coaching staff who were the long-term enablers of this pedophile.

Normally this would effectively end things. Evil was done, the perpetrators eventually dealt with, and events shift to recovering from damage these vermin caused. That’s not happening in this case due the systemic evil baked into the Penn State “culture.”

Penn State’s students’ response to board’s the termination of head coach Joe Paterno, who had known of- and enabled Sandusky’s pedophilia since 2002, was to violently riot, destroying property and repeatedly attacking the police.

Paul Howard, 24, an aerospace engineering student, jeered the police.

“Of course we’re going to riot,” he said. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?”

This seems to be the sort of student activity that one has to come to expect on university campuses, or at least on Penn State’s campus.

Perhaps worse, Assistant football coach Mike McQueary – the man who reported Sandusky for raping a young boy in the showers – had to be pulled from this weekend’s game after receiving multiple death threats for his doing so.

Don’t mistake me;  McQueary should be broken and mutilated, perhaps killed if one feels merciful. He witnessed Sandusky raping a child and neither took any to save the child nor report the filth to the police. He merely reported Sandusky’s perversion to Joe Paterno and then did nothing further when Paterno and the rest of Penn State athletics department did nothing.

It’s the fact that the pedophile’s and his enablers’ supporters are threatening him that’s the issue.

There is nothing left to redeem or salvage withing anything that resorted to violence in support of a pedophile’s long-term enablers and accomplices. Anything that could behave so isn’t even remotely human.

Evil’s Nests Are To Be Dealt With By Fire

Since America has now seen in graphic detail just what sort of creature Penn State produces via its “education” system and culture, it’s time for the entity to be closed and its buildings dismantled. By the actions of its staff, student body, and alumni it is proven beyond all doubt that there is no place in America for this thing and it must be destroyed so as to prevent any further corruption of our nation.

Let it be razed to the ground and the cleared lot left to be an example to all that America will never tolerate pedophiles, their enablers, or their supporters.

Justice Must Be Done Upon Them

The pedophiles themselves – yes, those who enabled Sandusky are morally exactly the same he is – should be dealt with by we, the People. We should exact justice from them and not leave them to overly tender, lax and liberal courts. They need to be mutilated beyond all hope of use or healing and forced to exist as broken things of mangled flesh.

The rioters who supported this pedophile and his enablers, Americans need to- and must hunt each and everyone of them down and exterminate them. No moral society, especially not one such as America, can allow itself to be weak enough to tolerate these filth’s continued existence. They must be slaughtered for the good of the nation. To do less is to be no better and no more human than these vermin.

~*~

Any bullet not spent in defense of the Right is bullet better never cast. Any blade not blooded in service of the Right is blade better never forged. Any man not willing serve the Right by and with these tools is not a man and is better never born.