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Joe Grabowski

The Consolations of Pedantry

The Not Too Personal Blog of Joseph L. Grabowski
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Throwing Back a Red Herring

5/4/2022

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In the wake of the leak of a draft opinion by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito which reveals that the Court is poised to overturn Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, various authors and pundits and politicians and public thinkers have begun warning of the dire cascade effects that will fall out from this. Roe, which has been called a "super precedent," has been seen as foundational in grounding all manner of privacy rights in other subsequent Court rulings and in legistlation. One particular author described a coming "privacy nightmare" if Roe really were overturned. And from all this, it would seem that the issue is really about more than abortion.

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Marginalized?

6/16/2021

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At The Catholic Herald, I take on the claim of "marginalization" that the LGBTQ movement trades in, and argue that it simply isn't plausible.
Human Rights Campaign’s “Business Coalition for the Equality Act"... brags...“437 member companies … [with] operations in all 50 states, headquarters spanning 33 states and a combined $6.9 trillion in revenue, and employ over 14.7 million people in the United States.” This coalition is simply one part of a network that also includes, “a majority of Americans, hundreds of members of Congress, hundreds of advocacy organizations, and more than 60 business associations — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.”
...
If this is socio-political disenfranchisement and marginalization, what do they think power and influence would be?
Read the whole thing.
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The part Father Martin doesn't (can't) say out loud

6/2/2021

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Writing at The Catholic Herald, I look at Father James Martin's subtle undermining of Catholic teaching not so much through what he says, but through what he deliberately leaves out.
Others have described [Martin] as “going right up to the line, and never crossing it.” This is a fair metaphor, but not completely accurate. Martin frames his arguments in a way that seems compelling, not only emotionally but logically. The key, however, is that there’s always one element left unsaid; one point deliberately evaded in order for the logic to inhere. If the unsaid thing were introduced, the argument would fall apart.
Read the whole thing here.
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Bacerra's bullying

4/29/2021

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HHS Secretary Xavier Bacerra really has it out for Catholic nuns, as I write in The Catholic Herald.
The application of the First Amendment to this matter should not be about the Religious Sisters of Mercy and their right to free exercise. It should be about how the government, in following fad of gender ideology, has sought to establish a secular religion and impose it on America.
Read the whole article.
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The question isn't why they leave, but why they ever stayed

3/21/2021

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When some people leave the Church, the real puzzle isn't so much why they do so, but why now. At least, that's what occured to me as I wrote this up for The Catholic Herald:
I’ve often sat with people to puzzle over a loved one’s abandonment of the Church. As people detail to me the reasons a friend or loved one gave for leaving, and ask me to help them understand them, one thing very often occurs to me. The fundamental question isn’t “Why did they leave?” It’s “Why were they Catholic to begin with?”

I don’t mean the obvious here, that they were baptized as an infant and raised in the Church. I mean what reasons did they adopt at the age of maturity for 
remaining in the Church? By what logic did they take ownership of what they received in the nursery or Sunday School? Did they ever even take such ownership of their religion?
Read the whole thing here.
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When you make MTG look like the rational one...

2/26/2021

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I write in ​The Catholic Herald:
Cooler, saner heads might have found Greene’s initial behavior “uncalled for,” perhaps downright “inappropriate” or even “extreme” — except that her colleagues and the media went out of their way to make it very hard for any sane person to end up saying so in retrospect. For in their own conduct, in their own bigoted and irrational labelling and hysterical vituperations, Greene’s critics only ended up making it seem like Greene — the erstwhile QAnon sympathizer — was the most sensibly behaved person in the whole scenario.
Intrigued? Read the whole thing.
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We deserved Larry Flynt.

2/13/2021

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In The Catholic Herald, I opine:
Flynt was more a product of a decaying culture than a cause. We very often complain about the media we have, and yet, in very many ways, the media we have are the media we have deserved. The law of supply and demand definitely holds. Whether it be a substandard journalism or a subhuman pornography, at the outset the would-be consumers of such things are as much to blame as those who descend to provide them. If no one bought it, no one would sell it.
Read the rest.
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On that hideous creche

12/13/2020

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I write in The Catholic Herald:
The creche is embarrassing. It’s not the depiction of the birth of our Lord faithful Catholics want and the world needs to see. I’ve often complained that Catholics ought to be more careful about airing our dirty laundry before the world, or allowing our internal debates over theology and praxis to become stumbling blocks to those outside the Church. I don’t want to give scandal with this piece. I want to admit the obvious — this creche is comically awful — but I also want to try to put it in some perspective.
Read the whole thing here.
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On Trump's loss

11/7/2020

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I didn't vote for him. But I can understand those who did. The problem is, they can't understand those who didn't.  And too many of those who didn't can't understand those who did...
My message to Trump voters is that not everyone who really hated your choice is some kind of socialist revolutionary who hates freedom. Many had real concerns, the same kinds of concerns that Trump voters had, like jobs and health care. A lot of them were genuinely opposed to Trump’s words and behavior.

​To the Biden voters, I’d say that few people who voted against your choice are racists or fascists. Many had real concerns, the same kinds of concerns Biden voters had. They saw your candidate as a threat to things they deeply valued, like religious liberty, with good reason. I’d also say that a lot of people who voted for Biden were absolutely unenthusiastic about him, and he owes his victory to his opponent and not to his own winsomeness.
Read the whole thing at The Stream.
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Three Questions on Distributism - Question 3

9/28/2019

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Continued from Question 1 and Question 2.

I have read that Distributism is anti-mass production. Is this true? If so, what model does Distributism put forward for developing complex machines, medicines, and other products reliably and affordably?
This, too, like the former, is a very good question, precisely because it seems simple but belies a great deal of complexity. 
 
Once again, some Distributists, encountering this question, might simply point out that there are models of mass production organized along Distributist principles, perhaps most notably such as the Mondragon Cooperative in the Basque Region of Spain. 
 
But once again, I tend to feel that such an answer is too facile: at least in my mind, lingering implications of the question remain even after pointing out that Distributism can work with large-scale production.

I think there are philosophical correlations here to what I wrote about in the previous answer. Just as wasteful obsolescence has real-world consequences that market mechanisms alone don't seem fully 
to account for, so too most markets involving mass production have what are called "externalized costs" that seem bound up with ethical/socio-political questions, and can't be resolved simply by economic analysis. 

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Three Questions on Distributism - Question 2

9/28/2019

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Continued from Question 1.

​Distributism believes businesses and individuals will flourish if the means of production is well spread; therefore, it believes that control of assets by the few is to be avoided. Socialism professes the opposite, believing there should be no private property, while Capitalism can lead to Oligarchy or Corporatism if left unchecked. On the other hand, Capitalism, when at its best, promotes people to innovate and out compete others either by making a new or better product or making a product better. How does Distributism promote innovation and prevent Oligarchy? At what point does a business become to big? Am I correct in guessing that American anti-trust laws are a form of Distributism?
I addressed some of this in the preceding, but this is a good question in its particulars.

To answer the ultimate question, I'd say that, yes, anti-trust laws and regulations preventing effective monopolies certainly are implicitly in line with Distributism.

On the topic of innovation and competition, though...

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Three Questions on Distributism - Question 1

9/27/2019

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A questioner wrote to me with three questions following my recent podcast recording on Distributism, and as I took some time to answer them and thought them generally useful basic questions on the subject, I decided I'd post them with the answers I gave here. 

Here follows the first question and its answer; questions 2 and 3 with their respective answers will be posted separately. Be not faint of heart, this is the longest answer by a good margin, but also the most fundamental question.

​Enjoy!

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Ninety-Nine Problems, But a Witch Ain't One

9/3/2019

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Years ago, after I first read The Screwtape Letters, I liked to quote often the two epigraphs Lewis included before his preface. The first, taken from the "table talk" of Martin Luther, ran thus:
​The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
The second, from St. Thomas More, is in very much the same vein.
​The devil… the proud spirite… cannot endure to be mocked.
There is, of course, a certain amount of great wisdom contained in these quotations—although, for a young man just setting out on a path of growth in the spiritual life, there may have been a bit of what Freud called Verleugnung (sort of a species of denial) involved in my attraction to these adages. Indeed, the second quotation, given as it is in truncated form and contextualized by the Luther bit, might be mistaken to mean something quite different from what Saint Thomas More intended. In its original context, the Saint was speaking about the perseverance with which a virtuous man rebukes temptation: how the devil will eventually give up tempting him rather than risk being "mocked" by his continual refusal—or worse, cause the virtuous man to attain even higher merit in warding off stronger diabolical assaults.

Apart from that potential misreading, thought, there is another manner in which the wisdom of these quotations must be taken with a grain of salt, and balanced by broader perspective: because it seems there are at least some times when the devil delights in being mocked, and we have all seen evidence of this recently...

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Going Right the Wrong Way

8/14/2019

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From the "GKCDaily" quotations account on Twitter comes this nugget that caught my eye:

I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.

— G. K. Chesterton (@GKCdaily) August 14, 2019
Though the source isn't given, this is apparently in one of Chesterton's Illustrated London News pieces from the period between 1920-22 - I don't have my volumes near to hand, so I can't zero in on the particular date and title of the article.

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Donors are not fathers

6/18/2017

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I reflect on a sad conversation, and a sadder state of affairs in our culture, on this Father's Day...
This conversation comes back to me today, Father’s Day. She and I were really saying many of the same things — but between what we each meant by those things is a very wide gap.

Our talk ended with her in tears. She said she couldn’t help feeling that I was implying her child would somehow be deprived something he needed. That is what I was suggesting.

​But in my mind, the whole time we talked, the main culprit for that deprivation — the only person toward whom I was tempted to feel any real anger or scorn — was that man who would be a “donor” and not a “father.”
Read the whole thing at The Stream.
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