Pope Assails Moral Relativism - NYTimes.com

Pope Assails Moral Relativism - NYTimes.com:

“The concerns for nonviolence, sustainable development, justice, and peace, and care for our environment are of vital importance for humanity,” the pope said. “They cannot, however, be understood apart from a profound reflection upon the innate dignity of every human life from conception to death,” he said in an address to more than 140,000 people at his first appearance at World Youth Day here.

There is nothing innate about human dignity.

Ascribing "dignity" (whatever that is) to every human life from conception to death is to preempt a whole range of actions that make good sense. If one buys into the nonsensical idea of "inherent human dignity", then one can't accept the logic of protection of the commons, which implies only that problems are worse later.

Inherent human "dignity" is a vague and stupid concept. Morality is relative. The pope is wrong.

Here: The Stupidity of Dignity (or cached in the first comment below)

Help to save the world, Pope tells Australia - National - smh.com.au

Help to save the world, Pope tells Australia - National - smh.com.au:

[The Pope's] message, unexpected and delivered in Italian, called for a spiritual response to the environmental crisis and asked Catholics - especially young people - to find 'a way of living, a style of life that eases the problems caused to the environment'.

Clearly, it was too much to expect even a peep about the root cause of all these "problems caused to the environment": TOO DAMNED MANY PEOPLE eating the fish, fouling the air, chopping the forest, poaching the animals, confining the rivers, draining the swamps, consuming the oil, acidifying the oceans, destroying the reefs and so forth.

A spiritual response. Right.

This is the U.S. on drugs - Los Angeles Times

The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.

By the the way, the authors of the piece are not just silly legalizers like me.

David W. Fleming, a lawyer, is the chairman of the Los Angeles County Business Federation and immediate past chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. James P. Gray is a judge of the Orange County Superior Court.

So there.

The six groups the authors thought to mention that benefit from the War on Some Drugs were:

• Drugs lords everywhere making billions of tax-free dollars
• Street gangs involved in peddling the stuff
• Government drug warriors preserving and growing their turf
• Politicians manipulating voters
• The Prison/Cop Complex (PCC)
  The authors referred to this bunch as "people who make money from increased crime". They point out that the prison guards union in California is one of the strongest, and growing, lobbying groups in California today. The authors didn't make specific mention of the "cop" part of the PCC, but they should have.
• Terrorists funding their operations with dope.

Some people might say I'm being redundant, but Iran/Contra comes to mind so I'd add:

• Governments funding their illegal operations with dope.

Another group I'd add to this list is

• Purveyors of currently legal mind-altering drugs.

There are others whose financial and power interests are served by continuing the War on Some Drugs, of course. To hell with them all.

One of my favorite movie lines goes something like, "A person is smart. People are stupid."

Once again:

The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition -- with little to show for it.

We are so fucking stupid...