To
bring about that temptation, then, here’s what we’ve been doing this week,
despite the usual end-of-year slowdown:
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| Mocking him would be seppuku (harakiri), not a hate crime. |
• Thursday’s conviction of Dylann
Roof who murdered nine people in a shooting rampage in South Carolina last year
raises some interesting — and worrisome — legal questions. Instead of being charged with (among other
things) nine counts of first degree murder under state law, he was charged with
thirty-three counts of hate crime resulting in death under federal law. At first glance most people would be tempted
to say, “So what?” After all, either set
of charges could result in the death penalty, and the man is outstandingly and
unquestionably guilty. The problem is
that “murder” is an objective fact, while “hate crime” is a matter of
subjective opinion, and “resulting in death” is a bit vague. For example, some people consider ridiculing
others for obesity a hate crime. Thus —
going strictly by the precedent that could be set in the Roof case — pointing
your finger at an overweight person and screaming “OBESE!!” resulting in your
victim having a heart attack and dying could be classed as a federal “hate
crime resulting in death” that carries the death penalty. Ludicrous, you say? Certainly . . . until you recall that the law
in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was made purposely vague in just such a
fashion to allow the courts to rid society of undesirable individuals and groups. It couldn’t lead to that here? Don’t be too sure. At the end of the film Judgment at Nuremberg, the convicted German judge Ernst Janning
(played by Burt Lancaster) says to the American judge who convicted him, Dan
Heywood (played by Spencer Tracy), “We didn’t know it would come to that!” If it can happen in Germany, one of the most
civilized nations on earth, it can happen anywhere.
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| "Que? Pienso que CESJ fue Jesuit! Llame Norm Kurland ahora!" |
• There is an interesting piece on
Pope Francis and his 80th birthday tomorrow in today’s Wall Street Journal. While CESJ is not a religious organization,
we do keep tabs on world leaders . . . especially world leaders who might be
open to the Just Third Way. On reading
the piece, it seems obvious (at least based on the writer’s opinion) that Pope
Francis is one world leader who might be open to learning about the potential
of the Just Third Way to solve a lot of the problems with which he is faced. Now, if we could just get to him . . . he
isn’t returning our phone calls . . . he probably thinks it's a Jesuit plot or something (actually, years ago we did have someone in England claim we are a Jesuit group and therefore Up To No Good, probably because they thought the "SJ" in "CESJ" stands for "Society of Jesus" instead of "Social Justice").
• In a somewhat unusual turn of
events, all the face-to-face meetings we had scheduled this past week either
got cancelled or postponed. Some of this
may have been due to people inadvertently “overbooking” their time during the
holiday season. One, unfortunately, was
due to serious illness.
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| "Jes' tied yer kangaroo down, Sport, now where's the cockatoo?" |
• If the face-to-face meetings were
something of a washout (although, as they were lunch meetings, it meant more
for the people at the office. . . .), the telephone conferences were very
successful, and not just in comparison. The CESJ core group had a very good telephone
conference with Father Edward Krause, C.S.C., Ph.D., a CESJ Counselor currently
in residence at the University of Notre Dame.
Father Krause, a professor emeritus of social ethics at Gannon
University in Erie, Pennsylvania, will be making phone calls on CESJ’s behalf
to set up meetings with key academics at Catholic institutions of higher
learning in Northern Virginia. There
were also telephone meetings with academics in Argentina and Israel interested
in advancing the Just Third Way, as well with a political figure who is working
to open doors to members of the U.S. Senate.
• The Perth Herald-Tribune has published another Just Third Way article: "Higher Wages versus Higher Income."
• The Perth Herald-Tribune has published another Just Third Way article: "Higher Wages versus Higher Income."
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter Witness: From Broken Dream to a New
Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores. The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount. A full case is twenty-six copies, and non-institutional/non-vendor
purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover price on wholesale lots
($416/case). Shipping is extra. Send enquiries to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers.
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| Throw doubloons our way and see us smile like Jolly Roger! |
• Here’s the usual announcement
about the Amazon Smile program,
albeit moved to the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing
it. To participate in the Amazon Smile
program for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• As of this
morning, we have had visitors from 58 different countries and 53 states and
provinces in the United States and Canada to this blog over the past two
months. Most visitors are from the United States, Russia, Canada, the United
Kingdom, and the Netherlands. The most popular postings this past week in
descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on Private Property,” “Book Review: Field Guide for Heroes,” How to
Make America Great Again,” “A Dishonest Way to Argue, I: Apples and Oranges,”
and “Minimum Wage Follies.”
Those are the happenings for this
week, at least those that we know about.
If you have an accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a
note about it at mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into
the next “issue.” If you have a short
(250-400 word) comment on a specific posting, please enter your comments in the
blog — do not send them to us to post for you.
All comments are moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#