Lies and apathy
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November 11, 2012 at 10:22pm
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Incidentally, this reminds me of the film ‘Tea With Mussolini’ which was broadcast yesterday by PBS.
In that film, Mussolini, with his usual pomp, promises Lady Hester that she should not be worried about the advance of the fascists and that he would personally protect her and her compatriots. He even offers her tea, and they pose for a photo.
But as soon as Mussolini declared war on Britain, Lady Hester was one of the women arrested and interned by Mussolini’s forces.
There were many instances when Dom Mintoff repeated what Hitler had said. But Mintoff always negated that he read about hitler. Then it must have been Mintoff’s sixth sense.
Mintoff may not have read about Hitler but he certainly read about Joseph Goebbels.
Impressive! Truth much as is the most fundamental value on which relationships are to be based, is certainly the thing all politicians fear most the world over. Malta is no exception, and this reflects the values of the society we live in.
We know they lie through their teeth all the time and vote for the ones we believe will do less harm at the end of the day.
The other option is to not vote and let others decide which liars will decide over your life.
What a sad predicament.
How many people are killed by abortion?
[Daphne – None, unless it’s a backstreet abortion.For the state – even the Maltese state – to acknowledge you as a person, David, you have to be born alive.]
Not enough to keep the world’s population from exploding, if you want an honest answer.
Encouraging the gays and giving them more rights might help the world’s population from exploding.
This could be lateral thinking.
What do you think?
Well, given that the European population is all but declining, I guess that the situation is not as simple as you make it out to be.
Besides that kind of reasoning leads to ideas of social engineering, eugenics and other emotionally charged subjects, so better avoid.
That is sophistry, Daphne, and you know it.
[Daphne – No, it isn’t sophistry. It’s legal fact. We were having a discussion round the dinner table about this very subject only a couple of nights ago: the inherent contradiction in parliamentary statements about human life beginning at conception when what we are talking about here is persons. A baby born dead is not considered, under Maltese law, to have ever been a person – so much so that it needn’t be given a proper burial. I am not making a value judgement here (I have my own views about the matter) but merely stating facts. One of those facts is that a baby inside the womb is not a person at law. Another fact is that many people, especially men, have no idea just how many miscarriages occur routinely. They think of a miscarriage as some major tragedy involving a large and very visible foetus, and time spent in hospital. In reality, most women have miscarriages and barely notice them – most so-called ‘missed periods’ are just that. If these were all people or persons or human life, then the drains of Malta are full of them. I’m sorry to be so explicit on a dreary Monday morning, but let’s not confuse issues. Have you ever wondered why Maltese men are ‘black and white’ about abortion, but Maltese women rarely are? Perhaps it’s because we know the biology and psychology. It also helps to know the law.]
It is legalised sophistry. You would readily recognize that if you knew anything about the legal abortion by butchery of an incompletely delivered baby because in the eyes of the law it did not exist as a human being even if it were screaming in pain.
[Daphne – As I have said already, I am not making a value judgement and I have my own views about abortion in its different stages. But facts are facts: we are not persons at law from the moment of conception but from the moment of (live) birth. Now this is a side observation: I am invariably struck by the way it is always men who, in Malta, are first out in the field to defend the unborn and to talk about how horrible abortion is, while women stay silent. That’s because women know it’s not all black or white.]
Actually, Daphne, I am very much familiar with what you are saying regarding routine miscarriages.
At one point I used that fact to argue on The Times that embryo freezing in IVF might not be quite the grave disaster/genocide that it is made out to be. Obviously I was beaten to virtual death by the metaphorical clubs of the holier-than-thou brigade.
I realise that that is the impression I gave above, but I am not actually black or white at all regarding abortion.
I do believe that there are situations where abortion may be justified. I just don’t think that it should be done on a whim, that’s all.
And I don’t think that the life of the embryo should be held in the balance according to a legal definition.
[Daphne – Ah, but there’s the trouble, isn’t it. Define whim. That’s what I mean about not being all black or white. And in any case, that changes the whole philosophical basis for the ban on abortion in Malta, which rests on the premiss that human life begins at conception and no human life must be deliberately terminated. That leaves no room for permission for abortion in some cases.]
A few weeks ago I submitted a letter to The Times editor regarding IVF and contradictions arising from the stand of the antis, in particular the Church. They responded that my letter was too long and I had to shorten it.
I respectfully declined because I did not want to dumb it down, so it still lies dormant in my outbox, unpublished. Alas.
Can’t help it. It never is black or white. It’s fifty shades of grey.
You’re incorrect there Daphne. The state requires a birth and death certificate for foetuses 24 weeks and over.
[Daphne – In trying to disprove my point you merely proved it. At 24 weeks, the ‘foetus’ is viable. If we are going to be consistent, then a birth and death certificate would be required even for routine miscarriages at one month. Is it a human life when it is conceived, or is it a human life when it becomes viable?]
Burial of foetuses younger than 24 weeks are buried together yearly after a specially dedicated mass. Parents of older foetuses have the option of burying the foetus themselves or at the yearly burial.
You are right though about the frequency of miscarriage. It is calculated that the average woman has about 20 – 40 miscarriages during her fertile period.
Personally I am against abortion. A one cell foetus has complete DNA and the potential to become a full grown adult. Killing a foetus is equivalent to killing a person.
[Daphne – That is ABSOLUTELY DISGRACEFUL statement. It is utterly abhorrent to compare the abortion of a one-cell foetus to the murder of a person. I always suspect that it is the people who say these things who truly have no feelings.]
Fine, I agree. It’s worse murdering a person than a foetus for obvious reasons, however you can’t say that killing a live cell isn’t killing.
[Daphne – I’ve just scraped a live cell off the back of my hand and stamped on it. Does that count?]
That’s funny.. It’s true.
The difference between a skin cell or any other differentiated cell, and a zygote or foetus, is that the zygote has all potential to become a person, while a differentiated cell does not.
I know that it sounds whimsical to care for such a small set of cells, but if one keeps in mind that it’s the precursor to a fully-fledged being with a personality, it becomes easier to understand the brutality of abortion.
[Daphne – Oh, I don’t know about that. I really do think that with most people, even if they won’t admit it, there’s a line to be drawn between those first few cells and an actual baby-like foetus. The potentiality element doesn’t really strike many chords. When we break eggs, we don’t mourn the chickens they could have been. I suspect much of our thinking on this subject has been conditioned by the increasing inability of women to become pregnant, when they finally get round to begin trying in their 30s. The reality is that for earlier generations of women, it was a matter of ‘please God don’t let me get pregnant yet again with my ninth child’, so they were far less sentimental.]
There is no such thing as a one-cell foetus.
In my extensive experience as a doctor ladies can be, and often are, just as vociferous as men against a destruction of their baby in utero that is often demanded by the male partner against the mother’s wish.
[Daphne – Yes, when it’s their own baby they’re talking about and they want to keep it. But in the main, women don’t presume to decide for other women, generally because we’re familiar with all the grey areas involved, and especially because pregnancy and birth are not concepts to us, but biological experiences.]
In law the unborn child has inheritance rights “Qui in utero, est pro jam nato habetur quoties de ejus commodo quaeritur” meaning one who is in the womb is held as already born, whenever a question arises for its benefit. Besides our law prohibits abortion as it is a crime against a person.
[Daphne – Wrong and wrong. In the first, you misinterpret Roman law and worse, try to transpose it to contemporary Maltese law. Ancient Roman law and culture did not even acknowledge personhood at birth, but at around the age of two. And in the second, abortion is not a crime against a person, because persons in Maltese law begin at birth. It is an anomalous situation in which you are not permitted to kill a potential person rather than an actual one.]
Francis Saliba: “In my extensive experience as a doctor ladies can be, and often are, just as vociferous as men against a destruction of their baby in utero that is often demanded by the male partner against the mother’s wish”.
Unless you work in an abortion clinic (and you obviously don’t), your experience as a doctor in this case is as extensive as that of anyone else. I’m of course assuming you don’t generally get queues of people asking you to perform abortions.
Labour and their little Mussolini, I understand, have plans (not devulged) to replace Arriva with Nazi railways. Guess who gets a free ride?
Anything we’ll get will surely be an improvement on the present on.
Just for the record, Mussolini was a Facist not a Nazi.
So it should read a Facist railway, which incidently ran on time.
Nazism was the later German and more destructive copied version of an earlier Italian fascist state.
Silvio, fascism/nazism = crappy economy. The statement “Benito made the trains run on time” is just a myth – http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp
No wonder you admire Mintoff. You’re obviously a sucker for ‘grand’ gestures. Just like those who admired Benito for fractionally raising the wages of the workers at FIAT, whilst ignoring the fact that in the US the auto workers’ wages meanwhile doubled.
To add insult to injury, Italian workers not only had lousy wages, they also lost their civil liberties. At the end, their fascist government (just like the nazi/german government) had to resort to war to cover up their economic incompetence.
You say that anything would be better than Arriva. Rubbish. I and many others would gladly choose Arriva just for the improved emissions; walking was a nightmare every time one of those polluting yellow dinosaurs passed by. The change in drivers is also welcome.
Hopefully one day we’ll fully shed our third-world mentality and the IT side of public transport (vide Geneva’s http://www.tpg.ch/, a pleasure to use) will also work. This however requires a change not just in Arriva’s operations, but in the population’s attitude and education… and guess which party is facilitating that change?
“Dust
If I was as you say ‘a sucker for grand gestures’ why do I not approve of Gonzi’s Parliament?
[Daphne – Does Gonzi have a parliament? I didn’t know that.]
It looks something from the instruction book of Facisim.
‘How to impress the masses ‘
How do you kill eleven million people?
“The Holocaust- the mass sacrifice of over eighteen million innocent Protestants, Orthodox Christians, ethnic Jews and minority groups by burning them alive in ovens in Poland and Russia less than seventy years ago by Catholic dictators Adolf Hitler S.J. and Fr Joseph Stalin S.J. represents the largest and most expensive act of mass human sacrifice in history.”
“At the end of the war, the first thing that the Allies did under Eisenhower was pull down all the statues of Mother Mary (to whom the camps were dedicated) outside the hundreds of death camps. Many of the oven blocks—ahead of any other buildings—were quickly dismantled and destroyed in many camps. Some camps, such as the only human sacrifice camp dedicated to burning children (Lodz) was virtually wiped from history.”
http://one-evil.org/content/acts_vatican_holocaust.html
Ken il Malta : You can’t be serious; so the Nazis were tools used by the Vatican in wiping out religious opposition? You are either taking the p#*s out of us all or you have overdosed on David Irving.
I never read anything by or about David Irving in my life.
Tsk, Tsk : Just Wikipedia David Irving, history revisionist par excellence, for whom the Holocaust just never happened. Is Kev a chum of yours exchanging conspiracy theories like Panini football stickers ?
“Qeridna dan il-gvern” is what I hear every morning when I arrive at work and am at a hearing distance. This proves Hitler’s dictum which says that a lie repeated many times will be believed at the end.
it’s so relevant to what we are witnessing in the Maltese political field.
Whilst this maybe accurate, unfortunately it is mostly a propaganda piece used by the Republican Super One (Fox News) to equate Obama to Hitler.
it’s not accurate…
Daphne, do you honestly think that the majority of the electorate who might view this type of video would actually understand it?
While the message may seem common sense to you and to many of the readers of this blog, I very much doubt that anyone beyond a handful of people would stop to reflect.
Only about 2% of any given population use the evolved thing between their ears.
Perhaps I am too cynical when it comes to the human condition.
I am a firm believer of a representational model where man is a routine seeking animal: habits of thought and action, automated and generally mindless behaviour. This contrasts to the model than man thinks and rationalises or is mindful every step of the way. This is compounded because people simply believe they are the latter (look at the Times blogs if you have any doubt).
You recently said that people want change because they are bored (or something on those lines). I think you are spot on.
I think two aspects are missing from your analysis:
(1) People generally believe most of the things they are told. The psychology of belief is interesting here: Essentially, when it comes to certain issues (religion, politics, responses to people in authority), man appears to maintain a six year old’s naivety – a willingness to let others do his thinking, make decisions and join the dots. Inevitably this leads to a significant degree of control.
(2) The change people have in mind is one thing. The change that Muscat has in mind is another. MLP campaigns subtly imply that it will bring about the change that people have in mind. MLP is doing people’s thinking.
In combination: People comply will blindly. People elect Muscat. People will rejoice as if they have been liberated from 25 years of deep suffering. Malta is screwed with someone who is at least 100 times worse than Mintoff.
Is this a sly dig at the “Brazilian Lie”?
[Daphne – No.I don’t have the mind of a chicken and the perspective of a goldfish.]
Remember VAT = CET and the scam about the cash registers?
When he was still a Super One hack, Joseph Muscat used to write articles for Kullħadd and in one of the titles he quoted Mussolini (obviously, without crediting the source – plagiarism was always his speciality): better to live one day as a lion than a hundred days as a sheep.
The maths in all this is completely at sea.
The piece first refers to 311 million Americans, then claims that over the past 25 years just 10 million ballots were cast adding that 100 million Americans didn’t bother. What happened to the other 200 million?
Incidentally in the last election 62,085,892 people voted for Obama and 58,777,012 voted for Romney. That’s approximately 120 million votes cast and counting.
Also incidentally (and quite rightly) the piece accuses all politicians of blatant lies. A case of ‘goose’, gander’, and ‘good’. And that is where the PN’s problem lies.
And whilst we are commenting on lies and liars:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20121112/local/vince-farrugia-assault-case-lawyer-reveals-more-smss-witness-admits-lying-under-oath.445049
It seems that we are a nation of liars. Shame on you Mr. Farrugia, forcing other persons to lie under oath. Resign, you have no other alternative.
The way this case is unfolding is very worrying – I’d had so much sympathy for Vince Farrugia, I felt sorry for the guy although I’ve never met him.
It seems that what should have been an open-and-shut assault case is being effectively undone buy the victim himself.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20237437
yet another bit of stupid and deceitful republican propaganda trickling down to fabled Malta
How I wish these innocent sounding voices told the truth, the whole truth and nothing but.
Yes of course there were good Germans. The harsh, terrible truth is that the Church, in particular the Lutheran established Church was complicit in vilifying “the Jew” even to the point of chopping the old testament from high church services altogether. By the time the real church got round to what was happening (see Bonhoeffer), it was too late:
Also: The Nazi party was at its apogee in 1933 not 1945 as this clip supposes. The figures quoted (8.5%) are more in line with Nazi electoral results in the 2nd Reichstag election of 1924 (only the Ost Mecklenburg Vorpommern region managed a higher showing at between 10%-19.9%).
Admittedly Nazi party membership and votes polled at elections are not the same thing. After Hitler banned political parties in 1933, both apples and oranges were off limits.
I suggest you have a look at Susannah Heschel’s ground-breaking research in “The Aryan Jesus” (2010) to better understand the history of German anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th century. Dig deeper and you get to some fairly ugly bits in Isabella and Ferdinand’s little experiment too.