CSotD: Belief vs Understanding
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David Rowe on the conviction, in an Australian court, of George Cardinal Pell for sexually assaulting choir boys.
Rowe has a well-earned reputation for amusingly ghastly depictions of people, but I think he wisely recognized that there’s no need for it this time, and that linked article, though a model of objective reporting, is horrific enough that there’s no need to exaggerate any further.
To spin the old poem
I do not like thee, Cardinal Pell,
Though why this is, I cannot tell.
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Cardinal Pell.
Though of course this time someone was able to tell why he did not like him, one of the usual barriers to justice in such matters being, as noted the other day, a form of denial when a good observant Catholic is assaulted by clergy, and then, once he gets over that, the reluctance of other good, observant Catholics to believe him.
Meanwhile, Dave Granlund comments on the lack of specificity which emerged from the Pope’s conference on sexual abuse.
Granted, the Pope may take all that he heard in that conference and, in a few weeks, emerge with something that really lays out a plan for prevention, a plan for detection and a plan for remediation.
And President Trump may come back from his meeting with Kim having completely eliminated nuclear arms and missile development from the Korean peninsula.
It could happen.
Too little too late
When I hit the keyboard this morning at 4 am, I checked to see if DD Degg had picked up on the controversy over this Steve Breen cartoon and, thank goodness, he hadn’t, only then about an hour later, he did. That man does not get enough sleep.
Well, you can read what he reported and what Michael Cavna reported and now you can read what I came in with too little too late, and “too late” is appropriate for this one.
I saw Breen’s cartoon when he posted it a few days ago, and thought he’d missed the mark, that — as he has now realized — he failed to distinguish Baldwin and Morrison from Smollett.
If it had been a white guy and he’d lined him up with Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway, it would have simply been a “meh” miss, but, as I’ve noted in the past, you need to be cautious in criticism of those who remain the target of bigotry.
But enough already.
There’s also this: It’s been a month since the attack and the facts have emerged and, however he did on sensitivity, Breen kind of slid under the wire on timing.
And yet I’m still seeing new cartoons on the topic.
They’re too late. The Jussie Smollett skyrocket has banged and sparkled and faded away. It’s time for you to draw something else.
How about showing President Trump as Humpty Dumpty on a wall?
Nobody has thought of that one yet.
Juxtaposition of the Weather
Here are two different views of the weather — not the climate, as Bug Martini notes — which are either a commentary on perception or on deadlines.
Adam Huber lives in Madison, Wisconsin, while the Hambrocks are about two hours away in Kenosha, so it’s reasonable to assume their weather is not identical but not all that dissimilar.
This winter has struck me as really diverse: Some people are getting nailed hard and others barely scratched. Here in New Hampshire, where we expect winter to be wintry, we’ve had a couple of snow storms but more or less as Edison’s family — a very odd mix.
OTOH, I suspect Bug Martini is done on a much shorter time frame, and I know the Polar Vortex did a number on the upper Midwest, possibly after the Edison Lee strip was drawn and submitted.
As a jinx.
Meanwhile, cartoonists based in Florida and Southern California should perhaps do comics about Humpty Dumpty, because, even in balmy New Hampshire, we don’t want to hear about your stupid weather.
Which brings us to …
Apparently, Trumpty Dumpty not only makes words mean what he wants them to mean, but applies the same rule to science.
As Jack Ohman depicts it, he’s appointed a climate change panel with a militant denier at its head, and an apparent mission to counter the conclusions of everybody in the goddam world who knows anything about climate.
And if you think of Canada as the Great White North, you may believe it will officially stay that way, because he’s appointed an ambassador who believes that the scientists on both sides are accurate.
2+2=4, but it also equals 3 and perhaps 57. We should respect all opinions.
This doesn’t belong with the snow and weather gags of Edison Lee and Bug Martini. It belongs up with the Vatican, which, on this date in 1616, ordered Galileo to
… abstain completely from teaching or defending this doctrine and opinion or from discussing it… to abandon completely… the opinion that the sun stands still at the center of the world and the earth moves, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatever, either orally or in writing.
Which seems rather exact, in comparison to their more nebulous directives on the topic of diddling altar boys.
But pre-Enlightenment science was called “Natural Philosophy” for a reason, which was that, like the various attempts to prove the existence of God, it began with a conclusion and then sought ways to justify it.
The modern parallel being that, when we said that four legs were good and two legs were bad, we were counting wings, but not arms, as legs, and, anyway, things change and we later realized that four legs are good, but two legs are better and this time we’re not talking about wings.
If you can’t follow along, Betsy Devos will fix the schools until you are able to understand.
There are, after all, two sides to everything.
There are Clay Bennett‘s observations on it.
And Elvis Costello’s …
(I think they both need a little time in the re-education camps)
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