Arguing Semantics

The Weirdness of Eastern Europe

I used to know a Czech at high school. He was always up for an argument. When I ran into him some years after high school, he wanted to take up on some argument that we had back at high school, as if only days had passed. He wanted to re-prosecute his arguments and then drive home some arcane conclusion that he wanted to push for back in the schoolyard.  

I knew another Czech. He played dungeons and dragons with us. He would drink quite heavily and by 8:30 pm, he would argue anything and everything. He once argued that there were no such things as medieval townships, just "potential cities". He wouldn't let that pass even when we begged him to. Like that guy in the meme who wants to be argued around a difficult point, he demanded we argue with him.

When I got to AFTRS, I kind of hit the motherlode of East Europeans. Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and so on - and they all loved a good argument. Even the laconic ones would be loquacious when it came to the true nature of Marxism or the unbearable lightness of one's libido. At some point you would find yourself in a deep argument with them. It just was the way it was.

What I did notice about the way they argued, was that they liked to argue semantics. In the English speaking world, we don't like to argue semantics. When somebody who is a native English speaker says "I'm not going to argue the semantics," it usually means "fuck off with your bullshit." However, if you ever found yourself in a surreal never-ending argument with an Eastern European, you usually found yourself arguing the nuances of semantics like they mattered. It doesn't to us, but to them, it seems to matter a lot.  

I don't know why Eastern Europeans love semantic arguments so much. Our disdain for semantics must seem barbaric or anti-intellectual to them, but there really is a divide in how and what we argue. My own theory about this is that Eastern Europe was so much more boring than the rest of Europe, so to devise some entertainment, East Europeans developed arguing semantics into an art form. To endlessly argue semantics is not only a virtue, it is also a great way to pass time living under tyranny and with no rock music, movies, or books. Arguing semantics endlessly is, a kind of performance art over there. I suspect that over time, Eastern Europeans have created a consciousness where arguing semantics endlessly is just the way life goes. It's a bit sad that this passes for philosophical thought in some parts of Eastern Europe. 

Take Alexander Dugin, the alleged ideologue of Contemporary Russia. He seems to be nothing but a demagogue selling tawdry race theory claptrap. And yet he lands in Vladimir Putin's orbit as a great thinker on the back of reams and reams of bullshit. And by bullshit I mean semantic crap woven into more semantic crap. Hardly any of Dugin's 'thought' would pass Philosophy 101 in the West, but there he is, advising Putin. It'a all semantics built up into something that it shouldn't be. 

And this phenomenon, more than anything else would explain Vladimir Putin's penchant for long speeches about nothing. They're "about nothing" to us exactly because a lot of what he's banging on about are semantic arguments which we dismiss instinctively, or as second nature. Putin on the other hand thinks he has crafted some incredibly intelligent argument arguing the most nuanced semantics. He would be dead wrong in thinking any of those semantics would persuade anybody in the West. And so he wonders why we don't understand him. It may well come as a shock to him one day when somebody explains to him that the great effort he puts into arguing semantics is totally meaningless to an anglophone world. 

The cultural schism is a lot bigger than people are giving it credit. 

View From The Couch - 04/Oct/2016

Democratised Nonsense

The whole marriage equality 'debate' is rather unfortunate. It's unfortunate in the sense that there really isn't any logical reason to deny marriage equality. The pseudo-arguments being mounted against it by the christian lobby and conservatives of this country are in most part spurious and idiotic, not even worthy of analysis except that we have to pretend to take it seriously for the sake of it looking like there's a debate.

I don't know about you, but I think this is a kind of intellectual malaise. It's the sort of regressive thinking that allows equal airtime to climate change deniers or extreme right wing nutbars who want to loosen the gun laws of this country. Yes democracy means  canvassing all opinions but should the media work so hard to accommodate the unpalatable? Aren't the outlier opinions outlier opinions for a reason? Just as we don't let creationism sneak into science classes, we should not let idiotic ideas receive the spotlight.

Nonetheless the media is full of democratic niceness and gives platforms to these people in order to create more drama and tension where there need not ought to be. A sensible editorial position would be to not let climate change denial have a place in the national discourse. Allowing such topics oxygen subtracts from our polity, not strengthen it, and the inability of the media to discern such distinctions essentially has weakened our democracy.

Of course, a lot of this is harder to do in practice, and there will always be somebody who champions the democratic right of stupid opinions to be aired and disseminated widely, but they do so at the indulgence of better minds, and at the expense of better discourse. As for the plebiscite, it is clear that it is unworkable if it is not binding; and the current government will not make it binding because a significant portion know that a majority will vote in favour of it and that is something they would seek to deny. Given this situation where the government itself is committed to this anti-democratic parlour game, it is worth saying we should not entertain this idea of a plebiscite and we should just push for a vote in parliament instead.

Arguing Against History

It goes without saying that the victimhood posturing made by the Australia Christian Lobby is pretty pathetic. These are the people arguing against legalising gay marriage because doing so would take something away from Christian marriages. Hence the argument they can mount is that the symbolic loss on the part of Christian marriages is something for which the government and the law cannot compensate, and therefore it must be stopped. You know what? Just writing that sentence made my head hurt.

The core of the Christian Lobby's argument is that they don't want it because they don't want it, and all it takes is a little bit of digging to get to the homophobia that resides not too far from the surface of calls for 'religious freedom'. It's a compete and utter joke that this kind of thinking holding up a very simple process which, really should be no skin off tor collective noses, but they carry on as if this is some kind point of principle that cannot be altered. You sort of wonder why these charitable Christians can't find the same passion in protecting the human rights of asylum seekers or the homeless or the drug addicts and mentally ill of this world.

But no, they persist with the deranged notion that somehow this entitled whitbread middle-class is the victim in the process. Pardon me if you think I'm being harsh but this bullshit really ought not to be aired by the media as the counter-argument to marriage equality. It's not an argument, it's a statement of prejudice and an ancient and ugly one at that. (And that's coming from somebody who isn't gay.)
Who would have thought the problems of the Twenty-first Century involved shedding the prejudices of centuries prior to the Twentieth?

The Absence Of Critical Thought Amongst Conservatives

For close to a decade starting from the mid-2000s, we've seen the rise of the late BabyBoomer generation to the ranks of ministers in this country. The Coalition is still firmly in the hands of the Baby Boomers while the ALP has moved on to Gen-X as their front-bench. What is particularly notable about the conservative Baby Boomers is that they are the people who benefited the most from Whitlam making tertiary education free, and then went on to try and raise Tertiary education fees to unprecedented levels. Not only are their policies crap, they seem to be largely unaware of the perception in the community of them as eying the most entitled people putting a wrecking ball to the national consensus.

The fact that things have not improved under Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership is not very surprising given that the paucity of talent amongst the Liberals and Nationals. The paucity of talent is also unsurprising because the kinds of kids who signed up for young Liberals bacon campus were either spoilt brats from Private Schools who never really leaned anything and were protected their parents' money, or people so stupid to think ideology was a good substitute for doing one's own thinking.

Thus the ideologically motivated have become the front-and-centre face of conservatism, and worse still it's an un-reflective, ill-conceived ideology that is masquerading as something more effective than it actually is. This of course gives rise to a Treasurer like WTE Joe Hockey who announces an end to the age of entitlement and proceeds to cut welfare while cutting taxes for the rich. So far Scott Morrison is faring a little better in that he hasn't cut welfare as much as Hockey did, but he too is intent on giving the wealthy a tax-cut because he believes whole-heartedly in the laughable principle of trickle-down economics.It's enough to make you wonder what kind of education these people got - or perhaps what part of their expensive education they heard enough to take away, because there doesn't seem to be much logic or mathematics or economics or sociology involved.

The tremendous electoral success of the neo-liberal agenda based on Milton Friedman has sort of covered up the vast intellectual blackhole at the heart the neo-liberal project. It is no surprise then that after the GFC, the right has scrambled to find a way to explain away the colossal failure of the massively financialised economy and the global banking crisis it brought about. It is even pitiful that some have taken to Ayn Rand as their go-to thinker. It doesn't et more pathetic than that. Even today the reason the Turnbull government struggles to arrive at a compelling narrative is because it can't formulate one from a position of reason. It can only keep playing the ideological position statements as if they can substitute for actual thinking.

But The Problems Are Mounting

The truly compelling global problem is climate change. Somebody is going to have to pay to deal with it and it can't all be put on the general public nor the governments. It's going to have to come from the private sector. The rampant denialism notwithstanding, they're the facts. The added fact that our government can't bring itself to deal with those issues, and instead rolls around in the political mud trying to figure out how to get past marriage equality shows you just how feeble the minds of our politicians have become. Not only are we living in a time of catastrophic climate change, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.

Another is the issue of the over-financialised world economy which is centred around banking and the issuing of credit to a world awash in debt. If the GFC triggered by the Lehman collapse of 2007 was one thing, we're staring down the barrel with the potential collapse of Deutsche Bank. If Deutsche Bank goes down, so do derivative trades that amount to about the same as the entire world's GDP. Angela Merkel is saying the German government won't be bailing out Deutsche Bank,but when you think about it, DB is the walking talking quacking, waddling exemplar of "too-big-to-fail". Somebody is going to have to dig deep and keep it going or else any number of scenarios that lead to the implosion of the global economy would be on the horizon - just as it was when Lehman bit the dust. Do we hear a peep out of our treasurer in Australia about all this? No. So, once again, not only are we living in a time of catastrophic economic failure, we're living in a time of catastrophic failure of intellect amongst our national leadership.

It's one of the luxuries of living in Australia - we're so far removed from the world's problems. Most of the time, the world's problem don't really affect us that directly. In the past we've sent troops to the Old World just to get ourselves involved in the world's terrible affairs (like WorldWar I!); but in most part we've sat outa great deal of global issues,and that has worked for us. And that's all well and good except with these two problems, we're firmly in orbit of the looming black hole. Honestly, conservatism is intellectually bankrupt. What we're seeing is the process of intellectual foreclosure.

'Irrational Man'

Philosophy As Enabling Bullshit

It's very hard to figure where Woody Allen posits classical and traditional Western Philosophy in his life. His earliest writings crack jokes about Plato ("He used to knock over little boys. What the hell would he know?") and even Kant's moral imperative ("if we all behave that way, willI get to eat my lunch and keep it?"). This fixation has wound its way through his career as plenty of punchlines were dished out at the expense of Socrates through to Heidegger at various junctures. It's worth wondering just how seriously he takes it if he wants to so talk about it. After all, his famous joke goes he was flunked from college in a metaphysics test when during an exam, he turned to the boy next to him and looked into his soul.

Here, with 'Irrational Man', we finally get the pastiche philosophical patter rolled into the dialogue of one character, The results are quite funny and funny because they are awkward, but also because what happens is in a way Woody Allen's admission that he holds no hope in philosophy. Maybe that's a good thing.

Spoiler alert as usual.


What's Good About It

In Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix, Woody Allen has two great actors who can carry the lines with adroitness and gusto. The two of them make hefty words sing as ordinary dialogue. It's quite the accomplishment. Woody Allen's dialogue doesn't seem to be getting easier in his old age. His recent films have been filled with difficult turns of phrases with demands for expert comic timing. As the film consists of many scenes that are two handers and three handers featuring the two, it is striking just how good Stone and Phoenix are in their respective roles.

Woody Allen's mordant wit is a kind of elaborate gallows humour, but he does a great job of holding off his plot twist. He is a magnificent writer of dialogue and excellent observer of character - he sure has the mettle of his men and women measured down pat. I wonder if a hundred years from now, people will watch his films and grapple with the vocabulary and the interchangeable vernacular of modernity and classical thought as expressed in a varsity context. He captures the anxious speech of educated people so well.

What's Bad About It

Maybe Woody Allen is getting a little tired of the philosophy jokes themselves. If there is a single failing in his portrayal of character, it is that Phoenix's philosophy professor whois so deep in despair seems to be getting through the basic curriculum fairly breezily. It is basic sort of stuff, but he seems all too at ease with the dispensing of pedagogy.

Also the snippets of philosophy he teaches come across as cribbed notes and not very interesting. Maybe it's meant to show just how bored Phoenix's character Abe Lucas is with the framework and historic context Western Philosophy, but it comes over as way too glib. As one drop out to another, it makes me want to say, "well, hold up right there. That's totally an un-nuanced view of..." That's bad writing.

Similarly, his presentation of Emma Stone's Jill as being fundamentally middle-class and therefore unable to escape her own class prejudices is a harsh assessment of her character. After all, his film is positing an extraordinary position where murder might be acceptable. For a film that wants to show the attempt to transcend moral concerns of the bourgeoisie, it takes a harsh stance on the very same moral framework that allows the plot to turn.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that Philosophy is at the centre of this film, which is at its core a simple yarn about an attempt at a perfect crime. It's couched in terms of philosophy exactly because it serves to obfuscate the motive for the crime. Much like 'Throw Mama From The Train', the central point of getting away with the perfect crime, resides eliminating motive. And just as 'Throw Mama From the Train' works very hard to establish the ground rules as to why the motive needs to be eliminated for the perfect crime, this film posits that a man can arrive at the point of enacting a crime through philosophy, and because he does so through his philosophical excursion, he would be able to obscure his motive substantially as to make it look like there is no motive.

When one casts one mind to it, if a murder is completely without motive, it suggests the work of a psycho-killer; and such movies have a particular tenor that leads to detective fiction. Abe Lucas has a motive, and it is to do one deed that would have a positive impact on somebody he overheard in a cafe. It's arguable whether it is a strong enough motive to lead a man to murder somebody he doesn't really know.

On one level, for all the exposition that Abe is a brilliant philosopher, if all it leads to is this crime, then either we're being sold a crock or philosophy is a crock. This being Woody Allen writing and directing, we're given the slanted evidence that it is philosophy that is bullshit. Mind you, a lot of philosophy scholars I know have ended up in pedagogy of said bullshit, so much so that I'm even inclined to believe Woody Allen's dig at a big Western Institution. Nonetheless, I had to say it's probably Woody Allen who is selling a crock of shit in this instance. As fragile and vulnerable it may seem, there's a lot more intellectual muscle in Western Philosophy yet.

Existential Despair As Plaything

Finding tenure as a philosophy tutor in this day and age has to be pretty cool when you think about it. Abe's philosophical predicament of existential despair is actually a little unrealistic. Most PhD. grads I know who have done philosophy would love exactly that job. If there's one job that a philosophy major would not feel existential despair would actually be holding a chair in academia as a philosopher. There are many kinds of conditions of existence which induce the kind of nausea or despair that existentialists of old may have written about, but being a philosophy academic is not one of them. Complaining about that condition of life is a bit like complaining about being a rock star or a movie director. If anything, it's like Larry David's never-ending complaints in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'.

Still, it's one of Woody Allen's tropes whereby the main character is tormented. When it is Sean Penn playing a tormented guitar player in the 1920s, feeling outshone by Django Reinhardt, that's one kind of torture; but some of the other roles would invite the suspicion that these characters were posturing wankers rather than genuinely beset by existential despair. It's rather unclear where Woody Allen stands on the very topic because he's made so many jokes about it, at its expense and his own expense. Judging from this film, there are no new breakthroughs in his thinking - although the fact that he is able mount these discourses as grim black humour without inserting himself as a character shows that he's generalising his theory of existential despair as a plaything for the bored.

The Older Man, The Ingenue

Woody Allen's other trope for which he gets a lot of flack is the older man and younger woman set up. It recurs in his work because, seemingly, it's the only understanding of relationships he has any more. Oddly enough, because he writes it so often, he has written so many versions and inversions of this relationship dynamic, he's certainly the expert.

At least he's stopped casting himself as the older man, and the movies are better off for that.

Crusader Complex

A Fool, Even in Thought, Is A Fool

Here's an article about the moral crisis allegedly affecting Australia and the western world.It's interesting because it shows there's a philosophical sense of crisis being addressed, but with inadequate tools.

''Sometimes Western civilisation is treated with outright hostility,'' read the invitation letter. ''Cultural relativism has led to our education system often undervaluing the achievements of Western civilisation.''

''The rise of the nanny state is undermining our freedoms of association, of speech, of liberal democracy.''

John Roskam, from the institute, said the evening tapped into a debate about values, where they come from and what they are grounded in - Western civilisation.

''It's rounder than the concept of a threat, it's under challenge,'' he said.

This is some pretty paranoid thinking. I am hard-pressed to think of anybody who is a cultural relativist who thinks that the values of Western civlisation are not worth preserving. Even Johnny Rotten in his rotton-est hour would concede that Western civilisation is pretty cool in parts. The single hallmark of John Howard's time as Prime Minister was his utter defensiveness about these things, and his language that almost reeked of a victim's complaint when it came to things to do with say, Aboriginal Reconciliation and Feminism. You have to take a somewhat culturally relativist position (but not much really) to let Aboriginal Reconciliation happen and be a good thing and let feminism advance. Indeed it's arguable that these kinds of things are good things that are the fruits of Western tradition.

But no, John Howard is worried.

Howard spoke off the cuff. According to those present, he argued that Australia has a secular tradition with no established church. But, while that tradition must be respected, it was his personal belief the Judaeo-Christian ethic has been the most profound moral and cultural influence in this country and it should be preserved. Other religions could be embraced and welcomed without in any way diminishing the Judaeo-Christian influence.

Howard, who never wore his faith on his sleeve, gave examples of where he saw erosion caused by a combination of factors such as post-modernism and people who think the values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving.

Really now. Again, I seriously doubt people on the Left from the champagne socialists out to some hardcore communists in Australia think that the "values of Western civilisation are not worth preserving". The extreme wing of the environmental movement probably want the West to renounce heavy industry but it's seriously questionable if they want the West to renounce, say, Socrates or Pascal or Kant or Freud.

What's really funny is that this meeting is somehow a meeting of people trying to preserve the Western civilisation and they're actually raging against the Enlightenment, so to speak. note especially John Howard's call to have more taboos. If that's not a backward step into the medieval darkness, I don't know what is.

Then you have Cardinal Pell, he of the kiddy-fiddlers-anonymous Catholic Church:

Pell went further, saying he felt suicide today was being ''celebrated''. Faith and values, he said, meant you're living for some reason other than yourself. He lamented that a secular view is legitimate but a religious view should not be heard in a public place, and that is was deemed permissible to speak openly of a green god but not a religious God.

Beyond religion, Julia Gillard's proposed national history curriculum was singled out for a belting, because it supposedly does not place enough emphasis on British and European influences.

Howard cited the recent push for a human rights charter in Australia as a consequence of a lack of understanding of our system of parliamentary democracy and an independent judiciary.

Both he and Pell acknowledged the flaws and blemishes of Western civilisation and the ''black spots'' these had left in Australian history.

But Pell referred to China, where he said an erosion of values was also occurring as capitalism took hold. ''This radically different culture is now searching for the secrets of Western vitality to provide a code for decency and social cohesion compatible with sustainable economic development.''

He quoted the Chinese economist Zhao Xiao's ''fascinating comparison with the selfism of Western radical secularism''.

''These days, Chinese people do not believe in anything,'' Zhao asserted. ''A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies anything is possible - what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?''

This is just too rich.

I've never heard the Catholic Church in Australia champion Confucianism. Ever.  Cardinal Pell lamenting the passing of the old values of Confucianism is therefore a new development. You sort of wonder how he reconciles that with his Catholic beliefs, after all Confucius clearly states that belief in the mysterious, the strong, the chaotic and gods is not a rational course of action. i.e.  a proper person does not run to cults and religions.

That China is losing its old ways as a result of capitalism is sort of interesting, as it is China's attempt to reap the fruits of Western civilisation without taking on board the core values of the west that provided for them. Like, good old liberalism. Indeed, it is the free-marketeering profit-above-all-decency kind of economic rationalism that is enabling the contemporary economic animal of China, that is being so disparaged here. Not so long ago, these were the exact western values people like John Howard and Cardinal Pell were peddling to a God-less, communist China. Surely they can't be too shocked at the results! Not if they had any continuity of thought. But of course if you listen to these people it's the fault of 'cultural relativists'.

And that's just the bit that pertains to China's modernisation. It strikes one that perhaps the biggest problem with John Howard and Cardinal Pell talking about  Western civilisation is that they don't understand its historical significance and only want to keep the bits that suit their personal political positions and agendas ("no, you don't say, art!"). This is why they're willing to admit there are 'black spots' in its history and yet they don't really want to deal with those black spots too much. Doesn't this show that the very malaise in the Western civilisation they're talking about with much alarm  is also showing up in their own discourse in their inability to recognise the faults of their own system?

Then there's the complete  muddling of religious doctrine with philosophical and historical traditions of the so-called Western civilisation. It is true, that historically the Church has played a large part in the history of Western Europe and the colonial states they have spawned. It is also true that the Judeo-Christian faith has provided the largest framework from which thinking on ethics and philosophy has been undertaken. Nonetheless, it is totally fallacious to claim that all of this has been good. We only need to look as far as Gallileo's or Darwin's experiences in having to explain scientific findings to the retrograde faithful. The Church and Judeo-Christian thought cannot lay claim to all of Western civilisation, just as Western civilisation cannot lay claim to just the good bits and not the 'black spots'. It certainly can't own all of science and therefore modern technology. It can't even own epistemology these days.

Indeed, the mere fact that we're even talking about Darwin today as a controversial figure in certain circles suggests that the Catholic Church still has not come to terms with science, let alone the enlightenment, and that the true fear of the cultural relativist is actually a fear of the Church's own irrelevance to thought.

What's really frightening is that people like this have so much influence in our society.

What Is This? A Religious Putsch?

The SMH also had this stupid little column, with this hysterical closing bit:

Secularism is certainly not neutral and those who wish to expunge Christian values from our schools and public institutions should more fully explain the worldview from which their alternative values derive.

In the mean time, if we are going to continue to recognise and celebrate our Judeo-Christian heritage, the state government should not dilute the influence of Scripture classes because they are the one opportunity in life the majority of young people have to understand what it is all about.

I don't know why religious types think that they have a monopoly on thinking about goodness. It is the single most repugnant thing about the article. A lot of Christians I know would probably balk at the degree of intellectual hubris of this writer.

Here's news for some people. Ethics is a difficult thing for religious types precisely because it seeks to address and critique morality; and morality is often defined by things like scriptures such as the Bible or the Koran. You can't have ethics unless you're willing to get objective about morality and where it comes from. It's not a big claim, it's just logic.

The simple version of ethics comes down to questions like "religion X says it's okay to do X, but religion Y thinks not. How do we address the goodness and badness of doing X"? If X is male circumcision, nobody bats an eyelid. If it's female circumcision, we all get uptight about it and rightfully so. The question then becomes, what makes it "rightfully" so? That very question is where ethics sits.

So, it's probably important to address what is considered moral under the Judeo-Christian framework of morality, but to do teachings of ethics correctly, you must critique whether thee claims to goodness or badness within the moral frame work stand up to analysis. For instance here's an ethics question for Catholics, was it good for the Pope to have covered for pedophiles when he was a Bishop? The Pope is currently trying to say, it's okay because he ended up as Pope and how dare we question the representative of God? Is this really 'good'?

What's really disturbing is that columns such as the one the SMH put up shows a clear attempt to muddle the water between what is ethics and what is morality so as to shoe-horn religion - in this instance Christianity of this particular dudes' particular denomination - back into the middle of discussions. Once again, this is such a backward step that even if you weren't a strident secularist, you have to combat it by saying how 1) misguided it is 2) how politically motivated it is in its misguidedness 3) and how deliberate it is in its confusing argumentation because it deliberately seeks to muddy the waters.

The long and short of it is, 'secularists' are not trying to sideline religion because they think it's bad. They're trying to sideline it from discussions of ethics because ethics can only begin when we stop harping about morality, and we cannot go there while the religiously motivated keep on trying to bring ethics back to "My God is Better Than Yours" routines of religious thought.

So, Mr. Jim Wallace, please stop trying to corrupt the youth of today with your opiate for the masses!

Apprehend That Pope!

Which brings me to this interesting article today.

Two leading atheists are investigating the possibility of arresting the Pope for "crimes against humanity", lawyers have confirmed.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are paying lawyers to investigate whether Pope Benedict XVI should be arrested when he visits Britain in September.

Mr Dawkins and Mr Hitchens believe the Pope should face charges for the alleged cover-up of sex abuse in the Catholic Church, The Guardian reports.

The Guardian reports that a letter written by the Pope in 1985, when he was then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, urged that a paedophile priest in the US not be exposed for the "good of the universal church".

Mr Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, told The Times: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."

Mr Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, added to the London-based paper: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded pay-offs, but justice and punishment."

Well, right. Somebody's got to be held accountable for all this grief. I say, book him, Danno.