All posts by Wintery Knight

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California demands blocking of natural gas pipeline, as blackouts loom

I collected together 3 news stories and I think they show a very interesting portrait of how Democrats think. Although they would like to present themselves as practical problem-solvers, the truth is that they always do what makes them look virtuous to others. And then, when they get terrible results, they throw blame onto others. Let’s take a look at the stories.

First one is from the Daily Caller:

Attorney generals (AGs) from California, Oregon and Washington are calling for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to stop the expansion of a crucial gas transmission project, arguing that it will violate climate laws; despite the states facing some of the highest gas prices in the country as well as the prospect of blackouts.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a motion on Monday asking the FERC to deny the proposed capacity expansion of TC PipeLines’ Gas Transmission Northwest (GTN) XPress pipeline project (GTN), according to a press release. The three western states currently hold some of the highest gas prices in the nation and may be at risk of suffering blackouts.

California possesses the highest national average of $5.3 per gallon, meanwhile, Oregon’s and Washington’s gas price averages sit at $4.80 and $4.70 per gallon, according to AAA data. California may also be at risk of experiencing blackouts as its grid which is undergoing a green transition struggles to cope with statewide energy demand as it phases out fossil fuels.

Those three states are very secular and very leftist. And they certainly have embraced “green energy” policies. But green energy has a lot of problems. First, it’s intermittent, not stable. Second, it’s expensive, requiring subsidies from taxpayers. And third, it’s incredibly harmful to the environment – not just in killing birds and bats, but also in damaging the environment with huge solar panel farms and wind turbine farms.

What’s interesting though is that the green energy states are the ones who are most threatened by green energy.

Here is something from far-left Newsweek:

Much of Southern California remains under an excessive heat warning, with the state’s grid operator warning that the high temperatures could lead to blackouts.

The state is facing a prolonged late-summer heat wave, with temperatures expected to reach as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit in some parts, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

“An impactful, long duration heat wave is expected from the beaches to the desert through Labor Day,” the San Diego office of the NWS wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. “High to very high heat risk will impact the coast and valleys by Sun & Mon. Plan ahead now so you can stay cool and hydrated, especially if you have outdoor plans.”

An excessive heat warning is in effect from 11 a.m. on Wednesday until 8 p.m. Monday across a vast swath of Southern California, including Los Angeles County.

“Dangerously hot” conditions are expected, according to the NWS, with peak temperatures of 95 to 112 degrees expected through Saturday, and 100 to 115 degrees on Sunday and Monday.

I thought this was interesting – they are telling people how much use electricity – even to charge their electric cars:

During a Flex alert, consumers will be urged to reduce energy usage between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. when the system is most stressed.

“The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights,” the grid operator said. “Lowering electricity use during that time will ease strain on the system, and prevent more drastic measures, including rotating power outages.”

You might have heard that California wants to ban gas vehicles by 2035. That’s interesting, but what’s more interesting is that they don’t want people charging their electrical vehicles either. And the people in California voted for this.

They’re addicted to virtue signaling. It’s almost as though when they themselves off from the moral law and from forgiveness, it suddenly became a huge problem for them to tell everyone how good they are. Being good used to be between a man and God. Now, people have to signal their virtue in order to keep guilt, shame and meaninglessness at bay.

Do moral dilemmas undermine objective moral absolutes?

One reason why some people reject the existence of objective morality is because moral absolutes can conflict.

Canadian philosopher Michael Horner to explains the problem.

He writes:

You may have been confronted with the story of the Nazi soldier coming to the door of the family who are hiding some Jewish people in their home and asking them point blankly, “Are there any Jews here?” The person telling the story then asks you, “What would you say?” or more precisely, “What should you say?”

[…]I think for many people the term moral absolutes connotes ideas like inflexibility and rigidity, and that there can never be exemptions. I have also found that many people believe that holding to moral absolutes means that circumstances are not relevant in a moral evaluation and that moral absolutism cannot handle moral dilemmas. But in fact it is possible to believe in moral absolutes, or as I prefer to call them objective moral values, without adhering to these connotations I have mentioned.

For many people to believe in moral absolutes is to believe in rules that no other rules can ever trump. It follows from this that moral absolutes are all equal and there can never be any exemptions. But what if moral absolutes exist in a hierarchy?

We know from experience that very often more than one moral rule applies to a situation. This often leads to moral dilemmas. So in the ‘hiding the Jews example’ the moral rule of telling the truth seems to apply to the situation, but it would seem that the moral rule to protect innocent human life from torture and murder applies also.

If absolutes are all equal there is no way out of the dilemma. You can’t choose one absolute over another because in doing so you would be violating at least one absolute which, in their view, is supposed to be inviolable.

So, in this case, it seems as if the moral absolutist is stuck in a dilemma. If you lie to save the innocent life, then that would be wrong. But if you tell the truth and hand the innocent person over to murderers, then that would be wrong. Does this really disprove objective moral absolutes?

This problem annoys me, because I know this is the kind of objection to objective morality that annoying philosophy lecturers like to push onto freshmen in order to convince them that morality is nonsense.  But does the moral dilemma objection really work?

More Horner:

[…][I]f moral absolutes exist in a hierarchy and the circumstances or the situation were relevant in determining which absolute takes precedent, then there may be a solution to the moral dilemma. That is exactly what I think is the case in the example. I for one have no difficulty knowing that the morally right thing to do in that situation is to protect the life of innocent people from torture and murder rather than tell the truth to a person who has torture and murder in their plans. My moral intuitions are very clear about this.

If someone objects and says, “No, you must always tell the truth. After all it is an absolute, and absolutes by definition can never be violated,” I would point out that they are just using a different hierarchy, putting truth telling above protecting the life of innocent people from torture and murder. There is no way to avoid making a judgment like that since more than one absolute does apply to the situation. I would just ask them to think it through again, and once they see that they have to make a judgment based on some sort of hierarchy in that situation, then I think most people’s moral intuitions will affirm that protecting the lives of innocent people from torture and murder, in that situation, trumps truth telling. There is no way to avoid choosing one over the other.

But isn’t this moral relativism? After all, we are deciding what to do based on the situation! It’s relativism, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t, because there is always one right thing to do in every situation. In every situation, you always follow the weightiest moral rule. The right thing to do does not depend on your subjective state of mind. It is an objective moral duty, and it is the same for everyone, across all times and in all places. That’s what objective morality means -what is right and wrong is not determined by personal preferences or cultural conventions, which vary by time and place.

And of course, God is the ground of this hierarchy of objective moral absolutes. They existed through him before human beings even appeared, as part of his design for us, his creatures. How we ought to behave is grounded ontologically in God’s design for us.

Federal court strikes down Democrat plan to force Christian doctors to mutilate children

One of the concerns I had about having a Democrat take over the government was that Christian doctors and nurses would be forced to perform abortions against their will. You might remember that many Christians had previously voted for Obama, and he had pushed through Obamacare – legislation that forced Christian companies like Hobby Lobby to cover abortion-causing drugs.

Although Hobby Lobby was able to win at the Supreme Court, and escape the abortion drug mandate, there was more in Obamacare to fear.

Here’s the latest from The Federalist:

A federal court on Friday struck down Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services’ attempt to force doctors to perform mutilative transgender surgeries against their religious beliefs and conscience objections.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the lawsuit Franciscan Alliance v. Becerra that “a Catholic healthcare network and a group of nearly 19,000 healthcare professionals cannot be required to carry out these procedures in violation of their deeply held beliefs and professional medical judgment,” according to the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit law firm that seeks to protect religious freedom.

HHS originally mandated that physicians perform wrongly named “sex-reassignment” surgeries as part of Obamacare in May 2016. “The requirement would have forced doctors to perform these procedures on any patient, including on children, even if the procedures went against their conscience and professional medical judgment,” Becket said following Friday’s ruling.

The law was originally put in by Obama, but the Biden administration has picked up on defending it:

Since the 2016 Obamacare mandate and subsequent Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, President Joe Biden’s HHS has continued to shoehorn so-called “gender identity” into the definition of sex discrimination in health care. In March, HHS issued a notice saying that “[a]ttempts to restrict” transgender surgeries are “dangerous,” and earlier this month, the department filed a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking,” which, if enacted, would require hospitals to perform both mutilative transgender surgeries and abortions.

So, I remember talking to black people in my office when Obama was up for election. Men and women. And I was explaining to them how Obama had voted against legislation that protected infants who were born alive during abortions. And what they said to me was “we’ve never had a black president. Besides, what do presidents have to do with abortion?” I guess they thought that having a president with the same skin color as theirs was more important than having a president who respected the conscience rights and religious liberty of Christians.

After the first two elections of Obama, we had a pretty good understanding of what Democrats believed about abortion, same-sex marriage, infanticide, etc. Nevertheless, many church attending Christians turned out to vote for Joe Biden. So now Christians have to have legal battles in order to get out of being forced to mutilate children. How could religious liberty be brought so low in America?

Christians really could do better at voting in elections.