We like Bernard

I’ve written it repeatedly; the polls confirm it. More and more people like Bernard Grech.

In the meantime, Chris Fearne polls higher than Robert Abela. And yet, I think Adrian Delia shouldn’t have approached the Deputy Prime Minister. This was another unfortunate faux pas on Dr Delia’s part. Dr Delia is highly intelligent, extraordinarily resilient, and fiercely courageous. But I’m not sure he was made for the position he so wishes to occupy. It’s like musical talent: you can spend endless hours practising singing, but if you’re off-key, you’ll never become a band’s frontman.

That’s life, sound.

Last Monday, I listened to Bernard Grech explaining his vision at the Ħaż-Żebbuġ PN Club. It contained elements that were obviously tailored to meet the expectations of the Żebbuġi electorate. But among the more generally applicable elements was Dr Grech’s insistence that Man should be at the centre of politics (“il-bniedem fiċ-ċentru tal-politika”).

This vision is in stark contrast to Muscatian politics, for which the economy takes centre-stage. Prime Minister Abela seems to be distractedly continuing Labour’s Muscatism – “distractedly” as he seems more interested in the gym and his boat than in politics, probably because he hasn’t been politically weaned yet. I’m sure many share this perception – at least, that’s what the surveys indicate. People are increasingly feeling that Chris Fearne would have decidedly been the wiser choice last January.

The other favourite with the electorate, Bernard Grech, has a tranquil yet combative approach. It’s an approach you instantly take a liking to: Dr Grech is in combat mode but serenely. He exudes selfconfidence without overdoing it. The more you think about him and his style, the more you like him. unfair as

Muscatism in practice

it may

Muscat was constantly drivelling about his Best-in-Europe fantasy but, in reality, “Malta” has become a by-word for “sleaze”.

Just watch Episode 6 of the last season (2019) of the American comedy series VEEP, and pay attention to the dialogue between 04:29 and 04:32. In those four seconds, you’ll hear the “President of Georgia” offering a bribe to Selina Meyer, a “US Presidential candidate”: $114 million sent from the Seychelles, via Malta, via the Seychelles again, and finally to her account. The dialogue is predicated on the given that using Malta for this sleaze is normal.

That’s the state Muscat, his cronies, and now Robert “Gymand-Boat” Abela have thrown this country into.

Independence Day 2020

Two things about what happened last Monday.

One, the arrest of Keith Schembri and his accomplices is absolutely good news for the country. Only up to a point, though. In the sense that these arrests should have been made long ago.

Be that as it may. It’s good that the long arm of the law has finally caught up with the filth – now we await the clean-up. That should also include Schembri’s former boss, Joseph “2019-Man-of-theYear-in-Organized-Crime-andCorruption” Muscat.

In the meanwhile, today (Thursday) I read that Muscat has denied he’s being investigated by the Italian authorities for possible ties with the Sicilian Mafia.

Two, the empty-headed who thought that in 2017 Simon Busuttil delivered empty box files to the Court have – obviously – been proven wrong. Anyone with even two working neurones wouldn’t have expected otherwise. That there were people who really believed that Dr Busuttil was bluffing, that he showed up in Court with empty box files, is, to say the least, baffling. It should set off alarm bells: a functioning democracy depends on a functioning media. In this country, independent media outlets use English – leaving a huge chunk of the population in the darkness of ignorance.

Tax

I’m wondering whether our tax system has evolved an unconscious bias: it seems to favour the big fish and punish the small fry. Whether or not one has the necessary infrastructure and personnel, we’ve all become tax collectors. I remember the late Notary Ġużé Abela going to Court in 1995 arguing that the law shouldn’t turn people into tax collectors – he quoted the legal maxim omnia labor optat premium. Dr Abela lost the case, but he was right.

We’ve got to outgrow this fixation on “fiscal morality”, on citizens as involuntary tax collectors. The country needs a simplified tax-collection system, because citizens need to use their time to think about their private lives and families. Before being citizens, people are human beings.

A complex tax-collection system reduces human beings to mere citizens. In a sense, it’s a “Fascist” idea. “Fascism” deifies the State; for “Fascism” the State is a god and citizens have to mould their lives around the needs of the State-God. “Fascism” reduces human beings to mere citizens whose supreme moral duty is to tend to the needs of the State before theirs.

So that’s why “Man at the centre of politics” – Bernard Grech’s message – is crucial. It lies between Muscatism – that puts the economy at the centre of politics, with human beings having to serve the economy – and “Fascism”, that puts the State at the centre of politics, with human beings having to serve the State. Dr Grech’s politics puts the human being – from conception till death – at its centre, and politics and the economy have to serve the human being.

Shaming the pro-abortion lobby

How can one not shame people who lobby for the killing of unborn human beings? The proabortion argument hinges on the idea that the unborn human being is not yet a citizen, and therefore isn’t entitled to State protection. (This argument was explained in detail by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 US Presidential campaign.)

Not shaming the pro-abortion lobby means participating in their amorality!

The central problem with the pro-abortion argument is the blatant lack of remorse and scruples: pro-abortion people speak casually about terminating the life of a fellow human being, as if it were something of no consequence, dismissing human life as either worthless or else a commodity, a raw material that can be acquired and disposed of. This lack of remorse and scruples casts a powerful light on the psychological make-up of the people who display it.

I found something worth sharing in Sigmund Freud’s Über die Psychogenese eines Falles von weiblicher Homosexualität (1920). He writes about the after-effects of decisions taken without an awareness of what they entail on the psychological level. One sentence struck me in particular: “One is also astonished at the unsuspected results that may follow on artificial abortion which had been decided upon remorselessly and without scruple.”

Despite all the hot air we get from the pro-abortion lobby in particular and the liberal cartel in general, abortion triggers processes that then impact other people through the parents’ altered behaviour. We are all connected in a community; we aren’t atoms freely floating in the empty spaces of the market-economy society.

The West dominated the world also because it internalised a basic principle hammered by Christian theologians into the heads of entire generations: pacts have to be respected. Once you give your word, you’re morally bound to keep it (see Matthew 5:33-37). This principle is clearly based on the idea of scruple and the remorse felt when you don’t keep your word. The liberals, instead, promote a worldview free of scruples and remorse, based on their mistaken notion of “freedom”.

When two human beings create a third, there is an implicit promise made to that new human being: that it will be helped to become a functioning adult. The liberals throw that implicit promise away, with neither remorse nor scruple. But, as Freud observed, scruples and remorse are part of our psychological make-up, and anything that defies our deepseated unconscious hard-wiring creates problems.

Maltese Quirks (5)

The linguistic neglect this country languishes in can be gleaned from Bill 131, that proposes to amend the notarial legislation. According to the English version, the notary may decide not to give his services if “the parties fail to deposit with him […] duties, taxes, fees and expenses”.

The Maltese version reads, “il-partijiet jonqsu milli jiddepożitaw miegħu […] dazji, taxxi, drittijiet u spejjeż”.

Since when do notaries collect dazji?

The law should just read “taxxi”, as “taxxa” is the equivalent of both “duty” and “tax” – see the title of Chapter 364 of the Laws of Malta.

But there’s more to it than that. “Duty” is one type of “tax”, meaning that “duty” is implied in “tax”. Why, then, to use both “duty” and “tax”?

In legal drafting, one finds the interesting phenomenon of semantic triads: a three-word sequence in which the first (hyponym) is semantically the most specific, the third (hypernym) is semantically the broadest and includes the previous two, and the middle word is an in-between. But in this Bill’s provision there’s just a group of words with no obvious semantic link – so why use a hyponym and a hypernym in succession?

Then again, Minister, you might wish to use “imposta”, because we write “Dan it-trasferiment mhux

imponibbli” (“This transfer is not

taxable/dutiable”).