Double standard (Part 1)
When I went to school, as a committed Christian, I was constantly confronted—partly rightfully, partly unjustly—with the double standards of church dignitaries. Double standards were often regarded as a religious phenomenon.
Today’s moral guardians are no longer church oriented, but all the more actively on the move. Instead of the Ten Commandments, there are ten thousand commandments, which are constantly changing and increasing. Instead of hell, social and media death now threatens if one does not submit.
And yet nowadays it is often the fiercest moral guardians who display the fiercest double standards.
Some random examples
In Germany Green party voters fly more often than voters of other parties. Green MPs in the German federal parlament, the Deutsche Bundestag, fly more often by plane than MPs from other parties.
Greta doesn’t cook on her ocean-going yacht and doesn’t use a microwave. Instead, she has freeze-dried food with her, which is even more energy-intensive to produce than normal food. And if from now on every US traveller can build an ocean-going sailing yacht and needs several people full-time to bring him or her to the USA, this will worsen the climate balance considerably, not to speak of Greta’s co-workers who all fly to the USA.
The STERN magazine writes in a big article or rather an inflammatory article “You up there!” in the issue of 14.03.2019 against twelve super-rich German family clans, which control whole economic empires, and belongs itself to one such family—viz the Mohn family, which owns the Bertelsmann Media Group etc.—a fact which the STERN, of course, does not mention.
I recently found a “wonderful” example of such double standards in one of the nation’s great moral guardians, the SPIEGEL magazine, which never tires of denouncing the double standards of the churches. The cover story of issue 33/2019 is cruise holidays. According to the SPIEGEL, all cruise ships actually need to be withdrawn from service. It is suggested that the cruiseline companies are handled with velvet gloves by the media because they are among the most important advertising clients. Will therefore the Spiegel magazine set a good example by doing without such adverts from now on? Far from it, Spiegel often offers reader trips on cruise ships. On spiegelonline, in the article “Criticism of cruise shipping companies—socially no longer justifiable” (at least on Aug 15th 2019, see here) it says:
“Editor’s note: Like other media houses, SPIEGEL-Publishing also offers reader-voyages on cruise ships. However, the editorial department and the publishing house are strictly separated. In the internal memo on the current cover story it says: ‘We will nevertheless take the cover story as an occasion to rethink these cooperations’.”
Would the SPIEGEL magazine give the Vatican or the Evangelical Alliance a pass on such a double standard and flimsy reasoning? Another department of your own company is responsible for it, so you can’t do anything about it? Genuine double standards!
