stcynic
Posts by this author
October 22, 2004
First a town in the south bans halloween because it's satanic. Now a town in Washington has banned it because the witch costumes might offend Wiccans. Can we please, all sane people, rise up and with one voice tell both groups to sit down and shut the fuck up? Thank you.
October 22, 2004
So last night was a blast. The show was held at a place called the Crazy Horse Saloon, and it was just like what you'd expect from a place with that name. It's a redneck bar, the kind of place where men wear cowboy hats without a hint of an attempt at irony. There was even one guy wearing leather…
October 21, 2004
Tachyix asked, in a comment, if I had any advice for aspiring comics. I thought I'd move the answer up here to its own post. The most obvious answer is "don't do what I did", since I obviously didn't make it as a comic, but that answer would conceal an important truth. I didn't make it as a comic…
October 20, 2004
I got a phone call a little while ago from one of my comedian buddies, Don Reese. Don is a very funny stand up comic and he's coming to perform here in Michigan for the next couple weeks. Tomorrow night he's going to be about 40 minutes from where I live, so I'm gonna go see him, but he was calling…
October 20, 2004
Much has been written about the incompetence with which the Bush administration has pursued the war and post-war occupation in Iraq. I'd like to add to our understanding of that situation by looking, in hindsight, at what was predicted with foresight before the war. Many of the people who were…
October 19, 2004
Early in October, I entered Kelly Hollowell of the Worldnutdaily into the running for Idiot of the Month. Here's our second nominee: Jim DeMint, the Republican candidate for the senate in South Carolina. According to this little hillbilly Hitler-clone, gays and single mothers should not be allowed…
October 19, 2004
Timothy Sandefur has taken note of the posts on Bork by myself and Jon Rowe and added his own voice to the discussion (if there is anything that bonds the three of us together, it's our shared distaste for Robert Bork). I like this passage a lot:
The cure, you see, for the misery of homosexuals in…
October 19, 2004
Much has been made of the decision by Sinclair broadcasting to preempt regular programming to air an anti-Kerry documentary in 25% of the nation just before the election in a couple weeks. Democrats are predictably up in arms about it and want the FCC to step in; Republicans are predictably just…
October 18, 2004
How about this chutzpah...Andrew Sandlin thinks it's horrible what John Kerry did to poor Mary Cheney:
For John Kerry (and earlier, John Edwards) to invoke the lesbianism of Cheney's daughter as a campaign issue when in fact neither she nor the Republicans have made her sexuality an issue of any…
October 18, 2004
Thanks to Jon Rowe for the heads up on the latest screed by Robert Bork. Rowe rightly points out how thankful we should all be that when Bork's nomination was voted down in the Senate, we ended up with Anthony Kennedy on the court instead. In stark contrast to Bork's authoritarian agenda, Kennedy…
October 18, 2004
I've written before about the connection between Jerry Falwell and Reverend Moon, particularly that Moon gave $3.5 million to Falwell to bail out Liberty University from impending bankruptcy in 1995. Now comes an article by Robert Parry that shows that the connection goes even deeper than I knew.…
October 17, 2004
Jon Rowe has an interesting post up about an article by Thomas DiLorenzo. DiLorenzo's article was about a book called Intellectual Morons, by Daniel Flynn. Flynn's book, at least in part, was about the philosophy of Leo Strauss and his followers, the Straussians. The Straussians have been a subject…
October 16, 2004
Today is my 37th birthday, as Lynn's comment on the previous post revealed, so I think I'll take the rest of the day off from my grueling blog work. Besides that, I feel like crap and I keep having coughing fits. Oh well, life is good anyway. Thanks to my readers for sharing their ideas with me…
October 16, 2004
As a follow-up to my last post on threats to free speech from the left, it may be instructive to look at some very disturbing trends going on in our neighbor to the north. Canada has increasingly squashed free speech in the name of protecting minorities from offense. For instance, it is now…
October 15, 2004
Eugene Volokh points out a pretty stunning example of a university violating the free speech rights of students. This sort of thing is not new, of course. Many universities have "hate speech codes" that violate the first amendment in a rather flagrant manner. At a time when a lot of attention is…
October 15, 2004
Here's another religious right leader admitting that "traditional values voters" are so bigoted that they might not vote for Bush solely because his running mate has a gay daughter:
"I think it is part of a strategy to suppress traditional-values voters, to knock 1 or 2 percent off in some rural…
October 15, 2004
Timothy Sandefur says that I "refuse to call a dirty trick a dirty trick when committed by John Kerry", referring of course to all of this outrage over Kerry's mere mention of Mary Cheney's name the other night. Now it must be said that Sandefur does not take the position that so many of the others…
October 15, 2004
Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for catching this article in the National Review Online, containing this quote:
Fox News contributor Mort Kondracke put it best when he said last night, "I think it was totally underhanded -- the outing of Dick Cheney's lesbian daughter.... And it struck me as a low blow…
October 15, 2004
Jason Kuznicki has a couple interesting posts up this morning. The first one explains why he thought Kerry's naming of Mary Cheney was crass. His position is far more reasonable than the nonsense being offered up by the outraged conservatives who have suddenly discovered their need to defend her…
October 15, 2004
It seems that mblog has gone belly-up, so my old blog site is gone. Thankfully, I had exported all of my old posts to a file when I bought this domain. I keep running into a problem importing them, though. It will start importing the old entries, and will do 10, 20 or more of them and then it will…
October 14, 2004
Rusty Lopez has responded - kind of - to my post about the absurdity of the anti-stem cell research position. He seems to have perfected the presuppositional boogie, that curious theological tap dance whereby one never actually engages the position being taken, preferring meta-debate to debate. He…
October 14, 2004
From his second post on the subject of Mary Cheney's name being brought up:
In many speeches on marriage rights, I cite Mary Cheney. Why? Because it exposes the rank hypocrisy of people like president Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney who don't believe gays are anti-family demons but want to win the…
October 14, 2004
For some reason, a lot of people are all upset that John Kerry mentioned Mary Cheney by name when discussing the subject of gay marriage and whether people choose to be gay or not. This boggles my mind, and Andrew Sullivan hits it just right, I think:
I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry's…
October 13, 2004
I was one who hammered the Bush/Cheney campaign pretty hard for not having their daughter Mary or her partner, Heather Poe, on stage with them at the Republican National Convention in New York after Bush's speech. All of the other family members were there, but not them, and it struck me as cruel…
October 13, 2004
Both Rusty at New Covenant and Matt at Wheat and Chaff have posted in the last couple days to bash Christopher Reeve for promoting embryonic stem cell (ESC) research. They say that he is selfish and self-serving for promoting "death" to improve his own position. Matt writes:
Why are these men…
October 12, 2004
What does it mean that I got all the way to the end of this post before finding out it was a satire? Does it say more about me, about how well written it is, or about the commonality of the language that it mimics so effectively?
October 12, 2004
Sandefur has updated his post on my alleged bias, but has continued to oversimplify my position. In fact, I think he is engaging in precisely the kind of false dichotomy that he would recognize immediately were it foisted upon him. In fact, in his follow up he has gone even further than in his…
October 11, 2004
I've often said that the most gratifying thing about blogging is the sense of community that develops, as though each blog is a house in a neighborhood and the neighborhood is full of interesting people. In my blog neighborhood, as I perceive it, there are three houses that have stood out to me…
October 11, 2004
Timothy Sandefur has once again taken me to task, this time about my post concerning the Bush campaign's consistent distortions of things said by John Kerry. It hardly needs to be said that I have enormous respect for Sandefur. Not only do I think he's one of the best bloggers around, I also think…
October 11, 2004
When I came across this article entitled "The 15 Deadly Lies that Christians Swallow", I just had to click on it. In a sane media outlet, those lies would include claims like Darwin's deathbed recantation, or the notion that the earth is only 6000 years old. But since we're dealing with the…