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stcynic | October 25, 2004Our old pal, Rev. Andrew Sandlin, is participating in a debate with David VanDrunen on "the role of God's law in society". His opening statement can be found here, and it sums up perfectly how he and his fellow Christian Reconstructionists think. Some people find it incredible that there are people who actually want to pass laws that stone adulterers, witches and homosexuals; but these people do. First, he explains which portions of the Mosaic Law still apply today in his theological system:
In addressing social and civil ethics, we do tend to focus on the Mosaic legislation because it…
stcynic | October 25, 2004Fascinating post by Jon Rowe about Catholics and natural law, based on a conference he attended recently. He points out the odd fact that Catholic thinkers tend to be more in line with the natural law philosophy of the founders because they have embraced philosophy and reason far more than their Protestant counterparts. That's not terribly surprising, given the Catholic tradition embodied by Aquinas that one could infer the truth of Christianity from reason alone. However, those same Catholic thinkers can then advocate, for instance, harsh anti-sodomy laws, which are inconsistent with the…
stcynic | October 24, 2004I finally managed to get all of my old blog entries moved over here, along with all of the old comments as well. The internal links are not correct, of course, and I'm not gonna go through 500 entries to fix them all. The search function should work for that if someone really wants to find an old post. But now at least I can refer back to my own previous posts and link to them. The old entries will also look a little funny. For some reason, if I don't use the actual paragraph tags (which I never needed before), it changes the spacing of the paragraph immediately following a blockquote. And…
stcynic | October 23, 2004Kevin Keith has written an absolutely devestating fisking of Phillip Johnson's latest bit of nonsense. In addition to being the Grand Poobah of the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson is also on the lunatic fringes of the AIDS issue (though as a law professor, he is profoundly ignorant of both subjects and therefore makes extremely silly errors of reasoning when discussing them). It's the standard Johnson screed. I think he just takes the same article and changes the enemy du jour from "the Darwinian establishment" to "the HIV establishment" or "the AIDS establishment". Phil Johnson is…
stcynic | October 22, 2004One of the most irritating things to me about the shallow patriotism that is so pervasive in America, especially these days, is the notion that refusing a military draft is intrinsically a bad thing. We hear it all the time in regard to those who refused to go to Vietnam, despite the fact that most people will agree that the war itself, was a monumental mistake. The only way this position would be credible is if one believes that each citizen has a duty to kill or die when their government orders them to, regardless of whether that order is a just one. But there is a fundamental problem at…
stcynic | October 22, 2004Happy Birthday, Earth!
Yes, folks, today is the Earth's 6000th birthday, according to the famous Bishop Ussher. In 1650, he famously calculated the age of the Earth using the biblical timeline based upon the ages at which various people were begat and came up with October 22nd, 4004 BC. At around 6 pm. Technically, the 6000th birthday was actually in 1997, owing to odd lineups in various calenders, but such pedantry would just ruin a good party.
She looks pretty good for 6000, don't you think? A little bigger around the equator, perhaps. The smog has made her a little more gray around the…
stcynic | October 22, 2004First 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.
stcynic | October 22, 2004So 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 chaps over his Wranglers, something heretofore exclusive to only gay bars or biker bars. They do comedy there one night a week, and it draws a pretty good crowd, but the rest of the time they have a band that plays there and all of their equipment is still on the stage. That left the comics with a…
stcynic | October 21, 2004Tachyix 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 because I just didn't want it badly enough to keep working at it. So my first bit of advice is this - you either have to commit to it all the way, and have a real passion for it, or don't bother trying. And that's good advice primarily because the life of a comic, until you become a big name star, is…
stcynic | October 20, 2004I 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 to tell me that another old friend of ours, Ted Norkey, is going to be there as well. Now I doubt any of you have heard of Ted Norkey, but I assure you that Ted is the funniest comedian you've never heard of. A genius, and I don't throw that term around lightly when it comes to comedians. The bad…
stcynic | October 20, 2004Much 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 deeply involved in the situation have been coming out lately and admitting that the administration was caught completely off guard by the strength of the guerilla insurgency that we're facing in Iraq. The latest to do so was Jay Garner, the man Bush picked to oversee the Iraqi occupation before Paul…
stcynic | October 18, 2004How 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 kind is worse than a punch below the belt.
It is, as Mortom Kondracke implied, despicable politics. Kerry and Edwards should be ashamed.
Folks, Andrew Sandlin is a Christian Reconstructionist, for crying out loud. If he was in control of government, he would stone Mary Cheney to death. And yet…
stcynic | October 17, 2004Jon 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 of much discussion and posting between myself, Rowe, and Timothy Sandefur (who was a scholar at the Claremont Institute, home of the West Coast Straussians, but is not a Straussian himself). Flynn is himself a conservative, and so are the various followers of Strauss, but there are some major…
stcynic | October 16, 2004Today 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 over the last year and to Lynn for bringing me so much joy.
Postscript: Of all the strange coincidences....today is also Timothy Sandefur's birthday. I had no idea. Happy Birthday, Mr. Sandefur. I went to school with a girl who was born on the exact same day I was, about 2 hours apart both in time and…
stcynic | October 15, 2004Here'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 areas by causing people to turn on the president," said Gary Bauer, a conservative Christian who ran for president four years ago.
Do they not realize what their words mean? Are they really that stupid? Or don't they care?
stcynic | October 15, 2004Timothy 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 I've been criticizing take on the matter. He doesn't engage my arguments for why I think it was fine, and he doesn't really spell out why he thinks it's a dirty trick. It's just sort of left as a self-evident assertion. He simply says it is a dirty trick "to mention on world-wide television the…
stcynic | October 15, 2004Jason 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 against the mere mention of her name while simultaneously supporting policies and positions that demean her life. I can certainly understand the argument that it was unnecessary to mention her by name, and the argument that he should not have tried to speak on her behalf. Those are reasonable…
stcynic | October 15, 2004It 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 suddenly give me an error message that says the mySQL database is gone. But of course it's not gone, it's still there. So I'm stumped by it. I have two choices. I can continue to import the files 10 or 20 at a time, then going back and editing the exported entries file to take out the ones that got…
stcynic | October 14, 2004Rusty 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 never addresses, or even attempts to address, any of the factual claims I made. For instance, I argued that since the leftover blastocysts from IVF would be destroyed anyway, not allowing stem cell research does not, in fact, save a single life. But it does, of course, have a great potential to cost…
stcynic | October 13, 2004I 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 to exclude them and quite symbolic of the administration's anti-gay policies. Given that criticism, I should at least give credit where credit is due and note that both Mary and Heather were on stage and on camera following the Vice Presidential debate last week. I'm sure the Cheney family went…