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stcynic | September 21, 2004The other day I took a couple of shots at a ridiculous article by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler concerning Meyer 2004. Consider that the opening act. PZ Myers puts Mohler's screed through a shredder, then lights it on fire and buries the ashes. Anyone who still wants to defend that bunch of nonsense....good luck.
stcynic | September 21, 2004I don't often cite Joe Carter's writings at Evangelical Outpost favorably, but I have to give credit where credit is due. His post condemning Jimmy Swaggart's vile statement about killing homosexuals is dead on the mark. Swaggart said on a recent broadcast:
I'm trying to find the correct name for it . . . this utter absolute, asinine, idiotic stupidity of men marrying men. . . . I've never seen a man in my life I wanted to marry. And I'm gonna be blunt and plain; if one ever looks at me like that, I'm gonna kill him and tell God he died.
Joe Carter responds:
I wish I could honestly say that…
stcynic | September 20, 2004I sure hope that Robert Novak is wrong about this:
Whether Bush or Kerry is elected, the president or president-elect will have to sit down immediately with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military will tell the election winner there are insufficient U.S. forces in Iraq to wage effective war. That leaves three realistic options: Increase overall U.S. military strength to reinforce Iraq, stay with the present strength to continue the war, or get out.
Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush's decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his…
stcynic | September 20, 2004Despite the fact that the first thing he did upon returning from his weekend getaway was bust my chops for my take on the Dan Rather fake memo story (LOL), I'd like to congratulate Timothy Sandefur both on his award from the Clarement Institute and on the recent publication of his article about the Declaration of Independence in Constitutional interpretation in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was kind enough to send me a copy of that article, and I give it a big thumbs up. I hope it will be available online at some point so that you can all benefit from his insights into a…
stcynic | September 17, 2004Okay, I'm back in the office and I just had to join in the chorus against one Alec Rawls. I first encountered him when Brian Leiter wrote about his screed against Eric Muller's debunking of Michelle Malkin's book on Japanese internment camps during WW2. Then PZ Myers posted some of his absolutely ridiculous (not to mention misogynistic and sexist beyond belief) ruminations on evolutionary psychology. Just look at this bit of mental dystrophy:
European males and females both see the world in the instinctive female way, as the Spanish displayed last month. By choosing not to fight for their…
stcynic | September 17, 2004Okay, since I'm sitting here waiting for a fax to go through before I can leave, and since I'll be writing nothing of much substance today, I urge you all to go immediately to Positive Liberty and read this post about the reformation, the enlightenment and the fusing of tolerance with Christianity. Though it was prompted by a slightly misstated question I had asked in a previous post, I agree with it entirely, and I'll probably have more to add to the subject myself when I get the chance.
stcynic | September 17, 2004I'm going to be out of the office for the next several hours, so I've turned off comment moderation. If I get spammed, I'll delete them when I get back. Have a good day everyone.
stcynic | September 14, 2004Jason Kuznicki's Positive Liberty has rapidly become one of the must-read blogs on the web. Jason is in the process of finishing his PhD in history at Johns Hopkins, and is probably the only person any of us is likely to know to have turned down a Fulbright scholarship. His writing is clear and lucid, informed by a wealth of knowledge in a wide range of subjects, and he seems entirely unconstrained by our expectations of what he should think or say on a subject.
His latest post is a review of Carmen bin Laden's book Inside the Kingdom, a book I look forward to reading myself. Carmen was the…
stcynic | September 13, 2004Please go read this delightful reflection from Joseph Duemer after a day of repotting his baby bonsai trees. I love this finish:
For all my political consciousness, I remain located in an essentially aesthetic space. But I do not make the mistake of setting the aesthetic above the social, political & historical spaces from which others write & speak. Others speak from other places & it is the totality of speaking that constitutes human Being. Clearly, these "spaces" or perspectives do not exclude each other & in fact intersect in complex ways; but speaking for myself only, I…
stcynic | September 13, 2004I am one of those who has said many times that the larger context of the war on terrorism is that of a crucial internal battle within Islam, a battle that puts the US, and western ideals, in the crossfire. Ultimately, the battle to defeat the Bin Ladens of the world must be fought primarily by his fellow Muslims and I believe it is very important for the US to build ties to the voices of sanity within Islam and strengthen their hand as much as we can. We must redraw the lines of battle, redefine the dichotomies, so the battle is not between Islam and the west, but between decent and peaceful…
stcynic | September 1, 2004I've only just been introduced to her, from a mention of her in a Christopher Hitchens article, but this could really be fascinating. Azar Nafisi is an Iranian expatriate who teaches literature at Johns Hopkins University. She was teaching in Iran at the time of the revolution in 1979, and had high hopes for the revolution as she hated the Shah. Alas, the Ayatollahs were not to take too kindly to educated women working outside the home. She was fired for refusing to wear a veil. She ended up teaching clandestine classes in her home to young Iranian women, introducing them to literature and…
stcynic | September 1, 2004Jon Rowe says Queen rocks. Timothy Sandefur says Queen sucks. Allow me to cast my vote strongly with Mr. Sandefur - Queen sucks. Not for the same reasons, mind you. I'm with Jon in liking a lot of prog/art rock, and while I also really like most of the bands that Timothy likes (though I never really cared for CCR), it's not because I demand that there be "no fanciness". I can equally enjoy simple music (I'm a huge blues fan) and complex music (I would love to have been with Jon to see Yes and Dream Theater at the Borgata). But Queen is simply the most annoying band in history, in my view. Yes…
stcynic | September 1, 2004I've been a fan of Jason Kuznicki's blog for quite some time now, as should be obvious. But I had never read the essay Without Pain or Fear or Guilt, an essay he wrote about his coming out of the closet, until today, when Lynn pointed it out to me and suggested I read it. My reaction upon reading it was just, "Wow". I challenge even the most hardened homophobe to read that essay and not be moved by it. I have been asked a few times why I, as a straight man, argue so passionately for gay rights. Jason nails the answer perfectly:Properly speaking, there is no such thing as "gay rights." There…
stcynic | August 30, 2004Lynn just sent me an interesting article on a situation at Black Hawk College involving academic freedom. I recalled seeing a headline on Worldnutdaily about it, but didn't bother reading it until I saw this followup article. Here's the situation, as the Worldnutdaily describes it:
LeBlanc reportedly revealed two blackboards at the front of his class, with the F-word written on the left one and "God" written on the right one.
"I don't even remember what went on for the rest of the class," Stotler told the Dispatch, saying he was too upset to pay further attention.
LeBlanc is Bruce LeBlanc, a…
stcynic | August 28, 2004Reacting to my post yesterday about Lincoln suspending habeas corpus and trying to arrest Chief Justice Roger Taney, Timothy Sandefur writes:
Still, I can't help but wonder why there's always so much talk about Lincoln's or the Union's violations of civil rights during wartime. (Often examples are given which were not done on Lincoln's orders or even with his permission, but by generals in the field, whose orders were sometimes overruled by Lincoln.) You rarely see an article talking about how the Confederacy violated people's rights to dissent and so forth. Why is that? Now, perhaps it…
stcynic | August 27, 2004All of a sudden I'm getting a bunch of hits from snopes.com, the site that debunks urban legends. But the referral page is the bulletin board/forum and I can't find anywhere in the forum that I'm mentioned. So one of you people who linked to here from snopes.com, leave me a comment and tell me where and why I was mentioned there on the bulletin board and what it's about. Thanks!
stcynic | August 26, 2004ACLJ says:
The term "Equal Access" is also used more specifically to refer to the nondiscriminatory use of public school facilities. The Equal Access Act, passed by Congress in 1984, provides that when a public school district gives students an opportunity to form extracurricular clubs that meet on school grounds, that it may not refuse such an opportunity to Bible or Christian fellowship clubs.
Unfortunately, many liberal advocacy groups, such as the ACLU and People United for Separation of Church and State, argue that the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment requires the government…
stcynic | August 24, 2004The charm of democracy, as HL Mencken noted so long ago, is that it is the only truly amusing form of government ever invented. Unlike Mencken, however, I can't feel only joy and mirth when watching how ridiculous our entire political system is. That great American democracy that we're always talking about amounts to this:
Rich men (the candidates) sell themselves to Richer Men (CEOs and other corporate fatcats), promising to pass laws that will make them even richer and more powerful. The Richer Men, knowing a profitable relationship when they see it, promise to fund the efforts of the Rich…
stcynic | August 23, 2004Until the typekey issue is sorted out, I've turned off comment moderation. I figure this is probably too new to attract the comment spammers anyway. I'm also having difficulty installing mt-blacklist, so any of you bloggers out there who have the new blacklist installed (version 2.0e, not the old 1.65 that only works with MT 2.x), help would be appreciated.
My friend Reed Cartwright of De Rerum Natura figured out that weird problem I was having with the paragraphs after a blockquote appearing double spaced. Turns out it wasn't a stylesheet problem, it was my problem - apparently you have to…
stcynic | August 22, 2004If you're reading this, you obviously got the message from my old blog and followed the link. This is the permanent home of Dispatches from the Culture Wars. A lot more content is planned for the main page, but that will take some time to get going the way I want to. As you can see, I pasted the last few entries from my old blog over here, just so we'd have some content here to test out the layout. A couple of notes on the new blog:
I strongly recommend that, if you have not already, you all go out and get a Typekey account. Typekey was set up specifically to work with blogs that are made…