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stcynic | August 20, 2004By the way, Dispatches from the Culture Wars will soon be moving. I have registered the domain name stcynic.com and will be putting up a webpage there this weekend. My hope is to make this into more than just a blog, I also have a lot of other content in mind for the future. But in the meantime, I hope to have my blog itself moved over there after this weekend (wish me luck installing everything correctly and if any of you are MT pros, let me know so I can send cries for help in your general direction should I get stuck). Stay tuned.
stcynic | August 20, 2004Jon Rowe has written an absolute must-read essay on our favorite intrepid campaigner, Alan Keyes, and our favorite nihilist-who-sounds-like-a-fundamentalist philosopher, Allan Bloom. I was not aware until I read it that Keyes was the person that Bloom was referring to in his book The Closing of the American Mind, when he told the story of a black student at Cornell who had been threatened by radical black students and the administration would do nothing about it. In fact, other than the fact that they both are social conservatives, I had no idea that Keyes was a student of Bloom at all. As…
stcynic | August 17, 2004Timothy has a post addressed to me, in reply to my post yesterday. He makes two arguments. First, he argues that the crimes of communist thugs were often understated and the crimes of anti-communist thugs often overstated. No argument from me on that one. I absolutely agree, and for the record I am not one of those people who downplays the abuses of communism. However, I think it's just a little too simple to say "our thugs were better than their thugs". The history is a lot more complex than that, and my argument is that we often created the problem we were responding to. For instance,…
stcynic | August 17, 2004One of the truly valuable voices in the world on military issues belongs to David Hackworth. Hack is one of our most highly decorated military veterans, from his days as an underage merchant marine at the end of World War II through Korea, where he was the youngest captain in the Army, and Vietnam, where he was the Army's youngest colonel. In 1971, having spent 5 years in combat in Vietnam, Hack returned to the US and, as an active senior military officer, publicly told the truth about that war - that it was a war we could not win and it was time to get out. Since that time, he has been a war…
stcynic | August 16, 2004Timothy Sandefur has started a campaign to encourage people to donate to an organization that wants to put up a Victims of Communism memorial. Yesterday he wrote an essay on why communist systems lead to repression and barbarism, which I find mostly quite accurate. I think he's slightly off on his initial premise:I suspect the biggest obstacle that the Victims of Communism Memorial faces is the sympathy for communism that is so startlingly common in the United States. Terrified of being labeled a McCarthyite, many people refuse to acknowledge the fact that there is a great deal of lingering…
stcynic | August 16, 2004There has been much discussion and contemplation this weekend about the direction this blog has taken lately, and I'm going to attempt to change the course a bit. Not a total overhaul, but perhaps a change in tone. Lately I have been focusing a lot on outright mockery of the truly stupid or deluded. There was no ulterior motive for doing so, the reality is simply that I find people who believe patently ridiculous things to be fascinating. Despite my cynicism, I still continue to be astonished that people can say things in public that are so illogical or contrary to the evidence that even a 9…
stcynic | August 13, 2004This morning, I was thinking that perhaps I should cut back on bashing people who are so obviously moronic that it's not sound sport to even bother with it. Then I came across the cretinous Joseph Grant Swank's latest bit of utter idiocy:The APA has stated to media that homosexual lifestyle is normal. It used to be considered abnormal, in need of psychological assistance. Now all its in need of via the APA is protection from the heterosexuals who keep upping the anxiety quotients of those into sodomy.
When the APA came out recently with practicing sodomy being okay, then that opened the door…
stcynic | August 12, 2004Craige McMillan, the WorldNutDaily's uber-moron, has finally sunk to about as low as you can get to score political points. Just gaze at this unbelievable statement:Many conservatives worry that the Democratic Party is nothing more than a loose-knit collection of social extremists intent on moving their particular agenda out into the mainstream, regardless of the cost to the rest of us. And at the top of that list is homosexuality. Conservatives see the Catholic Church facing bankruptcy and ruin because homosexuals infiltrated the seminaries and recruited their boy-lovers as students into the…
stcynic | August 12, 2004On a lower post, Jen Shroder seems to think that I've blocked her from commenting. She's wrong.Ed, why does it appear that I'm blocked from an Aug 11 page where you make a lot of ridiculous claims?
I have no idea, but it's not true. It's not possible to block someone from commenting only on one specific post without blocking the comments on that post completely. The comments are open. But I have no idea what you're referring to, since the only thing I posted on August 11th was about the Worldnutdaily and Reverend Moon.I don't have time to really go over all of your claims, but a huge faux pas…
stcynic | August 9, 2004For some reason, Mr. Powell just cannot let our exchange end without ducking back into the punch one last time. His latest post on it combines incessant whining with precisely the kind of arrogant presumptuousness that he accuses me of:Ed Brayton from Dispatches from the Culture Wars is a very intelligent person. He debated me fiercely, refused to see any of my points, and had lengthy refutations for every one of my posts. After a certain point, I'd give up, at which point Ed would goad me into another confrontation where he would do the same thing. He tied me up in knots and deflected what I…
stcynic | August 6, 2004In our continuing exchange with Jen Shroder, a former Idiot of the Week award winner, I want to bring up another discussion from a comment thread below. In that thread, totally unrelated to anything so I have no idea why she brought it up, she said:Did you know that African Americans and Jews are by FAR the most persecuted groups according to FBI statistics? Gays are a distant third. So where are all the pro African-American and Jewish toleration courses? There aren't any. Because it's not about tolerance. It's about recruitment of the gay community.
Jon Rowe then responded to her statement…
stcynic | August 6, 2004I'm moving this exchange up to its own posting because I don't want it to get lost amid the more recent articles. We first encountered Jen Shroder when her colleague Tamara Wilhite was awarded the Idiot of the Week prize a few weeks ago. I found an incredibly stupid article by Wilhite on a site called bushcountry.org that actually said that the terrorists will bomb us because of gay marriage, then while looking through that site came across an even more ridiculous article by Shroder, that included such staggering statements as:"Pluralism" is a hate religion dedicated to eradicating the…
stcynic | August 5, 2004Jason at Positive Liberty has a post up about Missouri passing an amendment to their state constitution to outlaw gay marriage. Missouri had already passed a state law against gay marriage a few years ago, but apparently they figured they better shoot the corpse again to make sure it was dead. Jason includes this one stunning quote from a gay marriage opponent in Missouri:Here in the heartland we have a heart for families, and this is how deeply we feel about marriage.
He rightly points out the obvious hypocrisy of that statement, and the dishonest use of the word "family". I've noted before…
stcynic | August 4, 2004Happy Anniversary to Timothy Sandefur and his lovely girlfriend, Erin. Nice to see I'm not the only one who gets all mushy and sappy despite my reputation for sober and cynical thinking. It happens to the best of us, ya know. Even HL Mencken, the uber-cynic who once defined love as "the delusion that one woman differs from another", fell in love with Sara Haardt, courted her for 7 years and married at the age of 50. All men eventually fall before the charm and power of women, of course, but you could at least have tried to hold out until you hit 30, Timothy!
stcynic | August 3, 2004It seems that Tamara Wilhite and Jen Shroder are in good company over at bushcountry.org. Let's take a look at another columnist there, Joseph Grant Swank. He writes not only for bushcountry.org but also for the amusingly named intellectualconservative.com that allows the uber-idiot Bob Meyer to write for them, for the Chalcedon Report, the absolutely frightening Christian Reconstructionist journal, and for the entirely appropriate thevillageidiot.com. On August 2nd, Swank wrote this column, throwing a fit because an atheist was allowed to deliver an opening invocation at the start of a Tampa…
stcynic | August 3, 2004I am jealous beyond belief of Timothy Sandefur right now, after reading his report on seeing Eric Clapton at the Hollywood Bowl this weekend. I've seen Clapton only once, in 1990, but it was one of the best concerts I've ever seen. No opening act, but the concert still lasted nearly 3 and a half hours. And even after that long, we were still able to pick out a dozen big songs he hadn't played, which is testament to the duration and quality of his career.
Timothy reports that Robert Randolph was the opening act for this show. If you haven't heard this guy, you need to. I've been saying for a…
stcynic | July 30, 2004Anyone know what language this is? Maybe Finnish? Is there a Finnish language?
He seems to be quite enthusiastic about my blog, having linked to about a dozen articles. But anyone have any idea what it says?
stcynic | July 29, 2004I was reading Timothy Sandefur's blog and saw a thank you to another blog, No Blog Here, that has begun linking to him. Followed the link and found out that this same person is linking to me as well, along with Jon Rowe, Will Wilkinson and Crooked Timber. And he's from Michigan, even if he is a *spit* Wolverine. Seems like a good guy. Philosophy grad and active in Big Brothers/Big Sisters - gotta love that. So in honor of his excellent taste in blogs (the other 4 are great choices and regular stops of mine as well), I hereby command you all to go forth and visit his blog as well.
stcynic | July 28, 2004My many thanks to Jon Rowe and Timothy Sandefur for taking the time to answer my inquiry about Leo Strauss. After seeing multiple references to Leo Strauss, the late and famous political philosopher from UChicago, I became interested in his work and those he influenced. I knew that both of them had some background with students and followers of Strauss, particularly Timothy, who was (is?) a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, the homebase of the "Western Straussians", so I sent an email asking them if they would take the time to give me some history and background on Strauss and his…
stcynic | July 27, 2004A few days ago, I wrote a strongly worded but entirely accurate critique of an absolutely abysmal article by Robert Meyer. I pointed out that every single claim he made about Gould's views on evolution was not only false, but exactly the opposite of what Gould actually believed. That led to an email exchange with Mr. Meyer, which I posted previously, in which he didn't bother to even address the criticisms I made of the falsehoods he perpetrated in his article. Now I'd like to post the e-mail exchange I had with Mr. Gardinier, beginning with the comment he left on the previous thread and my…