Coates is very quotable, if nothing else

Yeah, I don't think there's anything wrong with condemning the violence; you don't need to be an expert in Iranian politics for that

That all seems very correct --- I'm a social conservative but simply can't bring myself to vote for the GOP.

If by generalization you mean "empirical fact," then sure. And middle/upper-class white people tend to use drugs without involving peripheral crime (if the Wire taught me anything, it's that "the bodies" bring the police).

Well, but I wonder --- the implication was that minority-dominant neighborhoods have more crime (an empirical fact!), not that minorities are inherently inferior, i.e. none of the usual racist tropes. It WOULD have been troubling if he had said that he was walking by three Puerto Rican businessmen in the financial district, or something, and felt threatened; that would be clear racism.

Though speaking of racial tropes, that guy seemed like the 'whitest' person ever. (And Livejournal, really?)

The thing is, I'd be willing to bet a great deal of money that the crime rate in minority-dominant neighborhoods is actually much higher than in an average 'white' neighborhood. Which makes his reaction extremely plausible; it's not racism, it's just a sad truth that a white person has more REASON to feel unsafe. Though this is tangential to your point.

"They give the listener the impression that what follows is a good faith proposal to solve that problem, not some half-assed proposal that’s really intended to advance a broader ideological agenda."

Seriously.

Also Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption.

Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. The greatest work of philosophy or theology ever written (and yes, that includes the Republic, the Summa, etc.)

It's "Marcuse," and what does Klein have to do with the Frankfurt school?

This was the first speech of Obama's that really made me see that he's basically just a hollow rhetorician, and that he'll rarely if ever back any of this up with actions (his actions have thus far tended to be very centrist/establishmentarian). I basically predicted the speech, almost paragraph for paragraph, before he delivered it; he has a standard schtick that's getting quite old. I guess many Republicans saw this months ago, or even back in 2007. And I'm very, very cynical about this speech; tell me how this is going to actually DO anything to convince, or even vaguely BEGIN to convince, a 19-year-old male Iraqi who has a very long list of reasons to hate the West.

How did no one comment on this? Absolutely brilliant; I wish I had something to add, but mostly I just found myself nodding my head.

Megan always seems so intelligent and sharp, to me, and yet there are literally websites entitled "fire Megan McArdle," and basically all of the commenters at Hilzoy were being extremely nasty about her intelligence and so on; this is a common theme among comments at her blog, as well (or at least it has been in the past).

I think there was too much equivocation about what the word 'person' meant (she was not at all clear if this is a legal 'person,' a metaphysical 'person,' an imago Dei 'person', etc.). Also there were way too many phrases like "It cannot seriously be thought ..." and "If anything in the world is true, it is ...", which she then followed with statements that are not, in fact, absurd/obvious, but probably only absurd/obvious to someone with her premises. See esp. the conclusion, where she writes, "Our sense" that a rape victim may "of course" choose abortion; or the last sentence, even, where she says (a propos of nothing, really) that "a very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person." If one of my philosophy undergrads CONCLUDED their essay with that statement, I would have a stern conversation with them, for sure. Or also, on page 54, she mentions a premise about the body being "on loan", as it were (a premise held by many religious folk, obvoiusly) and then says, "But I shall simply ignore this possibility." Basically, her arguments only work if you're operating from the usual background of assumed liberal-democratic-humanist-atheist premises. Without those, sure, it isn't "morally required" (p. 61) to carry a fetus to term; but in Macintyre's phrase: "Whose morality?" (Though whether this morality could or should be codified into 21st century American law is of course a whole other kettle of fish.)

This is not to say that it wasn't a very interesting article; particularly the point about how if a pregnancy only lasted one hour, we would think it indecent for a woman to not give birth to a child that was the product of rape; yet why should the length of the pregnancy really matter?

I really do wonder at people who, in the course of their 20something hipsterish tourism 'experience,' denigrate the "masses" on their "tour buses"; I don't really see how what you're doing is any different (in a sense, it's even worse; you're not experiencing the "real Europe" any more than they are), except that you're incredibly smug about it

lol, good call on putting this in the "Torture" tag

That's the funniest article I've read all week.

It's quite true that Roe v. Wade is further left than the majority opinion.

And, come on, it's not just that Obama SEEMS like a really good rhetorician because we've had W. and Clinton before him; even his opponents (well, Frum or Douthat or other intelligent conservatives) will concede that he's a masterful speaker and genuinely brilliant at dialogue and debate, etc.

I completely agree. I'll just add that the finale re-introduced the metaphysical heft that Douthat complained was lost in S3; it seems that they're going outside scifi tropes entirely, and into something more mythical/religious.

Do more posts like this.

This seems like the most straightforward no-brainer reform imaginable, and I can't figure out why Freddie would be in any way opposed to it

you've got some coding problems there, dude

Quite right.

The Judaic God is interpreted quite differently in the Church Fathers, of course (God isn't actually 'angry,' God doesn't actually change his mind, etc., that these were all imperfect ways of putting the truth which need to be read in a multi-layered way).

You write:

"Traditions have, in some sense, chosen different paths or perhaps different “personally appealing beliefs” over time."

And let me say, that's quite right; different monastic orders with different rules, different political arrangements (from antinomian/proto-anarchist communes to Byzantine empires, etc.), married and unmarried priests, all sorts of things. And yet, those are all trivial and minor. The question of whether two men deciding to commit to each other is to be called "marriage", by Christians, is not minor. I say this not in the sense of a bloviating conservative culture warrior arguing that this is inevitably going to lead to the downfall of society, etc. (it's not), and is thus CALLING it 'not minor' to get more votes, or something. Purely in the delimited sense of theology and the life of the Church and in the sense of something that can be 'changed' or not ... no, of course not. This is not in any sense minor. Marriage, it should be emphasized, is a sacrament (quite literally, for Orthodox and Catholics); it's a sacrament with a very complex and specific theology (as well as nature, 99.9% of human culture, etc.) behind it.

Again, how this translates into the secular/civil sphere is a much more difficult and complex question; I'm ultimately agnostic on this, as no one can really know what societal effect it will have, and the 'rules' of modernity really do imply that I can't (and further, wouldn't want to) tell two gay people what to call their relationship. As long as the Truth is maintained outside of the secular sphere, I don't really care.

Though, generally, it really should be said that I've gone to philosophy conferences where I've heard queer theorists say things like "we need to destroy the hetereosexual family," and "we need to 'queer' American society" (verbatim). It's not completely ridiculous to say that there's a group of people who are militantly opposed to tradition, who hold traditional morality to be immoral, and who are interested in imposing their own morality on others. There really is a homosexual agenda; I've met these people.

Now, with that said, I think it's right to say (as some blogger, either Sullivan or Linker or someone quoted by them, said), there's a big difference between militant homosexuality and two 70-year-old lesbians who want to get married.