Austin Stone

Some scientists think we should expand the definition of ‘person’ to include chimps: "As a population of West African chimpanzees in the Ivory Coast that just two decades ago numbered 10,000 and accounted for half of the world’s population dwindles to just a few thousand, . . . . Continue Reading »

Loyalty is immoral ? Color me skeptical. Without further ado, here’s the avalanche of questions that come to mind upon reading Helen’s post: First question: "Loyalty is immoral—I won’t bother trying to deny it. Morality is universal and objective; loyalties are . . . . Continue Reading »

I’ve enjoyed exploring the nooks and crannies of James’s sprawling post , but there’s one thread of it I’d like to pick up—the one having to do with loyalty ( unsurprisingly ). It may strain my vernacular blogging style to take up such an unabashedly theoretical . . . . Continue Reading »

And an open soul.  I have just read through the first chapter (on "Glaucon’s Republic") of the amiable Prof. Ranasinghe’s brilliant, challenging, and edifying The Soul of Socrates (Cornell 2000).  (Well, it’s not new is it, but it is new to me, and maybe to . . . . Continue Reading »

So this is my ‘much-anticipated’ rejoinder to Freddie . The best way I know how to do this is like sewing a button. I want to sew Freddie to my fabric of understanding (but not so close that he, the button, is too tight to the fabric to be usable as a button!). The back of that fabric, . . . . Continue Reading »

This is an unusual month — polls, pols and so on. But this is an unusual paragraph too. How quickly can you find out what is so uncommon about it? It looks so ordinary that you may think nothing is odd about it, until you actually match it against most paragraphs this long. If you put your . . . . Continue Reading »

The problem with constructing a manifesto for postmodern conservatism is that principles, once propositionally articulated, have a way of organically untethering themselves from the experience out of which they were borne. So we idealize generalizations from our lived and pre-theoretical experience . . . . Continue Reading »

I should start off by confessing that this post isn’t at all topical, except insofar as Freddie has challenged the Pomocon stable to explain why postmodern conservative doesn’t just mean "a conservative who should know better" ( TM ). So, with that half-hearted . . . . Continue Reading »

Justin "Sandbox" Hart has written a diary accusing me and my fellow PoMoConers of hanging out in cloud-cuckoo land and thinking when we should be, like, leading GOTV efforts and . . . stuff. This makes complete sense, because as we all know the modern conservative movement is totally . . . . Continue Reading »

Freddie DeBoer, PoMoCon commenter extraordinaire, has fired a broadside in our direction . James is working on a response . I’m getting ready to do the same. Nicola has penned a snarky rebuttal . Eve rebutted this long ago . Here’s hoping that this heats up. . . . . Continue Reading »