How do I know? Facebook told me. This is my opportunity to pay a little tribute to my fellow blogger. Below, Pete writes a post that he begins with “I don’t have the mental energy . . . ” and then he proceeds to prove that even when he doesn’t have his . . . . Continue Reading »
That book series! John Presnall writes about it below. I have something to add to the discussion. I am on the board of our county public library. There was a bit of controversy at a board meeting over this book and the genre called Gray Romance. Yes, it’s selling . . . . Continue Reading »
If American conservatism is inauthentic but intersecting with ideas of postmodernism through a (non-right liberal) distaste for ideology and incredulity toward meta-narratives, then it is useful to consider some of its rhetorical features. The definition of rhetoric will vary because of the diverse . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m delighted to see that Freddie deBoer and Led-the-commenter have delivered excellent pushback on a weak point of my previous post . Their point in brief is that the mere fact that our contingent minds have had remarkable success in explaining the universe so far is no guarantee that they . . . . Continue Reading »
Freddie has written a post that forces me into the odd position of defending Sam Harris; the crux of which is the claim that once we accept the human mind as being a contingent accident of evolution, we necessarily must abandon any faith in the intellectual edifices constructed by such minds: For . . . . Continue Reading »
The Awl points out this interview with Tina Brown . At about 19:40, Brown asks: “Are we building this new sort of subculture frankly of impoverished, living in garret writers? Because the fact is writers can hardly make a living right now because they dont get paid.” Leon . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter’s review of Avatar is a must-read: Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that . . . . Continue Reading »
In thinking through Jean-Francois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition and my position as a conservative Catholic sympathetic to our friends on the Porch, Id like to throw this out there for some opinion. Lyotard (Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as . . . . Continue Reading »
Bryan Wandel has a good blog post here . Short, insightful, and well worth the read. One quibble however: Without accounting for the relationship between these two, Webers demystification (and ours) only regards the logical explanation of things, and not the participation and commitment that . . . . Continue Reading »
Matt Zeitlin should be less surprised by the final sentence of his post (link not suitable for children): Im not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on it authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the . . . . Continue Reading »