From the monthly archives:

December 2001

Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwaanza/Solstice/Newtonmas/Season of Joyful Consumption!

December 18, 2001

Happy Christmas/Hannukah/Kwaanza/Solstice/Newtonmas/Season of Joyful Consumption! – Like Matt Welch, I’m off to the Continent for the Holidays. I’ll be in Berlin, visiting a good friend. I’m looking forward to Christmas in Vetschau, a little burg east of Berlin and New Year’s in Prague. It’ll be my first trip out of North America. And it’s about [...]

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Totalitarian Chic — At the

December 17, 2001

Totalitarian Chic – At the Georgetown Urban Outfitters, for $45 you can get a replica Soviet soccer Jersey — CCCP boldly emblazoned across the breast. For only $45, you can purchase ideological transgression. For just $45, you can have your own faux-vintage wearable protest against hegemonic market culture. Show you’re too cool to care [...]

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Without genetic or cybernetic enhancements

December 16, 2001

Without genetic or cybernetic enhancements to the capacities of the human brain it may be impossible to fully comprehend just how dumb Ted Rall is.

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Living Without Appeal — Re-reading

December 16, 2001

Living Without Appeal – Re-reading my previous post, I was reminded of one of my favorite philsophical passages. It’s from The Myth of Sisyphus, by Albert Camus, and it moves me every time I read it. It’s about living “without appeal.” Very roughly, Camus’ point, as I understand it, is that by remaining almost naively [...]

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In Praise of Crises of

December 16, 2001

In Praise of Crises of Meaning– A common complaint from both left and right is that liberal commercial society creates a crisis of meaning for its denizens. Without the external imposition of expectations and responsibilites, our lives lack a structure within which meaning may emerge. This is supposed to be a problem in need of [...]

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Goldberg has moved on to

December 14, 2001

Goldberg has moved on to a topic proper to his intellect: Is respect for dogs a sign of cultural health? Wow.

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Gillespie Gives Goldberg the Beatdown

December 14, 2001

Gillespie Gives Goldberg the Beatdown — Nick Gillespie’s crisp, smart rebuttal to Jonah Goldberg’s aimless ravings about the dangers of libertarianism demonstrates by contrast the morbid condition of conservative thought and the vitality and robustness of the libertarian program.

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Perry de Havilland of the

December 13, 2001

Perry de Havilland of the Libertarian Samizdata lets Goldberg have it, and sportingly links to The Fly Bottle. And Instapundit mentions us both!

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The Libertarian Defense League v.

December 13, 2001

The Libertarian Defense League v. George Will – George Will bizarrely characterizes libertarianism as “faux conservatism.” Have libertarians ever tried to pass off their ideology as conservative? Are gay marriage, legalized heroin, open markets for prostitution and so forth easily confused for conservatism? Someone please explain this to me.
In any case, the libertarian view is [...]

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More Goldberg Bashing — Goldberg

December 13, 2001

More Goldberg Bashing — Goldberg concludes his essay thus:
Chesterton pointed out that when a man stops believing in God, he won’t believe in nothing, he’ll believe in anything. God isn’t necessarily the issue here. But the principle is the same. Humans, especially children, very much want to believe in things. If we don’t bother to [...]

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Jonah and the Libertines -

December 13, 2001

Jonah and the Libertines – In his recent NRO Column, Jonah Goldberg maintains that “cultural libertarianism” is the great threat to the American Order. Goldberg has long been grinding his anti-libertarian ax, and here he outdoes himself, putting forth Virginia Postrel and Nick Gillespie as symptoms and causes of the relativistic cultural decline that brings [...]

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Instapundit’s Fox News piece on

December 13, 2001

Instapundit’s Fox News piece on academia reminds me of Robert Nozick’s analysis of why intellectuals oppose capitalism. It’s worth reading. So is Matt Welch’s commentary on Instapundit’s piece.

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Sullivan has reconsidered his suggestion

December 12, 2001

Sullivan has reconsidered his suggestion that Johhny Taliban springs from the corrupt mores of those blue Gore-voting states. But he does so not because the suggestion is full-on stupid, but because Mr. Walker is in fact a right-wing extremist. In the end Sullivan holds fast, reasoning that the only authentic rebellion against liberal [...]

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Andrew Sullivan won’t rest until

December 11, 2001

Andrew Sullivan won’t rest until the last liberal is smoked out of its cave! Geesh, was he beaten as a child by hippies? Sullivan near enough gets an intellectual hernia straining to map Johnny Walker/Mike Spann onto the dubious Blue/Red electoral division. It’s really just dumb. Where was Timothy McVeigh from again?
(Upstate New [...]

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Good essay by Claire Wolfe

December 11, 2001

Good essay by Claire Wolfe arguing against national IDs.

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I just now see that

December 11, 2001

I just now see that my previous points echo many made by Andrew Sullivan in his posts about Fisk’s Fisted Face. Well, great minds… (though I don’t have Sullivan’s unstoppable urge to grab each dumb statement by someone on the left and hold it aloft as a representative example of the inner depravity of [...]

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Unlike some, I feel sorry

December 11, 2001

Unlike some, I feel sorry for Robert Fisk for getting the crap kicked out of him. It’s just callous to take pleasure in a man being beaten bloody. And it’s plain repulsive when a generally thoughtful person like Glenn Reynolds calls the beating “well-deserved.” (Tell me it’s just macho bluster, Prof.!)
But it’s repulsive when Fisk [...]

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Apologies for the dead air.

December 10, 2001

Apologies for the dead air. I’ve been a bit busy to blog. Thanks to those of you concerned that I was dead.

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Bad Sex Awards! — The

December 7, 2001

Bad Sex Awards! — The year’s most notably execrable passages of sordid prose. Includes Jonathan Franzen, whose honored passage contains such pungent wonders as
He was kneeling at the feet of his chaise and sniffing its plush minutely, inch by inch, in hopes that some vaginal tang might still be lingering eight weeks after Melissa Paquette [...]

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Man, so close! ——–

December 7, 2001

Man, so close!

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More on Embryo Rights! –

December 6, 2001

More on Embryo Rights! — Instapundit gives a shout out to Bryan Peterson and his new blog, JunkYardBlog, where Bryan laments that anti-cloners are unfairly cast as reactionary laggards, while cloning advocates picture themselves as the rational vanguard. Bryan’s remains agnostic about cloning, but he does have views about the qualifications for Full Moral Standing. [...]

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Thanks to Tony Adragna, Paul

December 6, 2001

Thanks to Tony Adragna, Paul Orwin and Jen Klocke for a most stimulating comment box discussion about my prior post. Pop down and check it out! (Start from the bottom of the comment box and read up.)

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Glenn Reynolds admiringly reproduces this

December 5, 2001

Glenn Reynolds admiringly reproduces this letter to the editor from Sheldon Cohen, a U of Tennessee philosophy prof:
Regarding the declaration by British Liberal Democrat Graham Watson, “Terrorist organizations in one country can be freedom fighters in another,” in a Nov. 27 article:
I have heard this true but inane statement, or a variant, one time too [...]

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Natalie Solent offer the following

December 4, 2001

Natalie Solent offer the following prefatory disclaimer to her post sympathizing with Scientologists for their persecution by the French state:
I have not the slightest belief in L Ron Hubbard’s foolish and occasionally sinister made-up religion of Scientology.
But of course all religions are made up! (Did Mohammed & Joseph Smith really talk to God or [...]

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Thanks to Matt Welch for

December 4, 2001

Thanks to Matt Welch for (1) excerpting my comment about Johnny Taliban and thereby creating a happy spike in my traffic, and (2) calling me handsome. Now, if I could only get a hot French wife like Matt’s!

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