December 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.

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Good essay by Claire Wolfe arguing against national IDs.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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!