From the monthly archives:

April 2002

Come as You Are –

April 30, 2002

Come as You Are — Fourth Annual Masurbate-A-Thon.
Sometimes I’m especially proud to be half-Canadian.

Middies & Johnnies, Oh My! — Because Mollie Ziegler has commanded it, I’m making note of Saturday’s St. John’s College/U.S. Naval Academy annual croquet match at the St. John’s campus in Annapolis, the quaint seaside capital of the ironically nicknamed “Free State.” The event is singular and must be experienced to be fully appreciated. For [...]

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Killing the Intellectuals — If

April 30, 2002

Killing the Intellectuals — If you’re a new tyrant, what’s up near the top of your to-do list? Kill the wordsmiths! Kill the artists! Kill the musicians! Or at least, shut them up or ship them out. Why is that? Because political reality is a kind of social reality. Tyrants have guns, and guns can [...]

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My New Man-Crush — I’ve

April 22, 2002

My New Man-Crush — I’ve recently discovered that I have an intellectual crush on Christopher Hitchens. I can think of no active intellectual so free of cant and dogma, and so driven by intellectual honesty. And his prose kills. Here’s a good bit, from The Nation. Spot on, too. This takes off from a [...]

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The Repugnance of “Repugnance” –

April 18, 2002

The Repugnance of “Repugnance” – We’re all now wearily familiar with Leon Kass’s “wisdom of repugnance” arguments. I want to point out a class of cases in which these arguments (if we’re charitable enough to consider them arguments) commit the fallacy of begging the question, that is, of using the conclusion as a premise in [...]

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Posthuman Blues — I haven’t

April 17, 2002

Posthuman Blues — I haven’t read Francis Fukuyama’s new book, Our Posthuman Future, but I did get a chance to chat with the man himself a couple weeks back in St Louis. While I don’t agree with him on most counts, I respect the fact that he didn’t resort to table thumping “repugnance” assertions about [...]

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Telos Schmelos — All this

April 17, 2002

Telos Schmelos — All this talk about embryos is frustrating. It’s frustrating because there’s little middle ground between ‘lump of cells’ talk and ‘person’ talk. There’s little middle ground because there’s little middle ground between reality and fantasy. There’s really no getting through, is there? The “it’s a person because it’s a potential person” argument [...]

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Who’s Afraid of the Bourgeoise?

April 14, 2002

Who’s Afraid of the Bourgeoise? — The anti-American Jew-haters, that’s who. Insightful essay by David Brooks. (Thanks to Farsam for the last two links.)

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