I previously wrote a rather lengthy post on why statist societies are brittle. Is there a solution to this problem? The easiest solution is to simply propose the opposite extreme —total anarchy. In fact, this is what many people do propose, in the form of libertarianism. It’s always easy to jump from one extreme to another, from absolute government control over every aspect of our lives to absolutely no control over our lives. The problem is that this won’t work, either; history shows us no time in which people have lived without peace and without government. The only time [...]
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American culture is, one way or another, business culture, and our business is service. Once we were a great industrial nation. Now we are a service economy. Which means we are forced to interact with each other, every day, in person and by phone and email. And it’s making us all a little mad. I’m not sure we’ve fully noted the social implications of the shift from industry to service. We used to make machines! And steel! But now we’re always in touch, in negotiation. We interact so much, we wear each other down. We wear away the superego [...] Yet Leanne Foster, whose position puts her in the daily orbit of the age-old divide between teenage girls and their mothers, is not as sanguine as her daughter about female equality. She sees a unique generation gap emerging: on one side, mothers who came of age during the women’s movement of the 1970s fighting for equal opportunities, “empowerment” through financial independence and rejecting female “objectification”; on the other, their daughters, raised in a hyper-sexualized culture replete with Bratz dolls, porn-inspired American Apparel ads, and the message telegraphed by Kim Kardashian and her tabloid-cover cohorts that a leaked sex tape [...] Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians. But that is the nature of the ruling (you can read it all here). It isn’t a ruling on law, it is an assertion that the position of the gay rights movement is the one and only correct opinion, and everyone opposed is wicked. If you go through the ruling, it is clearly asserted that whatever does not go the way gay rights advocates wish is the result of a horrific conspiracy of evil religions. And, furthermore, those who oppose gay [...] There is a video on YouTube of an 8 year old girl imitating Lady Gaga in a talent competition. I’m not going to embed it here, because it’s not something you really need to see; you can imagine how bad this is without actually seeing it. What I find interesting about this specific video is the reaction among some of those in the world when they see this video. You’re overreacting, I told myself. But watching that little child’s half-naked body contort and gyrate and crawl on the floor, her sweet little face disguised as a grown up lady [...] When an oil worker told investigators on July 23 that an alarm to warn of explosive gas on the Transocean rig in the Gulf of Mexico had been intentionally disabled months before, it struck many people as reckless. Reckless, maybe, but not unusual. On Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board said that a crash last year on the Washington subway system that killed nine people had happened partly because train dispatchers had been ignoring 9,000 alarms per week. Air traffic controllers, nuclear plant operators, nurses in intensive-care units and others do the same. Mark R. Rosekind, a psychologist who [...] The Christian life is just a bunch of rules. It’s not about joy, or being happy, it’s just all about not doing things that keep God from being happy with you. Who wants to give up things that will make you happy? Isn’t my happiness important? Who wants to get caught up in all of God’s red tape? I’ve heard this sort of thing expressed a number of times; the Christian life is a life without joy, or without happiness. Who wants the life of a Christian? When you start to feel pulled into it, the instant reaction is [...] The historic truth, whether or not one wants to acknowledge it is that, from the moment Mohamed began articulating his faith, it was inextricably intertwined with conquest. For that reason, Islam, as a faith, cares not whether the people brought within its fold actually believe the faith. It is enough that, having come under the control of an Islamic government (and do remember that mosque and government are one and the same) they follow its forms. This is why Islam, as a religion, is entirely comfortable with and, indeed, encourages, both forced conversions and the death penalty for apostates. [...] |
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