McChrystal The Torturer

I have never liked General McChrystal being allowed to run our Afghanistan operations.  Long before his current foolish comments in Rolling Stone that have gotten him fired and replaced by General Petraeus, he should have been brought up on charges of war crimes: “Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel. ‘Will [the Red Cross] […]

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On The “Compassion” In The Catholic Bishops’ Letter To Congress Against Gay Rights

Recently, United States bishops petitioned Congress to not protect gays from being fired for their sexual orientation.  Andrew Sullivan already precisely attacked the bishops’ immoral political calculation by which they explicitly committed themselves to a perverse moral contradiction whereby they simultaneously concede that homosexuality is to a significant extent not a choice and argue that […]

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Cults Of Inerrant Leaders

Glenn Greenwald summarizes an atrocity of institutionalized injustice, whereby the executive branch of the United States has the power to abduct and torture innocent people with impunity: The Supreme Court today denied a petition of review from Maher Arar, the Canadian and Syrian citizen who was abducted by the U.S. Government at a stopover at JFK Airport when returning […]

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Bill Maher Teases Andrew Sullivan Over His Sarah Palin Fixation

As a huge Daily Dish fan, I loved this: Your Thoughts?

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U.S. Bishops Argue Employers Should Be Allowed To Consider Being Gay A Fireable Offense

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote a letter addressed to the United States Congress people opposing ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act For the sake of clarity, permit us first to state two basic tenets of Catholic Church teaching on this issue. First, persons with a homosexual inclination “must be accepted with respect, compassion, […]

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Maggie Gallagher Gloats About Maine

Here’s what she said and below it there’s the scathing, harsh satire of it that expresses what what she stands for really means to the lives of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters.  I found I needed a strong stomach for both videos but for opposite reasons.  The truth in the satire, as incendiarily nasty […]

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Philosophical Ethics: Can We Uphold Both A Moral Law And A Principle That We Should Break It?

In a series of posts this semester, I am going to blog all (or almost all) the lecture topics for the two Philosophical Ethics classes I am teaching this semester. Each of these posts will primarily explicate the reading or a theme that dominated class discussion in a way that should be accessible to novices […]

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Smug Atheists?

Andrew Sullivan, whose blogging I usually admire and emulate a great deal as he’s really my blogging hero, had an astoundingly nasty post about the fact that atheists dared to meet up together to listen to Daniel Dennett mock the emptiness of apophatic theological gobbledygook last weekend. They’re really charming, aren’t they? It is as […]

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Are We In The Midst Of A Literacy Revolution Unseen Since The Greeks?

Clive Thompson reports that Stanford’s Andrea Lunsford thinks so: It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school […]

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‘Nuff Said Award Winner: A Daily Dish Reader

Karen Armstrong has recently written a book defending an apophatic God against both atheists and religious literalists. Recently she and Richard Dawkins were both asked by the Wall Street Journal to write essays on where evolution leaves God. In reply to Andrew Sullivan’s accommodationism, which came out in his discussions of this debate, one of […]

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What Are Conservatives’ Constructive Social Policies For Gays?

Be celibate and/or invisible seem to be the only options conservatives have on the table for millions of people.  Andrew Sullivan takes Robert P. George to task on this point : There is also, moreover, no positive social policy actually crafted for gay people in George’s view. What does he believe we should do with […]

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Fascism + Racism

Analyzing the despicable e-mail from Boston police officer Justin Barrett that contained these true colors: Your defense of Gates while he is on the phone while being confronted [INDEED] with a police officer is assuming he has rights when considered a suspect. He is a suspect and always will be a suspect. His first priority […]

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American Conservatism Right Now–Less A Movement Than An Industry

In the context of trying to make sense of the Palin phenomenon and her recent resignation, Andrew Sullivan perfectly sums up the problem with the current state of America’s right wing establishment: And this helps explain the broader problem with American conservatism right now. It is less a movement than an industry. From Fox News […]

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(Japanese Band) Sour’s “日々の音色 (Hibi no neiro)”

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the great find!   As he puts it, this is a “mind-blowingly charming music video”

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Obama’s 8-Year Strategy

Andrew Sullivan’s take on Obama’s long game, which frustrates the both the impatient on the left and the right: As he had once written when describing his strategy as a black man in a white world: no sudden moves. And we have seen none. Obama likes the system; he just wants to make it work […]

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A Follow Up Post On Gays And Christianity

In reply to this post I wrote about an archbishop of the Anglican church’s claims that those Christians who accept homosexuality do not share the same faith as him and that such people are being rolled over by “cultural trends,” came this passionate defense of Christian leaders’ right to discriminate against gays in the comments […]

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Reactions To Palin’s Resignation

PZ Myers: She doesn’t give a good reason why; in an annoyingly chipper speech, she whines about the way she was being scrutinized for ethics violations, and the fact that she was currently an ineffective lame duck governor, and then announces that she’s stepping down from office. It makes no sense at all, and it […]

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Palin As Paradigmatic Fundamentalist and Why I Turned Against Faith

A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog brilliantly connects the dots: Part of Sarah Palin’s irresistible appeal to her fundamentalist base is her ability to look at the camera with utter conviction and declare black to be white. The ability to lie well is a valuable part of the fundamentalist psychology. My son isn’t gay, he […]

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Andrew Sullivan Lets Loose On Palin (Again)

The last year or more I’ve been a devoted reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog.  But it was the last three months of the presidential campaign that I have the warmest nostalgia for and much of that time his blog painstakingly logged ever one of Sarah Palin’s lies and character flaws. It was a great source […]

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The President’s Speech On LGBT Issues Yesterday

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the video and one to the transcript. Dan Savage isn’t blown away: my first impression after a quick read is that Obama wants credit for all the great stuff he’s asked Congress to do for gay and lesbian Americans—and he’s only asked Congress to do this […]

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“The Curtain Has Been Pulled from the Islamist Wizard”

Andrew Sullivan isolates the essential result of the last two weeks in Iran: it seems totally clear to me that the curtain has been pulled from the Islamist Wizard. Theocratic regimes require some base level of reverence, and watching the old Supreme Leader lose it at Friday prayers a week ago, and the bare-faced martial […]

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