I’m generally positive about the influence of blogging on the flow of information. I think it’s valuable both in terms of news and commentary and even in academic discussions. It provides a new possibility for minority ideas. It’s a good place to test ideas and to get comment on them without doing the full research…
It may be a symptom of insanity, but amongst the 20 or so blogs I read constantly are both Pandagon (from the left) and the evangelical outpost (from the right). Generally those two blogs are so far apart that they cannot be regarded as in conversation, so I was quite surprised over the past couple…
I really likes this article on MSNBC/Newsweek written by Patti Davis. Based on her own experience with becoming addicted and overcoming it, Davis looks at the celebrities going in and out of rehab and heading straight back into trouble. Davis’s article has something that is often lacking in these discussions: An assumption that people are…
For some balance on the incident of showing Brokeback Mountain to middle schoolers, check out this post on Pursuing Holiness. I really can’t comment much since I haven’t seen the movie, but the phrase “age appropriate” (or in this case, not so much age appropriate) makes sense to me.
When I saw the post Virtual Gomorrah: Temptation, Technique, and Technological Progress on the evangelical outpost, I expected to be annoyed by calls for censorship. And indeed there are a few words that tend to annoy my libertarian approach, such as these: . . . My basic position is that while they are desperately needed…
Many of us right now are thinking about and praying for the folks at Virginia Tech. Others closer to the scene are responding as their duty calls them. But it’s an ill wind that blows no one good, and there are two groups of people who thrive on this sort of thing: The news media,…
Yes, indeed, but also for correction. After writing my previous entry, I found this column by Howard Fineman on MSNBC. Rather than hide it as an update to that post, I wanted to highlight it. Fineman concludes: As for Obama, he was benefiting from events. But he should be sobered as well. What the Viral…
One of my very unliberal positions is on political speech. I very much believe that controlling money spent on speech, whether that speech is in a commercial ad for a product, or in an ad for a candidate, in that candadate’s own speech, or in a journalist’s article is the same as controlling the speech…
The TVC is generally bummed about their week, and one of the major downers for them was California Representative Peter Stark declaring his unbelief in God on the floor of the house. I’ve commented on this sort of attitude before. What did they want him to do? Lie? What about all those Christians and others…
. . . but they supposedly recount one incident. The first came to me via the Traditional Values Coalition alert e-mail, which is generally quite strident. It referred me to this story on Alain’s Newsletter, which tends to make the TVC alerts look calm, collected, and irenic. Now here’s another story, this time from The…
