hell’s handmaiden

Gay marriage is something of a hot political topic right now, and those wishing to stop the slide towards legal same-sex marriage often point to the children. The children, the argument goes, will be harmed by such unions. The children will suffer. The children, in some versions of the argument, will be raped by the gays. After all, the gays are perverts to begin with and, besides, they already rape kids disproportionately relative to heterosexuals… or so the argument goes. Consequently, homosexuals have no business raising kids and so have no business getting married– never mind that the two are not inextricably linked.

Or, the Alice the Underappreciated.

I am going to step outside of the usual family of topics which I put up on this blog, and talk about a man whose music occupied my mind during its malleable formative years, and whose best work has been all but forgotten. The project is fueled, in part, by my having recently re-acquired several Cooper albums, and it is partly motivated by a fan’s desire to save Alice from himself, or at least, to save his memory. See, Alice sadly hasn’t done himself justice since sometime in the mid-80s. I don’t deny that he’s had some success since then, and I know that he’s released several albums to rave reviews, but this later work represents only a shadow of his former glory. He’s kept the hard-rock– even getting harder and moving towards metal– and the shock, but he’s lost the wit. True, this is humble opinion, and I don’t intend to justify it, but there you have it.

Time after time, the news media have covered progressives and conservatives in wildly different ways — and, time after time, they do so to the benefit of conservatives.

Media Matters - “Media Matters”; by Jamison Foser

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The 33rd Philosophy Carnival is up at the boundaries of language. This looks like a good one.

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Someone I knew long ago quipped to me that “all of the smart people stopped believing two hundred years ago.” Unfortunately, that isn’t true. While it seems that sanity did briefly start to take hold a few hundred years back, all of the smart people did not stop believing. Reason, in the whole, failed to escape the jaws of superstition and quite a large number of smart people do still believe– a fact which provides me no end of puzzlement, as we will get to eventually.

So, why am I not a Christian?