Reading National Review‘s “The Corner” and some comment threads at Rod Dreher’s place, I was puzzled to see so many conservatives gushing about McCain’s choice of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. From what little I’ve read she seems to be an admirable lady with strong convictions, but how does this alter the ticket in any material way–enough to make formerly lukewarm conservatives positively giddy about McCain?
Month: August 2008
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Do it for the hens
Via bls at The Topmost Apple comes word of a Humane Society campaign to get religious people to replace eggs from battery hens with cage-free eggs or egg substitutes during the month of October. Great idea. St. Francis would be proud.
Be warned, though, that there are a lot of labels (organic, free-range, cage-free, certified humane, etc.) that mean different things and which may or may not have effective oversight and enforcement mechanisms. As it happens, the HSUS has a handy guide to these labels.
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Conservatism 2.0
Readers should check out Culture11, a new site that has been touted as a conservative version of Slate (which some wags have claimed is redundant), and which is staffed by some of the bright, young lights of eclecticly heterodox conservatism. Looks promising even if, like me, you fear we’re suffering from a politico-cultural commentary glut.
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Of dogs and asses
Today at the library I picked up what looks like a great new book: Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition, by Laura Hobgood-Oster. It’s a study of the role animals have played in Christian stories, art, iconography, and piety throughout the ages, with an eye toward recovering a more positive view of animals within the tradition and the life of faith. Publisher’s page is here.
I imagine I’ll be posting on this in the days ahead.
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Libertarian Leninism
Do libertarians really hate environmentalism so much that they’ll soft-pedal Chinese authoritarianism just to stick a thumb in the eye of the Green Menace for the sake of the shiny capitalist utopia? (The idea seems to be that eventually, in the far-flung future, everyone will be rich, so we shouldn’t worry too much about the current victims of “economic progress.”)
I’m not denying the existence of trade-offs between economic development and containing pollution, but Katherine Mangu-Ward appears to be taking the bracing, straight-up “breaking eggs to make an omelet” line here, with a dash of cultural relativism about human rights thrown in just in case you might worry about poisoned villagers and old women thrown into reeducation camps.
(I realize that there are libertarians, like the good folks over at TAotP, who don’t fit this profile, but you can see why people would get the idea that libertarians aren’t interested in limits on government power so much as in being apologists for corporate capitalism–and in this case, the heavily state-managed-and-subsidized Chinese version, no less.)
A Thinking Reed 