A Thinking Reed

  • Huxley, the perennial philosophy, and the scandal of particularity

    Aldous Huxley is best remembered for his chilling depiction of a totalitarian state in Brave New World. I’ve long thought that Huxley’s vision was in many ways more accurate than Orwell’s, at least as far as the West is concerned. We seem more likely to fall for a spiritually dead consumerist dystopia than a boot-on-the-neck…

  • Friday metal – Metallica, “All Nightmare Long”

    This is one of my one or two favorite tracks from Death Magnetic. And the video is downright weird.

  • Long national nightmare, over

    Supreme Court Overturns Bush v. Gore

  • The evil empire–a little less evil

    Starbucks is going all fair trade in the UK. (via) (I don’t really think Starbucks is evil; but this still seems like a good thing–though I realize there’s debate over the effectiveness of fair trade programs.)

  • The oil crash: a very inconvenient truth

    I just finished watching this extremely well-done documentary (if you subscribe to Netflix you can stream it from their site as I did). If anything, it was more terrifying than An Inconvenient Truth. I think that’s because the consequences–drastic economic dislocation, a series of resource wars, etc.–are more immediate and viscerally disturbing. (Obviously the two…

  • Feingold interview

    I don’t know when I became such a Bill Moyers fanboy, but I enjoyed watching this interview with Sen. Russ Feingold (via Gaius). Feingold, as you probably know, is one of the most progressive members of the Senate, voted against the Iraq war, and was the only senator to vote against the PATRIOT Act. He’s…

  • Forever war

    Michael Brendan Dougherty has a smart article in the new issue of The American Conservative about the post-election “whither conservatism” talk that has been roiling the Right. The one thing that doesn’t seem to be receiving much of the ballyhooed conservative re-thinking, Dougherty points out, is the Iraq war, and foreign policy more generally.

  • Ricky Nelson, Dino, and the Duke

    The great Howard Hawks/John Wayne western Rio Bravo wasn’t just an excuse to pair Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson, but it didn’t hurt: I’m watching this tonight and just felt like posting these.

  • The heavens declare the glory of the Lord

    How cool is this–Hubble Telescope “Advent calendar” (Thanks, bls!)

  • Mill, liberal perfectionism, and religion

    As a tangential follow-up to this post, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a petty exhaustive discussion of J.S. Mill’s moral and political philosophy here. Specifically, here’s a discussion of the relationship between Mill’s utilitarianism and his liberalism; here’s a comparison between Mill’s liberalism and other variants, such as Rawls’s. The emphasis here on…