A Thinking Reed

  • The political is the personal

    Two recent articles talking about the difficulty of being in relationships with people where sharp political differences are involved: a gay conservative writer for the New Republic writes about being dumped by his liberal boyfriend, and a guy writes to Salon‘s Cary Tennis about how he can’t stand to be around his Republican parents. I…

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here. As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for…

  • Faith on the farm

    The New York Times looks at a variety of religiously-motivated farmers concened with good stewardship, humane treatment of animals, and fair treatment of farm workers. It’s always tough to know how widespread the phenomena discussed in these kinds of “trend” stories actually are, but it’s heartening to think that “environmentalism” is no longer a dirty…

  • Liberation, human and animal

    (This post actually started out short. Honest!) Christopher (at his new blog) directs our attention to this article by Andrew Linzey on the connection between violence against animals and violence against humans. Clearly it’s not a matter of cruelty to animals causing violence against human beings in a straightforward way. Rather, as Linzey says, “cruelty…

  • CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

    Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world. The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into…

  • KsE “Holy Diver”

    Eric mentioned that the Killswitch Engage cover of Dio’s “Holy Diver” that I posted last week no longer appears to be available at YouTube. For those interested, you can see the video in a variety of formats at the band’s webpage at Roadrunner Records: here.

  • McKibbon, Roepke, and John Paul II

    Caleb Stegall reviews Bill McKibbon’s Deep Economy (which I still haven’t read) in a recent issue of The American Conservative. In the course of the review he mentions this great exchange between economists Wilhelm Roepke and Ludwig von Mises: In 1947, two titans of 20th-century economic theory, Ludwig von Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, met in…

  • Why creation?

    (Talk about a presumptuous title!) In this post I touched briefly on the question of why God creates the universe in the first place. Keith Ward, following Hegel, suggests that in creating God is able to realize a kind of love and relationship, one with creatures capable of not responding to God, that would otherwise…

  • Friday metal – Suicidal Tendencies, “You Can’t Bring Me Down”

    Though probably best known for their early punk material (“Institutionalized,” “I Saw Your Mommy”), ST’s two best albums (IMO), How Will I Laugh Tomorrow… and Lights, Camera, Revolution are pretty much pure thrash metal. This clip is from the latter. It’s not entirely clear from the video why the authorities are cracking down on ST.…

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in. It seems to me that a lot of…