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Stephen R.L. Clark’s "anarcho-conservatism"
I’m on vacation, visiting the wife’s ancestral homeland of Indiana. Blessedly free of online distractions for the most part. Hence the relative dearth of posting. But I have been reading a really interesting book by philosopher Stephen R.L. Clark called The Political Animal: Biology, Ethics, and Politics. Clark has written on a variety of topics,…
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Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics
I received an e-mail drawing my attention to the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, a recently launched think tank whose mission is to foster “the advancement of progressive thought about animals.” The director is Rev. Andrew Linzey, who regular readers will be familiar with (I reviewed Linzey’s Animal Theology here). Although it doesn’t appear to…
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VI top 6 albums of 2006
Sheerly based on personal preference and in no particular order: 1. Mastadon, Blood Mountain2. Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood3. Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways4. Decemberists, The Crane Wife5. Trivium, The Crusade6. Jars of Clay, Good Monsters
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Nock online
The Ludwig von Mises institute has made several of the works of the great anarchist writer Albert Jay Nock available on line (via Tory Anarchist). These are mostly out of print and hard to find works, so it’s quite a resource. Nock’s Our Enemy, the State is a classic and, while Nock was considered a…
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Food for thought on war & peace
Brandon is hosting the second “Carnival of the Citizens,” focusing on “Justice, War, and the Quest for Peace.” Lots of interesting-looking posts (most of which I haven’t had time to read yet).
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Moderate drinking = longer life
From MSNBC: Moderate drinking may lengthen your life, while too much may shorten it, researchers from Italy report. Their conclusion is based on pooled data from 34 large studies involving more than 1 million people and 94,000 deaths. According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day…
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Making omelettes
I’m willing to agree that, other things being equal, a pro-capitalist dictator would be preferable to a pro-communist dictator, but I’m not quite sure what this editorial from the Washington Post is supposed to be getting at. Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Pinochet deserves some credit for the Chilean “economic miracle,” does…
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The economics of Bible publishing
“The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some…
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The pope and animals
Via Andrew Sullivan, part of an interview with then-Cardinal Ratzinger: At any rate, we can see that [animals] are given into our care, that we cannot just do whatever we want with them. Animals, too, are God’s creatures, and even if they do not have the same direct relation to God that man has, they…
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Blessed Spinoza
Hillary Putnam reviews a new book on Spinoza in the New York Observer. I have a longstanding fascination with Spinoza. As an undergrad I became obsessed with his writing and all the secondary literature I could get my hands on. Harry Austryn Wolfson’s book in particular (which sadly appears to be out of print) was…
