Twisted: Animal rights activists have held a protest in Canada at the premiere of a documentary about three art students who videoed themselves killing a cat. Demonstrators urged ticket-holders at the Toronto Film Festival to boycott Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat. The documentary shows interviews with artists, police and activists – but not…

Generally, I think the strongest argument against pacifism is it’s immoral. Namely, we abandon the innocent who should be protected. Just war is committed to believing that you cannot commit an evil that a good may come. You cannot bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s better for more people to die on the beaches of Japan…

It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, there is any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can…

Andrew Ferguson: Am I the only one who sensed the spectral presence of Bill Clinton (pre-bypass) hovering over George W. Bush as he delivered his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention? The speech, or at least its second half, has been widely praised as a stirring justification for the country’s continued vigilance in the…

The Big Hominid has a very thoughtful post on 9/11 and the events that have unfolded in its wake over the last three years, managing to avoid the cliches of left and right (n.b.: some bad language). I have very little to add to the cacophany of commentary on the anniversary of 9/11. Suffice it…

That’s what’s happening in the Netherlands according to Wesley J. Smith writing at the Weekly Standard: In the Netherlands, Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness. But what does that mean? In many…

Aeon Skoble at Liberty & Power offers a much more reasonable and nuanced version of the “libertarian hawk” position: We have rights prior to any political structures. Political structures maintain power through force, which much be justified by consent. Consent can only be legitimately given if the power-structure which is being consented to protects rights.…

The war creates no absolutely new situation; it simply aggrivates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed…

[I]t is good to be reminded from time to time—good for persons like me, with certain pre-modern prejudices—that our relations with the liberal democratic order can be cordial to a degree, but are at best provisional and fleeting, and can never constitute a firm alliance; that here we have no continuing city; that we belong…

The New Atlantis is an online journal that covers the moral and social implications of technology. Two articles of note from the current issue: “Stem Cells and the Reagan Legacy” by Gilbert Meilaender “The Pornography Culture” by David B. Hart