As a follow-up to the last post, here are two more counterintuitive political pieces: “The Conservative Case for Voting Democratic” by Doug Bandow of the Cato Institute: Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush’s latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do…

Lotsa good stuff out there: Arnold Kling (who’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite commentators) on the “happiness police.” Peter Hitchens (Christopher’s antiwar Tory brother – weird family I guess) has a provocative essay on the “parental state” and the erosion of the rule of law. The American Enterprise has two items of note from…

Earlier I argued that our intuitive apprehension of certain moral principles justified us in adhering to a form of moral realism. I maintained that most people would assent to certain moral truisms, and that these judgments are independent, epistemologically speaking, of whatever theory about the nature of morality we happen to hold. In other words,…

Hugo Schwyzer says: To be honest, one of the reasons I’m a socialist is because I do think that virtue sometimes needs to be compelled by an external source. Left to my own devices, despite my faith, I will choose expensive clothes and trips over giving money to the poor. I do give a great…

Here’s an interesting piece from Chris Armstrong in Christianity Today that uses the absurd “reality” show Amish in the City as a jumping off point to discuss how the lifestyle of the Old Order Amish offers a telling critique of many aspects of modern life, even – perhaps especially – among Christians. The Amish, according…

This is still a free enough country that no one actually has to vote. Perhaps it is the only freedom we have left: the freedom not to collaborate with any segment of the political class that is destroying the last vestiges of the American republic. Whether you choose to withhold your vote or to throw…

Okay, all this political blogging’s got me down. Let’s take things back to a more abstract level. Sometimes people argue that since there is no universally agreed upon moral theory (say, utilitarianism, Kantianism, divine command theory, or whatever), then we should be moral relativists. That is, if we don’t have a satisfactory second-order theory about…

At National Review Online, Steve Waldman (founder of Beliefnet) does a good job straightening out some of the recent loose talk about religious belief and politics: Let’s say a Senator A opposes the Iraq war on practical grounds. He thinks it’s a distraction from fighting al Qaeda that erodes our credibility overseas. He votes no…

I’ve been looking for a reason to back John Kerry. Really I have. I mean, President Bush has lost any goodwill I might have had for him by racking up huge deficits, playing fast and loose with civil liberties, and starting a “war of prevention,” for which the justification has proven to be shaky to…

Political analysis is not our forte here at VI. Much preferred are the unfettered speculations of philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, we’re being bombarded by 24/7 coverage of the Democrats’ convention, so one’s thoughts naturally turn to politics. Now, it occurs to me that something strange is happening. Large swaths of the “anti-war” movement, broadly speaking,…