A Thinking Reed

  • Humanitarianism of convenience?

    Good post from Digby on the humanitarian rationale for our latest war: We intervene in places in which we have large financial and strategic interests, period. It’s merely a convenience to attach a humanitarian label to it and persuade everyone that we are doing God’s work instead. Even the arguments for Iraq were all wrapped…

  • Iowa factory farms try to put the clampdown on free speech

    I had blogged previously about efforts by factory farms and their political allies in Iowa to make it illegal to create videos or other evidence of the mistreatment of animals in intensive-farming facilities. But the bill under consideration apparently goes further than that. According to this editorial in the Des Moines Register (via Farm Sanctuary),…

  • God’s right to the respectful treatment of God’s creatures

    I’ve been re-reading Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals and just wanted to jot down some salient passages. On intensive farming: To put it at its most basic: animals have a God-given right to be animals. The natural life of a Spirit-filled creatures is a gift from God. When we take over the…

  • Note on the blogroll

    I’ve updated the blogroll, mostly pruning some sites that’ve become dormant. (My rule of thumb is that a site is dormant if nothing new has been posted in 6 months or more.) As always, I’m happy to re-link if a site becomes active again. Added later: I’ve also removed the Twitter widget from the sidebar,…

  • Friday Links

    –Iowa’s House approved a bill to make it illegal to film the goings on in factory farms; it still has to pass the Senate. –The great Midwestern backlash. –What is the difference between liberals and libertarians? –Rejecting death-centered Christianity. –The fondness some secular liberals have for fundamentalism. –More than half of Americans now favor legal…

  • Jonathan Safran-Foer: “Eat a ton less meat”

    I’ve developed quite a healthy respect for Jonathan Safran-Foer. I’ve never read any of his novels, but from what I gather, he’s a critically respected writer who could probably carve out a profitable niche churning out books in the vein of Franzen and other contemporary “literary” novelists. So it must have been somewhat risky, career-wise,…

  • Meanwhile…

    …take all those proud feelings about the United States standing up for freedom and human rights in Libya and turn them inside out, and vomit into them. That’s Bahrain. More here. Sigh.

  • Friday Metal: The Human Abstract, “Digital Veil”

    Really digging this album.

  • The next war

    Well, it looks like we’re going for a hat trick–three wars at once! Qaddafi’s a monster, of course, but this is intervention into another nation’s civil war. And if the no-fly zone and “no-drive zone” don’t work (and given historical precedent, that’s not at all unlikely), the pressure for further escalation will be immense. I…

  • Whither the liberal-libertarian alliance?

    Here’s an interesting post from the new(ish) blog Bleeding-Heart Libertarians: Here are some policy areas where classical liberals or libertarians seem to have a lot of common ground with those on the political left: • Immigration – Immigration is a net benefit to the receiving country and a matter of justice to would-be migrants. We…