A Thinking Reed

  • A very brief argument for animal liberation

    From philosopher Steve Sapontzis: Very briefly, the argument for [animal liberation] runs as follows. Morality is goal-directed activity which aims at making the world a better place in terms of reduced suffering and frustration, increased happiness and fulfilment, a wider reign of fairness and respect for others, and enhanced presence and effectiveness of such virtues…

  • Why do Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin (and the American people) hate our freedom?

    William Saletan has a good round-up and rebuttal of the campaign on the Right to prevent the construction of a Muslim community center and mosque in lower Manhattan, not far from the World Trade Center site. Maybe I’m naive, but it’s actually kind of shocking to hear high-profile pols like Gingrinch and Palin all but…

  • Hearts alive

    Finished Moby-Dick this weekend – wow, what a book! The literary genre-hopping, the cosmological speculations, the epic scale, the humor, the unforgettable characters, the ornate, rhythmic splendor of the language – is there any other novel like it? (I’m not even sure it is a novel!) I think it may have supplanted The Brothers Karamazov…

  • From hell’s heart I stab at thee

    Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces,…

  • Friday Metal: Protest the Hero, “Blindfolds Aside”

  • Cannibals

    It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own…

  • The man show

    This is a bit of an easy target, but “Man Church” is at least interesting for what it supposes men want church to be like: Man Church is church the way a man expects it to be done. No singing, short sermon, time to talk with other guys, no women present, and coffee and donuts.…

  • Gender and God-talk

    Derek posted a couple of pieces on the language we use to talk about God, which sparked a good bit of commentary. (See here and here.) Partly, this ended up being about the propriety (or not) of using feminine symbols and pronouns to talk about God. The best discussion of this I’ve come across is…

  • Some numbers on immigration

    From the New Yorker: When the topic is illegal immigration, some of our political leaders reliably produce more heat than light. On April 28th, in a letter to President Obama, seventeen members of Congress, most of them from the Southwest, demanded immediate action to increase border security, noting that “violence in the vicinity of the…

  • The Right and guilt-by-association

    Saying that the Right has been employing McCarthyite tactics seems almost redundant at this point, since virtually the entire repertoire of the Right since the 2008 election seems to consist of guilt-by-association. Still, Robert Wright’s analysis of the ludicrous ginned up controversy over the proposed mosque to be built near the Ground Zero site in…