[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
My second AOTP post is up: Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism.
Tag Archives | Left and Right
Blogging the Impossible
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
I’ve begun a ten-week stint of blogging at The Art of the Possible, a blog devoted to liberal/libertarian dialogue. (The title comes from the line “Politics is the art of the possible,” a quotation from that great champion of liberal/libertarian dialogue, Otto von Bismarck.) My first post is now up: Poison As Food, Poison As Antidote.
Sunscreen in Denver, Part Duh
Okay, I don’t want to start liveblogging the damn convention, but Biden just had two accidental moments of honesty: “When we said we were going to have an open convention, we meant this” (pointing around to the open-to-the-sky arena), and “We’re here for the cops.”
Plus, one of the commentators said that the moral of Obama’s candidacy is that if you obey your parents you can grow up to be president.
Sunscreen in Denver
On a more serious note: I just caught the end of al-Gore’s speech, after which the convention organisers started playing the 60s anthem “Let the Sun Shine In.” There’s a certain obscenity in playing that song while in the streets outside the flag-bestooned arena, the true heirs of the 60s are being herded and arrested.
Without You, How Would I Ever Manage?
I often disagree with Scott Adams’ “nonfiction” remarks (he’s neither sufficiently libertarian nor sufficiently left), but his comic strip continues to capture what the actual experience of being in the business world is like – as in today’s installment. As long as libertarians are perceived as offering denials of, rather than solutions to, this pervasive feature of most people’s everyday life, we won’t make many converts – nor will we deserve to.
Deconstruction on the Mount
During the Saddleback forum, when Obama was asked about evil, he replied:
Evil does exist. I think we see evil all the time. We see evil in Darfur. We see evil – sadly – on the streets of our cities. We see evil in parents who viciously abuse their children. And I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely. And one of the things that I strongly believe is that we are not going to – as individuals – be able to erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process. And we can confront it when we see it.
Now, the one thing that I think is very important is for us to have some humility in how we approach the issue of confronting evil. Because a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil, in the name of good. And I think one thing that’s very important is having some humility in recognizing that just because we think our intentions are good doesn’t mean we are going to be doing good.
Then during the televised postmortem, Charles Krauthammer referred to this remark as “postmodern.” Funny; I thought it was Christian.