Category Archives: culture

i saw, today,

a man shushing a perfectly attentive group of uniformed students by means of a strange finger-snapping ritual during a tour of the library. The meta-message: 1) You are not capable of listening without my silencing you. This is so obvious that it makes no difference that you are already silent. 2) You are not human [...]
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chinese mothers, roman mothers, capital accumulation, and time preference

Required reading for this post: Amy Chua, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior; Mary Beard, The Classic Woman?; Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization (or any other work by Hoppe which explains his idea of time preference). Quick review of the relevant thoughts from above: (1) Hoppe explains how the process of [...]
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cross-cultural experience and the idea of group prayer as performance

Group prayer is odd. As a group of people take turns saying their peace, one sometimes wonders just who is being addressed. Is the prayer to God, or is God merely a rhetorical device the speaker uses to talk to us fellow listeners indirectly? One friend of mine who participates in a Bible study group [...]
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a male perspective on a particular feminist statement

I will admit that I do not understand feminism. It seems to mean so many different things to so many different people that I am at a loss when it is references casually, with the expectation that everyone will understand. Ditto for the word patriarchy — for the sake of this post I will call [...]
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my take on the current unrest in the muslim world

Things are heating up in the Muslim world. If you’re wanting details, use Google and read to your heart’s content. My intent here is not to repeat what so many others have already said, but to give the bottom line as I see it. The recent struggles in the Muslim world represent a fundamental change [...]
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frayser high school: thoughts on teen pregnancy

There’s a high school in Memphis where 90 girls have been pregnant this year, and 20% of the girls are mothers.  I’m not going to do the typical “Oh-my-goodness-what-is-this-country-coming-to?” thing, because that’s what everybody’s already screeching about.  Instead, let’s get some historical perspective.  Teenaged girls have been getting pregnant as far back as history has [...]
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bringchange2mind.org: good principles, clumsy advertizing

is a website dedicated to changing the stigma that surrounds mental illness.  As they rightly should, for both moral and practical reasons. Related Posts:A Peek at Religion in Dunning’s ‘Extremes’ and the Inescapability of Confession
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thoughts on jared loughner

Jared Loughner believes that the US government does a great number of evil things, and specifically that our currency system of fiat money is a gigantic rip-off which enriches government and its friends at the expense of everyone else.  I agree.  A few days ago, Jared Loughner shot a Congresswoman and a number of other [...]
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christianity and homosexuality

This here is a discussion between Chuck Colson, Shane Claiborne, and some other guy talking about Christianity and gays.  Worth a listen. It’s all a very good talk until at the very end Chuck Colson says something that makes one wonder if he’s spent the last few decades locked in a metal box with nothing [...]
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an invasion of talking heads

I was raised without a TV, and was therefore somewhat sheltered from the absolutely insane nature of television.  When I would hear people use the phrase “talking heads” to describe TV talkers, I cringed.  Surely such talk was nothing more than unfair attacks on those who disagreed!  Sure, people slip up when talking from time [...]
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