This is how many secular teachers treat the traditional beliefs of students...[they] subject them to such scorn that they are pushed outside the bounds of acceptable debate. This strategy is effective because young people who go to good colleges are extremely eager to learn what it means to be an educated Harvard man or Stanford woman. Consequently their teachers can very easily steer them to think a certain way merely by making that point of view seem fashionable and enlightened.
[T]he burqa can actually be empowering, by offering me the privacy and anonymity to just carry on with my work instead of worrying about whether my hips look huge in that dress...there are psychological effects of not wearing a burqa as well -- a tendency to get too caught up in trying to achieve the perfect look, for example.
Yet somehow I was proud of my deep dark edgy miserableness. I consoled myself that everyone else wasn’t brave enough to face the nothingness. But I was. I laughed off everything and found myself dreadfully serious...Oddly enough, when I was enlightened I felt burdened...I didn't take life seriously but I thought of death incessantly.Read the whole thing.
While the anagram to 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' is 'I am Lord Voldemort,' as my good friend pointed out, 'Albus Dumbledore' becomes 'Male bods rule, bud!'via the comments to this post at DarwinCatholic
It is easy to move from thinking about what other people lack to pitying them for lacking these "essentials"...it can almost start sounding like the only way to live a good life is to have running water, a warm, spacious, cozy home and easily accessible, easy to use laundry facilities. At that point, I’m about as ridiculous as some billionaire socialite who can’t imagine how all the little people live without an army of servants, a summer home, and a private jet.Some good food for thought.
A short, thought-provoking video. It's a good summary of the point that Jonah Goldberg recently made here.
via InsideCatholic
I wonder how an intelligent, intellectual woman can buy into such clap-trap...Isn't it time we gave up on the primitive ideas of an unenlightened time now two thousand years gone? Our future as a species lies in our intelligence and creativity, not in polarizing folk tales about invisible spirits and miracles. I wish NPR would resist indulging such weak-minded ideas with so little resistance.Claw of the Conciliator has a great response.
Truly great literature doesn't tie itself in such a slapdash way to an issue of the day...[She is not] playing fair with her readers to insert Dumbledore's gay-contemporary- political-identity into the works after the fact! This is the worst kind of cheating, when the author decides to pander to some political identity group when the final book has been published, and the readers think they know everything important about the characters that there is to know.
Armies have long used bugs to spread disease among their enemies. The Black Death arrived in Europe after the Mongols catapulted flea-ridden corpses into the city of Kaffa on the Black Sea...Those who fled from the city brought with them bubonic plague, which killed 75 million people in the 14th century.
[T]he new supercontinent wouldn’t be a fun place to live for most plants and animals...Most of the future supercontinent would be desert, since no rain would develop over the vast interior. On the coasts between the tropical latitudes, the weather would vary from 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer to minus 4 degrees in the winter, punctuated by hurricanes 50% stronger than the fiercest ones today.
