Sic dolet

 [Nota Bene:  Lest any reader think that the argument below is evidence of what happens when the American School System keeps its charges in the dark about all things sexual, I would kindly tell him to check out the New Hampshire Case  Blanchflower v. Blanchflower  (click on the link, please; I'm too lazy to summarize the facts of the case here).  The argument I give below was not taken from NOM, any other SLPC-designated hate group, or any seemingly sexually unenlightened group like, say, the Catholic Church.  Rather, the argument is pretty much the same one which was given by the Liberal (and, therefore, enlightened) Majority.  The knuckle-dragging Conservatives dissented!  Furthermore, the Liberal Majority Opinion was a victory for a Lesbian, who was, as co-respondent in the original divorce case, one of the plaintiffs.] The legal recognition of same-sex "marriage" has nothing to do with the societal approval of whatever same-sex couples may do...

The basic principle of Protestantism is sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible is the only infallible rule of faith. Now Catholics have always responded, "Well, what good is an infallible book without an infallible interpreter of that book?" To which the Protestant rejoinder has always been, "Scripture interprets itself, so there!" And then followed the Thirty Years' War, which ended in the acknowledgement that where Catholics have the most gunpowder, that region will be Catholic and where the most gunpowder belongs to the Protestants, that region will be Protestant. If guns can't penetrate the hermeneutic circle, nothing can, and several centuries later the debate over sola scriptura is pretty much the same as it was in 1521. This means, among other things, that Protestants still insist that Scripture is self-interpreting. Okay, if this is so, then why do Protestants attend Bible School? What can Bible School teach you that the self-interpreting Scripture ...

 [written in 2008] The following essay is addressed to a woman and was in response to one of her posts on her weblog. The post was about Nietzsche's theory of morality. The woman claimed that Nietzsche asserted that all morality is a result of group think. I refuted this claim and wrote other things as well. It may be of some interest to my readers, or not. Okay,  zur Sache , as the Krauts say. First off, it is wrong to claim that Nietzsche proposed that morality is always the product of group think, if by "group" you mean the unwashed, knuckle-scraping masses of the "herd". For Nietzsche there are two categories of morality, the one of "good and bad" and the other of "good and evil". The former is the morality of the strong and is by Nietzsche's lights the healthy, life-affirming morality. The latter is the morality of the weak, which is according to Nietzsche based not upon love, as its proponents claim, but upon vindictive resentment a...

  [From Max Picard's book  Hitler in uns selbst] During a trip to Germany in 1932, I received a visit from the chairman of a major German political party, who asked me how it was possible that Hitler had become so well known, that he had acquired so many supporters. I pointed to an illustrated newspaper that was lying on the table and asked him to thumb through it. The first page had a picture of an almost naked female dancer. On the second page a battalion of soldiers were doing exercises with machine guns, and underneath was shown some scientist in a laboratory. The third page had a chart chronicling the development of the bicycle from the mid-19th century to the present day, next to which a Chinese poem was printed. The next page had photos of workers from some factory performing calisthenics during their free time, and underneath were the knotscripts of an Indian Tribe in South America. On the opposite page stood some lawmaker, sunning himself on a bright summer’s day. “Th...

(This was posted to my MySpace Weblog on July 1, 2006). This comes a bit late, this commentary of Joan Acocella's review of  The Playmate Book  which appeared in the March Twentieth issue of  The New Yorker . At first I was surprised that the sophisticates at  The New Yorker  would dignify such blatant exploitation by giving it so many pages of analysis. Then again,  Playboy  is very much a cultural phenomenon, and  The Playmate Book  is a very stylish coffeetable monument to that phenomenon or at least tries to be. So, the  The New Yorker  as America's judge of true style has a duty to review this book and determine whether it is truly stylish. The answer is no. The nude playmates are so vapid that they are not even erotic. The whole Playboy culture that Hefner espouses has not extricated itself from Hefner's own fantasy of a brandy-snifting bachelor world filled with highbrow discussions about Nietzsche and good, wholesome devianc...

The anthropology that underpins transgenderism, namely the complete disassociation of the mind from the body, is precisely the anthropology necessary to understand prostitution as a "job like any other". If one locates human identity entirely in the mind, then there can be no parts of the body considered so integral to personhood that they should be off limits to the profanations of commerce. The entire body is merely an instrument, which means that one's "privates" have as much significance as one's arms and legs, and just as we do not think it is any violation of our dignity as humans to put our limbs to work, it should not be deemed below our dignity to put our "privates" to work either because neither our limbs nor our "privates" have anything to do with our identities as men and women. They are all equally instrumental. It is little wonder then that George Soros is funding both the Transgender Movement and the Pimp Lobby.

 For a little while in a roof's shade, Brightly painted horses turn in a band. They have all been taken from a land That hesitates before it fades. A pinching harness keeps them bound, But all have courage in their eyes, A crimson lion terrifies, And now the china elephant comes 'round. Just as in the woods there's a buck, Except that it's saddled and carries A little blue girl all buckled up. And on the lion rides in white a young Boy and holds on with a small warm hand As the animal shows his teeth and tongue. And now the china elephant comes 'round. Bright young ladies are also there, Almost too old for these wooden mounds, In the middle of the leaps and bounds, They look up, around, at us, anywhere. And now the china elephant comes 'round. And so it goes--faster, hastening its end, It circles and it turns and has no aim, A red, a green, a grey sent around, A small inchoate outline of a face, And sometimes we see a smile triumphant And bless'd that sparkl...