The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Scott Martens:

But that's the whole point: As soon as you use the word "property", it's like using the word "freedom". Who could be against freedom? Taking people's freedom away is tyrrany (unless Republicans do it). Who could oppose the protection of property? To do otherwise is to sanction theft. To try to place such things in a context of social value is to relativize them, and relativism is terrorism.

Or at least, that's how it plays out on TV. Heck, these days folks act as if property was a right more fundamental than freedom of conscience, so it's hardly surprising.

Intellectual property is not property. It is not only not inalienable, it can and should be regularly alienated, preferably on a fixed and vigorously applied schedule. It is a way for the creators of intellectual works to receive compensation for creating them without creating complex, awkward machinery to value or track them or to extract compensation from a public whose use of them varies. It is no more property than scientific theories or mathematical proofs. It is just something important but abstract whose creation has a different compensation structure.

It's not that acts of mercy aren't taken seriously among Protestants. Catholics have to do good works to gain salvation, but this can lead to insincerity. Protestants are saved by faith, but doing good works when you don't need to is how other Protestants recognise that faith isn't insincere. Protestants are supposed to just help the poor out of pure joy and willingness to do what Jesus would want. Failure to do so makes others question whether you're really faithful.

The Great Awakening was built heavily on just this sort of social pressure. But instead of using good works as the way you recognise that someone's faith is genuine, American religious conservativism has substituted righteousness. Righteous people hate abortion, righteous people aren't gay. But above all else, righteous people have no doubts about what is right. God said it, I beleive it, and that's the end of it. Sound like any American politicians?

I'm not sure that what prevents just anything from being declared a church under Federal law has anything to do with the nature of anyone's beliefs either. There are entities of an explicitly religious nature, which have a single, coherent theology and a definite belief in a higher power, that nonetheless have to pay taxes. INAL, but it seems to me that the IRS has to look at the actual operations of the entity and how it uses the income it receives when it evaluates something for a tax exemption. The only difference between being a religious organisation and being some other sort of tax-exempt organisation is that when your organisation is called "Christian Outreach to the Homeless" or the "First Baptist Church of Greenville" people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt about your claim to tax exempt religious status.

Certainly by the standards usually applied to tax-exempt organisations, Unitarian societies would generally qualify. Which leads me to wonder if this Texan judge is just getting parochial about the meaning of the word "religion", since there are surely other varieties of tax-exempt status that the Unitarians can easily qualify for.

I don't think Canadian Tire is Marxist. Subversive maybe, I mean they print up their own money. Keynesian, possibly. I could be wrong though. They own a chian of workmen's clothing stores.

Mark - I commented on your piece on A Fistful of Euros. I'm not trying to be critical of you either, but there was never any prospect of this truce happening under any circumstances. It's not a matter of European honour or right to criticism. Continents don't have honour, nor do nations. There are totally cynical reasons for never having thought once, much less twice, about whether it might be better to agree to it.

I think the grand mistake was to respond to this so-called offer at all, but then, I think it was a mistake to think of this conflict as a war with soldiers and guns in the first place. Simply letting Bin Laden act like an enemy sovereign with the power to make peace hands him a meaningful victory.

Hmm...

Ms Catch of the Day at ActForLove.org looks like a case of bait-and-switch to me. The use of a young, attractive, leftist woman is surely intended to attract the eyeballs of a target demographic that will inevitably be disappointed to learn that she is looking for "[a] girl who isn't too skinny and isn't too tall and cute as a button."

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