Kevin, you jumped on bellatrys for capitalizing the words truth and reconciliation, though Truth and Reconciliation Commissions often come up in discussions about how to deal with great historic crimes. I get snide in arguments myself, and there's no good reason for it, but I know that when caught making a snide comment out of ignorance the proper thing to do is admit that you were wrong.
Oh, Matt Y made my point in the link above this post.
Someone may have already said this--I didn't have time to read through the thread. But I think the fact that Bush proposed 15 billion dollars of spending on AIDS in Africa and other places is at least partially the result of evangelical prodding. I don't bring this up because I'm overly fond of how my fellow evangelicals have been acting in the political sphere, because I'm not. They (or the white ones anyway) tend to be jingoists who ignore America's foreign policy sins and most other sins that don't involve sex. But there are leftwing evangelicals like Jim Wallis and I think their influence has had some good effect on the rest of the community. Not enough, but a little.
Whether Bush is actually delivering on his 15 billion dollar promise is another question. I think Kerry or Edwards promised to double that amount in one of the debates, but that didn't seem to swing too many evangelical votes their way.
On the antislavery thing, Bartolome Las Casas was antislavery about two centuries before the people mentioned in the link. Yeah, he initially proposed substituting African slaves for the Indians he was trying to save, but he eventually realized the slight moral inconsistency in his position and opposed slavery in general.
Just a pet peeve. I get tired of those 18th/19th century abolitionists getting all the attention.
Martin Kaplan to the contrary, people who are "serious and thoughtful" never took the self-image of the NYT seriously, not if they thought about it. Kaplan's "serious, thoughtful" people who expect the NYT to be a gatekeeper of quality in terms of what is credible or believable are and always have been suckers. They wanted someone to tell them what respectable mainstream people are supposed to think.
I don't think people should concede anything to the NYT beyond the obvious. It's a big paper with more resources than anyone else, but given those resources, they don't deserve any grade higher than a gentleman's C.
HP, that wasn't an attack on Fred, that was a sarcastic reference to the post by Mark. That was obvious, if you followed what happened here or even if you read the thread you linked. The "borderline personality" crack was a cheap shot for which there is no evidence, certainly not in this thread. But it's nice to see the old circular firing squad blazing away with its customary accuracy.
I was very sensibly going to stay out of this, but one of my pet peeves was triggered. The notion that God wouldn't care about us because we're small and weak and live on a small planet around an ordinary G-type star, blah, blah, blah, is silly. By "silly" I mean it contradicts the moral principles most of us claim to believe in. For instance, suppose scientists discovered a mud puddle inhabited by a species of intelligent microbes. Would we say we shouldn't care about them because they're just a bunch of insignificant amoebas sitting there waiting to dry up and perish? Might as well drain the puddle and put in a parking lot, I guess.
So if God exists, He wouldn't care about us because we're too small to matter? Sheesh, if that's His attitude, I'd be an atheist myself. But my own belief is that God is better than humans, not worse.
Darn, a series of comments about topography and I get to it when it's winding down.
Anyway, someone above (Erik Olson, I think) mentioned a river drive north of Alton Illinois, near a small town called Elsah, and he was exactly right--I took that trip around sunset a and words fail--it was like being in a landscape painting. No one would go there for a vacation--it's only the sort of day trip you'd take if you lived in St. Louis (as I did for several years) or someplace nearby, but in a place like this, you start to realize that you don't have to visit mountains or spectacular seashores to
feel some mystical Wordsworthian sort of ecstasy. Ordinary landscapes in flyover country can do it.
Well, I suppose the Mississippi River isn't exactly ordinary, come to think of it, but I could say similar things about landscapes in West Tennessee or other places that no one would fly thousands of miles to visit.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 7 |
| 2003 | 1 |
Total: 9 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Donald Johnson:
Show all comments by Donald Johnson.