The Slope

Here's an article on gay marriage, arguing against those that argue that opening the door to same-sex matrimony opens the door to all sorts of disordered sexual behavior.

Here's the money quote (third paragraph from the bottom):

While Stanley Kurtz claims he has won the slippery slope debate outright, his analysis, here, is reasonably limited to the dangers of polygamy and polyamory. But beyond just the policy differences between the two, there is also a legal bulwark between Justice Kennedy's reasoning in Lawrence v. Texas (and the Massachusetts decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, which borrowed heavily from the reasoning of Lawrence) and the invasion of the polygamists: The right to sexual privacy Kennedy finds in the line of cases starting with Griswold v. Connecticut, the Connecticut birth-control case from 1965, is an intimate right, between two consenting partners. The court calls these "the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy." The desire of a group of seven people to marry simply does not intuitively fit into that binary sphere of intimacy.

"Intuitively?" The only difference between a binary system of marriage and polygamy is intuitive? Well, I was watching the news with my grandmother the day gay marriage started in Massachusetts. She saw pictures of men in suits kissing on the steps of some capitol building and was horrified. "That's such a disordered perversion," she muttered. "How could anyone think marriage should be between two men or two women?" If you think that the best and most honest argument people have against gay marriage is that it's icky, don't claim that polygamy is icky and not at all related to same-sex matrimony.

Let's be frank: binary relationships are not at all intuitive if you remove family and procreation from the equation. If it's all about love (read: sex) and some vague notion of fulfillment, then anything goes. Don't be surprised when the bigamists and the pedophiles (successfully, because they will win at this rate) use the arguments that gay activists have been using for the past few years.

Troy

What a horrible movie. It is not as it was, so to speak. The substance of the movie was vicious lies and propaganda that distorted an amazing piece of historical mythology. What version of the Illiad were the jokers who made that movie reading?

Perhaps I'll be more specific later.

Long live the King!

Hold your ground! Hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of men fail, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down. But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth. I bid you stand, Men of the West!

-King Aragorn, from the film The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

I can't wait till the extended edition comes out on DVD.

The warrior king

I will tell his Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men’s loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

-Gates of Fire

Everyone should read this book.

The small things

At brunch today (and yesterday for that matter) the dining hall finally had real sausages. Not those grey, wrinkly, pinky-sized monstrosities but real, honest to goodness Italian sausages. My weekend suddenly got a lot brighter.

Small things can make me happy.

I just went downstairs to move my laundry from the washer to the drier. I got there literally two minutes after the wash cycle had ended. What do I find? My clothes had been taken out of the machine and dumped on top of it in puddles of detergent and bleach. Grace period, people. Grace period. Don't be in such a rush. And be considerate than to put newly washed clothes in bleach and detergent and whatever filth had collected in said bleach and detergent.

The guy who committed this travesty had the nerve to return shortly after and stand watching his machines while I cursed under my breath. It's been a while since I've wanted to hit someone this bad.

Small things can make me really angry.

Genuine

This is a really touching moment.

Say what you will about this President, you simply cannot call him an evil man. I could tell from the first time I saw him that he was a decent, good guy. This confirms it.

Either that or he's a lot smarter than the Dems give him credit for. Either way, the Left loses.

So much money...

For such inferior art.

That's right. I said it. Picasso really isn't that good. In fact, he stinks.

Art is of necessity linguistic. It is a techne, a craft, after all. Though art is born within men it is meant to be expressed among men. If one cannot look at a painting and develop some sense of what the artist is communicating, then what's the point. That sort of art really is based on "using your own words" (George Carlin has a funny bit on idiom; literally, to use your own words would be to speak in gibberish and nonsense).

Consign it to the flame.

Though most historians attribute the development of modern art to the development of the camera and other technological achievements, I think the death of an educated yet common culture did the trick. Visual art especially, which relies on well-known forms and figures to make its points, is worthless without a storehouse of common knowledge. Something as seemingly insignificant as not being acquainted with the Bible, for instance, renders most of civilization and its artistic artifacts unknowable to you. With no common heritage all art becomes solipsistic of necessity, so bring on the water lilies (yes, I also hate Impressionism; there's a reason landscapes were relegated to the bottom rung of visual art for centuries).

Mommy's Favorite

What do you tell kids like this when they get older?

"Gee, honey, you were genetically engineered to save your older brother's life. But we love you just as much as we love him."

Soylent Green is people.

War Hero?

By now we've all heard about the doubts surrounding the first of Candidate Kerry's three Purple Hearts. Well, now the doctor who treated that first wound speaks out.

He literally treated the wound with a Band-Aid. Read for yourself here.

Kerry has always been a keen and calculating political figure (though it sure took him a long time to get out of the sophomoric "I'm going to be president one day and everyone should know" mode). The circumstances surrounding his first Purple Heart point to either a plan to amass the award as quickly as possible (three Hearts gives you the option of leaving the service early, which is what Kerry did) or to a plan to pad his resume for a future run at office, or both.

I hate to be cynical, but I haven't heard much good about the man from those who knew him at Yale, or those who are in the institutions he belonged to while an undergraduate.

Justifying Herodotus?

I recall, reading Herodotus for the first time some years back, that one passage struck me in particular. The historian was talking to an Egyptian priest who claimed that the Hellenic Civilization was far more ancient than most believed, that it had existed for millennia. The priest said (and apparently produced records that backed his words up) that Greece, and not Egypt or any other land, was the age-old source of learning and civilization that watered the rest of the world. The great Athenian statesman Solon, as Plutarch (I think) writes, actually decided to write a history of ancient-ancient Greece after he visited Egypt and had similar conversations and saw similar records, but he died before he had the chance.

[Perhaps I'll find citations when I have the chance. As for Herodotus, it should be somewhere in Book II, where he talks about the Egyptian Empire. As for Plutarch, his biography of Solon isn't that long so you can find the quote without much trouble if you're curious enough.]

Well, I found a rather interesting article that seeks to debunk the theory of the Indo-European migrations and claims that Greek Civilization is much older than we had previously thought. Not only that, but Greece itself has been continuously inhabited by the same people for more longer than we previously had thought. In other words, this is a bit of proof to the story that Herodotus heard in Egypt. I'd love to see more research and debate on this point, but I'm sure I won't since most academics have a vested interest in tearing down the roots of actual Culture and Civilization for the sake of a whacked out political agenda.

Anyway, read the article here. It's quite long but worth a look.

:: how jedi are you? ::

And don't you forget it.

At least he's honest...

I've long been uncomfortable with pro-gay marriage activists. Not only because I oppose same-sex marriage, but because I always had a feeling they were hiding something. I once asked a rather prominent activist "I like marriage because it gives x benefits to people, spiritual benefits that are good for people and society. Things like monogamy, children, etc. are affirmative goods that marriage brings. Why do you want marriage? Do you have any vision of an ideal gay marriage?"

His response? "Let's just say that there will be some gay marriages you'd approve of, and others you wouldn't."

Matt Foreman here makes it clear that not only is gay marriage just one more step in the destruction of all that is good in society, but he has got a lot of hate for those who oppose him (not to mention the retributive acts he seems to have in store).