Vote for Me!
I've just seen one of those rare birds, an Internet discussion that seems civil. And I'm in the rare bird! It's over at Quora, a pretty neat site I've not spent much time on but attracts higher-than-average-quality user-submitted answers to a wide range of user-submitted questions. I bit on the following question: Religion and Politics: Why do some people think "It's in the Bible" is a valid argument? I bit because no one else had given a satisfactorily Christian answer. Answers are voted up...
Materialist Dogma
Alvin Plantinga on the new iconoclastic book by philosopher Thomas F. Nagel: [Nagel has] performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age. Read the whole review.
Standard English
From the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition: Standard English n. The variety of English that is generally acknowledged as the model for the speech and writing of educated speakers. USAGE NOTE The term Standard English is sometimes used to denote the variety of English prescribed by traditional prescriptive norms, including rules and usages that many educated speakers do not systematically conform to in their speech or writing. Recently, however, the term has more often been used to...
Isn’t It Ironic, Don’t You Think?*
Last week or so I was driving somewhere and listening to an ad on the radio, an ad that (like those Geico commercials [TV, 2007*] with the Pierce Brosnan look-a-like) was intentionally ironic, self-referential. That is, it made fun of itself, pretending to be a non-ad ad. As Bob is my witless (Rugrats, 1993*), I thought, "I've got to write an article about the irony now prevailing in contemporary culture." But the prospect was daunting; I didn't feel S-M-R-T enough (Simpsons, 1999*) to even...