So in the wake of yesterday’s post responding to Elizabeth Bruenig’s, um, critique, a number of scattershot questions have arisen. You can track some of that by looking at @ebruenig and @douglaswils. For example, one friend cautioned me offline that Bruenig is not a moral liberal. But in my calculus, the beating heart of liberalism …
Outrage Goes in the Purple Bin
So in something of a prescient move, in my last post I mentioned my widening circle of irrelevance—my particular brand of toxicity is now being increasingly opposed, and out of the blue, by various important voices, modulated voices, voices of sweet reason. The latest is from Elizabeth Bruenig, a columnist with The Washington Post, who …
Nubile Young Women, The LA Times, and Me
Introduction: The trick is to write a headline that gets people to read just the first couple paragraphs. After that, the overall quality of the writing has to hold them. So wish me luck. So taking the occasion of the Roy Moore story, last weekend The LA Times published an op-ed piece by Kathryn Brightbill …
In Which I Suggest We Not Vote for Dirtier Elections
So I begin these ruminations with a most necessary qualifier, necessary at least in these troubled days of ours. To defend due process is not to defend the dirty deeds that must be prosecuted or rejected under a system of due process. A civilized society, in order to institutionalize a bias against lynchings—against a populace …
Fried Brown on Both Sides
So the campaign equivalent of a daisy-cutter bomb was dropped on the Roy Moore campaign yesterdiddy. There are certain things we don’t know, and certain other things are stinking obvious. Let us begin with what we don’t know. The allegations have been made, and Moore hotly denies them, calling them defamation. So, not having had …
Not a Bad Time at All
On Throwing a Ball
The situation described in the following letters is entirely fictitious, including persons, names, crimes, sins, relationships, circumstances and all particulars. The kind of situation that is described, however, is all too common and my hope is that biblical principles applied to this fictitious scenario may be of some help to individuals tangled up in a …
Year of the Pig
So we are spang in the midst of what is being called a “sexual harassment apocalypse.” But this is only being experienced as an apocalypse by a certain class of individual—that class being what we might call the poseur-feminist. This is one who cops the attitude of quisling males who somehow decided that, provided their …
Moscow City Council Election 2017
So please allow me to begin with the necessary disclaimer. I am about to encourage any Moscow residents who care what I think to vote in a particular way this coming Tuesday. That being the case, I need to say at the outset that in writing this I am not representing any particular institution with …
Reformation Fail?
So I don’t want to come across like a fastidious person or anything, but there were a couple of things recently that I thought were kind of in poor taste. (“Just a couple? Where do you live, man?”) I mean a couple of things regarding Reformation 500, the half-millennium anniversary of the Reformation yesterday, and …