Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Roundup Of Stuff

Okay, busy day at work, but my tabs are filling up with things I've been meaning to link to. So, briefly:

1) Christopher Hitchens is a very angry person. I don't know quite what he's angry about, or even who he's angry at. But he sure is angry.

2) After a few very slow weeks over the holidays, The American Scene is really doing some great, thought-provoking blogging right now. Reihan certainly has gathered up a serious set of conservative thinkers, and I have been finding myself re-reading and re-re-reading many of the entiries of late.

I'll link to my favorite two recent ones, one from Reihan about the way technological advancements are bound to render the insurance paradigm obsolete, and a second from James Poulos about one issue where I really think well-intentioned liberals and conservatives can come together, the question of how to increase human happiness in a world of ever-increasing material comfort, coincident with ever-decreasing spiritual satisfaction. Call it The Progress Paradox zone.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to come back to these two posts in the near future and write a bit more about my thoughts on them, but you should check them out, either way.

1 comment:

Other Dave said...

Hitchens book is ridiculous. He looks at signficant actions by religious individuals and applies one of two brushes: if it was a negative act - he paints it to be a result of the evils of organized religion. If it was a positive act, he claims it was in spite of the church, a result of individual secular conscience. He is Pat Robertson, only playing to the exact opposite extreme audience. Both deserve their place on the margins.