Category: The Dish

Who is Mark Siljander? Dinesh D’Souza’s dream Republican, a creature of the Christianist right, a lover of Mel Gibson, a devoted enemy of the gays … and enmeshed in funding Islamist terror:

As the veteran-diplomat-turned-amateur-scholar implied, once the original teachings of the two religions are properly understood, the differences between them are no greater than the differences between the multitude of different Christian denominations.

Siljander touted these notions as "paradigm crashing," and said he hopes they will "create a movement, a dynamic" resulting in small groups throughout both the Christian and Muslim worlds who will meet to study these ideas and advance them.

It all makes sense in a sick way, doesn’t it?

Jonah Lehrer worries that science is becoming more and more alien to the world we actually experience.

Tim F. revels in the wake of a GOP congressman shilling for al Qaeda.

You never know which of Romney’s various personae is actually on the ballot.

The environmentalist opposition to food from cloned animals may miss the point:

Assuming the world (minus most of India) will continue to eat beef, which seems pretty likely, what is the most righteous position on the meat? Eating beef from free-range, humanely-raised living animals or lab grown cells?

Is the constant pursuit of sexual conquest a form of pathology? Psychology Today explores the question.

A charming essay from uber-con, Roger Scruton:

A society that does not laugh is one without an important safety valve, and a society in which people interpret crude humor not as the first step toward friendly relations, but as a mortal offense, is one in which ordinary life has become fraught with danger. Human beings who live in communities of strangers are greatly in need of laughter, if their differences are not to lead to civil war. This was one of the functions of the ethnic joke. When Poles, Irish, Jews, and Italians competed for territory in the New World to which they had escaped, they provisioned themselves with a store of ethnic jokes with which to laugh off their manifest differences.

Norm Geras differs.

Here comes Clinton Boy. Better spin than Tracy Flick.

The uncommitteds weren’t committed enough:

Let this be a warning to others running against the Clinton Borg. Still, even in defeat, Uncommitted did nothing his supporters need be ashamed of. Can the other side claim as much?

Recycling gets more and more imaginative.