social commentary ⁽⁴⁶⁾

I should note upfront that I am not an official representative of the Constitution Party. Nor have I run my ideas by any official representatives of that party. My reasons for preferring this party over the Libertarian Party are entirely my own. Partisans of either party who find my perspective inaccurate or unfair may certainly feel free to correct me—provided they can do so in a civil, constructive fashion, of course. That…

As I began to realize a few days ago, when I spoke of the “Baffling Clash: Pro-Life Leaders v Donald J. Trump,” some of us cannot be part of movements. As someone who believes every person’s inalienable right to life begins at conception, I’m saddened to discover I cannot be part of the pro-life movement. The insistence of this movement’s leaders on lockstep conformity to the women-who-abort-are-guiltless-victims position, however, has made clear…

I saw a very strange documentary recently: (A)sexual (directed by Angela Tucker, Arts Engine Inc., 2011). The premise of the film, which takes for granted the contemporary belief that people have innate sexual orientations (inclinations to have sex with persons of the opposite, their own, or both sexes: heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality, respectively), is that there are people who have an orientation not generally acknowledged: asexuality (an innate lack of inclination to…

Believing true what one wants to be true rather than what actually is true may be a less prevalent phenomenon among conservatives than liberals, but it is certainly not unknown among conservatives. For instance, one needn’t watch Fox New, the Fox Business Network, or an economics-related conservative event for long to hear someone who has been successful in the free market argue that his experience is “proof” that all one has to…

Main Remarks Well, I’ve been able to disprove the theory that my prior, somewhat-related letter only failed to make it into print because of U-T San Diego’s word limit (see also the follow-up letter I opted not to send). I disproved the theory by writing a very short letter that U-T staff could easily have used for filler, which I forwarded to them by email back in July. Here it is: From:…

No sooner had I recovered sufficiently from an illness to watch some news than I was greeted by a story highlighting once again the sorry state of our dieing culture. Members of the homosexual lobby (known in corrupt contemporary English as “gays”) apparently read GQ, since their (as always) loud and emotional condemnation of public statements unfriendly to their irrational and unbiblical worldview has gotten Phil Robertson, patriarch of the hugely popular…

Earlier this week, an email from my local creation museum informed me that said museum had been refused membership in the area’s Museum Council. I’d spoken to employees and friends of the museum the day that some representatives of the Council had visited, so I knew those representatives had been favorably impressed and that museum employees and friends fully expected their Council application to be approved. Dour gloom-and-doomer that I am, my…

Christians active in the battle against pornography have lately been excited by news of a not-yet-peer-reviewed Cambridge study popularly reported to prove that “porn addiction” is as real as addiction to drugs or alcohol. When I first heard about this (in an email from Breakpoint), I was skeptical, since I recalled (or thought I recalled!) from a couple Physiological Psychology courses that alcohol and drugs don't just prompt certain patterns of brain…

Note: Direct links to specific paragraphs may not work. Most of the anchors for these direct links were created by code I wrote for the Pious Eye site and had run when pages loaded. As my new site is static, dynamic coding from the old site has gone away. I apologize for any inconvenience. If and when time permits, I’ll manually fix some of these issues. — D.M.H. Swanson, Kevin. Apostate: The…

Although this modified image is not in the public domain because modified, visitors in search of public domain, and other free-to-use, Hayek images may find Flickr user Levan Ramishvil's Friedrich Hayek album, which I discovered in 2024, worth visiting. – D.M.H. “‘Social’ or Distributive Justice.” Chapter 9 in Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago:…

In a couple book reviews, I took issue with one author's anti-individualist rhetoric and expressed gratitude (though not perfect satisfaction) for another's effort to distinguish between different uses of the word “individualism.” I've just discovered that the use of “individualism” to refer to quite different things, so that true individualists may end up condemning and arguing against what they and others wrongly label “individualism,” is not a new phenomenon at all. In…

Concerning the Manhattan Declaration (available on the Manhattan Project site, accessed 04 February 2013)….I have just signed this declaration). However, I thought I should note that my signing is not a blanket endorsement of all the wording found in it (though I do endorse most of the wording). Specifically, I am not entirely comfortable with all the wording in the preamble. For instance, that preamble states that Now, none of the actual…