[LINK] A Roundup

• Daniel Drezner notes that there are certain structural similarities between the Roman Catholic Church and the Soviet Union.


• Jonathan Edelstein studies the arguments made by laywers appealing the verdicts in the Pitcairn sexual abuse cases.


• Razib at GNXP points out that the current Pope sees no problem with evolution.


• David T at Hurry Up Harry reports about a new speaking appearance by Irshad Manji.

[META] Blogroll Additions

I've aded the weblogs of Canadian writers Nalo Hopkinson and Michael Winter (The Big Sky) to my blogroll.

[BRIEF NOTE] The Expansionist Party of the United States

The website of this political party, apparently the work of L. Craig Schoonmaker (who has his very own blog), has always struck me as funny rather than offensive. Perhaps it shouldn't, since, as of 2002, 40% of Americans did favour Canada's annexation.

That attitude strikes me as odd. I can imagine certain changes in the United States' internal political structure--say, Puerto Rico becoming a state of the Union--but significant changes in American frontiers strike me as unlikely. There just isn't the sort of constituency outside of American frontiers to support that. I know that I shouldn't take the fact that, according to its counter, a website advocating Nova Scotian statehood only has 4027 visits. But still.

This is one area where American universalism conflicts with American realities, I suppose, just one more way demonstrating that Americans view their political structures as rather more universally applicable than they actually are, as example x of the principle that the way we do things must be wildly superior.

[BRIEF NOTE] Secularism's Durability

nhw pointed me towards this article by Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian concerning the future of Roman Catholicism in Europe under Pope Benedict XVI.

Europe is now the most secular continent on earth. The phenomenon of the last pope masked the underlying trend. We saw the great crowds of enthusiastic young people on St Peter's Square, or at open-air masses on his many journeys, and half-forgot the plummeting figures for church attendance and the recruitment of priests. An American Baptist missionary website puts things in perspective. "Western Europe," it states, "is ... one of the world's most difficult mission fields. Most missiologists compare it to the Muslim-held Middle East when it comes to responsiveness to the gospel." Voltaire would be proud of us.

This reminds me of an essay I discovered back in November, recounting how missionaries in Prague were so dejected at being rejected by the Czechs that they took to trying to convert other visiting Americans.

For different reasons, American conservatives, Muslim fundamentalists, and old-line reactionaries say that Europeans' secular hedonistic social-democratic capitalism and its associated mindsets are inherently fragile. They say that as soon as Europeans are presented with a superior alternative--a renewed Roman Catholicism, an Americanized evangelican Protestantism, an imported Islam--they'll switch over with alacrity. Maybe, just maybe, Europeans actively like things the way that they are?

[MEME] Via bitterguy

A typical post of mine in one line? How about this?

I think and write a lot, perhaps too much, about fairly obscure subjects. Oh, I've a personal life, too.