For later reading

It's New Year's eve and the room is full of dogs hiding under the bed because of firecrackers....and the internet keeps going on and off.

So bookmarked for later reading (via Tea At Trianon)

Camille Paglia on the battle of the sexes (or how upper class American feminists got it wrong). A lot of it is because the feminist leaders are elite and not only despise men but despise those who do "dirty jobs", or pretend they do not exist.

and the problem with atheism:

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.
Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.
I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children's father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.
They found hope where they could.
I want to go back to that 16-year-old self and tell him to shut up with the "see how clever I am attitude". I want to tell him to appreciate how easy he had it, with a path out. A path to riches.