I admit, my own desire for children is along the same lines.  Instinctively, there's a feeling that "there isn't enough of us."

Do you know who are even less happy then parents?  Single adults.  It may be true that married non-parents are "happier" than married parents, but both groups are happier than unmarried single adults.

You have to view this sort of thing in the proper perspective.

One could argue that our existing system of private electronic money, tied to the dollar, is the logical endpoint of such a system.  We do know what the logical endpoint isn't: a currency system tied to a fixed commodity.  The eurozone proved that; financial markets prefer floating fiat currencies, because the risk of balance of payments crises is much less than under rigidly fixed regimes.

But far be it for me to point out that two thousand years of fixed currency failure, from medieval sovereign debasement to the modern-day eurozone BOP crises, should cast aspersions on the usefulness of gold as a monetary instrument.

But how much gold?  Who sets how many ounces are in a unit of "gold"?  You do realize that governments debased their currencies for thousands of years before inventing paper money?

But we're so selective, don't you think?  The accusations levelled against this man are not really Nazi material; after all, American troops also "burned villages with women and children in them" in World War II.  That was hardly uncommon behaviour.

There is no evidence this man engaged in ethnic cleansing or genocide; only questionable military actions, the details of which we do not know.  He was a Ukrainian who fought for the Nazis because the Nazis were fighting the USSR, not an Auschwitz camp worker.

"Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and ableist"

Know what the biggest benefit of the higher education bubble is?  When it collapses, we won't have to listen to cultural Marxist prattle like this.  Such programs will be among the first cut when universities start tightening their budgets.

Identity corporatism is the most disgusting type of politics.

Isn't this just a patronage job?  Maybe they have to post a job offer online to meet regulations?   My understanding is that Michelle Obama's exorbitant salary as a "diversity consultant" was also a patronage thing; her father was a powerful local figure of some sort (I can't remember if it was organized crime or politics, not that there's a difference between the two in Chicago).

The evidence seems a bit circumstantial, to me.  It was hardly uncommon to "burn villages with women and children in them" in World War II; the question is why, and whether the man's company was deliberately targeting civilians.

And let's be honest: it's extremely difficult to prevent troops that haven't been properly trained from committing excesses in war, especially if the military structure they're in is itself inexperienced in matters of troop discipline.  It's entirely possible that this guy wanted his troops to murder civilians; but it's also possible he didn't, and simply lacked the necessary control over his men to prevent it.

Perhaps.  I suspect the Catholic hierarchy feels a bit betrayed, though it's really their own fault.  If one insists on celibate priests, then excluding those with strong sex drives does make sense, I think (I believe it was Paul who said "it's better to marry than to burn").

It's a messy issue.  I prefer the way my own religion does things, which is to prefer congregation leaders be married men.  Much less messy.

I'm not sure it's quite that simple.  Fifty years ago, the American elite embarked on one of the biggest social engineering enterprises in human history.  They decided to reforge America from a WASP ethnic state into the world's first successful multi-ethnic and multi-racial democracy.

If they had stayed the course, and done what was necessary to forge America's disparate racial and ethnic populations into a singular new ethnic identity, this might have worked.  Instead they chickened out, and left us in our current "multicultural" mess.  The social science is surprisingly solid on this: you emphasize people's differences when you want to segregate them, not when you want them to live in harmony with each other.

An overreaction to the priest sex scandals, do you think?

We do have a long-term fight, though: overturning Roe v. Wade.  Aside from that, having long-term goals for specific policy changes can be difficult; there's always the danger of overshooting.  And incremental steps towards a policy can be a lot more politically damaging than the policy itself.  A flat tax is a good example; incrementally moving in that direction leaves us exposed to being branded as the party of the rich, in a way that a sudden shift to a flat tax would not.

I fail to see why we we must choose between centralizing autocrats and morally nihilist libertarians.  After all, people can be libertarian at the federal level while supporting a more active government at the local level, can't they?

But it's not enforced equally, and that is a problem.  The most obvious response would be to enforce the rules just as laxly for gay people as for straights, though I think that would be a mistake (I happen to think society should demand sexual restraint more than it presently does, and this is a perfect opportunity to move the bar higher for heterosexual behavior).

There's no need to be conspiratorial, Brian.  There are gay lobbies in most churches, in the sense that many Christian church leaders are sympathetic to the plight of homosexuals, even if they don't quite know what to do with them.  That's not at all the same as "the gay [political] lobby," which is a nihilist movement more than anything else (it may not be evil in the way radical feminism is, but it's still pretty nasty).

That's not true at all.  There are plenty of straight sex-crazed men who enjoy sex with other men, without being attracted to them (that's why I find homoerotic jousting among straights so disgusting; nothing is more gross than someone who wants to sexually experiment with you but does not, and never will, find you attractive).