Since I have the place to myself for the moment, I figured it’d be time to do a little intellectual spring cleaning. Call it “20-odd Theses”, if you want.

I don’t care what you put on your pizza. Pineapple? Shrimip? Kale? Put whatever you want on your pizza. And I’ll do the same. Keep your nose outta my food. I’ll do the same for you.

Same goes for hot dogs.

If you’re not a lawyer, the “Oxford Comma” is an affectation.

I, and to the extent it matters, this blog, stand for a few things I think are worth upsetting the apple cart for, above and beyond the above:

I support free speech. Not just the gauzy, “Question Authority” bumper sticker type that disappeared from every Subaru in Marcy-Holmes when Barack Obama was elected. The real thing – Communists standing on soapboxes, Nazis (pardon the redundancy) marching parades, Klansmen jabbering away freely – and all the good people confronting, refuting, and best of all mocking and taunting them back to the stone age. Because defending speech you agree with wouldn’t need a Constitutional amendment.

Human freedom and dignity, and the inalienable, unabridgable right to defend it.

The whole panoply of small-“l”l liberalsm (aka movement libertarian conservative) thought. You say it’s obsolete? Then so is my Christian faith. I’m not burying either of them for the sake of false polity, much less temporal swings in public mood.

Moral order. All humans are equal before just laws and God alone. Beneath that, it’s all about talent and merit.

The injunction to be kind to “love one another as God loves you” and to be charitable to oen’s fellow human is not a contradiction to the above.

Exploiting and swindling that sense of charity is a moral crime carried out by moral algae.

Christian Humanism, fundamentalist chanting points aside, is not a contradiction. Western civilization sprang from Judeo-Christian Humanism – applying the principles of both faiths to civil society. Not “theocracy” – but a society guided by generally-accepted principles drawn from that faith.

Truth is a virtue. Supporting truth is a calling. Upholding truth over lies is a mandate. Good and evil both exist, and being incisive, critical and honest about the differences is Right and Good vs, Wrong and Evil. Being honest about the differences is a colossal burden and supreme good.

On the subject of good and evil, truth versus lies? It’s a fact:

• That the Holocaust happened. It wasn’t fictional, it wasn’t exaggerated.
• That as a result Jews get angsty about talk about systematic extermination. Those who are irate about “demographic replacement” but don’t recognize that Jews have been dealing with it on a kinetic rather than sociological level for centuries – and never moreso than this past 100 years – – are beyond me. Not that I won’t try.
• That Palestinians may have legitimate grievances with Israel.
• That their response – along with, and maybe at the behest of, the rest of the Arab world – in 1948, tearing up the original “two state solution” and launching a war of extermination against a people who were a little salty about the whole “exterminating Jews” thing, may have made those claims a lot less sympathetic
• That litigating these grievances by invading Israel and slaughtering innocent civilians, including children, on top of decades of doing the same, isn’t a legitimate way to resolve grievances, ever
• That the grievances of the Palestinian people are in fact nothing but a stage prop in this current crisis – the massacre was launched not to affect Israeli-Palestinian policy, but to try to derail the Israeli-Saudi peace negotiations, at the behest of Iran.
• That every single Palestinian civilian killed is the fault of Hamas – who on the one hand try to pass themselves off as a “military”, and then violate the rules of war by using civilians as human shields, which is an actual war crime.
• Hamas is in fact the very definition of “fascist” in every meaningful way; an authoritarian statist regime that co-opts society’s institutions toward its end, and

If you don’t believe all the above? I’m not going to say “unfriend me, go away, leave me alone”. I will in fact say “stick around, because I’m going to engage the sh*t out of you”. But it’s gonna be sporty.