The Philosophical Optimist

            In a world so flooded with sexual images and energies that it has reached a Brave New Level of boredom, it seems only the eccentricities retain any possibility to excite.   Hence our current seeming fascination with such matters as “same-sex marriage.”   In the last few years, some have insisted that we should ban same-sex marriage by legislative fiat.   Most recently, this country’s highest court has taken the opposite approach by banning any and all such bans by its own judicial fiat             But, as usual, they are all wrong.   Or at least, that is not the whole story.             That cannot be the whole story because to presume that it is such is to hold to the fallacious belief that marriage is a mere human creation of positive law: the Supreme Court decision treated the issu...

If you didn’t see this coming, you should   have: it has been announced that the next person to play the Doctor in the BBC series Doctor Who will be a woman.   As the show’s makers have insisted, the cries of outrage probably have been greatly exaggerated, since narrow-mindedness is not a thing whovians are known for.   More importantly, this turn of events should not have surprised fans of the show at all.   Indeed, the show seems to have been preparing us for this eventuality for quite some time.             It all begins, oddly enough, not with a chair (that was Juno ), but with Matt Smith’s hair.   When (in “The End of Time”) David Tennant regenerates into Matt Smith, the Doctor immediately begins inspecting his new body.   When he gets to his hair, this is his reaction:       “Hair.   [feels his hair, which is slightly long]   I’m a girl!   No! ...