The Ethicist hath a life.

Some house-cleaning and announcements:

Where has Aethix Plexis been the last week, you undoubtably are asking yourself. The answer is simple. The ethicist and his partner in righteousness are both humanities students in their autumnal year of college and, as such, are fast approaching the time of reckoning — a 60-100 page essay representing the culmination of all knowledge in our respective fields. Expect scarce but rambling posts in the coming three weeks. Were the characters of our photographer-housemates, who have a (to be generous) slighly less demanding barrier to graduation, not so colored by their exploitive craft, perhaps the Plexis could maintain its regular features by turning duties over to them. Alas, we don't play with that kind of fire.

And in case anyone was wondering, Randy Cohen did a bang up job this Sunday in his column.  What a coincidence that Randy did his job just as I didn't want to do mine.

So, in the meantime, here are some videos about evil.  The first comes from a BBC show where an atheist scientist goes around the world goading the devout into rationally justifying their faith, an untouchable topic in American television (see this survey which, according to a quick google news search, wan't even picked up by the newspapers).  It gets really good about half-way into it, after the narrator compares the evangelist preacher to Joseph Göbbles. 

The second video comes from the middle-days of Pat Robertson.  Having spoken of two plagues — Communism and gays — at a Republican convention, we get a behind-the-scenes look that explains why Larry King Live makes for such asinine TV.  I would have liked to put up the Jerry Falwell video from the 700 Club where he explains the causes of 9/11 as feminists and the ACLU, but no one seems to have it.