I just skimmed a BeliefNet interview with La Coulter in which she discusses her newest screed about how the anti-American heathens are something something something. It is, as you might expect, roughly equal parts puerile jokes and total batshit craziness, but I did raise an eyebrow at this bit: Is it possible to be a […]

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I think I finally understand the (non-religious) conservative case against gay marriage—and, simultaneously, why it has remained so maddeningly opaque just what the real argument is. I was thinking back on an old argument with Maggie Gallagher in which we’d reached the familiar point where the gay marriage opponents try to explain why the idea […]

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A theme that keeps coming up in my research into toxic obedience and bad group behavior, albeit under different names and in different variants, is what Robert Jay Lifton, in his study of Nazi doctors calls “doubling,” a kind of psychic compartmentalization that allows people to commit brutal acts under the aegis of one role […]

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In response to a proposal that Hollywood boycott Mad Mel, David Bernstein of Volokh Conspiracy wonders why, if this is acceptable, the anti-communist blacklist of the 1950s “remains one of Hollywood’s deepest shames.” He adds: I’m not going to shed any tears over Mel Gibson’s self-destruction, but I haven’t shed any over those poor unfortunate […]

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By now Teh Internets are abuzz with tales of Mel Gibson’s drunken, abusive anti-Semitic rant during a COPS-worthy interaction with a sheriff’s deputy. Greg Tinti at Outside the Beltway is first out of the gate (that I’ve seen) suggesting that any gloating aimed at Gibson’s fundie fanbase is unjustified: Don’t get me wrong, if this […]

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I meant to mention earlier that I went with Kerry, Ezra, Spack, & Yglesias to check out A Scanner Darkly last week. (You can watch the first 24 minutes online.) It is, as Peter Suderman notes in his NRO review, an extraordinarily faithful adaptation: It’s up there with Terry Gilliam’s take on “Fear and Loathing […]

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Tyler Cowen’s post on countersignalling, which I discussed in a post below, came back to me as I read Christopher Bohem’s account of the behavior of egalitarian forager bands in Hierarchy in the Forest. Turns out it’s pretty widespread among groups where members are hypervigilant against dominant hunters or temporary, limited-function leaders becoming dominant over […]

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Intelligence officials offered up a rather weird argument in defense of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program in congressional testimony today: But the administration officials called FISA impractical and ineffective for tracking al Qaeda, saying the law would require separate warrants for each U.S.-bound phone call placed by an overseas suspect. “It would cause a tremendous […]

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In “What a Bleeping Shame,” Jon Last gives an overview of the CleanFlicks decision, which found that companies selling bowdlerized copies of popular movies (but which bought and warehoused one original DVD for each cleaned copy they sold) were infringing copyright. But there are scattered errors, such as: The law takes copyright seriously. It’s one […]

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I expect partisanship from the Weekly Standard, and I expect a partisan magazine’s horse-race handicapping to be colored by a bit of wishful thinking, but there’s a level of hackery past which it becomes impossible to do any useful analysis at all. As a case in point, consider “Will Casey Strike Out?” Purporting to be […]

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