The creationist group Answers in Genesis is running an amusing new ad campaign in various conservative magazines, blaming racism on Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species was published on the eve of the American Civil War, six years after Gobinau’s pseudo-pscientific racialist ur-text An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. It is, of […]

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Jonah Goldberg reviews Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul in the most recent National Review, and I had a few chuckles at this line: Once a voice of restraint and reason, Sullivan now specializes in shrill panic: mercurial ranting full nof operatic arguments, steeped in bad faith, aimed at people he once praised (including yours truly). […]

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Amy Phillips at iLiberty.org has a handy dandy roundup of various paternalistic initiatives on the ballots this week, and how they fared, from winking at dope-smokers to milking cigarette smokers. Read it, for your own good—and for the children.

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Riffing off Bryan Caplan’s excellent Cato Unbound piece on voter ignorance, Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias both suggest that this is not a terribly big problem, since policy is determined by elites anyway. In other words, political “slack”—one of Caplan’s proposed solution—is already ample, a situation which has plenty of its own drawbacks. There’s something […]

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I’ve got a short piece up at Campus Progress warning Dems away from “moderation” on reproductive rights. One argument that didn’t make it into the final draft for space reasons, but which I’m curious to bounce off the blogsphere, is that accepting the fetuses-are-persons line (even if you think maternal rights to bodily control trump […]

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Via Pandagon, this is incredibly creepy: Not that this requires any further comment, but: “MEMORIES: Key to Captivating Beauty”? What the fuck does that even mean? Obviously the subtext of all this stuff is that women are property, but I’m always a little amazed when they’re willing to go right ahead and make it text—as, […]

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I’d really love to believe the GOP-lost-but-conservatism-won meme that’s circulating, especially the version that stresses Republicans’ apostasy from the ’94 gospel of small government and fiscal responsibility, or the one that points to the power of libertarian spoiler candidates. Hell, I hope it sticks if it’ll dissuade a few of the remnants from tacking left—or […]

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So, a confession. Readers who’re convinced that my dislike for President Bush automatically makes me a Democrat anyway will probably be unsurprised by this, but I think I just had the first experience of genuine solidarity with a major-party electoral victory of my adult life. On the way home from watching the results, in a […]

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So, like lots of people who favor limited government, I’m generally glad to see divided government and a near-even split in the Senate, even if the ideal would probably be Dem executive and GOP Congress rather than the reverse. But it’s worth bearing in mind that a healthy bit of gridlock isn’t the only option. […]

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I owe it to John Doris’ fascinating book Lack of Character to say something at length about his general—and unsettlingly compelling—argument for a deep psychological situationism and skepticism about broad and consistent personal character. But for now I just want to call out an amusing phrase—I’m not sure whether it’s his original coinage—he invokes in […]

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