I feel like you don’t see quite so many good old fashioned blog rants anymore, so it’s sort of nice to see Freddie DeBoer let one rip over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. The first part is a long criticism of what Ross Douthat’s been up to since taking his gig at the New […]

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According to the narrative that appears to have been in place by Saturday, reactions to the news that Barack Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize were sharply split on partisan lines: Democrats celebrating and conservative Republicans reacting with “outrage.”  Now, between Twitter and my RSS feed, I woke up to a whole slew […]

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Thoreau over at Unqualified Offerings writes: In a report on Indonesia, the Economist makes the interesting point that urban Muslims in Indonesia are actually more likely to be drawn to more austere, fundamentalist versions of Islam than their rural counterparts.  The rural Muslims prefer religious practices that blend Islam with elements of Hinduism and indigenous […]

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Charles Murray chides those who found his analysis of the politics of torture investigations by the Justice Department disturbingly amoral: To those who were dismayed, I’ve got worse news: I think it is permissible to talk about murder and rape in amoral terms. To talk about the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and the genocides in Armenia […]

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Conveniently tying together two recent posts, Dworkin has an extended discussion of courtesy in Law’s Empire, which he uses to illustrate some points about the interpretation of social institutions, but which has some independent interests. On the familiar account of somewhat ritualized behavior like tipping your hat to people you encounter, or saying “Please” and […]

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I think Radley Balko has said almost everything I’d want to about the Whole Foods/John Mackey/Obamacare op-ed debacle—in two excellent posts here and here, so I’ll just add some scattered observations. What I find interesting is that the “boycott” doesn’t make a lot of sense in the traditional way: Usually the point is to pressure […]

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Lane Hudson explains why he thought it was appropriate to interrupt Bill Clinton’s keynote address by yelling out a question about Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell and DOMA once he realized there wouldn’t be a Q&A after the talk: So, to the folks in the audience at #NN09, I just wanted to make sure he talked about […]

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David Boaz thinks it’s “ridiculous” to see racism in the Obama-as-Heath-Ledger’s-Joker posters that have appeared recently. I have no idea what the creator’s actual intent was, but I certainly raised an eyebrow and wondered what was going on there—and not because I’m disposed to see all criticism of Barack Obama as inherently racist.  I think […]

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Lisa Wade at Sociological Images muses on why commercial depictions of “lust” or “sexy” overwhelmingly involve images of women, making the implicit lust-er or perceiver-of-sexiness a straight male: Thought Experiment:  If nearly naked men had been dancing in those columns, do you think the audience would have thought “hot men for the women!” or “how […]

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For all the mocking references we see to “The One,” I find I normally associate dogmatic political cults of personality with the right. Whenever I’m tempted to think they’ve got a monopoly, though, I’ll pull up Jason Linkins’ no-punches-pulled article on Keith Olbermann’s complicity in an intra-network “truce” and skim the outraged comments from people […]

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