Some good news in opinion poll trends. Since it’s pretty clear that age is strongly related to negative attitudes about homosexuality, we’re just going to see this continue. And since attitudes like these tend to be socially reinforcing, I’m betting there’s a critical mass where we see a big, abrupt jump, as older folk either […]

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First, if you have any interest in taking a Moral Sense Test run by the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard (and who doesn’t?), go click through and do it now before I deflower your pristine intuitions with my throbbing analysis.   All done?   Good. Ok, the test basically presents a series of short scenarios […]

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I’m so hitting this if I get back in time from New York, where I’ll be seeing the Kirov production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle the previous week. I’ll just have to be careful not to bust into “Where Do We Go from Here?” during Siegfried’s death march.

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Quite a

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I’m saddened to read that Lindsay Beyerstein’s father died yesterday, less than a month past his 60th birthday. I actually hadn’t realized they were related: I was only aware of Barry Beyerstein as the best sort of skeptic, casting a critical eye on the grand claims of alternative medicine without ever lapsing into dogmatism—open-minded, as […]

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So, I’m out of sympathy with the sentiment, obviously, but it is pretty damn funny—especially if, like me, you spent your formative geek years in thrall to Moderately-Multiplayer Ontable Role-Playing Games. The person who created this image has actually produced a whole series of Magic-style cards representing various elements of political argument and conflict: philosophers, […]

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So, most periodicals have ethics rules prohibiting reporters from accepting gifts of more than nominal value from any person or organization they’ve written about or might cover in the future. And, formal rules or no, this seems like something of a no-brainer. But it occurred to me today that I’ve attended, gratis, several very nice […]

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Twin defenses of Guantanamo Bay today in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal make the case against closing this delightful vacation spot. The enthusiasm on display here is a bit odd given that the White House itself insists it considers the prison’s closure a priority. (Of course, in politics, everything is a […]

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A New York Times editorial today condemns “three bad rulings” by the Supreme Court. One is the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” decision, which the Times calls a “mangling of sound precedent and the First Amendment.” Another, and the primary target of the editors’ ire, is the Wisconsin Right to Life campaign finance ruling, which “opened […]

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TNR sends a mole on the National Review cruise, and comes back with such an astonishing cargo of crazy that there’s a spit-take lurking in each paragraph. (No word on whether they were following this activity schedule.) At this point, you’d really think it impossible to be surprised anymore by the terrifying self-delusion of conservative […]

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