I often shy away from slippery slope arguments for two reasons. One is that unless you’re willing to talk in some detail about the mechanism of the slip, it’s all too easy to let yourself drift into fanciful doomsday scenarios divorced from any real argument. The other, though, is that they often take your eyes […]

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Demographers seem to have trouble deciding where GenX ends and the Millennials begin: I’ve seen dividing lines ranging from 1975 to 1982. One of the ways people try to track these things is by figuring out when the last children were born who remember some milestone moment—do you remember the Kennedy assassination, or the Challenger […]

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So one of the cloaks opponents of gay marriage use for their disdain for homosexuals (this is charitable: it would be more offensive to assume that they really believe their own flaccid arguments) is that it decouples (no pun intended) marriage from the goal of proceation and child rearing. My reaction to this line of […]

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Amy has a fantastic account of her time in the NYC blackout. I envy her slightly for having been able, during the power outage, to see the stars above the Manhattan skyline, which I never have.

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I may have just engineered the biggest obstacle to getting my ass out of bed since the heyday of Kozmo.com, which (for New Yorkers) made even the five minute stroll required to pick up damn near anything unnecessary. I’ve set up a wireless network connecting my notebook and desktop. Fast enough to watch streaming video, […]

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It’s frequently necessary to remind conservatives that libertarians aren’t necessarily libertines. Which is true. But not in my case. So I was pleased to discover that I liked the band The Libertines, a British sort of The Clash–meets–The Strokes affair. They’re playing the Black Cat this evening.

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Plenty of smart folk have already rebutted (or celebrated) this post at Through the Looking Glass, but I’m gonna arrive late to the ball and jump on the dance floor anyway. Charles Dodgson notes a case in which some silly homeowners association forbade a man from putting a UN flag on his lawn, and then […]

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So, who are the slackers responsible for the fact that I can’t get an American DVD version of Richard Linklater’s seminal and brilliant film Slacker? Back in high school, I managed to hunt down and dub a copy after some effort, and it soon became one of my favorite films. (I haven’t seen it in […]

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Barry Deutsch takes issue with commenters on the Castillo case, defending the court’s decision and the classification of Demon Beast Invasion as obscene. (Whether he thinks the clerk is the correct person to punish in this instance isn’t clear, but leave that for now.) There are two main contentions Barry offers, both of which I […]

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Derb almost justifies his existence for ten seconds by linking to this amusing catalogue of contemporary cliches.

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