This New York Times Magazine article gets the prize for the worst neologism of a week, but does prompt a thought… aside from what I’m going to guess is a too-sanguine attitude towards our current military interventionism, what exactly separates these guys from libertarians? More generally, I get the impression that young “conservatives” who aren’t […]

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Insty links a recent piece from Scrappleface, which practically oozes desperation. The tiresome pseudo-apology isn’t particularly funny, but the underlying argument you reach if you peel it away is laugh out loud hilarious. The message, in short, is that because terror can now be carried out with the tools any stockboy has access to at […]

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audblog audio post

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The most recent Brian Lehrer show includes discussions with Chuck Freund on Arab pop culture and with Jeet Heer on the Straussian influence on the Bush administration.

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Just one last reminder: Thursday night, 7pm at Rendezvous Lounge near 18th and Kalorama. Tell your friends.

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There was an old McDonalds commercial that always annoyed me, as a vegetarian. We see Ronald McDonald in a grove of hamburger trees, plucking a Big Mac from a nearby branch. It bugged me because it concealed the ugly reality of how that little meatpuck found its way into those (at the time) styrofoam containers. […]

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Warning: Matrix Reloaded spoilers in post below. The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere representation. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Even as reviews of the second much-anticipated film in the […]

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…that The Fifty-Minute Hour, by my one-time debate partner Amy, is a phenomenal blog. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blather…

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Is distributed supercomputing overhyped? So says Shirky.

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You know, I’ve always had a vague suspicion that a large part of the appeal of antiglobo protest was the social scene, not to mention the opportunity to flirt with attractive young people in revealing hand-stitched Guatemalan attire. Now, there’s proof. Update: Wow, am I a dunce… I missed the best part. Commenter Andy points […]

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