Matthew Yglesias, from whom I seem to be getting all my ideas for blog posts recently, has a couple of posts on the relevance (or lack thereof) the question over whether homosexuality is “innate” or a “choice.” My take, not knowing a whole lot about the science of the issue, is that so many people […]

[Read more →]

On the suggestion of a commenter to a post below, I was skimming over the first chapter of David Stove’s Against the Idols of the Age when my eye lighted on a passage concerning what Karl Mannheim called “unmasking” explanations. These are most familiar if you’ve debated with one of the few genuine Marxists not […]

[Read more →]

Reason‘s Ron Bailey is always great to read on biotech issues, but I sometimes feel as though his forays into bioethics go wide of the mark. This piece on the pro-aging views of Leon Kass (a philosopher libertarians would have to invent, as a foil, if he didn’t exist) is a case in point. Kass’s […]

[Read more →]

Brad DeLong has a post on Robert Nozick’s now slightly infamous use of rent control laws to extract a settlement of over $30k (in mid 80s dollars!) from his then landlord, Love Story author Erich Segal. First, a general note on the ample discussion that followed. There’s plenty of tiresome rehearsal of some line about […]

[Read more →]

Much quoted since the sad death of Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been his aphorism: The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. However, as Matthew Yglesias observed a while […]

[Read more →]

Y’know, it probably never would’ve occured to me to pick up a Dixie Chicks album otherwise, but given how quickly their stock has fallen with the mouth-breathing waste-of-flesh demographic over the last few weeks, I think I may just go pick up their latest.

[Read more →]

Next time some patriotic genius tells you that our foreign policy has nothing, nothing at all, to do with terrorism, because it’s American culture that provokes such all consuming hatred in the Muslim world, point ’em to this photo of young Arabs headed off to fight against U.S. troops in Iraq: Yup, he’s wearing a […]

[Read more →]

…a ton of longer items I’ve wanted to blog all week but haven’t had time for shall be up over the weekend. (I’m increasingly working on pieces that people actually pay me to do… whoda thunk it?)

[Read more →]

Apparently, some of the police who patrol my (overwhelmingly Hispanic) neighborhood think it’s both permissible and entertaining to pull over Latino families under false pretenses, then berate them, make fun of their ability to speak English, and threaten them with arrest without cause. Some of them also think they’re not obligated to provide badge numbers. […]

[Read more →]

According to John Quiggin, Al Jazeera is reporting that Salam Pax has been wounded and is hospitalized. If that’s true, and if even Al Jazeera now knows who he is, that probably means he’s in danger, if not from his wounds then from reprisals.

[Read more →]