It turns out that Alec Rawls, son of John Rawls (aka the late grand don of 20th century egalitarian philosophy) is a flaming libertarian! In an article in The American Enterprise about six years back, a profile of various “rebel children” included the following: What happens when your father is not only a liberal, but […]

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Gene offers an argument against determinism that I’ve seen advanced by Tibor Machan, and I’ve got to confess it doesn’t strike me as any better now than it did when I first read it. In a nutshell, the argument runs as follows: there are certain apparently compelling reasons offered by many philosophers to the effect […]

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In a fit of pathological obsession, I decided to do a little more digging on the question of Lott’s survey. University of Chicago professor William Landes was working on a paper with Lott around the time of the crash: he confirms that Lott lost quite a bit of data in July 1997, and emphasizes his […]

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Glen has a clever post that puts into perspective just how “wacky” those alien-lovin’ Raelians are.

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Like Jim Henley, I received an email from prof. Lott himself yesterday. In true Fox Mulder form, I want to believe, but there’s no really solid confirmation yet. On a few points, there seems to be little doubt. Plenty of people — from publishers to academic collaborators — can corroborate that Lott had a hard […]

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In casual conversation yesterday, a friend mentioned someone named “Avril Levigne.” “Avril what?” I replied. “Is that like Emeril, the chef?” My friend was aghast: apparently everyone else knows who this person is. And a quick trip to the Kazaa network confirmed that she is, in fact, a standard issue teenybopper pop singer. I have […]

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Since leaving NYU, I’ve increasingly shifted my focus from ethics and political philosophy, the topics that most occupied me there, to certain issues in the philosophies of logic and language. There’s a kind of continuity there, since I’ve always taken a core underlying problem, whose clarification would help us make headway in any of those […]

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The Gryph reports some disturbing evidence indicating that John Lott may have fabricated a “national survey” that he claimed to have conducted for his book More Guns, Less Crime. Law professor James Lindgren, one of the people most responsible for the exposure of Michael Bellesiles’s fraud, has posted a report on his attempt to verify […]

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Penn Jillette, in the most recent issue of Regulation: [Dean Cameron] is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met and, on top of that, he came up with the perfect piece of political performance art that you should try yourself the next time you fly. He had the Bill of Rights printed on pieces […]

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From Reuters: More good news for drinkers — frequent tippling of beer, wine or even spirits lowers a man’s risk of heart attack, and it appears to be how often, not how much, that is important. Regular male drinkers cut their risk of heart attack by about one third compared to nondrinkers, and one beer […]

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