Since the publication of this New York Times piece, it seems as though you can’t swing a dead cat in a major city without hitting someone uttering the word “metrosexual.” Hell, in the comments to this Hit & Run post, my friend Will avers that I am, myself, a “card-carrying” metrosexual. (Maybe an ex-metrosexual, now […]

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My piece Cost of Living is up at Reason. There are a whole bunch of intriguing philosophical issues raised by the question of how to value human lives that I didn’t have space to explore there, and it’s a problem that we ultimately can’t avoid grappling with. One interesting posit is that in addition to […]

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Thanks Amy. I thought people had just stopped commenting (and/or reading) until Ms. Phillips kindly informed me that I was using outdated YACCS code. Whoops.

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Y’know, I don’t actually think this whole row over Nigerian uranium is such a big deal, unless it was a deliberate lie. And I’m entirely willing to believe that it wasn’t—that it was an honest goof, or even that there’s some further evidence we haven’t seen that still supports the contention. Fine, whatever. I didn’t […]

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In the wake of Dan Dennet’s fundamentally silly “brights” op-ed, blogosphere comment sections have been erupting with tired old theist-atheist debates. I got bored with these years ago, and typically stay out, but I do feel compelled to note one argument that always sticks in my craw. You’ll often hear an argument to the effect […]

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I think I find myself in the unusual position of siding with arch-leftist Barry Deutsch of Ampersand against the always-eloquent Amy Phillips when it comes to the recent Nike commercial speech case. First, let’s get a dumb red herring out of the way—the idea that there’s some terribly pressing issue about whether”corporations have the same […]

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The recent bruhaha over Bush’s maybe-lie maybe-exaggeration vis a vis Iraqi attempts to buy Nigerian uranium put me in mind of the SNAFU Principle, which should be familiar to fans of Robert Anton Wilson or the Principia Discordia. The idea is that the further up on the hierarchy one is, the further disconnected from reality […]

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The best line to emerge from the Supernova conference on decentralized tech, which I attended last week, came from Clay Shirky, who was discussing deep-rooted, hidden assumptions: You go into the restaurant and take the french fries off the menu and call them “freedom fries” instead. And you think you’ve changed something. But it’s still […]

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Tim Lambert has revamped his John Lott watchdog blog, now dubbed Deltoid.

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I just had a lengthy conversation with a PETA spokesman about conditions prevalent even at “organic” dairy farms. I certainly don’t sign on to the full-blown animal rights (as opposed to animal welfare) position PETA advocates, but I don’t think I can rationalize holding off from full-blown veganism any more… which is going to be […]

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