John Derbyshire asks: I want to know why “owning the insult” doesn’t seem to work any more. It used to be a standard ploy—not just “liberal,” but “Whig” (originally “cut-throat cattle rustler from the wild Scottish borders”) and “Tory” (orig. “illiterate Papist peasant from the remotest bogs of Ireland”). Yet nobody could now start a […]

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The more I think about it, the more curious I become about the contents of the secret FISA court ruling first reported by the LA Times, which supposedly sparked the sudden need for reform. The article suggests that the ruling had forced intelligence agencies to treat communications between two parties, both overseas, as domestic surveillance […]

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There’s an interesting post at Feministe in which blogger Jaclyn grapples with some of her thoughts about dating a “cisgender man” (viz.: a biological male who was born that way and presents/performs male gender) after a long period of being involved exclusively with women and transmen. I’ll suggest in passing that some of the unease […]

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I have no idea at this point whether or to what extent the much-gnawed-upon “Scott Thomas” diaries in TNR were truthful, but this seems like odd reasoning: I made this point in my column today, but let me tease it out: All things being equal, it’s more likely that the Army got the truth than […]

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A new book about Herbert Spencer apparently argues against the conventional wisdom that he preached “social Darwinism.” I think that’s right, and the association has lasted as long as it has just because it was useful to have an identifiable foil. I remember taking an intro-level ethics class in college where Spencer’s social Darwinist views […]

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All through reading Michael Ignatieff’s NYT Mag contribution to the chastened hawk’s mea-minima-culpa genre, it took a tremendous effort of will to suppress the urge to grab the nearest fork and make like Oedipus. (No, no, Mom, the other thing.) But the Wheel of Karma turns, and David Rees’ takedown at Hufflepuff returned a solid […]

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Ezra links, in a spirit I think we can charitably call self-flattering, to Dani Roderik’s taxonomy of dismal scientists. “First-best economists” (we learn) decide public policy questions by “knee-jerk” application of simplistic, idealized models. “Second best economists”—who understand that the world is, like, complicated and stuff—are more amenable to targeted regulation. (Is there some kind […]

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A couple years back, as part of a long article on gay adoption, I wrote about Ann Magro and Heather Finstuen, a lesbian couple who were fighting to overturn an Oklahoma law that denied recognition of out-of-state second parent adoptions by same-sex couples. An appeals court has now overturned that law as inconsistent with the […]

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I’ve got an article up at Reason today about the weekend’s FISA amendment. If you just can’t get enough, see also Tim Lee’s take at Ars Techica, Patrick Keefe at Slate, and Ryan Singel at Threat Level.

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It looks like I may have been too quick to accept TNR‘s reported corroboration of (most aspects of) their Iraq diarist’s dispatches: The Weekly Standard is reporting that the author has recanted. Though, of course, now that he’s been named, there are obviously reasons to take that with a few heaps of salt as well. […]

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