I was naturally repulsed upon reading this post at Feministe about “three ‘pro-life’ organizations” planning to stage some sort of macabre celebration in honor of terrorist and multiple-murderer Paul Jennings Hill. Fortunately, these “organizations” appear to be digital pufferfish: A couple of dudes creating a welter of websites in order to give the appearance of […]

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One of the very, very few practical perks of being a libertarian is that you will occasionally find yourself in conversations about what’s wrong with “our side” with groups of both liberals and conservatives. It very quickly becomes apparent that both groups are utterly convinced that “we” waste all our time in petty internecine squabbling, […]

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I was just chatting with an old friend about attitudes toward marriage and children. I’ve always understood the desire for these things (to borrow a bit of philosophy jargon) in the de re, but not the de dicto sense. That is, I understand full well being crazy about a specific person with whom you’d like […]

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I normally dig on Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi, but his Adbusters piece on the sorry state of the American left is pretty weak sauce. (See Ross Douthat for a similar take.) First, the essay opens and closes with some rather odd reflections on the word liberal—its aesthetics and connotations—that treat the term as though it […]

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Security expert Bruce Schneier has an excellent essay at Wired drawing some much-needed attention to the increasingly obvious fact that very many of the scary terrorists who want to KILL us!!!1!!1!! are laughably impotent Keystone Jihadis. This worth bearing in mind, because lots of hawkish rhetoric seems to tacitly assume that the proper metric of […]

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Apparently, the Supreme Court justice grounds his reasoning on vital constitutional questions in what he’s learned from pop action shows: The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” […]

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The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education does yeoman’s work drawing public attention to suppression of academic freedom on campuses around the country, but there are (sadly) so many cases each year that it’s hard to keep them all in perspective sometimes. Most university administrations make the occasional misstep, but many—sometimes with a little prodding—ultimately […]

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The New York Times cheers the purchase by

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In a recent article at TCSDaily, Atheist Karl Reitz provides a prime example of what Dan Dennett calls “belief in belief.” That is, though his prose style actually seems calculated to undermine any possibility of belief in a merciful deity, Reitz wants to argue it’s a damn good thing people adhere to false religions, not […]

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In the comments to the post “Rock Heresy,” Andrew writes: So, is there an album that is beyond reproach? It would have to be something that doesn’t aim too high, wouldn’t it? I don’t know that I’ve got an answer to that one, but it did get me thinking about the category of the “overrated” […]

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