The Washington Post has published an op-ed of truly magnificent stupidity (and, incidentally, gratingly twee prose) today, decrying the platform the Internet provides for anonymous speech: In any community in America, if Mr. anticrat424 refused to identify himself, he would be ignored and frozen out of the civic problem-solving process. But on the Internet, Mr. […]

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This may just be the strangest anti-drug PSA ever.

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In the aftermath of a few well publicized rape/murder cases in New York last year, I wrote that I found it somewhat unsettling how quick some folks were to decry as “victim blaming” or “slut shaming” any suggestion that these ought to serve as tragic reminders that, for instance, there are parts of Manhattan where […]

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Diane Rehm, who I hear once had pretensions of being a journalist of some kind, conducted a maddeningly uncritical, borderline fawning interview with drug warrior Joe Califano on her program today. My expectations at this stage are actually pretty low. I didn’t expect Rehm to probe terribly deeply into Califano’s dire warnings about the terrifying […]

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Well, this is a little unusual: I basically agree with the gist of Liam Murphy’s response to the Dan Klein essay I discussed in a post below. Coercion is either going to be a strictly descriptive term with, at most, indirect moral significance, or a morally loaded one. But in the latter case, your application […]

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Ross Douthat has a good roundup of the discussion sparked by Christopher Hitchens’ claim that Karl Rove is an atheist who typically characterizes himself (I’ll agree, somewhat condescendingly) as “not fortunate enough to be a person of faith.” I was actually discussing this very issue with a friend over the weekend, and as I said […]

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Speaking of coercion… is that you, Yglesias? The fact of the matter is that older teens are adults and that the essence of adulthood is being put in a position to make decisions – even bad decisions. To be in a position where one has to rely on advice from one’s friends and family rather […]

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Dan Klein has a long and interesting Cato Unbound essay that takes as its starting point the somewhat puzzling finding that more than half of economists in a recent survey believed that minimum wage laws were “not coercive in any significant sense.” Klein takes this result to be explained by the negative connotation of the […]

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That’s how my friend Will describes books that he hasn’t actually gotten around to reading, but about which he’s consumed so much of the secondary literature that he feels as though he has. (A Theory of Justice seems to be in this category for huge numbers of people—which quickly makes sense if you both understand […]

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I realize that the canons of journalistic objectivity preclude interspersing any coverage of the rabid opponents of evolutionary theory with periodic observations that they’re totally fucking crazy, but can we at least get a brief aside when they say something that’s just verifyably gibberish? To wit: “Both Nazism and communism were inspired by Darwinism,” [George […]

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