Amanda Marcotte exercises her uncanny, quasi-mystical power to peer into the dark, shrouded heart of the libertarian. Among her discoveries: We were all staunch supporters of the war, and think that the rich are morally superior to the poor (who, by the way, they own like chattel). Who knew?

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Starting next week, I’ll be contributing occasionally to The Economist‘s Democracy in America as a guest blogger. Per their policy, the posts won’t be attributed, but I figure those of you who’ve been reading for a while will probably recognize the flavour of my prose through the Britishisms.

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A few weeks ago, my regular pub trivia team took over the rotating hosting duties at our weekly game at Wonderland. Teammate and Reasonoid Dave Weigel and I decided to close with an audio round, split into two parts: Dave did five questions about his beloved mash-ups, and I did five about 20th century composers, […]

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Looking over the comments to the essay linked in the previous post, I’m reminded of one of the rhetorical problems facing opponents of torture. If you point out that some interrogation method we’ve used at some point is a cruel, abhorrent tactic better suited to Kim Jong Il’s North Korea than the United States, someone […]

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It’s already been very widely linked, but if you haven’t seen this analysis by a former Navy trainer for SERE (the military’s interrogation resistance course), it’s something of a must-read.

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Via TLF, Decaln McCullagh nails the most obvious reason why a “Do Not Track” list seems unnecessary: Anyone who cares enough about this form of “privacy invasion” (a form that strikes me as fairly benign, but YMMV) presumably also cares enough to spend 30 seconds figuring out how to block cookies from non-trusted sites. Is […]

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I’m reading a book on the psychology of evil in which it’s suggested in passing that judging actions primarily by intent is difficult because people’s “real motivations” are often unconscious, and their conscious motivations essentially rationalizations. The implicit premise here is that the conscious motivation C would not really be sufficient to move the actor, […]

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Ezra Klein advances the Whiny Siblings model of transportation infrastructure funding: In answer to this, some conservatives suggest Amtrak should be able to stand on its own two feet. But is that fair? Last year, Congress appropriated $40 billion in highway funding — that goes to maintenance and new road construction. And a similar sum […]

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Am I alone in suspecting that one serious consideration behind the decision to keep Stephen Colbert off the South Carolina Democratic primary ballot was that he might well win it? Or, at the very least, beat many of the “serious” candidates? After all, that’s the only way adding him to the ballot would help him […]

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There are some cases where I’d like my Mac to use different programs to open certain files with different extensions, even when the underlying file type is the same. For instance. .RAR files and .CBR files are basically both just RAR archives, but I want the former to open with the appropriate extractor, while the […]

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