Here’s an item that should come as no surprise to anyone: Religion Is a Potent Force for Cooperation and Conflict, Research Shows The article discusses a paper by Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges that describes religion as strongly fostering cooperation within human social groups, as a means of competing more successfully against other groups. We […]
From time to time in these pages we have noted the accelerating caponization of the Western male, as the grand project to bring the sexes into complete convergence somewhere deep in distaff territory continues apace. Fortunately, there are still a few pockets of resistance.
Here’s a novel approach to implementing coordinated behavior in a non-hierarchical “swarm” of autonomous machines: Biologists have long puzzled over the ability of bacteria and social insects to sense not only the presence of compatriots but their number and to synchronise their behaviour. It turns out that these creatures perform this synchronisation using a process […]
Remember Colin Quinn? That Brooklyn comedian who was on Saturday Night Live for a while? I happened to be looking at Twitter just now and watched him destroy whatever was left of his professional life. In response to the news that the majority of babies born in the USA are now non-white, he emitted this: […]
The big news of the day is that President Obama, after years of reticence on the topic, has just announced that he supports same-sex marriage. I don’t suppose this will have much effect on the vote. It’s hard to imagine that his coming out in favor of SSM will snatch any supporters away from Mitt […]
East Germany, before and after.
Here’s Eric Hoffer, writing in 1975: After all that we have seen with our own eyes there ought not to be a grownup person who is not contemptuous of the gibberish about an ideal society and does not look for the lineaments of a commissar in the features of an idealist loudmouth. The trouble is […]
More nanny-state idiocy from the Feds. Here.
In the comment-thread of a recent post, I’ve been arguing with our resident gadfly The One Eyed Man about the Constitutional legitimacy of Obamacare’s individual mandate — part of a broader disagreement about the proper scope of Federal power. After much back-and-forth I wrote: Bottom line: Constitutional law is a fascinating study, combining history, literature, […]
In the past few days Heather Mac Donald has posted two essays on the jarring dissonance between mainstream coverage of race and violent crime and the underlying realities thereof. We hear all the time about the need for a “frank discussion of race in America”; perhaps this will help. Read them here and here. The […]
March 29, 2012 – 10:36 am
Here’s a cogent item on the death of free speech in Britain, by Charles Cooke.
March 28, 2012 – 12:09 pm
The New York Times opines today about yesterday’s Obamacare arguments in the Supreme Court. Predictably, the editors seem to believe that the effects of the Affordable Care Act are of sufficient national importance to trump its Constitutional audacity, and so they are willing to brush aside yesterday’s sharp questioning by conservative Justices as mere tendentiousness: […]
Among the people I follow on Twitter is the popular comedian and writer Andy Borowitz, winner of the first National Press Club Award for humor. He pops up all over the place: you can read him in The New Yorker, at the Huffington Post, and in syndication in many major newspapers. He’s contributed to lots […]
March 25, 2012 – 11:35 pm
An object at rest tends to remain at rest, I’m told, and I’ve been providing experimental confirmation for the past few days. Have no fear, though: just because we haven’t been chronicling the collapse of Western civilization as attentively as usual here at waka waka waka doesn’t mean it isn’t proceeding apace.
Here’s a thoughtful new item by Sam Harris called Islam and the Future of Liberalism. A sample: As I tried to make clear [in a recent podcast], we know that intolerance within the Muslim world extends far beyond the membership of “extremist’ groups. Recent events in Afghanistan demonstrate, yet again, that ordinary Afghans grow far […]
Here, courtesy of VFR, is another illustrative account of the myriad blessings that the cult of Diversity showers upon us all. As anyone with a realistic understanding of history and human nature knows, high diversity erodes social trust and cohesion, and this story has it all: ethnic conflict, identity politics, race-hustling lawyers enriching themselves by […]
Still swamped here, with no time for a long post. At the top of the list of topics on my mind, though, is that insane Dharun Ravi thoughtcrime trial and verdict — in which an (admittedly unlikable) young man is facing 10 years in jail, a permanent felony record, and possible deportation for committing … […]
In a comment to yesterday’s post on l’affaire Fluke-Limbaugh, I linked to a pair of blog posts by University of Rochester professor Steven Landsburg (sent my way by Dennis Mangan). In the first, Professor Landsburg wrote: [W]hile Ms. Fluke herself deserves the same basic respect we owe to any human being, her position ”” which […]
In a comment to our recent post about artificial wombs, I quoted some remarks by Lawrence Auster about the ongoing contraception brouhaha. In his post, Mr. Auster had written that liberal/feminist thought understands the issue along the following lines: 1) Society is a collection of equal persons, all having the right to equal freedom. 2) […]
We’ve been hearing ad nauseam about what a cad Rush Limbaugh was to call Sandra Fluke a “slut”. (I certainly agree that he would have been far wiser not to, for assorted good reasons, not least of which being that it was ungentlemanly.) President Obama was shocked — shocked! — to hear such language, and […]
Folks my age are old enough to remember, wistfully, the golden age of the American manned-spaceflight program, and have with sadness watched NASA’s long descent into senescence and irrelevance — from the virile pioneer of a “new frontier” that it was in the 1960s, to a sedentary bureaucracy tasked with getting children interested in science […]
Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum comments on Sandra Fluke’s testimony before Congress, and on the newly discovered right to make other people subsidize your sex life. See also our recent post on positive versus negative rights, and the balance between rights and privileges in a sturdy and flourishing society. It seems apt to quote a […]
February 29, 2012 – 4:32 pm
Here you go, folks: the live-tweeting of last night’s Park Slope Food Co-op meeting.
February 29, 2012 – 12:21 pm
Last spring I wrote a brief post called Golden Mean, reproduced below in full: If you look at any vigorous society in its prime, you see a healthy balance between rights and privileges. When either grows too much at the expense of the other, a nation declines: on the one hand toward impotent mediocrity, on […]
February 27, 2012 – 3:33 pm
Excellent post on monogamy over at Mangan’s. Read it here.
February 26, 2012 – 7:06 pm
A while back, in a private correspondence with a conservative blogger about what the Left means when it talks about “social justice”, I wrote the following: Daniel Dennett once wrote that “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. The central principle of liberal “justice”, and of Rawlsian justice, is exactly that: to […]
February 22, 2012 – 12:45 pm
Dennis Prager floats an interesting idea: allowing citizens to indicate in advance whether they wish to pursue the death penalty in the the event of their being murdered. It would be like checking the organ-donation box on your driver’s license. Mr. Prager remarks: I can’t think of one good argument against it ”” unless you’re […]
February 22, 2012 – 11:28 am
John Derbyshire commented, in last Friday’s Radio Derb podcast, on the Dharun Ravi trial getting underway today in New Jersey (this is the case in which a gay Rutgers student named Tyler Clementi killed himself some time after Mr. Ravi had secretly recorded Mr. Clementi kissing a male student in his dorm room). The case […]
February 17, 2012 – 12:34 am
For his heresies, Patrick Buchanan has now officially been sacked by MSNBC. (I’ll confess that I’m surprised he lasted so long.) He comments here.
February 15, 2012 – 1:45 pm
From Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, 1840: After having thus taken each individual one by one into its powerful hands, and having molded him as it pleases, the sovereign power extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules, which the most […]
February 13, 2012 – 12:12 am
Nicholas Kristof weighed in today on the Catholic-contraception kerfuffle, in a Times op-ed piece. Even Mr. Kristof acknowledges that this issue is hardly cut-and-dried. He writes: Look, there’s a genuine conflict here. Many religious believers were sincerely offended that Catholic institutions would have to provide coverage for health interventions that the church hierarchy opposed. That […]
January 30, 2012 – 11:51 am
At the Washington Post’s website there’s an item titled “Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.” The article looks over the gap between Presidential job-approval and job-disapproval ratings (by respondent’s party affiliation) over the years, and concludes that Mr. Obama has divided the nation more than any third-year President ever has. (In a recent poll, 80% […]
January 25, 2012 – 8:12 pm
Are you tucked away in an elite intellectual and cultural cocoon, isolated from America’s ‘vibrant’ popular mainstream? One can only hope. Find out here.
January 22, 2012 – 11:39 pm
More on the blessings of socialized medicine, from the Daily Mail.
January 22, 2012 – 11:26 pm
What say you, readers? Is this child abuse?
January 19, 2012 – 1:30 pm
My friend Danny Fisher’s website Wish I Didn’t Know has picked up a story about a proposed smart-phone app that will warn users about high-crime districts, presumably so that safety-conscious travelers can avoid blundering into them. The app has apparently irked various interest groups, who I suppose think that gathering crime-rate statistics and making them […]
January 12, 2012 – 11:13 pm
With a hat tip to Dennis Mangan, here’s a provocative item: Israel Upholds Citizenship Bar for Palestinian Spouses Israel’s Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship. Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional. “Human rights do not prescribe national […]
January 4, 2012 – 1:18 am
In the discussion thread of our recent post about Yusuf al-Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood, the issue soon became: what should the attitude of the West have been toward the democratic uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere? On the one hand, as Americans it seems we ought to support democracy wherever we can; on the other, […]
December 22, 2011 – 12:41 am
Here is a long and deeply depressing essay about California’s dying Central Valley, by one of its lifelong residents, Victor Davis Hanson. How did we let this happen to ourselves?
December 18, 2011 – 12:40 pm
Horrifying images and video from Egypt, here. One of the consistent lessons of history, from Aristagoras to Gorbachev, is that authoritarian systems place themselves at great risk when they attempt to liberalize. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is learning this lesson today; they have unleashed forces that they have no idea how to […]
December 15, 2011 – 7:25 pm
In an excellent little essay at NRO, Michael Knox Beran reminds us that human suffering is, to borrow a word from the natural sciences, conserved: it can be transformed but not eliminated — and that the modern liberal obsession with its eradication at any cost is futile, and in the end destructive. We read: The […]
December 15, 2011 – 7:05 pm
Here are a couple of recent items on the dawa-jihad front: First: you may have heard about the kerfuffle that arose recently when the home-improvement chain Lowe’s decided to yank its sponsorship of the “anti-Islamophobic” television series All-American-Muslim. (Dozens of other sponsors soon joined them; all are now predictably being tarred as “racists” by the […]
December 13, 2011 – 4:31 pm
A few months ago I started noticing a particular female announcer’s voice on radio and television commercials. She had a pleasant enough voice, but I thought it exhibited a peculiar weakness — in her falling inflections she would routinely drop below the bottom of her tonal register, and her sonorous voice would break momentarily into […]
December 7, 2011 – 5:55 pm
President Obama gave a rousing speech for his base yesterday in Osawatomie, Kansas: a collectivist stem-winder in which he invoked the rough-riding spirit of Teddy Roosevelt to call for more leveling, more government regulation of everything, and more central planning — in general, more “tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro […]
December 3, 2011 – 5:08 pm
Pure insanity in deep-blue Boston: First-grader accused of sexual harassment A Boston elementary school is investigating a 7-year-old first-grader for sexual harassment after he struck another boy his age in the groin. But the mother of the accused said her son was fending off the other child, who had choked him in an altercation on […]
December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm
The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must […]
December 1, 2011 – 10:20 am
Here’s some common sense from Thomas Sowell, in the context of an essay about Newt Gingrich’s position on immigration: Let’s go back to square one. The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the […]
November 21, 2011 – 6:24 pm
Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read: Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious […]
November 13, 2011 – 1:36 pm
There’s a good piece by Katie Roiphe on “sexual harassment” in today’s Times. Money quote: The creativity and resourcefulness of the definitions, the broadness and rigor of the rules and codes, have always betrayed their more Orwellian purpose… Also: Codes of sexual harassment imagine an entirely symmetrical universe, where people are never outrageous, rude, awkward, […]