September 13, 2008 – 10:43 pm
As always, there is a provocative exhange of views taking place over at the website Edge.org. It began with an essay by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt entitled Why Do People Vote Republican?
September 7, 2008 – 12:06 am
In a comment to a recent post, reader David Brightly asked if I was worried that naturalistic accounts of morality “might lead to less good and more harm being done.” It’s a good question, and I am not sure about the answer.
September 1, 2008 – 10:51 pm
There is an organization, which I expect most of you have heard of by now, called “the The Brights“. It is dedicated to the promotion of what it calls a “naturalistic worldview”, which it defines as being free of “supernatural and mystical elements”. The name, I think, is exceedingly unfortunate; it seems smug and pollyanna-ish, […]
August 30, 2008 – 11:55 pm
“Baron Bodissey”, at Gates of Vienna, mans the ramparts against creeping socialism in a clear and forceful post. An excerpt: A basic rule for the classical liberal is that government should perform as few functions as possible, and that taxes should be kept as low as possible, in order to eliminate the corruption and non-productive […]
August 30, 2008 – 2:46 pm
Here, courtesy of the Drudge Report, is a link to a blog post and video clip in which we see the pinguid pinko propagandist Michael Moore gloating at the approach of Hurricane Gustav. Caring not a fig for the human and economic impact of the impending storm — which is sure to be considerable, and […]
August 24, 2008 – 10:21 pm
It’s late in the day, and it’s been a long, full day: up early this morning to drive our son back to college, then an evening memorial service here in Wellfleet for a truly remarkable woman — Ellen Rafel, our next-door neighbor here on Hiram Hill, who lost her fight with cancer this spring. So […]
August 12, 2008 – 10:04 pm
I watched a little of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics the other day. It was an elaborate spectacle, and quite beautiful: an enormous troupe of drummers, identically clad, playing and dancing in perfect unison. There may well have been thousands of them; there were at least many hundreds.
We’ve been giving morality, and the universality of moral intuitions, a good going over lately (particularly in this discussion, which now has over 100 comments). Readers with an interest in this topic might like to have a look at Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test. Feel free to share your thoughts here. Note: Don’t read the […]
Don’t like having your freedoms infringed? Worried about the economy? Forget the Patriot Act and the credit crisis; here comes the EPA.
In today’s Times, John Tierney calls our attention to the possibility that the government may soon be imposing “Title IX” requirements on university science departments, because there aren’t “enough” women going into fields like physics and engineering. This is dangerous territory, of course; we all remember the shameful pillorying of Harvard president Lawrence Summers for […]
Feeling tired? Listless? Maybe all you need is some concentrated water. Just add water.
Democracy has obvious drawbacks, not least of which being that at its worst it is nothing more than mob rule. As William Alger said, “a crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.” So the leader of a democracy, depending upon his aims and his talents, can seek to lead by addressing his […]
From my friend Wayne Krantz comes a link to a story that will appear in tomorrow’s New York Times: apparently some of Barack Obama’s younger and more enthusiastic supporters, having noticed that his middle name — Hussein — has been a heavy cross to bear, have decided to make it their own middle name as […]
This just in, from the Washington Post: The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices’ first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history. The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under […]
In response to yesterday’s item about punitive sterilization, a reader e-mails: I think maybe the main problems are that it is an extreme punishment, taking away an obviously fundamental “right,” and the irreversibility issue in a world of inaccurate justice. In that regard, it is outside the penal philosophy of “rehabilitation,” … which should be […]
Some topics seem to be entirely off limits for discussion these days. Often, they are ideas that not all that long ago were not only not taboo, but were embraced at the highest levels of progressive academia and government, right here in the USA. To the philosophically minded, though, there are no off-limits topics — […]
There’s a piece in today’s Times Magazine that is so breathtakingly misbegotten that I am reduced nearly to speechlessness. I had thought of giving it a thorough, line-by-line fisking, but as blogger Steve Sailer also realized upon reading it, it simply stands on it own, a fantastic self-caricature. It is, essentially, an argument that European […]
In today’s New York Times is yet another mention of a notion that seems to be attracting a lot of attention lately: Ray Kurzweil’s idea of an impending technological “Singularity”. The concept is simple enough: if we look at the history of the world, we see a consistently accelerating rate of progress — first biological, […]
Good work by Horace Jeffery Hodges at his website, The Gypsy Scholar. See here, and here.
A couple of days ago I linked to Steven Pinker’s discussion of the recent report by the President’s Council on Bioethics, and mentioned that one of the contributors, surprisingly given the overall makeup of the Council, was the irreligious and materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his essay, he is in fine, feisty form.
Can anybody explain to me why there is such a flap about Hillary Clinton’s mention of the RFK assassination? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, even taking into consideration that taking offense is the new national pastime. I’m no fan of Mrs. Clinton, but this seems ridiculous.
It’s been a hectic weekend, and there’s been no time for writing. Fortunately, our West Coast correspondent Jess Kaplan has sent along two items of interest.
It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.
While looking over the latest from our friend The Stiletto (who, by the way, has just been chosen as a Webby Awards Official Honoree for her “tart” political commentary), I ran across a story about Arizona’s efforts to deal with its enormous influx of illegal aliens. I was struck by one passage in particular: [E]nough […]
As long as I am to be pilloried as a racist and reactionary xenophobe anyway, I might as well carry on. Here’s the latest cave-in, this time from Britain.
No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all […]
I’m sorry to have been off the air yesterday; I spent a long day with the promising young band Bulletproof Soul at Avatar Studios, mixing some of the material we recorded a few weeks ago. I am also working at the office all day today, so can’t write at length now either — but it […]
We’ll all sleep a little better knowing that monsters like these are off the streets. Story here.
As long as we’re on the subject of spineless capitulation to religious extremism, here’s a relevant post over at Gates Of Vienna.
March 31, 2008 – 11:42 pm
On the opinion page of today’s New York Times was an insightful essay, by business editor Eduardo Porter. In it Mr. Porter makes the case that to the extent that societies are fragmented along ethnic, racial, linguistic and religious lines, they are less inclined to support public spending for social programs. While this may be […]
March 12, 2008 – 11:37 am
We thank Kevin Kim once again, this time for calling our attention to a gratifying piece by David Mamet about a road-to-Damascus event regarding the standard liberal worldview.
An item in today’s Washington Post informs us that our only hope to avoid total annihilation is to reduce our carbon emissions to zero. Now.
With hat tips to both the Big Hominid (from whom this entire link-based post is essentially plagiarized) and the Gypsy Scholar, allow me to introduce you to Pat Condell, a British comedian, atheist, and polemicist. If you love a good rant, you won’t be disappointed.
Our online friend Jeffery Hodges, writing once again from his home base in Seoul, South Korea, has added an interesting essay of his own to the discussion of multiculturalism that we’ve had here recently. He cites some intriguing research into the way different sorts of cultures deal with the problem of freeloaders in cooperative systems. […]
Well, I certainly stirred up some controversy with that recent post about the Dutch and their apparent willingness to ban a forthcoming film in order not to anger any Muslims. A great many topics came up, and I think some readers may now look at me as some sort of Eastward-facing version of Lester Maddox. […]
The struggle of civilizations, or perhaps more aptly the struggle of modern civilization against medieval barbarism, has taken a depressing turn in the Netherlands. Unlike their neighbors the Danes, who have staunchly defended their liberties despite storms of outrage from thin-skinned Muslims mortally offended by a few cartoons, the Dutch are planning a somewhat different […]
With a hat tip to our pal The Stiletto, we offer an article by the independently minded journalist John Stossel (who is currently a guest speaker, by the way, at this conference on the excesses of global warmism). In this essay Stossel makes the case that restrictive gun laws unfairly deprive us of the ability […]
February 28, 2008 – 3:12 pm
If you’re wondering what you’re missing at TED 2008, have a look at this on-the-spot blog. If this isn’t the place to be for these few days, I don’t know what is.
February 27, 2008 – 10:58 pm
Today was the beginning of the annual TED conference, which has become just about the toughest ticket in the world to get hold of. Held in Monterey, California, it’s a gathering of 1,000 of the “edgiest” members of the tech, entertainment, and design communities, and frankly, it sounds like a blast. Each speaker is given […]
February 10, 2008 – 11:25 pm
There’s been quite a ruction lately about comments made by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, that called for Britain to adopt Islamic Sharia law as part of its legal system. This sort of supine acquiescence is the road to cultural suicide, it seems to me, and he has been roundly castigated by all, as […]
February 8, 2008 – 11:19 am
Thanks to Kevin Kim for bringing to our attention the World’s Stupidest Comment Thread. It includes such gems as: When politicians say they are for Change but never explain what the change is we better all be careful. I think Adolf Hitler was elected in Germany on a platform of “Change”. and A lot of […]
February 2, 2008 – 2:12 pm
About forty years ago I read a science-fiction book called Wasp. I remember it only dimly, but as I recall it was a corking good read, and the central metaphor of the book has stayed with me: that a small insect, buzzing around the inside of an automobile, can so distract the driver as to […]
January 24, 2008 – 7:50 pm
Dennis Mangan calls our attention to another depressing instance of Draconian speech-policing, this time at Brandeis University.
January 17, 2008 – 1:22 am
In his recent New York Times Magazine article on the evolutionary and biological underpinnings of morality, Steven Pinker acknowledges the nihilistic shadows nearby, and, like other popularizers of Darwinian naturalism, reassures us that we needn’t worry. I think he’s right — we needn’t — but not for the reasons he suggests.
January 13, 2008 – 10:52 pm
As promised, Steven Pinker has written what I think will be seen as a a fairly important article for the New York Times Magazine about human morality. Having banged on the topic of morality a great deal myself lately, I encourage all of you to read it. I found little to disagree with, though his […]
January 13, 2008 – 2:13 pm
Perhaps some of our Korean correspondents might like to weigh on in this odd practice.
January 9, 2008 – 10:51 pm
I’ve just run across a website that might have interesting possibilities. It’s called BigThink, and its aim is to be a sort of online multimedia venue for the exchange of Ideas. I’ve only just started poking around in it, so I haven’t anything much to say about it so far — and being so new […]
January 8, 2008 – 5:15 pm
We read here that the Supreme Court is considering the legality of the most widely used method of lethal injection, on the grounds that it may cause undue suffering to the party being executed, thereby running afoul of the Constitutional proscription regarding “cruel and unusual” punishment.
December 22, 2007 – 9:22 pm
Following a link from Bill Vallicella, I’ve just read a review of the movie Pete Seeger: The Power of Song, in which the reviewer, the historian Ronald Radosh — who knew Seeger personally, and admires him as an artist and a man of peace, generally — nonetheless calls attention to the unrepentance of those of […]