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 […]
December 2, 2007 – 11:46 pm
Readers will probably be familiar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Muslim apostate and political writer. You may have heard of her in connection with the film Submission, about the opression of women under Islam — for which she wrote the screenplay, and for which its director Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam […]
November 27, 2007 – 11:06 pm
Having set such a breezy tone with my previous post, I’m sorry to have to get back to more serious matters. But I’ve just been presented with further evidence, in case any was lacking, that Western civilization is indeed circling the drain: apparently the first season of Sesame Street, from way back in 1969, has […]
November 14, 2007 – 1:06 am
Thanks to our friend Dennis Mangan, the curmudgeonly proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, for commenting at his website on our recent post The Teflon God. Dennis — with whom, by the way, we generally agree about most things — raises the objection, often made, that some of the worst brutality in recent history was committed by […]
October 31, 2007 – 11:31 pm
From our old friend Peter Kranzler comes a link and a question. The link is to this news item, which tells us that the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, has been ordered to pay $10.9 million to relatives of a U.S. Marine killed in Iraq, after church members jeered at people attending his […]
October 26, 2007 – 3:25 pm
I haven’t time just now to write at length, but want to draw your attention to an excellent article, by one Sarah Baxter, from London’s Sunday Times. It examines the convergence between the Far Left and radical Islam, which arises from a confluence of several interests, loathing of America and resentment toward Israel being foremost […]
October 24, 2007 – 10:31 pm
On Monday evening Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza squared off for a debate at The Ethical Culture Society’s Manhattan auditorium; the topic was “Is Christianity the Problem?” I first heard about it from my friend The Stiletto, who sent me a link to an item by D’Souza announcing the event.
October 23, 2007 – 11:32 pm
In today’s New York Times is a review, by Michiko Kakutani, of The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, by the feminist author Susan Faludi. I haven’t read the book, and I am not about to comment on it. I did, however, read an Op-Ed piece by Ms. Faludi back on September 7th, […]
October 21, 2007 – 11:17 pm
A couple of days ago the Nobel laureate James Watson was all over the news: he had expressed, in an interview for the London Times, his opinion that scientific results indicated that black Africans were, on average, less intelligent than white Northerners. In a subsequent article, we read: Dr Watson, who runs one of America’s […]
October 21, 2007 – 12:01 am
In a previous post, I commented, perhaps a bit archly, upon the recent decision of the Portland, ME school board to give birth-control pills to young children without parental notification. While it is easy enough (and fun!) simply to jeer and scoff, now that I’ve got that out of the way I suppose we should […]
October 20, 2007 – 12:07 am
In today’s Times we learn that the King Middle School of Portland, Maine, will be doling out birth-control pills to its pupils. Eligible candidates will be as young as 11, and parents will not be notified. If you don’t believe me, take a moment to read the story for yourself. Readers will, of course, already […]
October 17, 2007 – 9:45 pm
As I was poking around at the newly added Policeman’s Blog (see our previous post), I came across an item that featured the video below, in which we learn how a proper Musselman is expected to treat the ladies.
October 16, 2007 – 12:41 am
I’ve just read Sam Harris’s Letter To A Christian Nation. It is brief — one can finish it in an hour or so — but pungent.
October 10, 2007 – 12:41 am
My friend Wayne Krantz has sent along a link to an item in the New York Times about the social perils of email. The article, by psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, is entitled E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread). In it, we learn that: In contrast to a phone call or talking in […]
October 4, 2007 – 4:43 pm
Well, enough politics for now. I’ve dwelt on the topic overmuch lately anyway; folks might get the idea it was something I’m actually interested in. I’m gratified, at least, not to have received the cataract of vitriol that I might reasonably have expected to follow that previous post, though it might be too soon to […]
September 24, 2007 – 11:32 pm
There was a predictable ruction about whether or not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should have been allowed to speak at Columbia today, and I must say that at the very least it was gratifying to see that he was given a chilly greeting. It was nice to see the academic community turning out to express their disapproval […]
September 20, 2007 – 10:41 pm
Ask anyone these days, and they’ll tell you that health-care services in Cuba are second to none. Despite the island nation’s having been so thoroughly beggared by almost half a century of totalitarian Marxist rule that people drown themselves in rickety boats in desperate attempts to flee, even the humblest son of the soil, when […]
September 19, 2007 – 5:23 pm
One hears a lot these days about a “right” to health care. I bristle at this, because I think the notion of “rights” as anything other than matters of human convention is rubbish. We may, as a society, choose to define our laws such that they include a “right” to those things we deem appropriate: […]
August 26, 2007 – 8:37 pm
With a hat tip to our friend the Big Hominid, we direct you to a remarkable video clip, of the apostate Muslim gadfly Wafa Sultan engaging in a heated debate on al-Jazeera television. Sultan characterizes the struggle between jihadis and the West: The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of […]
In yesterday’s New York Times, the cultural critic and polymath Edward Rothstein discussed the central idea of Lee Harris’s book The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West, namely that the Enlightenment faith in the progressive ascendancy of reason in human affairs is a false hope.
The Gypsy Scholar, Horace Jeffery Hodges, discussed the question of absolute national sovereignty in a recent post. It’s an important and difficult issue, and opinions vary greatly.
August 2, 2007 – 10:56 am
Elton John would like to do away with the Internet. He laments, as do I, that people no longer get together to make music, but do so now mostly alone, sequestered in their little digital studios. He’s quite right about that part; music has a strongly social component, and good things happen when people play […]
I make no secret of my admiration for the philosopher Daniel Dennett. His intellectual interests coincide nearly exactly with my own: the puzzle of consciousness, the theory of evolution, the phenomenology of religion, and the question of human freedom in a world apparently ruled by a combination of deterministic and probabilistic laws. He has tilled […]
Recently blogger Dennis Mangan, the proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, offered his readers information suggesting that animal products in the diet are the cause of numerous health woes. It grieves me to offer more grist for his mill on this one, as I am a carnivore’s carnivore ((I’ve even considered attempting a diet that consists solely […]
More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.
No-one should be surprised by the grumbling on the Left about the Supreme Court’s decision on racial discrimination, for reasons that hardly need enumeration here. In broaching the subject at all I am on thin ice, as a white male: a member of a morally stunted, congenitally tainted group that is deemed in many circles […]
Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination […]
A little while ago we opined that, odd as it may seem, here in America the particulars of a politician’s faith matter less than that he have some sort of religious affiliation. Quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney seems to agree: I think the American people want a person of faith to lead […]
I should probably have done a bit more research before posting the preceding item; the legalities in this case are clearer than I had realized. Most states, including Ohio, consider “non-therapeutic” abortions after 24 weeks to be unlawful; it appears also that the Ohio criminal code considers the “unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy” to be […]
As noted by Steven Pinker in his introduction to the 2007 Edge Question, there are some topics that one ventures into at one’s own risk. Here’s one: The police in Canton, Ohio, have just arrested one Bobby Cutts, Jr., for the foul and gruesome murder of Jessie Davis, who was due to give birth in […]
Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are […]
The prominent Swiss Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan is a controversial figure: to some, he is an important moderate voice, one that could do much to heal the deepening rift between Islamic and Western culture, while to others his call for an assimilable, Europeanized form of Islam masks a more radical agenda that is closer to […]
Here’s an addendum to our previous post (which was in turn a comment upon a recent post, at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website, about atheism and morality).
There was a provocative item in yesterday’s Times. It concerned one Andrew Feldmar, a psychotherapist from Vancouver, and what happened when he tried to enter the US to pick up a friend at the Seattle airport.
There’s a quirky little item in the science news today: some researchers in Germany have been studying fruit flies, and have observed that their behavior seems surprisingly flexible.
We note that Jerry Falwell, the prominent religious extremist, sanctimonious prig, and bigot, has died. This is the man who, on September 13th, 2001, said: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, […]
Here in Gotham, where we have the best of everything, we flatter ourselves that our great city is America’s premier culinary destination. Not so; we have been eclipsed, for the moment at least, by Elderon, Wisconsin (pop. 189), home of the Testicle Festival. Learn more here.
April 19, 2007 – 11:55 pm
There is quite a ruction, as we might expect, over the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding a Federal law barring “partial birth” abortions, and even the justices of the Supreme Court seem quite angrily divided. This is law at its most difficult, in which separating the rights and interests of the parties involved — in fact, […]
In the wake of the horror at Virginia Tech, folks around the world, and here at home, are expressing a predictable variety of responses. The Left is calling for stricter gun control, the Right for stricter immigration, the Europeans are criticizing our violent culture, and all sorts of people are focusing on the Asian-ness, or […]
April 13, 2007 – 10:38 am
Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus, Imus. Imus Imus Imus. Imus Imus Imus, Imus, Imus Imus Imus Imus Imus!
There is a front-page story in today’s New York Times about a radical and highly controversial proposal that, if adopted, will almost certainly shake our civilization to its very foundations: voluntary guidelines for well-mannered blogging.
My friend Jess Kaplan calls our attention to an extremely disturbing development: schools in the UK are now avoiding the subject of the Holocaust in their history curricula in order to avoid offending Muslim students, whose social and religious programming often includes Holocaust denial.
Readers of these pages will certainly be familiar with Daniel Dennett, the prominent Tufts University philosopher who has done important work over the last several decades on the subjects of free will, evolutionary theory, and, most notably the philosophy of mind. Dennett has also been a major player lately in the increasingly voluble science-vs. religion debate; his book Breaking the Spell is must reading for those who have an interest — from either perspective — in this vital dialogue.
Well, our Dan has been through quite a lot in the past few months; in October he suffered an aortic dissection, and nearly died.
Kevin Kim has posted a characteristically thought-provoking essay on violence and human nature. Do have a look.
You may already know about the TED conference, which is held each year in Monterey, California. The acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and it is a forum for presentations by, and discussions among, some of the brightest bulbs at the vanguard of technological and cultural evolution. I hadn’t heard of it myself until reading this article last week , by New York Times technology writer David Pogue, whose own weblog , by the way, is a rewarding destination for those of you who like to keep up with the latest nifty gadgetry.
Only a thousand people may attend the TED gathering each year, as it is intentionally confined to a small and intimate venue. (Next year’s event is apparently already sold out, at $6,000 a seat!) But the organizers have made videos of many of the presentations available on the Internet; you can find them here. I’ve only poked around a little, but there seems to be quite a lot of interesting material there; readers are encouraged to go and have a look.
Here’s a nice piece of government work, from the AP (by way of James Taranto):
WASHINGTON — Suspected members of extremist groups have signed up as school-bus drivers in the United States, counterterror officials said yesterday in a cautionary bulletin to police. But an FBI spokesman said, “Parents and children have nothing to fear.”