Social Sciences
stcynic | October 8, 2004Recently I was watching an HBO comedy special starring Ellen Degeneres. I only watched her sitcom a few times when it was on, but I've always thought she was quite funny and original. And I've always respected the way she handled that big "coming out" show that got so much attention. She didn't lose sight of the fact that it had to be funny, and it was. At the end of this special, she did something unusual - she turned up the lights and took questions from the audience. And after a few questions, a young woman stood up and started talking about how Ellen's coming out gave her the strength to…
stcynic | September 27, 2004Jason Kuznicki has followed my lead in giving a positive review to Timothy Sandefur's recent article on liberal originalism in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Incidentally, Jon Rowe agreed with us as well. Mr. Sandefur sent copies of the article to the three of us (and perhaps others) and we all agree that he has written a very valuable contribution to the debates over original intent. Indeed, I think we are seeing the beginnings of what could be a serious movement in constitutional theory, as scholars like Sandefur, Randy Barnett, Scott Alan Gerber and a few others map out a…
stcynic | September 18, 2004If this story is true....wow. That's all I can say. Wow.
My 21-year old daughter disappeared from NYC last Tuesday afternoon when walking with friends through a park where no protest was being held -- and was held prisoner -- without being charged -- by the NYPD for three days. The first day and night she spent in an unsafe and inhumane facility at Pier 57 ("Little Guantanamo") provided by the Republican Party.
Yes, it was managed by the Republican National Committee. It was leased by the RNC to hold political dissenters who disagreed with the Bush administration. The second two days, my…
stcynic | September 13, 2004I am one of those who has said many times that the larger context of the war on terrorism is that of a crucial internal battle within Islam, a battle that puts the US, and western ideals, in the crossfire. Ultimately, the battle to defeat the Bin Ladens of the world must be fought primarily by his fellow Muslims and I believe it is very important for the US to build ties to the voices of sanity within Islam and strengthen their hand as much as we can. We must redraw the lines of battle, redefine the dichotomies, so the battle is not between Islam and the west, but between decent and peaceful…
stcynic | September 3, 2004Like Jason Kuznicki, I didn't watch Bush's speech last night, but read it this morning. One of the charms of reading the speech in text is that you get to laugh knowing that such an inane speech was interrupted by applause approximately 14,873,994 times (the other advantage is that when you read one of Bush's speeches, as opposed to listening to it, the word "terrorist" has all three syllables in it). It would be absurdly easy to fisk the speech, take it apart claim by claim and show all the oversimplifications, lies by ommission and hypocrisies in it, and one could of course do it just as…
stcynic | August 31, 2004I think I've made it pretty clear that I loathe political conventions and campaigns in general, with their tired litany of empty language and meaningless cliches. Rarely does anyone even attempt to address a real issue in real terms. Today one of my favorite actors, Ron Silver, gave one of those brief little hoorah speeches at the Republican convention, and it was full of mostly tired cliches as usual, but there was one statement in it that stood out to me because it provides at least a glimpse of a real and larger issue that I think we must address one way or the other. He said:
Even though…
loom | August 23, 2004Marriage, we're told by the president and a lot of other people, can only be between one man and one woman. Anything else would go against thousands of years of tradition and nature itself. If the president's DNA could talk, I think it might disagree.
In the 1980s, geneticists began to study variations in human DNA to learn about the origin of our species. They paid particular attention to the genes carried by mitochondria, fuel-producing factories of the cell. Each mitochondrion carries its own small set of genes, a peculiarity that has its origins over two billion years ago, when our single…
stcynic | August 22, 2004Jon Rowe has written an absolute must-read essay on our favorite intrepid campaigner, Alan Keyes, and our favorite nihilist-who-sounds-like-a-fundamentalist philosopher, Allan Bloom. I was not aware until I read it that Keyes was the person that Bloom was referring to in his book The Closing of the American Mind, when he told the story of a black student at Cornell who had been threatened by radical black students and the administration would do nothing about it. In fact, other than the fact that they both are social conservatives, I had no idea that Keyes was a student of Bloom at all. As…
stcynic | August 20, 2004Jon Rowe has written an absolute must-read essay on our favorite intrepid campaigner, Alan Keyes, and our favorite nihilist-who-sounds-like-a-fundamentalist philosopher, Allan Bloom. I was not aware until I read it that Keyes was the person that Bloom was referring to in his book The Closing of the American Mind, when he told the story of a black student at Cornell who had been threatened by radical black students and the administration would do nothing about it. In fact, other than the fact that they both are social conservatives, I had no idea that Keyes was a student of Bloom at all. As…
stcynic | July 30, 2004Jon Rowe has a post about the WorldNutDaily called Antistatism Makes for Strange Bedfellows. He says:
I think the strangest case of antistatist politicsin fact, libertarian politicsmaking for strange bedfellows is how the Christian Reconstructionists have managed to infiltrate libertarian circles, indeed calling themselves Christian libertarians. Like real libertarians, they too want to eliminate todays big-government.
And he goes on to note that the "christian libertarians" want to replace this big government with, of course, a biblical theocracy. I thought I'd add a little information to…
tlambert | July 18, 2004[Note: This is a copy of a document found at this link on John Lott's website on April 25, 2005. I have added critical commentary, written in italics like this. Tim Lambert ]
1) Did I Attribute the 98 Percent Brandishing Number to Others? No
Apparently, some credence is being given to the claim that I have attributed the 98 percent brandishing estimate to others instead of myself. Some are taking this as evidence that I never conducted the survey. Yet, the fact is I never attributed this number to anyone else other than myself. It is claimed that I attributed this number to Gary Kleck on…
loom | June 30, 2004Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you'd predict from the size of our body. Six million years ago, hominid brains were about a third the size they are today, comparable to a chimp's. So what accounts for the big boom? It would be flattering ourselves to say that the cause was something we are proud of--our ability to talk, or our gifts with tools. Certainly, our brains show signs of being adapted for these…
stcynic | June 20, 2004I've been doing some reading today of two of my favorite living essayists, Stanley Crouch and Nat Hentoff. They are both intellectuals, cultural observers, literary critics and, primarily, jazz critics. Both have written for the Village Voice. Both are also relatively controversial figures, for different reasons.
Crouch is controversial for many reasons. He is a black intellectual who still uses the term "negro"; he calls afrocentrism a "simple-minded hustle" and Louis Farrakhan "insane"; and he has had a few major run-ins with colleagues, one of which led to his dismissal from the Voice. He…
stcynic | April 22, 2004From the files of our intrepid vice police comes this story about Baltimore Ravens fullback Corey Fuller. His house in Tallahassee, Florida was raided by 20 - TWENTY - law enforcement officers on Tuesday night. Was he hiding stolen goods? Peddling crack? Storing bodies in his crawlspace? Nope. What was this obvious threat to society doing? Well, he was playing poker with his friends. And for this horrible crime against humanity, he now faces up to 5 years in prison and a $5000 fine.
Color me pissed, and not just because I participate in weekly poker games of this sort (though presumably for…
stcynic | March 29, 2004I posted on who I thought was the funniest comedian a few days ago, now it's time for who I think is the funniest writer of our day. The award goes to Joe Queenan. Queenan is a freelance writer who has written in dozens and dozens of magazines as diverse as Spy and Forbes. He has also authored several books, including Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood, and the funniest of them all: Red Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon. This last book is simply one of the funniest books ever written…
stcynic | March 1, 2004Rusty from New Covenant has replied to my post on the religious right lowering its expectations, but more specifically to a comment I made at the end. I ended the post by saying, "The culture war isn't going well for the religious right. Another victory for true decency." Rusty responds:
True decency?
Why is it that Darwinists continue to hold on to ideas such as decency, morality, justice, and rights? Actually, what I should ask is: Why do inconsistent Darwinists continue to hold on to such ideas?
Let me say a couple of things. First, I hate the term "darwinist". I am no more a "darwinist"…
stcynic | February 23, 2004They seem to be in desperate need of a fact checker at the Worldnetdaily. One of their features is called The American Minute, written by Bill Federer. Federer is president of Amerisearch, which is described as "a publishing company dedicated to researching America's noble heritage." Based on this snippet from one of his columns, I'd say their dedication to research far exceeds their ability to research. After noting that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on the same day, he says:
Lincoln is best known for freeing the slaves by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, affirming…
loom | January 26, 2004Last week I wrote a post about some new research that suggests that global warming could trigger large-scale extinctions in the next few decades. In particular, I dissected some of the objections that were leveled at the study, pointing out how irrelevant they are to the actual science at hand. Some people who posted comments raised a question that I didn't talk much about: how did biodiversity respond to rapid climate change in the not-so-distant past?
After all, in the past 2.5 million years (known as the Quaternary Period) Earth's climate has become particularly jumpy. It has swung in and…
stcynic | January 25, 2004Josh Claybourn has an interesting blog that I read now and then, but this morning he has an odd entry on the front page entitled "Libertarian Freedom: Self Destruction?". I think he's engaging in a bit of a straw man - at the very least, in drastically oversimplifying complex ideas. The entry begins,
The consequence of original sin - man's fallen nature - is central to everything in the Christian worldview. Marxists, humanists, and most atheists/agnostics will tell you that human nature is perfectible and that only our faulty societies and social constructs have hindered man's reach for…
loom | December 18, 2003Just before the winter solstice brings autumn to an end, here's a chance to blog about the great evolutionary biologist--and student of fall foliage--William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in 2000, has never reached the household-name status of other evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins or Stephen Jay Gould. But he deserves a place of privilege, for all his profoundly influential ideas. He found an explanation for altruistic behavior in many insect species by expanding biology's notion of fitness to include the genes an individual shares with its relatives. He offered…