Stephen Cohen has an excellent, urgent column in the IHT on the topic of McCain and Obama’s totally inadequate and positively harmful Russia policies. I have nothing to add for now that I haven’t said before; Russia is the most important country in the world as far as American foreign policy is concerned. With Russia [...]

Here’s a horrible idea:
Justice Kennedy, for example, could simply write, “I agree with many of the arguments by four of my colleagues that statute X is unconstitutional, but I do not believe we as a court should overturn the considered and democratically accountable wisdom of Congress without more consensus.”
In the name of judicial restraint, I, [...]

That’s liberal/progressive blogger Brian Beutler, apparently, who had his spleen vented for him in the unsatisfying sense by some contemptible little bastard on the wrong side of Adams Morgan. I don’t know Brian, but many people do, and along with them I send a prayer and a burst of healing cosmic energy. Also, since Brian [...]

A lot of spluttering is taking place over the possibility certainty that Barack Obama is a ‘Christianist’ of some kind or another: see Rod (II), Daniel, Ross, Andrew (II), Ambinder. Sure enough, Andrew walked right into this one and has smartly admitted it very swiftly. Daniel seems for a minute to have the last word:
The [...]

Well this is embarrassing:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart [...]

Ross asks if the iPhone is making us stupid.
[Walter] Mossberg delivered this assessment [at the Aspen Ideas Festival] with a strong note of techno-pessimism woven in: A lot of his talk had to do with the issues constant connectivity raises for deep knowledge (”people hate iPhone users,” he remarked, “because you can never have an [...]

At Slate, Bill Saletan takes a crack at ape rights in Spain. I must admit, I have zero problem with extending legal protections to animal species on the basis of a rights recognition framework. Score one for the Great Ape Project. But I do have an 800-pound problem with the following:
Peter Singer, the philosopher who [...]

Peter Beinart, he of the heavy-duty Time topic of Patriotism With America At A (Nother) Crossroads, wants to be an equal-opportunity chastiser. What could be more bipartisan and transcendent? But nothing can justify the transcendence of wisdom behind his cheap shot on ‘right-wing’ patriotism:
[...] in America, where most people hail from somewhere else [...] blood-and-soil [...]

Rod Dreher will just lurv this one. In a general sign of the horribleness of Time magazine and the culture at large, the hot new story is the mainstreaming of wild, nasty sex (with your husband or wife, of course) in Christian churches. For fans of crazy hot sex on the one hand and Christianity [...]

Amateurism is not ignorance. And politics is not life. But consider Matt Yglesias:
I’m a very “bad” tourist in terms of looking things up in advance and planning. But I always enjoy doing things this way — seeing something cool is twice as cool when unexpected. George Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is one [...]

It used to be said that if The Cure made a happy album something had truly gone wrong in the world. It must now be said that if Tom Friedman is depressed, we’ve run officially off the rails on a crazy train. So yikes:
My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline [...]

I have a lot of problems with statistical analysis. Most of my complaints go straight to the heart of the use of large-n studies of groups — irritating quant people, of course. But some complaints are much more inclusive. What follows is one such. Robert Stacy “The Other” McCain, blogging at AmSpec, refers us to [...]

Who’s worse than Mugabe? And why don’t we hear about him? Perfectly good question fielded a few days ago by Peter Maass at Slate. I haven’t kept up with the Central African Republic like I used to, but his answer sounds as good as any, and without blowing the surprise (because you really should read [...]

So I’ve just returned from Providence, RI, where an IHS conference on social change was held at Brown University. Stars of the show included the ever-lucid Will Wilkinson (recently in the news himself) and Claremont Professor Paul Zak, who received during the conference a Drudge Report link heralding a “childbirth wonder drug that can ‘cure’ [...]

Andrew is annoyed:
And when you add in state taxes, those earning over $250,000 will have a marginal tax rate around 60 percent. There’s no point in disguising this: Obama will punish those who succeed in order to funnel benefits to those who haven’t. Yes: he’s a liberal. But Bush never dealt with the fiscal reality [...]

It might crack. Sonny describes my defense of international law as “full-throated,” but it’s also as full-throated a warning against Europeans who want to put American officials on trial as it is against Americans who wouldn’t mind putting international law on trial itself. Sonny actually seems to conclude his enthusiasm for the latter approach with [...]

Once, the Democratic Party bestrode the nation, a colossus of consensus and community. But there was a catch. Michael Kazin and Julian Zelizer tell us that
before the reunited Democratic Party can start to make a forceful case to the nation, it will have to [...] equal what was perhaps Franklin Roosevelt’s greatest political success: to [...]

Sorry, George Will. Nudging irritates me. When I think of nudging, I do not think of unobtrusively maximizing aggregate efficiency in a way consonant with free public choice. I think of this:

I think, I’m a man, not a number data point clustered within a statistically significant group! Nudging is only possible when you look at [...]

So: is Sonny right that it’s out of control and stupid for foreign countries to think about capturing and prosecuting Bush administration officials for war crimes (after January)? Maybe. Is he right that Americans would totally flip out if high-ranking Washington geeks who wanted to dip their toes in the Mediterranean found themselves locked in [...]

Probably the most telling (if only the second or third saddest) aspect of the AP’s eulogy for bearded bawd George Carlin is this one:

The actor Ben Stiller called Carlin “a hugely influential force in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves [...]

Like Daniel, I happily pondered Reihan’s Spectator prophesy of a yupster Return to the Blue Lagoon of Hippiedom. And the result of that pondering centered around the following two sentences:
As the left-wing cultural critic Thomas Frank argued in The Conquest of Cool, Madison Avenue eventually cracked this countercultural code. The hippie quest for freedom was [...]

At Slate, Paul Collins asks if modern life has killed the semicolon:
The semicolon has spent the last century as a fussbudget mark. Somerset Maugham and George Orwell disdained it; Kurt Vonnegut once informed a Tufts University crowd that “All [semicolons] do is show that you’ve been to college.” New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s favorite put-down [...]

Kerry Howley has come back with an outstanding post on the culture/birthrates/tradition meme flying around the intertubes. I know it is outstanding because I agree completely with over 90% of it. It is always thrilling when I agree in such large amounts with a libertarian, so let me count the ways:
(1) “The conversion/inheritance framework assumes [...]

Daniel thinks small-country regionalism is no laughing matter, whereas large-country republicanism may still be impossible to take seriously:
In the end, the federal republic was consolidated because it came to pass that an extended republic that was not consolidated would break up along regional or sectional lines according to the political differences between blocs of states.  [...]

Ross’s back and forth with Dan McCarthy and Daniel Larison (see also Matt Yglesias and MB Dougherty) merits a nice long read. As a casual fan of direly necessary and highly trivial interventions, but a deep skeptic of those that fall in the middle, I really hope to distill the entire debate down to the [...]

Andrew’s a little naive about it, methinks:
The drug czar would have you believe it’s 30 8 times the strength of the 1970s. No one doubts that pot is now a lot stronger than it once was - although it varies widely. That’s the genius of modern agriculture. But so what? Jacob Sullum makes a point [...]

By way of playing catch-up on the Kerry/Will/Megan Natalism Debate, I’ll begin with this fundamental McArdlean insight:
Food is awesome, but it is culturally trivial.
Think for a moment — I know I did — about how often it is that big proponents of diversity resort or revert to culinary metaphors. The liberal utopia often appears to [...]

What happens to us when we can outsource and archive our memories? What’s the difference between technological recall and human remembrance? What do Jorge Luis Borges and Maude Flanders have in common? My attempt to answer all these questions and more is up now at The New Atlantis. Teaser quote:
Through technology, the alienation and systematization [...]

Unlike Reihan and like Matt Frost, My Sino-optimism is very limited. But after picking my way through thickets of ethnonationalism all throughout the past two weeks in Spain, I’ve got to give Alex Massie an amen:
I imagine China is too busy being China (On the March!) to worry too much about anyone who isn’t Chinese, [...]

Matt Yglesias approvingly cites Kay Steiger:
Furthermore, I never really understood, if it’s such an important issue for families to all have the same names (because how would you know you belong to one another otherwise?) why it has to be the woman that changes her name. Why can’t the man? I’ve yet to hear a [...]

One more reason why Frank Rich is sort of tripping (see below) is captured by Jonathan Chait with haikulike levels of parsimony:

The McCain campaign’s line of the day is that Barack Obama “wants to take us back to the bad old days of going after terrorists with prosecutors rather than predators.” But Obama did propose [...]

The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of [...]

Have her replace Tim Russert. The network needs a woman with an ounce of substance, and Hillary could use a little cosmic revenge.

I see thru Daniel that McCain’s new slogan is not, contrary to my advice, “Solvency, Citizenship, Subsidiarity.” It is, instead, “Reform, Prosperity, Peace.” I guess Prosperity is supposed to cover Solvency, Reform is supposed to encompass Subsidiarity, and — ah, but instead of Citizenship it’s Peace, a position sure to win over droves of libertarian [...]

I´m a little late to Julian´s also-belated take on the German paper that ran a headline about the White House as “Uncle Barack´s Cabin,” but one element of the story is worth belaboring. Consider:
the editor’s attempt at a defense—while bolstering the “obliviousness” theory—is incredibly lame:

Editors at Taz defended their decision to run the headline on [...]

I´ve been eating Spain´s tasty and delicious garlic shrimp as often as possible out here in Madrid. In a fine fit of synergy, Ezra has posted his recipe for the fragrant, sizzling dish. We´ve done without the vinegar, but I have full confidence in Ezra´s list of ingredients, and give gambas al ajillo my unreserved [...]

Daniel responds to my take on McEmpire:
aside from being another occasion to say that popular opinion is no guide to making good policy I would add that the frequent comparisons made between a long-term presence in Iraq and other long-term presences in Korea, Germany and elsewhere makes for an exceptionally good reason to leave Iraq immediately.  It [...]

Apropos of, more or less, liberaltarianism, Reihan is anecdotally impressed with
the particular facts of the individual stories I kept coaxing out of people, and by how values informed life choices. That is, a taste for freedom and autonomy led to more risk-taking and thus to sharper fluctuations in economic outcomes. The quality that propelled some [...]

Snap judgment on the court´s ruling: this is the graf that counts:
A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissents is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years. Hence the hollow ring when the dissenters suggest that the court is somehow precipitating the [...]

McCain would love to see US troops stationed peacefully in Iraq for the foreseeable future. To him it does not matter when they come home. What matters is that the casualty rate get low enough to persuade Americans they shouldn’t care about another expansion of American empire. In fact, the entire debate about bringing them [...]

Director Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jew, saw himself as steering the film toward a message movie about European failure to fight fascism until it was too late. Zinneman’s vision is ultimately the one that prevails. — Kyle Smith
Sonny is maybe more right than he´d like to be that High Noon is a neoconservative allegory — [...]

Ross, talking about those crazy Singularitarians, channels a little Tocqueville:
the mere fact that the Singularity is inherently “escapist,” and bears a not-inconsiderable resemblance to Christianity, isn’t a problem with the concept. It’s the whole point.
As John Gray has also pointed out, we seem always innately to grope toward the concept of God. But that concept [...]

What could such a snappy slogan refer to? Why, John McCain´s campaign strategy, of course! My wild and crazy thoughts are up now at The Guardian. Pull quote:
The Republican party, and American conservatism more specifically, must recover its intellectual credentials. A permanent-combat mentality has combined with a deadening self-congratulatory clubbishness within the walls of the [...]

Let me take the opportunity to second Sonny´s contention that a true nobility of movie reviewers is impossible without a plurality of nobles. I´m of the mind that monopolies should be permitted to form — only to be busted up — so in the broader context of media centralization, I´m very hesitant to suggest we [...]

Lots of laughs from Freddy Gray: the menu from World Food Summits past and present. I can´t vouch for the quality, character, or track record of the Food Summit, but we should be careful not to condemn people who work hard for the dispossessed and want to enjoy a nice dinner afterward. Problem is, the [...]

At The Plank, Michelle Cottle is in a tizzy over the prospect of Mitt Romney as John McCain´s surrogate pointman on foreign policy:
Has John McCain suffered a severe blow to the head? If not, then why on earth is he trotting out Mitt Romney as a font of foreign policy wisdom? We’re talking about a [...]

Jim Manzi has recently re-promoted American francophilia. I like this, and sympathize deeply with French civilization and French culture for many of the same reasons Jim and Charles Murray dwell upon. But from the catbird seat of wide-lens cultural comparativism, I think the root of any American francophilia has to be found in the uniqueness [...]

Now what? Andrew revels in the minor epistemological crisis:
When Obama passes the magic number, what to post? Readers are hereby invited to submit quotes, YouTubes, poems, songs, photographs and whatever you dream up to commemmorate the Clintons’ departure from presidential politics for, well, at least three years. This is a celebration that can unite Democrats [...]

By now my great love for Hillary has slopped itself all over the blogosphere, so my own answer to this question is clear enough. But as a matter of political science, it´s worth putting the question. Now that the thunderous Vox Puertorriqueño has made the earth stand still, why not suspend the old campaign, end [...]

Sonny is right to accredit reports of al Qaeda´s timely demise as well-deserved good news. But it´s as good as occasion as any to exercise our contrarian muscles for the fun and edification of all. One of my great complaints about the way we´ve represented the threat of jihadist terrorism has zeroed in on the [...]

We all know that Michael Gerson’s theoretical compassion cashes out in practice as a seemingly neverending string of tendentious and condescending attacks on mean old Republicans. But who, exactly, are these people? Could they be…straw men? Bear with me as we consider Gerson’s latest missive:
[...] compassionate conservatism has come under criticism for a variety of [...]

Ross has blogged some essential remarks on the meaning of conservatism that bear much further comment. Mark Schmitt implicates Ross in an alleged school of thought that has given up on rediscovering “the moral absolutes of conservatism” in favor of “purely improvisational, tactical positioning.” Schmitt complains that these are “elegant, short term solutions disguised as [...]

Mike Huckabee denounces libertarianism as a “heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism” that poses “the greatest threat to classic Republicanism” and is “not an American message.” Justin Logan blows a gasket. I, personally, am greatly looking forward to the infighting that will occur in the right-of-center camp if McCain loses. — Matt Yglesias
In managing [...]

That’s a heavily rhetorical question that I might not live up to in this post, but I’ll try anyway for the purposes of casting a sharp, counterintuitive argument in the direction of everyone’s favorite punching bag, Michael Gerson. I’m inspired to do so by Kara Hopkins’ @TAC on Gerson’s latest round of name-calling:
Thus a new [...]

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.
The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration [...]

Thru Andrew, I see her condition has worsened:
I am in this race for all the women in their nineties who’ve told me they were born before women could vote, and they want to live to see a woman in the White House. For all the women who are energized for the first time, and voting [...]

My main worry about the Bush years is not that the President created problems so terrible that no one can undo them. My main worry is that the President has broken so many hearts and scrambled so many brains that people looking for commonsense fixes will be led by a trauma-stricken elite to do stupid [...]

Put together the latest round of knit-browed studies of Web 2.0’s psychological consequences, and that’s what you’ve got. We now know, for starters, that “Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online:”
The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when [...]

Like Alan, Sonny airs a complaint:
journalism has always been little more than a delivery method for advertising. But it’s still unclear just how to deliver those advertisements to the customer when the written word is your medium and those words are transmitted for free. It’s even harder to see how freelance writers are supposed to [...]

is that you remember how much worse it’s been, and how much worse it could be. Despite our frustrations with the war, we have repeatedly avoided catastrophe. Despite our oafish, incompetent government, we enjoy peace and freedom at home. Despite our economic anxiety and uncertainty, no one is selling their Escalade for three dollars or [...]

Mixed news for fans of radical life extension: Charles Lindbergh is sort of your posterboy.
Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death - but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.
“Beating death was [...]

And I thought Paulville was the limit of the utopitarian imagination. Fool!

I’ll keep blogging about this until every silver bullet has been fired and every stake pounded. Obama-Clinton would not be a ‘team of rivals.’ Barack Obama is not, and can never be, on Hillary’s team. Nor does she have the psychological capacity to ever truly be on his. Nor is Obama the ‘rival’ of the [...]

Inspired and revolted by Sonny’s review of one of the Amis’ less undrinkable-sounding notoriously funky beverages, I present forthwith your summering drink list. I mean your summer drinking list. I mean…
DOs
1. Rye. Rye is one dark liquor that’s better when it’s hotter and more humid than mind and body can take. This is true whether [...]

I owe John a response to his very savvy account of why it is true that we’re living under Tocqueville’s famous ’soft despotism’:
I have myself [Tocqueville writes] vainly searched for a word which will exactly express the whole of the conception I have formed. Such old words as ‘despotism’ and ‘tyranny’ do not fit. [...] [...]

A conversation has started which will, and should, only grow louder, more vociferous, and more comprehensive. It’s about whether or not conservatives should work on developing and pitching new ways of addressing today’s big problems. Stephen Bainbridge, Megan McArdle, Yuval Levin, Andrew Sullivan, and Jim Antle (twice) have weighed in worthily — and not at [...]

This ad has been making the rounds and attracting a certain amount of Democratic ire — purportedly for, as Matt puts it, “mainlining homophobia”:

Outstandingly, Matt persists in his excellent defense of fig leaves: this is homophobic mainlining “with no real fig leaf rationale or anything.”
Actually, I find this ad to be hilarious, probably because the [...]

Andrew abandons all hope of a unity ticket:
I think she has now made it very important that Obama not ask her to be the veep. The way she is losing is so ugly, so feckless, so riddled with narcissism and pathology that this kind of person should never be a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Welcome [...]

A while ago I went back and forth with John Schwenkler on torture. Our positions are pretty close together, but an element of the ‘torture problem’ we seem to be experiencing seemed to me to have received too little attention given how central it is to the controversy. That element is the blurring, in time [...]

Unaware of my existence and identity as Thomas Frank appears to be, how could he have known, before clicking SEND on his silly piece in today’s Wall Street Journal, that here I sat, all along, clickyfingers at the ready, secretly able to laugh him down the way he deserves?
He couldn’t. So in the sense that [...]

By way of Jonathan Last’s and Victorino Matus’ commentaries on Star Wars and Indiana Jones, Sonny raises a pop culture problem with profound implications for right-leaning political philosophy:
[Last] argued that viewers were cheering for the wrong side in the Star Wars flicks–that the empire was a force for stability in a universe ungovernable by [...]

Having recently cast aspersions on his attitude toward constitutional law, I now take up the challenge of defending Barr against John Tabin, who was at the Libertarian debate hosted by Reason last night:
Dave Weigel asked the candidates if they favored any of the US interventions since the first Gulf War, and Bob Barr flatly said [...]

Philip Rieff is the greatest social thinker you’ve never heard of. The second volume of his posthumous and mindbending three-volume opus, Sacred Order/Social Order, has hit shelves (there is a copy, for instance, down at Kramerbooks in Dupont). It’s edited by the very sharp Alan Woolfolk, and I recommend it highly. Though I haven’t had [...]

Ross writes:
there are times when quietism is the better part of valor, and times when revolutions are necessary things. And given my own declinist instincts, I can easily imagine myself ending my writing career sharing the “only a revolution (or the Benedict option) can save us now” point of view that some of my favorite [...]

In his American Conservative review of Matt Yglesias’ new book, Heads in the Sand, Austin Bramwell contends that, “[i]n the end,”
it is unclear whether Yglesias seeks anything more than an internationalist fig leaf for the policies he happens to prefer.
So what if he does? As my long trail of blog crumbs reveals, I have deep [...]

The New York Times has a nice medium-sized bit up on burlesque, or should we say ‘neo-burlesque.’ I find it all pretty endearing. Contrary to the expectations of some cultural libertarians, I am not a pent-up prude simply because I am unwilling to bet our public standards of moral decency over on the randiest instincts [...]

What a bizarre article in the LA Times about the Republicans’ awkward torment: the first half is a quick survey of the disarray, confusion, and bad karma that’s plaguing the national party, while the second half is a long transcription of Republican squabbling over cap-and-trade.
Let me go out on a limb and suggest that cap-and-trade [...]

Not crushing on him:
Obama has apologized to the reporter:
“Second apology is for using the word ’sweetie.’ That’s a bad habit of mine. I do it sometimes with all kinds of people. I mean no disrespect and so I am duly chastened on that front.”
Indeed, it appears to be a habit. Over at Broadsheet, Rebecca Traister [...]

Sonny’s right — dead right — that Kilmer’s Doc Holliday is one of ’90s cinema’s indelible figures. “They want revenge.” “Fer what?” “Bein’ born.” Brrr! That’s movie magic.
But what about Kilmer’s attempted comeback film, Salton Sea? And while we’re on it, if Val Kilmer can ruin his career by starring as The Saint, and Robert [...]

For a long time (i.e. since college) I have disliked one of the main rules of linguistics. Out of my dislike, I forgot what it’s called, but the rule states that words have no necessary connection to the things they describe. So the word for ‘tree’ needn’t be what it is in any language for [...]

I know this is a stretch as a thought experiment, but bear with me.
Imagine that the Nazi party were somehow able to rise to power in Germany without relying on, or even incorporating, an anti-Semitic plank. (I know, I know, just imagine.) Imagine then the incredible wealth of Jewish brainpower and manpower that would have [...]

John Schwenkler draws my attention to this:
Capitalism the Creator
The Mises Circle goes to Seattle to address contemporary issues in liberty, and the role of capitalism as the main force for every form of progress in our age. We live amidst its fruits — technology, culture, philanthropy, human well being — and have yet to appreciate [...]

There is no way I’m going to be able to get through the 172 pages of the California marriage cases opinion anytime soon [pdf]. But in my punchdrunk way I can cherry pick a few items.
First I have to get out of the way the personal confession that gay marriage as a constitutional question leaves [...]

I’m inclined to agree with Sonny’s cut-the-hurt-feelings-and-campaign take on the hot story of the day. I don’t think Bush was talking about Obama. I really could care less whether Bush was talking about Obama, because the inanity and tiresomeness of Bush’s remarks are equally profound whether he was thinking overtly about Obama or thinking covertly [...]

Star intellectual Steven Pinker, who should be careful whom he calls stupid, has penned (for The New Republic) an attack on the President’s Council on Bioethics that makes my ridicule of Martha Nussbaum sound like a call-in to Delilah. It is so easy to think up a list of insults for this piece that I [...]

Andrew has a roundup of commentary on the possibility of coercive helpy heroism in Burma, meaning Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat doing one of their good back and forths (as usual) on the matter. I think they’re both right. Idealism and relativism, the two most significant elements of Western thought today, make for a total [...]

Never before have two major parties gotten into such a competitive self-destruction competition. What Bush has done to the Republican party, with poodle-like levels of assistance from Congressional Republicans, is plain enough. But reading this New York Times dispatch on the John Edwards endorsement? Sloganeering’s been lowered to a whole ‘nother level. And the grassroots [...]

Ramesh Ponnuru makes a point about this Vito business that I ought to be sure to respond to. Specifically, he takes issue with my hope that we can all agree to deem adulterous public officeholders bad persons:
Ross Douthat seems to agree. I don’t—especially with this “bad person” business. I certainly believe that someone who cheats [...]

I urge you to go back over to the main DTO site and read James Dellinger and Phil Brand’s piece on Hawaiian ethnonationalism. I’ve said pretty much all I need to say about the subject before, but there’s a related angle on this story that I’m increasingly fond of and is probably best captured in [...]

Apropos of (as Sonny’s mentioned) Newsweek’s claim that Obama faces an attack campaign portraying him as “the Other,” I ought to mention what a pet peeve it is to talk in terms of Otherhood, which is far too abstract a category to be of much analytical use and which Republicans, certainly, are far too anti-intellectual [...]

Over at The American Scene, Matt Frost is undoubtedly right to question and even ridicule supposed experts about ‘Millennials’ — that latest incarnation of the Pepsi generation who are supposed to be, individually and in the aggregate, both so much more enlightened than their ancestors and so much more trenchantly aware of the emotional and [...]

Sonny pushes back against the attacks on Hillary Clinton’s insta-infamous recognition of the race factor:
But if we can step away from heated racial rhetoric for a second, we should probably ask ourselves a question: What if she’s right? It’s true that no Democrat can win the presidency without getting a large portion of the black [...]

I should respond to some of these Vito-related comments, I think, because they sound reasonable enough at first blush and provide thereby a good means of sharpening my argument. First consider commenter Tel:
He wasn’t married at the time, but Thomas Jefferson did father several children with one of his slaves, starting in 1795. Should his [...]

Shocking news from across the pond:
Study leader Professor Mark Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moore’s University said: “Millions of young Europeans now take drugs and drink in ways which alter their sexual decisions and increase their chances of unsafe sex or sex that is later regretted.
“Yet [...]

Another doomed Republican, another sexual surplus and moral deficit:
Rep. Vito Fossella of New York acknowledged on Thursday that he fathered a child from an extramarital affair, answering questions that arose from his arrest on drunken driving charges last week.
“My personal failings and imperfections have caused enormous pain to the people I love and I am truly [...]

I’ll go to my grave, I’m sure, insisting that Iraq was an oddball case all along, and that the mass consensus for treating Iraq in strange and unique ways was never fungible for a whole host of reasons. (Fleeting triumphalism among a few commentators interested in following suit with any place Alexander the Great once [...]

Now obviously the powers of the Vice Presidency have increased considerably during the last two administrations, and just as obviously being veep in a McCain presidency is a special case, since the heir-apparent aspect of the office will be magnified by McCain’s age, his disinterest in vast swathes of policymaking, and the possibility that he [...]

We’ve heard so many empty promises and ritual BS from our own politicians that it might just be the right time to take new Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at something resembling face value. Imagine, if only as a mental exercise, that he even sort of means any of this:
Describing the eight years of Putin’s presidency [...]

That hard-to-describe tingly sensation experienced when your policy options short of force aren’t working. We all feel it. But reactions to Restless Bombs Syndrome may vary, both person-by-person and case-by-case. Striking a collegial contrast with my own stated symptoms, Sonny lays his out as follows:
James admits that Iranians are killing Americans (albeit in Iraq) and [...]

Michael Brendan Dougherty makes an enjoyable @TAC upon the metric system, Hegelianism, and their latest champion, Fareed Zakaria.
The enthusiasts for the metric system (which is based on incorrect calculations anyway) remind me of the enthusiasts for Esperanto. George Soros speaks Esperanto.
But Zakaria’s conclusion is even worse:
Generations from now, when historians write about these times, they [...]