Better to Be an Adulterer than a Mormon?

A lot of people are discussing Francis Beckwith’s comments at Patheos about how evangelicals are not so subtly saying it is better to be an adulterer than a Mormon. It’s a great post and takes a line of thought I’d never even considered before. A few quotes:  

Global Warming and the Right

OK, I promise I’ll be back to technical philosophy later tonight. I just wanted to promote two great blog posts about the Republican party and Global Warming. The first is from The Volokh Conspiracy while the second is Megan McArdle commenting on that post. Believe it or not Republican darling Chris Christie dared speak in [...]

Evolutionist Cartoon

There’s been an interesting graph making the rounds of Twitter and various blogs today. You’ve probably seen it. It’s from the web comic Calamities of Nature. It’s just a graph of belief in evolution versus per capita gross domestic product. It then has a fit for the data using an equation of the form y [...]

The Great Divide

I’m not normally a Krauthammer fan. Actually I rarely like any pundit – they all seem wrong far more often than right. I also note the incentives for them aren’t to be accurate but to generate readers. Often a task much easier by generating controversy or preaching to the choir. (A general problem with the [...]

Levi, Ethics and Politics

Levi has a great post on Badiou whom he applies towards the question of ethics and politics.  A few excerpts. Badiou’s ethics is not designed to formulate a set of rules that would tell us how to respond to situation x (hence the “one size fits all” critique is a bit of a red herring [...]

Fermi Problem

I love Fermi Problems. The idea is to make rough approximations (often by doing order of magnitude comparisons with “common sense”) and then calculate the answers to complex problems quickly.  What I really like about these sorts of problems is that they really illustrate the basics of the way physicists think.  In effect they, better [...]

Thoughts on the Mormon Political Scene

It seems like Mormons are the media group of the moment. Not only do we seem to be in nearly every reality show, dance show and recently even lampooned on Broadway but we are represented by two leading contenders for the President and the head of the Senate. Not bad for a group whose active [...]

Philosophy Useless?

The Eternal Universe commented on a recent editorial about how philosophy is bankrupt. There have been similar editorials of late including one in the NYT a few months back. (Sadly I couldn’t find it quickly) The basic idea is that philosophy has failed since it can’t give practical answers to politicians. “Philosophy, it seems to [...]

Bacteriophages

I want to try and do at least one general philosophy post, one science post and one quasi-religious post each week. I’ll probably throw in the occasional political post as well. It’s a bit of a difference from what I was doing before which tended to primarily be just about philosophy. I’ve long said the [...]

Bleeding Heart Libertarians

There’s a new blog up: Bleeding Heart Libertarians. More or less it appears to be a blog for Libertarians who aren’t opposed to social justice. Pretty interesting and more on the philosophical side of things rather than just a typical politics or economics blog. I’m intrigued as social justice is one big reason I’m opposed [...]

World Inequality

We talk a lot about inequality however it seems to me that the way Americans talk about it is fairly distorted due to it being focused on inequities within America. Not that such inequality doesn’t matter. It does. But this graph I saw at Marginal Revolution ought give one pause.

Am I a Neo-Liberal?

Am I a neo-liberal? I don’t think so. I don’t buy the intellectual backdrop for libertarianism in the least. However as a practical matter I’m for smaller government. I just think far too many conservatives are so focused on shrinking government that they don’t care about running effectively a small government. i.e. the problem isn’t [...]

The Inequality that Matters

Tyler Cowan (of Marginal Revolution fame) has a great article on inequality at The American Interest: “The Inequality that Matters” A lot of the points he makes are ones I’ve made before here. The differences in equality between Bill Gates and myself are relatively minor. Contrast this with say 100 years ago when the opportunities [...]

Mastery and Value

Over at Secular Right Razib links to a paper by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute that goes through purported problems between evolution and conservatism. Now clearly I’m a theist but I find a lot of the purported problems between evolution and faith pretty lame. Without going through all the problems in the paper let me suggest [...]

Elections

I figured I’d make a few comments. The Republicans beat expectations (which were already quite high) in the House but were quite below expectations in the Senate. In particular they lost the race with Reid in Nevada. While the anti-tea party backlash hasn’t started yet I suspect some of the major Senate failures are due [...]

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