Just another geek in the geek kingdom
Here s a micro-story I started with the Access Crypto Summit flash fiction prompt in mind, left half done, and then belatedly finished off anyway, because it seemed a waste not to: BUZZFEED/CQ CONGRESSIONAL TRANSCRIPTS September 25, 2023 FINAL Excerpts from Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Deterring Interdicting Child Pornographers Internet [ ]
Graeme Wood s Atlantic cover story What ISIS Really Wants has attracted plenty of attention and controversy, spurring several interesting responses as well as quite a few less illuminating ones. Here s the core claim many readers want to contest, or even condemn as a kind of smear against Islam: The reality is that the Islamic State [ ]
As recently as a couple years ago, “political correctness” was one of those phrases that triggered a reflexive eye-roll from me: Sure, it was a thing in the early 90s, but had long since morphed into a tedious gripe typically voiced by folks chagrined that nobody finds their racist jokes funny anymore. Lately, though, even [ ]
One of the more useful thought experiments I ve encountered in philosophy, because it seems to apply to so many situations, is Derek Parfit s Harmless Torturers, from his celebrated book Reasons and Persons: The Harmless Torturers. In the Bad Old Days, each torturer inflicted severe pain on one victim. Things have now changed. Each of the [ ]
So, here are a couple weird things about Superman I ve never seen anyone comment on, though they re so glaring it seems as though somebody must have. First, Superman has a range of diverse and extraordinary powers common to his species, each of which would seem to represent a complex and independent evolutionary adaptation: Directed flight, [ ]
So, I recently succumbed to an old collegiate vice (no, not that one…) and allowed myself to get sucked into a libertarian comments section debate. This was, on the whole, about as edifying and productive an exercise as you might expect, but having already expended an hour or two in this questionable way, I figured [ ]
In the previous post, I ran through some criticisms of the Supreme Court s recent Hobby Lobby ruling that I don t think are very impressive—some because they re unconvincing, others because they wouldn t be relevant to the core logic of the opinion even if they were otherwise absolutely correct. For the purposes of this post, then, I m [ ]
One of the frustrating things about the reactions to the Hobby Lobby ruling—mostly from progressives, if only because people naturally to respond in much greater detail to decisions they disagree with—is that there’s an interesting debate to be had about the case, but we’re mostly not having it. Most of the critiques I’ve seen of [ ]
A few years back, as you may recall, there was some debate in scientific circles about whether Pluto should be classified as a planet—one that prompted some public consternation (and ironic T-shirts) among members of the general public dismayed to be told that, contra what they d learned in middle school, there were only eight planets [ ]
Like most of my friends, I think Arizona governor Jan Brewer was probably right to veto SB 1062, which as Reason s J.D. Tucille writes, was less a blow against big government than a homophobic stunt designed to signal official approval of anti-gay animus, while creating a special class of associational rights for people who justify [ ]