Long story short: Sam Harris said that we should specifically profile Muslims at airports, not grandmas in wheelchairs and 4-year-old girls, because if someone’s going to try to crash a plane in 2012, it’s almost certainly going to be a radicalized Muslim. Liberals went insane, calling Harris a racist and other terrible things, atheists disowned …
Monthly Archive: May 2012
May 27 2012
Cicero Would Have Hated Facebook
I’m reading The Essays of Montaigne because, well, it’s there. In discussing friendship, ol’ Michel blockquotes Cicero: Those are only to be reputed friendships that are fortified and confirmed by judgment and length of time. Yeah, that’s totally not what happens now. If Facebook’s “friend” becomes the dominant definition of the word, we’re going to …
May 27 2012
The Banal Quest for Validation
ZachsMind just posted a very thoughtful response to a post of mine from a few weeks back that seemed to get a wee bit of attention from the Tumblrsphere. The meat of my post that has been a few times bequoted is thus: How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What …
May 24 2012
Fuselage is a Hilarious Word
The following is a collection of thoughts about air travel that I typed into my iPad’s note program or twiddled into my iPhone’s Twitter client while making my way through the flying process this past weekend. They are in no particular order and have not been edited in any meaningful way from when they were …
May 16 2012
Nearly-Friendly Earth Atheist
Well will you look at that. Today I began blogging as a contributor to Friendly Atheist, where my beat is politics. I’ve already got my first post up, about one GOP House Member’s meddling in scientific research. Teaser: It has a fantastic metaphor featuring violence done to podiums. Obviously, the reach of Friendly Atheist is …
May 06 2012
186th Place Would Be Awesome
Charles Wheelan gives some unconventional commencement advice, that, while welcome, I feel misses where the pain and anxiety really sit. He writes: We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn’t about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message …
May 01 2012
If I Had a Dollar
If I had a dollar for every time someone complained about wage discrimination against women, I’d be a millionaire. Unless I were a woman, in which case I’d have $770,000.
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