Brave Ron Lindsay

El_Tres_de_Mayo

Lindsay is immensely courageous. He is willing to have bad people executed, and he’s not afraid to say so! Everyone should go and give him a cookie because he is willing to be unorthodox and support the death penalty.

About ten days ago, I wrote an essay for Huffington Post on the death penalty, in particular, focusing on how some of those who oppose the death penalty support imprisonment in a supermax facility as a supposedly more humane alternative—a position I find logically dubious if not hypocritical. The recent decision of the Dzhohkar Tsarnaev jury to sentence him to death made me think about this issue again. It also made me think about how humanists all too often commit the cardinal intellectual sin of many of the religious. That is, they hold certain principles as beyond question. This is not a good thing.

All of you people who say the state shouldn’t kill people are just being dogmatic: it’s positively sinful that you don’t think through the issues and agree with Ron. The only way you could possibly be disagreeing is because you’re unwilling to question everything.

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Another phrase that annoys

Over there on the right is a classic example of garbled science: the claim that vegetables can be grown ‘without chemicals,’ as if the vegetables themselves weren’t little lumps of chemicals already.

But I have another one to add to the list of bad ideas, and this one comes from a press release from the American Thoracic Society.

Electronic cigarette flavorings alter lung function at the cellular level.

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The dick-centered life

Circumcision

I was just chided by Ally Fogg!



No. of days Heather Hironimus in jail for protecting her child from genital mutilation? Now 5
No. of US liberals giving a fuck? Still 0

Hey! I’m a US liberal…and I had no idea who Heather Hironimus was. My excuse was that it was the end of the semester followed by a bout of travel and family business. But now I’ve looked her up and…hoo boy. I am shocked.

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Ireland and the US share a common struggle

New York City Hosts Annual St. Patrick's Day Parade

Ireland is having a referendum on marriage equality this week, so Aoife is running a series of guest posts on why LGBTQ people deserve the same respect as others. It seems obvious how the vote should go, but I’ve been living in the US all my life and seen that human decency seems to be a struggle for a lot of people. Let’s all hope for good outcomes everywhere!