Smear the queer

The equals sign has become almost ubiquitous as the supreme court considers the issue of same-sex marriage. Why are gay rights so chic at the moment?Putatively fighting for equality is always an easy way to obtain cheap grace.Additionally, though, I suspect it is because the same-sex marriage crusade feels purer than other potential civil rights crusades do. A black guy who...

Gay marriage and having sex with your sister

With the supreme court considering California's proposition 8 regarding same-sex marriage*, my social media feeds are full of self righteous crusaders crusading for the cause. Leaving alone the legal considerations and even questions about the potential socio-moral fallout in denying people civil rights or alternatively in devaluing marriage, the supercilious sanctimony of so many of the morally superior proclaiming in favor presents an almost...

Depicting reality or escaping from it?

I'm finally getting around to reading Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. The descriptions of how widespread and commonplace violence was in the 'popular culture' of the medieval and middle ages make for fun reading, but I wonder (because I don't know) how representative said popular culture was of the larger societies it existed in at the time.I bring this up because that doesn't appear to be the case today--if anything, the inverse...

Deficit spending is about who's doing it

After mulling it over, I think we need a third party presidency for budget deficit reduction to become a sustained, acted upon priority. Pew has tracked public prioritization of reducing the nation's federal budget deficit for nearly twenty years, and from someone whose default position is one of starving the beast, looking at how partisan positions flip flop...

Rand Paul wins google poll

Rand didn't just win the CPAC straw poll, he's winning the Google interest poll, too. Here are the search results for the rest of CPAC's top four, as well as for Jeb Bush, who the AP, swimming against the grassroots tide--in vain, one hopes--describes as "perhaps the highest-profile establishment figure [in the GOP]". Results track from December 2012 through the...

Human biodiversity needs you!

In a recent Taki's column, the Derb parenthetically notes the unfortunate competition for primacy of the acronym HBD that the phrase "human biodiversity" shares with the phrase "happy birthday". Nothing against congratulating people for managing to survive another year, but the former phrase is enhanced by the abbreviation while the latter is cheapened by it. Human biodiversity doesn't have a wikipedia page yet, but HBD does...

We can spare the state department, but that's it

Rand Paul is spitting into the wind. Unfortunately so from my perspective, but it's what he's doing all the same. Pew recently released the results of a survey in which respondents were asked whether they would increase, decrease, or maintain current spending levels across 19 different expenditure categories if they were writing up the federal government's budget. The following table shows the public appetite for spending increases (decreases) by...

Self-assessed health by race, age, and sex

Despite the claims that low educational attainment among blacks relative to whites is in large part due to blacks feeling intellectually inferior to whites (known in the academic literature as "stereotype threat"), the data actually show blacks to be as confident in themselves--if not more so--than are whites (and other non-blacks).I wondered how similar the story would be...

Menthol preference by race

Some follow up on the previous post looking at racial distributions of smokers of the top cigarette brands in the US. Firstly, a couple of commenters asserted that Parliaments are the SWPL brand of choice. Here's the breakdown:Primarily white with a nice Asian showing and a correspondingly weak NAM share. Looks like we have a winner. Rescued pit bulls suffer secondhand smoke...

Pugilistic pit bulls

Roissy's perspicacious, if deliberately provocative (it's who he is, after all), post on pit bulls and the bleeding heart SWPL instinct to apologize for (if Tookie was a dog, he'd look like this) and adopt them got me into a heated facebook conversation. Opposition to Roissy's post took two familiar forms; 1) Exceptions to the rule ("My family's three year old pit bull is the most lovable dog ever."), and 2) External factors ("It's all about how...