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Right off the bat, Romney hits us with some unscripted juice. “My, oh my, you guys are great to be out here with this rain,” he says. He has declined the use of an umbrella and is getting rained on with the rest of us. He grins, jaw like a crescent moon. “This guy here…
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“What the Hell is a Simpson Bowl?”
Andrew Sullivan, whose writing I generally adore, is, I think, really wrong on an important aspect of horse-race analysis for the presidential election. His prescription for Obama at the Democratic Convention: … if I were to offer a single piece of advice to the campaign, it would be to use the convention to declare that…
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Pow.
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Twisted Sister joined a list of other artists telling Romney/Ryan to stop using their music, but this is especially interesting to me, because how do Romney and Ryan not realize that they are, in fact, the “it” we’re no longer gonna take? Jed Groettum
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I believe that it is possible to believe women and to support WikiLeaks at the same time without moral hypocrisy, and I believe that those across the left who seem to have a problem with holding those two simple ideas in their heads at the same time need to ask themselves what accountability actually means.…
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Is fantasy intrinsically hostile to technology? That is, was Tolkien simply drawing out what is already there in the genre? Or has he limited it in unnecessary ways? What would a fantasy that embraces technology look like? Arthur Weasley’s fascination with Muggle tech in the Harry Potter books is simply comical — though a great…
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Alexander Aan and Me, Ctd.
An update for my tens of readers. The White House petition for Alexander Aan pushed by my employing organization failed to achieve orbit. Ironically, that failure has arguably garnered more attention than the effort itself. Anyway, I had some strong feelings about said failure, and wrote about it at Friendly Atheist in the form of…
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There are no rights in nature, only in a society with a legal system and a police force. Does Copyright Matter? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
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My dear young friend,” said Mustapha Mond, “civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise. Where there are wars,…
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I don’t want good causes like secularism and skepticism to die because they’re infested with people who see issues of equality as mission drift. I want Deep Rifts. I want to be able to truthfully say that I feel safe in this movement. I want the misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes, and downright trolls out of…
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You are Stuck with Joe Biden
So there is this small flurry of rumors fluttering about the murkier reaches of the Beltway media saying that President Obama has been courting Hillary Clinton to join him on the 2012 ticket in place of Joe Biden, and these rumors of course have nothing to do with the fact that Romney is not only…
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In the event, we have not only missed a chance to do some good for Alexander Aan (however remote that possibility was); we have made it look as if the secularist movement is a toothless tiger. If we can’t rally 25,000 people to sign a carefully drafted petition that contains no scary detail that ought…
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I do no research. Given that I’ve just written a book that revolves around two London Met police detectives, this might seem a little foolhardy. I have no real idea what detectives do with their days. So I made some guesses. I suppose that they must investigate things. I tried to imagine what that might…
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It’s More or Less in the Bag
I worry a lot. Bad things really do happen. Unexpected things. It’s smart, I think, to never be too comfortable that you fail to prepare for contingencies. But it looks like some folks are finally beginning to admit one thing: Obama is almost certainly going to get reelected. Ignore the tight race of the national…
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Alexander Aan and Me
Considering the maniacal focus I’ve had on the case of Alexander Aan at work, it’d be remiss of me not to deal with it on my own blog. So a quick recap. Alexander Aan, a civil servant in West Sumatra, Indonesia, posted on Facebook his lack of belief in God and some satirical cartoons about…
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