IAIN MURRAY swings both ways — writing for conservative publications, but now savaging “intelligent design” theory in The American Prospect. He’s right, of course.
I wonder — did writer’s block force the Prospect crowd to reach out?
UPDATE: Here’s a post with more thoughts, which I found via Electrolite.
WHEN IN DOUBT, COIN A TERM: TAPPED announces that it has “Blogger’s Block.”
WHERE ECO-SILLINESS GOES OVER THE EDGE: The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Several people emailed me this link, but I don’t think it’s actually new. Why all the attention all of a sudden?
And yes, there really are people who think this way.
GERALD FORD has an oped opposing the Brownback anti-cloning bill in today’s Washington Post. I agree, of course, that the Brownback bill is terrible — though unlike Ford I don’t regard it as a foregone conclusion that reproductive cloning is awful. In fact, I don’t really see any reason to think that it is.
IN LIGHT OF MY TechCentralStation column on neuroscience today, I should probably also steer interested readers to this weblog on neuroscience, focusing primarily on neuroprosthesis.
UPDATE: Just got this interesting email:
My name is Maria Yang and I am a medical student at UC Davis. I just wanted to comment on your TCS article (“Brains: Good, Bad, and Modified”):
I think neuroscience does not receive the attention and emotions that cloning/abortion does simply because neuroscience is considered way too complicated and way too esoteric and way too academic to really affect the lives of the average citizen, or the average ethicist.
It’s easy to explain cloning and abortion in lay terms (“like a photocopy”; “removing a piece of tissue”/”killing a child”). But how does one “simply” explain neuroscience? How does one state in five words or less the concepts of neurotransmitters, inhibition, inhibition of inhibition, etc., and how all of those interactions can produce a desired (or undesired) effect?
That, and do people *really* want to know the intricacies of brain function? People never ask how Prozac works–they just know that it makes you happy. People want instant gratification: just deliver the end result and move on to the next distraction.
While I don’t want to attribute the disparity of attention given to various ethical issues solely to laziness, it seems like people just find it easier to work with issues that can be summed up in five words and generate a visceral response from the masses. It just takes too much time and effort to actually look closer, dig deeper, and understand what a bigger issue may be.
Yes. Also, Hollywood hasn’t done much with neuroscience. If they made a movie out of Greg Bear’s Queen of Angels that might change.
ARE AMERICAN JOURNALISTS ARMING TERRORISTS? I expect to see the Violence Policy Center issue a press release any minute now.
SORRY THAT BLOGGING HAS BEEN SO LIMITED TODAY — I’ve been revising a manuscript (it’s a law review article on the Commerce Clause). I’ve been so busy with computer hell (the wired part of my network works, but the wireless part still doesn’t — except intermittently) that I got a bit behind.
THE WIDELY-REPORTED (well, in IndyMedia-type circles) Matt Guckenheimer statement about killing women and children in Afghanistan is false — according to none other than Mr. Guckenheimer himself. Tim Blair has it. Here’s an earlier post on the subject, with links.
ERIC S. RAYMOND says that we are all Jews now, and uses a comment on Dawn Olsen’s page (for which he doesn’t provide a link, tsk tsk, but it’s in the comments to this post) to launch into an interesting discussion of what ticks off Islamofascists, why it leads to antisemitism, and what to do about it.
THE BLOG BOOK PROJECT is getting some mainstream press. I think that’s very cool.
MORE GUNS: Honestly, I keep trying to get away from this issue, but interesting stuff keeps popping up. There’s a new Zogby poll on attitudes about the Second Amendment that suggests it’s pretty much impossible to call the Administration’s individual-right position “out of the mainstream” or “radical” unless the definition of “mainstream” means “the op-ed page of the New York Times” Which, of course, it does.
Eugene Volokh has more.
FOR THOSE IN MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL, I’ll be on KSTP radio just after the hour, talking about teen sex. Sorry, no Internet stream.
MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN IS UP — and it’s not about Mars!
KRISTOF UPDATE: Nick Kristof’s dumb, biased, and inaccurate column on gun shows came in for a pasting in the Blogosphere yesterday. Even leftie blogger Ted Barlow found that Kristof’s stereotypes didn’t match his own gun-show experience.
Here, by the way, is a clear and detailed explanation by Dave Kopel (who has a book on gun regulation just out from NYU Press) of why the “gun-show loophole” is a myth — and one propagated with malice aforethought. Kristof should either be embarrassed to have fallen for this disinformation campaign, or ashamed to be complicit in it. Kopel also debunks Kristof’s claim, parroted (like the rest of his column) from VPC and Brady press releases, that denials under the Instant-Check system mean that an equivalent number of criminals have been stopped from buying guns:
The 700,000 figure is simply the number of initial denials under the National Instant Check System and its predecessor, the Brady waiting period. The figure includes people who were initially denied a gun because they had the same name as a criminal, but who appealed and were later authorized to purchase. It also includes people denied for improper reasons, such as unpaid traffic tickets.
But in even citing it, the anti-gun folks are being dishonest: “Indeed, the figure of 700,000 gun purchasers who were turned down includes people who were turned down when attempting to buy at gun shows from federally licensed firearms dealers.”
Because, you see, there is no “gun show loophole.” Federal gun laws require licensed dealers to do background checks wherever they sell guns. They don’t require casual sellers to do background checks, wherever they sell guns. Kristof is either too lazy to find out the truth, or too dishonest to tell it. Your call.
NOTE: Kristof says 690,000. The McCain / Lieberman anti-gun commercial that Kopel quotes says 700,000. I assume that some copywriter, ahem, rounded up.
UPDATE: Reader Byron Matthews makes this valuable point:
It isn’t simply that non-FFLs don’t have to comply with those laws —
non-FFLs do not have access to the NICS background check system. You
have to be a licensed dealer to use the system. As a private seller,
even if you wanted to do a background check to avoid any possible
liability should your buyer misuse the gun you sell him, you can’t do
it.
I understand this has to do with privacy concerns, where access to the
system might be misused by neighbors checking up on each other, etc. My
guess is that if the check system were open to private sellers in some
way, many would use it.
I don’t mean to pick on Kristof (I like some of his work) but his gun pieces have been sloppy and misleading — and frequent.
CORNEL WEST UPDATE: Well, really it’s a Larry Summers update. Josh Chafetz and Matthew Yglesias have an interesting back-and-forth on who’ll be hiring Cornel West’s replacement. It turns out that since he’s a University Professor, his replacement will be chosen by (drumroll, please) . . . . Larry Summers!
Hmm. So Summers gets rid of a loudmouth provocateur who isn’t pulling his academic weight, and gets to choose his replacement. West, on the other hand, gets some mixed (mostly bad) publicity, and has to move to New Jersey. So, who won this round?
Advantage: Summers!
MICKEY KAUS demonstrates, once again, that he’s an ass man. But everyone who’s been reading him for any length of time knows it already.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
SOUTH KNOX BUBBA’S IQ TEST gets a link from Andrew Sullivan today. Who says a new blogger can’t get noticed?
THE GOVERNMENT HAS finally gotten around to firing someone over 9/11.
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Eric Rudolph?