Over at The Bellman, Zwichenzug has a good post responding to my abortion argument.  Here are some thoughts.

John Ku, a grad student at Michigan, has a nice abortion argument on his webpage.  You can find it here (click on the "abortion" button you’ll see near the top of the page).  Its conclusion is that abortion is not murder.  I don’t have much to say about his argument, other than that I think…

I haven’t been reading blogs as long as some people have, and am sure I’ve discovered only a small fraction of the good blogs out there.  Most of the blogs I read regularly are listed in the sidebar.  In comments, please expand my repertoire by listing a few of the blogs you like.  Blogs of…

At midnight, Turkey introduced a new currency.  It is less funny and more useful than the old currency.  From the Guardian: "Under the old system monthly salaries were counted in billions while even the shortest taxi ride could set clients back five to 10 million. "With budgets quoted in quadrillions, bureaucrats faced the mind-boggling task…

Consider two demands: 1. A moral theory must be able to accommodate many or most of our deeply-held, commonsense intuitions.  If a moral theory tells us to do something we feel strongly we ought not do, then there is something wrong with the moral theory. 2. A moral theory must be capable of surprising us. …

I like Nina Hagen.  Here’s a nice Nina Hagen video. UPDATE: The second link is now broken.  If anyone happens to find another site with Nina Hagen videos, please leave word in comments. 

Consider the following story: Anna is driving her truck at night along an unlighted, winding road.  She turns a corner and suddenly, 50 feet ahead of her, she sees a dark mass.  She thinks she sees it move.  It is about the size of an adult human being, but it could just as easily be…

Ignore the harmful phenomenon of grade-inflation, which is pushing us toward a de facto pass-fail system.  Even assuming the minimum level of performance required for an A were not steadily creeping downward, the ABCDF system is still bad. 

I was given a copy of A Mencken Chrestomathy for Christmas.  So far and for the most part it is about as amusing as it was claimed it would be. At the end there’s a collection of "Mencken sententiae."  I think some of these nicely capture kernels of truth (e.g., "Tombstone–An ugly reminder of one…