Month: March 2013

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I love Brust’s novels, but I usually find his philosophizing to be unpersuasive. Every once in a while, though, he drops a gem. I think his point here is indeed disputable (there is a difference between falsifiable in principle and falsifiable at the moment), but I also think that there is more philosophy in science than some would like to think. We still call them Ph.D.s for a reason.

So, What IS Science, Anyway?

I know science–both the discoveries and method of–are important to me. I know that I believe we ought to deduce natural laws from the facts, as opposed to imposing them on the facts. I know tha.…..

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The level to which opponents of same-sex marriage are misunderstood (and thereby misrepresented) on this issue (and a host of others) is staggering. 

WPost: Yes, we fear and loathe religious traditionalistsWPost: Yes, we fear and loathe religious traditionalists

mollie | Catholicism, Evangelicals, Marriage & family, Politics, Religion, Same-sex marriage, Social Issues, Uncategorized

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Fascinating. 3.5 percent of adult Americans identify at LGBT of one stripe or another, but the density is three times greater in the District of Columbia. In fact, D.C. has a density twice as great as the next entry on the list. I bet there’s an engrossing backstory which explains this distribution.

Groundbreaking Study Ranks States by LGBT Population

It isn’t even close. Ten percent of adult residents in Washington, D.C. identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, according to a groundbreaking new Gallup study that for the first time has e…

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This is a fascinating interview. Several bits stood out to me. I mention two here:
“Joe Nocera at the Times runs a daily tally of gun killings. He’s not running a daily tally of how many people defend themselves with guns. For one thing we don’t know about it most of the time. David Hemenway at Harvard is very pro gun-control and he thinks it happens about 80,000 times a year. If that’s true, that means that guns are saving 10 times as many people as they’re killing.”

“We have this impulse in the U.S. to do something. We have no national church, so the only way we can express our public morality is to say there ought to be a law. It’s antithetical to the American can-do character to say there are certain things we just can’t do much about.”

For the record, I am not a “gun guy.”

What Liberals Need to Understand About ‘Gun Guys’

The author of a new book tries to reconcile his personal politics with his fondness for firearms.

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I sometimes feel I could listen to Penn all day. In this clip he makes a great point: many American Catholics are actually Protestants unwilling to act on their convictions.

Watch this: Outspoken atheist Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) defends Catholic orthodoxy on CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight

“I think I may be somebody who believes in the Pope’s position more than most Catholics. I really take people at their word. And it seems like all of the cynicism and all of the — who are we going to…