What the world needs now is
caffeinated beer.
Via
leadgend. Lincraft has gone
into receivership.
Being clever with Lego™.
Monkeys will pay to see
monkey porn. Does this fall into the category of yes we are primates or scientists are sick and twisted?
The rules for
getting service from Parisian waiters. (No doubt
tyggerjai and
bunnikins will be able to tell us all about it when they get back.)
Trying to
explain why the US has bad food.
Via
philosophyjeff. Abstinence programs are
ineffective: students in almost all high school grades were more sexually active after undergoing abstinence education.
Researchers don't believe the programs encouraged teenagers to have sex, only that the abstinence messages did not interfere with customary trends among adolescents.
kenshi has a great post about
the joys of parenthood.
Didn’t know that philosopher
W V O Quine was a
conservative.
A
very thoughtful essay about the evolution of the modern left. You can tell it is a by a left thinker, for it completely avoids a fundamental dynamic in the evolution of the left - that socialism doesn’t work. If socialism reliably produced decent societies, if public ownership reliably produced effective and dynamic firms, the history of the last 50 years would have been very different. (If the politburos of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communist Parties have noticed, you wouldn’t think it too much for other people to do so.)
A piece critiquing
Martin Wolf’s take on globalisation
from a social democratic perspective. The author misrepresents Wolf’s position (one reason people like myself sneer when we see the term ‘neoliberal’ is that misrepresentation of the views of economic liberals usually follows immediately) and fails to grapple with the problem for his own agenda that Wolf zeroes in on: the problem in many places is having an effective state at all. It also reads as something of an attempt to preserve some ground of difference for social democracy from a broad liberalism - difficult, since the history of social democracy is the history of the retreat of its socialist component (a consequence of the problem that socialism doesn’t work).
Via
anemone. Choosing distinctively Black names for your children
is a sign of lower socio-economic status (pdf file), but not a causal factor in later life chances. It makes sense, and there is a lot of evidence, that those with less status tend to seek ways to buttress their sense of identity. Is "Islamophobia" a
convenient figleaf for power plays?
Crikey! has been
sold. Given that the purchasers were the people behind the ill-fated Eye, I predict another collapse into uncommercial ideological conformity. Speaking of which, The Chaser
has folded. (
The Age is only kept going by its classifieds. Are predictable views, a desperate need to elevate oneself above the grubby masses and constant implication that anyone who disagrees is a morally retarded moron uncommercial? No, of course not …)
More American conservatives
are noticing how Dubya isn’t very.
The US dollar is falling. That probably means interest rates are
going to rise.