Philip Pullman nails free speech

From a clip via Boing Boing

Malthusian numbers

"Hawking declares that, 'in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.' But this is nonsense. For a start, there is no exponential growth. In fact, population growth is slowing. For more than three decades now, the average number of babies being born to women in most of the world has been in decline... Here are the numbers. Forty years ago, the average woman had between five and six kids. Now she has 2.6. This is getting close to the replacement level which, allowing for girls who don’t make it to adulthood, is around 2.3.... Half the world already has a fertility rate below the long-term replacement level. That includes all of Europe, much of the Caribbean and the far east from Japan to Vietnam and Thailand, Australia, Canada, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Kazakhstan, and Tunisia.

If you need some numbers to add to your refutations of Malthus, who simply should not be run, period, read this article.

A short history of the Congo

This has to be the most depressing timeline ever. You get the impression that, if any new technology comes along, this region will prove rich in the natural resource required to manufacture it, and, as a result, all hell will break loose. Link.

"Caveman" revisited: Fountain

“Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it.” And what happened afterward to, perhaps, the single most important work of art in the 20th century. Find out here.

If corporations are people, maybe animals are too

"Should animals, like indigent criminal defendants, be provided with legal representation by the state? It could happen. As Time has reported, on March 7, voters in Switzerland will decide whether to give 'domestic creatures . . . the constitutional right to be represented by (human) lawyers in court.' More...

I'm imagining that, before long, we will be seeing some serious LD rezzes on animal rights, although I don't think we'll select them to debate them because, at their root, they're a little bizarre. Still, the issues are fascinating.

Need to refute Malthus?

"Malthus, a man who, not to put too fine a point on it, was the scum of the Earth, who thought poor people should be deprived charity and healthcare and if they died as a result, well good, since they have ‘no claim of right to the smallest portion of food’." That Malthus? Well, you could do worse than this article. What interests me about Malthusianism is that someone could run theories that are empirically disproven, and get away with it. You've got to love debate: Tabula rasas gone wild!

Aff-Act

Most people are probably finished with this rez, but if not: http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/college-planning/admissions/race-college-admissions.htm

And therefore, 14% of any population is idiotic

"24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama 'may be the Antichrist.' What else do Republicans believe? Link.

By the way, Dick Cheney is the Antichrist. I thought everybody knew that by now.

Ada Lovelace

We would be remiss not to note this woman today. You could start here.

Innate morality v. social norms

Okay, it's not throwing the fat guy in front of the trolley, but it's interesting: "modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history." That's from a precis here; there's an analysis here.

In other words, cultural development affects moral judgment. You learn something every day.

Profile of Justice Stevens

From the New Yorker. If you care about SCOTUS, read it. Link.

I'd like to ignore Texas, but

Since TJ is a personal hero of mine, and, last I heard, the main author of the Declaration of Independence, I'm just a little taken aback. "Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin and conservative British law scholar William Blackstone. Heavy emphasis is also to be placed on the founding fathers having been guided by strict Christian beliefs." WTF? Next up, dentists will start asking for George Washington to be removed from the founders because he had a bad set of false teeth.

We should all be in a DNA database?

Nice fodder for a debate topic? "The goal of such a database is to help the police fight crime by better enabling them to find perpetrators who leave DNA traces at the scenes of their misdeeds...The main ACLU objection is: In America, people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Thousands of people are arrested or detained every year and never charged with a crime. Housing a person’s DNA in a criminal database renders that person an automatic suspect for any future crime – without warrant, probable cause, or individualized suspicion." More.

Kant on meat

Another Kant article, this time on animals. It's a marvel of rationalization! "In his ethical theory Kant makes it quite clear that animals are means rather than ends... Since animals are means and not ends, Kant claims that we have no direct duties to animals...Given this view, it would seem that Kant would not be very concerned with how animals are treated. After all, they would seem to be mere things. Oddly enough, Kant argues that we should treat animals well. However, he does so while also trying to avoid ascribing animals themselves any moral status. Here is how he does it (or tries to do so). "Article.

I knew Kant, and you're not him!

"We cannot expect ordinary people to be better philosophical moral reasoners than Kant. Kant’s philosophical moral reasoning appears mainly to have confirmed his prejudices and the ideas inherited from his culture. Therefore, we should be nervous about expecting more from the philosophical moral reasoning of people less philosophically capable than Kant."

Want to "be dissin' on Kant"? Read this in The Splintered Mind. Watch out for naughty bits.

Stanford Encyc on feminism/objectification

"The majority of the thinkers discussing objectification have taken it to be a morally problematic phenomenon." Yep. Good stuff all around for a philosophical understanding of feminism. Article.

Taxing Coke (the beverage) isn't enough

"The federal government already has a tax policy affecting what we eat, and it dramatically distorts the price of our food ... and the size of our waists." This isn't an insignificant thought regarding your tax dollars at work. Check it out: link.

Heidegger

Everyone's favorite Nazi. This is probably most of what you need to know: Heidegger tells us that "the Nothing noths." "Noths" being a word Heidegger has made up, it is hard to know what it means. Aside from which, it is hard to understand why he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis in the 1930s, why he continued to support them during the Second World War, and why he even refused to condemn the ideology afterwards. "We should not be surprised that Heidegger was for a short period a Nazi, not because anything in Sein und Zeit entails National Socialism but because nothing in Sein und Zeit could give one a standpoint from which to criticise it or any other irrationalism." More...

I would say that, given Heidegger's impenetrability, it's good to know that his politics allow us to skip him completely. Noth this, bub!

Gendercide

Perhaps as many as 100 million girls have disappeared in the last decades because of selective abortions encouraged by new medical technology (ultrasounds and fertility technology), childhood neglect of girls (nutritional, educational neglect and neglect in health care), prejudice, preference for male offspring and population policies such as the “one child policy” in China. More from P.A.P. Author Spagnoli isn't strident, but there's sad and important material here.

Teaching the so-called controversy, again

I mean, it's only a "theory." Then again, "It is not the role of public schools to confirm the religious beliefs of their students." Ronald Bailey in Reason solves the problem of people who want science v. people who want religion. Link.

Refugee facts

Interesting maps (after the first two charts) showing where refugees come from, and where they go.

In defense of blowing each other's brains out

Reason Magazine, a libertarian rag that I actually enjoy reading, provides arguments in favor of incorporation here. If guns are so great, why can't I fly to WDW with one strapped into my belt? Or at least sail through "It's a Small World" with one, as my daughter suggests? But then again, I definitely need one around the house for defense. My cat likes to bite? Ka-boom, kitty!

The fact that people like something or want something doesn't make it a right. And something that was a daily requirement over two hundred years ago is not necessarily a daily requirement today just because it was one then. In other words, either the law is an ass, or 5 of the Supes. Pick one.

The right to blow each other's brains out

It looks like SCOTUS wants to incorporate the second amendment. Bam!