Category: Uncategorized

Are all Americans Afro-Americans? Was your mama a neanderthal? Is there any such thing as “race”? Interesting Scientific American article here on all these matters.

Here is a sensible article about Socrates’s skepticism. It makes me realize, once again, just how rare it is for an individual to insist that he/she really doesn’t have knowledge of important things — but without giving up on the task of acquiring it.

I’ve encountered more people in Utah who follow Ayn Rand than anywhere else. So here is a discussion of someone who followed her and has now “shrugged her off.” Any thoughts?

An interesting article here (scalia-and-lure-of-natural-law1) from First Things on the recent 2nd Amendment decision.  It suggests that – gasp – Scalia made the most reasonable interpretation by appealing to something like the ‘natural law’.

[Full disclosure: While not being ‘anti-gun’, I am hardly ‘pro-gun’.  I do not own a gun, and will confess that I see little reason for why anyone would need one for self-defense or why anyone would need a handgun or an automatic weapon (since hunting appears to me to be the only good use for guns).  Guns seem to me to bring more danger than safety to situations.  But I think Scalia was right to avoid utilitarian social engineering and stick to the principles at hand.]

Read the rest of the article here. The author, a psychologist, claims that men typically go further into the extremes than women, in directions of both (say) mathematical ability and idiocy.