USUPhilosophy

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.

In recognition of George Carlin’s passing, here’s his 10 Commandments shtick. (Warning: naughty words are used.)

An interesting legal case in Florida, reported by the NYT:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a community’s values.

What do you think? Does a community’s googling reflect their values? Or does it only reflect their private values, as opposed to their public values? Is that a viable distinction?