Opposing Views…
I was approached by the folks over at OpposingViews.com to weigh in on the debate over whether or not animals should have the same rights as people. What follows below is the quick essay I submitted to them; if I have time, I’ll probably follow it with another argument or two. You can find all angles on the debate here if their site starts working correctly… there were transient failures at the site all this past weekend. Also, sorry for the cross-posting if you happen to have seen my announcing this elsewhere.
In one episode of the 1980s absurd British sitcom “The Young Ones,” Neil, the hippie of the group, famously quipped “vegetable rights and peace!” comically upping his hippie cred into the stratosphere. Hippies, of course, are presumed to be for rights for all kinds of things: trees, rocks, water, air, and, of course, animals. Not being a hippie myself, I can’t really speak to the arguments for granting non-sentient things like trees rights (though there is a rather compelling environmental case to be made for protecting them from what economists call the “externalities” of capitalist industrial production) but it is worth thinking about why animals should be accorded at least some of the rights that we bipedal primates called “humans” enjoy.
November 17 2008 @ 09:17 PM | Comments
Loving For All ⇒
The Connecticut Supreme Court overturned a ban today on same-sex marriage. The statement linked above from someone who led the fight in marriage equality back when it was against the law in some places to marry a person of a different race writes with eloquence about the freedom to marry for all.
October 10 2008 @ 05:09 PM | Comments
No More Wilder Effect, Never a Whitman Effect: When and Why Polls Mislead about Black and Female Candidates ⇒
I previously wrote about why I read Obama’s numbers as -5% of what the polls generally report. The above paper by Hopkins (a post-doc at Harvard) suggests that I was not being nuanced enough in my approach, as ludditerobot nicely hints at in the comments.
September 29 2008 @ 09:01 AM | Comments | Tags: politics, link
“We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
— This is what a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com on Tuesday about how they came up with the $700bn figure. (No, I’m not joking.)
Quick summary of the $700bn rescue plan, from the excellent blog indexed. The author posts brilliant and pithy index cards each day, but not all of them are as funny as this one.
September 25 2008 @ 11:34 AM | Comments | Tags: photo, politicsNext → Page 1 of 50