Musings on The Truman Show and Pleasantville
This week’s Thursday Night Bar Fight about living in a TV show of your choosing has got me thinking about two movies. I didn’t have either in mind when I came up with the...
Author: Tod Kelly
Thursday Night Bar Fight #10: The “Three Hour Tour”
Bad news, everyone! NASA has just reported that a giant meteor is on a collision course with Earth. NASA has also confirmed there is no way to stop the moon-sized rock. Its arrival brings...
Ideology is the Enemy: The Creeping Victory of “Consistent” over “Judicious”
Note: This is part of an ongoing series I’m doing on the growing dangers we face by becoming more ideologically rigid. They are not intended to go in any particular order, and would be...
Wow.
This doesn’t look good: The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented...
The worst texting typo/spellcheck snafu I’ve ever committed.
So, over the weekend the good and decent Doc and I were chatting back and forth by text.
The Cheap-Ass Gourmet – Puttanesca
Note: The Cheap-Ass Gourmet is a cooking series we recently started doing here at the League. Each recipe in the series has three things in common: each is perfect for a person on a budget,...
Time for Heads to Roll at the White House and IRS
As regular readers know, I’m trying to focus on writing a series on the problems with ascending ideology in America. As such, I’ve been trying to avoid posting things that fall squarely into the “grossly...
What the Hell am I supposed to make of the new Pew report?
I find myself seriously puzzled by a new report from the Pew Research Center, which shows that Hispanic high school graduates are now enrolling in college at a greater rate than white graduates. Or...
Thursday Night Bar Fight #9: Furries Unite!
Good news, everyone! The Council for Higher Education Accreditation has finally granted the League university status. As of now, reading and commenting here earn you actual course credits, which you can save up and...
Why Conservatives Can’t Win Non-White Votes, Heritage Foundation Edition
UPDATED BELOW (ALREADY!) After each national election since I can remember, conservatives have wondered aloud why more minorities don’t back them. After all, African American neighborhoods might especially benefit from the strong, self-sufficient economies...
Why You Should Stop Being a Loyal Employee
It’s Stupid Tuesday over at Blinded Trials, and this week Russell asks what eras have we passed in our lives, when we declared, “to [ourselves] and to others, ‘I once was this, but now...
Ideology is the Enemy: Prelude
Over the next several weeks months I will be writing about the recent ascendance of ideology in the United States and why it worries me. Specifically, I worry that the voting public’s generations-long desire...
a brief note on why you’re all about to be soooo sick of me very soon (assuming you weren’t already)
Like Erik, I’ve been practically invisible around here for the past month or two. (I missed two Bar Fights in a row!) Unlike Erik, I don’t have a mega-cool and talent-revealing singer-songwriter vid to...
Arguments Against People Are Not Always Tu Quoque
This will be a short post, but I wanted to quickly respond to Jason’s excellent but just slightly off post on the inherent dangers of arguing tu quoque. Everything he says about the fallacies of tu quoque are spot...
The Curious Martyrdom of Tim Tebow
A few hours ago, the entire world of sports journalism came to a momentary stop as the New York Jets formally announced their release of backup quarterback Tim Tebow. In many ways, this parting...
On the need for political finance reform…
I wanted to highlight a TED-Talk given recently by Lawrence Lessig, which Mad Rocket Scientist forwarded to me this afternoon. Many of you probably know Lessig from his work with technology use and copyright...
In Which The City of Portland Makes Me Seriously Consider Becoming a Registered Libertarian
Just as everyone becomes a liberal when Walmart announces a new store in their neighborhood, it turns out everyone becomes a libertarian when dealing with dead trees. Or maybe it’s just me. As many...
So, explain to me again how the South is just the same as everywhere else?
A year or two ago I made a disparaging comment about the South in the threads and was rightly taken to task by a number of readers. (As I recall, MFarmer was particularly on-target.)...
Thursday Night Bar Fight #8: The Darker Side of Higher Education in the 21st Century
Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Higher Education in the 21st Century. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the...
It’s actually not pronounced mänster
Yeah, so this bugged me. Over at Balloon Juice, DougJ says that he’s glad that pundit Michael Kelly is dead and wishes that he’d died younger. Anticipating the need for a straw man in...
