There are a couple claims at issue here, and throughout the piece. One is just the commonplace observation that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris &c. can come across as arrogant jerks, which is fair enough, but then, who else is going to really proselytize for the absence of a belief? It’s like starting a non-chess-players club; plenty of people fit the membership requirements, but only those with an active hostility ot the game are going to feel the need to make a point of joining. In any event, this is at most an observation about a particular group of people; it doesn’t have much to do with the soundness of an atheist position as such.

I find the question “in what ways does an agnostic’s beliefs differ from an atheist’s?” much more interesting. The answer, of course, is “none.” The abstention from answering that so-called agnostics claim as their position amounts to disbelief, the very same position held by atheists, nothing more. As Sanchez writes, “An agnostic here would for practical purposes be an operational atheist who makes a point of saying “but I may be wrong” a little more frequently, or demurely refrains from asserting his secular background worldview too explicitly.” In effect, it’s a conceit to make agnostics feel more multicultural and sensitive to others’ strongly-held values, and it all boils down to their being “polite atheists” who refuse to call themselves such.

I also want to voice agreement with Sanchez that the question “why is there something instead of nothing?” is meaningless. Of course, I also think that the question “is there a god?” is meaningless for most intents and purposes, as a definitive answer is impossible, so this fits nicely along with my other beliefs.

Politicians compose a subset of people, so they should act strategically. Likewise with national leaders. If they did not understand rational action and strategy, then their ability to accomplish our national aims would rely exclusively on chance. (That would be a confusing signal to send to nations with whom we play strategic games, which could benefit us, but it would be far too unreliable.) Leaders who understand game theory and who can act strategically, by definition, know how to act in a way that maximizes our nation’s potential outcomes.

I also prize leaders who are honest with their constituents. If citizens need to understand something about a situation, leaders should explain it to them without mincing words or making false promises. We see this with the American debt situation. People feel concerned about our national debt, which makes politicians claim that they want to cut the debt. Yet, when it comes to undertaking measures to reduce our budget deficits, politicians refuse to address the issues that give rise to the debt crisis, such as Medicare, defense spending, etc.

This illustrates a clear tension between these two values: honesty undermines our leaders’ best strategic move. These leaders understand that to cut Medicare or defense spending probably means that voters will punish them. After all, who wants to vote for a politician who cut grandma’s health insurance or left us vulnerable? Never mind that these are necessary steps to cut the debt. Politicians know that this is the case, so they promise to cut the deficit and debt without cutting programs or increasing taxes. Thus, incumbents make the strategic move on the individual level while forgoing the strategic move on the national level.

How can we ensure that we have leaders who place precedence on our nation’s strategic interests over their own personal ones? Perhaps the answer lies in an un-democratic system of government or in a state-less society, but these raise different issues.

Maybe the central battle in epistemology between rationalism and empiricism just boils down to typology, with intuitive types believing the former and sensing types the latter.

Many students graduating with enormous debt loads have valid reasons to ask why they have to pay such high interest rates on huge amounts of debt. I fail to see where law students at a private school in a job-poor legal market play into that, though (see here). People like Todd graduated from college before enrolling in a professional degree program. They had all of the tools at their disposal to evaluate whether this investment would pay off. Someone heading to the University of Miami School of Law probably didn’t take the time to do this.

It seems that people deserve bailouts if they could not have understood the likely consequences of their gamble, be it buying a house way out of their price range or investing in bad mortgages or spending a quarter of a million dollars to gain entry to a saturated job market. Bailing out those who could and should have looked ahead to analyze what they ought to expect from their investments creates just the sort of moral hazard that people have decried when it comes to the major financial institutions. Shouldn’t policy encourage people like me, who consider the terrible legal job market and avoid going straight to law school, rather than those who throw down huge amounts of money without a thought to the actual circumstances of that decision?

I understand that my peers have received oodles of information indicating that a legal career is as much a sure thing for lifetime employment and wealth as, say, medicine. I get that it’s hard to question what our parents and advisors have told us. I do. For a while I was certain that I would start law school immediately after college. At the same time, it takes five minutes of research on Google to find plenty of information about why going to law school is neither a cure-all nor a sure thing. (If devoting the time to research this represents more of an effort than you want to give, then what kind of lawyer will you make anyway? The entire job is based on research.) This is a quarter-million-dollar decision, so pleading ignorance represents a cop-out of the highest degree.

I’m sorry, Todd, but your bailout isn’t on the way because you don’t deserve one. Responsible people who took the time to reflect on the reality of the decision don’t owe you anything. Investing that much money in a bet that you can’t really expect to pay off shouldn’t qualify alongside, for example, first-generation college students being saddled with debt.

To their surprise, they found the opposite—there was a small but statistically significant reduction in obesity rates in communities with a Wal-Mart, perhaps because the store also sells fresh produce of good quality at a good price.

This is unexpected given my personal experience and understanding of big box stores’ clientele. It does make sense, though, considering that big box stores bring the same negotiating advantages to produce as to any other product. Accordingly, while this is good for the consumers, I wonder how good it is for the producers, who already have low profit margins.

(via The Daily Dish)

“We have said repeatedly that our religious beliefs and principles prohibit such weapons as they are the symbol of destruction of generations. And for this reason we do not believe in weapons and atomic bombs and do not seek them.”

Note that I don’t think we should take Khamenei at his word. However, people who would intervene in Iran offer no reason why we should take Ahmadinejad at his word, either. We have mixed signals from the country’s leadership on this question, but we know that Khamenei has the final word. Iran has competing incentives that will decide whether they actually pursue nuclear weapons. If they acquire a nuclear weapon, they will gain power and influence, but they will also alienate (even more than they already have) the rest of the region and the world. Our media tend to fail to recognize that, though.