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It it wrong to require boys to be vaccinated against a disease that does almost all of its damage to women? I can’t see why.
Archive for October, 2009
October 17th, 2009
Category: Uncategorized
Barack Obama shouldn’t give away the Nobel Peace Prize money. It’s not his money; it’s ours.
October 16th, 2009
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Crime Control, Policy Analysis, Politics and Leadership, Prisons and penal policy, Reviews
Want law enforcement that’s really tough on Mexicans? Try Mexico’s. Only seven years until accused there are presumed innocent, and meanwhile the cops aren’t afraid to do what’s needed to get the job done. Like lie under oath. Roberto and Layda are students in my shop (Roberto is my PhD advisee), and I am over-the-top [...]
October 16th, 2009
Category: Crime Control, Public management
Finding that diminishing lead exposure was the big driver in reducing crime rates doesn’t imply that criminal justice policies don’t matter.
October 16th, 2009
Category: Education policy, Sports
Certain of my colleagues are taking advantage of the current financial crisis of the university by asking whether a big-time competitive athletic program is really central to our educational and research mission. These people are at best quibblers and whiners, at worst unpatriotic, unAmerican subversive agents (indeed, I know one of them to be an [...]
October 15th, 2009
Category: Afghanistan
James Vega’s urgent case for rejecting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan—and the imperial mission that the counterinsurgency model, surprisingly, requires.
October 15th, 2009
Ruminations on social and personal time preference, with an example
October 14th, 2009
Category: Crime Control
William Saletan thinks that pedophilia is sick but that wanting to have sex with pubescent girls is “natural,” and therefore not as wrong. This makes no sense.
October 14th, 2009
Category: Climate change, Energy and Environment, Middle East Politics, Moral philosophy, Nationalism, Politics and Leadership, Uncategorized
If you’re still collecting evidence that a society built on extractive wealth is liable to moral pathology, put this one in your dossier. The Saudis are demanding that if we use less of their climate-toxic export, we should pay them (and the other oil-exporting countries) for what we don’t buy. Let us pause in awe [...]
October 13th, 2009
Category: Uncategorized
Under the heading “Of the Slavery of the Negroes,” Montesquieu writes, “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.”