All Thoughts Being Equal

Yesterday I wrote a piece for Little Green Footballs that ended up being part 2 in a three-part series on something nasty in the publication history of Reason magazine. Namely, a "special edition" from February 1976 on historical revisionism... that ended up including some really odious Holocaust denial and reads like a Who's Who of deniers and friends-of-deniers. When called out by PandoDaily , Reason editor Nick Gillespie issued a really weak-tea response: I went back and looked into each alleged denialist contributor to the special edition, and yeah, it shouldn't have been hard for 1976! Reason to say no to these cranks, and even less hard for 2014! Reason to condemn its past self and move on. I won't retread that specific ground here; if you're interested, read the LGF posts here [1], here [2], and here [3]. Instead, let's look more at the meta-level callout by Mark Ames at PandoDaily and response by Nick Gillespie at Reason . In my mind this e...

Note: This post was adapted from a Facebook comment I made in a closed group. In the March 2011 edition of their National Health Statistics Report , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published results on sexual identity from the 2006-2008 National Survey of Family Growth. More recently (July 2014 edition of the NHSR) they published the results of the 2013 National Health Interview Survey[1]. This got passed around with headlines like "Gay population smaller than previously thought." According to the report, Proper counter-propaganda tactics would be to pull out other statistical nuggets for comparison. As a particularly evocative example, only 1.7% of the American population self-identifies as Mormon [1] , so they're outnumbered 2 to 1 even with this maybe-lowball stat. Similarly, the Southern Baptist churches claim roughly 16 million members, which is about 5% of the U.S. population [2] ... not all that much bigger than the LGBTQ population...

I. In a discussion on Facebook tangentially related to my last blog post (insofar as it was about how political views aren't rational for a lot of people), my friend Briana made the following comment: I've never seen it [politics] as rational... there is an ideal that it can be, but I've never seen it in practice. Otherwise, we'd have started culling our own populations by now. I objected pithily that we don't need to cull humans because humans are capable of using birth control (including the decision not to reproduce), to which she elaborated: No, we cull other animals because we don't mind killing them from a moral standpoint (i.e. we are less repulsed emotionally). If we did mind as much as we do for ourselves, we'd find other ways to manage their populations like we do for ourselves. Culling is the rational choice (most economical, quickest and easiest). Finding other ways to appeal to our personal security that are less effective, ta...

I. Robin Koerner, a liberty-minded Brit whom I heard speak at last year's Washington State Libertarian Party convention , has a new article out at Huffington Post called Your Problem With Guns or Gays Is Not Political . Given my moderate bias against guns, shockingly, I kind of agree with him. But I also think this is a case that nicely illustrates how the personal is (sometimes) political. I recommend that you go read the whole thing, but I also want to excerpt some juicy quotes. First, Koerner describes his own British noncommittal stance towards guns. As he puts it, "guns feature nowhere in British culture." I expect that most Americans would in practice find "taking tea" a bit odd, even though we academically know what it is from various imported movies and television shows, and many Americans like tea. But then Koerner gets into the meat of his point: Many decent people who have no interest in guns simply can't imagine what it must be like to be ...