Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

While I have long been of the opinion that arguments are largely a waste of time, I am always fascinated by the pathology which might help explain why. A post by Steve Sailer discusses the pros and cons of the well-known “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Sticking to the case of the Scotsman makes it a…

Reason Magazine has an excellent page up on Obamacare Software Glitches. The comments are good too. Esp. the bits about software design.

I can remember that not so long ago, Google was criticized for cooperating with China and other countries which combat Internet freedom. We Americans tend to take it for granted that we live in the land of the free — an open country opposed to such totalitarianism. Right? Wrong! As Bruce Schneier points out, this…

A dental hygienist named Miriam Carey was shot dead after attempting to ram the barricades outside the White House. Here’s what we know about Miriam Carey, the woman identified in news reports as the suspect in a shooting incident that left Capitol Hill on lockdown for a brief period Thursday afternoon, and has now reportedly…

It’s not every day I read a statement like that in the “news,” but I did. A Belgian’s female-to-male sex change went awfully wrong, and the botched surgery led to euthanasia. Over the years, I have seen that people who are unhappy with the way they are are seldom made happy by external human agency,…

Bob Sykes makes this comment to Eric’s Who are the real criminals? Opponents of the “War of Drugs” always talk about adults and marijuana. But the issue is children and heroin. There will always be some drug and purchaser that people will want outlawed, including people like our blogger and commenter who only smoke marijuana.…

I was reading reviews of The Sex Sphere and came across this Is Sex outside the Sphere of Morality? when I did a search for “Sex Sphere”. It is a “conservative” view of sex morality. You can read it to see what I’m replying to when I say: The biggest cause of single motherhood in…

I realize that Obamacare starts tomorrow, but I often wonder whether we still live in the United States, once the land of opportunity. I read in the Destroit Free Press the other day that the federal government literally stole $35,000 from a small businessman under “asset forfeiture” laws, claiming his regular bank deposits were “suspicious.”…

Commenting on the sickening reports that the Kenyan mall hostages were cruelly tortured, Glenn Reynolds made a simple observation: if this kind of thing keeps happening, people are going to start thinking less of Islam. I can easily imagine that Glenn will be attacked for saying that by Media Matters and the various leftists who…

As we know, Aaron Alexis had a gun and was crazy. This crazy man didn’t have a gun. Instead, he pushed a woman in front of a train. As CBS 2’s John Slattery reported, it was the last thing the young woman must have expected – being pushed by a man routinely hanging around the…

I’ve had it with Drudge and his shameless habit of linking Alex Jones’s Infowars site. His latest link is to a “story” which argues that the Navy SEALS did not kill Osama bin Laden. Obviously, Drudge and his ilk are hoping that many conservatives will be willing to go along with this conspiracy theory simply…

This takes the food war insanity to an all new level. Health department raids community picnic and destroys all food with bleach The evening was everything I had dreamed and hoped it would be. The weather was perfect, the farm was filled with friends and guests roaming around talking about organic, sustainable farming practices. Our…

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve complained about artificially high prices subsidizing crime in the context of the war on drugs. Well, now the same thing seems to be happening with the war on cigarettes. This morning I read about how ridiculously high cigarette taxes are turning cigarettes into  ‘Gold Bars’ For…

While most people know that Ernest Hemingway loved bullfights and supported Castro and the Cuban Revolution, earlier I stumbled onto an interesting biographical detail that has heretofore been kept quiet. Hemingway used to watch murders: Fontova writes about influential Cuban agents in the United States and how the mainstream media continues to suck up to the…

The reason that Republicans cannot win Latinos – or other minorities for that matter – is because Republicans counter liberal ‘Santa’ version of big government with what I call the ‘Darth-Vader’ idea of big government. So says Shikha Dalmia, senior analyst at the Reason Foundation, during  FreedomFest 2013 in Las Vegas. While her discussion focused mainly…

Most people would agree that this sucks: Most, that is. But by no means all. A couple of my neighbors have these things — high tech subsonic subwoofers or whatever they’re properly called — inside their houses. When they activate them, it causes my house to shake and the air is permeated with what seems…

Every day I see one call or another for gun control, but this one is unusual. Bill Quick commented over at Ace about the Kenya carnage (in which Muslim gunmen massacred dozens of Christians at a shopping center): We’ve simply got to have stronger gun-control laws, right now, if not yesterday – it’s the only…

What is rape? That may sound like a stupid question, and I used to think I knew what it was, but reading a story as twisted as this has left me feeling very confused: GRAND RAPIDS, MI — The attorney for former Central Catholic High School tutor Abigail Simon is looking to turn the tables on…

I guess so. Joe Biden’s art-dealer niece went on a violent rampage at her luxury Tribeca apartment Tuesday — throwing punches at police officers and flailing “frantically” as cops wrestled her into handcuffs, sources said. Caroline Biden, 26, went wild at about 9:15 a.m., “screaming at the top of her lungs” after her roommate confronted…

Brewing your own beer can be a pain in the ass. You have to buy all kinds of expensive stuff, then you have to become proficient at fine-tuning the mashing of grains, the selection and nourishing of the proper yeasts, boiling and hopping according to elaborate and almost sadistic schedules, washing bottles (if you haven’t…