Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Ann Althouse links Michael Crowley’s discussion of David Duke’s rather nonchalant reaction to the presidential race. Apparently, the hard-core racists don’t know which candidate would best suit their agenda: Amazingly, some commenters on racist websites are already debating the grim choice between Obama and McCain. I don’t think that’s especially amazing. For the conspiracy theory…

Here’s a picture I took last week on the edge of Lake Okeechobee, Florida: While it’s dried out in the sun, that plate-covered, prehistoric-looking fish ought to look familiar to many home aquarium keepers, as it’s a Plecostomus, best known as the “algae eater.” I had not known that the Plecostomus had been introduced into…

I’m sorry to hear on the radio that William F. Buckley, Jr. has died. (Confirmed by Marc Ambinder, who cites the National Review’s Corner.) Kathryn Jean Lopez reports as follows: I’m devastated to report that our dear friend, mentor, leader, and founder William F. Buckley Jr., died overnight in his study in Stamford, Connecticut. After…

I think the most likely end result of all of the Democratic Party infighting I discussed in the last post will be a Clinton Obama “party unity” ticket. This assumes that Obama would swallow his pride and accept the number two spot even if he won the most delegates. It might sound ugly, but it’s…

Regardless of who “wins” the Democratic primary elections next week, neither candidate will win enough delegates to win the nomination. All that will happen is that both will win more delegates in proportion to the vote. If the races are close, this means there will be no major net change, and Hillary Clinton and Barack…

Rightly or wrongly, Frank Rich (in a piece called “The Audacity of Hopelessness“) has applied the Iraq war model to the Democratic primary election: WHEN people one day look back at the remarkable implosion of the Hillary Clinton campaign, they may notice that it both began and ended in the long dark shadow of Iraq.…

I complain a lot about the growing nanny state threat to dog ownership in the United States, but fortunately, dog control measures are nowhere near as draconian here as they are in Iran: A 70-year-old Iranian man was arrested and sentenced to four months in jail and 30 lashes for walking his dog, Adnkronos.com reported…

Earlier today I read that democratic operatives in Pennsylvania are doing their damnedest to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot. I see this as further evidence that Hillary Clinton has every intention of winning the nomination — which, even assuming she wins Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, she will have to win by the hardest of…

Speaking of context, yesterday’s post on Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement of Obama reminded me that because anyone can endorse anyone (and thus, candidates cannot control them), endorsements have to be seen in context. That Farrakhan endorsed Obama does not mean a lot in and of itself, and it certainly isn’t fair to imply that Obama agrees…

What is creation? I’m not getting cosmic here, because I’m talking about the manufacturing process — whether in the artistic sense or the commercial sense or both — when a thing or things are made by man. In the broad sense, creation can be said to be anyone making anything, but in the property sense…

God help me, but I thought this was funny. It’s not nice to laugh at people’s misfortunes. I must be sicker than I realized.

While I doubt it matters to any of the people in question, I don’t especially like Louis Farrakhan’s crackpot race-based view of Barack Obama: “This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better,” he said. “This young man is capturing audiences of black and brown and…

Looking at the ongoing campaign he calls “soft jihad,” (which “uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance”) Roger Kimball offers a modest proposal to…

Had it not been for this Pajamas Media piece, I might have forgotten that tonight was Oscar Night. Which would have been bad, right? Because it’s been an annual tradition here that I’m at least supposed to Dead-blog the Oscars, and here I am just turning them on in time to see a woman who…

I want to return to Dr. Helen’s post about male-bashing, especially in the context of damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenario she discussed (and with which I identified). It has become apparent that Pennsylvania will be the ultimate showdown state in the increasingly nasty battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and no matter what happens, fault will…

This video shows Hillary Clinton earlier today getting about as close to becoming unhinged as she’s been so far. She’s literally screaming “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” and accusing Obama of acting like Karl Rove — not because of genuine smear tactics, but because his campaign is distributing a leaflet criticizing her health care plan.…

Barry Rubin of GLORIA Center is taking a look at the latest call to arms by Hamas. If it is to be believed, it sounds like a last desperate message from a cut off segment of the army hoping the cavalry will arrive soon. From the looks of things the cavalry is not coming. In…

This piece by Democratic blogger David Musgrove takes a skeptical look at Hillary Clinton’s latest bit of unoriginal and desperate sloganeering — which can fairly be called the “It is time to get real” campaign: “It is time to get real — to get real about how we actually win this election, and get real…

Not long ago, groundless paranoid conspiracy allegations were floated against John McCain. What irritated me was not the idea that some crackpot would be making the allegations, but that such claims are being treated as “news” — and are then believed by bloggers who ought to know better. In the case of the McCain allegations…