It's a good reminder that even science can't get in the way of the old lies the media is so fond of telling us.

* There is simply no scientific or mathematical formula that defines conservatism. See, that would be a winning entry in this year's contest! It raises a number of questions: who exactly does the author think he's disabusing of the notion that a political belief system can be rendered as a "scientific or mathematical formula"? What distinction does he believe he's drawing between scientific formulas and mathematical ones? How deep into this imaginary argument is he that he thinks he needs to add the word "simply"?

Another fallacy for our times? "one of my biggest pet peeves in political discussion: The "Imagine the reaction if he was a Republican/Democrat" argument. ... It's just a silly point to make, one based entirely in the fact that the person making it has no actual evidence for their claim. And inevitably it asssumes the worst -- if President Bush had made that joke, there'd be rioting in the streets!

Yes, it's from Cracked. But it's actually pretty good.

it became apparent to me that idealized virginity is just a tool to keep women in their place. But then I realized something else: if virginity is considered that valuable, what’s to stop me from benefiting from that? It is mine, after all. And the value of my chastity is one level on which men cannot compete with me. I decided to flip the equation

This is such a perfect example of why vocal feminists get cranky about seemingly trivial things like jokes and/or hosiery: because the underlying premise here, the thing that makes it "funny," is that being like a woman is humiliating

The fallacy in all of this is painfully easy to spot. If we measure survival, which these studies do, with a 5 or 10 year survival rate then obviously people whose cancers are detected early will survival longer than people whose cancers are detected late.

Several years ago I made the assertion on my old blog that evangelicals should "think Christianly" about their work and fields of study. I also claimed that we are merely fooling ourselves if we believe that we can approach our vocations with a sense of religious neutrality. Naturally, some people were skeptical. Even those who agreed with my general point did not see, for example, how there could be a particularly Christian view to hard subjects like mathematics. While I certainly understand their hesitation, I do in fact believe there is a Christian view of mathematics. Indeed, I believe that there is a distinctly Christian view of everything.

Leiter comments, "Apparently, a good paper on the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction might be helpful for the Supreme Court."

On the old saw, that if women ran the world, there would be no...