Kieran Healy’s Weblog Sociology and other distractions

Remind Me

What’s so great about living in Arizona? Oh yeah, I remember now. Heh.

Mixing it Up

A reflective post from Mark Kleiman about the war that also, in passing, wins the Mixed Metaphor of the Month Award:

The other was the Richard Perle “paper tiger” scenario, where the regime turned out to have a glass jaw.

“The Iraqi leaders were supposed to go down like a house of ninepins,” he did not […]

English as she is Wrote

Kevin Drum’s liberal optimism comes out in interesting ways. For instance:

Still, the basic idea is sound: given that most of our misspellings are now corrected for us by computers, the only thing standing between us and perfect spelling is homonyms.

Alas, the main thing standing between us and better writing may be Microsoft Word. This is […]

What is a Child?

Talking about a post by Amitai Etzioni, Matt Yglesias observes

At any rate, I think it is true that most of the big liberal theories that have been articulated don’t do a terribly good job of explaining how and why we should treat children, so maybe this shot isn’t quite as cheap as I thought.

Let […]

Clean Hands, Dirty Hands

David Adesnik of OxBlog has responded to my criticism of OxDem and my view of the likely post-war experience in Iraq. Thanks to David for taking the time. Here is some reaction from me.

Aaron Brown Transcript Fun, II

Following up on the one from the other day, here’s another great transcript of Aaron Brown interviewing someone, trying to push his own view via his questions, and then discovering he is losing the argument in a really embarrassing way. Hint to Aaron: if you want to strongarm interviewees, you need to have a strong […]