I’m forced to link again to Colby Cosh, dammit, for his superb reply to Michael Fumento’s TNR article about Attention Deficit Disorder. A man who takes Thomas Szasz seriously is a man to be reckoned with. What I want to know is, is blogging a trait or a disease?
Dr. Manhattan essays Bill James and warblogging, and is kind enough to include me on a short list of warblogging statheads. (My friend Mark Riebling should be there as well. Cosh, too, is an admitted stathead, though not exactly a warblogger. By warblogging standards I’m not much of a warblogger either.) Should Bill James switch to politics, as this piece argues, not entirely seriously? Not with spring training opening in less than a month.
And Riebling, while I’m on the subject, claims that posting will be slow because his new book is due March 2. What kind of excuse is that? Just because the guy has a job and writes books on the side doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be posting more often than someone like me, who, uh, doesn’t.
Jim Ryan has an excellent series on Kekes and the problem of evil, at four parts and counting. No, you’ll want more parts, honest.
Mark Wickens is giving Bjorn Lomborg’s critics the what-for.
Homme sans Qualités squares off with Eugene Volokh on intelligent design. They’re both agin it.
Agenda Bender interviews Justin Timberlake.
Cindy’s Guide to the ‘Stans is the best thing on this list; you should read it right now if by chance you weren’t paying attention when Glenn told you to. Sample:
The Kyrgyz are the Welsh of Central Asia. They’re jolly, profoundly democratic, and inhabit a beautiful, mountainous country that no one visits and which has no natural resources at all except for some gold and clapped-out mining. They are divided north and south in lifestyle and geographical orientation, and are widely associated with sheep-related activities. They still practice droving, and have the worst cuisine in the world. Their southern valleys are home to heroin connoisseurs. They have never ruled anything, not even Kyrgyzstan, and don’t really seem to care. They think their neighbours are soft and secretly wish they too were Kyrgyz. Their neighbours rarely think of them at all, except in a comic context, but if pushed will say they distrust them as sly and two-faced. Russian spittle-licking suits them just fine, and hey, Ivan, why don’t you buy some of our lovely smack while you’re here?
Cindy will be annoyed that he generates traffic by quoting someone else at length. Tough; so do I.
Moq’s article on Central Asian stereotypes was surprisingly successful. Maybe I ought to follow up with a similar piece of my own on the attitudes of small Oceanian republics towards each other. "Vanuatans are the French of Oceania. They like chewing garlic, shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘pah!’…"
I don’t know why you’re surprised. One of the most popular articles of all-time in National Lampoon was P.J. O’Rourke’s Ethnic Groups of the World. I still remember the Irish joke from it, about the Irishman who got so drunk he kissed his wife and beat the Pope’s hand to a pulp with a coal shovel.