Owls of the world, unite!

Let us take up arms against our lark oppressors!

Much to my amusement, I find that I fit the owl stereotype quite well.

Temple Grandin's WSJ interview on Asperger's

I don't really know if Asperger's syndrome really exists; the Internet tells me that I have it, and I suppose I empathized somewhat with the sketch of the disease in Tyler Cowen's excellent Create Your Own Economy. Still, the criteria for diagnosis seem loose enough that about a third of the people with whom I went to college probably also fit it, and I am wary of the over-medicalization of American life generally.

Still, this WSJ interview with Temple Grandin about her Asperger's is fascinating.

Letters I will never send, #4

Dear social conservatives , including those inclined to boo my friend Alex McCobin at CPAC:

Please read Jason Kuznicki's post "Hardly A Life to Be Lived" regarding gays and conservatism over at Positive Liberty sometime. It would be good if you could offer a better response to the questions that he's posing than Maggie Gallagher did. I am much more likely to start listening to you if you could.

In a related vein, please also read this excellent article about Tom Palmer's role in the 2nd amendment litigation, which contains the very good sentence "And it would have been one of those modestly ironic moments if my colleague might have been murdered in a gay bashing, when he was straight."

From the flle of unlikely but pleasant intellectual coincidences:

I happened to read this Bryan Caplan post on "fear budgets" at the same time as listening to a recently downloaded song titled "There Goes The Fear." It's so rare that I read blog posts with appropriate musical soundtracks. For the record, I actually don't know what I think of the fear budget hypothesis; it's certainly interesting, but I have no real expertise vis-a-vis these things.

Side note: I've had surprisingly good luck finding likable music from whatever's being played over the store loudspeakers in Anthropologie, including the album from which "There Goes the Fear" comes. This fact is probably deeply probative of uncoolness on my part, but I never claimed to be cool. My music collection largely signals that I had two friends from the Dartmouth paper who were semi-serious music nerds who could orient me toward suitably cool music c. 2003. Since graduating, they moved to Brooklyn and took up endeavors like working for The Daily Show and various independent film and music producers. I, on the other hand, moved to D.C. and took up endeavors which involved working with actual Republicans, which made it harder and harder for them to stand me. So, thus lacking in guidance, my coolness has declined exponentially, and I flail about cluelessly. But at least I make a point of flailing non-pretentiously.

I would not actually have the comparative advantage at doing this

...but somewhere, there should be a guide to CPAC events arranged in order of target I.Q. of attendees.

There should also be a similar guide to D.C. right of center happy hours/social events. It would be funnier if there were one-paragraph descriptions of each event complete with quotes from attendees, explaining why the author came up with the target I.Q. that he or she did.

Not that I really feel like writing more about biocons

...but there's an entertaining OkCupid piece up titled "The Case for an Older Woman, complete with pictures. (via)

Quotable quotes

"Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come."

-- Victor Hugo