Long Game

"In a high-powered visit to Cairo, Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met Thursday with the members of Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). In addition to meeting with the military elite, the Turkish leaders are also talking to the opposition forces. On Thursday, Gul and Davutoglu met with Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and over the course of the next three days they are expected to meet with opposition figures Mohamed ElBaradei and Arab League chief Amr Mousa, as well as the Jan. 25 Youth Coalition."

"China begins its annual "Two Sessions" on Thursday, starting with the Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress, an advisory body, and followed by the National People's Congress (NPC), the national legislature, on Saturday. The event has already elicited the usual calls for economic reform, improvement of governance, and alleviation of social problems. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao struck the tone in a recent speech by emphasizing that the country's foremost priority now belongs to improving people's living conditions - making people "happy," a new official buzzword - and correcting economic imbalances to benefit households even at the risk of slower growth in the coming years."

The Last Psychiatrist

" I'm a philosopher. I use the word "metaphysics" differently from many non-philosophers. My aunt Bonnie and most other Americans think the word "metaphysics" has to do with magic crystals, spiritual energies, and ley lines. I don't. The fact that these other people use the word differently from me gives me no reason to pause, because "metaphysics" is a philosopher's technical term. "Freedom" is not a philosopher's technical term, though. So we philosophers have to start with a presumption in favor of common English use. If we recommend revising language, we need good grounds for doing so."

"The normal tendency of classical liberals is to recoil upon hearing the term "exploitation," especially when its invocation is tied the demand for increased powers for the government. At least since the time of Marx, talk of "exploitation" has mainly been the domain of the political left, especially in critique of the relationship between capital and labor. But it would be a rhetorical and philosophical mistake for classical liberals to concede this concept to the left. Marx was wrong to think that capitalism is inherently exploitative, a mistake grounded in both a theoretical error about the nature of value and various empirical errors about the nature of a market economy. But this does not mean that there is no such thing as exploitation, nor that exploitation is not a serious moral wrong, nor even that capitalism as it exists today is not very often wrongfully exploitative."

"Calls are growing for a no-fly zone over Libya, but a power or coalition of powers willing to enforce one remains elusive. In evaluating such calls, it is useful to remember that in war, Murphy's Law always lurks. What can go wrong will go wrong, in Libya as in Iraq or Afghanistan."

"I'm a horrible gamer. Hopefully it doesn't show in ordinary conversation, but as soon as I start playing something, I become an asshole. The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there's text on screen, I'm not reading it. If there's a cut-scene, I'm skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can't shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won't do anything. I thought that was normal."

"Intro. Aesthetics, if it aspires to be in the least rational, sane, and just, must seek to explain, rather than judge, personal responses to works of art. When aesthetics seeks to justify a specific set of preferences, it degenerates into mere special pleading and rationalization."

"Analyst Lauren Goodrich examines the current state of Russian-U.S. relations and how Vice President Biden is using his Moscow visit to begin the critical and difficult negotiations about their competing interests in Eurasia."

"U.S. Vice President Joe Biden began his official visit to Russia on Wednesday by meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, to be followed by a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Thursday. Prior to his visit, Biden made a half-day stopover in Helsinki, where he met with Finnish President Tarja Halonen and had a working lunch with Prime Minister Mari Kiviniemi. "

"A new game has hit the MMO scene in the last couple of weeks and is making waves. RIFT has managed to draw a sizeable portion of the community at least temporarily away from their current homes. Many players are excitedly moving house from Azeroth to Telara, saying goodbyes to old friends and making new ones."

"As parents, we are tasked with instilling a plethora of different values into our children. While some parents in the world choose to instill a lack of values in their kids, those of us that don't want our children growing up to be criminals and various misfits try a bit harder. Values and morality are one piece of the pie. These are important things to mold into a child's mind, but there are also other items in life to focus on as well. It starts with looking both ways to cross the street and either progresses from there, or stops."

"An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study's author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study -- and that there was "no doubt" Wakefield was responsible. "It's one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors," Fiona Godlee, BMJ's editor-in-chief, told CNN. "But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.""

"It has become a kind of self deprecatory mantra of the games criticism community: video games generally don't tell very good stories. Which is true. And we need to stop saying it. Heard of that medium called the movies? Yeah, most of them are terrible. Heard of film critics? Those guys know that movies are generally pretty lousy, but they don't talk about it all the time, nor do they apologize for it."

"It was an odd invitation, and one that was impossible to turn down. Don Bluth was doing promotion for Tapper: World Tour, and he was available for interviews during the Game Developers Conference. The legendary animator had started at Disney, and then went solo to work on movies and projects as diverse as An American Tale, the Secret of NIMH, Titan A.E., and, of course, the Dragon's Lair arcade machine. Now, like everyone else in the world, he has made an iOS game, giving the bar-game Tapper a new look for modern audiences."

"Forces from the United States and some European countries have intervened in Libya. Under U.N. authorization, they have imposed a no-fly zone in Libya, meaning they will shoot down any Libyan aircraft that attempts to fly within Libya. In addition, they have conducted attacks against aircraft on the ground, airfields, air defenses and the command, control and communication systems of the Libyan government, and French and U.S. aircraft have struck against Libyan armor and ground forces. There also are reports of European and Egyptian special operations forces deploying in eastern Libya, where the opposition to the government is centered, particularly around the city of Benghazi. In effect, the intervention of this alliance has been against the government of Moammar Gadhafi, and by extension, in favor of his opponents in the east."

"Rand's "Sense of Life" as an argument ad hominem. All ethical arguments, according to the philosopher George Santayana, ultimately resolve into an argument ad hominem. "There can be no other kind of argument in ethics," Santayana warns us. Aesthetic arguments often suffer from the same problem, particularly when they are either used as the pretence for baseless psychological speculation or moral condemnation. In Rand, we find evidence of both. She could not accept that people had different aesthetic tastes than her own. Her tastes were not only "objectively" better, but those with contrary tastes were lesser people. Worse, in her public philosophy, Rand tended to be rather coy and ambigious about all of this, as if to give herself plenty of wiggle room so that she could deny that she meant any offense. But her scorn for contrary tastes is palpable, even if it isn't always explicit. And in her private life, she didn't always hold back her scorn. People, she declared, who did not share her sense of life were psychologically incompatible with herself."

"You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology."

"The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn't really the enemy"