There's a 538 blog post making the rounds that notes that failures to indict are extraordinary rare (there have been 11 such failures over the last 162,000 cases, a rate of .0068%). Unless you think we are in the midst of an epidemic of wrongful indictments, it just isn't plausible that the Ferguson case fails to rise…

Yeah, I mean it's not as though religious views like Schilling's influence their adherents' position on subtantive issues like abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, global warming, public science education ... this discussion is entirely academic!

It might be helpful to think in terms of the oft-made comparison between E-Sports and chess. In both cases the contest is not a physical activity, so in that sense you don't see anything at the stadium that you would miss watching from home. But if you can understand why chess fans might want to want to see Magnus…

I don't get the impression that we do hesitate to place "responsibility" on those who get hurt. My impression is that most people have defended Stewart and condemned Ward in this case. I have even seen many argue that the morally salient harm was really that inflicted by Ward on Stewart, since Stewart must live with…

If Stewart knew that Ward Jr. was there and knowingly hit the throttle, then he is culpable. Not much else matters. Even if you think Ward Jr. acted stupidly, that can't exculpate Stewart.

"Self-policing" would only be beneficial if applied to real harms (and frankly, I'm skeptical even then). But the main criticism of baseball's unwritten rules is precisely that they define slights and transgressions that are arbitrary and unrelated to anything worth caring about.

The only way this makes any sense to me is if the four hours just accounts for the time required to actually input the words (as opposed to drafting, editing, revising, etc.). That would still be a weird way to describe it, though, since no on writes that way.

No one advocates that the Redskins be "forced" to change their name. Your invocation of the first amendment only makes sense here if you think that freedom of speech entails freedom from criticism or protest—but it doesn't.