What do you know, yet another social website.

A recent essay on Big Think says:

Birth control isn’t about my health unless by health you mean, my capacity to get it on, to have a happy, joyous sex life that involves an actual male partner. The point of birth control is to have sex that’s recreational and non-procreative. It’s to permit women to exercise their desires without the sword of Damocles of unwanted pregnancy hanging gloomily over their heads.

It seems to me that pro-sex rhetoric would have more traction if it gave some weight to the role of sex as an expression of love, which reinforces the bond of couples. Even independent of procreation, that’s a social purpose that the most pleasure-hating communitarian could at least grudgingly endorse.

Travis Corcoran wrote, in response to a question:

This is deserving of a longer post, but the ultra-brief version:

I started out soft atheist, but always accepted the absolute existence of good and evil (it is evil to kill Jews in gas chambers, even if both the law and the prevailing culture say that it is OK).

The acceptance of an absolute moral code eventually lead me to theism.

Given that one absolute that I accept, I felt I had to accept theism.

I guess hope there’s a lot hidden under that word eventually.

I rashly commented:

Hm. Should I bother writing up my godless views on objective evil?

and, to my amazement, someone took me up on it:

If you’re feeling like it, I’d be happy to read them!

( . . more . . )

[an old schoolmate who lives in Ghana] suggests you add Volkswagen Ghana as a friend on Facebook.

Robin Hanson on Lord of the Flies: schools as a decivilizing force

I got a spam entitled Very Discrete Packaging and Billing. One would hope so!

Dissatisfied with my hairstyle, I decided some months ago to shave my scalp in the spring, take pictures over a year, and then decide what length I like best. So on the equinox I initiated the plan, and promptly caught cold. Ten days later (still congested) I notice that my hairline is asymmetric: it has receded more on the left (where I usually parted it until 1998) than on the right. Hm.

Another Facebook “friend” request from a foaf I’ve never heard of. This one appears to be a scientist, in a field of which I approve, and we have six “friends” in common – or five, not counting one of his peers whom I accepted as a “friend” because of his reputation though we’ve had no direct contact.

Though it’s not obvious what I could possibly lose by it, I’m a bit suspicious of any stranger who’d seek to be linked with a nobody like me.