Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

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Category: Ethics, Morality & Religion

  • A Visual Aid (Sujatha)

    To the unfolding soap opera of the Generals and their paramours (From Gawker): Paging Oliver Stone. On second thoughts, not enough battlefield scenes. Maybe we should get Baz Luhrmann to turn this into a Moulin Rouge-like spectacle.    

  • Bigotry’s Flavor of the Month … or Century

    An apt opinion piece in the New York Times.

  • Why I Am More Conflicted Than Anna – About The Cartoons

    (Note: I am bringing this six year old post to the front in view of the recent events that are unfolding in Egypt, Libya and now Yemen.) Anna posted her sensible thoughts on the brouhaha over the Danish cartoons which have inflamed passions in the Muslim world.  The result has been protests in several Islamic…

  • Labor Day Links

    Once again, I can do no better than post links to a few interesting stories I came across. A terrible political "documentary" by a delusional desi. Can a doctor do this? Apparently yes, according to the AMA's guidelines.   Not exactly a Marathon Man. This was bound to happen sooner or later – it is after all, an…

  • It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a business / person …

    Didn't Mitt Romney know that if he ran for the highest office of the nation, his personal taxes were going to be of some interest to voters and the media? Of course he did. But for some reason Romney has decided that it may do less harm to his candidacy if he were to brazen it out by…

  • Forward into the Past

    Sanjukta Paul on the exploitative business practice of classifying workers as independent contractors -over at the Frying Pan blog. (This is part I of a three part article; part II and III will be added as they appear)

  • Patriotism, offshoring and ethics (prasad)

    Matthew Yglesias at Slate makes the case that Romney should simply shrug and say offshoring is a Good Thing, instead of making silly claims about “retroactive retirement.” He says basically that it is good for jobs to be located where it’s most efficient, that in terms of wealth creation this is positive sum, that the…

  • Another minor collateral damage in the great war on terror

    I mean, couldn't this guy have been whisked out beforehand or even during the raid in one of the Blackhawk helicopters? Didn't the US intelligence know that Al Qaida sympathizers in the  Pakistani army and government, who were probably harboring bin Laden, were going to punish this guy for embarrassing them?

  • International Workers’ Day

    Happy May Day. A message from Noam Chomsky. 

  • A semi-righteous book (prasad)

    Jonathan Haidt is a moral psychologist best known for his work on moral foundations, the basic dimensions along which peoples' moral intuitions vary. These include care/harm, fairness/cheating, liberty/oppression, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Interestingly, Haidt's research suggests that while conservatives bring all these dimensions to bear upon moral deliberation, liberals and libertarians use only the first…

  • Michael Sandel on markets and corruption (prasad)

    Michael Sandel has written a long, thoughtful, but frustrating article that raises questions about the intrusion of markets and market values into new domains. He begins with a long list of problematic goods and services that can now be bought and sold, then explains why we might worry about such things being sell-able. He has…