Born on State Highway 1

So, rather than removing personal responsibility from the picture, the naturalistic worldview shows that holding people accountable is actually an essential part of the chain of causation that can shape good behavior. Furthermore, naturalism makes us more likely to be compassionate and effective in how we hold people accountable, since as we’ve seen it undercuts justifications for harsh punishment that ignore the causes of crime.

Good to see that someone wrote it, saving me the trouble of doing so. This article is about how the notion of personal responsibility can be incorporated sensibly into a deterministic (read: non-magical) view of human behaviour. [Later edit: sadly, this article has disappeared from the internet. Please leave a comment if you can find it.]

I’ll just link to the comic, because it’s big.

Obama orders general to shave Colbert’s head.

David Eddings is dead. He wrote basically pulp crap young-adult fantasy, but I read it and more or less grew up on it. My high-school friend Dennis and I used to stay over at each other’s place, awake all night reading the Belgariad and the Mallorean. He was always further ahead than me and would suddenly start laughing at things he couldn’t tell me about without ruining the story.

There is a friend of mine in Christchurch I still think of as “Javelin” – he named himself after an Eddings character on the BBS we used to use.

Years later, I carried my friend Sean home from a fairly epic episode of drinking. Not a simple feat, as he is the Southern Hemisphere’s mirror image of Jason Segel. In the morning, he stumbled out of bed to explain that he had thrown up in the night, but in an effort to save everything around him had reached for a book and puked into that. It was Belgarath the Sorceror by David Eddings. The first pages had filled up quickly, so in his half-conscious reasoning he had turned the pages to make more room for the continued noxious stream of bourbon and bile. Ruined the book. Or, as James said, could only have been an improvement.

Funny. I was going to say I read the Elenium too, with that main character, Spokane. But the main character was Sparhawk. Spokane is where Eddings was born. I’m not sure I knew that. Weird.