Dave Barry runs for President

Yes, I am running for President. And this time round, I do not intend to be cheated of victory the way I was in the 2000 election when the so-called "US Supreme Court" defying the clear wishes of the American people failed to declare me winner, on the so-called "legal grounds" that I did not receive any so-called "votes".

Tony Judt on Robert Kagan

Robert Kagan wants it both ways. At the end of his book he rather limply asks that Americans and Europeans show better mutual comprehension; but the foregoing 100 pages display not just ignorance of the recent European past and current European diversity, but an undertone of arrogant condescension, mixed with a certain amount of humbug. "The problem," he writes, is that "the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates Europe's post-modern norms." But the norms that Washington currently violates are its own - there is nothing uniquely European, much less post-modern, about the rule of law or the desirability of peace over war.

Peter Singer on Animal Rights

Lewis Petrivlovich says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives and then lists "children, kin, neighbours and species". If the argument works at the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of species, it should also work for the middle class: race. If the argument doesn't show race to be a morally relevant boundary, how can it show that species is?

Robert Dworkin on Affirmative Action

Colourblindness that has no basis in moral principle and helps only to perpetuate social stratification is worse than pointless.

Julian Barnes on Dreyfus

Charles Peguy said the Dreyfus Case confirmed the rule that the victim usually isn't up to the mystique of his own affair. "We were willing to die for Dreyfus," he commented, "but Dreyfus wasn't."