Dangerous Intersection now available on your smart phone

We have now upgraded Dangerous Intersection so that you can access all of our articles and comments (and submit comments) on your smart phone. I'd like to give some recognition to two entities and one person that/who have made this advance possible. First of all, this website runs on a WordPress platform. This is excellent and free open source software has been developed by hundreds of community volunteers (how does Free Market Fundamentalism explain this massive effort?). For the new mobile capability, we are using a new release, WPtouch Pro 2.0, by Bravenewcode. For those of you who run your own WordPress sites, WPtouch allows incredible functionality for about $30 per website. If you visit DI on your smartphone, I suspect that you'll agree. I'd also like to thank Josh Timmons, a St. Louis computer consultant who tirelessly maintains our server and provides me with immense amounts of technical know-how, much of it in the wee hours. For those of you who use iPhones, you can also make DI the equivalent of an App. Simply visit this site by entering the URL (http://dangerousintersection.org/ ). Once you see the site on your phone, press the "+" button at the bottom of your screen and choose "Add to Home Screen." The next screen allows you to choose a shortened name for our site (I chose "DI"). Then press "Add." From then on, you can access DI directly from your iPhone home screen (you needn't go through Safari any longer). I don't want to be presumptuous. I hope that your finding this site to be thought-provoking in a civil way. To the extent that this is true, then, see you in the future, either on your computer or on your phone.

Continue ReadingDangerous Intersection now available on your smart phone

Moral conduct in the absence of commandments.

“Thou shalt love puppies.”

Does the above Commandment explain why people dutifully gravitate to homeless puppies, adopt them, feed them and love them? Of course not, because there is no such commandment. Nor are there any other abstract moral principles requiring us to love puppies. We love puppies because the urge to love small tame animals is deep in our bones. We love puppies because we are built to love (contrary to those who claim that life is fundamentally dog-eat-dog -- Consider also, that the “struggle for existence” is only a conceptual metaphor with limited application). Our human bodies are pre-rigged to take care of cute little mammals, especially when they appear to love us back. We would love puppies even if there were a commandment telling us to NOT love puppies.

Continue ReadingMoral conduct in the absence of commandments.

Lost comments from August 25 – Found!

I regret to verify that this website has recently lost some comments. This has recently been brought to my attention by three readers. After hearing from several of you, I scrolled through the comments chronologically. On most days, we receive about 10 comments. For August 25, I seen no comments. August 25 was one of the two consecutive days that we took down the server for an hour to upgrade our hosting capacity; this is a somewhat complicated procedure. I suspect that something went wrong during that process, though I am not positive. I think that I lost two or three of my own comments. [more . . . ]

Continue ReadingLost comments from August 25 – Found!