I think you might want to check into the statistics about smoking cessation. Government intervention has been extraordinarily successful in reducing smoking, in the US and elsewhere.

I'm not a libertarian, but I think it's worth noting one of the ironies of libertarianism: that the very class they think they are fighting on behalf of - job-creating entrepreneurs and the hard-working upper-middle class - has little interest in their ideas. Because they know that the status quo is already doing a good job of looking out for their interests.

And to be fair, I know some libertarians who seem to truly believe that corporations as we know them are an evil sustained by the government, and with the shrinking of government, we'd somehow return to the simple, honest capitalism of a century ago. (I don't share their nostalgia for that time, on a range of levels, from the conditions of non-white Americans to the status of women, but there you go.) I think that belief is naive: the wealthy castes of the US will always be able to reconstruct the kind of government that they want.

does that mean libertarians support regulations requiring the labeling of foods? public health warnings on cigarettes, as explicit as possible? that doesn't sound like any kind of libertarian platform i've ever heard. what other mechanism for producing "perfect information" - or even adequate information - would you suggest?

The article in its entirety explains itself: how the study became part of a wave of rhetoric dismissing the value of organic foods all around.

(Organic is also not about not-killing-insects. It's about avoiding the unnecessary use of pesticides to do so. Fly swatters - and natural forms of pest control, and even some other not-natural ones - are completely OK for organic food.)

"For a certain set of nutrients" = conveniently )or as the article put it, "curiously", not those nutrients which the research from Newcastle University found to be higher in organic foods.

For a meta-study, that's a pretty bad.

From TFA:

"Yet even within its narrow framework it appears the Stanford study was incorrect. Last year Kirsten Brandt, a researcher from Newcastle University, published a similar analysis of existing studies and wound up with the opposite result, concluding that organic foods are actually more nutritious. In combing through the Stanford study she’s not only noticed a critical error in properly identifying a class of nutrients, a spelling error indicative of biochemical incompetence (or at least an egregious oversight) that skewed one important result, but also that the researchers curiously excluded evaluating many nutrients that she found to be considerably higher in organic foods."

So, no, he doesn't have the wrong definition of nutritious. You just read the first two paragraphs or so.

Yep, you can train your pleasure center, which is what a lot of people who cut down on red meat consumption have done.

The pleasure center of the brain is a notoriously unreliable guide to decision making. Look at compulsive gamblers, crack addicts, and people with massive consumer debt - not to mention those who are obese for dietary reasons - as an indication. You may want to try to get some executive function over that shit.

Except when the public learns that they banned party balloons while the military kept using the lion's share of helium, they'll rightly turn on the scientist who called for the ban as the miserable kill-joy he really is.

When they opened offices to do business in those countries. As long as they're interested in selling ads from Indian and Malaysian companies to Indian and Malaysian markets, and getting paid in Indian and Malaysian currency, they'll abide by Indian and Malaysian laws.

Are you asking yes and no questions? Yes. As I way to concede without conceding? Yes. Is it effective? No. Is it overdone? Yes. Are there better ways to write? Definitely, yes.

Fruits are vegetables.

(A vegetable is any edible part of a plant.)

God, I hate Blackboard. I mean, really really hate it.

If GOPHER and Usenet were good enough for me, they're good enough for my students.

We always called the "clit-mice."

Oh, I thought I was talking to someone smart, not someone who would make such a reflexive and unthinking statement like:

Because a smart person would realize that the most important discussions are those which may not result in simple "establishment" of the superiority of one claim, concept or valuation over another.

Also, Heidegger's viewpoint isn't an "opinion." There are more categories of utterance than just "fact" and "opinion," by a multitude. And clearly, if I refer to Heidegger, it implies that I find his viewpoint compelling.

But I'm sorry for wasting our time. Please, go back to your world of simple formulaic thinking.