by Patrick Appel
Yglesias is "a lot more open to the view that Barack Obama is secretly a Muslim than to the view that the spirits of dead people can return in certain situations." Douthat differs:
[W]hereas I would happily stake most of my net worth on the premise that Barack Obama is not, in fact, a secret Muslim, I wouldn’t risk much money at all on the proposition that ghosts do not exist. That’s not because I’m a huge believer in haunted houses: It’s just that I think I have an excellent handle on the likelihood (or unlikelihood, more properly) that Obama has been practicing taqiyya all his life, whereas the question of whether ghosts exist or not depends on too many unknown unknowns to fit with the scope of any effective odds-making project.
I get Ross's point, but I'm with Yglesias.