From what’s become a productive exchange between Katherine and I downblog:

The danger from the libertarian perspective is not that we elect Democrats and they stop official torture and curtail the policy of preventive war while they get about the business of changing health care policy and raising taxes and preserving 70-year-old social welfare programs in […]

I know Belle has at least one thing left to post, and I’m not sure about the others, but since I am home, it seems a good time to express my thanks to the Sinister Six and the fine work they did on our behalf this week. Thanks very much to Leonard, Jennifer, Tom, […]

Down below you’re tossing some figures around and going back and forth about an old Pew poll counting “Enterprisers,” and trying to fit that square peg of a category into the round hole of “Libertarian.” Two more recent polls, discussed last month on Q and O, put the percentage of “libertarians” at between 9 and […]

This is weak, I know. I have some shit to say that’s half-formed and my younger daughter has a bad cold. Jim’s going to extend my reign by one day so that I can insult him and his faithful readers by implying that anarchism is teh crazy. In the meantime…
1. Rally Round Jah Throne/Bad Brains
2. […]

(Post by Neel Krishnaswami, one of Jim’s libertarian minions of DOOM!)

The past few days have seen a big flurry of discussion here about whether or not a libertarian-liberal rapprochment is useful/desirable/possible/sensible. It’s mostly focused on the immediate politics of such a thing, so I figured I’d talk a little about the far-off future. (In the […]

(posted by Jennifer)

Here’s a BBC photo essay about an Egyptian woman named Magda Amer, who is a Muslim preacher. Very interesting little piece—Magda’s definitely not the poor oppressed fundamentalist woman you read about in places like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, and I’m sure she’d be resentful of any Western woman who dared to feel sorry […]

Jesse Walker has a great piece on how

Assuming the Dems’ next nominee won’t be a self-described libertarian, what can he (*) do to make himself attractive to libertarian voters?
The short answer — and this applies to Republican candidates too — is: (a) Don’t be as bad as the other guy, and (b) Be actively good […]

[posted by Leonard]

(In which I read NRO so you don’t have to.) As you may be aware, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru just published a book, The Party of Death, about the the prolife movement and its opponents as he sees them. Most conservatives have touted Party warmly, and have, I think with some […]

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi apparently really is dead. Gandalf pointed out that many are dead who deserve life. This won’t be one of those. An awful, murderous man - the kind who makes us hope there really is an afterlife with a Hell for the bad people. I doubt it will make much difference to the […]

Up here they do dates in the “rational,” continental D/M/Y format. This has led to some adventures in database import that make for dull anecdote and tedious experience. Inspiration struck, and I began asking:

“When’s Canada Day?”

“July First.”

“When’s Christmas?”

“Um, December 25th . . . ”

“When’s New Year’s?”

“January First. Hunh?”

“So when you talk, you talk month-day, even […]

Gene Healy and Timothy Lynch write that

Our entire constitutional system repudiates the notion that electing good men is a sufficient check on abuse of power. To preserve that system, this country sorely needs a resurgence of conservatives’ ‘’healthy skepticism.'’

This will happen not long after we pry the conservatives’ sweaty hands from the levers of power. […]

(posted by Jennifer)

Wired magazine has a horrifying article that starts with a description of a Consumer Products Safety Commission SWAT team raiding a home-based scientific equipment business whose client list includes the Department of Homeland Security and fire departments training HAZMAT crews. Why? Because they sold items, traditionally associated with kids’ chemistry sets, that could […]

Blogging is not terrible, therefore we grow too fond of it.

I’m hesitant to praise Andrew Olmsted’s retrospective on Iraq too much, because doing so smacks of “Oh, you finally agree with me!” but it’s an excellent and not at all defensive or obfuscatory recap of why invading Iraq was always a bad idea. Read it, please, and let me concentrate here on a couple of […]

[posted by Leonard]

Since Belle mentioned the weird concept of “actually existing anarchy”, I thought I might help a bit by giving her something to chew on.

The concept here is simple enough: according to this article by Alfred Cuzan, we’re never really out of anarchy. Obviously, a counterintuitive idea; what does he mean […]

[Posted by Belle Waring]

Recently, I was thinking to myself, “self? You don’t have enough blogs.” And then I was like, “what, are you fucking drunk?” And then my self said “yeas,” which explained a lot. But right then I got an email from Jim Henley saying, “hey, you want to wreck up my blog with […]

(posted by Jennifer)

I haven’t believed in God for years. But when I did, I believed in one seriously damned impressive God. All-knowing! All-powerful! A God who could alter the concepts of time and space itself if He so chose.

In short, my God was a God worth worshiping. So if Satan tried to send […]

They’re baaaAAAAACK!

Via Polytropos, who is also sort of back. And do read Michael Hall on parental ideologues.

Just cause I manage two quick posts, you guestbloggers aren’t off duty! I still won’t be back in the States until Friday night.

I will take time to say that I’m very pleased and grateful about how you all are doing, though.

Greg Stolze brings a twist to the distributed patronage model and extends it to fiction. I wrote about his adventures in distributed-patronage game design last year.

They took me to dinner tonight at Schwartz’s Charcuterie Hebraique, a genuine Montreal landmark and one of the relics of the city’s dwindling Jewish community. (Largely anglophone, it has decamped to Toronto.)

Yummy! I had the “smoked meat” sandwich. (They are vague on which part of the cow produces it; you’d think brisket, but my host […]

[posted by Kn@ppster]

Jim’s been poking at the fabric of this phenomenon called “liberaltarianism” a bit, and he’s not alone. Libertarian ideas are picking up advocates on the Left, and “southpaw libertarians” are becoming an increasingly credible force in the libertarian movement.

Why? Well, a guest post on someone else’s blog isn’t the place to rehash […]

[posted by Leonard]

At Catallarchy, Patri Friedman has posted the results of an interesting study he performed. Data were taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth.

OBJECTIVE: The goal was to determine the relationship between the parental use of sunscreen products and the skin color of children in first grade.
…
RESULTS: … Children of High sunscreen-using […]