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anonymous

Palmer's Revisionism - 0 views

bhl.typepad.com/...-ideological-revisionism-.html

libertarian

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Palmer says Schmidtz and I conflate wealth with liberty. He says we think wealth just is a kind of liberty. A year later, I’m still not sure why he accused us of that. I met him two weeks before he wrote his response piece. He asked me for a free copy of A Brief History of Liberty, which I gave him, so he could read it before responding to us. In the book, Schmidtz and I explicitly state that when we say increased wealth promotes positive liberty, this is an empirical claim.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 11
     
    " I'm a philosopher. I use the word "metaphysics" differently from many non-philosophers. My aunt Bonnie and most other Americans think the word "metaphysics" has to do with magic crystals, spiritual energies, and ley lines. I don't. The fact that these other people use the word differently from me gives me no reason to pause, because "metaphysics" is a philosopher's technical term. "Freedom" is not a philosopher's technical term, though. So we philosophers have to start with a presumption in favor of common English use. If we recommend revising language, we need good grounds for doing so."
anonymous

Are Libertarians Serious About Liberty? - 0 views

delong.typepad.com/...ans-serious-about-liberty.html

politics ideas philosophy

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 10 - Cached
  • the conservative movement includes many people who are indifferent, if not hostile, to the liberty of foreigners, immigrants, drug users, gays and lesbians, women who want abortions, broadcasters, sex workers, criminal defendants, Muslims, publishers of pornography, atheists, and so forth....
  • What libertarians and conservatives share isn’t a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom... the Founding Fathers... free markets... limited government... Hayek....
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 10
     
    Money: "What libertarians and conservatives share isn't a shared commitment to freedom so much as a common way of talking about freedom..." By Brad Delong at Grasping Reality with Both Hands on July 21, 2010.
anonymous

Libertarians Are the New Communists - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...ns-are-the-new-communists.html

shared by anonymous on 07 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe.
  • By radical libertarianism, we mean the ideology that holds that individual liberty trumps all other values.
  • By communism, we mean the ideology of extreme state domination of private and economic life.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • social libertarians aren’t the problem. It is the nihilist anti-state libertarians of the Koch-Cruz-Norquist-Paul (Ron and Rand alike) school who should worry us.
  • Like communism, this philosophy is defective in its misreading of human nature, misunderstanding of how societies work and utter failure to adapt to changing circumstances.
  • We say the conditional “would” because radical libertarianism has a fatal flaw: It can’t be applied across a functioning society.
  • Radical libertarians would be great at destroying. They would have little concept of creating or governing. It is in failed states such as Somalia that libertarianism finds its fullest actual expression.
  • Some libertarians will claim we are arguing against a straw man and that no serious adherent to their philosophy advocates the extreme positions we describe. The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist and the Pauls speaks for itself. Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work -- not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist.
  • The alternative to this extremism is an evolving blend of freedom and cooperation. The relationship between social happiness and economic success can be plotted on a bell curve, and the sweet spot is away from the extremes of either pure liberty or pure communitarianism. That is where true citizenship and healthy capitalism are found.
  • True citizenship means changing policy to adapt to changes in circumstance. Sometimes government isn’t the answer. Other times it is.
  • Freedom is responsibility.
  • anonymous on 07 Sep 13
     
    "Most people would consider radical libertarianism and communism polar opposites: The first glorifies personal freedom. The second would obliterate it. Yet the ideologies are simply mirror images. Both attempt to answer the same questions, and fail to do so in similar ways. Where communism was adopted, the result was misery, poverty and tyranny. If extremist libertarians ever translated their beliefs into policy, it would lead to the same kinds of catastrophe."
anonymous

The Libertarian Case for a Basic Income - 0 views

www.libertarianism.org/...libertarian-case-basic-income

shared by anonymous on 20 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Still skeptical? Well, here are three libertarian arguments in support of a Basic Income Guarantee. I begin with a relatively weak proposal that even most hard-core libertarians should be even to accept. I then move to stronger proposals that involve some deviation from the plumb-line view. But only justifiable deviations, of course.
  • 1) A Basic Income Guarantee would be much better than the current welfare state.
  • Current federal social welfare programs in the United States are an expensive, complicated mess. According to Michael Tanner, the federal government spent more than $668 billion on over one hundred and twenty-six anti-poverty programs in 2012. When you add in the $284 billion spent by state and local governments, that amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • Wouldn’t it be better just to write the poor a check?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      There's still an argument to be made that flat out giving poor people money would result in tons of misspent cash because we aren't very good with money if we haven't nurtured good habits.
  • A Basic Income Guarantee would also be considerably less paternalistic then the current welfare state, which is the bastard child of “conservative judgment and progressive condescension” toward the poor, in Andrea Castillo’s choice words.
  • Conservatives want to help the poor, but only if they can demonstrate that they deserve it by jumping through a series of hoops meant to demonstrate their willingness to work, to stay off drugs, and preferably to settle down into a nice, stable, bourgeois family life.
  • 2) A Basic Income Guarantee might be required on libertarian grounds as reparation for past injustice.
  • One of libertarianism’s most distinctive commitments is its belief in the near-inviolability of private property rights. But it does not follow from this commitment that the existing distribution of property rights ought to be regarded as inviolable, because the existing distribution is in many ways the product of past acts of uncompensated theft and violence.
  • However attractive libertarianism might be in theory, “Libertarianism…Starting Now!” has the ring of special pleading, especially when it comes from the mouths of people who have by and large emerged at the top of the bloody and murderous mess that is our collective history.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      THANK you. It's a strong objection from people like me who are all too aware of the twisted LP-logic emerging from enthusiastic converts.
  • But Nozick’s entitlement theory of justice is a historical one, and an important component of that theory is a “principle of rectification” to deal with past injustice. Nozick himself provided almost no details
  • In a world in which all property was acquired by peaceful processes of labor-mixing and voluntary trade, a tax-funded Basic Income Guarantee might plausibly be held to violate libertarian rights. But our world is not that world. And since we do not have the information that would be necessary to engage in a precise rectification of past injustices, and since simply ignoring those injustices seems unfair, perhaps something like a Basic Income Guarantee can be justified as an approximate rectification?
  • 3. A Basic Income Guarantee might be required to meet the basic needs of the poor.
  • Could there be a libertarian case for the basic income not as a compromise but as an ideal?
  • Both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek advocated for something like a Basic Income Guarantee as a proper function of government, though on somewhat different grounds.
  • And so, Friedman concludes, some “governmental action to alleviate poverty” is justified. Specifically, government is justified in setting “a floor under the standard of life of every person in the community,” a floor that takes the form of his famous “Negative Income Tax” proposal.
  • Friedrich Hayek’s argument, appearing 17 years later in volume 3 of his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, is even more powerful. Here’s the crucial passage:The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born. (emphasis added)
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Dec 13
       
      In my 3-5 years being a Libertarian, I *never* read this bit from Hakey. Methinks that may be a sore-spot I was blind to.
  • But as my colleague Kevin Vallier has documented repeatedly, Hayek was not opposed to the welfare state as such (not even in the Road to Serfdom). At the very least, he regarded certain aspects of the welfare state as permissible options that states might pursue.
  • But the passage above suggests that he may have had an even stronger idea in mind - that a basic income is not merely a permissible option but a mandatory requirement of democratic legitimacy - a policy that must be instituted in order to justify the coercive power that even a Hayekian state would exercise over its citizens.
  • A Basic Income Guarantee involves something like an unconditional grant of income to every citizen.
  • So, on most proposals, everybody gets a check each month. “Unconditional” here means mostly that the check is not conditional on one’s wealth or poverty or willingness to work.
  • A Negative Income Tax involves issuing a credit to those who fall below the threshold of tax liability, based on how far below the threshold they fall.
  • So the amount of money one receives (the “negative income tax”) decreases as ones earnings push one up to the threshold of tax liability, until it reaches zero, and then as one earns more money one begins to pay the government money (the “positive income tax”).
  • The Earned Income Tax Credit is the policy we actually have in place currently in the United States.
  • It was inspired by Friedman’s Negative Income Tax proposal, but falls short in that it applies only to persons who are actually working.
  • 1) Disincentives - One of the most common objections to Basic Income Guarantees is that they would create objectionably strong disincentives to employment.
  • After all, with a Basic Income Guarantee, the money you get is yours to keep. You don’t lose it if you take a job and start earning money. And so in that way the disincentives to employment it creates are probably less severe than those created by currently existing welfare programs where employment income is often a bar to eligibility.
  • 2) Effects on Migration - When most people think about helping the poor, they forget about two groups that are largely invisible - poor people in other countries, and poor people who haven’t been born yet
  • With respect to the first of those groups, I think (and have argued before) that there is a real worry that a Basic Income Guarantee in the United States would create pressures to restrict immigration even more than it already is.
  • That worries me, because I think the last thing anybody with a bleeding heart ought to want to do is to block the poorest of the poor from access to what has been one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever devised - namely, a policy of relatively open immigration into the relatively free economy of the United States.
  • 3) Effects on Economic Growth - Even a modest slowdown of economic growth can have dramatic effects when compounded over a period of decades.
  • And so even if whatever marginal disincentives a Basic Income Guarantee would produce wouldn’t do much to hurt currently existing people, it might do a lot to hurt people who will be born at some point in the future.
  • Tyler Cowen and Jim Manzi put forward what seem to me to be the most damning objections to a Basic Income Guarantee - that however attractive the idea may be in theory, any actually implemented policy will be subject to political tinkering and rent-seeking until it starts to look just as bad as, if not worse than, what we’ve already got.
  • anonymous on 20 Dec 13
     
    "Guaranteeing a minimum income to the poor is better than our current system of welfare, Zwolinski argues. And it can be justified by libertarian principles."
anonymous

Group Solidarity and Survival, Arnold Kling - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...group_solidarit.html

shared by anonymous on 25 Jun 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 25 Jun 10
     
    By Arnold Kling at EconLog (Library of Economics and Liberty) on June 25, 2010.
anonymous

The Seen, the Unseen, War, and Peace - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...the_seen_the_un.html

criticalthinking geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 10 - Cached
  • If people judged war purely on the basis of its obvious, immediate consequences, then, pacifism would be almost universal.
  • To sell war, you've got to convince people that its non-obvious, distant consequences are positively fantastic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      This is where the fuzzy-promises of war fit into things. There may very well be a geopolitical rationale behind it (good or bad, right or wrong), but that is not how it is sold to the public. As irritating as that makes me, I believe that this citizenry lacks the analytical thinking - especially regarding economics and geopolitics - required to evaluate it on its merits. And then, as I think further, that sort of person is lible to decline engagement if it looks like a minor loss of "empire" could avoid those horrible examples of war's effect.
  • My best explanation is that Bastiat's seen/unseen fallacy is not a general psychological tendency.  Instead, it's an expression of anti-market bias: Since people dislike markets, they're quick to dismiss claims about their hidden benefits. 
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      As of this writing, I don't quite understand this.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When it comes to the unseen benefits of war, there's actually a perfect storm of irrationality.
  • Not only do people like government, the institution responsible for running the war.  Support for war also neatly coheres with the public's anti-foreign bias.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Jun 10
       
      But this "Us Vs. Them" mentality continues to erode in the slow moving churning of years. To half remember a TED lecture I watched - We've come a long way from thinking the people in the next village aren't human - but there's still so very much to go.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 10
     
    By Bryan Caplan at EconLog (Library of Economics and Liberty) on June 21, 2010. Thanks to David Gottlieb for the find: http://www.google.com/buzz/dmgottlieb/PBNvVHN9CDr/The-Seen-the-Unseen-War-and-Peace-EconLog-Library
anonymous

The Tea Party and Insurgency Politics - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/..._party_and_insurgency_politics

politics criticalthinking geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 17 Sep 10 - Cached
  • The political lesson, worth pondering in these times of Tea Party rumbling, is that serious protest movements such as the Perot phenomenon or today’s Tea Party revolt never just fade away. They linger in American politics, sometimes largely unseen but sometimes quite overt, and exert a continuing tug on the course of electoral decision-making. Eventually they get absorbed into one major party or the other. In the process, they often tilt the balance of political power in the country, occasionally for substantial periods of time.
  • What it represents and portends can best be scrutinized by trying to answer three fundamental questions:
  • First, is this movement for real and is it enduring? The answer is yes.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The second question is, where did this movement come from? What precisely were the impulses, angers and fears that spawned this seemingly spontaneous wave of civic energy?
  • But most Tea Party leaders emphasize three general principles.
  • The first is “fiscal responsibility,” which includes a strong aversion to huge federal deficits and the yawning national debt.
  • The second principle is “constitutionally limited government,” which implies states’ rights and the protection of individual liberties from federal intrusion.
  • the third is “free markets,” seen by Tea Party adherents as the protection of intertwined “individual and economic liberty.
  • Both the Jackson and Clay traditions have reverberated through American politics for nearly 200 years.
  • The third question centers on how the Tea Party will influence American politics in the coming years.
  • Indeed, much of the flow of American politics that angers Tea Party adherents — increased federal spending, growing deficits, Washington’s earmark culture, the looming entitlement crises — were in full force during the Bush years. That’s why Tea Party adherents are so bent on busting up the Washington establishment by first busting up the GOP.
  • anonymous on 17 Sep 10
     
    "The political lesson, worth pondering in these times of Tea Party rumbling, is that serious protest movements such as the Perot phenomenon or today's Tea Party revolt never just fade away. They linger in American politics, sometimes largely unseen but sometimes quite overt, and exert a continuing tug on the course of electoral decision-making. Eventually they get absorbed into one major party or the other. In the process, they often tilt the balance of political power in the country, occasionally for substantial periods of time." By Robert W. Merry at StratFor on September 17, 2010.
anonymous

The Love of One's Own and the Importance of Place - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...one_s_own_and_importance_place

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 10 Dec 10 - Cached
  • The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power.
  • there is a huge gulf between the uncertainty of a prediction and the impossibility of a prediction.
  • There is no action taken that is not done with the expectation, reasonable or not, erroneous or not, of some predictable consequence.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • Nature is the most predictable thing of all, since it lacks will and cannot make choices. Scientists who like to talk about the “hard sciences” actually have it easy.
  • First, human beings have choices as individuals. Second, and this is the most important thing, we are ourselves human. Our own wishes and prejudices inevitably color our view of how things will evolve.
  • Successful forecasting should begin by being stupid.
  • By being stupid we mean that rather than leaping toward highly sophisticated concepts and principles, we should begin by noting the obvious.
  • we should begin by noticing the obvious about human beings.
  • they are born and then they die
  • Human beings are born incapable of caring for themselves
  • Humans protect themselves and care for their young by forming families
  • Who should you ally with and where would you find them?
  • Why should you trust a relative more than a stranger?
  • The idea that romantic love should pre-empt the love of one’s own introduces a radical new dynamic to history, in which the individual and choice supersede community and obligation.
  • Which love is prior? Is it the love to which you are born — your family, your religion, your tradition — the love of one’s own? Or is it the acquired love, the one you have chosen because it pleases you as an individual?
  • one married out of love for one’s parents, and out of the sense of duty that grew out of that love.
  • Romantic love is acquired love.
  • This notion is embedded in the American Declaration of Independence, which elevates life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness over obligation.
  • Ideology is an acquired value. No child can be a Jeffersonian or a Stalinist. That can only be chosen after the age of reason, along with romantically acquired spouses.
  • Tradition is superseded by reason and the old regime superseded by artificially constructed regimes forged in revolution.
  • As a citizen, you have a relationship to an artificial construct, the constitution, to which you swear your loyalty. It is a rational relationship and, ultimately, an elective relationship. Try as one might, one can never stop being an American. One can, as a matter of choice, stop being a citizen of the United States. Similarly, one can elect to become a citizen of the United States. That does not, in the fullest sense of the word, make you an American. Citizenship and alienage are built into the system.
  • Loving America is simple and natural. Loving the United States is complex and artificial.
  • For modern regimes, birth is an accident that gives no one authority.
  • In post-revolutionary society, you may know who you were but that in no way determined who you would become.
  • Traditional society was infinitely more constrained but infinitely more natural.
  • This leads us to nationalism — or, more broadly, love and obligation to the community to which you were born, be it a small band of nomads or a vast nation-state.
  • Modern liberalism and socialism do not know what to do with nationalism.
  • For economists, self-interest is a natural impulse. But if it is a natural impulse, it is an odd one, for one can see widespread examples of human beings who do not practice it. Consider the tension between the idea that the United States was created for the purpose of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and the decision of a soldier to go to war and even willingly give his life.
  • Dying for a regime dedicated to the pursuit of happiness makes no sense. Dying for the love of one’s own makes a great deal of sense. But the modern understanding of man has difficulty dealing with this idea.
  • There is an important paradox in all this. Modern liberal regimes celebrate the doctrine of national self-determination, the right of a “people” to choose its own path. Leaving apart the amazing confusion as to what to do with a nation that chooses an illiberal course, you have the puzzlement of precisely what a nation is and why it has the right to determine anything.
  • Europe had been ruled by dynasties that governed nations by right of birth. Breaking those regimes was the goal of Europe’s revolutionaries.
  • In the case of the American founders, having acted on behalf of national self-determination, they created a Bill of Rights and hoped that history would sort through the contradiction between the nation, the state and the individual.
  • Why should we love those things that we are born to simply because we are born to them? Why should Americans love America, Iranians love Iran and Chinese love China? Why, in spite of all options and the fact that there are surely many who make their lives by loving acquired things, does love of one’s own continue to drive men?
  • Wherever one chooses to go, whatever identity one chooses to claim, in the end, you cannot escape from who you are.
  • anonymous on 10 Dec 10
     
    The study of geopolitics tries to identify those things that are eternal, those things that are of long duration and those things that are transitory. It does this through the prism of geography and power. What it finds frequently runs counter to common sense. More precisely, geopolitical inquiry seeks not only to describe but to predict what will happen. Those predictions frequently - indeed, usually - fly in the face of common sense. Geopolitics is the next generation's common sense. William Shakespeare, born in 1564 - the century in which the European conquest of the world took place -- had Macbeth say that history is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. If Macbeth is right, then history is merely sound and fury, devoid of meaning, devoid of order. Any attempt at forecasting the future must begin by challenging Macbeth, since if history is random it is, by definition, unpredictable. By George Friedman at StratFor on May 26, 2008.
anonymous

Up from Slavery - 0 views

reason.com/...print

government criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 07 Apr 10 - Cached
  • The Cato Institute's boilerplate description of itself used to include the line, "Since [the American] revolution, civil and economic liberties have been eroded." Until Clarence Thomas, then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, gave a speech at Cato and pointed out to us that it didn't seem quite that way to black people.
  • Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others.
  • I said that white Americans probably considered themselves free. But in retrospect, were they?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 07 Apr 10
       
      Alien & Sedition acts anyone? That surfaced almost immediately following independence.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • I've probably been guilty of similar thoughtless and ahistorical exhortations of our glorious libertarian past. And I'm entirely in sympathy with Hornberger's preference for a world without an alphabet soup of federal agencies, transfer programs, drug laws, and so on. But I think this historical perspective is wrong.
  • For the past 70 years or so conservatives have opposed the demands for equal respect and equal rights by Jews, blacks, women, and gay people. Libertarians have not opposed those appeals for freedom, but too often we (or our forebears) paid too little attention to them.
  • We often focus on the size of government, as measured in percentage of GDP taxed and spent by the government, which is an important and measurable concept. But our real concern is power. What kind of power does the government wield over the people?
  • anonymous on 07 Apr 10
     
    By David Boaz in Reason Magazine on April 6, 2010. Thanks to @paleofuture for the pointer.
anonymous

What Gay Marriage Polls Tells Us About Marijuana Legalization | TPMDC - 0 views

tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/...litymarijuana-legalization.php

shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 13 - Cached
  • But if you were surprised at how quickly marriage equality happened, get ready for another shock: pot’s going to be legal too. The same demographic and cultural changes that propelled marriage equality to majority status are already pushing support for legal pot to the same place.
  • TPM analyzed all available, nationwide polling data on the questions of full marijuana legalization and marriage equality for the past 18 years and found public opinion on the two issues has taken a nearly identical trajectory.
  • Though marijuana legalization is slightly behind marriage equality in terms of public opinion, it has enjoyed a steadier climb along the way to earning the support of nearly half the country. As the accompanying chart shows, backing and opposition to marriage equality has undergone some dramatic dips and peaks over the last seventeen years. On the other hand, support for marijuana legalization has simply moved, pardon the pun, higher and higher each year. This could be an indication marijuana legalization may enjoy an even smoother ride to ultimate approval than marriage equality.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • TPM spoke with activists working on both issues and they identified several reasons marijuana legalization may have a less bumpy road along the way to earning nationwide support.
  • Erik Altieri, a spokesman for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, a pro-marijuana lobbying group, said a major factor behind this may be legalizations natural appeal among some conservatives and libertarians who see it as a civil liberties issue.
  • They also pointed out marriage equality has entrenched opposition among religious, social conservatives — something pot legalization lacks.
  • “The argument for legalization has really been sort of couched in medical usage. You still have to sell marriage. Not everyone knows a gay person or a gay person who wants to marry their same-sex partner. Everyone knows someone who smokes weed,” the consultant said.
  • In theory, support for pot legalization could stall at the current 50/50 split. But one key trend, the same driving the seemingly inexorable rise of support for gay marriage, makes that outcome highly unlikely. Young people overwhelmingly support legalization. And diehard opposition is heavily concentrated among older voters.
  • Between 2009 and 2012 support for marijuana legalization grew at nearly twice the rate it had at any time since 1995. Altieri attributes this rapid increase to the economic crisis.
  • “What I would really pinpoint as the source of this last four year nudge up where we jumped up 10 points is the economy,” Altieri said. “People always knew we shouldn’t be giving such harsh punishments to those arrested for marijuana offenses and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put them in jail. It became much more imperative when we had the financial crisis and then we’re seeing the debt ceiling.”
  • In two dozen states there are forty or so marijuana reform bills in play ranging from simple decriminalization, to medicalization and full-on legalization. Where we’re also seeing the movement is on the federal level where we haven’t previously. There are six to seven federal marijuana bills in Congress and they span the scope like we haven’t seen before including a call for a presidential commission to look at medical marijuana and Jared Polis’ legislation to remove marijuana from the Controlled Substances Act, which would essentially end the federal government’s involvement in marijuana prohibition.”
  • While President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and a growing crowd of the most high-level national politicians has jumped on the bandwagon of marriage equality backers, the marijuana legalization movement hasn’t had a similar infusion of political star power.
  • “More politicians are going to come aboard as they are realizing that this is no longer a political third rail, that this is a political opportunity for them. They’re self interested creatures at heart, so that’s what theyre paying attention too,” Altieri said. “When Colorado and Washington did what they did, it took the issue to a new level of legitimacy that we’d never seen. This was no longer something that people could make snide comments about on cable news.” 
  • Washington and Colorado’s legalization law also set the stage for a pivotal moment where Attorney General Eric Holder will decide whether to intervene in those states and arrest those involved in the (still federally illegal) marijuana trade.
  • “History has shown that, once you hit 60 percent on an issue in this country, it gets really hard to go against it,” he said. At the average rate support for legalization has grown since 1995, public opinion will hit that magic 60 percent threshold by 2022. But based on the rate backing for legalization has grown between 2009 and 2012, we could see public support for the issue reach that number bey 2019.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 02 Apr 13
       
      That's entertainingly close to the two dates (from non-related sources) that point to our cyclical/structural socio-economic realignment. On thing is certain (to me): Pot legalization will suddenly become a non-issue as states (and eventually, the feds) see it as a much needed source of revenue (along with cutting a few legs out of the prison-industrial complex).
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 13
     
    "With the Supreme Court now at least considering a definitive statement in favor of gay marriage and support for marriage equality now practically a litmus test issue for Democratic politicians, Americans across the political spectrum are expressing surprise at how rapidly this once marginalized idea became something like a national consensus."
anonymous

We Are All Hayekians Now: The Internet Generation and Knowledge Problems - 1 views

www.petervv.com/...we-are-all-hayekians-now

shared by anonymous on 18 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Primarily in his The Use of Knowledge in Society but also in his other contributions to the socialist calculation debate, Hayek crafted a brilliant statement of a perennial problem.
  • In the world of human endeavor, we have two types of problems: economic and technological.
  • Technological problems involve effectively allocating given resources to accomplish a single valuable goal.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The choice to build the bridge is a choice between this bridge or that skyscraper as well as any other alternative use of those resources. Each alternative use would have different benefits (and unseen costs).
  • This is not a mere question of engineering the strongest or even the most cost-effective structure to get across the Hudson, this is a question of what is the strongest or most cost-effective possible future version of New York City.
  • “We are building the world’s 20th search engine at a time when most of the others have been abandoned as being commoditized money losers. We’ll strip out all of the ad-supported news and portal features so you won’t be distracted from using the free search stuff.”
  • But, of course, Google survived, prospered, and continues towards its apparent goal of eating the entire internet (while also making cars drive themselves, putting cameras on everyone’s heads, and generally making Steve Ballmer very very angry). So, why did Google win? The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, in Hayek’s theory.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 18 Apr 13
       
      Very embarassing videos.
  • “Our goal always has been to index all the world’s data.” Talk about anemic goals, come on Google, show some ambition!
  • So, is this one of Hayek’s technical problems or is this an economic one?
  • Our gut might first tell us that it is technical.
  • Sure, all this data is now hanging out in one place for free, but to make a useful index you need to determine how much people value different data. We need data about the data.
  • In Soviet Russia, failed attempts at arranging resources destroyed the information about the resources. The free market is the best way to figure out how individual people value individual resources. When left to trade voluntarily, people reveal their preferences with their willingness to pay. By arranging resources through coercion you’ve blinded yourself to the emergent value of the resources because you’ve forbidden voluntary arrangement in the economy.
  • This is different on the internet.
  • The data resources are not rivalrous
  • Search used to be really bad. Why? Because search companies were using either (a) content-producer willingness to pay for indexing, (b) mere keyword search or (c) some combination of editorial centralized decision-making to organize lists of sites.
  • These methods only work if you think that the best site about ducks is either (a) the site that has the most money to pay Altavista for prime “duck” listing, (b) the site that has the most “ducks” in its text, or (c) the site that was most appealing to your employees tasked with finding duck sites.
  • If 999 other websites linked to one website about ducks, you can bet that most people think that this site is better at explaining ducks than a site with only one link to it (even if that link was horse-sized).
  • So Google uses the decentralized Hayekian knowledge of the masses to function. Why does this mean we’re all Hayekians?
  • All of the questions of organizing activity on the internet are solved (when they are, in fact, solved successfully) using Hayekian decentralized knowledge.
  • Amazon customer reviews are how we find good products. Ebay feedback is how we find good individual sellers. And, moreover, whole brick and mortar services are moving to a crowd-sourced model, with sites like AirBnB for lodging and RelayRides for car rental.
  • the giant firms of tomorrow will be those that empower people to freely share their knowledge and resources in a vibrant marketplace.
  • Today, the central challenge for a firm is not to develop careful internal management but rather the non-trivial task of building marketplaces and forums to encourage decentralized knowledge production and cooperation.
  • Our generation already understands this on a gut level. We Google everything.  We defend freedom on the internet as if it was our own personal real-world liberty at stake. We mock the antiquated central planners of the early web, looking at you AOL, Prodigy, for their ineffectual obviousness and denial of crowd-sourced knowledge.
  • We all know where the best economic knowledge lies, in the many and never the few.
  • anonymous on 18 Apr 13
     
    "We are all Hayekians now. Specifically, the "we all" is not quite everyone. The "all" to which I'm referring is people of the internet-people who've grown up with the net and use it for a majority of their day-to-day activities. And, the "Hayekian" to which I'm referring is not his theories on capital, or the rule of law, but, specifically his vision of knowledge."
anonymous

The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery - 1 views

truth-out.org/...s-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

shared by anonymous on 23 Jan 13 - Cached
Erik Hanson liked it
  • In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states. 
  • It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?"  If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
  • Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work.  Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South.  Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings.  As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
  • If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse.  And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.
  • Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves. 
  • This was not an imagined threat.  Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces.  "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps.  During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779.  And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.
  • Henry then bluntly laid it out: "If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
  • "In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."
  • The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing): "[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry.  "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power? "This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it."
  • James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid. "I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."
  • His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
  • But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government.  So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
  • anonymous on 23 Jan 13
     
    This article is designed to be quite provocative. It's sure worth exploring. "The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote.  Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too."
anonymous

The American Public's Indifference to Foreign Affairs - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-indifference-foreign-affairs

shared by anonymous on 18 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • At different times, lesser events have transfixed Americans. This week, Americans seemed to be indifferent to all of them. This may be part of a cycle that shapes American interest in public affairs.
  • The United States was founded as a place where private affairs were intended to supersede public life.
  • Public service was intended less as a profession than as a burden to be assumed as a matter of duty -- hence the word "service."
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • In many European countries, the state is at the center of many of the activities that shape private life, but that is less true in the United States.
  • The American public is often most active in public affairs when resisting the state's attempts to increase its presence, as we saw with health care reform. When such matters appear settled, Americans tend to focus their energy on their private lives, pleasures and pains. 
  • Of course, there are times when Americans are aroused not only to public affairs but also to foreign affairs. That is shaped by the degree to which these events are seen as affecting Americans' own lives.
  • There is nothing particularly American in this. People everywhere care more about things that affect them than things that don't.
  • People in European or Middle Eastern countries, where another country is just a two-hour drive away, are going to be more aware of foreign affairs. Still, they will be most concerned about the things that affect them.
  • The United States' geography, obviously, shapes American thinking about the world. The European Peninsula is crowded with peoples and nation-states. In a matter of hours you can find yourself in a country with a different language and religion and a history of recent war with your own. Americans can travel thousands of miles using their own language, experiencing the same culture and rarely a memory of war. Northwestern Europe is packed with countries. The northeastern United States is packed with states.
  • Passing from the Netherlands to Germany is a linguistic, cultural change with historical memories. Traveling from Connecticut to New York is not.
  • American interest is cyclical, heavily influenced by whether they are affected by what goes on. After 9/11, what happened in the Islamic world mattered a great deal. But even then, it went in cycles.
  • It's not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it's that their interest is finely calibrated. The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat.
  • The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with. Americans may turn out to have been wrong about these things in the long run, but at the time, an issue must fit these criteria
  • Context is everything. During times of oil shortage, events in Venezuela might well have interested Americans much more than they did last week. During the Cold War, the left-wing government in Venezuela might have concerned Americans. But advancements in technology have increased oil and natural gas production in the United States. A left-wing government in Venezuela is simply another odd Latin government, and the events of last week are not worth worrying about. The context renders Venezuela a Venezuelan problem.
  • It is not that Americans are disengaged from the world, but rather that the world appears disengaged from them. At the heart of the matter is geography.
  • The American reality is that most important issues, aside from Canada and Mexico, take place across the ocean, and the ocean reasonably is seen as a barrier that renders these events part of a faraway realm.
  • During the Cold War, Americans had a different mindset. They saw themselves in an existential struggle for survival with the communists.
  • One thing that the end of the Cold War and the subsequent 20 years taught the United States was that the world mattered -- a mindset that was as habitual as it was reflective of new realities.
  • Starting in the late 1980s, the United States sent troops to Panama, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kuwait. The American public was engaged in all of these for a variety of reasons, some of them good, some bad. Whatever the reasoning, there was a sense of clarity that demanded that something be done.
  • After 9/11, the conviction that something be done turned into an obsession. But over the past 10 years, Americans' sense of clarity has become much more murky, and their appetite for involvement has declined accordingly.
  • More recently, the standards for justifying either type of intervention have become more exacting to policymakers. Syria was not a matter of indifference, but the situation lacked the clarity that justified intervention.
  • The United States seemed poised to intervene and then declined. The American public saw it as avoiding another overseas entanglement with an outcome that could not be shaped by American power.
  • We see the same thing in Ukraine. The United States cannot abide a single power like Russia dominating Eurasia. That would create a power that could challenge the United States. There were times that the Ukrainian crisis would have immediately piqued American interest. While some elements of the U.S. government, particularly in the State Department, did get deeply involved, the American public remained generally indifferent.
  • From a geopolitical point of view, the future of Ukraine as European or Russian helps shape the future of Eurasia. But from the standpoint of the American public, the future is far off and susceptible to interference.
  • (Americans have heard of many things that could have become a major threat -- a few did, most didn't.)
  • This is disconcerting from the standpoint of those who live outside the United States. They experienced the United States through the Cold War, the Clinton years and the post-9/11 era. The United States was deeply involved in everything. The world got used to that.
  • I spoke to a foreign diplomat who insisted the United States was weakening. I tried to explain that it is not weakness that dictates disengagement but indifference. He couldn't accept the idea that the United States has entered a period in which it really doesn't care what happens to his country.
  • The diplomat had lived in a time when everything mattered and all problems required an American position. American indifference is the most startling thing in the world for him.
  • This was the position of American isolationists of the early 20th century.
  • The isolationist period was followed, of course, by the war and the willingness of the United States to "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty," in the words of John F. Kennedy. Until very recently, that sweeping statement was emblematic of U.S. foreign policy since 1941.
  • The current public indifference to foreign policy reflects that shift. But Washington's emerging foreign policy is not the systematic foreign policy of the pre-World War II period. It is an instrumental position, which can adapt to new circumstances and will likely be changed not over the course of decades but over the course of years or months.
  • The sense that private life matters more than public is intense, and that means that Americans are concerned with things that are deemed frivolous by foreigners, academics and others who make their living in public and foreign policy.
  • They care about some things, but are not prepared to care about all things.
  • Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable. To me, it is simply becoming a fact to be borne in mind. I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.
  • Americans might not be interested in the world, but the world is interested in Americans. Until this luxury comes to an end, the United States has ample assistant secretaries to give the impression that it cares.
  • anonymous on 18 Feb 14
     
    "Last week, several events took place that were important to their respective regions and potentially to the world. Russian government officials suggested turning Ukraine into a federation, following weeks of renewed demonstrations in Kiev. The Venezuelan government was confronted with violent and deadly protests. Kazakhstan experienced a financial crisis that could have destabilized the economies of Central Asia. Russia and Egypt inked a significant arms deal. Right-wing groups in Europe continued their political gains. "
anonymous

Tolerance and a mosque - 0 views

www.chicagotribune.com/...osque-20100819,0,2518101.story

politics religion

shared by anonymous on 20 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Our Constitution guarantees the freedom of all faiths. Not just the ones most of us are comfortable having as neighbors. Not just the ones that attract the most members or the ones whose faith traditions resemble our own. All faiths.
  • In this country, we don't poll-test our constitutional liberties to determine when they do and don't apply.
  • New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg a Republican, deserves credit for his unequivocal stance: This is about religious tolerance, period.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • We've already said why we favor allowing the mosque to be built. We support the developer's right to build on private property as law permits. Local officials green-lighted the project by a 29-1 vote. That should be that.
  • anonymous on 20 Aug 10
     
    "'Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington,' Gingrich said. 'There is no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.' Tempting as it is to rebuff Gingrich, in truth all of us ought to thank him. His intemperate and strained metaphor offers calmer minds a genuinely useful reminder: Our Constitution guarantees the freedom of all faiths." At the Chicago Tribune on August 19, 2010.
anonymous

Justice Stevens on 'Invidious Prejudice' - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...10wed4.html

liberty islam america criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 11 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Nov 10
     
    A great deal of what public figures have said about the proposed Islamic cultural center near ground zero in Lower Manhattan has been aimed at playing off fear and intolerance for political gain. Former Justice John Paul Stevens of the Supreme Court, on the other hand, delivered one of the sanest and most instructive arguments for tolerance that we have heard in a long time. Justice Stevens, who retired at the end of the court's last term, served for two and a half years as an intelligence officer in Pearl Harbor during World War II. In a speech on Thursday in Washington, he confessed his initial negative reaction decades later at seeing dozens of Japanese tourists visiting the U.S.S. Arizona memorial. "Those people don't really belong here," he recalled thinking about the Japanese tourists. "We won the war. They lost it. We shouldn't allow them to celebrate their attack on Pearl Harbor even if it was one of their greatest victories." But then Justice Stevens said that he recognized his mistake in "drawing inferences" about the group of tourists that might not apply to any of them. "The Japanese tourists were not responsible for what some of their countrymen did decades ago," he said, just as "the Muslims planning to build the mosque are not responsible for what an entirely different group of Muslims did on 9/11." Many Muslims who pray in New York City mosques, he added, "may well have come to America to escape the intolerance of radicals like those who dominate the Taliban." Descendants of pilgrims "who came to America in the 17th century to escape religious persecutions" and helped establish our democracy should get that, he said. Justice Stevens ended with a powerful message that participants in the debate over the mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan should heed: "Ignorance - that is to say, fear of the unknown - is the source of most invidious prejudice." At The New York Times on November 9, 2010.
anonymous

Caucasian Nation - 0 views

nplusonemag.com/causcasian-nation

politics racism

shared by anonymous on 30 Oct 10 - Cached
  • But it’s futile to insist on nuances of history and law when we’re speaking the language of “offense.” The mythical heartland Sarah Palin speaks from, or for, is full of these voiceless, downtrodden plain folk who are constantly being offended, for whom there is no end to the offenses, real or imagined, perpetrated against them: the Mexican immigrant speaking his native tongue, the Muslim at his prayers, the black man drinking from a public water fountain (oh wait, that one’s not offensive anymore . . .). One of the more charming stories in Budiansky’s history of Reconstruction concerns a Southern gentleman who wanted a freed slave whipped because he had the temerity to wish him “good morning” without being spoken to first. These offended people see with such dreadful clarity things that don’t exist, and so remake reality to suit their grievances.
  • Of course, the majority of white Americans, like the majority of all other kinds of Americans, have good reason to feel aggrieved. They are the victims of bad economic and foreign policies; their state budgets are crippled by debts, their federal legislature is paralyzed, environmental catastrophe stalks their shores, oceans, and atmosphere. But when they go to the polls in November, if they go at all, a fair number of them will cast their vote on the basis of who stood up for them against imaginary Muslim hordes invading lower Manhattan to pray to their terrorist God.
  • In a late interview by turns confessional and triumphant, Lee Atwater, author of the strategy that turned the solidly Democratic, racist South into the solidly Republican, racist South, described the Southern Strategy’s metamorphosis over the years, “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” Partly through Atwater, Republicans developed a kind of reverse means test, an economic version of the old “one-drop rule.” Policies that were likely to help blacks, even if they were also likely to help poor whites, because they were policies largely designed to help the poor, regardless of color, became issues to campaign against: welfare, health care, federal education funding, progressive taxation, clean air regulations, funding for public transportation, just about any “progressive policy” you can think of. Some whites would be hurt, but blacks would be hurt worse. This has proved true. African Americans as a group are still poorer than whites as a group, regardless of the achievements of this generation’s talented tenth and of the growing army of the unemployed of all colors.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The ideology of states’ rights against federal enforcement, the metastasized right to bear arms, the fear of “big government” intervention — these were the pillars on which the Confederate and later segregationist South sought to erect a white plantation nation.
  • As of right now, there exists no serious strategy to combat this new bigotry. The Democratic leadership appears content to hope that once these radical Republican race-baiters take control of Congress after the midterm elections, the ordinary responsibilities and realities of power will force them to abandon the strategies they used to obtain power.
  • Instead of being “overcome,” historic American racism against nonwhite people has gone into deep cover and, with the irrefutable illogic of the unconscious, emerged as a newfangled American antiracism for the protection of white people.
  • “This guy, is, I believe, racist,” said Glenn Beck of Obama back in 2009, probably because he believed, like Breitbart, that when you accuse somebody of racism, however baselessly, the burden of proof shifts to the accused.
  • The crowds thronging to join Beck’s march on Washington — conveniently coinciding with the 47th anniversary of King’s “I had a dream” speech — showed the rest of us that Obama’s “postracial” America looks a lot like racial America.
  • In fact there has been an authentic white culture in American history, or rather a way of life concerned above all with the protection and preservation of white ethnic domination, and playing up the white victim has always been a part of it.
  • Even though we’ve mostly done away with outright racial violence, the memory of violence survives in the symbolism of  the Shirley Sherrod affair, the signs at Tea Party protests that say “the zoo has an African Lion and the White House has a Lyin’ African,” and the “open carry” demonstrations sponsored by the NRA, descendant of the Confederate gun clubs, at the town hall meetings for national health care.
  • Even so we have not yet achieved a more intriguing benchmark of progress: the election to the presidency of the descendant of an actual slave.
  • The most enduring behaviors of nations, like the hardest-to-break habits of individuals, are those we are least aware of. The new racists — that is to say, “concerned citizens” of Caucasian descent — seem only dimly conscious of past American racism, an ignorance no doubt unconsciously maintained, but more potent for that. Journalists for supposedly liberal publications like the Times and the New Republic have sought “actual racists” in the Tea Party movement and, because no one would say the N-word on the record, duly exonerated the Tea Partiers of racist intent. In exchange, Tea Party spokespeople acknowledge that the odd unreconstructed crank might turn up at one of their rallies. It’s a free country. All the reporters could find was that self-identified Tea Partiers were more likely than most Americans to pick a poll option asserting that “too much attention has been paid to problems facing Black Americans.”
  • Ostensibly, then, all the Tea Partiers want are the same contradictory things that most real Americans want: Medicare benefits, disproportionate federal spending on rural districts, and no taxes. As a T-shirt puts it, “I’ll keep my guns, money, and freedom, you can keep the ‘Change.’” But the summer’s events show that the defense of unthreatened freedoms counts for less than an apparently widespread white wish to make more out of their difficulties than other people. This is no longer a culture war, a revolt of stoics against the “culture of complaint,” but something deeper and older that precedes the identity politics movements it aims to subvert. Forty-two years after the Civil Rights Act, white people who still think of themselves predominantly as “white people” want to air their grievances with the aid of a social movement. One half of what passes for American two-party discourse calls now for another rebirth of a nation: the Caucasian States of America, a postmodern ethno-nationalist republic.
  • The Confederacy provided us with our own native opposition to classical 19th-century Liberalism, both economic and political, and it shouldn’t really be that surprising that contemporary antiliberalism with strong support in the former slave and border states borrows its language and gestures.
  • The robust case for dominating other people sounds awful to most American ears today. So the contemporary idea of ethnocracy relies instead on an opposite rhetoric of victimization. The simple-minded mantra we’re taught in grade school goes like this: blacks good because oppressed, whites bad because oppressors. So if whites suddenly became oppressed, even while remaining the majority, they would magically become good again. Many Americans are now being taught to think this way.
  • There is no dispute that both American common-law traditions of liberty of conscience and the First Amendment protect the construction of the center, regardless of its popularity. It shouldn’t be a big deal. And yet: “Ground Zero Mosque supporters: doesn’t it stab you in the heart, as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls refudiate,” tweeted Sarah Palin, white goddess of the victimization movement. This opening salvo was later amended, with little more grammatical success, to “Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.” The idea that 9/11 somehow taints all of Islam, so that all Muslims should be honor-bound not to practice their religion within an unspecified radius of Ground Zero for fear of hurting other people’s feelings — this is like the blood libel meets Oprah.
  • anonymous on 30 Oct 10
     
    "Last week, the NAACP released a detailed report tracking racist elements in the Tea Party. Looking past smoking gun links to actual card-carrying white supremacists, Marco Roth argues that the rhetoric of the Tea Party is tainted, from its very origins, with a long-running strain of "white victimization" politics, dating back to the Confederate South's refusal to accept that it had lost the Civil War." By Marco Roth at n+1 on October 25, 2010.
anonymous

Obama Is Making Bush's Big Mistake on Russia - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...g_bush_s_big_mistake_on_russia

geopolitics america russia foreignpolicy

shared by anonymous on 24 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Putin's treatment of Clinton raises doubts about the Barack Obama administration's strategy toward Russia, which has focused on building up the supposedly moderate President Dmitri Medvedev, reportedly one of the few foreign leaders Obama has bonded with, as a counterweight to Putin.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 10
       
      If true, this could be a grevious mistake, as Russia has shown a historic knack for tightly managed foreign policy under strong leaders (which Putin is).
  • After his first meeting with then-President Putin in June 2001, George W. Bush famously said: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 10
       
      That was hilarious, even at the time. My sincere hope was that the statement was intended for the domestic audience (to give comfort), because if it was for the international audience, then Bush very likely came off as very, very naive.
  • And now, we're hearing that Obama believes he has a different and promising relationship with Medvedev -- one independent of Putin.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 10
       
      My hope is that *this* is a conservative, careful way to say that Obama will give the benefit of the doubt. While I have only epheremal reasons to think this, Obama seems a bit shrewder than Bush.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • For all his talk of reform -- and so far it is just that, talk -- Medvedev still claims that Russia is a working democracy that protects the liberties of individual Russians despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 10
       
      Which is as laughable as that earlier Bush quote about "sensing his soul."
  • On Medvedev's watch, Georgia has been invaded and Abkhazia and South Ossetia effectively annexed, and Russia has continued to threaten its neighbors and put forward a "new security architecture" whose obvious goal is to undermine NATO's role in Europe.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 24 Mar 10
       
      Aggressively reclaiming Russia's near abroad is still their aim. Can you blame them? What's important here is that Medvedev really *is* tightly in line with Putin. It's best to think of his presidency as the continuation of the Putin administration, not a thing that's distinct from it.
  • In short, there is little reason to believe that basing a "reset" of U.S.-Russian relations on increased personal ties between presidents Medvedev and Obama will buy Obama any particular advantage. If anything, doing so reinforces Moscow's incentive to continue the "good cop, bad cop" routine.
  • anonymous on 24 Mar 10
     
    Tagline: "Remember when George W. Bush thought he could get things done by making nice with Vladimir Putin? Barack Obama is repeating the same error with Dmitry Medvedev. " By Jamie Fly and Gary Schmitt in Foreign Policy on March 22, 2010
anonymous

Could You Modify It 'To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?' - 0 views

www.cato-at-liberty.org/ts-from-becoming-this-advanced

education

shared by anonymous on 28 Jul 11 - Cached
  • This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Jul 11
       
      I disagree. This attitude is a natural outgrown of our decision to operate education in an inflexible, bureaucratic way. I attended a whole mess of private schools that were no different from public schools in that regard.
  • In a competitive marketplace, educators have incentives to serve each individual child to the best of their ability, because each child can easily be enrolled elsewhere if they fail to do so.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Jul 11
       
      I'm also not convinced. There are all kinds of economic and geographic limitations that would exist in this mythical 'free market' education environment.
  • It’s easier just to feed children through the system on a uniform conveyor belt based on when they were born.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Jul 11
       
      Again: Private schools would be no different, in this regard. All that said, I totally agree that what Khan's doing is marvelous and wonderful. I just don't see how CATO can shoehorn the libertarian idealism into it so perfectly.
  • anonymous on 28 Jul 11
     
    Money: Khan's programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who've seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it "to stop students from becoming this advanced."
anonymous

Faith and freedom: Newt's theology of exceptionalism - 4 views

www.economist.com/...faith-and-freedom

politics american

shared by anonymous on 12 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Mr Gingrich only took questions submitted in advance.
  • In the place of a credible commitment to family values, Mr Gingrich throws social conservatives hunks of red meat about American exceptionalism and the theological underpinnings of limited government.
  • "Secularism", Mr Gingrich maintains, "describes a worldview in which you're randomly gathered protoplasm" temporarily inhabiting a soulless world where there is no reason not to visit evil or universal insurance coverage upon your fellow sacks of protoplasm.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Obamacare, whatever its faults, is not an attempt to empower bureaucrats at the expence of citizens. If Obamacare is misguided, it is also a sincere, morally-motivated, attempt to ensure that all Americans are in a position to meaningfully exercise their self-sovereignty, to guarantee the worth of their rights. 
  • He demands instead that judicial rulings comport with with the spirit of his favoured interpretation of a single line in a document meant to announce and justify political secession, not to create law.
  • Mr Gingrich argued that Congress ought to override judges who, when interpreting the establishment clause, fail to rule as if dicta in a strongly-worded letter to King George III had established an official American political theology.
  • American politics is not, as Mr Gingrich would have you believe, a Manichean struggle between devout, liberty-loving champions of heaven-kissed inherent rights and amoral bureaucratic predators ravening for power.
  • anonymous on 12 Jul 11
     
    Will Wilkenson goes to a Newt-thingie. Glad I didn't. "LAST evening, at the last possible moment, I decided to bike the quick mile from my house to hear Newt Gingrich speak at the University of Iowa. I was hesitant to make the trip because I've been bored by Mr Gingrich before, and I agree with Time's Michael Crowley that Mr Gingrich's "continued campaign against what appear to be very long odds...seems consistent with someone looking to sell a bunch of merchandise."
anonymous

The Ideological Turing Test, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views

econlog.econlib.org/...the_ideological.html

politics partisan criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • [I]f you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, "What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?" A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don't think it's right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can't do it. They can't get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, "What do liberals want?" You get this bizarre stuff - for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism.
  • It's easy to scoff at Krugman's self-congratulation, but at the meta-level, he's on to something.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      Let's see about that...
  • There are important caveats.  Don Boudreaux wisely observes that we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck.  I'd add that we should compare people in the same field: Rand's inability to explain Keynesian economics would be no more telling than Krugman's inability to explain Nozickian political philosophy.  (Of course, if Krugman could correctly explain Nozickian political philosophy, that would be fairly impressive).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Set up a rough-and-ready ideological Turing Test.  I'll take it first.  Then invite Krugman to make me eat my words.
  • How?  Here's just one approach.  Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room.  Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a liberal.  Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room.  Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a libertarian.  Simple as that.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    I still don't know what to make of this, but it's worth investigating, if only to put it to rest or flog it with a whip made of angry horses. "According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals" Thanks to Adam Gurri for nudging me toward this line of inquiry.
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