2010

Grading the Pledge to America

September 24, 2010 @ 12:01 am

So….the Republicans have put out their Pledge to America. Is it any good? Jeffrey Tucker sums it up pithily by juxtaposing short quotes from it and the Declaration of Independence: Declaration of Independence (1776): “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or [...]

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Ecofascism in the Name of Fending Off Ecofascism

September 18, 2010 @ 11:31 am

Micah White at The Guardian writes of the growing danger of ecofascism or environmental authoritarianism. Some environmentalists, like James Lovelock and Pentti Linkola, want to put democracy on hold and/or return humanity world-wide to a primitive state of existence in order to combat global warming. Ironically, his proposal to fend off this growing danger is [...]

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Dollar Got the Blues: The Official Song of Dollar-Haters

September 8, 2010 @ 12:01 am

The song was written in 1971 by Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, a long-time resident of Slidell, Louisiana. Live 04/16/83 in Hamburg, Germany: Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown (guitar/vocals), Homer Brown (tenorsax), Bill Samuell (tenorsax), Joe Sunseri (baritonesax), Craig Wroten (piano), Miles Wright (bass), Robert Shipley (drums). HT Dick Clark for bringing this to my attention. ~*~ Cross-posted at [...]

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Boston Legal's Alan Shore on Americans

September 7, 2010 @ 12:01 am

In a recent post at The Libertarian Standard, Akiva claimed that people (in general) get the government they deserve. The US is an imperial-warfare state and a growing surveillance-police state, not to mention a nanny-welfare state. Boston Legal’s left-liberal attorney Alan Shore echoes Akiva’s sentiments in a closing argument in defense of, oddly enough, a [...]

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Should Parents Need a License to Procreate? A Moron Says Yes.

September 6, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

Hugh LaFollette, “Licensing Parents Revisited,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. The premise of his article is that the legitimacy of professional licensing is well-established and the practice should be expanded to parents. While one could argue that it doesn’t follow from professional licensing being applied to various professions that it should be expanded to parents, this [...]

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Progressive Egalitarians Should Be Anti-IP

September 5, 2010 @ 11:35 pm

The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your [...]

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Imperial Doublespeak About Iraq

September 1, 2010 @ 1:18 pm

In a series of Orwellian twists, the United States is pulling out (prematurely some say) “all” “combat” troops from Iraq but doubling down (for starters) on mercenaries. The Obama Administration gets away with “fulfilling” Obama’s promise to end US combat operations in Iraq by removing the last (officially-labeled) combat brigade from the country, yet 50,000 troops [...]

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Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons

September 1, 2010 @ 1:02 pm

I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation. First the passage from Lacy’s article: Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of [...]

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