Forgiveness
As of right now, I’m willing to forgive Ron Paul a heck of a lot. Barney Frank too. Their bill to legalize marijuana would do a whole lot of good both for our country...
Monthly Archive: June 2011
Jose Antonio Vargas: “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant”
Read the story, then read the story behind the story. Then comment.
The Broad and the Narrow, or How to Beat a Dead Horse
[Ed. Note – I realize this is beating a dead horse at this point, but in my defense, the below was primarily written prior to the last two or three posts on the Metcalf...
Ignoring the Thrust
by E.C. Gach It looks like there’s three different categories of critique which aim at rebutting this “garbage” by Stephen Metcalf over at Slate (I’m open to additional categories I may have missed). 1.)...
School Choice and Single Payer
(This post originally appeared at Forbes. I’m posting it here partly because I think it’s a consistent position to support both single-payer healthcare – something many progressives advocate – and single-payer education – something...
No such thing as bad publicity
Christopher Carr makes an interesting counter-point to my assertion that the Metcalf piece “bodes ill for the liberaltarian project” because: I disagree. For years, libertarians were ignored, like that kid at the high school...
Still More Caricatures of Libertarianism
If anything, I have become more and more of a libertarian the further I’ve moved to the “left”. I say “left” because I think terms right and left have become more than a little...
Painting Conservatism Out of the Corner: A Review of William Voegeli’s Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State
Andrew Sullivan’s recent apologia—or, perhaps, obituary—of conservatism makes at least one very good point: Modern conservatism has painted itself into a corner. Concerning the poor and uninsured, for example, Mr. Sullivan rightly observes that...
Opportunity Costs
Ezra Klein offers a strong response to the right-place, right-time, right-attitude argument about George Washington’s greatness. As president, he points out, Washington did have a variety of choices about how to proceed and opportunities...
X-Men: First Class
I thought X-Men: First Class was loads of fun, largely because of Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy. Here’s Jonathan Last with a pretty interesting post on mutant assimilation. On a more serious note, I...
The rise and fall of libertarian thought
In a lengthy, passionate, and strident new essay on Slate.com, Stephen Metcalf cites the example of Harvard professor Robert Nozick’s transformation from libertarian champion-in-chief to apostate as proof of the ideology’s inherent inability to protect...
On Ned Stark, Ice and Fire
Spoilers after the leap… (First half of the post may have season one show spoilers, after that there is a warning for more book-related spoilers.)
Market Anticonservatism
I see Elias Isquith just read F. A. Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative.” This essay had a formative influence on me, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Isquith asks: I know...
Will Truman joins Not a Potted Plant
Please welcome me in joining Will Truman who will be blogging alongside Burt Likko at Not a Potted Plant here at The League.
Apostasy: an open thread
I see that the Southern Baptists have re-affirmed their belief in hell as “an eternal, conscious punishment,” following views to the contrary expressed by a pastor in Michigan. When I abandoned the fundamentalist Christianity...
Hayek’s “Why I Am Not a Conservative”
From a recent — and typically funny, snotty and merciless — Christopher Hitchens review of David Mamet’s new book, I came across this essay from F.A., which I’d never even heard of before, much...
Well The Midnight Gang’s Assembled…
The Big Man comes on at about 4 minutes in. Strange to think of Clarence Clemons and his saxophone in the past tense — I always kind of thought he’d disappear into back into...
