I found a great morph of Olbermann and O’Reilly:
Tag Archives | Left and Right
Rand Paul Petition
If you’re interested in signing a petition asking Rand Paul to support Red & Black Café’s right to bar cops from their premises, click here.
(I don’t know how thrilled the Café would be with Paul’s support – but I doubt they’re at much risk of getting it ….)
China Syndrome
Larry Arnhart has a blog post about my article (original draft here, revised but shorter version here) on libertarian themes in Confucian thought.
A caveat: as you’ll see, Larry seems more sympathetic to the Burkean side of Confucianism than I am; on the issue of tradition I think the Confucians take a genuine piece of the truth and blow it up to be much more of the truth than it is, at the expense of the recognition that a great deal of tradition is oppressive and needs to be combated. As I say in the original article, “the Confucians can all too often be preachy, hidebound, starchy apologists for an authoritarian status quo”; so I get a little worried when Larry takes the moral of my article to be the need to respect the “communitarian authority of social traditions.”
Clueless Cesca
Bob Cesca, a comedian apparently, is complaining that the free market hasn’t solved the oil spill crisis.
Rothbard on Dukakis
In addition to what you can find at Liberty magazine’s official site, there’s a trove of back issues of Liberty on Mises.org. (CHT Jesse Walker, who has a good labortarian piece on pp. 53-57 here.)
It’s been pointed out that “G. Duncan Williams,” the pseudonymous author of a sort-of-pro-Dukakis piece about the Bush-Dukakis presidential race on pp. 12-14 of the November 1988 Liberty, was actually Murray N. Rothbard, not yet in full paleo mode. (In addition to Rothbard’s distinctive style, having the same number of letters per name could be a clue.)
Ah, memories. I also wrote a sort-of-pro-Dukakis piece that year; it was my declaration of independence from the Republican Party. (Rothbard’s farewell to the GOP had obviously come much earlier.)
Maddow Bashes Anarchism
Just saw Rachel Maddow explaining that Republicans have a secret hankering for anarchism (if only!), and that the spurious appeal of statelessness can be refuted by considering the nightmarish conditions in Mogadishu, capital of stateless Somalia (interesting that she just happens to pick the area of Somalia with the highest government presence).
The truth, of course, is that in Somalia as a whole, security and prosperity have improved, not deteriorated, as a result of state collapse.
I just sent her (no doubt pointlessly) the links to Benjamin Powell et al.’s article “Somalia After State Collapse: Chaos or Improvement?” (observatori.org/paises/pais_74/documentos/64_somalia.pdf) and Peter Leeson’s “Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse” (peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf).
If anyone wants to join me in this probably futile gesture, her address is rachel@msnbc.com.