Blank To The Bone
“Expect to be called a demogogue, but dont be a demogogue.”
“Expect to be called a demogogue, but dont be a demogogue.”
Aha! So this is what happened to the Heritage Foundation.
Statistics wizard Nate Silver talks about the re-launch of FiveThirtyEight on ESPN, political punditry, and burritos.
Libertarians largely agree that the Drug Wars needs to end. Their latest Internet folk hero, however, might make ending those Wars that much harder.
Note: This is part of an ongoing series I’m doing on the growing dangers we face by becoming more ideologically rigid. They are not intended to go in any particular order, and would be more truthfully catalogued as “musings” than “treatise.” You can find the introductory post here. All of the Ideology Is The Enemy…
Over the next several weeks months I will be writing about the recent ascendance of ideology in the United States and why it worries me. Specifically, I worry that the voting public’s generations-long desire to live in a peaceful, vibrant, financially feasible and pluralistic community is being slowly replaced with a willingness to abandon those…
by James Hanley Thanks to all who took the time to take the IDEALog survey and report their results to me, and my apologies for taking so long to present the results. I’ll present the findings in a moment, but first some background and development (just to make this an excruciatingly long post). Background: Liberalism…
~by James Hanley Fellow reader Stillwater, responding to my critique, writes: you [Hanley] keep insisting there is this significant difference between our theories, our policies, our preferred values, our analytical methods. If there isn’t a category difference captured by all those distinctions, then we’re talking about subtle shading on the edges of things. But if…
So what did I think? The Hunger Games is about the empire of economic necessity. If you’re a human being, congratulations. You’re playing the hunger games too. Within just a few hours, you will need clean water, food, shelter from predators and the elements, possibly medical care, and even sometimes safety from each other. How…
~by RTod Two weeks ago I wrote a guest post for the League; it essentially had two central thrusts at its core: The first was trying to define a kind of principle-centered pragmatism. But the second thrust was a bit of a swipe at using political ideology as your primary guiding star. That argument in…
Unlike Lisa, I’m hesitant to describe populism as a complete ideology. The characteristics of American populism she identifies – evangelism, a healthy skepticism towards meritocratic achievement, a reverence for the “ordinary” – are certainly distinct, but they don’t imply a coherent set of political positions. A person can be skeptical of meritocratic achievement and embrace…
[Updated] Writing of Evan Bayh, Ross Douthat opines: America needs politicians who stake out interesting, politically-courageous positions on important policy questions. What it doesn’t need is politicians who occupy the safest possible ground on the great issues of the day, shift slightly left or slightly right depending on the state of public opinion, and then…
Jonah Goldberg has a very smart response to Jim Manzi’s reflections on “liberty-as-means” libertarians vs. “liberty-as-goal” libertarians. I want to focus on Jonah’s post here, but you should read Manzi as well. Jonah writes: My own view is that the Right is intellectually healthier and more creative because its dogma remains unsettled (yes, I’ve written…
Indulge me, if you will, in a little self-reflection. I would probably describe myself as a libertarian conservative. I’m pretty sympathetic to the ideas of limited, decentralized government, free markets, and a decent respect for history and the culture. One thing I can’t muster, however, is the righteous certitude that seems to characterize so many…
I was going to write a longer post on this, but one interesting consequence of Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a decision I support, however tentatively) is the ad hoc redrawing of foreign policy battle lines. So you now have a hawkish Republican congressman arguing for withdrawal/some variant of the Biden “counter-terrorism”…
Via Andrew, Felix Salmon pokes holes in a list of necessary reforms from Nassim Taleb: Taleb’s first principle is that “nothing should ever become too big to fail”. But all economies have too-big-to-fail institutions; they always have, and they always will. Looking at the rest of the list, how on earth do you stop the…
J.L. Wall, writing in response to Scott’s treatise on 21st Century Conservatism, writes: There’s a danger in a self-conscious tradition, and a tradition in which it’s acceptable to toss off a limb for the sake of the whole — traditions, in addition to being billion-headed rabbis (not letting that analogy go, folks), are like starfish:…