Australia joins China in censoring the internet

Eugene Volokh has a thoughtful post about the matter. There’s not much I need to add. A sad day for freedom.

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Atheism doesn’t necessarily imply common sense

Via a post by Althouse, I was alerted to this recent Richard Dawkins quote about children reading Harry Potter and other fantasy fiction:
I think it is is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know…
I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read [...]

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On Bob Barr, and an endorsement

I am not an American citizen and hence not eligible to vote. If I did though, I’d vote for Bob Barr.
Yes, that Bob Barr. The guy who authored the insidious “Defence of marriage Act”. A former drug warrior extraordinaire.  Socially conservative ex-Republican.
And the Libertarian candidate for President.
Suffice it to say that Barr is the real [...]

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Britney Spears under permanent conservatorship

From the Fox report:
Lawyers for the pop princess asked that the temporary co-conservatorship (which was due to end on Dec. 31) be made permanent on Tuesday afternoon and Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Riva Goetz granted the request.
Britney’s father Jamie will now have long-term control over her assets, estate and business affairs and Spears’s mental [...]

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Neutrality in crisis

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”
- Dante Alighieri
[Edit: A reader points out that this quote is actually due to JFK, who (incorrectly) attributed it to Dante]

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Then and now

Charles Krauthammer in October, 2006:
When just a week ago Barack Obama showed a bit of ankle and declared the mere possibility of his running for the presidency, the chattering classes swooned. Now that every columnist in the country has given him advice, here’s mine: He should run in ’08. He will lose in ’08.
And the [...]

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The war on drugs takes a different shape

Three New York policemen gang-rape a man with a walkie-talkie antenna, for, you guessed it, smoking some pot.
(Hat Tip: The Agitator)

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I am off for the weekend

I am out of town for the next three days. So there will probably be no posts till Sunday night.
Have a nice weekend.

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Libertarianism as viewed from the other side

Pandagon has a post criticizing libertarianism, and it has generated an enormous number of similarly veined comments. Most of them are inane but some of them are surprisingly well written (that is not to say I agree with them).
Why am I linking to this? Well, there’s too much of an echo chamber going around these [...]

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Why the Republicans must lose

There are at least two good reasons why libertarians should not be supporting McCain this election.
One of those is fairly straightforward: Obama is better. I have written several posts in the past elaborating on this point. To put it briefly, Obama is no libertarian, not even close, but on some of the most important issues [...]

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The slippery slope effect of hate-speech laws

David Bernstein has a fine post where he explains the perils of having ‘reasonable restriction on free speech’ such as hate speech laws:
When I was in law school, advocates of weakening First Amendment protections to restrict “hate speech” pointed to Canada as a shining example of how egregious expression could be banned without threatening freedom [...]

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Barcarolle from Les Contes d’Hoffmann

My car radio is usually tuned to FM 91.5, better known as classical KUSC. The channel plays beautiful classical music, but because they are listener supported, every three months they go on donation overdrive.
So, I was listening to them go on and on about how I should help keep the music going, and that if [...]

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Ideological echo chambers

In an article published at Newsweek and Slate, Jacob Weisberg says the current crisis proves that “[libertarianism] makes no sense”. In fact he goes further than that:
Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world’s failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult [...]

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The world is connected

“Many philosophers of the present day are convinced that every existing thing and event is logically unconnected with any other and could disappear from the world without necessarily affecting anything else. Such a rubbish-heap view of the world I cannot accept.”
– Brand Blanshard.

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Milton Friedman on the war on drugs

Milton Friedman, Nobel prize winning economist  — and one of my personal idols — was among the most influential libertarian thinkers of the last century. Friedman was primarily a consequentialist, meaning he advocated libertarian policies based on the fact that they work better. Such an approach has the great advantage of political effectiveness. If you [...]

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