• Iraq,  Tech

    Sunday rapid fire

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  • Quotes

    Quote of the moment

    From this post at Jane Galt’s

    No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens –Abraham Lincoln

    The commentor was dubbed “Occam’s Beard” which is a name I like.

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  • Economics,  Memes

    A vanishing meme

    One pleasantly departed meme is “War is good for the economy”. While never true (you can’t destroy human and physical capital and have a net increase in the economy) I haven’t heard it that much in the past few years.

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  • Libertarianism,  Politics

    More on the Libertarian Party

    A very well written post on the LP over at the Volokh Conspiracy, to wit:

    Some LP defenders argue that even if the Party doesn’t have any chance of winning, it can at least help educate the public about libertarian ideas. However, there is little if any evidence that the LP has actually had any success in this task over its 35 year history. Those libertarians who have succeeded in spreading libertarian ideas – people like Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and the Cato Institute – have done so without any LP affiliations, and indeed have tried hard to work with the two major parties. Whether fairly or not, the mainstream media and academic world are not going to pay much attention to ideas emanating from a tiny third party that has no chance of winning any elections; therefore, the LP’s educative potential is unlikely to be much greater than its electoral potential.

    If we had a proportional representation electoral system, like many European countries and Israel, a separate libertarian party would make excellent strategic sense. The party (if better run than the dysfunctional LP) could command 10-15% of the vote, thereby winning roughly that percentage of legislative seats, and would be a potential part of a ruling political coalition. A libertarian party might also make sense if one of the major political parties were on the brink of collapses and the libertarian party stood a chance of taking its place (as the Republican Party displaced the Whig Party in the 1850s). However, in the real world, the US is unlikely to move toward proportional representation and neither major political party is likely to collapse anytime soon. Therefore, the cause of libertarianism will be better off without a separate Libertarian Party.

  • Atheism,  Religion

    Annoyances in the media

    It’s atheism this time, Sam Harris in particular. He rapes the mirror in 10 myths — and 10 truths — about atheism. It’s a smarmy read, in particular

    2) Atheism is responsible for the greatest crimes in human history. People of faith often claim that the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot were the inevitable product of unbelief. The problem with fascism and communism, however, is not that they are too critical of religion; the problem is that they are too much like religions. Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok.

    How remarkably pointless. Everything good is on his side, and everything bad, even though explicitly and actively atheist, is on the side of religion.

    What does it say of people who can’t admit that their position on an has an unpleasant side? Libertarianism is unclear on Foreign Policy and weak on the mentally ill. Liberalism is weak on education, conservatism is weak on immigration (pretty much every blend of conservatism). Why not admit these things? Any internally consistent ideology or religious theory will have strong points and weak points by any objective measure,