Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Big-Government Libertarianism

Interesting Tyler Cowen piece on libertarianism going forward. His vision for libertarianism strikes me as quite compatible with the goals of DLC-style neoliberalism, but with a better overall story -- "positive liberty" rather than pragmatic liberalism.

Oh, and he also comes up with a nice metaphor regarding global warming:
Yes, I know some of you are climate skeptics. But if the chance of mainstream science being right is only 20% (and assuredly it is much higher than that), we still have, in expected value terms, a massive tort. We don’t let people play involuntary Russian roulette on others with a probability of 17% (one bullet, six chambers), so we do need to worry about man-made global warming.

New Contest

All right now! The AI competition is warming up over at Murphies. The goal of this contest is to rank the winners at the Murphies who are ranking the AI contest. You can take into consideration any comments a poster makes about the audience's misapprehensions regarding talent, but CANNOT take into consideration any comments a poster has made outside the AI thread in analyzing the poster's ability to pass judgment in a reasoned manner (e.g. lunatic ravings about global warming, regardless of which side you're on). That would not be right.

The winner gets a copy of "An Inconvenient Truth".

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Settling scores

Senator Obama has paid a serious price for his impudence and learned that, when you're in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you best not mess with a bearer of one of the great surnames in American politics.

It's just idiocy

See, this is how you keep your US Attorney job in Dick Cheney's America. Just keep on ignoring the sweatshop conditions at a defense contractor until you can develop the immigration case. Deport the illegal immigrants who actually support our troops in a concrete, non-car-magnet-based way. It's just that easy.