Unqualified Offerings

Italy is launching a criminal probe into the Sgrena/Calipari shooting incident. (Via Antiwar.com.) I haven’t read the – let’s just call it the American report yet, but it seems unlikely to me that the checkpoint soldiers violated either the letter or spirit of their orders and engagement rules that night. It’s the orders and engagement [...]

The redacted and unredacted editions of the “joint” “inquiry” into the Sgrena-Calipari checkpoint shooting incident, upon which I believe I have written once or twice. Via Drum.
See also a recent Olmsted item on “lies.” I neither accept nor reject the truth of the claim that a satellite measured the speed of the Italian vehicle. The [...]

Liberal theorists in the blogosphere and elsewhere have expended a great deal of energy attempting to problematize desert of income and wealth, with an eye toward justifying taxation. Here’s my question for liberal readers, bloggers and poobahs: Would you identify any particular level of taxation as unjust? Not unwise or counterproductive, but outright immoral and/or [...]

So, something I was discussing tonight with Henry Farrell has been on my mind for much of the weekend: would it be possible to sustain a politics that separates the concept of the social safety net from the paternalistic impulse? Put another way, could you have a welfare state without a rampaging regulatory state? It’s [...]

While she says some things I disagree with in comments to the paternalism post below, Avedon Carol makes a superb point about the costs of drug prohibition and an interesting argument:
“Shift” is the wrong word. The consequences don’t move away from the addict, they are actually increased, compounded, and then those effects branch out, expand, [...]

Went to see this last night with Neighbor Q and a group of his pleasantly geeky friends. I have never been a Hitchhiker’s person. Read the first chapter of the first book, found it a bit breezy and facile, put it down and rarely gave it another thought. If the Caesar’s Bath meme were longer [...]

As part of Catallarchy’s May Day “celebration,” UO friend Nicholas Weininger offers an essay on Hungary’s October Revolution of 1956.