Unqualified Offerings

Arthur Silber’s latest is worth reading in its entirety. It’s a pretty comprehensive argument for anarchism. A voice at the back of my head notes that there are some big, big governments out there, in terms of their social-economic footprint, that don’t seem bent on ruling the world by force. In fact, during those heady [...]

As a follow-up to Mona, Arnold Kling is one of those people who really ought to stop writing about foreign policy altogether for a long time, however much I worry, like Justin Logan, about the downside for local real-estate values in an already disastrous market. Tyler Cowen had the decency to stop writing about the [...]

Honestly, this outcome doesn’t sound so bad to me. I suppose if I imagined that it were somehow possible to not have heroin dealers in the world, it would bother me more. Or maybe there’s a darker aspect to the story Henry omits. Otherwise, while I’m against legislating against the large national chains, I do [...]

Jason Kuznicki weighs in on the earmark issue I raised the other week. He’s agin’ ‘em. Meanwhile, it looks like the bridge to nowhere will be the bridge from nowhere too.
BONUS MATERIAL: An etymology of the word “earmark.” Turns out it originally had something to do with marking ears!

By Mona
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Arnold Kling invokes the “political problem” of “hindsight bias” to detract from the fact that many astute folks — a minority, including our own Jim Henley — were quite correct about the practical reasons (setting aside the moral ones) for not invading Iraq:

…the unexpectedly low cost of invading Afghanistan may have been [...]

“Baiting” is a corrupt and depraved practice. The Language used to discuss and justify it is corrupt and depraved language.
There are longer ways to say the above, but none more accurate.

On one level, I can sympathize with, and even geek out over, the task of military casualty analysts in Baghdad, as profiled by Karen DeYoung in today’s Washington Post. But analysts and managers are always at risk of becoming prisoners of their categories, and the more different ways you have of measuring performance, the greater [...]

By Thoreau
Jennifer has alerted me to a site where cops complain about getting speeding tickets.  They even announce the names of cops who gave them speeding tickets, in hopes that other cops will take notice of this “unprofessional behavior.”  Um, yeah.  Sure.
I doubt that the creators of that site realize this, but by highlighting instances [...]