The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Conflicting Accounts of Obama’s Foreign Policy Achievements

by Ethan Gach May 1, 2012

Andrew Sullivan wants Obamaites to more aggressively tout the President’s foreign policy achievements: “I think the Obamaites need to be more aggressive in foreign policy arguments. Obama ended one war in Iraq, dispatched Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi without a single US casualty, re-set relations with Russia, brought unprecedentedly united international pressure against Iran’s nuclear bomb potential, wiped out much of al Qaeda’s mid-level leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and presided over democratic revolutions in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain. He restored ...

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May’s Embarrassment of Riches – A Books & Reading Open Thread

by Tod Kelly April 30, 2012

For the past few months I have been bitching to friends and family that I can’t find anything good to read. So I am really looking forward to the next four weeks. May 2012 looks to be a pretty great time to be a reader, at least if you’re me. (Mind you, part of this has to do with the fact that I only found out recently that two of my perennial favorite writers released books in the past few ...

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The Politics Of Envy

by Elias Isquith April 30, 2012

Have you noticed the strain of contemporary right-wing thinking in which the speaker purports to be advocating something egalitarian in nature, but is actually using envy to fuel even greater inequality? It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the “We must repeal Obamacare in order to save our children” line. When done correctly, it’s really an impressive move — the kind of trick the word “sophistry” only begins to describe. And if you haven’t seen it done yet, you will ...

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Constitutional Authority Statements

by Ryan Noonan April 30, 2012

I was getting ready to write something about the new Social Networking Online Protection Act (SNOPA for short – couldn’t get another O in there, guys?), and its intersection with the free market, libertarianism more generally, and the liberal idea of how freedom really works. Instead, I got totally sidetracked. I headed over to THOMAS (one of my favorite resources) to look up the actual text of the bill so I might have something interesting to say, looked up the ...

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A Question for Techies, Engineers and the Libertarian-Leaning

by Tod Kelly April 30, 2012

Reading an old “office war story” by Wardsmith over the weekend, it struck me that most of the libertarian leaning people I know in my fleshbot life work as engineers, programmers, or in some other kind of “techie” capacity. Also, in my experience those industries have a far higher population percentage of people who describe themselves as libertarian leaning. And since there are a lot of people here that have far more experience with both the tech and libertarian worlds ...

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Wiring the Wonky Left’s Moral Compass

by Conor P. Williams April 30, 2012

Thanks in no small part to Andrew Sullivan and Rod Dreher, my post last week on the “Wonky” American Left has generated some interesting discussion. Given that I’ve been unsuccessfully pushing this argument for a few years, I couldn’t be happier with the response. Debate beats quietude every day of the week. Here’s a modest attempt to respond to some of the most common complaints and questions I received (Thanks to those who provided feedback!):

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MON TIKI project update, 4/28/12

by David Ryan April 28, 2012

This weeks we got the hulls up on dollies, the beams up on the hulls and me up on the beams. It was an exiting week!

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Corporate Hierarchy, Job Security, and Political Identity

by Tod Kelly April 28, 2012

My first job in a real sales capacity was in the employ of a behemoth Fortune 500 company. Of all the companies with whom I have ever had a professional association of any kind, it is by far the largest. For many reasons (some of which I have noted elsewhere) it was the worst job of my adult life. I worked on the outside sales team, and our job was to go out in the field to cold call on ...

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248 Small Government Party Members Vote “Yea” on CISPA

by Patrick Cahalan April 27, 2012

(Edited to add) Erik and I crossed the streams. From there: One important thing to glean from this, especially when held up in contrast with the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, two bills aimed at combating online piracy, is that once you tack the word “security” onto a bill it becomes far more toxic to oppose. The Tea Party may be the small government wing of the Republican Party, but when it comes to national security suddenly limiting the state ...

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First Quarter 2012 GDP At 2.2%

by Elias Isquith April 27, 2012

News on the economy today and it’s looking increasingly like the happy surprises which characterized the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 were aberrations.

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Friday Jukebox

by Mark Thompson April 27, 2012

Bob. A guitar. 1970-ish. Hanging out in a hotel room.* Nothing else. No one else.** ‘Nuff said. Sometimes less is more. *IIRC. **Well, except for the guy doing the recording.

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Forget About Undecided Voters

by Elias Isquith April 26, 2012

Credit where it’s due — this, from the Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost, is on-the-money: I would say that 90 percent of the vote is pretty well set. And this is the biggest reason that I am skeptical of these predictive models — they usually fail to account for the fact that there were simply more gettable voters for Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, or even Reagan in 1984. They assume that a president today can still win ...

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Debt and Career Choices

by Mike Dwyer April 26, 2012

The President wants to keep student loans cheap. Because I believe in higher education with all of my heart and soul, it would seem natural for me to support this proposal. As the parent of a child that starts college in the fall this proposal would assist our goal of giving her a quality education. But it doesn’t. While I am not willing to go so far as to say the government should do away with school loans, I would like to ...

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13.1

by Jason Kuznicki April 25, 2012

See that fellow over there? He’s running a half marathon. He’s probably in a world of pain. Possibly, though, he’s running laps around heaven itself. It’s 6:10AM, last Saturday. It helps that I’m a morning person. I never need to set an alarm. I’m just awake. I suit up. Contact lenses. Take the asthma meds. Put on the iPod. Head out. My dad taught me long distance running. I don’t think he meant to give me a safe, cheap, legal, ...

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The Sometime Blogger Formerly Known As…

by Ryan Noonan April 25, 2012

Hello all! Sorry I’ve been kind of out of touch for a month or so. I’ve had a lot of big things going on, the second-biggest of which was getting a new job. The first-biggest, of course, is that I went and got hitched.

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On Quin Hillyer’s Nuanced And Thought-Provoking Treatise On Race

by Elias Isquith April 25, 2012

Lord help me, I’m going to write about race s’more.

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The Rise of the Wonky Left

by Guest Authors April 25, 2012

~by Conor P. Williams I. What’s wrong? Remember back, if you can, to January 2009. It seemed to be a completely untainted transformational moment. To hear the Beltway chatter, this was the final unraveling of the Reagan Era and the dawning of a new progressive movement that could redeem the Bush Administration’s multifarious failures. Four years on, and those memories are sepia-stained by an infusion of Tea Party vitriol. Indeed, for all that 2009 resembles the Left’s current situation, it ...

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Austerity On The Run

by Elias Isquith April 25, 2012

I wanted to flag this before it became too much Old News. Andrew Sullivan, still a self-described conservative and a tireless deficit hawk, has looked to the events in Europe and concluded that austerity — at least for the time being and in a democratic context — simply doesn’t work:

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Marginal cases and virtue

by Rose Woodhouse April 24, 2012

Children are marginal cases. Talking about ethics in terms of autonomy, or rights — Kantian ethics — famously leaves children, especially very young children, in an odd place. I have addressed this elsewhere in a couple of specific applied issues. In this post, I wanted to talk about the greater theoretical issue.

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Can We Have Post-Modern Faith?

by J.L. Wall April 24, 2012

A new study out of the University of Chicago shows, in its words, a “modest” decline of belief in God globally, with dramatic variations among individual countries. I don’t want to argue about the value or non-value of surveys attempting to pinpoint whether God has a constituency problem—but I do want to make a point about the terminology it, and we, use when talking about belief and non-belief. The survey notes that 60.6% of Americans agree with the statement, “I ...

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Why I Read Bryan Caplan

by Jason Kuznicki April 24, 2012

I know I often disagree with him. But then there’s stuff like this: “What’s stopping Warren Buffett from paying more taxes?” is a red herring. The fundamental question is: “Why is government’s share of the voluntary donations market so damn small?” All genuinely charitable donations suffer from the Prisoners’ Dilemma… That’s probably a big part of the reason why charity is only a few percent of GDP. But none of this explains why out of the more $300 billion that ...

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