tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-310378092008-08-06T19:27:26.772-05:00John Markleynoreply@blogger.comBlogger165125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-9962899063304295022008-08-06T19:26:00.000-05:002008-08-06T19:27:26.805-05:00

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where the United States government immolated tens of thousands of innocent people and sentenced tens of thousands more to slower but no less awful deaths by radiation sickness and cancer. Some recommended reading on the subject: Historian Ralph Raico on the circumstances of the bombing, some additional historical context from

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-61904715058841799502008-08-04T23:41:00.004-05:002008-08-05T00:19:11.666-05:00

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, probably the most famous anti-Communist writer of the 20th Century, is dead at 89. His death should be an occasion for self-reflection and shame in the West. Faced with the most monstrous evil in human history, how did the leftist intellectual establishment respond? They strained every nerve to deny or conceal the horrifying truth, and when that ceased to be practical,

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-14115279699191943012008-07-30T14:14:00.002-05:002008-07-30T14:17:47.325-05:00

I apologize for the sparseness of posting lately. And now, an embarrassing admission: I had a new article up on Strike the Root two weeks ago, and I neglected to link to it. Here it is.

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-2357508735536079562008-07-24T00:05:00.004-05:002008-07-24T00:28:47.442-05:00

Over at Distributed Republic, Brandon Berg wonderfully captures my own attitude towards mainstream politics: The problem with pragmatism is that it's just not practical. Ideal pragmatism is great--freed from ideological constraints, you can just do what works!--but ideal pragmatism isn't an option. What we actually get is real-world pragmatism: People's beliefs about what policies produce the

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-72288242237672470162008-07-21T14:09:00.001-05:002008-07-21T14:15:58.793-05:00

Will Wilkinson has an excellent post, “The World is Not a Zoo,” on multiculturalism and the desire to force people into certain cultures.The "zoo" metaphor strikes me as a very good one. Actually, on one of Russ Roberts' EconTalk podcasts, Michael Munger used the term "human zoo" to describe what he saw as one of the driving forces of opposition among Western liberals to free trade with the

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-64145728628176218922008-07-15T17:47:00.002-05:002008-07-15T19:19:13.596-05:00

Imagine you’re walking down the street, minding your own business, when a stranger attacks you without provocation. He rains blows upon you until finally, desperate to protect yourself, you spot an opening and give him a single crack on the jaw. Shocked, your assailant staggers back, looking hurt and offended and asks, sanctimoniously, “When did this relationship become violent?”American

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-41949222062119099792008-07-12T17:36:00.003-05:002008-07-12T22:55:42.186-05:00

Warning: Please note that the first and third links in this post lead to written descriptions of rape, and may be highly disturbing or upsetting.Over at Pajamas Media, I had the bad fortune to encounter what is probably the most disgusting congregation of human vileness I have ever personally encountered on the internet, which is saying something. There are acts more despicable than ridiculing

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-3655067713653761082008-07-08T23:25:00.004-05:002008-07-08T23:55:04.070-05:00

You know what's frustrating about the universe suddenly relieving itself on you without warning? You have all sorts of notes about news stories compiled and ready to use, but then you're suddenly feeling too rotten to get some proper blog posts together, and by the time you're back up and running again it's all too old and out-of-date to use even by my rather generous standards. In lieu of

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-21615665152969789672008-06-26T16:08:00.003-05:002008-06-26T16:13:05.258-05:00

This is a continuation of my previous post on Friedrich Hayek, which gives a bit of context for this one. Previously, I mentioned that, in defense of the idea of a sort of convergence of libertaranism and moderate welfare state liberalism, Will Wilkinson quoted Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty, where Hayek said:All modern governments have made provision for the indigent, unfortunate and

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-77050852746793609752008-06-24T13:05:00.000-05:002008-06-24T13:05:02.296-05:00

Kevin Carson has a post on remarks made by Matthew Yglesias, in which Yglesias said:My ideas really are basically the ideas that were at the core of the bipartisan, establishment consensus throughout the Cold War years. And they're ideas that could and should have been the key ideas of center-left think tanks in the post-9/11 world. But that's not what actually happened. Instead, a set of ideas

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-22488197237190963762008-06-23T22:49:00.000-05:002008-06-23T23:06:06.433-05:00

I’ve been thinking about Friedrich Hayek since he came up in Will Wilkinson’s discussion of liberal-libertarian alliance, which led me to dip into The Constitution of Liberty for the first time since high school. While I admire Hayek greatly, I think libertarians would do better to take him as a treasure trove of ideas to take from rather than as a model for what libertarianism ought to mean.

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-57419273156633141842008-06-21T16:41:00.000-05:002008-06-21T16:44:33.626-05:00

There’s something I’d like to add about the subject of my recent Strike the Root article about Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the police. (Short version: MADD is collaborating with law enforcement to tell teenagers their friends have been killed, then letting them stew in grief for an hour before admitting it was a trick.) I based the article on an account of the MADD program from the San

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-73189512376138658672008-06-20T18:52:00.000-05:002008-06-20T18:53:24.235-05:00

Over at the Mises Institute, their Daily Article is one of my all-time favorites, Albert Jay Nock’s classic essay “Isaiah’s Job.” If you’ve never read it, please go have a look.

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-23626025594192425342008-06-19T00:54:00.000-05:002008-06-19T01:00:36.293-05:00

I've got a new article up at Strike the Root. Have a look.

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-7949814966474439582008-06-13T18:43:00.000-05:002008-06-13T18:54:52.899-05:00

I was pleasantly surprised to see that my post on Will Wilkinson’s proposal for liberal/libertarian alliance drew some interest. My thanks to Will Wilkinson for his response, and to Robert Kaercher for making it one of the links of the day when he was guest editor at Strike the Root. I’ll probably have some more thoughts on this later, but for now I just want to hit a main point and give a

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-9000658693920782972008-06-11T17:33:00.000-05:002008-06-11T17:36:24.350-05:00

I was reading about the case of Amelia S., a 17-year old girl from Indiana with clinical depression who fled National Guard boot camp without authorization and returned home. The Guard tried to force her back to training, in defiance of rules regarding people with diagnosed mental disorders. She has now been released due to public pressure, despite the handicap of being forbidden to retain

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-20199946674485891682008-06-07T17:51:00.000-05:002008-06-07T18:04:21.520-05:00

Will Wilkinson has what I would consider a deeply misguided post about the alleged affinity between libertarianism and big government welfare statist left-liberalism. It’s sort of the bearded mirror universe double of left-libertarianism; left-libertarians like Long, Johnson, Carson, et al. want to radicalize libertarianism and unite it with the anti-statist elements of the Left, whereas

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-61737551941260819372008-06-04T22:26:00.000-05:002008-06-04T23:19:27.047-05:00

I was sad to see at the Mises Institute blog that economist and Mises Institute associate Sudha Shenoy has passed away. You can read more posts about her by Lew Rockwell, Thomas DiLorenzo, B.K. Marcus, Sheldon Richman (with comments by Robert Higgs), Sauvik Chakraverti, Ralph Raico, Peter Klein, Chris Sciabarra, and Steve Horwitz. You can also read an interview with her from 2003. Rest in

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-44118723885888257302008-06-03T15:45:00.000-05:002008-06-03T15:50:26.443-05:00

I just realized that my last three post titles all end in exclamation points. Underneath my mild-mannered exterior lurks a boiling cauldron of rage, apparently. Who would have thought?

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-92014480887644211362008-06-03T15:31:00.000-05:002008-06-03T15:40:30.101-05:00

My middle name is "Drew," and for most of my childhood that's what everyone called me. (And before you become the quadrillionth person to ask: No, it's not short for Andrew.) I'm still called this within my family to prevent confusion, due to the fact that almost every male in my mother's family since the time of the Sumerians has been named "John." I finally switched to using my first name

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-86271949362590668122008-06-02T15:15:00.000-05:002008-06-02T15:17:10.862-05:00

Robert Murphy at Crash Landing comments on the following phenomenon:It always amazes me when someone will complain about the government on some issue, and then some blowhard comes back with, "You're lucky you live in a country where you have the right to criticize the government." And the guy says it like the critic is a whiny teenager or something complaining to her parents about only getting

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-88203521440911124582008-05-26T01:15:00.000-05:002008-05-26T01:23:17.581-05:00

From Rad Geek comes the bizarre story of an elderly man in Florida who was arrested and fined $2,000 for offering a woman who said she needed help getting home- who was actually an undercover agent of the Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Department- a ride home in his car. His offense? After the agent repeatedly demanded to know how much money he wanted for his aid, 78-year old Rosco O’

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-78278775498417370762008-05-21T21:32:00.000-05:002008-05-21T22:04:50.766-05:00

Is a little respect for the English language too much to ask from one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers? The answer, of course, is yes. I found this in today’s online Wall Street Journal: When Steven Barber turned in a short story this semester for his creative-writing class at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, his instructor was alarmed. The 23-year-old student had

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-71349516859379530132008-05-19T17:17:00.000-05:002008-05-19T17:21:40.696-05:00

At Hit and Run, Kerry Howley posted a quote from Paul Samuelson that got me thinking. Samuelson said:Finally, let's discuss poverty. Everyone's against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration -- new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we

John Markleynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31037809.post-65721276502164369122008-05-13T19:06:00.000-05:002008-05-13T19:13:17.620-05:00

Over at my other site, which has been gobbling a lot of my time lately, I've got some thoughts on Utopianism and politics in science fiction that may be of interest.

John Markleynoreply@blogger.com