- High Hitler (drugs, drugs, drugs!)
- every generation gets the drugs it deserves
- Lawsplainer on federal and state marijuana laws
- why illegally obtained evidence is generally inadmissible in court
- Putin and patriotism: national pride after the fall of the Soviet Union (excerpt)
- long, fraught history of Pakistan and the US
- Old Dogs, New Tricks: Turkey and the Kurds
- Good piece, but I’m still waiting for a great book (or article) on the Hanseatic League. All the great ones are probably in German…
Ken White
Worth a gander
- Zero hour for Generation X
- Confederate flags and Nazi swastikas together? That’s new.
- America at the end of all hypotheticals
- What’s left of libertarianism?
- Factual free market fairness
- Thinking about costs and benefits of immigration
BC’s weekend reads
- Cairo’s Chinatown
- Informational post on Turkish grand strategy
- Free speech for me, but not for thee (SPLC edition)
- Experts and the gold standard and, really, a big key to continued economic development
- A bunch of new earth-like planets have been found. The Long Space Age (peep the dates)
BC’s weekend reads
- the Economist endorses the Liberal Democrats in UK election (in Europe, a liberal democrat is roughly the same thing as a libertarian in the US)
- “One of the most important lessons of Trump’s success is that classically liberal rhetoric and positions were not very important to voters.“
- “It turns out that Westerners are rational, virtuous, and liberty-loving, while Orientals are irrational, vicious, and slavish.“
- The West is indifferent to Afghanistan and Iraq’s world of terror
- Roman slavery, revolution, and magic mushrooms
- What the fuck?
BC’s weekend reads
- Turkey and the Case of the Magical Vanishing Coup
- Is the overthrow of a democratically elected government ever justified?
- John and Abigail Adams educated their son, John Quincy, to become the worthy successor of the Founding generation of the new regime
- An American economist’s observations from Europe
- The Influence of Culture on Science, and the Culture of Science
- Confessions of an Ex-Prosecutor
PS: Did anyone else notice that the Brexit vote was 51%-49%? I mean, there’s a lot to think about there, especially for libertarians who claim that democracy sucks but Brexit/Nexit/Grexit is totally and completely justified if the people demand it…
BC’s weekend reads
- The debt of a Pope called Francis to past Syrian refugees, Part 1 (be sure to check out parts 2 and 3, too)
- Ten Things I Want My Children To Learn From 9/11 (and also “Ten (or So) Lessons of 9/11“)
- Hellburners Were the Renaissance’s Tactical Nukes
- The Inevitable Divorce: Secular France and Radical Islam
- How Petty Traffic Fines Ruin Lives in Milwaukee (and Everywhere in America)
- Edwin and Barry both have excellent posts on current events in Europe and the Near East (Jacques has a related post); be sure to scroll through all the comments in their respective threads…
Around the Web
- Olivier Roy on Laicite as Ideology, the Myth of ‘National Identity’ and Racism in the French Republic
- Prague ’68 and the End of Time
- How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies
- The Swamping that Wasn’t: The Diaspora Dynamics of the Puerto Rican Open Borders Experiment
- A Voice Still Heard: Irving Howe
- Borders and Bobbing Heads: Postcoloniality and Algeria’s Fiftieth Anniversary of Independence (so close, and yet so far…)
- The New Yorker on the recent scientific fraud, with its epicenter at my alma mater. (Delacroix remains startlingly relevant because of it.)
Ken White explains the legal logic of the Ferguson shooting
Read the whole damned good post at Popehat.
In other news, I read a post from somewhere calling out libertarians for not voicing an opinion about the Ferguson shooting. I think the post also managed to blame libertarians for the militarization of police forces across the country.
Seriously.
Dave Weigel points out the obvious over at Slate; Ilya Somin takes the writer who tried to claim libertarians didn’t care about black people getting shot by police departments to task over at Volokh Conspiracy (a very good blog, by the way); Dan Balz (hehe) points out in the WaPo that Ferguson is only strengthening the libertarian wing of the GOP; Senator Rand Paul’s op-ed in Time is required reading if you take your US citizenship seriously.
Update 8/18: Here is Congressman Ron Paul in 2002 asking rhetorically, on floor of the House of Representatives (the lower parliamentary house in the US federal government), if America has become a police state.
Around the Web
- Criminal defense attorney Ken White has the most thoughtful take on the recent SCOTUS ruling that pit Clarence Thomas against Antonin Scalia
- Ayn Rand versus evolutionary psychology. Economist Bryan Caplan explains why Ayn Rand was wrong
- Why were American Economics textbooks so Pro-Soviet? A great question from Caplan (again)
- Inequality: Haven’t we had this discussion before? Economist Peter Boettke, a specialist in the history of economic thought, asks the question
- Remembering Why Hayek Mattered. A political scientist from Princeton, Keith Wittington, provides a great example
Around the Web
- Permanent War versus Peace; Professor Angelo Codevilla elaborates
- Law professor at Fordham deceptively carries on the tradition of censorship-cheerleading; Ken White elaborates (Senior Editor Warren Gibson has also touched on this before)
- What if Mengele cured cancer? Bryan Caplan (who else?) asks the question
- Another law professor from Fordham, Nicholas Johnson, has a great post on The Bad Gun Dumpster
- Negroes and the Gun: Non-violent Winchesters and the fine art of concealed carry in the modern civil rights movement; Another, newer post by Mr Johnson elaborating upon one of the concepts in his new book
Around the Web
- College football metrics: machines say the Pac-12 is the strongest football conference, humans erroneously believe the SEC is stronger
- Ken White on the cultural implications of the War on Drugs
- Orin Kerr on the case that sparked Ken White’s analysis I linked to above
- Ali Ezzatyar, a lawyer at UC Berkeley’s Program on Entrepreneurship and Development in the Middle East, makes The Case for Kurdistan
- A Barton Hinkle, echoing Dr Delacroix’s recent work, advises us to ‘cheer up’ because things are getting better (thanks to capitalism)
Around the Web
- When governments go after witches
- Borders, Ethnicity and Trade [pdf]
- A Lonely Passion. Libertarians in China
- Halloween in Germany: read this with globalization and its critics in mind
- Should Japan take the lead in mediating US-Iranian talks? Props to Obama, by the way
- Another excellent Free Speech blurb from Ken White
- Culture in a Cage
Around the Web
- Ken White has the best post of the year (so far) on free speech
- Angelo Codevilla on the US’s god-awful intelligence apparatus
- Reclaiming fairness as a precept of commerce. Bart Wilson argues that we’ve been a-travelin’ down the wrong path.
- Contra Dr Delacroix‘s thoughtful argument, Jon Harrison thinks the GOP is terminally stupid
- Imagining a remapped Middle East: Robin Wright muses about how 5 countries could become 14 (and a map for context)
- A ‘comments’ thread on a libertarian blog in which a lone libertarian takes on some of the neo-reactionary elements that Andrew has been blogging about.
Around the Web
- How to use sex like a Russian spy
- East German socialists created their own 10 Commandments
- Chinese tourists warned by Beijing not to urinate in public (put on your anthropologist cap)
- Ralph Raico on Wilhelm von Humboldt, Germany’s most infamous classical liberal
- The persistent appetite for orthodoxy; one of the best indictments of collectivism I’ve read in a while
Notes On Liberty 