When Whataboutism Is Fair Play
Many, myself included, have wondered what it might take for Trump's staunch supporters to waver, what quantity and quality of dirt would be necessary, and what level of malfeasance would rise, in their minds, to impeachable levels. I'm not asserting that such exists,...
Trump, Cohen, and Behar
Yesterday, two sacks of wet cement thudded on the Trump administration. Paul Manafort, erstwhile Trump campaign chairman, was convicted on 8 counts of of financial shenanigans, and Michael Cohen, erstwhile Trump attorney, pled guilty to a number of criminal charges,...
Sand In The Gearbox
Have you ever written a product review on Amazon? Ever clicked a rating button on Rotten Tomatoes, or IMDb, or Netflix? Ever banged out a song, book, or movie review on iTunes? Added to Wikipedia? Commented on a news or opinion article? Given a purchase feedback on...
Mis-Legalizing Marijuana
Years ago, before marijuana legalization started to really gather momentum, many converts to the idea of legalization put forth the notion that we should legalize it and "tax the shit out of it." They figured that they could rationalize the switch from opposition to...
Keeping ‘Em Poor
New York City, under the stewardship of the more-progressive-than-thou Mayor Bill De Blasio and a city council dominated 48-3 by Democrats, recently became the first city in the nation to impose limits on ride-sharing cars. As I recently blogged, they purportedly did...
Excel At What’s Easy
The Atlantic recently published a bubble-bursting article that cautions young people against the "find your passion" advice they get from parents, from educators, from valedictorians, from commencement speakers, from motivational speakers, and from countless others....
They Broke The Law!
Illegal immigrants have broken the law. For many, that's reason enough to want them all deported, and reason enough to oppose amnesty of any sort, including DREAMer legislation, and to go as far as arguing against birthright citizenship, declaring that the children of...
The Wrong Questions
In the movie that put him on the Hollywood map, Matt Damon, as "Good" Will Hunting, lambasted a Harvard pseudo-intellectual for reading "the wrong ***ing books." He then proceeds to inject garbage politics into the movie by citing Howard Zinn's piece of revisionist...
Hating The Gig Economy
The advent of the information age has created countless new types of jobs and careers. It has also fostered new types of labor freedom for earners, including the ability to work from home, the ability to contract tech services from the other side of the world, and to...
Absolutism And The Somalia Straw Man
If you're a libertarian, you've heard this before. If you're a reflexive basher of libertarianism who lurks in libertarian neighborhoods, you've probably used it. If you're neither, well, read on... A libertarian Facebook page recently posted a screen cap of a...
Wrongthink Trumps Identity
Back in the early 90s, I worked with a young female engineer who was a hard-core feminist and heavily involved in NOW (the National Organization for Women). We got to be friends, and she gave me a lot of insight into the movement. At the time, the rule seemed to be...
Plastic Gun Hysteria
In a textbook combination of "late to the party" and "seize the moment," a number of our liberal politicians have suddenly gone nonlinear over 3D printed guns. Their histrionics would be laughable if they weren't so insidious, because they're acting as if a - the...
Politically Guided Moral Panics
EDITOR'S NOTE: This essay is the second in a series on the Drug War. Part 1: Science In the [first part of this argument][1], the proposal was made that medicine should be given all latitude to study medical issues, drug addiction being one. It posited that with a...
Trade Clarity
After a couple years of constant exposure to Trump's speeches, statements, off-the-cuff remarks and, especially, tweets, it behooves the prudent observer to avoid taking every word literally... AND, to avoid waving off everything he says as "serious but not literal."...
Permits, Protection, and Protectionism
Another summer day, another kid's lemonade stand gets shut down by the government. This time, in upstate New York, where a 7 year old and his dad had the temerity to undercut the prices posted by vendors at a fair. Somebody narced out the kid, the health department...
The T-Scale
I was recently "evicted" from a closed political group on Facebook. It was both amusing and sad, because it was a group I belonged to for years, a group where I had made a good number of Internet friends, and a group born of the foundational site of my political...
When Does Identity Matter?
Scarlett Johansson, who by any reasonable measure has had a stellar movie career and will probably continue to do so for decades, recently got caught in the middle of a social justice imbroglio. The actress, who has since resigned from the role, was cast to play a...
Trump’s Greatest Asset
What if I told you that Trump's greatest asset, the most powerful tool in his arsenal, was not his Twitter account, or his brook-no-criticism supporters, or the swathes of Middle America that feel abandoned by the political and cultural elite, but rather the Left...
Your Dream Is Not Reality
I had another of those "free markets suck" conversations the other day, one that evolved from conversations about supposed disparities in child mortality stats across nations, to socialized medicine, to the supposed failures of free markets in safeguarding against...
Apple Pie Americans and Conservatives of Convenience
One of the greatest frustrations for libertarians and others who believe that principles matter lies in the all-too-often witnessing of people who claim to stand on principle, but throw it out the window when it gives them an answer they don't like. It's incredibly...
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