Thinking about my post from last night, I realized how strange you might think me for assuming that there’s greater risk to liberty from police and prosecutors misbehaving than there is from letting a certain number of criminals get off on “technicalities.” Thankfully, with impeccable timing, we got this report today from the New York Times, summarizing a study by [...]
Sam, I agree with you that Rand Paul is off base in his remarks about the Civil Rights Act, but I have a few quibbles about the way you make your argument. (I see that when you aren’t going after Ayn, you are going after Rand with equal intensity. Young libertarians seem to love the Rands as much as young collectivists seem to despise them!) Now I [...]
First, I think Adam Serwer has really crystallized the basic problem with how conservatives (and a fair number of over-polite liberals) talk about race. It seems really weird to give Goldwater all this credit for not being personally racist while championing a cause supported by racists, and say this is the same thing as Kennedy and Johnson being racist but [...]
Sam Barr’s most recent post makes the rather shocking claim that Rand Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Kentucky being vacated by the retiring Jim Bunning, is a racist, or at least that he is not a non-racist. Sam deduces this from the fact that Mr. Paul is not a “consistent libertarian,” that he “picks and [...]
As I said yesterday, the Kentucky Senate race between Rand Paul and Jack Conway should be a real battle. Paul is probably not helping himself by insisting, as many libertarian ideologues but few Senate hopefuls do, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was wrong to ban racial discrimination in private establishments like restaurants and movie theaters. INTERVIEWER: Would you have [...]
Andrew Breitbart's May 2010 defense of the Tea Party in an exclusive interview with the HPR
I want to comment on Sam’s final club post from the other day, which I find compelling but nevertheless insufficient. Let me try to explain why. Sam gives us the standard-line “progressive critique” of the clubs. His is an argument that’s been made many times before — by the likes of April Yee here, Sabrina Lee here, and most recently by [...]
Obama and Democrats in Congress had a new proposal last week: require groups making public statement to show their face with their messages, reported the New York Times. For a country plagued with people using the veil of anonymity to mask unnecessary baseness, this can only be a positive change and a hopeful sign of a push for changes in [...]
Alex Copulsky’s reporting on the Tea Party is hilarious. If you haven’t seen his post yet, go check it out. But his sightings of ”trolls” — people unsympathetic to the Tea Party movement who are there just to make it look bad – corroborate the reports we’ve been hearing about left-wing activist groups mobilizing to crash the Tea Party events and frame them as [...]
In case you aren’t sick of the subject, I have written a full-length take-down of the recent Harvard Salient article on Ethnic Studies. It originally appeared in today’s Harvard Independent. Check out my HPR blog post from last week if you want the pithier, more sarcastic version. An Embarrassment to Harvard Conservatives Harvard conservatives, those Aristotle-citing, modernity-bemoaning, Western canon-promoting Young [...]
I’m not always wild about The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, but I think he has a very perceptive post about Israel’s relationship with the United States. He points out that the ultra-conservative governments that have been in power lately have been doing their best to alienate their potential American supporters, particularly young American Jews. Namely, that actions like Gaza or their [...]
If you’ve seen Avatar and haven’t yet read Annalee Newitz’s article “When will white people stop making movies like this?” then you’re missing out. Avatar — putatively anti-racist, seemingly simple and beautiful and extraordinarily entertaining — is in fact, she argues, mired with subtle racial biases and white ethnocentrism. She writes: These are movies about white guilt. Our main white [...]
Public discourse in the age of the Internet Republic.com 2.0 by Cass Sunstein Princeton University Press, September 2009, $24.95, 272 pp. Create Your Own Economy by Tyler Cowen Dutton Adult, July 2009, $25.95, 272 pp. Cass Sunstein begins Republic.com 2.0 by asking his readers to imagine a world where their control over the media they consume is total.”It is some [...]
