If there’s one thing liberals and libertarians can agree on, it’s Texas Hold-Em, and since the “liberaltarian” meme hit just before Tuesday’s poker night with an assortment of professional lefty types, it inevitably came up around the table. I can’t say I’m any more optimistic about the prospects for collaboration—there’s nothing like six years of […]

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James Poulos is always a pleasure to read, but he has come up with what is probably the silliest response to the “liberaltarian” meme: To wit, it’s all about casual fucking. Given the inordinate amount of thought he’s devoted to the torrid version of my sex life he’s conjured up, I almost hate to disabuse […]

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As he correctly surmises, I knew my friend Steve Maloney, a Hannah Arendt scholar, would flip out over a stunningly vacuous hit piece on everyone’s favorite theorist of totalitarianism. I kind of tuned out after the reference to the “last great political American philosopher, John Dewey,” but Steve has a witty post exposing the Banality […]

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I’ve heretofore resisted getting sucked into the apparently highly-addictive world of MMORPGs (unless you count a few MOOs from the mid-90s, I guess…) but I may have to finally give in when the just-announced Firefly game gives those of us who’ve been mourning the sci-fi western’s demise one more chance to get back out to […]

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Kathryn Jean Lopez has the smart, decent take on Mary Cheney.

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Apparently, Joel Schumacher is a Robert Anton Wilson fan: My friend Caleb Brown sends word he’s directing an upcoming Jim Carey vehicle called The Number 23, about a man who becomes obsessed with, well, the number 23—seeing it everywhere, and eventually convinced it’s obscurely controlling his life. On the basis of the trailer, it looks […]

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You’d think churning out farcical, desperate attempts to demonstrate some empirical harms of gay marriage would be a full-time job for Stan Kurtz. But he seems to be taking up a sideline in churning out farcical, desperate attempts to demonstrate the harms of atheism now too. Over at The Corner, Kurtz argues that if Russia […]

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My passing mention below of the “line running through Mill and Rawls” gets me, along with Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey, called out by Ezra for going on about lots of abstruse philosomaphy in the course of the ongoing “liberaltarian” discussion. We’ve adverted to certain theoretical shared ground as a reason for thinking some kind […]

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Brink Lindsey’s essay on the possibility of a liberal/libertarian alliance, which I noted yesterday, has elicited a flurry of discussion. Kevind Drum is skeptical, and his comments section provides ample reason to think he’s right to be—while also, incidentally, providing some evidence for my other contention yesterday that lots of us seem content to understand […]

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(Half of Promise Ring) + (bassist from Dismemberment Plan) = good stuff. I managed not to notice these guys until very recently, but was as pleased as I was surprised I found a friend willing to truck out to Northeast at 11 on a frigid Monday night to check ’em out. Give a listen. Addendum: […]

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