Speaking of orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and their relative rewards: I’ve had occasion to recall something Yglesias wrote about a year back, responding to one of my own posts about the popular charge that insufficiently strident conservatives must just be venal climbers hoping to curry favor with liberals: I think this situation is rather more complicated than […]

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Via some outfit called VoIP News, I’m intrigued to learn that my insidious paymasters at Cato number among the 15 greatest enemies of net neutrality. Scary!  Turns out Cato is a “hired voice of reason” which, along with CEI “seems to draw its funding from a smattering of every major corporation ever to fund lobbyists.” […]

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If you tell me there’s a squabble between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my instinct is to side with EFF before I even ask what it’s about.  If you tell me some group is trying to use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get a critical website taken down, I’m […]

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I’m a huge fan of Patrick McGoohan’s classic series The Prisoner, but for such a visually striking program, the quality of the A&E DVD release always left something to be desired. So I’m pretty psyched to see that we’ll be getting a BluRay version next week. Judging by the clips I’ve seen from the British […]

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xI’ve been debating the Heritage Foundation’s Jena Baker McNeill on the USA PATRIOT Act over at the LA Times all week: You can check out round one and round two, with the final bout scheduled for this afternoon. It’s frankly been a bit frustrating so far—I think it’s telling that PATRIOT defenders are so reluctant […]

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I’ve got one of a bunch of letters in the Sunday Washington Post objecting to their facile editorial on PATRIOT Act renewal, which weirdly asserted that a “reasonable balance” is struck by a bill that reauthorizes surveillance powers almost unaltered. My original letter, incidentally, had somewhat more pointedly said that the Post “duly transcribed” the […]

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Via Andrew, I see that conservative news outlets haven’t been even a little shamed by the serial exposure of previous slanders against “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings.  The Washington Times‘ editorial bashing Jennings for penning the foreword to Queering Elementary Education isn’t just stupid and offensive, as you’d expect; it’s downright bizarre. As you would […]

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Sez they: The loss of two people, even high ranking ones, might not seem too brutal but for the website’s recent history: it lost a quarter of its staff last November, along with a closely-aligned development executive at parent company CondéNet; then in April it lost more staff, including managing editor Leander Kahney, two other […]

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I have a probably excessive analysis over at Cato.

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Via Spencer and Lindsay Beyerstein, apparently Double-X has hired some kind of sociopath as a “friendship advice” columnist. And by “sociopath,” I mean the sort of person who thinks that it’s too much to ask that putative friends (a) not ditch another friend who mysteriously vanishes in a state of obvious distress on a night […]

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