April 2004

– Don Boudreaux, of the fun, new Cafe Hayek, excerpts and comments upon a passage of Dave Schmidtz’s from Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility (a point/counterpoint affair with Robert Goodin) about income inequality. Dave asks an absolutely crucial question about the sources of income gaps that, astonishingly enough, very smart people often never ask.

– God, I just love this. It reminds me a lot of Mormon paintings of the Prophet translating the Golden Plates envisioning the exploits of the Lost Tribes in the New World. Or a Scientology tract.

– Interesting short piece on rational irrationality by Alfred Mele. I had the good fortune of meeting and chatting with Prof. Mele at a small conference I helped organize for Mercatus on self-deception hosted by Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson. It was a really fascinating couple of days. In particular, I enjoyed meeting Bob Trivers, [...]

– Trying to finish this damn Rawls paper. So, let me tell you, I think A Theory of Justice pivots on a pretty big weasel on Rawls’s part. He says that he’s involved in an exercise in ideal theory. What’s ideal theory? According to Rawls, it’s “strict compliance theory.” That is, we imagine the best [...]

– Pat Tillman, the NFL star who turned down millions of dollars to join the Army Rangers, has been killed in Afghanistan. I am deeply impressed by Tillman, and am grateful for his choice to serve. His family and friends have every reason to be profoundly proud.
I bring up Tillman, because it’s worth bringing up [...]

I love it. It is hands down better than any other web-based email service, especially once you get used to the shorcuts, etc. I’m finding it much more convenient than my local email program, Thunderbird, and it does everything that I loved so much (categories/labels as opposed to folders; swift searchability) about my previous email [...]

[NOTE: The foregoing is excerpted from an online class discussion for Patricia Greenspan's metaethics course at the University of Maryland. This is out of context, but I thought some of you might find it interesting. The topic is whether we should consider the task of moral philosophy to be the systematization of our internal/first-person intuitions [...]

– Judging from this NYT Fashion & Style piece, Ana Marie Cox is all the rage. (Nice dog!) I just want to point out that the Gray Lady failed to note my attendance at the Peter Bergen party. (I was the guy in the burlap thong.) And for that matter, they missed, Matt “Baby” Yglesias [...]

– Julian has announced the next Blogorama. Thursday, April 8, 7:00-ish, Rendevous, Adams Morgan, 18th & Kalorama. No longer a novelty, the Blogorama on Kalorama is now a Washington institution, albeit a pathethic and low-rent institution.

– Being a moral person, a good person, is not about having an ideology, or the ability to deploy arguments in justification of what one has done, or what one believes. It is to a large extent about feeling the right thing at the right time. Look at these pictures of couples recently married in [...]