From the monthly archives:

April 2004

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

April 30, 2004

– Derby time. Here is your annual required reading.

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Argh! Who Goes There!

April 30, 2004

– For family and friends who have not had the pleasure of seeing me bearded, feast your eyes on this:

It’s from the America’s Future Foundation Valentine’s Day panel on courtship and dating (about internet dating, really). My comments on internet dating boiled down to: it’s just like regular dating, but with the internet. Anyway, ’twas [...]

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Risky Pleasures

April 30, 2004

– I don’t understand this passage in the WaPo story about the accession of ex-communist countries to the EU:
“Fifteen years after the Berlin Wall fell, the eight — who will join with Cyprus and Malta — have traded the straitjackets of planned economies and one-party rule for the risky pleasures of democracy and capitalism.”
According [...]

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Widening Inequality . . . It’s Good for Everybody!

April 29, 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.

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Idols of the Tribe

April 28, 2004

– In light of this, I feel I must make some announcements.
I am not a very good driver.
I am no better than average at getting along with others.
I am about as moral as most people. (Better about some things, worse about others.)
I am not going to heaven.
If I believed in God, it would [...]

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The Great Chain of Ayn Rand

April 26, 2004

– 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.

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Racist Republicans?

April 26, 2004

– Googling Social Change Workshop faculty member Gerard Alexander for his email address, I ran across his recent review piece in the Claremont Review of Books on theThe Myth of the Racist Republicans. It’s a careful demolition of a persistent piece of conventional wisdom. Before this came out, I ran into Gerard in the politics [...]

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Rational Irrationality, etc.

April 26, 2004

– 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, [...]

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Johnnies 4, Mids 1

April 25, 2004

– It was an amazingly lovely day yesterday in Annapolis.

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More Rawls Blogging: Fudging Ideal Theory

April 25, 2004

– 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 [...]

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Holy Fucking Shit, Dude. I Totally Understand EVERYTHING Now

April 23, 2004

– OK. I’ve been waiting for this study for years. Now we’re halfway home! I’ve had a hypothesis since my undergrad days that there was a distinct set of neural mechanisms responsible for the “Aha!” experience, and the linked study seems to show that. NEXT, they need to put people on LSD in the MRI [...]

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Pat Tillman, RIP

April 23, 2004

– 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 [...]

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Conscription and Libertarian Naivete?

April 23, 2004

– The conscription debate rages again. I pretty much agree with Julian and Tim. (I discussed the Posner/Galston debate, which Julian mentions, last summer. And I think I’m right about what I said there.) Matt, on the other hand, is off the rails.
Matt complains about the way Julian flogs him with wet Rawls:
At any [...]

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More Gmail –

April 23, 2004

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 [...]

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G-Mail

April 20, 2004

– Cool, Blogger just let me sign up a g-mail account. Send your hahafunny messages about home mortgages and penis enlargment to willwilkinson *AT* gmail.com. I AM NOT AFRAID OF THE MACHINE!!!!

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Metaethics: Internal and External

April 20, 2004

[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 [...]

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Fitter, Happier, More Productive . . .

April 17, 2004

– Tyler Cowen points to Michael Sandel’s Kass-like essay on the perils of genetic enhacement in the New Atlantic. Tyler makes a good point: if you’re worried genetic engineering will indirectly imperil some social value, like solidarity, say, you can always solve the problem by directly engineering a better sense of solidarity. Sure, but I [...]

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Wonk’d

April 17, 2004

– 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 [...]

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Technical Difficulties

April 11, 2004

– The Fly Bottle and related pages may suddenly go down today or so as I switch webhosts. Thank you for your tolerance.
Oh… and my willwilkinson.net email will also be temporarily unavailable. Try my gmu.edu, umd.edu, or yahoo.com email address. If you don’t know any of these addresses, then I guess it can probably wait. [...]

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It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

April 5, 2004

– 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.

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Liberalism and the Closed Society

April 5, 2004

– I’m with Tyler on this one:
So that is a significant reason why I am not a [modern] liberal. I prefer high growth, minimum domestic transfers, and a higher rate of immigration. Growth plus resource mobility is the best anti-poverty strategy we are likely to find. And this recipe is closer to classical liberalism than [...]

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Justly Married

April 2, 2004

– 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 [...]

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