Wednesday, April 22, 2009

"Liberty and Tyranny" (and me); plus Sprite and Bo

bo.jpg

Today marks one year since the last time there was a post on the wacky-links aggregator site Memepool (which over the preceding ten years had been sort of the PiecesofFlair of the late 90s and early 00s). Over the past year, the founder of Memepool has apparently gone from working at Yahoo to working at Google, perhaps a busier environment (a few other people I know are at Google — perhaps we all will be someday).

To compensate for the lack of Memepool, and to make up for me mostly blogging about animals, nerd culture, and rock music for the next couple months, here are some mighty entertaining and libertarian links:

•Mark Levin’s #1 New York Times bestseller Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto, I have just discovered, cites me as an endnote in Chapter 8, in my capacity as an ACSH guy condemning the ban on DDT, an effective insecticide without which over a million people die unnecessarily each year — at the hands of sanctimonious, chemical-banning greens like the ones celebrating Earth Day today and pretending to be the good guys. (Liberty and Tyranny also happens to use in its title two of the “nouns” mentioned dismissively by that New York Times columnist I recently responded to.)

•On a related note, remember that you can see me defend the Tea Parties in this April 15 clip from PJTV — just sign in — and in this clip from back on New Year’s Eve can see Will Wilkinson and me making libertarian predictions for 2009.

•Mark Levin previously hit the bestseller list with yet another one of those books about the author’s dog, Rescuing Sprite — and I’m sure we’ll soon see a book about the Obamas’ controversial not-so-rescue dog, but as long as people continue using the cool epithet “the Obamadog” (which sounds a bit like Uberhund) to describe Bo, as some headlines did, that’s OK with me.

•You may have seen this awesome site advertised atop Drudge — putting human faces on the countless stories of businesses harried or destroyed (with poverty increasing as a result) by ludicrous regulations (this may be a Chamber of Commerce project, not sure — more power to them for displaying some rare backbone if it is). The Americans with Disabilities Act, for instance, mandates that businesses can be sued for having their bathroom mirrors hanging two inches too high. (A basic econ rule to keep in mind that helps illuminate the issue: If you like regulation, you’re an asshole.)

•The left has Tom Tomorrow, combining clip-art-like cartooning with political lectures to the masses. The rest of us, thank goodness, now have OpToons, so check it out — and it’s nice to see mine isn’t the only site complaining about Janeane Garofalo.

•Meanwhile, in Arkansas: State Rep. Dan Greenberg spoke at the Tea Party rally there one week ago, and today you can find him on the Cato Institute’s Cato-Unbound site doing something libertarians rarely do: defending the wisdom of running for elected office.

I agree. If all libertarians became legislators and lawyers and policy analysts — and the leftists all became jazz musicians or painters — the country would be in much, much better shape.

5 comments:

Todd Seavey said...

And if you want socialist writings to balance out those links, you need look no farther (as Helen points out) than commie-symp blogger Matthew Yglesias, who has lately been blogging about redeeming the “socialism” brand and lamenting that the collapse of Communism unfairly gave central planning and anti-market thinking a bad name (encouraging institutions like Harvard to think like businesses instead of “doing the right thing,” he says).

Don’t I recall some of the phalanx of moderate- and liberal-leaning libertarians liking that jackass for some reason? Is it simply that in his willingness to link to certain libertarians’ blogs, he proves himself part of what the Clintons call “the Dialogue” and Hambermas would call democratic voice? Or more bluntly: “He talked to me! He talked to me! So I don’t care if he’s a commie! And I’m never hanging around with those stinky Republicans again!”

So easily and for so little is the battle lost.

Todd Seavey said...

Russell Hanneken notes an article that should help get my mind off politics, though: Apparently, in some quarters people think the Tea Parties are actually about tea:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/04/22/apop042209.DTL

Gerard said...

I haven’t reached that chapter yet, but I’ll check it out.

Meredith said...

Dammit, Todd. You’re making me feel guilty enough to actually post something to the blog – or maybe fix the layout that’s a mess. Can’t a lazy blogger fade away into internet obscurity in peace?

Todd Seavey said...

You know, PoF also seems to crash my browser or incompletely load with a frequency one wouldn’t normally expect from a site that wasn’t sending me torrented copies of _Gone with the Wind_ or something. But it’s good nonetheless.