weekly wrap

I figured I'd start taking the end of the week point to re-hash the things I listed as shared on here and perhaps add a few points here and there.

gay marriage looks a lot like...marriage

I didn't figure this should shock most rational people. There's still plenty of irrational arguments about the effects of gays upon children or somehow other marriages that will need to be assailed with empirical data at some point. But this is a nice start.

old news

This problem has been around for a lot longer than the Israeli-Palestinian problem. The British never figured out how to deal with active resistance of a non-violent nature in India. We didn't either in the South. If ever there becomes a cause for which people will champion with non-violent resistance that isn't worth dying or fighting for, we're screwed. The only good news is that causes like that don't seem to exist. At some point a Hamas like agency will press for non-violent resistance to the oppressions of Israeli occupations and economic blockades of their people and we'll see just how much more effective that will have been at creating an independent state than all the bombs could ever be. The "fortunate" problem seems to be that there's plenty of people who are fighting for more than just independence and as a result must resort to violence to press for their demands, ie, they want Israel to go away. That's not something that can be protested for and created through non-violent resistance. But pressing for equal rights or equal statehood, sure.

evolution has its pitfalls

I suppose this is a possible explanation for my lack of dating and my generally healthy immune system. More plausible for both is my lack of general or excessive human contact on a daily basis.

nobody knows who this is either

I like reading articles about nobodies who happen to actually be somebody. Especially when they criticize things that I often lean toward. I don't quite think he understood the argument for not licensing doctors (since ol' Milt meant the state not licensing them, not nobody licensing them). But there's not a few things on monetary policy that don't quite make sense in the real world that Milton Friedman was big on to go along side such "libertarian nuttiness". He does have several ideas I'm big on: negative income taxes, abolition of private/public school distinctions through school choice, abolition of state monopolies over things like mail and social security, things of this nature. But when it comes to fiscal and monetary policy, sometimes the crowding effects or inflation arguments get in the way of real and behavioral effects that should not be discounted as valuable in a crisis. It's the non-crisis stuff where that would become strong and meaningful arguments. You know, like the bubbles and inflationary spending over the past decade that created a problem for which one plausible answer was to borrow and spend our way out of. There might even be a good idea to redistribute much of the stimulus check money in there, since a lot of it was probably too long term.