Owner: The Superfluous Man URL:http://thesuperfluousman.blogspot.com/ Join Date: Wed, 07 May 2008 00:15:45 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: John Markley's blog on current politics and political philosophy, from a libertarian perspective. Has commentary on economics, war and peace, the nanny state, law enforcement, and the nature of statism. Site statistics:Click here
Henceforth, Leavenworth Penitentiary will be called "Funville USA" 2008-05-01 22:40:00 Over at Mises Blog, Jeffrey Tucker links to this revolting New York Times op-ed by Richard Coniff (registration and a strong stomach required) in which Coniff recommends replacing the word “taxes” with the word “dues,” on the grounds that “tax” has a negative connotation, whereas “dues” suggests community and obligation and general warm fuzziness.Now, statist attempts to twist language are hardly
There's no such thing as a free lunch, which is good if you're trying to lose weight 2008-05-01 00:25:00 Now, speaking as someone who is gradually deblobbifying himself, I don’t dispute that it would be better, all other things being equal, if people in America were fitter. Nevertheless, an article at today’s msn.com about the financial benefits of eliminating obesity, which compiles figures from various fields and concludes that the U.S. would save $487 billion every year, had some glaring
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, lose weight
Great moments in American democracy 2008-04-28 23:32:00 You know, there’s political stupidity, and then there’s… Well, this guy:SOUTH BEND, Ind. (April 23) - A congressional candidate is defending his speech to a group celebrating the anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, saying he appeared simply because he was asked.
Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in northern Indiana's 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next
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, democracy
, Great
Ironically, Laplace's demon foresaw that I would post this 2008-04-27 01:08:00 First caught wind of this at Roderick Long’s blog. There’s been some discussion here and there about a recent study announced by the Max Planck Society on human consciousness. To quote from the press release I’ve linked: In the study, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but
And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for your meddling right to a trial! 2008-04-23 21:28:00 Radley Balko never fails to disturb. He links to a story at Tennesseean.com, which informs us:Defense attorneys would be banned from advertising their expertise with drunken driving cases under a bill advancing in the Senate.Sen. Rosalind Kurita, a Clarksville Democrat, successfully added the provision to a bill that would create an online registry of repeat DUI offenders in TennesseeKurita says
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THIS is what people finally get outraged over? 2008-04-21 01:27:00 This post is angrier and more profane than unusual. The loveably wacky John Markley who writes about hallucinatory spiders and defending a libertarian society from an invasion of malevolent scorpion men is on break for the night.A few days ago, there was an incident where the Chicago police shot and killed a wild cougar that had wandered into an inhabited area and alarmed residents. Well, to
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Fred Reed column 2008-04-15 22:44:00 No sooner have I put up a new article on the war, than someone comes along to casually blow me out of the water. I ran into Fred Reed’s newest column while perusing Strike the Root today. A lot of the writing Reed (who fought in Vietnam as a Marine, and later returned to it as a war correspondent) has done on war has been very powerful, but this one is… just read it. Warning: Contains written
New article at antiwar.com 2008-04-09 03:23:00 I’m happy to say that my first article at Antiwar.com is now up. I’ve been reading the site since its inception, so this is quite satisfying for me. Hope you like it. (I just looked it up and realized antiwar.com has been around for 12 years. God, do I suddenly feel old. And sleepy. And slightly gassy. But mostly old.) For any antiwar.com readers visiting this blog, welcome! I’ve put
The mother of invention 2008-04-08 20:22:00 Faced with an unending flood of nonsense and partisan hackery from Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb, Julian Sanchez has contrived an ingenious labor-saving device: Goldfarb’s hackiest post of the day will be henceforth recognized with a link in the form of a photo of a horse-drawn Hackney cab, sans commentary. I’m tempted to come up with some sort of similar visual shorthand for whenever
Read more:mother
Curse you, Gregory XIII! 2008-04-01 23:59:00 I hate April Fool’s Day. I'm absent minded and often have only a vague idea of the current date, and so the same pattern repeats every year. I’ll be wandering the internet, and come across some sort of wonderful news. “Square-Enix announces Final Fantasy VII remake for Playsation 3," “Entire staff of The New Republic devoured by timber wolves,” “Mayo Clinic study proves 87% of foxy brunettes
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Injustice and its non-celebrity victims 2008-03-30 19:30:00 Over at Hit and Run, Michael Moynihan has a post about Mumia Abu-Jamal that got me thinking. Why did Mumia Abu-Jamal become such a prominent cause, as opposed to any of the myriad other people imprisoned in this country, many under circumstances far more questionable? I wish more people so interested in the inequities of the legal system would take some interest in some of its less prestigious
Good life is contradiction 2008-03-26 19:54:00 I usually look to Roderick Long for this sort of thing, but today he is surpassed: David Weigel, Associate Editor of Reason magazine, has created the greatest blog post title in human history.
Kenneth R. Gregg passes away 2008-03-20 16:36:00 Very sad news from the Liberty and Power Blog: KennethGregg
, intellectual historian and the creator of the libertarian blog CLASSical Liberalism, died of heart failure last Friday after a long illness. Sadly, he was only 57, and the last few years of his life were marked by a degree of tragedy most of us are mercifully unable to fathom. Kevin Carson has a very touching tribute him to at
David Brooks, Master of Psychiatry 2008-03-16 00:49:00 This is a subject I hadn’t planned on addressing on this blog, but now I feel I must. This sort of brain-dead bigotry and contempt is par for the course on, say, the Something Awful forums, but when it’s printed in The Newspaper of Record it merits a public response, however ineffectual that response is likely to be. Be warned that this post is long and has little or no direct relationship to
Read more:Brooks
, David
, David Brooks
, Master
, Psychiatry
Thoughts on William F. Buckley 2008-03-09 18:36:00 Much has been said, both good and bad, about William
F. Buckley
since his death. While I don’t mean to minimize his very real and serious faults, I would like to talk about the positive effect he had on me, personally.When I was a young conservative, my grandfather got me a subscription to National Review, which I eagerly read every two weeks. In 1996, they came out with an issue that announced
Statists distort libertarianism, Episode 4,367 2008-01-29 19:09:00 Excellent post by Will Wilkinson on this embarrassing screed about libertarianism in The Weekly Standard.
The Weekly Standard article is a useful reminder of how little neocons have strayed from their roots- neoconservatism is still liberalism’s thuggish little brother. (Which would, I suppose, make “national greatness conservatism” liberalism’s juvenile delinquent nephew.) Despite appearing
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I can't imagine why Robert Nozick never addressed these key issues 2008-01-25 15:19:00 Man, when it’s not the demon spiders, it’s shit like this. I had two extremely vivid dreams last night.
In the first one, my house was being assailed by what I can only describe as “scorpion men.” Bipedal, more or less human features, but with hard and chtin-like skin. They had enormous stinger tails, and people stung by them turned into scorpion men too. There were a bunch of guys I had
Read more:Robert
New article 2008-01-25 14:59:00 Now that I’m done alienating the cosmopolitan libertarians by accusing them of caring more about PC respectability than the carnage wrought by the warfare state, I can move on to dismaying the paleolibertarians by accusing immigration opponents of being unwitting abettors of the police state at home in my first article for The Libertarian Enterprise. I can only suppose that some deep-seated
Rapists and their enablers 2008-01-21 16:53:00 Found this via Hit and Run. In a summary of a study of the economics of prostitution in Chicago, we learn:What's particularly interesting is the authors' section on bargaining and the law. They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren't working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once
In which I succumb to the inevitable and write about Ron Paul 2008-01-15 14:32:00 I haven’t talked about the Ron Paul candidacy here before, because it wasn’t something I had an especially strong opinion about either way; I feel neither the intense enthusiasm for him of the Mises Institute/ lewrockwell.com paleolibertarians nor the hostility of the Voluntaryist/ Agorist anti-voters or Reason/Cato “cosmopolitan” libertarians.. I’ve liked Paul for a long time, enough that I’d
New article 2008-01-12 12:44:00 I've got a new article on police brutality, public indifference, and related phenomena up at Strike the Root.
I'm going to take up snuff, just out of spite 2008-01-04 13:55:00 Well, it’s come: the statewide Illinois smoking ban for bars and restaurants has gone into effect. Freedom and the right to private property are nothing compared to the power of the ever-stronger health fascists. I paid a visit to my usual bar on New Year’s Eve for one last cigar there. Henceforth, when I leave my home, I’ll be limited to doing one unhealthy thing at a time. I’ve already said
How do you know you’re a geek? 2007-12-30 21:24:00 I’ll tell you how. You know you’re a geek when you and a friend of yours meet to give each other Christmas gifts, and you have both, unbeknownst to the other, bought Robert E. Howard books.Though not the same book, sadly. That would have been cool; like an O. Henry story, but with more brutal violence and rippling thews.
New libertarian science fiction forum 2007-12-19 17:12:00 This is very neat - via Geoffrey Plauche comes news of the Libertarian SF Forum. It’s always nice when two of my nerdly interests combine. If, like me, you always find yourself finishing a new science fiction book and thinking, “You know, that was cool, but there weren’t enough privately owned arbitration firms,” check it out. This could be great if it takes off.
Cross-posted at In Darkest
A woman's body, a government health regulator’s choice 2007-12-14 16:17:00 I suspect far more people would be libertarians if they actually thought through the possibility of the statist measures they support being put to use by their opponents. Coyote Blog points out an interesting incongruity. The National Organization for Women is adamantly pro-choice, and vehemently opposes any attempt to have the government restrict a woman
’s right to have an abortion. This is
Man's Quest for Knowledge, Part V 2008-05-07 21:50:00 It's been too long since I last did this. You know, the best part of blogging isn't the opportunity for self-expression or the millions of dollars I make through AdSense every week. No, the best part is tracking the bizarre Google searches that bring people to this site. According to SiteMeter, the past few months have brought me seekers of truth questing for such things as:
Musclemen being
Read more:Knowledge
, Quest
Various immigration thoughts 2008-05-19 17:17:00 At Hit and Run, Kerry Howley posted a quote from Paul Samuelson that got me thinking. Samuelson said:Finally, let's discuss poverty. Everyone's against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration -- new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we
Read more:thoughts
A quick vocabulary lesson 2008-05-21 21:32:00 Is a little respect for the English language too much to ask from one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers? The answer, of course, is yes. I found this in today’s online Wall Street Journal: When Steven Barber turned in a short story this semester for his creative-writing class at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, his instructor was alarmed. The 23-year-old student had
Read more:lesson
The dread menace of elderly altruists, thwarted at last! 2008-05-26 01:15:00 From Rad Geek comes the bizarre story of an elderly
man in Florida who was arrested and fined $2,000 for offering a woman who said she needed help getting home- who was actually an undercover agent of the Miami-Dade County’s Consumer Services Department- a ride home in his car. His offense? After the agent repeatedly demanded to know how much money he wanted for his aid, 78-year old Rosco O
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