Over at The League, newly minted Gentlemen, Barrett Brown, has a little fun with National Review’s Joel Rosenberg. To see how a good fisking is properly undertaken, read the whole thing.
E.D. Kain wrote for Balloon Juice from 2010-12.
They Work Hard for the Money
Here’s Andrew Sullivan saying something sort of bafflingly strange about liberals in response to this post by Jamelle Bouie:
Why are so many on the left incapable of acknowledging that many people who are rich – but, of course by no means all of them – earned it the hard way? Until more liberals internalize this, they will fail to persuade America of the occasional need for government because people will rightly suspect that what they are really about is penalizing or diminishing hard work. By the way, I favor an inheritance tax. But I also favor allowing those who work hard to keep as much of their own money as possible.
Okay. So, first of all, are ‘so many on the left’ really incapable of acknowledging that many rich people worked hard to make all that money? Do they want to penalize hard work in response? I don’t think so. In fact, those two beliefs are contradictory.
Serious people outside the Anti-Tax Cult believe two things about taxation: first, that taxes are a necessary evil because they pay for services, and second that the government is often pretty lousy at the actual administration of those services – but nobody else is going to do it any better. Hence, necessary evil.
Naturally taxing something means we get less of it – so you tax carbon, you get less carbon. You tax productivity, it’s quite likely you’ll get less productivity. That’s a fine argument against the income tax on its own merits, but so far nobody has come up with a better alternative. And we still have to pay for all those services. The income tax was devised because it’s a sensible way to levy taxes, not because evil liberals are trying penalize hard work. Nobody likes to pay taxes but we do it because we recognize, as a society, that we all benefit from public roads and public education and so forth. We should also realize that for all the talk of welfare and government hand-outs it’s the very rich in this society who benefit most from government spending.
Of course, Sullivan wants to have his cake and eat it too: he supports many of the big expenditures coming out of Washington during Obama’s tenure but also mocks liberals as being somehow resentful of success who want to punish hard work. I think it’s much more likely that liberals want to levy taxes to pay for things like the Affordable Care Act which Andrew supported.
Ubuntu 10.10
So my laptop was crapping out. The wifi wasn’t working. It was getting absurdly slow. I tried running Vista’s recovery and it ran into some sort of infinite loop during the process. I have SATA hard drives so I needed a floppy to load XP. Obviously, I don’t have a floppy drive and I didn’t really want to buy a USB floppy.
So I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 10.10 and I must say, Linux has come a long way. I’ve been using it for a couple days now and it works great. Everything was loaded perfectly and quickly. The wifi works great. It boots fast. And I love the dorky aesthetic stuff like wobbly windows and the cube desktop. It runs way, way better than it ever did with Vista and all the crapware Sony had bogged it down with.
Anyone else use Ubuntu or other Linux distros? Anyone know a workaround for Netflix? I can run Hulu, Youtube, and other sites but not Netflix Watch Instantly and since I watch most of my TV on Netflix this really sucks.
(This could be an open-source-open-thread actually…)
Late Night Open Mic
Okay. Here’s some live acoustic stuff I think is really good. Thank God for Youtube. And for this music. Music just gets better and better as far as I’m concerned. I’ve cobbled together a bunch of songs/performances I like and that I think will keep y’all entertained. At least they’ve been keeping me entertained. That and the Hoptoberfest.
We’ll start off with some Avett Brothers and G Love…
More tunes after the leap.
Map of the day
Radically rethinking education
Stumbled on this video at James Joyner’s digs, and both the lecture and the animation are quite extraordinary. I was nodding along throughout. We do need to go in the exact opposite direction than we’re headed – away from the industrialized model of public education, away from standardized tests, away from unthinking conformity and mind-numbing medication. ADHD is a fictitious epidemic (Peter Gray has a lot of good stuff on this topic, as well here, here, and here). And so on and so forth.
Now on to the main attraction:
Actually no – don’t ask, don’t tell
This just popped into my inbox:
POLITICO Breaking News
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The Obama administration has asked for an emergency stay of a judge’s order banning worldwide enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law banning gays in the military. The Justice Department vows to appeal the ruling, and argues that President Barack Obama favors an ‘orderly’ legislative repeal of the 1993 law.
Well that was quick.