Knights & Knaves

Perhaps Raymond Smullyan’s dichotomy has more basis in reality than we thought. Here comes the Science: psychology researchers scanned people’s brains as they were giving their predictions for coin flips (having told the subjects they were researching psychic powers), in situations where they had the opportunity to lie and when they didn’t. The purpose was to test competing theories of honesty: whether the honest are able to muster up the will (aka executive function) to resist temptation, or if they are blessed with undeserved grace from such temptation. Turns out its the latter. If you feel bad for having lust in your heart for what ain’t yours to have, it is rightly so for you are not one of the elect, you bad person you. We can then deduce that Jesus was never actually tempted, although that’s possibly overdetermined as he might never have existed in the first place. Bryan Caplan will be happy to hear another swipe at the so-called fundamental attribution error.

 

I don’t think Ginsburg’s dissent was that embarassing

Steve Sailer & Half Sigma were happy that Ricci won, but thought it still disheartening that four members of the court signed on to Ginsburg’s dissent. The only Supreme Court decision I’ve read before was D.C vs Heller (and though conflicted regarding the result, I still viewed some arguments for the city as embarrassing). There’s a saying that hard cases make for bad law, and in this case the law was already bad enough that Ginsburg didn’t need to go out on a limb. If you’ve really got a dog in the fight a case may look easy and then the only explanation for a judge ruling the other way must be bad faith. A difference of one vote on the court not only gave Ricci a victory, but reduced the potential liability of a municipality in New Haven’s position, thereby undermining both their legal defense and incentive for the action they had taken. While the Supreme Court is to blame in Griggs for introducing liability for disparate outcomes from equal treatment with no evidence of intentional discrimination, it is still the case that Congress amended Title VII to explicitly prohibit disparate outcomes later. It is also case that the law makes some allowances for compromising equal treatment to avoid liability for disparate outcomes. Only Scalia’s concurrence (not joined by any other justice) broached the subject that the law itself may be contradictory and require changes down the road. This sort of thing is why John Hasnas wrote The Myth of the Rule of Law (see part II in particular) and to a significant extent why Bryan Caplan considers law a shockingly phony discipline.

Note that I am only saying that the dissent by those four justices is defensible. That does not constitute a defense of Sotomayor, as not even the dissenting judges agreed with her. Nor am I defending the actions of Destefano and other New Haven politicos.

For those interested in my own opinion on the case, it will take me a while because I’m so far out there. I don’t see why the Supreme Court should have any jurisdiction over a dispute between the New Haven government and some of its employees. The civil rights laws the city is violating were passed by the federal government, but the constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to tell city governments (other than D.C) what to do. There are some things like producing currency or conducting foreign policy that are exclusively the domain of the federal government, but the tenth amendment leaves everything else to the states.

I’m crazy enough of a libertarian that I think privatizing firefighting is a good idea, and I think private employers should be able to do whatever the hell they want in their employment decisions provided they abide by contracts. As long as firefighters are paid with tax dollars though, I think it makes sense to use the standard bureaucratic civil service rules we all (except Mencius Moldbug) have cherished ever since Garfield was assassinated, with as heavy a weighting as possible in the most objective measurements (like New Haven’s written test rather than the assessment centers offered as an alternative) to serve the taxpayer’s interest by maximally exploiting the labor market without politics or other management preferences interfering. It does not make sense to allow public sector labor unions. They used to be illegal, but as the creative destruction of competitive markets have eroded organized labor’s place in the private sector they have thrived on the government’s teat. A private company can try to calculate whether it will be more profitable to wait out striking workers, replace them with scabs, or try to meet their demands at the negotiating table. The government just keeps throwing more and more money that it doesn’t have, without getting any more labor.

UPDATE: As long as I’m talking law, I should note that Nick Szabo has compiled a best-of list of his online writings. For readers who want some of my own uninformed legal perspective, Judical empathy and Judicial restraint are some more recent stabs at the law.

 

It’s not just fundamentalists who are ignorant

I suppose I’m behind the news as I started the skeleton of this post some days ago but was too lazy to do any writing until now. At any rate, Andrew Sullivan decided to highlight a particularly annoying email from a reader insulting them dumb Christianists in order to explain the appeal of Sarah Palin. As readers know, I’m a godless infidel. I have never thought highly of Palin either. I regard McCain’s choice of her in petulant response to his advisors putting the kibosh on his first choice (Lieberman) as emblematic of his reckless disregard for his party or country, which is the same trait that exhibited throughout his career won him admiration as a “maverick” among the pundit class. So I’m writing this just because it was among the more egregious examples of politics-as-mind-killer.

The example of the molesting minister doesn’t even succeed on its own merits as stereotype. It is Catholic priests who have gotten the attention, not fundamentalists. Having been a former ultracalvinist I remember having great disdain for Catholics due to their lax attention to the Bible in favor of the tradition & dogma handed down by experts from the Church. Presumably the reader just has a low opinion of religion in general and had little problem tarring one variety with the sins of another. How do Protestant clergy compare to Catholics in rates of abuse? Hard to say, there isn’t much data to go on. It’s quite possible that the abuse rate is higher among public school teachers, so sending your kid to a private religious school would actually be safer. Finally, the thesis of the reader isn’t that fundamentalists are merely ignorant and impervious to evidence, but that they are actually seeking out the most audacious liars so that the self-deceiving double-think essential for them will be safe from reveal. The idea that parents of molested children are actually aware of what’s going on is new to me and rather sick.

Maybe the ministers aren’t molesting kids. Maybe they’ve internalized the frigid puritanism that prevents fundamentalists from having even a healthy sex-life, resulting in “foundering” marriages among the faithful. Another beautiful stereotype murdered by a gang of ugly facts. Conservative protestant women have the most orgasms, Catholics & mainline Protestants in between and those with no religious affiliation the least. Married women with feminist ideals are also less happy than their traditionalist counterparts. Arthur Brooks wrote a book on the relationship between happiness and (among other things) religiosity. Perhaps it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig in blissful ignorance. As a wise drunk once remarked, the only one who is truly happy is the village idiot. Feel free to be against happiness, but it’s hard to use it as a stick against fundamentalists.

Why did Andrew hold this email up to the world? He has a problem with “Christianists” generally and Palin in particular. That’s why he’s been promoting Palin conspiracy theories, though I suppose in a rather Cal Thomas sort of why. John Schwenkler put Sullivan and the “birfers” in their place here (and some other places). Chip Smith is invited to defend birferism, which is totally unlike being a “truther” but like being a holocaust revisionist (in a good way!) as he sees it.

On a final (hopefully for the rest of my life) Palin-related note, I engaged in some Szaszian mocking of the DSM and the armchair psychoanalysts of the former vice-presidental hopeful here.

 

Half Sigma vs Kevin MacDonald

UPDATE: Half Sigma has a response here, though not much new content.
More GSS fun! In response to something Whiskey said, I have updated my post on women & immigration. I got home today planning on doing a different GSS post. There had been two recent posts at the Hoover Hog on anti-semites, and a theme that stuck with me is the theory that Jews are pursuing a group evolutionary strategy against the white race. This is used by the racial right (although some deny being rightists) to explain Jewish liberalism. Half Sigma, in contrast, explains Jewish liberalism as being motivated to keep school prayer away from their kids, as Christianity with all its fun holidays and lack of dietary restrictions is just too much of a temptation for a Jewish mother to hazard. I’m going to look at questions that are racially vs religiously charged and compare the responses of Jews vs whites generally to see where the gap is larger.

 

You’re not helping

Mind Hacks linked to a study showing that ingroup-preferences in women increased when they were ovulating or reported high subjective risk of coercion. Interesting, but fairly-standard for evolutionary psychology. Perhaps more interesting is the response in the comments section. The first complains, without reference to any detail in the study, that merely by studying the topic they further entrench harmful stereotypes. When ignorant stereotypes abound it would seem all the more important that we find out the actual facts so that we may replace our uninformed beliefs with accurate ones. Instead a common reaction is complete indifference to the results of any study in favor of an obsessive focus on stereotypes themselves. I would even concur with the commenter that we should have more studies on hormonal fluctuations in men (and indeed there have been some interesting psych studies which involve “priming” them). Rather than an actual proposal for a study that might be done, the comment is more along the lines of the old Fark cliche “B-b-b-but Clinton”. That is exemplified to an even greater extent by the second commenter, who stereotypes the British right off the bat and then proceeds to complain of positive discrimination towards protected groups. A perfectly relevant comment for a different blog discussing a different topic. Hopefully Anonymous has complained that a blog as great as Mind Hacks requires commenters to register first, and while one interpretation might be that they are still on the low end of the Laffer-curve of comment restrictions another is that their current filtering mechanism isn’t producing any benefits.

Completely off-topic, but Philip Giraldi knows what he’s talking about, at least when it comes to Honduras.

Finally, Aschwin de Wolf directs my attention to a Stirnerite egoist blogger.

 

Open Minded Activists?

Joshua Knobe and John Jost discuss the latter’s research into “System Justification Theory” at Bloggingheads. System Justification is, apparently, what is at work when a poor person says that capitalism is the best system for the worst off in society; or when a biologist claims that Lysenkoism is the best system for advancing the study of evolution. I thought another term for this was “false consciousness,” but perhaps this is too Lenin dependent and SJT is something entirely different.

Now, the idea of “false consciousness” runs afoul of the claim by adherents of radical uncertainty, to which I’m sympathetic, that it is simply begging the question to imply that it is known that capitalism, socialism or some “third way” concoction is the best system for someone, poor or otherwise, to live under. Without this certainty, there is nothing necessarily “false” about any body’s consciousness.

But perhaps SJT is something entirely different.

Toward the end of the discussion, utilizing what Jost claims, partially by way of Jonathan Haidt, that liberal activists are open-minded personality types who don’t shy away from new experiences, Knobe suggests that the stereotype of the activist as a dogmatic ideologue is wrong – at least in the case of the liberal ones. But I don’t see how this is at odds with Philip Converse’s, and, subsequently, folks like George E. Marcus’ findings testifying to the opposite.  A personality style that is open to new experiences can be wedded to a belief system that “new experiences” are superior to traditional ones quite handily. Anyone seen a bumper sticker that reads “Keep ___ Weird,” with the blank space probably reading “Austin,” “Portland,” or “Santa Cruz”? When the desire to be open-minded to new experiences becomes this self aware, to the point of preserving the alleged result of spontaneity and free-thought, it sort of neuters the concept of grasping in the dark for such experiences and where they might take you, literally or metaphorically.

 

Can better regulation survive a George Bush & his appointees?

William Black makes a point I’ve often tried to make to liberals. Of course his solution is just to ban certain kinds of market transactions. I’m reminded of an old post at Post-Austrian Economics (unfortunately removed from the web) where a sort of public-choice challenge was made to Paul Davidson over how the government could expect to handle such complexities and unexpected events in markets, and I think his conclusion was similar. Black also seems to agree with Sailer on “too-big-to-fail“. Megan McArdle & Noam Scheiber distinguish between the hazards of size & complexity/interconnectedness here, and Karl Smith chides them on the difficulty of dismantling failed banks here.

As a minor rebuttal to Black, Stan Liebowitz argues it was actually not sub-primes that blew up unexpectedly but adjustable rate mortgages.

 

Do Iranians deserve progressive and (for those who haven’t heard of Hillary Clinton’s distinction) liberal sympathy?

Not according to this post at Secular Right by Razib Khan – er, I mean David Hume. The opinions of Iranians on a variety of social issues is presented, and it doesn’t mesh well with progressive predilections stateside. 

We know the bigger conservative outlets online have been calling, relatively explicitly, for solidarity with those involved in the Iranian uprising. But it’s the other side of the political spectrum that is of interest here. I mention it because I’ve seen alot of support on Facebook recently, from former classmates and various others, for Iranians in their struggle against an apparently increasingly corrupt, out of touch, uber-conservative regime. But I haven’t heard much about conservatism per se from the media, only “stolen elections” and such (though theocracy and its illegitimacy is no doubt a subtext). The reason would seem to be hinted at by the public opinion displayed at SR. The vast majority of Iranian respondents, across the income spectrum (wherein higher income is associated with higher education), thought that abortion was never justifiable; that homosexuality was never justifiable; and that “men should have more right to job than women.” These social attitudes need not be informed by a religious orientation, and in fact elsewhere Razib has noted that social conservatism is not inherently linked to either personal religiosity or an officially sanctioned state religion. Though I do think it might partially explain why a move to overthrow theocracy itself is not afoot.

If there were a question dealing with race, I’d love to see how it turned out. It is the issue for the modal liberal in modern America, aside from possibly environmentalism, but that’s because the issue of race has become less salient in recent years – the years since 1992, say. And as political philosopher and progressive academic heroine Amy Gutmann tells us, there is no democracy without a rectification of the race problem, a conflation of democracy with liberal democracy (ala Fareed Zakaria), and a proper stance – a “substantive” stance – on racial matters. 

So perhaps a stand-in will do for the missing “race” variable. How about immigration? According to the same World Values Survey Razib utilizes, Iranians are less cosmopolitan than Americans on this issue too. A greater proportion of Iranians disagree with the notion “Let Anyone Come In” than do Americans, and by a much wider margin agree with the statement “Stop People From Coming.”

In sum, what is it that Facebook fans of the Iranian uprising think will happen over there if their pleas are successful? If it’s a purely procedural form of democracy they hope to usher in, then I note their lack of interest in this problem wherever it exists. It seems to me that a perception that liberal, youthful, lovers of substantive freedom and a progressive ethos are up against a stodgy reactionary establishment is what motivates this enthusiasm. But if in fact the people they are supporting are even less liberal in orientation than a right-wing Republican (ooh, double shot!), and it appears that this is the case, what’s to get so excited about?

 

Better load your .44, this is civil war

Dave Kopel notes the relatively low rate of gun ownership in Iran. It’s mostly restricted to ethnic minorities, or so I’ve heard. It brings to mind something Chip said recently in the comments about one of the benefits of gun-rights being the possibility of revolt. I’m inclined to say that’s one of the worst arguments in favor of them. Better that is the oft-neglected utilitarian argument that lots of us just plain like guns, as well as the recognition that the police are not God walking the earth, and so arms distributed among the citizenry can pick up the slack. We could even be more radical and note the relative novelty of professional police forces & standing army, and consider if community posses & militias could entirely substitute for them. The possibility of revolt, even against a bad government, is quite plausibly an argument against guns in the hands of the people. To quote David Friedman, revolution IS the hell of it. I’m even in favor of secession anytime, anywhere for any reason but I’m hard pressed to think of times when wars for that were worth the price (including our own from Britain). Realistically speaking, even if we ignored the costs of the fighting itself, it doesn’t seem likely that The People’s Valiant Struggles Against Their Oppressors result in better governance. Communism was the biggest killer we’ve yet seen, Algeria* (and other former colonies) got well and truly fucked by its nationalist uprising, and Iran’s mullahs hardly seem better than the Shah. Here I should admit that trying to prevent the revolting populace from gaining access to guns may be futile, as when worst comes to worst they’ll just raid the armories.

*I wish I could link to the War Nerd’s “Algeria: The Psychos Will Inherit the Earth”, but the Exile sucks and it doesn’t seem available now.

On a related note, Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money has a post on the efficient killing power of the modern nation state which in parts sounds a lot like a radical libertarian (though as far as I know he’s your bog-standard liberal). UPDATE: Also related, Sean Safford of OrgTheory gives a friendly fisking of Gideon Rachman and Andrew Miller’s revolutionary checklist applied to Iran.

On an unrelated note, Karl Smith’s Modeled Behavior blog has moved to a new location with more frequent posting. I somewhat recently found that Charles Davi of Derivative Dribble sometimes makes posts at the Atlantic Business Channel that don’t also appear at his personal blog, so if you can’t get enough derivative-talk you should keep an on eye it. Finally, while I think I’ve already mentioned Eric Crampton’s Offsetting Behaviour here, in the off-chance that I haven’t I encourage you to check it out.

 

You know what I miss?

The riotporn blog.

In an unrelated matter, a commenter at a TNR post about the ridiculous Iranian propaganda video I wrote about a while back brings to light a propaganda cartoon the Germans made to dissuade the French from listening to the BBC. I knew the Third Reich did all sorts of dastardly deeds but I had no idea they would sink so low as to infringe on American intellectual property. Never forget and never again!

 

Some things are acceptable in different cultures

On the advice of Abel Kerevel I searched youtube for Santori and watched some of the earlier portions. One odd thing that struck me was the drummer wearing blackface at one of their performances. I suppose they wouldn’t have a history giving them an allergy to such behavior (although reportedly western Europe is more P.C in that regard than the U.S), but at the same time why would the idea of doing that even occur? Were Al Jolson movies really popular in Iran back in the day?

I feel lucky when I discover an entire movie has been placed on youtube, because I know it likely won’t last. A month or so ago I watched a few Werner Herzog movies placed by a user who has since been banned, and a few days ago found that someone had uploaded a lot of black-and-white classics like The Killers and Gun Crazy. The former is not to be confused with the superior “The Killing” by Stanley Kubrick. The latter has a rather lame protagonist but also a magnificent bitch who picks up the slack. I suppose they had to make the woman irredeemably terrible so you don’t feel too bad about her getting killed. That climactic moment was the only time Lila from Dexter did not get on my nerves. Perhaps it was just a more poorly written character or a worse English accent (which the English actress apparently had to be trained to do because her natural voice didn’t sound stereotypically English enough for the boneheaded casting director) because with Gun Crazy you (by which I mean myself generalized to all right-thinking people) want the trail of destruction to continue rather than put out of its misery promptly.

I don’t really have anything to add on John Maynard Smith’s “The Theory of Evolution”. It’s a good book that I recommend to all and possibly sundry. I wanted to replace it with Trita Parsi’s “Treacherous Alliance”, since Iran is in the news, but apparently the library got rid of it and I found Ray Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near” instead.

 

The fatal conceit of 100% reserves

A discussion sparked at ThinkMarkets resulted in this post on free-banking vs 100% reserves at The Austrian Economists that sums it up better than I could (UPDATE: Continued here). I’m almost kicking myself for not having used the phrase “fatal conceit” earlier on the topic. Not that I’ve read any of Hayek’s books (other than the cartoon version of Road to Serfdom), but the phrase is terribly apt.

On a related note, a long paper on Milton Friedman linked by Marginal Revolution a few days ago contained the quote “Particularly in the 1940s and 1950s, he was a zealous advocate of a reform proposal, somewhat nondescriptively referred to as the “Chicago plan” or “100 per cent money,” of 100 percent mandatory reserve requirements, which amounted to the de facto nationalization of the depository activities of the entire commercial banking system.” I think they might be using “100% reserves” in a different sense. A long while back I came across this, which said something similar but because I could not figure out what the citation was referring to or verify the second quote through googling I forgot about it.

On an unrelated note, Bob Murphy recalls a case where Friedman and the monetarists were proven wrong while Arthur Laffer and those awful (just ask Megan McArdle) supply-siders were right.

Back to central banking: One of Stephan Kinsella’s posts at the Lew Rockwell blog snarked at central bank independence, I replied (linking to Caplan) that the less independence central banks are the more inflationary they are, and while he agreed that he didn’t want any more inflation he didn’t seem at all persuaded. There are no comments at the LR blog (unlike the Mises blog, where I am banned) so discussion will have to take place here.

Speaking of the Mises blog, they just highlighted a paper by Mark Crovelli, who had nearly gotten a PhD in poli-sci (oddly enough still using a praxeological approach) but in disgust went back to working construction. Hats off to him for continuing to write such papers anyway. The paper disputes the von Mises brothers on assigning probabilities to a single event. Bayesian superstar E. T. Jaynes took on Richard von Mises’ conception of probability in a very clever paper here.

Finally, a weird coincidence: What are the odds that AidWatch and The Money Illusion would both have posts with the same French title at the top of their front page (not anymore, but a little while ago) at the same time?

 

Block by block

Sandy Ikeda at ThinkMarkets highlights some sites that track crime (and other things) down to the level of the neighborhood block. Haven’t checked out any of them, but sounds cool.

I’m surprised that none of them were announced anywhere (or at least anywhere I was reading), but apparently Razib has done some podcasts with Richard Spencer for Takimag Radio. I haven’t yet listened to them.

Political scientist Andrew Gelman double-dog-dares any sociologist worth his salt to demonstrate connections between voting power and actual power. Of course it’s much more effective to dare someone else at their own blog rather than hope they read yours, but I guess when you’re Andrew freaking Gelman you can just assume they do (or are sociologists less nerdy than me?).

Gelman has been among the rare folks to poor cold water on statistical demonstrations of electoral fraud in Iran (though I imagine he still thinks there was some). Perhaps even rarer in standing alone against the broader narrative regarding Iran is Daniel Larison. One would have hoped that Andrew Sullivan would have learned to be more restrained after being chastened for his cheerleading on Iraq, but he’s still denouncing any western skeptics as despicable or useful idiots. Hats off to his testosterone-injection fueled productivity though. Personally I’m in the same boat as Sailer, and don’t know enough to have a very informed opinion. A while back at Volokh I played Devil’s Advocate for the clampdown against Tiananmen protestors and hypothetical future (now current) mobs in Iran. Considering Mousavi’s past, he wouldn’t even need to be replaced like Kerenski for the post-uprising purge to occur. I hope Mencius Moldbug’s next post is an apologetic for the jackboots of authority. Finally, I’m surprised I haven’t heard more from Trita Parsi.

 

If too much of “this stuff” takes away our empathy and understanding that this is a tragedy – albeit not worse than someone being shot anywhere else, then that perhaps is a problem of revisionism.

That was the sentence from Bradley Smith’s reaction to the shooting at D.C’s Holocaust Museum I found most interesting. It reminds me of the debate over desensitizing violent video games some years back. I believe the same arguments were made about pornography before my time. From what I’ve heard evidence (compiled by liberal academics who hate America, families and children in particular) does not support those theories. My own opinion is that weirdos are more likely to be drawn to holocaust denial in the first place, and Von Brunn in particular was a producer rather than a mere consumer of such literature.

Does one have a responsibility to watch what one says based on the reactions of the audience? In the main I agree with Stephan Kinsella’s take on the instigator of a riot in Causation and Aggression. I would say that goes beyond explicitly ordering people to go riot and would (if this actually happened) cover Jim Morrison’s use of crowd psychology to provoke concert-goers.

That covers people who deliberately seek to create such a reaction, what about a result that is not sought but was foreseeable as a likely cause of one’s actions? The law provides manslaughter and other crimes of recklessness which do not require mens rea intent. I think a similar idea applies here and is a reason to include disclaimers if you think listeners might get the wrong idea. All of us speak considering the consequences on our audience. Otherwise we wouldn’t even need to bother speaking the same language or explaining when a bit of technical jargon does not mean what they might assume it does.

Given the difficulty of establishing a causal link between the actions of a single person (out of an unknown number of people who may have heard the message) and what has been said, I don’t propose that we introduce anything to criminal or even tort law to cover dangerous publications. All the same, a legal fiction should not delude us into believing a phenomenon is fictitious.

Being the awful Hansonian reductionist that I am, I wish that Smith & co would “break it down” when it comes to their heretical thoughts. There is a constant conflation of holocaust denial (or revisionism, if you prefer) with matters pertaining to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, U.S foreign policy, whether the Nazis were worse than the Soviets and the related matter of whether racism/bigotry is more dangerous than blank-slatism along with a host of other things. Political ideologues group many seemingly unrelated issues together into one world view. If holocaust revisionists really want to be treated like intellectually honest historians it would help if they acted more like scientists seeking the truth regarding specific matters.

Perhaps Bradley really is a bleeding-heart liberal (The Man Who Saw His Own Liver depicts an anti-nuke tax protester during the Cold War) who just happens not to prioritize Darfur or Tibet (I don’t care about them much either, but I’m just generally uncaring), but plenty of White Nationalists who display thoroughly illiberal attitudes about exterminating groups they dislike simultaneously expect sympathy for Palestinians or the civilians fried at Dresden. Those are worthwhile issues to discuss but should preferably be kept distinct from others that might turn things into a victimology contest.

I admit that in my post on Charles Lindbergh I stated that part of the reason I thought it important to look askance at “the good wars” of the past was that they served to justify wars now. As I was saying earlier in the post, it does make sense to keep in mind the likely reactions to what one says and the connections people already make. At the same time the different wars are distinct and one could possibly support or oppose any combination of them, and so discussion of them may be sensibly kept separate.

 

How many Saifedeans are there?

Recently at Scott Sumner’s The Money Illusion a commenter going by the name “saifedean” has been spreading the gospel of Austrian economics by way of Mises & Rothbard. I thought the name sounded familiar but then forgot about it. Now he’s including a hyperlink in his handle, and sure enough it’s the same person that occasionally blogs at “The Saif House”. I remember a while back at Taki’s they featured a post (now removed) by Saifedean Ammous that had nothing to do with conservatism, alternative or otherwise. I found that odd, especially when some googling showed that AlterNet has had a contributor named Saifedean Ammous who is a phd candidate at Columbia for “sustainable development”. I guess that would make him the first Austrian environmentalist I’ve come across. Perhaps TokyoTom from the Mises blog infected him.

UPDATE: Saifedean Ammous has confirmed that he is indeed the same individual I referred to in these instances. I wish him luck in his exploration of Austrian economics and hope he doesn’t wind up a wretched defect to literature & metaphysics like the late (in blog terms) Matthew Mueller, who strayed too near those mad, bad and dangerous to know.