A site that has proved its worth by putting me on its blogroll (if I’ve slighted blogs in the past by not mentioning them when they link to me, it’s probably because it’s usually only the top-X pages by clicks and then alphabetical order that get displayed in my dashboard unless I go more in depth) is Puzzle. If you like the link roundups at the Fourth Checkraise but can’t stand the one-paragraph posts of original content, this is the site for you. Two links in particular that struck me concern William S. Lind, who I do not mean to demean when I call him an interesting character. The first is a blog post on armored cavalry, which was interesting to me if only because DNI had switched from its old clunky form to a nifty wordpress-type blog format. The second is a video detailing the history of political correctness, focusing on the Frankfurt School. Besides Lind the only person that seems to share a similar obsession with those folks is Kevin MacDonald, though they view them from quite a different angle.
On an unrelated note (other than perhaps a connection to MacDonald’s anti-semitism) Jack Ross critiques Walter Block’s latest on those crazy Jews and their infatuation with anti-capitalism. Arnold Kling discusses the issue here, as does James Q. Wilson here. I also couldn’t resist this attack on Spengler from Daniel Larison at Taki’s where commenter James Cantrell seems to have independently discovered the Mencius Moldbug take on the Jews.
On a final unrelated note, I still haven’t gotten around to reading Vox Day’s “The Irrational Atheist” (I have finished the Blank Slate, but still haven’t reviewed it or In Defense of Hypocrisy), but via Uncertain Principles I see that Evangelical Realism has a category devoted to debunking (in a more serious manner than the UP commenters) his book.
Oh, and I lied about that final note thing. Gene Healy is back, and his book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power sounds neato.
Entitled to an Opinion 
April 11, 2008 at 1:46 am
thnx
April 11, 2008 at 9:00 am
Thanks for linking to the Block piece. I notice he doesn’t discuss the sub-thesis advanced in Yuri Slezkine’s “The Jewish Century,” which, if I recall accurately, interprets Jewish support for socialism (or at least Bolshevism) as a psychological outgrowth of “resentiment” toward one’s father (a recurrent theme in Pushkin and Kafka and other canonical Jewish writers), and by extension toward historically-bound Jewish tribal identity. The idea is almost that scientific socialism offered Jewish intellectuals a way of achieving a kind of fraternal assimilation with the outgroup, though that desire is itself wound with conflict and contradiction.
April 11, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Kling is an ninny who is censoring comments by you and me, so I wouldn’t be promoting his stuff if I were you. The linked piece on Jews is a characteristically underthought piece of smarm.
But thanks for leading me to Brooklyn Copperhead, I think he goes in my feed reader.
April 11, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I actually didn’t think Kling’s inequality column was that bad, but I didn’t read much of the comments at sadlyno. I noticed Kling added an update about making arithmetic errors, but I had skimmed through and not really payed attention to that stuff. I think his point about the lack of concern over the imbalance of power officials have over us versus an imbalance of wealth is strange. It kind of reminds me of Robin Hanson here and more similarly here.
It wasn’t Kling that censored me, it was Lauren Landsburg, and for good reason. I’m often pretty crude on the internet and forget that econlog is a family-friendly site (what kids are reading it, I don’t know). I’ve had my privileges revoked a few times and then got them back after apologizing. There have been some problems recently as some of my emails to Landsberg didn’t get through and then after being able to post again I found myself unable a later time without having gotten a new email saying why I wasn’t allowed to post. If I really want to say something I can just use a proxy. Did they tell you why you were censored?
I like Brooklyn Copperhead too (and I’m glad Keith pointed him out to me) and I feel like I should trust him more on the topic of judaism than others. I wish old posts displayed how many comments there were and he responded to comments though.
April 11, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Outland is Dutch, and so am I. An interesting development.
April 12, 2008 at 12:14 am
Not sure why I was censored, I was rude but not crude. I made the same point that I think I made around here recently — that if government didn’t have special powers, rights, and responsibilities, then it wouldn’t be the government.
Kling is the one of the more annoying types of libertarian, his pieces are uniformly simplistic and poorly thought-out, in contrast to the Klein paper he was citing, which is genuinely insightful. I find it hard to believe he has a PhD from MIT — not that that is an automatic guarantee of wisdom and virtue, but it ought to mean you know how to make arguments that aren’t laughable.
April 12, 2008 at 11:57 am
I agree Kling can be quite annoying, although I may just be saying that because of his support for the Iraq war and global warming skepticism. And his persistence in characterizing the past as a “plunder economy” (in contrast to our own) despite all the historical evidence of thriving markets. Your point about government does remind me of something Kling himself wrote: the Arbiter with the Golden Scepter.
April 12, 2008 at 12:13 pm
Oh well, he (or his editor) uncensored me, so let’s hear it for unimpeded discourse.
Kling is also the sort of libertarian who is willing to throw over his own principles as soon as they cause mild inconvenience to his own person. I suppose the suggestion that purchasing products from spammers be made a crime might be tounge-in-cheek, but it’s not very funny.