- Two posts by Matthew Yglesias. First: the Case for doing Nothing about Syria. Second: Syria and the Price of Oil. Markets responded to rumors of war by sending oil prices up. This indicates that this war create oil scarcity, not oil abundance.
- Owen Anderson warns against separating Martin Luther King’s civil rights work from its foundations. “To strip MLK's work of these features and then try to apply it to the trendy issues of the day would be to both demean and trivialize what he did and believed.”
- Quora Answers:
What is a good lay explanation of Comparative Advantage? Alex Tabbarok answers
- Barack Obama said,
“Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Bashar Al-Assad. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power.… The world, and the Syrian people, would be better off without him. But I also know that Assad poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors…and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.”
No wait, he said that about Saddam Hussein long ago - John Kerry said,
”Bashar al-Assad now joins the list of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein have used these weapons in time of war”
David Friedman points out that if Kerry meant poison gas, Woodrow Wilson would also be on that list. But if he meant Sarin gas in particular, Hitler and that Nazis never used it.
Associating Assad with Hitler is one of the most ridiculous comparisons ever. Syria is not Nazi Germany, and Assad is not Hitler. But, these kinds of juvenile rhetorical ploys is exactly how the United States government talks itself into war over and over again. - Owen Anderson writes another post on his future as a Research Associate at Princeton, where he will be studying the original American Ideals as stated in the Declaration of Independence. One segment of his post stuck out to me, not because it is an idea I haven’t heard, but because its so well articulated,
”If nothing is self-evident then we are either lost in an infinite regress of proofs or we get tangled in a loop of circular reasoning.”
And a picture of a Booshie
