- Actually a URL du Yesterday: Bryan Caplan considers
the leftwing take on Christopher Columbus, and deems it pretty much on
target. You know what they say about stopped clocks.
-
Thomas Sowell's column today is titled "Frivolous
Politics".
You may deserve whatever you get if you vote frivolously in this year's election. But surely the next generation, which has no vote, deserves better.
Gulp! Good point. Professor Sowell is probably the least frivolous person in California. - Both Donald
Luskin and Virginia
Postrel are pretty darn happy with this year's choice for the Econ
Nobel, Edmund Phelps.
Donald is overjoyed that it didn't go
to Paul Krugman; Virginia is pleased with the occurrence of the word
"dynamism" in Phelps' work. And rightly so. The lads at the WSJ's
opinion site have an op-ed from Edmund Phelps today.
-
The perky news team at Madison's WKOW-TV
have laid hands on a proof of a required textbook
for 9-11 conspiracy loon Kevin Barrett's class at the University
of Wisconsin. If you're wondering if it's got overheated fact-free
deranged rhetoric: why, yes it does, in spades. (Via Prof
Althouse.)
-
George Lakoff (a linguistics prof at UC Berkeley)
has recently written a book entitled Whose
Freedom?: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea.
Peter Berkowitz (via Powerline), writing in Policy Review deemed it
"embarrassing", a "dismal performance" that "dishonors scholarship".
In an outtake
from a forthcoming Reason article, Will Wilkinson
calls Lakoff's major conjecture "astoundingly empirically
ill-supported"; aside from that, there's only a "tired philosophical
core." Stephen Pinker, in a New Republic review (quoted here),
calls the book a "train wreck"; Lakoff's depictions of both allies
and adversaries are "cartoonish"; his "advice doesn't pass the giggle
test".
Other than that, though, I understand it's pretty good.
Oct
10
2006
URLs du Jour
2006-10-10 (PM Edition)