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- Via Kevin Drum, Bjørn Lomborg is optimistic that we can handle climate change, noting that rising sea levels will affect a mere 400 million people, most of whom live in cities, and that everyone else can be saved by politicians pursuing "smart, coordinated policies" costing something like $600 billion annually. In other words, we could take less-costly steps now to mitigate climate change -- using "smart, coordinated policies" -- or we can wait until those costs are astronomical, making it that much easier to turn our backs as people around the Equator drown. Sounds like a plan!
- Peter Suderman toys a bit with the increasingly popular Epistemology Dodge: "Does this mean that we should simply write off everything the CBO says? Not at all. Given the choice between having the CBO around and getting rid of it, we’re far better off with it. ... But let’s not buy into the idea that its projections represent anything other than a murky, and frequently mistaken, vision of the future if everything goes more or less as expected." Maybe it's just me, but this sounds like trying to have it both ways depending on whether you'll be pleased or displeased with any given future CBO estimate.
- Nothing new, but Nick Gillespie is quite convinced that libertarians have been the unseen driving force behind modern politics: "The real impact of a libertarian sensibility is building a mind-set that privileges autonomy and individual choice, voluntarism, and openness over top-down, coercive systems that force everyone to go along to get along. ... [I]t reflects all the best trends in commerce and culture of the past 40 years. ... That mind-set has already shaken the world in ways big and small and will continue to do so." It's easy to find supporting evidence (the Internet!) and counterfactuals (surveillance technology!) so color me skeptical about this particular dialectic.
- Remainders: I have to admit, I didn't expect to see the United States reduced to a second-class country in my lifetime, but here we are; I sincerely hope voters have considered the consequences of returning sociopaths to power in Congress; and more evidence that it's less the "paranoid style" that explains our present politics, and more the anti-intellectualism.
--Mori Dinauer
