Joel Mathis

At The Week : "Libertarians are not properly part of the GOP coalition, if indeed we ever were. There is no libertarianism in the soul of the Trumpian Republican Party, and Republican partisans today are not libertarians. The limited government leg of the stool is broken. If libertarians accede Trump's demand of our permanent loyalty at the polls, the best we can expect is splinters." I am not a libertarian -- I have too many hopes for what government can do for the people. But I respect a lot of libertarian people and their insights: Bonnie, for one, but also writers (and friends) like Rick Henderson and Steve Greenhut. (Radley Balko is not a friend, but he's another libertarian who was doing the hard work on police militarization long before it was popular.) We don't always agree on stuff (especially when Democrats are running things) but I appreciate their insights that what government can do for the people can also be stuff that government does to the people

I've been thinking about this all day. Apparently 200 marchers descended on the residential tower where Mayor Ted Wheeler lives ... and tried to set a fire on the ground floor . "The 16-story building contains 114 residences. The fire didn’t appear to spread and was quickly extinguished. Police used crowd-control munitions and released smoke into the air as they pushed the crowd west." It's easy to throw words like "terrorism" around. But. I keep thinking of people like Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City -- even though there were a number of innocent children there. And the 9/11 highjackers, who killed thousands of innocent Americans in order to accomplish their political task. Whoever set the fire in Portland was, at the very least, willing to risk the lives of all the residents in that residential tower just to make their ire known. I don't care if that ire was earned or not. What I do know is that what they did wa

  I kept expecting to see the Angel of Death emerge from the fog, standing at the prow of a longboat, ready to take me on a journey to Hades. 

I knew when I decided to go inactive on my longtime Twitter account and move to cultivating the blog instead, I was going to lose audience and a piece of the conversation. So I'm gratified that in the last day or so, more than 30 of you have decided to follow the Twitter account that is just a feed of this blog. That's roughly 1 percent of the number of followers I have at the old account, but hopefully I'm offering better and slightly more thoughtful content here. At the very least, I think, I am responding to actual stories and not just the headlines -- and I'm less tempted to offer knee-jerk takes when I have to go through the process of creating a blog post. It slows me down a bit. That matters, I think. I hope.  Anyway, for those of you who have followed me here: Thanks.

 Daniel Larison: Andrew Bacevich recently commented on our government’s senseless policy in Syria: “So instead of a realistic policy defined by clear national interests, the United States drifts toward a confrontation with Russia in a place that virtually no American believes is worth dying for.” This “drift” is what happens when U.S. foreign policy operates as if on autopilot. Instead of deploying troops somewhere to achieve a specific end to advance an American interest, our policymakers come to see the deployments as ends in themselves. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the deployment serves a clear purpose or whether it is a wise use of resources. It evidently doesn’t matter whether it’s legal. Once the U.S. sends troops somewhere, it usually takes extraordinary effort to extract them later, and that has no effect on subsequent decisions to deploy them in new countries. Correct. I'd add that deploying to countries like Syria creates a moral element to this flytrap effect: Once

 NYT report on the death of Dijon Kizzee, who was shot to death by sheriff's deputies in LA: On Monday, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officials said deputies tried to stop a Black man who was riding a bike in South Los Angeles. They said he was stopped for a code violation related to the bike, but wouldn’t elaborate on what the alleged violation was. The sheriff's office said Kizzee fled and then "made a motion" toward a dropped gun. I think we've learned by now that such accounts should be viewed as provisional, at best, and possibly false. But even if completely true, I'm trying to imagine a "code violation related to the bike" that was so worth enforcing that this outcome was worth it. We need laws for good order and civilization. But the libertarian side of me has come to believe that maybe we go overboard -- and that the result, sometimes, is a death sentence for selling loose cigarettes, or having a bike code violation. At the very least, it

At Persuasion, Matt Lutz argues that "asking people to be hyper-conscious of race is likely to aggravate, not fix, racial injustice."  Refusing to ascribe importance to something morally neutral is a virtue. And because colorblindness is a refusal to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, it remains the best remedy for old-fashioned racism that we have.  But:  The world is a much more peaceful place today than it was as recently as a century ago—largely because of attempts to emphasize our common humanity . If we focus on what unites us, our altruistic instincts take over and we become kinder and more trusting towards each other. But our tendency to favor the ingroup can never be completely eradicated. Perhaps the answer, then, isn't to embrace some unachievable notion of colorblindness, but A) to refuse to discriminate against others on the basis of their skin color, B) recognize that many people are discriminated against on the basis of their ski