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Having written about marriage as a strictly spiritual ordinance – one on which civil arrangements have exactly zero bearing – I’m going to develop that point a bit further by applying to it several key doctrines of the Protestant Reformation. First, the five points of Calvinism, known by the acrostic TULIP. For context, it will [...]
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Looks like 17 is the magic number again. You can click on any cover image to see a larger version. So without further ado: 17. Eluveitie – Everything Remains as it Never Was Celtic Folk/Death Metal Not nearly as good as Slania (2008′s #1 album). But it’s still ok. 16. Mar De Grises – Streams [...]
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The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a resounding triumph for justice. Though it ended up swinging in the opposite direction and actually outlawing a lot of private discrimination, it was a systematic breakdown of the walls which kept blacks from justice in the courts and from equal treatment by the state. Perhaps, given [...]
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Isn’t it funny that environmentalists generally line up on the left on political discussions – the left, the side dominated by the Keynesian cult of consumption? Let me back up and explain what I mean. During the Great Depression, the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes came to prominence, mostly because of good timing. It [...]
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For all the political and economic theories out there which claim to be the best, very few grapple with the question, if it is indeed good, why don’t we have it? Any consistent system must deal with this problem, because no system on earth even closely approximates an ideal type of any sort: we have [...]
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It’s not uncommon to hear people sanctimoniously condemning evangelism as forcing one’s religion on another. In their mind, religion is a purely private matter; a preference, like what flavor ice cream one likes. Rhetoric like this comes alike from the “Spiritual but not religious” crowd, the New Atheists, and pretty much anyone with a measure [...]
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Firefighters last month stood by as an unpaid house burned, protecting paying neighbors. However one defines public goods, this event obviously removes fire protection from that class. So should the firefighters be condemned or commended?
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Within believers in any economic-political system, there are those who justify it consequentially, and those who justify it morally: those whose justification is ex post, and those whose justification is ex ante. To be sure a good system will qualify via both metrics. But the question still remains of which route to take to convince [...]
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The Democratic party finds itself in a pickle. Poised to lose control of Congress this November, their congressional campaigns all reek of the desperation that characterized Republican campaigns in 2006. A few miles south, Cuba finds itself in even more dire economic straits than the US. The drastic step of cutting 10% of the government workforce was just announced, in the hope that a private economy can spring up where none has existed for decades…
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The fact that good Christians disagree on various doctrinal issues is a reality that every Christian must eventually come to grips with. There are, of course, easy ways out. For example, no one is going to heaven except those with my particular beliefs. This idea usually crops up in only the most insular churches and [...]
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Wordpress by default has a persistent sidebar which appears on most every page. One thing I’ve noticed while trawling the sites of designers is that usability is greatly improved by making the sidebar contextual – that is, not a generic site-frame that sits on every page. There are several ways one can improve usability on a site with the sidebar; things I will arrange from easy to hard.
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I’ve alluded to the regulatory house of cards before, specifically with regard to net neutrality. The basic idea is one of unintended consequences: starting from a state of freedom, the government sees a problem real or imagined and tries to fix it by fiat. Of course, this perverts incentives and makes for new problems, which [...]
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The strength of the Protestant reformation was the axe it applied to contemporary Catholic doctrine. One of the many categories to get the axe was the sacraments. Catholics had a nice round list of seven, several of which are nowhere spoken of in the Bible. But one in particular got thrown out perhaps too hastily, one whose consequences are now coming to bear in the modern American political scene: marriage…
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Ni Dieu Ni Maître – “Neither God Nor Master” – has become a trendy slogan among anarchists. The idea is that the self is the final authority, that it has an obligation to submit itself to no authority, religious or political. There indeed seems to be a sentiment that religious devotion is incompatible with liberty. Submission to the state, the logic goes, is only a small step to a mind accustomed to submission to God. Is it such a small step, though, as if the authority of God were essentially the same as the authority of men but on a grander scale?…
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The idea of beauty as the reduction of all particulars to a single head still allows for a dichotomy in the treatment of beauty; what I will refer to as the appreciation of first and second order beauty. First order beauty is the most common conception, simply because it is the most obvious. It is beauty in an object as such, and stops there: everything exists for a purpose, and executes its function in the best way possible…
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The art world is a fascinating example of spontaneous order. Though the particular motives are different, like with the market, motive is indeed the key to art culture as spontaneous order. There are two axes on which we can describe the motive of artistry: first the artists’s with regard to himself, and second the artist’s with regard to his audience…
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For those maintaining WordPress blogs with regular posts, one of the most frustrating things can be getting users to comment regularly. Obviously we want to make this as easy as possible for them. Sure there’s the #comments anchor that we can link to after they’ve read the article that jumps to the bottom of the [...]
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Man is undoubtedly a social being. Nearly everything he does is in regard to another human being. Some have taken this observation so far as to say that it is a fundamental characteristic of human beings to fragment into competing groups. Certainly this tendency is found in all peoples across all times. Yet to say this is a fundamental characteristic of humanity fails to apprehend the core of the tendency…
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Montesquieu described three distinct types of government: Republic, Monarchy, and Despotism. He makes salient the difference between Monarchy and Despotism: in a monarchy, the power of the sovereign is constrained, where in a despotism, the sovereign has total power to execute his every whim. Rather than making one threefold distinction, as Montesquieu does, it seems [...]
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The Illuminati has been making overtures to me of late. Never one to pass up an opportunity to lord secret power over unsuspecting masses, I quickly accepted. But it seems they’ve been planning to induct me for a while. An observant reader has recently brought to my attention a startling fact which it may behoove [...]
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Occam’s razor is often cited as an evidence against the existence of God. The argument goes that if we can explain the universe without resorting to notions of God, then it is preferable to do so. Whether or not Occam’s razor actually applies in this situation, this argument obviously has its appeal: why argue for the existence of something that we don’t need to explain what we see? Yet the appeal of this argument in itself belies its very unsuitability for this question, and in fact demonstrates just the opposite point…
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With graduation fast approaching, the question gets asked very often: What is God’s will for my life? Life is full of uncertainty about the future, and that’s generally the context of the question. What college do I go to? What job do I take? Whom do I marry? Where do I move? The circumstances are endless, but the question remains the same.
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China is on everyone’s minds now, not only because they send us cheap imports, but because Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with this arrangement. The crux of the issue is China’s currency policy, which most of the world believes is set “too low” – effectively making China’s exports cheaper than they would otherwise be in terms of other currencies. The US is not the only one upset either, for the sake of its trade balance…
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Hello all, It’s been a while since I’ve updated AguaT. Usually that’s because I simply don’t have the time to do so with all the other things I do; it’s rather low on my priorities. However, since upgrading to Snow Leopard, time is no longer my limiting factor. It seems ThemePark, the tool I use [...]
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Wired Magazine has a
great article on the future of money. Its basic premise is that, like with the media industries, the internet and the global communication infrastructure will allow the market to cut out the middlemen that lubricated the market in its absence…
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In the late 1780s, a debate raged between the Federalists and the Antifederalists on whether a bill of rights in a constitution would be sufficient, or even harmful, to individual rights. Ultimately the Federalists won and we got a bill of rights, on the condition that there be a general liberty amendment…
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Socialists, Syndicalists, and other collectivist groups will often posture their system as one of worker supremacy. They will also characterize Capitalism as a system of employer supremacy. This is not the truth, as if a system had to favor either employers or employees. Capitalism is rather a system of consumer supremacy – for both employee [...]
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When Christianity began to spread throughout the Roman Empire, the repeated complaint of the Romans was that the new faith subverted the worship of the gods that held the Roman state together. Though many less educated came to believe that the empire fell due to the displeasure of these gods at the Christian faith which [...]
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One of the main functions which the modern state has arrogated to itself in recent times, one which is almost universally viewed as legitimate now that it has become fully ingrained, is the setting of product standards. The FCC, FDA, USDA, CPSC, EPA, and other agencies constantly prevent countless products from ever even entering the [...]
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I am pleased to announce the completion and immediate availability of a manifesto for the copyright abolitionist, as well as a more academic companion paper going into detail on some of the claims made in the manifesto, A Social Utility Model of Intellectual Property Enforcement. These may both be found on the new Writings page, [...]
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Though the intellectual picture for free markets may look rosy with the discredit of orthodox Keynesianism with the oil shocks of the 70s, the Washington Consensus in the 80s, and the fall of Communism in the 90s, a far more formidable foe now looms ahead: institutional momentum. A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury…
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First, this is not a disputation as to whether decrees can precede one another. Even lacking a temporal order, a logical order may be necessary. The relevant question is in terms of means versus ends: were humans created for the sake of salvation and reprobation, or were salvation and reprobation created for the sake of humans?…