No one is going to know that around here until **BrainGlutton **gets off his ass and starts a thread about it!
Consistency Check: Do you accept without objection the labels “Pro-Life”, “War On Terror”, and “Family Values”, as those terms are commonly used in modern American political argument?
I feel like a character from Waiting for Gadot
Hmmm. I thread about Trent Lott turning into a joke thread. Who’da thunk?
We’re just trying to cope with our deep sense of loss.
Do I accept their existence? Sure.
Do I use them myself? Sometimes.
Do I use them with an ironic inflection? Occasionally.
Do I use commonly-understood synonyms for them instead? Sometimes.
Do I argue that there is “no reason” to use these particular terms, and recommend that others use “more descriptive” synonyms for them instead? Never.
Do I respond to other people’s non-ironic use of them with philosophical critiques, or cryptic little aphorisms suggesting that I find their phrasing ideologically objectionable or dishonest? You can bet your sweet bippy I don’t.
(Did I pass? It’s been a while since I had my consistency checked and you never know what they’ll find…)
From deep-sixing Lott.
**Kimstu **= Rumsfeld? :eek:
What about Denny Hastert’s deep sense of loss? He resigned too, and on the same day as Trent.
Did Brainglutton open a thread for him? NO.
That is soooo unfair!
It’s worse than that. He would spoil your opportunity to snark at me with zippy one-liners, which are rarer than a fried penis in Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge. It’s something you just never do.
Eww, thanks a lot John, now I feel all dirty!
(Thanks for the correction, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where or when or why I’d said that. Whew.)
I gotta say, though, that using the emergence of “spontaneous order” in a few internet entities like eBay and wikipedia as an argument for the possibility of a truly and completely libertarian society is somewhat like Communists using the existence of soup kitchens as an argument for the possibility of a truly and completely communist society. Neither phenomenon strikes me as likely to scale up very well to the workings of society in general.
Except that I wasn’t making “an argument for the possibility of a truly and completely libertarian society”. I was disputing your claim that “the thing about an increasingly large and complex society is that it becomes harder and harder to get major things done in it without the exercise of some form of coercive power”. The complexity (in the form of technology) can make it easier.
I want to be Vladimir this time!
You always get to be Vladimir! I’m tired of always being Estragon! 
Well, okay, I should have been more specific and said “it becomes harder and harder to maintain the increasingly large and complex set of major things that need doing in an increasingly large and complex society without the exercise of some form of coercive power.”
You’re right that size and complexity are not necessarily a barrier to getting certain types of “major things” done, like large-scale collaborative writing projects; in fact, they can even facilitate them.
(I note, though, that wiki and eBay do depend for their existence on that runaway offspring of coercive-power institutions, namely the Internet.)
I can’t prove this, of course, but I think the internet was one of those things that was going to happen one way or another. Unless one were to postulate that it takes a government to network a computer. 
Until it does, please stop using the word to refer to yourself or your politics. You are an American, like it or not, and in America liberal != libertarian.
He did?!
Probably for a similar reason, besides the lobbying thing. The VECO oil company scandal in Alaska is heating up, and both Lott and Hastert have been private guests of VECO CEO (and convicted briber) Bill Allen at his resort.
Caught an interesting segment of NOW over the weekend that dealt with this very subject. At one point they showed a photo taken at one of Bill Allen’s fishing retreats; among the happy campers were Messrs Hastert, Lott, and . . .
Larry Craig.
As to another matter (the recurring dispute about the definition of a free-market economy), I’ve long been partial to Ambrose Bierce’s views on the subject:
Well, it IS easier to pick out the mortar in the wall of a log outhouse than to drill through the steel of a regular restroom…