Why fum’th in fight?

In my state of quasi-cultural obliviousness, I have just discovered podcasts. I have only two or three on my ipod as yet, but one I like a lot already is the Naxos Classical Music Spotlight. It has a great weekly feature on some sort of music that, they of course, have in their library of music for sale. But if there’s such thing as good advertising, doing a 20 minute segment on Thomas Tallis where one plays “spem in alium” and goes over the history of Tallis’ life and his impact on the development of music is a great way to sell me music – especially since the stuff Naxos podcasts is available on ITunes (which makes sense given the advertising format). The podcast is free, but I can tell I will be doing a lot of business with Naxos in the future.

• Did the Chinese discover America and Australia first? Do we really need to know? If it is confirmed as authentic, I will say this, it’s a cool map.
• From the Tenessee State Department of Irony.
• Just reading an essay by Jon Elster in Deliberative Democracy. Elster writes:

“He could argue that the only alternative to the aggregation of given preferences is some kind of censorship or paternalism. He might agree that spiteful or adaptive preferences are undesirable, but he would add that any institutional mechanism for eliminating them would be misused and harnessed to the private purposes of power seeking individuals…This objection assumes (i) that the only alternative to aggregation of given preferences is censorhsip, and (ii) that censorship is always objectionable.”

It seems to me that the liberatarian is willing to grant these two assumptions… The deliberative democrat is not willing to grant (i), because he or she believes in the idea of preference transformation through complled rational discourse and the participatory democrat is not willing to grant (ii) because the value of political behavior does not lie in the distribution of resources in their view. The Foucaltian would likely grant neither because he or she would argue that the assumptions are moot as heavy handed preference censoring is a reality of man’s interaction vis-a-vis other men, large state or no state. I felt this might be an interesting thought to throw out there if there are any other stragglers still looking at the apparent hornets’ nest of libertarians that I kicked over by examining my own differences with their point of view.