Meta-Restructure: Top Five Most “Interesting” Posts + Delurking

Here are the top five most “interesting” posts on this blog for the past year or so, determined by some crude statistical ranking.

  1. Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only. (July 14, 2009)
  2. People of colour are not a story of suffering . . . Or resistance. (October 29, 2009)
  3. Feynman called a woman “worse than a whore” for not exchanging sex for sandwiches. (August 7, 2009)
  4. Male IT geeks think they are “low status” males. (February 1, 2010)
  5. White, male startup companies get funding for being white and male. (February 10, 2010)

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Libertarianism is rational for rich white people only.

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that is fiscally conservative, but socially liberal—except when it concerns social issues that involve money or property. Stereotypically, libertarianism is self-consistent only in a toy universe abstracted away from the messiness and social inequalities of the real world.

Several years ago, a libertarian introduced to me a flash video that was intended to promote libertarianism. I was amazed to find that the unrealistic abstraction and idealism that is stereotypical of libertarianism was manifested even in the video’s visuals. An unintentional visual self-parody, the video—The Philosophy of Liberty—illustrates libertarianism with abstract stick figures representing people devoid of race, gender, and historical context.

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