I think this book came up in another thread so I’ll put it here. @polo77j, did you ever finish this one? I’ll admit, there were parts in the middle that were slow for me and I put it aside for awhile. When I came back to finish it, I really liked it again.
Cool story. Well, maybe not cool. More like a very small and super geeky brush with fame. When reading about some of the famous researchers who worked with Kahneman and Tversky, I came across one of my neighbors! I knew he was a big deal in his field, and this nationally recognized person, but I didn’t know anything about his research, so that was kind of fun. I only met him a couple of times, but I know his widow quite well.
Not a book, but it’s a great little essay related to the idea that Christianity espouses socialism. It’s a bit interesting to me since I belong to a faith tradition with a history of voluntary communal property. Even today we have our own welfare system. I think Jesus was a classical liberal.
You’ll see the PDF, and I was able to put a copy on my Kindle.
Wonderful book. Given the topic comes up a lot in PWI, I figured I’d throw it a recommend. Coming from a gay conservative author, it is especially interesting.
I don’t know about conservatives, but we seem to be seeing more politically active gay libertarians. A gay journalist named Chadwick Moore recently drew protestors in a talk he gave at Portland State. He claimed a Gallup poll showed 1 in 5 gay Americans are conservative. I assume that might mean right leaning, but I didn’t see the poll. Dave Rubin of the Rubin report is gay and leans libertarian. Nate Silver, the numbers guy who wrote for the NYT and does the FiveThirtyEight blog is gay and says he’s somewhere between a “liberal and a libertarian.” You can see why LGBT individuals might find a home in classical liberalism if they are fiscal conservatives.
Given that the middle east and radical Islam come up frequently for obvious geopolitical reasons, I highly suggest “The World of Fatwas”. Shourie is an iconoclast, and has a significant streak of Dawkins-esque attitude in his writing, but he is unquestionably sharp, widely read and educated, and the book is highly insightful.
