I'd like a government where it's perfectly reasonable for the President to not have instant recall of places like Allepo

Is vaccination a violation of our civil liberties?

I appreciate civil liberties more than the next guy, perhaps because I'm a libertarian and not an anarchist. What do we mean when we say we're free? Anarchists will say our freedom is "inherent" but this can't be right because freedom only means something in the context of having to live with other people. Where does your freedom end and mine begin?

We can only answer that question when we reach some agreement about what behaviors we're tolerate and protect. And we're obligated to protect each others' freedom, so freedom comes with responsibility. If I don't pay my taxes, I'll be sent to jail. If I don't fight for the country if I'm drafted to, I'll be sent to jail. If I resist being sent to jail, I'll be killed.

Now, I think our taxes are way too high and the government through which we establish and protect our freedom fights too much and imposes way too many restrictions on us. Mostly I think they're fucking idiots. But I'm obliged to these idiots nonetheless because the relative health, prosperity and freedom I enjoy is premised on us being responsible citizens and meeting the trivial responsibilities we have to each other.

The vaccination responsibility is trivial. I'm not asked to go to war. I'm not asked to believe in any particular religion. I'm just asked to take a couple seconds of minor pain and a trivial risk that I'm one of the 1 in 1,000,000 people who actually have a bad reaction. It's irrational to worry about this. Even with improved hygiene, thousands, probably tens of thousands would get sick and die without vaccines every year. The cost benefit to vaccines isn't worth talking about.. It'd be much more rational to complain that you're being taxed too much for shitty schools, worthless politician, enfeebling social programs, crony capitalism and needless wars.

Taking away my ability to provide for my family is a much greater obligation than getting a shot, and I think folks are giving in to baseless fear to put one in front of the other.

I'm a Libertarian in theory, but vote Republican because I want my vote to count.

On iSideWith.com, I'm a Libertarian/Republican. This seems about right. More importantly, the odd results many get (like Scott Sumner being a Green/Socialist) seem to largely come from failing to spend any time weighting the importance of the categories.

Just like real voting, our system sucks because people vote expressively (for what they feel) rather than instrumentally (to accomplish policy).

What's "important" should be:
1. How big is the issue? The death penalty affects a trivial amount of people, the Obamacare fiasco a huge amount of people.
2. How can the issue be resolved? While I might sympathize more with those who suggest Global Warming is a huge problem, the proposed solution of cap and trade is terrible while the GOP of encouraging market responses seems practical. Likewise, many of the "problems" don't need solutions imposed by the government, because cultural and social dynamics will resolve them no matter who's in power (e.g. Gay rights).

Intelligence is supposedly going to be explained here, but I think the purported criticisms to be explained are strawman versions of more substantive and hard to refute criticisms. I don't think intelligence is very useful as a practical matter because:

1. It is not necessary to assume we are all good at something to criticize the overall intelligence concept. Rather, it's enough to note that everyone has different relative strengths across their cognitive domains, and it's these variations, along with that 50% of ability that isn't "g-locked' and is somewhat variant, will often dominate the explanation.

The blogger says that intelligence exists to cope with uncertainty. To pull an economics concept into the discussion, intelligence by definition doesn't help one cope with something like Knightian uncertainty (an uncertainty that's simply not calculable in a meaningful way). More practically, how many philosophers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, because it's not a problem that requires a philosopher. There are a lot of ways to resolve life's many uncertainties, and it's not always evident that throwing more intelligence at the problem is the most efficient. Out of all the problems out there to be solved, a critical application of abnormal intelligence solves very few of them.

2. The brightest of us aren't as bright we might hope. And definitely not so bright as to rightly claim the prerogatives they have historically claimed. Simply put, the smartest of us frequently lie, cheat, steal and kill, and the dumbest of us frequently know when they're being lied to, cheated, stolen from, and killed.

3. “It is possible that clever people develop a kind of cognitive noblesse oblige; they kind of know they have won the lottery on a valuable trait, but they think it is bad form to acknowledge it.”

See 2. If you're truly smart, you ought to be smart enough to not go prattling on about it. And if you're truly smart and realize that the overwhelming majority of people are truly quite a bit less smart, you ought to be smart enough to understand they may not be smart enough to take your prattling on about it in stride.

...providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.

 a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black). Andrew Sullivan - via Ann Althouse.

Of course, in reality the concern is that Obamacare's rules are basically creating a permanent caste system between the working poor and the working professional.

Under Obamacare the working professional gets heavily tax-subsidized employer-based insurance and the working poor get penalized if they do not buy insurance. And they get permanently routed to part-time jobs.

Basically, if you came up with a recipe to destroy the working class, you couldn't do a better job than Obamacare. So much for being a beneficiary.

People like the debt ceiling and they should.

People like the debt ceiling (although Tyler Cowen doesn't).The debt ceiling is useful precisely because it forces both voters and representatives to at some level confront and resolve the cognitive dissonance between "I want to spend all this money" and "I don't want to be at an unsustainable debt level".

The debt ceiling makes more sense, not less, in light of both behavior economics and public choice lessons.

The Presidential options on foreign policy

David Henderson thinks Obama will be re-elected due to foreign policy. In his post he argues Governor Romney would be the "war candidate". But there's no quotes from Romney or even outlines of his statements or thinking in any real detail. Nothing at all but vague assertions and implications.

2. The article that David links to calling the Romney advisors "neo-con retreads", in fact, doesn't call any of the advisors neo-cons. In fact, it says of his closest and most well-known advisors:

Zoellick: "He is a generally regarded as a relative moderate on foreign affairs, a pragmatism, at the other end of the spectrum in the Republican party from the neocons."

Williamson: "He is a state department veteran who served in the Reagan administration and during the George W Bush administration opted to concentrate on the Darfur crisis in Sudan rather than become bogged down in the Iraq war. One of his jobs is to co-ordinate the divergent views coming from Romney's 40-plus pool of foreign policy advisers."

Kagan: "One of the best-known thinkers in US foreign policy and a heavyweight adviser to Romney. He was a foreign policy adviser to John McCain in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. He is co-founder of the neo-conservative Project for the New American Century. In spite of that, he is not generally regarded as a neo-con but a realist. His latest book, The World America Made, was praised by Barack Obama."

Friedberg: "Professor of politics and international relations at Princeton. Another realist has focused recently mainly on the rise of China and argues that the Obama administration should be preparing for a potential conflict. In spite of that, he does not believe such a conflict is inevitable."

3. I don't understand why David is asserting that immediately withdrawing from war and the Middle East would be a winning strategy while posting links to public opinion research suggesting that majorities of voters support the policy of continued war offered by President Obama.

How about some specifics. In the comments to that post, Greg G says:

It is quite true that there is a lack of policy specifics that we have "heard from Romney." One specific that we have heard is that he is outraged that Obama has not been more supportive of the current Israeli government which is seeking our support in attacking Iran.
That has been the specific that he has chosen to emphasize the most. He has also criticized Obama for being willing to announce a specific date for leaving Afghanistan.

But... I don't interpret either of those specifics as favoring military action nor do I think he's unambiguously more "warlike" than Obama's policies. Rather, both cases relate to the feeling that Obama is sending the wrong signals to our friends and enemies around the world.

Foreign policy largely seems like a signaling game to me. Sometimes conflicts might be unavoidable, but history shows that lots of conflicts arise from misunderstanding the signals both our friends and enemies send. In that vein, once you've reached the stage of armed conflict, you've already lost.

Put simply, it's wise to tell an enemy you'll hit them back with overwhelming force if they attack. If an enemy questions your will to fight, it's wise to give every appearance that you'll fight and fight forever, even if you don't want to.

With respect to friends, giving them ambiguous signals of support is also dangerous. If your friend starts a fight, do you have his back? Will he start the fight if you say you don't? Will the enemy start a fight with your friend if he thinks you'll jump in? How about if he thinks you'll sit it out and let the friend go it alone?

All of this is pretty common sense stuff from both an every day perspective and a foreign policy perspective. And to my mind, Romney's specific criticisms are pretty valid. We very well might avoid (more) war by signaling our endless resolve to our enemies and communicating our exact intentions to our friends, regardless of what we actually intend.