I don’t know what you’re talking about — run the calculated utilities, and this is something that you’d be irrationally risk averse not to do. You will almost certainly get .19 in about a week, depending on how many contracts you can buy and sell. It seems to be more probable that Obama wins and loses Ohio than that Romney wins and loses Ohio, looking at the electoral map — that means that the big payout is a) more likely than the big loss, and b) a larger gain than the loss is a loss. I mean, don’t bet the farm if you don’t want to, but I don’t see how this is anything close to irrational.

Lincoln jokes? Too soon, too soon….

Well, no. The David Brooks bit is an op-ed, and it never accuses the movement of being anti-semitic (though it does make the Ad Busters link). Fox News, in repackaging it, does call the movement anti-semitic.

I hear ya… I mean, I love Stephen Fry, but sometimes, he’s wrong, and most historians are right.

Why are we citing the wikipedia pages of comedy quiz shows as scholarship? Couldn’t we at least cite the wikipedia page of the dude in question? Richard ap Meryk, Anglicised to Richard Amerike (or Ameryk) (c. 1445–1503) was a wealthy English merchant, royal customs officer and sheriff, of Welsh descent.[1] He was the principal owner of Matthew, the ship sailed by John Cabot during his voyage of exploration to North America in 1497.[1] An amateur Bristol scholar suggested that “America” was derived from Amerike, due to his sponsorship of Cabot’s expedition to Newfoundland, rather than from Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer and map-maker. This is not the consensus view of how America was named, but has been repeated as “urban myth.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Amerike

At least in English, “America” is not the name of a continent. North America is a continent, and South America is a continent, and “The Americas” is a region, but “America” is not ambiguous.

They can’t be both anti-communist and socialist. This is because socialism is a transitional stage on the way to communism. These aren’t sophisms. You just don’t know the meanings of the words you’re using.

Look, I’m just not that interested in arguing with you much more. You’ve said so much that’s not just false but demonstrably false, crazily false, and then defended it by way of selective citation, obfuscation, and changing your position. Now you say that I’m taking an ‘easy’ position, which is absurd, because I was only trying to point out how crazy what you’re saying is. Look, if you’re curious: the definition of socialism you cited seems pretty much right to me. State control of the means of production and capital is kinda the key. This is different from a war-time economy. If it were socialism, there would be no privately held factories. But there were; German companies like VW, BMW, Bayer, and so on were all private and operated with profits, even if the Germans told them what to produce. Shorter answer: read a book. Preferably not by a hack like Jonah Goldberg. You have a lot to learn about both history and political theory.

No, I just think you don’t know what ‘socialism’ means :)

If you think every party is a socialist party, then the word ‘socialist’ must be pretty much devoid of meaning to you.