Source: Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
by Aaron Ross Powell
“To harm someone is to inflict suffering on them and to do so out of greed, hatred, or delusion — the three roots Pali Buddhism calls unwholesome. The suffering itself and the mental state and motivations of the person causing it go together in the analysis. The upshot is that, even toward enemies, it’s wrong and, well, harmful to cause harm. What we actually want is for our enemies to be less harmful, which means released from the unwholesome states that drive their harm-doing in the first place, and so less likely to inflict suffering on others, including on us.” (05/11/26)
“There are many things which are part of ‘The Price of Liberty’ that lovers of liberty must pay. It is not just our ‘lives, fortunes, and sacred honor’ that are sacrificed for freedom. One of those offerings on the altar of liberty is giving up cherished beliefs and ‘facts’ that were taught us by our parents and grandparents, or even by others whom we love and respect, or schools from kindergarten to graduate school.” (05/11/26)
“Ridglan Farms was forced to release thousands of beagles from hideous experiments because activists formed a trans-ideological coalition. AOC-style liberals would never dirty themselves in that way.” (05/11/26)
“Israel’s military has killed six people in an air raid on a house in southern Lebanon, the latest violation of a United States-brokered truce that has only ever existed on paper. The Israeli attack on Monday night targeted a house in the Kfar Dounin municipality, some 100km (60 miles) south of Beirut, Lebanon’s National News Agency (NNA) said. … The air raid is the latest in a near-daily series of Israeli attacks despite an April 16 ceasefire, during which Hezbollah has also exchanged fire. Israel’s air force says it has targeted more than 1,100 sites in Lebanon since the so-called truce began.” (05/11/26)
Source: Independent Institute
by Phillip W Magness
“Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In Covid’s Wake amply documents the consequences of pandemic-era policy and its destructive implications for public health.” (05/11/26)
“The United Arab Emirates carried out military strikes on Iran, making it the only other country to join the United States and Israel in their war against the Islamic Republic, according to a Monday report. The strikes, which the UAE has not publicly acknowledged, included an attack on a refinery on Iran’s Lavan Island in the Persian Gulf, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The attack took place in early April, according to the report, which said it was around the time US President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire, but did not specify if it was before or after the declaration. Iran acknowledged at the time that the site had been attacked by an unspecified enemy, then responded by firing missiles and drones at the UAE and Kuwait, the Journal noted.” (05/12/26)
Source: Chris’s Substack
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra
“[O]ne implication of [Matt] Zwolinski’s work is that there is no single, coherent libertarian project to speak of, that libertarianism is a Big Tent, which includes many, sometimes conflicting projects offering substantially different interpretations of the world and starkly different proposals on how to identify and resolve the social problems they encounter. How adjacent these proposals are to libertarianism is a key issue here because when the definition or even description of a term becomes so fluid that it encompasses virtually everything, it ultimately signifies nothing. This isn’t about asking those in libertarian and adjacent spaces to hand in their club cards. It’s a question of how ‘adjacency’ can morph into ideological complicity and outright support for the very power structures that most libertarians have sought to dismantle.” (05/11/26)
