Armentano on UFOs

By -
I tried to think of an antitrust pun but nothing worked. ("DT doesn't trust the feds on Martians!" Ugh.) Anyway, here is the piece that got him fired from Cato. I have held all sorts of crazy views over the years, so I certainly don't think any less of Armentano for writing this. In fact, since he knows how crazy it sounds, I really respect him.

But it probably helps that he's retired from teaching and presumably can afford to get fired.

CORRECTION: Gene is right, upon further review, it was wrong for me to use the verb "fired." I think I picked that up from the LRC blogger where I stole this from. (Cosmic justice, I guess: I hadn't given a hat tip because I forgot, and so now I won't mention the person who misled me.) And just to clarify, I am not condemning Cato's decision necessarily. The point of my blog post was to praise Armentano for writing something that would make people roll their eyes.

Comments

  1. gcallah9:00 AM

    I don't think "adjunct scholar" is a paid position or one that requires doing anything, so I don't think you can get "fired" from it.

    Armentano probably could have avoided all problems by not explicitly dragging CATO into the picture to lend authority to his piece. (He is also an adjunct scholar at the Mises Institute, but he chose to cite CATO in his bio blurb.)

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah9:09 AM

    I read Armentano's follow-up piece, and he says "dropped," not "fired" -- more accurate, I think.

    But he also cries "censorship"! Aren't we free-market types supposed to clearly distinguish between censorship -- the government bans my writing -- and private freedom of association -- you can write that, but than we're going to drop you as an associate?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous10:38 AM

    Mr. Callahan, why do you capitalize all the letters in Cato?

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah6:07 PM

    Aren't they the brother of NATO?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous6:57 AM

    Cato, NATO, Stato, salad, salaad, dad diddley office, the near sight of the mere size of him...I guess it is all the same...

    ReplyDelete
  6. anti-antitrust6:45 PM

    Let me clear up some misunderstandings. First, the op/ed editor of the Press Journal included my Cato byline, not me. (I frequently write public policy op/eds in that newspaper with that byline). I never saw the piece prior to publication. Second, the word "censorship" in the title is, again, the newspaper's, not mine. As most of us know, authors almost never get their own titles included. I never claimed that Cato "censored" me,but only that they dropped me for writing in a sensitive public policy area. (Ed Crane, by the way, has since apologized for the way I was terminated). Finally, for those who think that this is NOT a public policy issue, or that the entire subject (UFO secrecy) is a joke, do yourself a favor and read historian Richard Dolan's "UFOs and the National Security State" (Hampton Roads, 2002). If you still think that what I argue in those op/eds is "silly" after reading Dolan, then you have a problem that I can't fix.

    Dom Armentano
    Vero Beach, Florida 32963

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous12:27 AM

    In life, we will face a lot of choices for us to choose. At times, we do not know how to choose, this is a hard thing for people to make a decision. Take aoc gold for example. That is an easy choice for you to make. If you do not know how to do now, please turn to make conan gold, then you will find surprise on aoc money. You will find that it is easy to make age of conan gold. If you do not know how to buy cheap aoc gold, I can help you.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more