'The 5 Best Libertarian Blogs'—Rate Your Own!

Joseph S. Dietrich, who has been doing some interesting libertarian writing over at the Washington Times website, has come out with his list of "The 5 Best Libertarian Blogs." This here humble blarg comes out at #5, with a kind write-up:
No libertarian blog discusses current events better than Reason's Hit & Run. Essentially a distilled version of Reason Magazine's viewpoints and style, Hit & Run focuses primarily on identifying and explaining the failures of government.
Hit & Run also features more overall content than any other blog on this list. A dozen posts or more constitutes an average day.
Rounding out Dietrich's best-of list:
4) The Libertarian Standard ("home to arguably the best content of any libertarian blog").
3) The Circle Bastiat ("With [its] concentration of academic star power, this blog, which is hosted by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, stimulates its readers' intellect").

2) Laissez Faire Club ("If nothing else, the LFC Blog is a pleasant alternative to the polemical, pessimistic rants of so many other libertarian writers").
1) The Beacon ("Unemotional yet unique, The Beacon is a must-read for all libertarians — young or old, monarchist or anarchist, Austrian or Public Choice. A delicate balance of positive and normative analysis, together with unrivaled consistency in quality, elevates this blog above the rest").
Dietrich also gives a nice shout-out to former Reasoner Cathy Reisenwitz: "the best new libertarian blog online is undoubtedly Sex & the State."
I must confess to visiting blogs an awful lot less in the age of Twitter, so I find this kind of old-skool tipsheet very useful. But not as useful as a crowdsourced list from you, beloved Hit & Run commenters! So since you've got another hour until the A.M. Links, let's hear your supplemental suggestions to the list above, preferably with some colorful prefixes in front of "tarian" to indicate differing viewpoints and emphases….
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5th Best? Not good enough. Well, I guess I know where I'll be spending my days from now on!
Oh, who am I kidding? I can't quit you.
Looks like they left out LewRockwell.com. Which would be a lot better if they allowed comments.
Joseph S. Dietrich bigs up H'n'R but not the commenters? Well the hell with him
Seriously... I actually rarely read the whole post and skip right to the comments.
I skip the post and the other comments and go right to my own. This is a good one.
I skipped right over yours to mine.
I don't even know what you assholes wrote, I just went straight to this awesome post of mine.
What about Radley Balko's The Agitator.
HuffPo is an even worse memory hog than H&R. That alone keeps it from being on any best list.
And being on HuffPo makes the comments almost unbearable. Though the ones on his blog are a lot better than typical for HuffPo.
You have to be a card carrying communazi to even register for an account on the HuffPo.
5th?! We're obviously not trying hard enough in the commentariat. I blame Baked Penguin.
Here are the few I tend to visit:
1. Popehat
2. Cafe Hayek
3. Coyote Blog
4. PINAC
And how can we forget the Alpha and Omega of libertarian sites:
5. URKOBOLD.
And a moment of silence for dispatches from TJICistan, before Travis Corcoran was deprived of his 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendment rights.
BakedPenquin?!? How dare you mention that Yankee's foul cognomen on these hallowed pages!
Hush, puppy. You have haunted us too long with your tales of erotic horror. As for JW, I refuse his assignation of blame, as I refuse to accept JW, period.
I refuse to accept JW, period.
Sorry, but you can't. SOCIAL BLOG CONTRACT!
2. Cafe Hayek
There are three Tonys there.
There are three here, too.
There are three Tonys there.
Eh?
Cafe Hayek has three resident dumbasses who will never "get it."
Are you talking about their long departed comments section? Don and Russ seem to be right on point.
He's talking about commenters
Cafe Hayek has three resident dumbasses who will never "get it."
Worse is that they are so certain that they do.
If my idea of using that website's grade level estimator to rate comments had caught on, we would have made it in.
I blame Steve Chapman. Or STEVE SMITH. Pick one.
The Freeman deserves to be mentioned as well.
I mostly like the Mises Institute, but I wouldn't put its new blog that high up. I wouldn't even say it merits a mention any more. The addition of John Cochran is nice, but it still has the pretty cranky Salerno. And now much less content than when Jeff Tucker was involved. (plus, the best part of that site was the now defunct forum, which had some great, calm, reasonable discussions)
I'd put Reason's far more content-rich blog much higher up, and replace Circle Bastiat with something like EconLog. David Friedman's "Ideas" blog is also fun and enlightening, and the Austrian Economists/Coordination Problem blog always has great posts, though it's rarely updated these days.
The Democratic Underground
RedState
The Daily Kos
Michael Savage
Jezebel
*pokes eyes out*
What? No balloonjuice?
Little Green Footballs is on the phone and they would like to speak with you.
Is that guy still around? I thought for sure he had moved his blog offline and he and his 4 friends who hadn't been excommunicated sat around jerking each other off in his basement. Or maybe he just wears a different sock puppet on each hand.
Not a blog, but the anarcho_capitalism subreddit is about the one redeeming feature of reddit. Wonderful place for philosophical discussions and occasional tweaking of the totalitarians/authoritarians in /r/anarchism
5th? thanks a lot Weigel.
I gave up on the libertarians in favor of the neoreactionaries, who are mostly ex-libertarians who got fed up with libertarian sophistry. The best ones are:
Fosetti http://foseti.wordpress.com/
Moldbug's http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/
Radish http://radishmag.wordpress.com/
Radish provides a more exhaustive list.
cool story bro
I gave up on libertarians for tentacle porn. I stay here for the humor.
It's a shame Moldbug ran out of things to say.
Perhaps he has, perhaps he hasn't. But even if he never writes another word, he'll remain a hero of mine for his repeated schoolings of Will Wilkinson, such as here and here. If he had written nothing else, that alone earns him a seat among the Immortals.
but not sophistry itself.
Are there any fora or other similar places where the conversation is any good? I come here for my primary internet interaction, so I was curious if there are any great places for people like *us* to talk. I do appreciate SweatingGin's referral to the subreddit - that sounds like it might be decent.
Sex and the State? The lead blogress may be a reason alumna, but posts like this are explicitly anti-libertarian. Cathy needs to fire her male feminist guest poster. There are no exceptions for feminism in libertarianism.
That said, I find her writing to be much better both in quality and liberty-mindedness.
"Brendan Moore is a current undergraduate at Coe College, studying feminism, zen deconstructionism, poetry, Amanda Palmer, and Tori Amos."
So yet-another unemployable pussy.
What is with the Amanda Palmer worship? She's talented and pretty witty, but I guess I don't get the magic.
She doesn't shave her armpits, but she does shave her eyebrows. So daring, so edgy.
You forgot the best part: He currently lives in Las Vegas, and would like to help you smash the patriarchy.
My biggest problem with Cathy's blog, besides this Brendan guy, is that there doesn't seem to be enough balance between posts advocating feminism to libertarians and those advocating libertarianism to feminists (i.e., there is an overabundance of the latter).
Granted I haven't been reading very long.
Also she, Token Libertarian Girl, and someone else (I think one of the ToL bloggers) recently wrote a post taking down a pretty bad LR entry for being sexist. I did find the LR post objectionable but I felt that the three of them discredited themselves somewhat by indulging in hyperbole.
Let's see how many more names we can come up with for "content-free bullshit studies."
Yeah. I actually wrote Cathy a long email explaining the facts and the probables on the Zimmerman case and why it is very likely that things happened pretty much as Zimmerman described them. She never responded. And she has responded to other emails.
Zimmerman is just a blind spot of stupid for some people. For whatever reason, it causes some otherwise rational people to think totally irrationally. It doesn't affect all people. Some normally pretty idiotic leftists have been quite reasonable about the case. But forget reasoning with the ones who have the stupid virus on that case.
Even Fluffy had a breakdown about it!
My vague recollection is that the Fluffster was saying, very early on, that there were good grounds for suspecting that Zimmerman was the aggressor.
As the facts came out, that looked less and less likely. Don't recall where he landed.
The breakdown of reason (drink if you want to) amongst people capable of rational thought is the biggest eye-opener for me. It just astounds me that so many people have totally gone round the bend over the Zimmerman case.
The simple, and irrefutable facts of the case make it plain that Zimmerman acted in self defense. There is simply no way that the circumstantial evidence, the eye witness evidence, and Zimmerman's explanation of what happened to converge as they did converge unless the shooting happened exactly as Zimmerman explained it.
Plus, it squares with the backgrounds of the two. GZ: Wannabe cop but not racist. TM: Wannabe thug into fist-fighting and a drug that can make one violent and paranoid.
The hoodie thing. What's with young males (of any race) wearing hoodies?
In warm weather even. I see it frequently.
Is it to avoid being identifiable?
Third sentence:
Zimmerman might not be a racist, but his actions leading up to Martin's death?Zimmerman with weapon in hand, stalking Martin through the streets, afraid of some phantom criminal who just turned out to be a black boy in a black hoody?aren't sparklingly innocent.
So you didn't bother to find out what actually happened, you just went with untrue talking points. I'm done.
Again, this is a guest poster. Cathy's work is better, she just needs to accept that some of her friends' writings don't fit the audience she is trying to host.
Like I said, that case is like a virus. Otherwise reasonable people have lost all ability to think rationally about it. I can't explain it.
It's because many people live in a mental world in which White Racism is the biggest, most defining problem in the country and maybe the world. They've had this pounded into them for decades. One effect is to cause a sort of misperception about black crime: it MUST be the fault of white racists. So, black-on-black crime is ignored or minimized, but if a "white man" like GZ kills a black teen, then it pops into their mental pattern, and their anguish over the plight of black male teens is transformed into a blind hatred of the guy who shot one. The logic is something like: "There is white racism, therefore Trayvon Martin was murdered."
Zimmerman with weapon in hand,
Demonstrably false.
stalking Martin through the streets,
Tendentious, but perhaps defensible.
afraid of some phantom criminal
The neighborhood was plagued with break-ins, and there is some reason to believe that little Tray-tray's hands weren't entirely clean.
who just turned out to be a black boy in a black hoody
Sorry, but a full-grown 17 year old is not a "boy" when it comes to a fight. Unless, of course, you are a racist who refers to all black men as "boy".
The neighborhood was plagued with break-ins, and there is some reason to believe that little Tray-tray's hands weren't entirely clean.
Funny how we never get any idea of the break-in rate since the incident.
This is an observation that seems to have been lost. 17 year old mlg would kick the shit out of 36 year old mlg.
Nice legs on Cathy.
Cathy is a cutie. And she is "sex positive".
What does that even mean? What if she were married and faithful to her husband - would she be "sex negative?"
I am not sure to be honest. I think it means she is open to swinging and such and doesn't view sex and commitment as always being the same.
It means she's come up with a long explanation for why it's ideologically acceptable for her to like porn.
I don't know about the sex-positive part, but she also calls herself polyamorous.
Faithful just means she isn't banging other people, it doesn't mean she's banging him. So, it could go either way.
This is why there are no women libertarians.
Yes she is, especially for an ex-squirrel.
A lot of her writing (and videos) though strikes me as a someone who gets very zealous about whatever she's into at the moment before moving on to the next thing.
Too bad she scribbled all over them. Fucking inkies.
I agree. It just ruins a woman.
The sites I visit - other than the monocle polishing porn:
diyaudio.com (making your own audio gear)
stevehoffman.com (music + audio gear)
a brief Instapundit read - though this is getting rarer and rarer
facebook (*shudder*) - to check up on my stable of MILFs
and the sites where I collect my links
I haven't updated in forever, but I had started a blog based on a combo of my religious and political views:
http://mormonlibertarian.ezknight.net
iNo libertarian cosmotarian blog discusses current events better than Reason's Hit & Run. Essentially a distilled version of Reason Magazine's viewpoints and style,
fixed
I find myself reading Popehat a lot lately.
You won't be missed.
Shouldn't you be off fighting the patriarchy?
Shouldn't you be at truck pull?
That's a tractor pull, you inbred Kentucky redneck! You ought to know better, or are you one of those self hating motherfuckers like Clarence Thomas?
It's not as if Popehat is yokeltarian friendly either.
Holy shit, you get dumber daily. Are you pooping yourself yet?
Dishonorable mention: Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Not because it's "not libertarian," or its futile efforts to reach out to places like Crooked Timber. It's largely terrible, and essential, as a bracing reminder of what academic philosophy is like. If you're like me and enjoy discussing the more 'philosophical' aspects of libertarianism, remember that the main bloggers there are the 'real' philosophers. Circular discussions, counterproductive jargon, a palpable disdain for people outside of academia or unwilling to accept academic orthodoxy as a starting point.
Its true value may be that it convinces some readers that pursuing a career in philosophy is a horrible mistake.
Good summary. I hate those guys.
Roderick Long and Gary Chartier are occasionally worth reading.
Kevin Carson too, as much as I frequently disagree with him, he seems to be making a turn.
I agree. I mean the regular bloggers. Long is the kind of academic philosopher I like to see. I wish he'd write/get some book published at some point; his Mises-Wittgenstein draft is great. Chartier usually has something interesting to say. Same for Steve Horwitz and Sarah Skwire, but notice that neither are trained philosophers.
Indeed, I don't agree with his eudomonist ideas at all, but he's still a very thoughtful philosopher and less frustrating than say, Zwolinski.
And I forgot all about Horwitz, he's really just out of place there. By Rod's own definition even he's a "right-libertarian" but I guess the occasional feminist rhetoric is enough.
EconLog
Marginal Revolution
Volokh Conspiracy
Bleeding Heart Libertarians
BLH bloggers can't get over their own smugness. It's basically Tulpa on steroids.
Free Advice with RPM? Anyone?
I enjoy it, but it's a pretty narrow blog. I wouldn't put it in the essential list of blogs to represent libertarianism.
If the FBI's infamous Cointelpro operations had quietly re-emerged (as alleged in recent years by the PBS news show NOW, The Nation, and CounterPunch magazine, among other sources) and someone with first-hand knowledge of it wrote a blog about it called "FightGangStalking"(with an archive of related articles) I bet that would be worth a look - especially for anyone with libertarian sympathies.
Samizdata. Written (mostly) by libertarians living in Airstrip One.
Just like Airstrip One, but less fictional. As real as Cointelpro Version 1 (assuming you accept that one was real).
Although I recently commented there and got attacked (along with others) by their rigid and obnoxious ideologue commenter Perry Metzger. He's such a pure libertarian that to him not granting asylum to Muslim refugees or even having national borders at all counts as "violence," but somehow sending money to a Muslim terror group counts as "peaceful." Yeah, right. But it's still a decent blog.
I also love Amy Alkon's columns and blog. She's a libertarian advice-columnist who excels at pissing off all the right people.
She's an annoying, hyperventilating harpy.
I disagree. And she's hot.
Cafe Hayek
Friedersdorf
Kids Prefer Cheese
Unbroken Window
and Tom Woods if you want some light Screwie-Lewie-type opinion
Friedersdorf isn't exactly libertarian.
I read Instapundit daily but I wouldn't call that a libertarian blog either
He certainly focuses more on civil libertarianism than anything, but I think he's more economically libertarian than he lets on. I'd bet he doesn't write much about it so he can try and stay in the good graces of the progressive elite (think Chris Hayes, Ezra Klein, barf), which is weak sauce to be sure, but whatever.
Circular discussions, counterproductive jargon, a palpable disdain for people outside of academia or unwilling to accept academic orthodoxy as a starting point.
This sounds... familiar.
The lpcolorado.org/blog used to be in the top 10. I has sad.
Huh - Cathy Reisenwitz sent me a "connect" thing in LinkedIn. I declined because I didn't know who she was, and "Sex and the State" sounded like trouble. Because LinkedIn is basically headhunters offering you jobs, and those kinds of "associates".....?
Anyway. Reason #5? Fuck your rating system. At least - speaking in a collectivist manner - the commentariat are #1.
That is all.
If by #1 you mean as in statist running dogs and cosmotarian-roaders.
I think she sent invites to anyone who emailed webmaster@reason.com, such as for unspamming a comment.
I wondered why I got one, addressed to my handle. But I am on LinkedIn under my real name, and don't want the two associated. (I need to get work in San Francisco, where libertarians aren't exactly feted.) So I sent her a message explaining the situation, and to find out if this was just spam of some sort, but never heard back.
Center for a Stateless Society. The writers there aren't apologists for government-enabled big business.
Because without the State, economies of scale would cease to exist.
They very best is obviously Attack the System. The biggest tent of them all, no matter how ugly it may be.
The Beacon is a must-read for all libertarians ? young or old, monarchist or anarchist...
Monarchist libertarians want a king, but that would be their entire government.
I volunteer.
MONARCHIST LIBERTARIANS MAKE THEMSELVES KING AND YOU ARE ALL HIS SERVANTS. UNLESS YOU ARE KINGS AS WELL, IN WHICH CASE WE GO TO WAR.
Which, it should be noted, is how those 'anachronistic society' re-enactments got started. I and my Viking hammer have defeated many a Japanese shogun and Aztec king.
Ordinary Times (formerly Ordinary Gentlemen) has pretty awesome comments, if'n you ask me.
It's not *EXACTLY* a libertarian site. The comments, however, have a lot of Libertarian pushback. There is an added benefit of everyone being excruciatingly polite.
And we're watching Babylon 5!
Goddammit, people! The best libertarian blog in the tubes is mad libertarian guy.
Have you people no taste?
Bishop Hill is a UK libertarian blog that spends a lot of time on CAGW. But also covers UK politics.
Someone needs to tell "Joseph S. Diedrich" to remove his photo from his web postings. Its abominable.
Great blog!