Thanks, Mr. Greenwald, for putting into words feelings I've experienced for some time. I've been in the newspaper business for 23 years and have always been a junkie, especially where politics is concerned. Lately, though, I've been tuning out all the shows I used to watch and mainstream newspaper columnists I used to read. But that's what it is -- they are interested only in defending the establishment. No wonder the latest ABC numbers show continued declines. They just don't get it.

In the end, for better or for worse, the people are sovereign, not the experts. For the very reasons you list, this has to be the way it is. It's not all or nothing, but I'm afraid that an AZ motorcyclist's abject ignorance of both the laws of physics (such as F=ma), and his own actuarial risk are not sufficient cause to force him to wear a helmet. Not in my view, at any rate.

Not allowing him to buy an AK-47, on the other hand, might not be a bad idea, if we can get enough of his fellows to vote for the prohibition.

David Bauder. From Marietta GA, has a blog at DavidBauder.com, couldn't find out any more without a lot more work.

Who is wrote this AP piece? There's no byline in the article to which you link.

It seems to me that the single purpose of this piece and subsequent dustup is to reinforce the "liberal" media myth.

I think Brit Hume is fair. Brit rarely goes on these attacks on his show Special Report. On Fox News Sunday he is a commentator so he states his opinion. I like seeing him and Juan go at on FNS. It always fun and interesting. It's like Ann Coulter said if the Democrats are to scare to take on Brit Hume how can they take on the terrorist calling for people to kill us. I admire Sabarnes because he use to go on Fox and fight it out with Brit Hume and Chris. He was the first to make the case against the war. His reasons stuck because he didn't backdown from the hard questions. One thing I wish the Democrats and left would just say is you don't give a damn about the Iraqis or what happens in that part of the world after we pull out. Most American don't either. Just like we didn't give a damn after the Vietnam pullout. New countries are always built on bloodshed. So why do people try to stop these things whether in the Balkins or Sudan or Iraq. America should do what it always does pick a side and fund it. I we had pull out 2 years ago. The Iraqis would have fought it out and we would have a winner by now and somebody we could deal with.

"Brit's" comments are made in debate? That's hilarious. Yes, like when Godzilla and Kong debate the finer points of destruction...such a "balanced" variety of interesting points of view in those Fox "debates".

FYI: Olberman only makes his comments in a "special comments" format where it is clear he is offering his opinion, and his opinion does not show bias towards a political ideology, it shows a clear bias towards the application of honesty and justified outrage, though he does display a bias against corruption, tyranny, hypocrisy, and stupidity.

As someone mentioned earlier, the fact that believing in evolution is, for one milisecond, understood as a political view is absolute proof that we are lost, at the ragged fringe of a flat earth.

The goal is to balance the needs of the collective with individual freedom.

The "collective" is nothing more than a bunch of discrete individuals. Discrete individuals should not be "sin taxed" for their cigarettes (except possibly to the extent such taxes are levied and limited solely to defraying public medical costs in smokers).

If the discrete individuals in the collective have not the right, neither does the so-called collective.

Look, many of you here are shrieking derisively as if I and libertarians think "markets" are some sort of panacea, our version of Jesus. We don't think of them that way. They are very useful and conducive to human progress, and they are an aspect of liberty. But advocating markets is not to claim they create utopia, or that those participating in markets should be free to, say, dump toxins in our waterways. Or even that everything markets offer people are good -- the world would be a better place if alcohol did not exist.

Many of you hold quite the cartoon versions of libertarians.

sufficient risks and sufficient benefits. I got carried away.

I'm a firm believer in free markets.

This turn of phrase is the problem. Would you say that you're a "believer" in a Euclidean analysis of distance? Of course not - Euclidean geometry is just a tool which is sometimes the right tool, and sometimes not.

Market analyses of social behavior is sometimes useful. Regulating some domains so that they behave like a market is sometimes useful. But "believing in" markets? Don't believe in them anymore than you "believe in" Riemann spaces!

Okay, I'll bite. Actuarial tables and risk/benefit analysis is useless unless you are aware of all the risks and all the benefits. But in the case that you are, then informing someone of the probabilities in the table is completely informing them of what they need to know to make a competent, informed decision.

Not everything is reduced to such tables, nor can every decision be framed in terms of an exhaustive list of risks, their concommitant benefits, and a simple choice. If it were, we could let computers running Bayesian analysis make all our decisions for us. There are bodies of knowledge that don't reduce that way, and you may have to rely on an expert to make a decision (and that's all long before we get to Godel). Should you have as much choice as possible? Sure. Should the expert be someone you can vet in some fashion? Sure. Should accumulated expertise be encoded in laws, guidelines, protocols, and in some cases, the permanent vesting of decision making authority to a trained group of experts? Sure.

This is not to say that eternal vigilance isn't needed to protect freedoms, nor that secrecy and privilege are good. It isn't even to say that drug laws or medical systems (or journalistic procedures) shouldn't be debated and discussed. But it has been over 100 years since scientists and experts have even been able to know all of their own fields in many subjects. It is unreasonable to devise a system that relies on individuals to make decisions requiring expertise based solely on informing them in the moment. They need to be protected from excessive decision making, from conflict of interest, from bad decisions, and all the other things experts can do, but do you really want to try to be expert on everything that affects you in a 6 billion person highly technological world, and "oh, well!" if you get it wrong?