Sunday, June 20, 2010

Penn Jillette interview

As a temporary substitute for any poker content, while I continue to spend my time enjoying Cardgrrl's presence in town, I refer you to this interview with Penn Jillette in Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2010/06/penn-jillette-is-willing-to-be-a-guest-on-adolf-hitlers-talk-show.html

My positions on skepticism and libertarian politics mesh very closely with his, but he expresses them in a much more pithy way than I ever manage to. E.g., this Q&A:


There really is a line-in-the-sand political mentality these days, isn’t there? You choose a side and you stick to it.

Absolutely there is. When I disagree with Obama, people always say, “Well, you’re a big Bush guy then.” And I’m like no, I didn’t like Bush either. I disagree with Bush and Obama on all the stuff they agree on, which is pretty much everything. They both want to kill people, they both want the government to be bigger, and they both want less freedom for individuals.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've always hypothesized that part of the one-dimensional polarization of politics comes from the primary system - in order to pass the primaries, candidates must be as solidly Democratic or solidly Republican as possible.

We'll see whether California's Prop 14 injects a shot of sanity or madness into this process.