RCL to become PSL!

RCL is not quite 2 years old, but in the short time we’ve been live, we’ve had several small scale changes (particularly with the blog roll). Now it is time for a bigger change. RCL will soon become PSL: Pro-Social Libertarians.

The name comes partly as a response to pieces like this one by Paul Krugman , but really its straightforward: libertarians are too often seen as being anti-social and much of what RCL, BHL before it, and now PSL, seek to do is correct that mistake.

The blogroll at PSL will be smaller than that of RCL, but we hope the content will not be reduced. Of course, we’ll also have guest posts along the way. The main bloggers will be:

Andrew I. Cohen

Andrew Jason Cohen

Lauren Hall

Connor Kianpour

Aeon Skoble

James Taggart

James Stacey Taylor

PSL is born from experience with BHL and RCL, but with new thinking from Jim Taggart (JD, Phd-Phil). As blogs have partially given way to podcasts, we anticipate having both. We also anticipate having a more open policy with comments, though reserving the right to remove unproductive (especially mean-spirited) comments.

What remains the same is perhaps more important than what is changing. You’ll still see great posts from our main bloggers as well as guests. Many posts are likely to be libertarian takes on issues of social justice; many are also likely to be about civil discourse. Indeed the tag line for PSL is “Owning Civil Discourse and Social Justice.”

To our way of thinking, libertarians-—at least libertarians of the BHL/RCL/PSL sort—do own both. That’s because we and so-called “Rawlsekians” or “liberaltarians” are concerned with the plight of the less fortunate and because we see points of agreement and disagreement with people in both of the dominant parties—and elsewhere (including the dominant ideologies)—and are willing to honestly debate the issues on the merits. That last is sorely missing in contemporary discourse and we want to help improve that. To do so, we will be maintaining some of the rules from RCL; namely:

1. While we may criticize the views of others and/or their work, when we do, we will remain civil.

2. Trolls and obnoxious commenters can be banned, but only by a majority vote of the group.

3. We won’t have posts that are mere links to something posted elsewhere. We might post a link to something someone else wrote, along with commentary about it. We may also have posts that serve to “round-up” links to several things others have written that we think you would be interested in.

4. We’ll try to space out posts, time wise.

Our policy regarding comments will be different:

5. Each of us will have our own default regarding comments, but if we allow comments, we reserve the right to delete unproductive comments. Generally speaking, the point to deleting a comment will be to prevent incivility from escalating.

Look for an intro post to PSL soon! I hope you’ll join us in this new chapter!