[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Three items of interest:
It looks like Ron Paul is considering running for the Republican nomination. (Conical hat tip to Lew Rockwell.)
His chances of getting it are, of course, svelter than a nanotube. (It would be hilarious if the Republicans did nominate Paul and then the LP nominated someone like Barr!) But it strikes me as a good publicity move; antiwar liberals of the Jon Stewart variety might relish the chance to draw attention to an antiwar, anti-Bush candidate for the GOP top spot.
- Robert Anton Wilson has died; see the notices from my two favourite people at Reason. His gleeful conspiracy novels anticipated both Foucault’s Pendulum and The Da Vinci Code, but were a lot more fun. For Wilson’s brief left-libertarian glossary-as-manifesto, see here.
- And finally, this great quote from Theodore Roszak’s Voice of the Earth (conical hat tip to David Edwards):
Our complex global economy is built upon millions of small, private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great social machine that encompasses all other machines. They must shape themselves to the prefabricated identities that make efficient coordination possible. … [T]hat capacity for self-enslavement must be broken.
And before you write in, gentle libertarian comrade: no, my quoting that does not mean that I agree with everything that Theodore Roszak ever said, nor does it mean that I’m getting a tattoo of Stalin on my forehead.
[...] UPDATE: Via Roderick Long I found two great tributes to Wilson at Reason: one by Jesse Walker and one by Brian Doherty. The former features an excerpt from an essay of Wilson’s called Thirteen Choruses For the Divine Marquis: I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, “Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing?” [...]