Archive | June, 2008

Enemy Agents in the Empire

My blog is increasingly getting hacked with hidden spam ads; I have to delete them every few days, and Google is threatening to drop my blog from their search engine. Apparently this is a common problem with WordPress. Well, today I notice that my archive.php file is now misspelled arhcive.php, and starts with “Merhabba my friend” (misspelled Turkish!), but I’m not computer-savvy enough to know what to do without making it worse. Any advice?


JLS 21.3 and 21.4: What Lies Within? An Atlas Shrugged Symposium and More!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The two latest issues (21.3 and 21.4) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies will also be the last, at least for the immediate future as the JLS heads into hiatus. So what’s in ’em?

Journal of Libertarian Studies One major item is a symposium commemorating the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, featuring Barbara Branden on her memories of Atlas’s initial publication; fan letters from Mises and Rothbard (the latter previously unpublished) to Rand; another Rothbard piece (likewise previously unpublished) on the literary merits of Atlas Shrugged; Geoff Plauché on Atlas, La Boétie, and science fiction; and Jennifer Baker on the relationship between virtue and success in Atlas.

What else besides the Atlas symposium? Richard Sharvy on what philosophers know and everybody else doesn’t; Anthony Gregory and Walter Block critiquing Hoppe on immigration; Anna-Karin Andersson rebutting Susan Moller Okin’s criticism of Nozick; James Garland on libertarian themes in Raymond Aron; Jeremy Shearmur on John Gray’s downhill intellectual slide; Pierre Desrochers on Alice Alexiou’s biography of urban theorist Jane Jacobs; Tom Woods on Nicholas Orme’s history of secular education in the Middle Ages; Robert Higgs on anarchy; John Brätland on Rawlsian intergenerational equity; Mark Crovelli on praxeological approaches to international relations; Frank Daumann on Hayekian social evolution; and Lou Carabini on why Bastiat was wrong about the broken window. (For the record, I think Bastiat makes precisely the point Lou thinks he fails to make, but never mind ….)

Read a fuller summary of the contents of 21.3 and 21.4 here.

Read summaries of previous issues under my editorship here.

Read back issues online here.

Buy these or other issues here.


Tools For A Revolution That Is Over?

William Gillis has put together a terrific online clearinghouse for market anarchist pamphlets called Invisible Molotov; check it out.

On the other hand, Gillis’s confidence that the task of jumpstarting left/libertarian reunification has been largely accomplished strikes me as a tad premature, given that libertarians and leftists continue on the whole to be confusedly estranged from one another.


Evil Lesbians in Space!

I’m a big fan of BSG’s Imperious Leader Ron Moore, but as long as I’m dissing him on race, I might as well diss him on sexual orientation as well.

Gina and Cain Moore used to criticise Star Trek for not having any gay characters. When BSG started he said he hoped to include a gay relationship along the way. Whenever he was asked about it he would say something like, “I still want to, we just need to find the right way to do it.”

Finally he delivered on his promise – by giving us a lesbian couple in which one has the other raped and tortured and the other kills the first in revenge. That was the right way he was looking for? Ooooookay ….

(Shades of JMS criticising Trek for no gay characters, promising a gay relationship on B5, and then giving us a barely-hinted-at lesbian relationship in which one of the two women immediately has a braincrash, turns evil, and leaves the show.)


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