Bryan Caplan has a response to my criticisms of Rand’s “pyramid of ability.” I have a comment in the talkback section.
Archive | 2010
Waterworld
I’ll be in San Diego next week. I’m glad it’s not this week! The mall where I saw the first Star Wars movie in 1977 is likely to flood tonight.
Libertopia Is Coming
Next July in San Francisco I’m planning to speak at Libertopia, an event organised by Sky Conway (about whom I’ve blogged previously), and not to be confused with any of the various other things out there already called “Libertopia.”
I believe the list of speakers on the website is only tentative, but it gives some idea of the ways in which it’s wide-ranging (both Brad Spangler and Hans Hoppe!) and the ways in which it isn’t (almost everyone on the list is an anarchist and is pursuing a primarily non-electoral form of activism; I have reason to think that’s by design).
A pity it’s so pricey (I’m with Starchild on that issue – high convention fees clash with inclusiveness), though if one skips the banquet and cruise and stays at a cheaper hotel (I like the Powell) it’s not as bad.
(The event hasn’t been widely promoted yet, but I’m spreading the word because there are, alas, deadline-triggered price hikes.)
Improved Gadsden Flag
Neil Gaiman! Squeeeeeee!
The New Yorker has a partly good and partly annoying profile of Neil Gaiman up.
Gaiman comments on the profile:
It’s pretty good actually, although given the amount of time I was on the phone with the New York Times Fact Checker for, I’m surprised at the number of things Dana still got a little bit wrong (from the Golden Age Sandman “killing” people with his gas gun on up, or down). I found myself feeling protective of the readers, and was disappointed that there wasn’t actually more about the stories in there: the huge signings and bloggings and book-sales numbers [and] such are a tiny by-product of the stories, and, for me, not the most interesting bit (it would be like seeing someone describing a classical concert: the funny man with the stick waving it around at the front, and all the people in their best clothes sitting patiently while other people blow or pluck or scrape or bang at things on the stage, which all seems a bit peculiar if you aren’t talking about the music). Glad it’s done, though.
He talks some more about the profile here.
Rand Unbound, Part 2
My contribution to Cato Unbound’s Rand symposium is now online. Not many surprises for readers of this blog: I do my Aristotelean eudaimonist dance, my labortarian/anti-conflationist dance, my anarchist dance, and my thick-libertarian dance. (And I drop in links to lots of my friends.)
Here’s Cato’s summary:
In his reply to Rasmussen’s lead essay, Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff in Ayn Rand’s moral and political thought. Long maintains that “Rand sets out to found a classical liberal conception of politics … upon a classical Greek conception of human nature and the human good,” and he goes on to defend the plausibility of this project.
In particular, Long stands up for Rand’s reliance on a naturalistic teleology to ground her neo-Aristotlean ethic theory, pointing to contemporary philosophical work that supports Rand’s view.
Long is less happy with Rand’s political thought and criticizes her ideas of the “pyramid of ability” and of big business as a “persecuted minority.” Long credits Rand for her trenchant analysis of corporatism, but argues that she was mistaken to deny that corporatism and capitalism go hand in hand. According to Long, Rand’s ideal of voluntary interaction not only implies a radical departure from historical capitalism, but also a more thoroughly anti-statist social order.