More juvenilia: Ayn Rand Writes Worthless Book, a parody, directed at both Randians and anti-Randians, on the occasion of the posthumous publication of Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It – so 1982, age 18, the height of my Randian period.
And if this is what I was writing at the height of my Randian period, I suppose it’s no surprise that I ended up drifting from apostolic purity.
The politerati are all aflutter because GOP party hack Reince Priebus compared our President Incarnate to Francesco Schettino, the cruise ship captain who’s been charged with manslaughter in connection with the recent shipwreck off the coast of Italy.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Priebus’s counterhack on the Democratic side, called it an “unbelievable comparison,” opining that “for the RNC chairman to compare the president of the United States to someone who has been charged with manslaughter shows a dramatic level of insensitivity to the families of those victims.”
I agree. After all, Obama is guilty of actual mass murder against the civilian population of Pakistan. To compare him to someone charged with the lesser offense of manslaughter is dramatically insensitive to the families of Obama’s victims.
“Gai Pan” means “doesn’t socialize.”
More juvenilia: an essay on Sophocles’ Ajax, from senior year of college.
Josiah Warren is often called the father of American individualist anarchism. (I’m in the midst of reading Crispin Sartwell’s excellent Warren collection.) Most of Warren’s major works are relatively easy to find online; an exception is his unpublished Notebook D, edited by Ann Butler for her undergraduate thesis in 1964. This too turns out to be online, but its being so is a bit tricky to detect: my information had led me to look for Butler’s 1968 M.A. thesis, which has the same title and is evidently not online; how it differs from the 1964 version I know not. (Butler wrote her 1978 Ph.D. thesis on Warren as well, though thankfully with a different title; this too is not online.)
Notebook D is probably not the ideal place to start with Warren; Equitable Commerce and True Civilization are better entry points. But Notebook D remains important and valuable; among its most interesting features is Warren’s account of his views on marriage and the family, and in particular his narrative of the way in which he applied his anarchistic principles to the education of his children. Read Part 1, from 1840, and Part 2, from 1860 and 1873.
More juvenilia: some unfinished stories from the 1970s.