David Cameron and Vladimir Putin – action figures, fully posable!
Archive | June, 2012
Mickey Marx
Check out this fascinating anti-Nazi Disney film from 1943. (CHT Tennyson.)
I notice that at 8:31, the list of authors whose books are being burned includes Voltaire, Spinoza, Einstein – and, very briefly, before being obscured by the flames, a short name beginning “Ma” with the rest covered up, which is obviously supposed to be Marx. Subliminal communist propaganda in Disney!
Hiro For Hire
Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash is being adapted into a film.
This will arguably be the second feature based on the book, the first being the reality show we are currently living in.
Priorities
Overheard at a local restaurant, from someone discussing the recent Auburn shootings: “And the worst thing of all is, I used to live in that apartment complex.”
Secular Growth
Destutt de Tracy, whom Jacob Levy has described as having “a plausible claim to being the first libertarian,” was a major influence on both Thomas Jefferson (who called his work “the most precious gift the present age has received”) and the Censeur group (Augustin Thierry praised him to the skies), and a contributor to the development of libertarian class theory. (Karl Marx for his part called Tracy a “fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire,” but you can’t please everybody.)
According to Leonard Liggio, in his introduction to Thierry’s Theory of Classical Liberal “Industrielisme”, Tracy was regarded by his contemporary Stendahl as being so far ahead of his time as to be more a thinker of the 20th century than of the 19th; Stendahl suggested (evidently in 1835) that Tracy might turn out to be the “philosopher of 1935.”
Considering what the world’s political and intellectual climate would actually turn out to be in 1935, the prediction now looks ironic and rather sad. But let’s see what we can do for 2035.
R.I.P. Elinor Ostrom
While she was no libertarian (and as keynote speaker at the 2011 APEE, took the opportunity to lecture the assembled libertarians on the importance of the state), her work on the ways in which coordination mechanisms and decentralised institutions can enable the poor to better their lot while bypassing the state is a vital contribution to libertarian thought. In many ways she was a left-wing Hayek.
