Think of it as a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 194a28-33.
Archive | June, 2016
Tertium Non Amatur
This post has a slight spoiler for X-Men: Apocalypse, so I’ve put it in the comments section.
The Lesson of Orlando
For my reaction to prevailing political responses to the Orlando shooting, see my post on the San Bernadino shooting.
I Got 99 Problems But a Glitch Ain’t One
So the aforementioned website glitch is solved, and Praxeology.net (along with the Molinari and ALL pages) is back up.
As Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) requested, I downloaded my files through FileZilla and scanned them for malware, but detected none; and their tech “support” line (after hours on hold listening to their horrible music loop) couldn’t tell me which files were infected.
However, since the most likely website vulnerability is WordPress files, and I haven’t used WordPress on that site since Brandon rescued my blog from Yahoo (may they also be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) back in 2008, I just deleted all the WordPress files, and that did the trick. Website’s back!
At the same time that I’ve been having this website problem, I’ve also been having another, unrelated problem, this one with the Alabama Philosophical Society website, AlPhilSoc.org. Here again the culprit is Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity). Y’see, Yahoo (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) recently transferred all its websites to its newly extruded appendage Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity), also apparently known as Luminate (likewise damned). So I had to create a new account with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) for AlPhilSoc.org.
Now when I first created AlPhilSoc.org (or GeoCities.com/AlPhilSoc, as it was then) back in 2000, for some reason I gave an address at cyberspace.org as my contact email. That was a very old email account of mine – in fact it was the first email account I ever had, from 1994. In any case, I soon changed my contact email to my current address, and I had no reason to think cyberspace.org was still associated with my account. All the AlPhilSoc announcements came to my current address, and when I looked in my account info online, the only email contact listed was my current address.
But when I went to update the AlPhilSoc account with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity), for some reason their system was convinced that the one and only contact email for me was the one at cyberspace.org, and that was the only address they would send their verification notice to – even though Yahoo (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) still listed the right address in the part of my AlPhilSoc account still hosted with them. Since I no longer had access to my cyberspace.org account – it had long ago been deleted – this meant that there was no way to access the AlPhilSoc site to update it. The tech “support” line for Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) told me there was nothing they could do.
Happily, I found a solution. Although my cyberspace.org account was gone, luckily no one had created a new account with the same username. So I created a new cyberspace.org account (not easily – cyberspace.org doesn’t support webmail, so I had to wrestle with SSL and IMAP and PuTTY, which I know from nuthin), chose my old username, and prompted Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) to send their verification email once more to the cyberspace.org address. This time I could answer and respond to it, and so I have access to AlPhilSoc.org once more. I’ve just updated it with info about the next APS meeting; see my next post.
Apparently I’m not the only one that has been having these problems with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity); see, e.g., here and here.
Book on Confucian Libertarianism Published
[cross-posted at C4SS and BHL]
I’m pleased to announce the publication of the second item from the Molinari Institute’s new POD publishing program. This one is my own Rituals of Freedom: Libertarian Themes in Early Confucianism, a book-length expansion of a much shorter article I wrote in 2003.
Here’s the summary:
When scholars look for anticipations of libertarian ideas in early Chinese thought, attention usually focuses not on the Confucians, but on the Taoists. But in their account of spontaneously evolving social norms, their understanding of the price system, their penchant for public-choice analysis, their enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, their preference for noncoercive interpersonal relations, their call for a laissez-faire economic policy, and their rejection of Taoist primitivism, the Confucians show themselves to be the true precursors of modern libertarianism.
The book will also be available in Kindle format in due course; keep an eye out for the announcement.
Also, look for more Molinari Institute books over the next few months, including:
- a collection of my academic articles, to be titled Austro-Athenian Essays
- a collection of my blog posts and op-eds, to be titled Other People Are Not Your Property
- a transcription of my 2006 philosophy seminar, to be titled Austro-Athenian Foundations of Libertarian Ethics
But, happily, it’s not all me. There will also be a collection of Free Nation Foundation essays (hey, only some of those are by me!), as well as a series of Libertarian Classics, including new translations of works by Gustave de Molinari and the Censeur group. And of course the second issue of the Molinari Review will be coming out in the fall.
Incidentally, the “Look Inside” feature on the Amazon page (US, UK) for the Molinari Review’s first issue has now been activated; check it out!
Want to support these projects financially? Check out either my Patreon page or the Molinari Institute General Fund (see icon below).
For Great Injustice!
Three new entries in my Libertarianism.org series on ancient Greece; these ones are on the Sophists, and in particular on the arguments some of them apparently gave in favour of injustice. Check the columns out here, here, and here.
