Added to the Molinari Institute’s online library: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1856 Speech on Affairs in Kansas (representing Emerson at his most anarchistic).
Money quotes: “The judges give cowardly interpretations to the law, in direct opposition to the known foundation of all law, that every immoral statute is void,” and “I am glad to see that the terror at disunion and anarchy is disappearing.”
I’m now on Twitter, at twitter.com/RoderickTLong.
Lo, yet another case of cops assaulting the person they had supposedly come to to help – in this case, because a person they knew was deaf was unable to understand their verbal commands.
Guizot reaching for his revolver
The following passage from the end of Guizot’s General History of Civilization in Europe reminds me of both Proudhon and Foucault:
It is the duty, and will be, I believe, the peculiar event of our time, to acknowledge that all power, whether intellectual or temporal, whether belonging to governments or peoples, to philosophers or ministers, in whatever cause it may be exercised – that all human power, I say, bears within itself a natural vice, a principle of feebleness and abuse, which renders it necessary that it should be limited. Now, there is nothing but the general freedom of every right, interest, and opinion, the free manifestation and legal existence of all these forces – there is nothing, I say, but a system which insures all this, can restrain every particular force or power within its legitimate bounds, and prevent it from encroaching on the others, so as to produce the real and beneficial subsistence of free inquiry.
This is supposed to happen tomorrow (CHT Reed Richter):
It looks a tad tricky.
If it succeeds, we can go into Randian rhapsodies about the triumph of human reason.
If it fails, we can go into Hayekian jeremiads about the fatal conceit of top-down planning.
So it’s all good.
The latest preview for Doctor Who Series 7:
Matt Smith seems somewhat more pleased with “dinosaurs! on a spaceship!” than Samuel Jackson was in his analogous situation.
Sherlock fans will recognise the guy with the shotgun.
In related news, see this: