The following picture appeared in Adventures of Superman #596, which by odd coincidence came out the same week as the 9/11 attacks:
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Colin Ward R.I.P.
Colin Ward disguised as Jimmy Carter
I’m saddened to learn that Colin Ward has died.
Jesse Walker has rightly called Ward’s Anarchy in Action the left-wing equivalent of The Machinery of Freedom.
Ward may or may not have called anarchy the cement that holds the bricks of society together, but the quote is a nice summary of his outlook – that spontaneous, voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation is all around us, in the interstices of statist society, routing around authority to get things done.
I Am Property; Therefore I Am Theft
From Tom Palmer a couple of years ago, here’s both an amusing anecdote about neocon ignorance and a helpful miniature bibliography on the history of the concept of self-ownership:
I once heard Irving Kristol dismiss libertarian ideas of property in one’s person as “an invention of some hippies in the 1960s.”
I challenged him to explain his unusual historical claim in the context of documents such as the Decretal of Innocent IV (c. 1250), the writings of Henry of Ghent (c. 1217-1293), the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua (1324), the writings of Francisco de Vitoria (De Indis, 1524) and Bartolome de las Casas (In Defense of the Indians, 1550), Richard Overton (An Arrow Against All Tyrants, 1646), John Locke (Two Treatises of Government, 1689), and more.
He looked at his wife, the distinguished historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who shook her head, and charmingly replied that “On the advice of counsel, I decline to answer the question.”
A Question About the Huntsville Shooting
So the media outlets all seem to be saying that Amy Bishop shot six of her colleagues before her gun “jammed,” whereupon she was “pushed out of the room.”
We haven’t heard what model gun she was using, but don’t most handguns have just six shots? If so, why not assume her gun ran out of bullets rather than that it jammed? Is it that the reporters know more than we do (i.e. that her gun held more than six bullets) or that they know less than we do (i.e. the media’s usual vast ignorance about guns)?
A related question: why didn’t those who pushed her out of the room disarm her first? Weren’t they afraid she might reload and come back?
Zwei Seelen
How can Butler Shaffer write this great anti-conflationist book and then turn around and say this? Grumble grumble gripe gripe ….
Hier Ist Kein Warum
When Primo Levi, as a newly arrived prisoner at a Nazi concentration camp, reached for an icicle to quench his desperate thirst, a guard knocked the icicle out of his hand. To Levi’s question “Warum?” (“Why?”), the guard replied with what was destined to become a famous quote: “Hier ist kein Warum” (“Here there is no why”).
Gosh, don’t it make you glad to live in a free country?