Sorry, I don’t have any story to go with the title. I just like the title.
The Trick of Singularity
As a global-warming agnostic – not having had the time or the inclination to study the issue closely enough to feel competent to address it – I have no particular comment or opinion on the recent leaked-email flap, so I won’t endorse this piece (CHT Ken MacLeod), but it’s certainly worth a read.
JLS Symposium on Atlas Shrugged Finally Available
Ayn Rand
The last issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies – last as in most recent (it remains to be seen whether it’s the last absolutely, as there might be at least one more issue) – was devoted inter alia to a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, with new contributions by Barbara Branden, Geoff Plauché, and Jennifer Baker, and two previously unpublished pieces by Murray Rothbard – one an amazingly revealing fan letter to Rand, and one a defense of Rand’s aesthetic theory. (The rest of the issue is interesting too, including a dandy piece by Bob Higgs on anarchism. For further details, see the summaries here and here.)
I’m particularly proud of that issue – but until recently, it wasn’t available online yet. Now it is. Gaudete igitur.
It looks to me as though hard copies of that issue (21.4) are available for sale also, but I haven’t tested whether that’s true.
O is for Visitor
IDEA FOR A MINISERIES: Extraterrestrials come to Earth promising hope and change. Gradually their sinister plot is revealed: They will take over the planet and run it pretty much the same way it was being run before.
Who Said It?
Can you guess the source of this passage?
– Do your people always quarrel thus?
– Always.
– Why?
– I do not know. They take their mates for life and are permitted but one and though both men and women have a choice in the selection of their mates they never seem to be satisfied with one another and are always quarreling, usually because neither one nor the other is faithful. Do the men and women quarrel thus in the land from which you come?
– No. They do not. If they did they would be thrown out of the tribe.
– But suppose that they find that they do not like one another?
– Then they do not live together. They separate and if they care to they find other mates.
– That is wicked. We would kill any of our people who did such a thing.
– At least we are all a very happy people, which is more than you can say for yourselves, and, after all, happiness, it seems to me, is everything.
– Perhaps you are right.
Icky Sticky Anarchy
I came from a real tough neighborhood.
I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.
– Rodney Dangerfield
According to Simon Read, in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchism, But Were Afraid to Ask: “The English anarchist Colin Ward calls anarchism the cement that holds the bricks of society.”
That’s a great line, paradoxical-sounding but true (though I usually quote it as “Anarchy is the glue that holds society together”). It’s a more succinct, and more radical, version of Paine’s “Great part of that order …” passage. (See also Emerson’s “hooks and eyes” line.) But where, exactly, does Colin Ward say it – if he does?
After looking through some Ward books I own and doing some internet searches (as well as searches through Ward’s books via Amazon’s “look/search inside” feature), I can’t find any place where he says this – though I did find a passage assigning the social-cement role to human solidarity, and another assigning it to music-making.
Can any of my readers recognise/confirm/disconfirm this quote?