I just got back from seeing Pirates of the Caribbean III – which was a lot of fun, despite the plot’s being a tangled mass of incoherences and loose ends.
But what I haven’t seen anyone in the libertarian blogosphere comment on is the film’s opening lines, in which the mercantilist villains announce the suspension of the rights of – if I recall correctly – assembly, legal counsel, jury trial, and habeas corpus.
On a less political note, did anyone notice Reggie Lee, the actor who plays the slithery Agent Kim on Prison Break, as one of Chow Yun-Fat’s henchmen here? His Wikipedia page says he was in the previous Pirates movie too, but I don’t remember him. He certainly stood out for me this time, though.
This week I’m attending David Gordon’s excellent 
It contains a couple of articles by me on the contributions to philosophy of law (and libertarian aspects thereof) by Xenophon, Cynics, Cyrenaics, Academics, Peripatetics, Polybius, Epicureans, and Stoics. Other entries include Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff on early Greek legal thought; R. F. Stalley on Socrates and Plato; Miller on near eastern legal thought, Aristotle, ancient rights theory, and early Jewish and Christian legal thought; Brad Inwood on Cicero and the Roman Stoics; Janet Coleman on Augustine; Charles Butterworth on medieval Jewish and Islamic thought; Thomas Banchich on Justinian’s Digests; John Marenbon on Abélard, the early Scholastics, and the revival of Roman law; Charles Reid on canon law; Anthony Lisska on Aquinas, Scotus, and other Scholastics; Brian Tierney on William of Ockham; and M. W. F. Stone on the Spanish Scholastics. You can 
heavier burdens and slighter opportunities than men because, for example, family responsibilities impede their uninterrupted pursuit of careers. McKitrick warns libertarians against merely brushing such concerns aside. She regrets that even such an early feminist as John Stuart Mill, in his “
The sooner we leave, the better; it was a mistake to go in and it’s a mistake to stay; if you get the diagnosis wrong you should change the treatment. We’re not making progress; there were no weapons of mass destruction; we went in under a UN resolution and not because we were threatened; we’re more threatened by staying than by leaving.
Eric Roark vs. Robert Nozick on whether a dominant protection agency can justly evolve into a state, Randall Holcombe vs. Walter Block on whether the state is inevitable, Walter Block vs. Tibor Machan on whether government is essentially coercive, and Jordan Schneider vs. myself on whether the market can provide objective law.
This frequent association of evil with self-confidence suggests some deep confusion of values; and those who accept it thereby become susceptible, I fear, to one of two temptations: either to renounce self-confidence (in order to avoid being evil) or to embrace evil (in order to hold on to self-confidence). Such a perspective contrasts with the more salutary Platonic-Aristotelean-Thomistic understanding of evil as a lack, an absence, a falling short, a descent into weakness and inefficacy.