Our conference hotel in Orange Beach
The schedule for the aforementioned Alabama Philosophical Society meeting is now online. (And today’s the last day to reserve a room at the conference rate!)
Also, the Auburn student newspaper has a (somewhat typo-ridden) story about our aforementioned Philosophy Club.
Today is the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. I haven’t got a goddamn thing new to say about them – but check out my previous comments here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Today is also the seventh anniversary of this blog, pursuant whereto I present the latest batch of Austro-Athenian Imperial Statistics. (For previous blog stats see here.) Thanks, Brandon!
Orange Beach
In addition, today is the seventh anniversary of the Molinari Institute, so it seems appropriate to announce (even though the detailed schedule won’t be posted online for another few days) that Charles Johnson and I will both be speaking on Molinarian topics at the Alabama Philosophical Society meetings in Orange Beach, 2-3 October.
Here are the abstracts:
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute): “Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State?”
I defend a strong incompatibility claim that anything which could count as a state is conceptually incompatible with any possible consent of the governed. Not only do states necessarily operate without the unanimous consent of all the governed, but in fact, as territorial monopolies on the use of force, states preclude any subject from consenting – even those who want it, and actively try to give consent to government. If government authority is legitimate, it must derive from an account of legitimate command and subordination; any principled requirement for consent and political equality entails anarchism.Roderick T. Long (Auburn University): “Left-Libertarianism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice”
A frequent objection to the “historical” (in Nozick’s sense) approach to distributive justice is that it serves to legitimate existing massive inequalities of wealth. I argue that, on the contrary, the historical approach, thanks to its fit with the libertarian theory of class conflict, represents a far more effective tool for challenging these inequalities than do relatively end-oriented approaches such as utilitarianism and Rawlsianism.
My DSL connection at home has been on the fritz these last few days (and even dial-up won’t work there anymore – the modem claims it can’t detect the dial tone), so until it gets fixed I can only connect when I’m in the office (where competing demands tend to claim my attention).
(Yes, I’ve checked to make sure everything is plugged in.)
So expect diminished web presence from me for the next few days as I await the arrival of my tech dervish.
A year ago this blog was hosted on Yahoo, and I was having major problems with hackers inserting hidden spam ads and messing up my code. Yahoo customer service was massively unresponsive to my complaints – until Brandon helpfully switched my data to his server and I was happily quit of Yahoo.
Now today I get an email from Yahoo informing me:
We will soon upgrade your WordPress blog. …
We have become aware of security vulnerabilities in WordPress version 2.0.2. To prevent hackers from exploiting these vulnerabilities and potentially damaging your blog or web site, we will soon upgrade all Yahoo! Small Business WordPress blogs running version 2.0.2 to the more secure version 2.8. …
We regret that we are unable to provide the precise day and time at which your blog will be upgraded, so we encourage you to review your blog regularly during the upgrade process, from August 31 to September 14.
Gee, thanks, guys. You’ve finally acknowledged the existence of the problem. Talk about too little, too late.
At the moment I can’t add comments. I’m testing to see whether I can post.
UPDATE: Problem fixed! Post away ….
At the moment the .net version of this blog isn’t working right, so if you have trouble with some of the .net links, change them to .com and all should be well.