My review of David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs in the February 2019 issue of Reason magazine is now online.
Spoiler alert: it’s not a sequel to Harry Frankfurt’s book.
Tag Archives | Left and Right
The Boats Were Waiting at the Battery
I’ve now finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140, about which I blogged a few days ago; my review should go up on C4SS soon. (Advance summary: great writing, confused economics and politics.)
In the meantime, check out Robinson’s short story “Venice Drowned,” which serves as a kind of companion piece to New York 2140.
Anarchy in Manhattan
[cross-posted at C4SS, BHL, and POT]
The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in New York City, 7-10 January 2019. Here’s the schedule info:
Molinari Society symposium: New Work in Libertarian and Anarchist Thought
G5C. Tuesday, 8 January 2019, 9:00 a.m.-12:00 noon, Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, 811 7th Ave. (at W. 53rd St.), New York NY, room TBA
chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)presenters:
Jason Lee Byas (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), “The Political Is Interpersonal”
Dylan Andrew Delikta (Memorial University of Newfoundland), “Anarchy: Finding Home in the (W)hole”
Alex Braud (Arizona State University), “Putting Limits on Punishments of Last Resort”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “The Anarchist Landscape: Social Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, and Anarcho-Capitalism from a Left-Wing Market Anarchist Perspective”
Regrettably, our session is scheduled opposite a session on Elizabeth Anderson’s book Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives, with comments by Jacob Levy and Jessica Flanigan. This is unfortunate both because many members of our potential audience will probably be lured away by this session, and because we’d like to go to it ourselves. But as good anarchists, we must bear our sufferings like Rakhmetov.
Time Will Run Back
Under the category of “things I had no idea existed”: Pëtr Kropotkin’s daughter, Princess Alexandra Kropotkin, interviewed by Henry Hazlitt and William Bradford Huie on CBS television in 1951 (the presenter is Frank Knight, but not that Frank Knight).
Her father is described as having been exiled from Tsarist Russia for his liberal views, which is quite right if by “was exiled” you mean “escaped,” and by “liberal” you mean “anarcho-communist.” This is a very anti-Red program, and you can tell they didn’t want to cause grievous mental confusion to the Great American Public. (Evening, all!)
(Does Huie actually say that “in America … nobody is afraid of a policeman”? Yes, he does. Preach it, white boy!)
Video footage exists of père Kropotkin himself, though it is not exactly extensive:
Still Not Voting
Two years ago to the day, I wrote this piece on voting, winding up with: “And that’s why I’ll be boycotting the vote this Tuesday.”
Looking it over today, I don’t see anything I disagree with. Hence I’ll be sitting this election out too.
Mind you, I hope the Democrats end up with enough seats to stymie Trump. Until we can manage to dissolve government in the economic organism, divided government is second best, especially when the president is unusually bad. All the same, for the reasons I explain in the linked post, I think I make a greater contribution to the public good by not voting than by voting for the lesser evil.
Molinari on the Campaign Trail
Dries Van Thielen sends me notice of his interesting article on Molinari’s Failed Election of 1859.