A couple of write-ups – 1, 2 – of the recent caffeinated philosophy event.
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Mystery Speaker
I was looking at this interesting list of speakers for an upcoming ISIL conference, when I noticed with surprise that one of them was … me.
I don’t know whether the other speakers on that list were actually contacted and asked to speak, but apart from seeing my name on that list I’ve heard nothing about it and – at $600 a pop – have not been planning to attend.
I’ve dropped them a puzzled note, and will report more when I learn more.
Update: I’ve learned more
Semi-Update
Re my financial saga, it’s been two months since my lawyer said he’d have something to tell me within two weeks (re whether the state tax department was going to accept my payment installment proposal). So I’ve just been waiting for the other shoe to drop. Now apparently it’s dropping some time next week; thus I should have some information to relay soon.
Daily Rand
I can’t watch this video (because at work I don’t have the administrative privileges I need to upgrade my player, and at home I still don’t have internet access), but it’s supposed to be Jon Stewart interviewing Jennifer Burns about her new book on Rand (so I did see it on tv the other night).
The Tragic Rand
Will Wilkinson has a good anti-conflationist piece on Rand, here. (CHT Charles Johnson.) I posted the following quibble:
Excellent piece (and on related points see also my posts Ayn Rand’s Left-Libertarian Legacy and Ayn Rand and the Capitalist Class); but I think I disagree with you about the benevolent-universe premise; when she says that success is metaphysically normal, I don’t think she means this to entail that success (or even the possibility of success) is statistically normal. Admittedly I think she perhaps sometimes slides from the former to the latter in her later writings (as in her changing views on charity); but if so, that was a mistaken inference and doesn’t impugn the principle itself. By analogy (to make a Michael Thompson-y point): even if some plague caused most lions to be born with three legs, it would still be true that the lion is a four-legged animal or that being four-legged is normal for lions.
Spangler on Social Revolution
Brad Spangler has an excellent post on the relationship between thick libertarianism and anti-electoralism.