The trailer for Changeling (from B5 creator J. Michael Straczysnki’s screenplay about the ever-helpful LAPD) is now online.
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Death Wish
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
So Barr disses Paul, and Paul responds by endorsing Baldwin. (Conical hat tip to Jesse Walker.)
On the one hand, this is more evidence of the strategically suicidal nature of the Barr campaign. (Which of course is fine by me: “It falls, it decays; who would preserve it? But I – I even want to push it!”) Surely Ron Paul’s support, or at least non-opposition, would have been an asset to Barr (he’s aware that Ron Paul has a bit of a following, yes?), and he could easily have avoided pissing off Paul and the Paulistas the way he did.
But on the other hand, Paul’s support for someone who says stuff like this doesn’t exactly do much to allay my concerns about Paul.
Philosophy and History
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
My colleague Kelly Jolley is the subject of a write-up in this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine. I’ve often described Auburn as “the coolest philosophy department in the world”; this article will give you a glimpse of Kelly’s central role in the story of how it became that way.
In other news, my fourth AOTP post went up on Friday: Those Who Control the Past Control the Future.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Tom Tomorrow is sometimes accused of satirising only the right and never the left. But I seem to recall one This Modern World strip in which someone accidentally drops a lit match and then quickly steps on it to extinguish it – while the punditocracy immediately goes into overdrive, speculating on how, if the match hadn’t been snuffed out, it might have caused forest fires that would devastate whole cities; they conclude: “I think this shows the need for more regulation.” Anyone know of a link to that?
In other news, I’m off to FEE again tomorrow for an Austro-Virginian bash.
Broken Window Fallacies?
The comment thread on last week’s 19-word post “Say What?” has now reached 98 posts.
Moloch Whose Buildings Are Judgment
I’ve finally read the book that everyone’s been recommending – Little Brother, Cory Doctorow’s tale of teenage computer hackers fighting 
back against a Homeland Security takeover of San Francisco in the wake of a 9/11-style terrorist bombing. (Buy it or get it free online. How can the author make money when he gives the book away for free? Doctorow explains.)
This is a great book for anyone who likes liberty, or computers, or geek culture, or San Francisco (and if you don’t like those things, hey, you’re the enemy anyway); the book is in part a love letter to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for which Doctorow once served as European Affairs Coordinator. Perhaps the best recommendation for the book is this pair of reviews on Amazon – one by some state-worshipping bozo:
I should not be surprised that a book dripping with liberal bias and spin is being marketed to children but I find that I am. … The fact that an author would write a book about undermining the United States government and in sense acting like terrorists because you’re being tracked or photographed is disturbing to say the least. One character in Little Brother refers to America as “Gulag America” and this did nothing more than to enforce that the author has no shame. To compare the U.S to a Gulag is despicable.
And one not:
[G]et copies of this book into the hands of your younger siblings, your children, your young friends, and anyone else you know who has yet to be crushed into conformity by the pressures of corporate life, family, and years of kneeling before The Man. You might just save them, and the world.
My only real quarrel with Little Brother is its ending: after spending a whole book celebrating insurrection and encouraging the reader to view all authority as damage to be routed around, Doctorow ends by urging us to, wait for it, get our nonvoting friends to vote. For a book that starts off with a bang (literally), this seems like a cop-out. And despite engaging in counter-economics and occasionally hanging out in an anarchist bookstore, the book’s protagonists never entertain any ideology more radical than “Constitutional rights are absolute.” Someone really needs to write a novel like this, only with an explicitly agorist/anarchist message – a kind of cross between Little Brother and Alongside Night.