So if someone says everyone should go to college, that’s snobbish.
So if someone said some people shouldn’t go to college, what would that be?
Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian
Blue Octavo Wavelength
I’ve got two conferences coming up, and I don’t [have/get] to leave town for either of them.
First up (2-3 March) is the Auburn Philosophy Department’s annual conference; the topic is the philosophy of colour, and the speakers are some of the top names in the field. (I went to high school with one of them; he played my slave in Plautus’s Bacchides.) Poster here, other info here. The schedule hasn’t been posted yet, but sessions run 9-5 on Friday and 10-5 on Saturday, at the Auburn art museum.
Next (8-10 March) is the Austrian Scholars Conference; schedule here. I’ll be speaking on “Austro-Libertarian Themes in Three Prague Authors: Čapek, Kafka, and Hašek.” Czech your calendars!
Programmable Reality
Progress is a matter of the real world becoming more and more like the internet.
That has the virtue of sloganesque pithiness and the vice of being subject to obvious counterexamples. But I think it captures an important truth. Anarchism, for example, in effect calls for the open-source abundance, multiplicity of choice, and non-hierachical flatness that characterise the internet to be extended to the realms of politics, economics, and law. (And 3-D printing does the same thing for production.)
At a less substantial level, this story about how customers may soon be able to determine which movies are playing at their local meatspace theatres is another example of the same phenomenon.
Border Solipsism
A carjacking incident in Mexico near the u.s. border results in 50 rounds being fired; one of these rounds crosses the border and hits a woman in El Paso. So everyone on tv is talking about how terrible it is that an American was shot; and they’re quite right, it is terrible that an American was shot.
But given that 50 rounds were fired, I assume that someone else got hit too too. Isn’t it also terrible that Mexicans were shot? Why are only American victims worthy of comment?
I’m reminded of the time a few years back when some jerk on the Weather Channel said that in a “worst-case scenario” the edge of an approaching hurricane might graze Florida or Texas, but luckily the worst part of the storm was merely headed toward Mexico.
Who Said This?
The individual is the true reality in life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society,” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. Man, the individual, has always been and necessarily is the sole source and motive power of evolution and progress. Civilization has been a continuous struggle of the individual or of groups of individuals against the State and even against “society,” that is, against the majority subdued and hypnotized by the State and State worship.
Anarchists Under Ron Paul’s Bed
One of the makers of the Anarchism in America video (about which I’ve previously blogged) has a piece up at HoughPough on Ron Paul, Libertarianism, and the Anarchist Connection. Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Ezra Heywood, Angela Heywood, Emma Goldman, Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Murray Bookchin all get name-checked.
The friendly words quoted from Bookchin do not reflect his later views (on which I’ve blogged glancingly).