[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.
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.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Today (well, strictly speaking, yesterday, as of five minutes ago) is the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and the sixth anniversary of both the Molinari Institute and my blog.
In related news, my third AOTP post is up: The Real Meaning of 9/11.
David Gordon’s review of Anarchism/Minarchism has been posted, with bouquets and brickbats for both sides. (But David charitably refrained from pointing out some of the eccentricities of the index.)
ARI has once again taken some baby steps into the 21st century by making available online a few more of the works they’re supposedly trying to promote, including Rand’s essays “The Objectivist Ethics” (probably her most important article), “Introducing Objectivism,” “An Answer for Businessmen,” “Man’s Rights,” “Collectivized ‘Rights’,” and “The Nature of Government” (this last is Rand’s only serious discussion of anarchism) as well as some Rand audio files (lectures and interviews).
Addendum:
I just noticed that, despite the absence of any warning to this effect, the online text of “The Objectivist Ethics” is not complete; it’s just the first few pages of the article. I haven’t checked the others yet, but beware. And if it still needed saying: DON’T TRUST ARI.
Charles Johnson announces today that his article Libertarianism Through Thick and Thin has just been published in The Freeman. (Actually I noticed the link posted on his other site a few days ago when I was looking for something else, but this time I refrained from scooping him – though I did link to the piece in a comment.) Charles plans to post a longer version in a few weeks.
The left-libertarian quest for world domination continues ….