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Down With IP! Long Live C4SIF!

By on October 13, 2010 3

Stephan Kinsella has started a new anti-IP outfit called the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. The Advisory Board includes Michele Boldrin, Julio Cole, Karl Fogel, David Koepsell, David Levine, Wendy McElroy, Nina Paley, Jeff Tucker, and your humble correspondent. Here’s our mission statement:

The Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (C4SIF) is dedicated to building public awareness of the manner in which laws and policies impede innovation, creativity, communication, learning, knowledge, emulation, and information sharing. We are for property rights, free markets, competition, commerce, cooperation, and the voluntary sharing of knowledge, and oppose laws that systematically impede or hamper innovation, especially those enforced in the name of defending “intellectual property,” such as patent and copyright; these should be radically reformed or entirely abolished.

We provide news commentary and analysis and scholarly resources from our unique pro-property, pro-market, pro-innovation perspective.

Subscribe to our RSS Feed!

Also check out our cool logo (designed by Stephanie Long – no relation AFAIK). “The bird … symbolizes freedom, while the origami aspect symbolizes man-made creativity”:

Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom

And if you copy it we will totally sue your ass.

Alabama Philosophical Events, Past and Future

By on August 29, 2010 3
Pensacola Gulf Front Hotel

Pensacola Gulf Front Hotel

The schedule for next month’s Alabama Philosophical Society in Pensacola (which looks to be our biggest yet) is now online. Abstracts will be added later.

Auburn University

Auburn University

(I had planned to present a paper on the extent to which the Problem of Good, i.e. of reconciling the existence of goodness with the universe’s having been created by an all-powerful malevolent being, is symmetrical with the traditional Problem of Evil, but then I discovered that more work had been done in this area than I’d realised, and that what I had to add wasn’t sufficiently original, so at the last minute I recycled my piece on Godwin instead.)

Also online is a pair of talks that Kelly Jolley and I gave back in 2002 at an Auburn Philosophical Society roundtable on the subject of The Idea of the University.

Up With Teleology! Down With Anarchy! Sideways with the Hypothetical Calculus!

By on August 24, 2010 1
Ludwig Boltzmann

Ludwig Boltzmann

Three more blasts from the past (all a bit more recent than my blast from Oscarville):

First, two papers I wrote for a science course in college: “The Temptation of Ludwig Boltzmann” (a short sf story exploring the implications of Boltzmannian probability theory – though Amazon thinks it’s something else) and “Evolution: Chance or Teleology?” (an essay on the spontaneous growth of physical order).

Next, a blast from my statist past: “Financing the Non-Coercive State,” an essay I wrote in (though not for) grad school, in which I decisively refute free-market anarchism!

This is Your Brain on Stateless News

By on August 23, 2010 1

Center for a Stateless Society

Some C4SS-related items worth checking out: [Note that this does not mean that other C4SS-related items not listed here are not worth checking out!]

Please support the Center’s work if you can. $5 here and $10 there can be a lifesaver.

The Comeback Kid

By on August 15, 2010 6

John Carter of Mars (by Michael Whelan), pretending to be Oscar of Oscarville

In 1972, when I was eight, I wrote a series of stories (or four “books” – 186 pages’ worth, though typed up and without the original drawings they come to a mere 25 pages total) collectively titled Oscar of Oscarville, about an eight-year-old boy who flew around on the back of an enormous hummingbird while whacking off the heads of monsters with his enchanted sword, in a magical land whose chief characteristic seemed to be the elicitation of various sorts of gigantism in everything from bats and butterflies to houses and hair tonic. (I then had no idea that there were actual places named Oscarville – in Alaska and Georgia, for example.) This was my magnum opus up to that point.

I hadn’t seen the Oscarville stories since 1981 and had feared they were lost, until I rediscovered them going through old boxes last week. As a break from more pressing but less enjoyable work, I’ve transcribed Oscar’s adventures and self-indulgently put them online. Lo, he is risen!

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