Nietzsche Rocks and Darwin Pukes

Posted on by under liberty and the left

Two more interviews from my YouTube Channel:

In the first, continuing the San Diego bookstore series (yet also transcending it), I chat with Jeff Mezzocchi, proprietor of the Eternal Return Antiquarian Bookshop, devoted to rare editions of philosophical classics. The conversation centers heavily on Nietzsche, but also ranges over the conflict between Cartesian caution and Spinozistic radicalism, Russian nihilism, Shakespeare in performance, dogmatic vs. skeptical readings of Plato, the perils of translation, teaching philosophy in the age of Zoom, the agonising tension between book collecting and bookselling, and the lakeside rock in Switzerland where Nietzsche and Jeff each experienced life-changing events.

(Like my earlier interview with Sean Christopher of LHOOQ Books, this interview should appeal to anyone with an interest in bookstores, philosophy, art, literature, etc., even if they have no specific interest in San Diego or its bookstore scene.)

In the second, I chat with science fiction author Ken MacLeod about Scottish space opera, libertarianism and Marxism, individualist anarchism, the Austrian calculation debate, Neoreaction, Brexit, Scottish independence, paternalism and anti-vaping laws, James Hutton and deep time, the Scottish Enlightenment, what he owes to David Friedman, what he owes to Margaret Thatcher, and that time Charles Darwin changed history by vomiting.

Stopped Clock: Jason Brennan Gets It Right on the Niskanen Center

Posted on by under Election 2020

If you ignore the well-poisoning horseshit he dishes out against Will Wilkinson, Jason Brennan manages, for once, to get something right: Jerry Taylor really is a hypocritical asshole for firing Will Wilkinson from the Niskanen Center, and, in consequence, the Niskanen Center should, as Brennan says, be boycotted (see Brennan’s post for details).

In addition, I think Brennan is right to put some pressure on Niskanen’s erstwhile supporters to stop supporting the Center. That’s what solidarity is, and how it works. Either you side with Will, or you side with Taylor, or you remain neutral because you’re in a position to be neutral. The latter gambit is not available to those who have supported Niskanen in the past, and intend to do so in the future. They have to make an autonomous, moralized decision one way or another. Do they support institutionalized hypocrisy, or do they support journalistic integrity? It really is that simple. Continue reading →

Vox Populi: Arguments Against In-Person Schooling

Posted on by under COVID-19

People sometimes like to brag on social media that they “don’t read the comments.” I like to brag that I do. In this post, I’ve posted nearly a dozen screenshots of comments by ordinary commenters at The New York Times website, demolishing David Brooks’s ignorant, self-righteous, shaming defense of in-person teaching in K-12 public schools.

I’ll refrain from extensive commentary on these comments, but I will say this: I stand in awe at the pathetic quality of the parenting in our country, largely populated by middle class people. Such is the job that American parents have done that they’re falling apart over the dire prospect of leaving their kids home alone in their well-stocked, heated, accoutrement-centered homes. And the kids themselves are so not all right, that faced with the supposedly overwhelming prospect of not learning what they supposedly learn in school, they can’t bring themselves to get off their asses and do some learning on their own steam–not even with the beneficent resources of the Internet, Khan Academy, and the entire paraphernalia of high-tech learning at their finger-tips, so loudly valorized by ideologues until people actually had to rely on the much-hyped technologies to get anything done. Continue reading →

CFP: “Rethinking College”

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Reason Papers (now edited by Shawn Klein, Arizona State University) has just issued a Call for Papers on the topic, “Rethinking College.” Here’s the blurb:

For years, we have heard about the coming bursting of the higher education bubble. Cancellation of college debt is an active political issue. Free speech on campus (or lack thereof) is a perennial issue. Criticisms of higher education from across the ideological spectrum continue to grow. The Covid-19 pandemic brought many of these issues to a head and has many people rethinking college. This symposium is interested in papers engaging these or other normative questions and issues about higher education.

Here’s a link with more information. Manuscript due date is July 15, 2021.

Blue Line Excuses for the Insurrection

Posted on by under Election 2020

If John Catanzara’s views are representative of sentiment within American law enforcement, that institution is gradually pushing us into an American equivalent of the Third Reich.

The president of Chicago’s largest police union defended the actions of a mob of Pro-Trump rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol—an incident that resulted in four deaths on Wednesday.

John Catanzara, president of the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 and a Trump supporter, defended the rioters in an interview Wednesday by saying “there was very little destruction of property.”

“There was no arson, there was no burning of anything, there was no looting, there was very little destruction of property,” Catanzara told the radio station WBEZ in a Wednesday evening phone interview. “It was a bunch of pissed-off people that feel an election was stolen, somehow, some way.”

Those claims are the twenty-first century American equivalent of excuse-making for the Beer Hall Putsch, and from pretty high up within the law enforcement establishment. It’s hard to know how representative or widespread Catanzara’s view is, but this Newsweek article is not the first time I’ve encountered it. It’s making the rounds within law enforcement circles. Continue reading →

Virtual Molinari Society Panel on Rights

Posted on by under Uncategorized

The Molinari Society will be holding its mostly-annual Eastern Symposium in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association via Zoom (7-9 and 14-16 January). Only those who cough up the hefty registration fee will be able to access the session, so no chance of free-riding this time around (the APA’s decision, definitely not ours; the APA is both pragmatically and morally confused about the costs and benefits of allowing free-riding at its conferences, but that’s another story). But there’s a substantial student discount, verb. sap. Anyway, here’s the schedule info:

Molinari Society symposium:
Radical Rights Theory

[Two timeslots back to back; we haven’t yet sorted the order of speakers or who’ll be in which timeslot – it depends on some logistical details that remain to be worked out (check back here for updates).]

12K. Thursday, 14 January 2021, 9:00-10:50 a.m. E
13K. Thursday, 14 January 2021, 11:00 a.m.-12:50 p.m. E

chair:
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

presenters:
Jesse Spafford (The Graduate Center, CUNY), “When ‘Enough and as Good’ Is Not Good Enough”
Daniel Layman (Davidson College), “Keeping the Proviso in Its Place”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University), “How to Have Your No-Proviso Lockeanism and Eat It Too”
Jason Lee Byas (University of Michigan), “Alienation, Forfeiture, and Two Concepts of Natural Rights”
Cory Massimino (Center for a Stateless Society), “Two Cheers for Rothbardianism”

See the full schedule here.

Were it not for the pandemic, I’d be heading to Manhattan for this event, preparing to dine with my co-panelists, to see friends in the NYC area, to catch up with colleagues in the profession, to visit some new museums, etc. But alas!

It Just Happened Here

Posted on by under Election 2020
For thirty years, I’ve heard conservatives lecture everyone else about the supposed “lessons” of Munich, Neville Chamberlain, and appeasement, all in order to rationalize endless warfare against “threats” abroad. Every time they want to start a war, they roll out their canned lectures on Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich, the one-size-fits-all analogy that justifies any brutality from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Persian Gulf. In fact, all they’ve managed to accomplish is perpetual war abroad, and fascist sedition at home. (Paul Krugman’s columns on this topic have been both prescient and explanatory.)

Continue reading →

Wal-Mart and Mask Mandates: The Empirical Issues

Posted on by under COVID-19

This gallery is meant to illustrate the issues raised in my discussion with Michael Young over Wal Mart in the post on the Great Barrington Declaration. See the combox of that post for further details. Click the thumbnails of each photo for important empirical findings.

Adventures in Space and Time

Posted on by under anarchism, Uncategorized

Three Agoric Café videos this week! What have you done to deserve such a superfluity of Agoric content? Nothing good, I’ll warrant.

In the main event, I chat with economist and legal scholar David Friedman on free-market anarchism; the Society for Creative Anachronism; tectonic geology; the quasi-anarchic legal systems of medieval Iceland and 18th-century England; being converted to anarchism by Robert Heinlein; how getting a Ph.D. in physics led to being an economist at a law school; the joys of fomenting war and exploiting one’s students; how he repeatedly achieved promotion through violence against his predecessors; how to make medieval armor both for humans and for turnips; how innovations in fireplace design facilitated adultery; and the perils of central planning for wizards.

The Friedman interview is bookended by two other videos of lesser import – this one, in which I show you around my childhood neighbourhood in San Diego (Sunset Cliffs and Ocean Beach, in Point Loma):

and finally this one, in which I share a special message for the New Year:

Galactic Mysteries, Birdheaded Humans, and Mona Lisa’s Mustache

Posted on by under Uncategorized

Behold, a new series on indie bookstores in the San Diego area (my hometown)!

In the first episode, I chat with Matthew Berger, new co-owner of Mysterious Galaxy (website; facebook page), a bookstore featuring titles in science fiction, fantasy, mystery, horror, etc., as well as merchandise, podcasts, author events, etc.

In the second episode, I chat with Sean Christopher, founder of LHOOQ Books / Exrealism, a unique bookstore with a once and future San Diego location (though currently located in a renovated armory in Astoria, Oregon). This episode in particular should appeal to anyone with an interest in bookstores, art, literature, etc., even if they have no special interest in San Diego (or Astoria).

By the way, I stripped out the soundtrack from the five-minute video at the end (on renovating the Astoria Armory), in order to avoid a musical copyright claim – but still got hit by a copyright claim for the background music on the 15-second clip at the beginning. So that soundtrack is muted now too.