Philosophy

Human, All Too Human: A Poem

December 29, 2010 @ 12:26 am

I wrote this in a strong, rebellious Nietzsche phase in Nov. 1999: Human, All Too Human What beast is Man! Cruel and mean-spirited Conformity is the master plan Individuality has faded To be different is to be outcast Mindlessly follow the herd mentality The disease spreads fast Don’t deviate from the herd morality!

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Introducing Prometheus Unbound

November 25, 2010 @ 6:25 pm

Last week I launched a new website called Prometheus Unbound.  I aim for it to be a sort of online “magazine,” a libertarian review of fiction and literature. The site will feature reviews, news commentary, articles and editorials, and eventually (I hope) interviews, from a libertarian perspective. I’m entertaining the possibility of publishing original fiction [...]

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Aphoristic Observation: Retributive Punishment Is to Restorative Justice as Egalitarianism Is to Equality

October 22, 2010 @ 12:59 am

Instead of raising the victim back up — to balance the scales of Lady Justice, so to speak — it seeks to drag the criminal down to the victim’s diminished level. ~*~ Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

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Road Socialism Leads to Broadband Socialism

October 1, 2010 @ 11:48 pm

In a previous post I pointed out the slippery slope in accepting government-backed licensing of “crucial” professions. The problem with slippery slope arguments is that they tend not to be rhetorically-compelling to those without a sufficiently cynical, I should say realistic, conception of the state. They are simply not convinced that allowing certain “reasonable” policies [...]

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Should Parents Need a License to Procreate? A Moron Says Yes.

September 6, 2010 @ 12:00 pm

Hugh LaFollette, “Licensing Parents Revisited,” Journal of Applied Philosophy. The premise of his article is that the legitimacy of professional licensing is well-established and the practice should be expanded to parents. While one could argue that it doesn’t follow from professional licensing being applied to various professions that it should be expanded to parents, this [...]

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Progressive Egalitarians Should Be Anti-IP

September 5, 2010 @ 11:35 pm

The Obama Administration insists that “‘Piracy is flat, unadulterated theft,’ and it should be dealt with accordingly.” Nonsense, of course. Only scarce goods can be property and therefore only scarce goods can be stolen. Ideas or information patterns are nonscarce goods. If I take your bicycle, you don’t have it anymore. If I copy your [...]

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Voting, Moral Hazard, and Like Buttons

September 1, 2010 @ 1:02 pm

I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation. First the passage from Lacy’s article: Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of [...]

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CrunchGear vs. the Tea Party on Net Neutrality

August 13, 2010 @ 4:54 pm

Yesterday, in All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon, I blogged about the Google-Verizon proposal for regulating the internet and why libertarians should oppose both it and any net neutrality laws and regulations. Today, I came across a post on CrunchGear, a tech and gadgets site, by Nicholas Deleon, that criticizes the Tea Party for [...]

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