From the monthly archives:

April 2003

Coercion: WTF?

April 30, 2003

– Here’s a challenge for libertarians. What exactly is wrong with initiatory coercion, other than the fact that it strikes us as intuitively repugnant? For my part, I cannot find a satisfying answer. Other kinds of non-coercive psychological manipulation, such as those that occur in relationships gone sour, strike me as just as odious as [...]

Read the full article →

Nigerian Democracy

April 23, 2003

– Wolverine.

Read the full article →

PoMos Concede Impotence, Irrelevance

April 22, 2003

– This is very heartening. (Link from NRO.)

Read the full article →

C.P. Snow’s Five Year Plan

April 21, 2003

– I’ve just been reading C.P. Snow’s famous The Two Cultures for a Liberty Fund in Indianapolis next weekend, and it’s just an astoundingly obtuse book. Of course, I have the benefit of having seen how things panned out. In Snow’s day, perhaps it made sense to delineate something like monolithic scientific and literary cultures, [...]

Read the full article →

Liberation Forthcoming

April 20, 2003

– After 4 1/2 years in College Park, a few of them simply dismal, I’m moving to the city! Where? Here. Five minutes or so on foot from Black Cat, 9:30, Velvet Lounge, Kingpin, Bohemian Caverns, Ben’s Chili Bowl, Cake Love, Saint Ex, etc., etc. I am exceedingly enthusiastic, reflecting my pent up disenchantment with [...]

Read the full article →

After the Fall

April 20, 2003

– Nice piece by Chuck Freund on the prospects of pan-Arabism after the collapse of the Hussein regime.

Read the full article →

The Underdetermination of Just Social Order by Democracy

April 20, 2003

– Iraq, we are told, is to become a democracy. This is a laudable aim. But democracy is a genus, not a species. Getting a democracy is rather like getting a mammal for a gift. Kittens are nice. Wolverines will lunch on your eyeballs. You don’t drop a wolverine in your friend’s lap, and then [...]

Read the full article →

Report from Buffalo

April 20, 2003

– So, last weekend I was in Buffalo for a grad conference on John Searle and a bigger conference on issues surrounding the works of Searle and Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto. I presented a paper at the little Searle conference, and the man himself was there to comment. Searle has always been one of my [...]

Read the full article →

The Sound of Silence

April 19, 2003

– I hope you’ve enjoyed my experiment in meditative blog silence. If you thought I was inactive, you must have succumbed to my well-wrought illusion of stasis. More discerning readers will have noticed how each new day, my apparently unchanging page was commenting subtly–passively protesting the hectic, frantic hurly burly of the world at large. [...]

Read the full article →