Another Chronicles thread in which I participated (briefly).
Someone sent me this horribly misogynistic and tasteless email. I just want to say, I strongly object to such immoral objectification of women.
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Coda: Tim Swanson found out that this woman is porn star Sydney Moon and the original clips are here.
Tucker Max has a new story up. The part from the blind piano player (about 2/5 of the way through) to his toilet adventures in the hotel (about 4/5 through) had me laughing so hard my stomach hurt.
“The accident occurred at the intersection of Fifth and Elm.” You hear such things on occasion, or “where did it happen?” There is an implicit assumption that an event has a location. I do not understand this. And event is a happening. Happenings don’t have a location for they don’t have a body or a size.
If two cars hit each other, where does the accident occur? Between the cars? The volume of space the cars occupied when they first hit? Or the volume of space traced by the cars from the beginning, to the end, of the accident, i.e. a 4-D volume? The concept is simply not well-defined.
To take some other examples–I love my wife. Where is the love? Last year, I loved my dog. Where did this event occur? What was its location? The sun got a year older last year–where did the aging occur? If I talk to a Dutch friend on the phone, where does the conversation, the talking, occur? If I bury a time capsule, and you dig it up after I’d dead, where did the message-conveying occur?
People who say “I was taken back” instead of “taken aback”. Don’t use fancy expressions if you have no real idea of what they really are.
Recipes that call for chicken stock. I have no idea what chicken stock is. I only have cans of broth.
Recipes that say to use a “broiler”. what the heck is a “broiler”? I have an oven. It has a broil feature, but I have no idea when it it to be used, and whether that means I have “a broiler” or not. Sheesh.
Recipes that refer to a pot as a “sauce pan”. I always thought there were pots, and pans. Pans are the low-rimmed things you can fry in. Pots are the deeper things you can boil in. So what in the world is a sauce PAN? Obviously what is meant is a pot, why not call it one.
I hate people. They’re such idiots.
A recent thread on Chronicles where Hoppe’s views were mischaracterized; I attempted to set the record straight.
I hate long outgoing voicemail messages that waste the caller’s time by having to listen to pointless information. I like it short and sweet: “Please leave a message” is good enough. Or, “I’m not here: here’s the beep.” My wife hated the one I left on our home voicemail, it said “LEAVE … A … MESSAGE” in a robotic voice.
Why do people need to say, “I’m not in right now, but if you leave a message, I’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you for calling, and have a nice day.” I want to tear what’s left of my hair out when I have to suffer through such meandering, time-wasting crap like that. Why do you even need to say, “you’ve reached the Kinsellas.” Duh. If it’s a stranger or wrong number, why give them your name? If it’s someone who you want calling you, they already know your name.
Also annoying is when people say, “I’m unavailable to answer the phone right now.” Look, you can say “I’m unavailable” or you can say “I’m unable to answer the phone,” but what the hell does “unavailable to answer the phone” mean?
A recent post on LewRockwell blog lately about this and Thomas Woods versus Thomas Fleming, Storck, et al.; a Chronicles blog thread I participated in with Fleming et al. Here’s another thread I participated in with Scott Richert about the non-aggression principle.
Other recent LRC posts:
Girls and Monkeys
Exponential Progress
ALOHA! LET MY PEOPLE GO (about Hawaii)
Green Nukes
Yet More on Galambos (on Galambos, engineers, and scientism)
Federal Rights and Federal Power (naivety of libertarians wanting the feds to protect our “rights”)
World Investment Court
From LRC Blog:
Yet More on Galambos
Posted by Stephan Kinsella on May 24, 2004 12:02 AM
Tim Swanson’s blog linked to Isaac Waisberg’s blogpost regarding the nonsensical nature of the owning-a-word mentality. Waisberg links to a Harry Browne Liberty article on Galambos. What a crankish nutball.Browne writes: “A few years later, I realized that the inability to conduct controlled, repeatable experiments made it impossible to transfer the methods of the physical sciences to the social sciences — including economics and investments. Still later, I came across Ludwig von Mises’ The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, in which he explains this point better than I could.”
This reinforces what I’ve come to think about Galambos: he adopts the monist, scientistic mentality which Mises showed to be flawed. He is like many engineers I’ve known: most are bright, but nowadays uneducated beyond calculus and applied engineering courses; yet they believe that, because they are the “best and brightest” they can solve social problems by some kind of brute force empirical-practical engineering type solution. The result is almost always embarrassing, totally devoid of any familiarity with philosphy or the relevant literature; it is just a step above the long-winded “I’ve-got-the-world-figured-out” diatribes by frustrated truck drivers who also think they have a system to win the lottery. Galambos was brighter and better read than most engineers, but he could not escape the pseudo-science of scientism into which engineers are immersed; he adopted the idea that we should find a “science” of liberty, with “science” used in the conventional, natural-sciences sense. Kind of a weird combination of California surfer-dude “hey-man” mentality combined with Carl Sagan wide-eyed love for (natrual)-science combined with the engineer’s misplaced confidence in his ability to solve all human problems using engineering techniques.
Galambos was wrong. He should have read Mises.
Galambos’s entire philosophy rests on the shaky grounds of scientism. To the extent I can understand what he really meant, that is. Because of his crankish views, he self-censored and doomed himself to dwindling cult status. Wow, man, like wow. Really impressive. Not.
I have to give Galambos his props, however: look at this great slogan he promulgated: “If you vote, don’t complain.” Now that’s brilliant!
Coda: Writes Tim Swanson): “So true. All of my roommates have been engineers as have most of my friends. Rather than reading any sort of economics text they simply come up with a “plan” utilizing some sort of top-down approach.”
In a recent LRC blog post, Day of the Long Knives (alt link), I discussed some of FEE’s colorful past. Below is a less-sanitized version of that post.
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I confess I never cared much for Leonard Read’s books—what a friend calls “grandfather libertarianism.” My eyes glaze over at meaningless, pop or cutesy titles like To Free or to Freeze, The Freedom Freeway, Talking to Myself, and How Do We Know? I never could finish them; the little hardbacks, not much longer than pamphlets, cost only a dollar or so, and have sat on my shelf for over a decade now, collecting dust. (The same goes for Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, and Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, which I could just not get through. Patterson’s too-dated over-reliance on proto-New Age metaphors of “circuits” and “energy” drove me, as an electrical engineering student, batty.)
Not that I frown on those who come to libertarianism through Read or others; the more, the merrier. In any event, though Read may be boring, the same can hardly be said of FEE in recent years. Most recently, there was whole Mark Skousen presidency debacle.
There was also an interesting episode in the late ’90s. At the time Hans Sennholz was President. The November 1996 issue of The Freeman (now Ideas on Liberty) contained a Book Review by Hans-Hermann Hoppe of The Failure of America’s Foreign Wars (edited by Richard M. Ebeling and Jacob G. Hornberger).
In the review, Hoppe pointed out that Hitler was relatively benign before World War Two compared to Stalin; Stalin had killed 20 million of his own people before the war, whereas Hitler did not start killing many people until after the war started. This true statement, unsurprisingly, angered certain people, including Israel Kirzner, then on the FEE Board of Trustees.
Next came Robert W. McGee‘s article Arab Terrorism: Causes and Cure, in the December 1996 issue of The Freeman, about the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights by the Israelis. McGee merely pointed out that Palestinians have been having their land stolen and have been subjected to numerous other human rights abuses since the 1940s, with the help of American taxpayers. As McGee wrote:
The Palestinians’ property right, one of the most basic of all human rights, was systematically disparaged. The disparagement continues to this day, as evidenced by the West Bank settlement policies of the present Israeli government. Russian Jews and others are being given Palestinian land to live on, and the Palestinian owners are being driven from their land without compensation. … The land grab is only one of many human rights abuses that the Palestinians have endured. … [N]o government should ever condone or financially support a regime that systematically disparages them. Once U.S. support stops, Arab terrorists (some of whom may legitimately be called freedom fighters) will be far less likely to attack U.S. property and citizens. … Muslims, Jews, and Christians can live in peace, but only when human rights, including property rights, are respected.
Kirzner, angered over the two articles, resigned from the Board of Trustees. Hans Sennholz, then the president of FEE, fired Larry White, the editor of the November issue in which Hoppe’s book review appeared; Robert Batemarco, the book review editor; and Robert Higgs, the editor of the December issue, in which McGee’s article apeared.
So at this point it appeared that Hoppe, McGee, White, Higgs, and Batemarco were persona non grata with FEE, and Kirzner had quit. It’s said that several FEE supporters were outraged by Sennholz’s craven, politically-correct actions. Some theorize that Sennholz felt compelled to act this way partly to atone for his serving as a Luftwaffe pilot for Hitler during World War Two.
One ironic aspect of this is that White, who has disagreed with Hoppe over free banking issues, was fired for publishing Hoppe’s book review.
And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the father-in-law having an affair with his daughter-in-law, who ends up committing suicide. Wait, woops, I think that’s Hillsdale 1 I’m thinking of. Nevermind.
- See, in Liberty magazine: Is It True What They Say About Hillsdale?; The Truth About Hillsdale; The Lessons of Hillsdale, R.W. Bradford; Hillsdale as an Ordinary College, Robert Campbell; Hillsdale and the Standards of Liberty. [↩]
Recent post on LRC Blog about Bushisms.
Another recent post, Property in the Law, quotes some interesting civil-law language on the nature of property rights from Professor Yiannopoulos’s treatise.
Another post discusses C.S. Lewis’ comments on women fighting in battle.
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