StephanKinsella.com

An old LRC post:

Holzer, Animal

I read a comment by Buckley long ago, regarding advice he had gotten from John Braine (author of How to Write a Novel): that in writing a novel, “the reading public expects one coincidence and is cheated if it isn’t given one, but scorns two.” I’ve always thought that was brilliant. And it’s right: I can tolerate one coincidence in a novel; more than that is annoying. It becomes like John Carter in the boring, serial Mars books. Not sure if you have to have one coincidence, but probably so–otherwise, it’s more like a real-life story, which usually have no designed, plot-like arc. (This is probably one reason I have always tended to dislike movies based on real events such as someone’s life–if they are true to real life, then they will usually have no cinematic story-like arc, no “plot”–just a series of events that tell facts that actually happened in reality; if they are interesting, they probably fiddled with the truth to make it more movie-like, which also bugs me. I’d rather see a documentary or read a biography or history book.)

Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Buckley containing this comment:

INTERVIEWER

Did you say once that when you decided to write a novel John Braine sent you a book on how to write one?

BUCKLEY

We were friends. … So he used to write me regularly, and I had lunch with him once or twice in London; he was on my television program, along with Kingsley Amis. … when I sent him a letter saying that I was going to write a novel, he said, Well, I wrote a book on how to write a novel, and here it is. So I read it.

INTERVIEWER

Was it helpful?

BUCKLEY

I remember only one thing—which doesn’t mean that I wasn’t influenced by a hundred things in it—but he said that the reading public expects one coincidence and is cheated if it isn’t given one, but scorns two.

My 8 year old recently brought home a few haikus he wrote at school. (A haiku is a type of Japanese poetry where you have 3 lines, with 5, 7, and 5 “on” (like a syllable); http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku)

My favorite is “Books”:

Books

Books. Books. Their knowledge.

Information flows through me.

The knowledge of books.

Others:

River

Its current flows fast.

The river rushes swiftly.

Its cool, sweet water.

Humans

I am one of them.

Some of them work all day long

You are one of them.

Air

It flies everywhere

It gives humans oxygen

We need it to live

Interesting piece in The Daily Bell: Mr. Goldberg Apologizes for His Mises/Phone Booth Crack?. Apropos this, see my 2001 LRC article about this little punk, On Jonah Goldberg’s Youthful Phase.

From a LRC post in 2006:

Re: Reuben deviationists

Posted by Stephan Kinsella on September 12, 2006 10:18 PM

Lecompte is pronounced like “luh count” by the way.

I’d had these sandwhiches as a kid and teen on the way past Lecompte on various camping trips, and always missed them. My mom and dad went there recently scouting out some campgrounds outside of Alexandria (“Ellic”), and told me about it. I mentioned I’d like one so my dad made a few calls, to see if they could ship them. He found out that they used to ship them but the FDA made them stop. So he called them back and they gave him the recipe. It is basically this, and I plan to try it soon. I haven’t tried it yet but my dad has and said it’s close to the original and very good.

Lea’s Ham Sandwich Recipe

• use some kind of white bread hamburger buns (they used a particular brand but I forget)
• go get you some ham, you, like maybe honeybaked
• keep some in slices, and grind a bunch, like with a grinder, or onion chopper
• also chop up/finely shred some lettuce
• put miracle whip on the buns (not mayo)
• put the chopped ham on the bottom bun
• put sliced ham on the top bun
• put the shredded lettuce, dill pickle slices, and a slice of tomato in between
• Then you want to compress/toast/smash the whole thing, sort of in a panini grill thing or george foreman type device, till the outside is toasty and it’s kinda smashed and hot

For another great recipe I picked a while back, check out this old LRC post:

Re: Hey, this stuff is great!

Posted by Stephan Kinsella on December 18, 2005 11:44 PM

Jeff, can’t go wrong with jambalaya (my hometown is allegedly the “jambalaya capital of the world”), but this recipe is one of my all-time favorites and unlike anything you’ve tasted: fairly easy, and utterly delicious: Chicken Big Mamou Pasta. Strangely enough, I found it at the Magnolia Cafe in Philly when I lived there. Trust me on this one.

From this post:

Derek: “don’t know, when you define aggression a priori”

I am not sure what this means. I am defining what libertarians are in terms of their view on aggression: they are against it. Aggression itself requires further explanation, definition, and justification. In my various articles I have attempted this.  E.g http://mises.org/daily/3660#ref18 .

Aggression is fairly obvious in terms of human bodies. But in terms of other scarce resources, you have to identify the owner first–aggression here is dependent on property rights. Thus what makes libertarianism unique is its property right assignment rule: basically the Lockean rule of appropriation of unowned property.

” you do so in a manner that objectively deems certain actions as non-aggressive and therefore non-problematic when they actually are in some reasonable sense.”

In other words, you are willing in some cases to condone the use of violence against someone who has not committed aggression against the body of, or trespassed against the owned property of, another person. We libertarians call that “criminal” or aggression.

“When recognizing social problems, aggression being one of those many problems (one of the more serious ones), you don’t engage in the tendency of deeming social problems non-problems at all because you understand you’re not aware of certain social contexts.”

We don’t “deem” anything but we are opposed to aggresion. We believe aggression is always unjustified. This does not mean we think there are no other social problems. What you are doing here is exactly what conservaives do when they say they aer against violence but it’s just one of many values, etc. — Check out this post and y’ll see wha I mean http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2012/01/17/the-disingenuous-liberty-isnt-the-only-value-attack-by-liberals-and-conservatives-on-libertarianism/

“The NAP, on the other hand, is about removing all care about context and focusing on one principle, or axiom in some cases, about aggression.”

No. You are wrong. You are squirming and evading, trying to avoid naming the truth: that you are sometimes willing to condone or commit aggression. If you are, go ahead and say it. If not, then you are identical with libertarians.

Let’s take a simpler exapmle. Presumably you oppose the torture and murder of children. Right? For whatever reason. You think that it is unjustified. It is wrong. It should not be engaged in. Saying this is not “simplistic” or “out of context”–it is just what you believe. Likewise libertarians feel the same about aggression: we basically believe that humans ought to live in society, in cooperation, as much as possible; that when there is a possibility of physically, violent conflict, this is always because of the fundmanetal fact of scarcity: their intended use of some scarce resources, whether others’ bodies or other reosurces, conflict. We believe that to avoid the problem of violent conflict people ought to abide by a set of property rules that allocate particular owners of all such contestable resources. And we believe that the owner should be the person himself, in the case of bodies; and in the case of previously unowned resources, it ought to be the first one to start using it, or someone to whom he has contractually transferred it.

Now the only way you can disagree with this is to think someone other than A ought to own his body–i.e. slavery. Or that someone other than the original homesteader of a resource should have it–that is, A homesteads property X and later on, some latecomer B gets to take X from A, to become its new owner. We call this theft.

Why would you be in favor of slavery or theft?

“Considering that libertarianism is all about people freeing themselves and taking *self-responsibility*, conveying an ethic that creates some philosophical and practical dependency of this type is a dangerous way of thinking in my opinion.”

It’s not “about” this. It’s not “about” anything–it’s not a novel with a plot. LIbertarianism is a political philosophy with a particular view of how property rights should be allocated. Every political philosophy has some view of property rights. It’s just that all the non-libertarian ones believe in some form of slavery or theft.

“I think this stems from the Austrians means of deriving ethics from a system of rights, “natural” rights usually, rather than derive a system of rights from their larger theory of ethics.”

Has nothing to do with it.

I suggest you read my What It Means to be an Anarcho-Capitalist. stephankinsella.com/publications

Back in 2008 I pointed out some problems with resorting to the courts of the central state to vindicate our rights, in the context of the Heller gun rights case. I argued that the Bill of Rights limits the power of the federal government. It was certainly not meant not empower the federal government via the courts or Congress to strike down state laws. For example at the time the Bill of Rights was ratified (1791), several states had an established religion. (See my post State and Religion.) Obviously the prohibitions on state involvement in religion in the First Amendment were limits on federal not state power.

The same is true for the Second Amendment. I have never believed the prefatory clause about militias was a limit on this limitation on federal power. In my view a federal court should refuse to enforce a federal law restricting gun rights, since there is no enumerated power granted to Congress to enact such a general, national law. And as a backstop, the Second Amendment further prohibits such federal legislation. But does it limit the states? No.

I had problems with some aspects of the Heller case, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Washington D.C. gun law based on the Second Amendment. (See To Hell with Heller; Heller gives local governments “space within which to limit gun ownership”; The Great Gun Decision: Dissent; Gun Haters Happy with Heller; and other posts.) Not that I was that upset with it. I would have probably voted to strike it down too, on libertarian grounds (see my post Higher Law). And thus I praised Heller plaintiff Tom Palmer for fighting against unlibertarian laws (Tom Palmer’s Fight for the Right to Bear Arms).

Scholar Kevin Gutzman had another interesting critique of Heller: he argued that not only does the Bill of Rights not apply to the States, but it did not even apply to Washington, D.C. itself, as a sort of “pseudo-state”–a special jurisdiction under federal control that operates somewhat like a state. I noted this intriguing argument in one of my posts criticizing Heller, The Great Gun Decision: Dissent, where I wrote:

Second, as Kevin Gutzman notes, the Bill of Rights provides limits on the power of the federal government–not states, and not DC. So, as with the majority in the Kelo case, the dissent would have had the right result for the wrong reasons. In Heller, the majority is correct in how they construe the meaning of the Second Amendment; the liberals are blatantly, dishonestly wrong. But both sides incorrectly believe that the Bill of Rights applies to DC. ¹

Heller plaintiff Tom Palmer roundly condemned Gutzman’s argument as “just plain dumb.” And libertarian centralist and Lincoln idolator Tim Sandefur attacked both me and Gutzman, in a post entitled “Stephan Kinsella’s idiocy reaches new lows.”

What is interesting is esteemed libertarian and Cato scholar Richard Epstein has recently opined that the Second Amendment does not apply to Washington, D.C. In The Libertarian Gun Fallacy, Professor Epstein writes “the Second Amendment imposes no limitations on the states … Washington D.C. [is] the one place where the amendment has no application whatsoever.” (See also Damon Root on Libertarians, Guns, and Federalism.)

Hmm.

1. See also my post The Unique American Federal Government.[↩]

Is up!

I’m not talking about personal matters like getting married or having a child or having great parents. Or, intellectually, on the level of reading Mises or Hoppe or Rothbard (or meeting the latter two, for that matter). But three great practical things that stand out that have made big differences for me:

• Learning touch-typing in 10th grade.
• Switching to a left-hand mouse (though now I use only trackpads) (see “Go Left, he said”: How Jeff Tucker Saved My Life).
• Adopting the GTD (getting things done) methodology (or, a version of it, as best I can).

I’ve started a podcast on HuffDuffer (RSS; Subscribe in iTunes), which I’ll use for my past and upcoming media, and for occasional audio files by other speakers I find interesting.