Who Were the Sea Peoples?

I decided to move some discussion from this post up to the top level here. Specifically, Watoosh wrote: "Well, if violence is defined as initiation of force (which, of course, presupposes certain property rights), then I think Rockwell is correct..." Well, if we define cats as elephants, then many people keep elephants in their house. More seriously, firstly, violence is not usually defined that way. It's defined as, you know, violence, so that, say, someone may respond violently or non-violently to someone who aggresses against them. Otherwise, it would make no sense to say, for instance, "He punched me, but I did not stoop to violence in response." And, secondly, the libertarian usage of "initiation of force" is very offbeat. If I wander onto someone's meadow, most people would not say I had "initiated force" -- I mean, sure, I used "force" against the earth to push off walking, but that's not force directed against...

"Libertarianism is the one political theory extant that consistently preaches non-violence in every way..." -- Lew Rockwell Is that so? "However, there is a presumption that all government employees are indeed guilty of a crime against humanity." -- Walter Block "Police may use such coercive methods [as beating and torturing suspects] provided that the suspect turns out to be guilty, and provided that the police are treated themselves as criminal suspects if the suspect is not proven guilty. For, in that case, the rule of no force against non-criminals would still apply. Suppose, for example, that police beat and torture a suspected murderer to find information… If the suspect turns out to be guilty, then the police should be exonerated..." -- Murray Rothbard "Applying our theory to parents and children, this means that a parent does not have the right to aggress against his children, but also that the parent should not have a legal obligation...

I just re-read Colin Dexter's The Jewel That Was Ours . (Mystery fiction is what I usually read for a break.) I looked up the date of the novel, and was kind of shocked to see it was 1991. Things happened seemed so... ancient! The plot centered around a tour of England. One of the characters disappeared from the tour, and people just had to wait for him to show up again. You see, phones were things that sat in fixed locations, attached to walls and such. The chief inspector had to ask to borrow a hotel's phone in order to call back to headquarters. When the British police wanted to find information on the backgrounds of the American tourists, they had to send wires to or phone the US, instead of checking their Facebook page. It felt more like fifty years ago than twenty.

Or how to avoid Voegelin-Rothbard  syndrome . A story: I was watching a special on John Coltrane. One of his former musicians was being interviewed. He talked about how long Coltrane could go on with a single number. One show in Philadelphia, they were playing a 3-and-1/2-hour matinee. Coltrane called the first piece, and began, of course, improvising. And improvising. Next thing they knew, the show was over. And they had played one piece for the entire show. The fellow mentioned that Coltrane's predilection used to puzzle Miles Davis. "John," he would say, "why you play so long?" "Miles, I get going, and just don't know how to stop." "John, you just take the horn out you mouth." Sometimes, as a writer, you have to "just take the horn out you mouth." Otherwise you get Voegelin-Rothbard syndrome. Many of you probably know the story of Rothbard and his history of economic thought, where a quick project to do a short tex...

I run across the above sentiment in discussion groups, usually when someone is arguing something like, "Well, if Hoppe is anti-free-immigration, then he is no libertarian!" (Not to pick on Hoppe: it might be Milton Friedman, or Hayek, or whoever, who is not a "real" libertarian.) This idea apparently exhibits a severe misunderstanding of why a word means this or that. It is the community of users of a language that decide what a word means, and they decide it by using it. So if most people call both Hayek and Hoppe libertarians, then libertarianism encompasses both their views. That doesn't mean you can't argue for a more restrictive definition. But then you have to say, "Libertarianism ought to mean X," not "Libertarianism does mean X." You could even continue to use libertarianism in your preferred way, but then you have to declare as much. ("I'm using libertarianism in the restricted sense of...") But, if you fail t...

I've just been alerted to the fact (by Anthony Evans) that this paper is available online .

"But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future — haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth — ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other — dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now , but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present." -- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters