Shameless Self-promotion Sunday #48
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
It’s Sunday again. Everybody get Shameless.
What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
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Editor’s Note. I moved Marja’s comment here from where it was originally posted in GT 209-04-26: Open thread on: localism, decentralism, anarchism, thick conceptions of libertarianism, and the U.S. Constitution. –R.G.
I missed yesterday’s anti-IMF/World Bank protests in DC. Now the reports aren’t all clear, but the cops attacked the march; aout 30 protesters were injured and 2 had to go to the hospital, one due to a broken leg; one due to pepper spray injuries.
Apparently, the cops decided to stop the march, surround it, order it to disperse, and attack it from all sides. A few stories say that they pushed protesters over one of the fences.
Was this a major protest with a permit?
I don’t know.
The permit process is like voting; it exists to build the myth of legitimacy and consent.
Nods
Ok; I am going to do my “obligatory” Sunday post.
Well, I was philosophizing about the ethics of market exchange with sex workers. My head hurts, so the fruits of that exploration will have to wait another day. Needless to say, I am going ahead with my research and book project dealing with sex work — know a few “insiders” who may help.
In the meantime, you should read Arthur Silber’s latest. He provocatively argues that there should be no torture trials.
Reading Arthur’s piece is deeply depressing though…
Does anyone else ever feel like that guy in Rent singing dying in America? That’s our theme song.
Oops! I mean it’s mine.
http://www.counterpunch.org/martens04272009.html
Hmmmm
The author looks badly upon legalized cannibalism.
Eating human flesh isn’t a rights violation. The more interesting question is whether or not a person can consent to being cannibalized without violation of individual rights.
The Free State Project as the far right? Aren’t Libertarians neither left nor right? Ok, I have to admit that Hoppe is the far right in the most disgusting use of the term.
Pete E is not Hoppe.
The more interesting question is whether or not a person can consent to being cannibalized without violation of individual rights.
Well, if I can leave my body to science for organ transplants, seems to me I can leave my body to Mike & Ed’s BBQ (who would probably get better use out of it anyway).
The more interesting question is whether I can consent to being cannibalised while I’m still alive (e.g., people cutting hunks off my body). But here too I would say sure, subject to the caveat that I can withdraw my consent at any time (given my views on contracts).
On thick-libertarian grounds, though, I would regard a culture in which consent to being cannibalised while alive was widespread as … inauspicious.
What about those who seek to be eaten first?
It isn’t cannibalism, of course.
And yes, that mindset would be inauspicious.
Wasn’t there a German case involving a cannibal and a vore fetishist???
Well, maybe one rational agent eating another counts as cannibalism in a Kantian sort of way, even if they’re of different species. Though I’m not sure whether Cthulhu counts technically as a rational agent.
Incidentally, I’m not sure where the idea comes from that Cthulhu’s going to eat everybody, but I don’t think it’s in Lovecraft. What Lovecraft actually says is:
This actually sounds more like a right-libertrian’s vision of the triumph of left-libertarianism. Indeed Lovecraft usually associates his writhing squamous nameless horrors with other things that creeped him out, like miscegenation, androgyny, immigrants, and (in Mountains of Madness) worker rebellion. Being, shall we say, somewhat less creeped out by those things, I’m sometimes tempted by the revisionist view that Lovecraft’s creepy-crawlies are actually the good guys.
On a related point, the bad guys in John Wright’s Phoenix trilogy look like Lovecraftian monsters (he even uses some of Lovecraft’s favourite words to describe them, such as “rugose”) and talk like Randian villains.
Marja: WikiPedia: Armin Meiwes. The man he (consensually) killed was Bernd J?@c3;bc;rgen Brandes.
Roderick: “I’m sometimes tempted by the revisionist view that Lovecraft’s creepy-crawlies are actually the good guys.”
Free Tiamat!
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=96301
“The revelations about Cass Sunstein, Obama’s friend from the University of Chicago Law School and nominee to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, come in a new book by Brad O’Leary, “Shut Up, America! The End of Free Speech.” OIRA will oversee regulation throughout the U.S. government.
Sunstein also has argued in his prolific literary works that the Internet is anti-democratic because of the way users can filter out information of their own choosing.
“A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government,” he wrote. “Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.””
George Orwell is rolling over in his grave. I’ll be dammed if I link to Sean Hannity on my blog or something.
Read the part about a government created or imposed (?) civility check. It’s kind of morbidly funny to see it proposed
( :
I’ve sent more angry emails than I care to remember. If only the government had asked me: is that being civil?
I’ve heard libertarians argue that we should support Cass Sunstein because he’s a sort-of libertarian (since he calls his theory “libertarian paternalism”). Counterfeit money is, of course, sort of money.
That’s a complete oxymoron, Roderick. Glad to see we’re agreed on keeping this crap out of the freedom lexicon ( :