Spooner or Later

In the midst of beginning-of-term hecticity, I forgot to mention this while it was happening, but I recently participated in a Liberty Matters discussion with Randy Barnett, Matt Zwolinski, and Aeon Skoble on the legacy of Lysander Spooner; read it here.

See also my previous Liberty Matters discussions on Molinari and Spencer.

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The Vanishing Race Card

I wrote this last summer and forgot to post it. Here it is now:

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How big a difference do racist origins make to the present moral status of an institution?

For Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson, it seems to depend on politics.

Carson condemns Planned Parenthood on the basis of the racist views of its founder, Margaret Sanger:

“Well, maybe I’m not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood. But you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people. … I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger, who founded this place – a woman who Hillary Clinton by the way says she admires.”

Indeed, Sanger had racist views. But Carson seems a bit inconsistent and selective when he turns around and praises the Founding Fathers as “courageous men of principle and faith,” and quotes Thomas Jefferson and James Madison favourably.

Surely Carson is aware that Jefferson, Madison, and many other Founders owned, bought, and sold black people as slaves; that Jefferson regarded blacks as “in reason much inferior” to whites, and “in imagination … dull, tasteless, and anomalous”; and that Madison held that “the physical peculiarities of those held in bondage … preclude their incorporation with the white population.”

If Planned Parenthood is evil because it was founded by a racist, why doesn’t being founded by a passel of racists make the United States evil? I have a hard time seeing how Carson can have it both ways.

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Your Duty to Vote

pizza4prez

Students for Liberty has opened voting on the position of Student of the Year. I’m voting for our amazing SFL Senior Campus Coordinator and C4SS Fellow Cory Massimino, and recommend that everyone else do likewise. You can vote once a day until February 12th. Vote here.

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Missing the Train to Elea

Popular culture gets Zeno’s paradox wrong again:

dilbert-zeno

There’s a widespread impression that Zeno’s proposed problem is that after you reach the halfway point to your destination, you then have to go halfway to the remaining distance, and so on ad infinitum, so that you get closer and closer to your goal but never reach it.

But that’s not how the paradox goes. The problem is much worse. The paradox is that before you can get halfway to your destination, you have to get halfway to the halfway point, and so on ad infinitum, so that you can never even start moving. (Here’s Rose Wilder lane making the same mistake.)

Probably the mistake arose from someone conflating this paradox with another of Zeno’s paradox, the Achilles, in which the fastest runner gets closer and closer to catching up to the slowest runner.

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Kopieren Ist Kein Diebstahl

amadehaha

A solemn, slow march … introduces the assembly of the priests [in The Magic Flute] in the most appropriate manner. It is said that in answer to the accusation of a friend that he had stolen this march from Gluck’s “Alceste” (Act I., sc. 3), Mozart laughingly replied that that was impossible, as it still stood there.
(Otto Jahn, Life of Mozart, vol. 3, trans. Pauline D. Townsend (London: Novello, Ewer & Co., 1882), p. 323.)

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