Naïs

evanmille:

Barack Obama has a Twitter account. Whenever a drone strike story comes up on my Dashboard, I’m going to tweet it @him. Its run by his staff, but I assume he reads it from time to time, and relevant tweets are probably passed on. 

There are so many egregious immoral things happening within governments all over the world, I wish I had the time to unearth them all, and shine a light. 

(via notquitecharlotte)

So apparently Dan D’Amico is aware of this blog.

Time to change URLs!

Also there was a grasshopper and he was fucking ass-fuck huge as balls big and I named him Eugen. And I saw some people go through the hole in my fence and I wanted to run them over.

So Dr. Hasnas riled some people up by proposing we eliminate criminal law in favor of an expanded tort system, Dr. Kline riled some people up by challenging some conventional wisdom with regard to game theory while brilliantly introducing the subject, Dr. Pennington riled some people up with casual nationalist potshots during a capable introduction to government failure and public choice economics, and Dr. D’Amico riled Dr. Hasnas up by deprecating the latter’s age during a lecture on monetarist, public choice, and Austrian criticisms of Keynesian theory.

In all seriousness, it is enjoyable to see those marginal libertarians, those students who came not because they’re hard-core libertarians recommended for it but because they are simply interested in the general concept of liberty, challenged in their conventional wisdom. It was interesting during lunch when Dr. Hasnas talked about subversively educating in market solutions through making students discover them in their independent empirical research. He talked about an environmental law professor whose students assumed he was just a general statist leftist, but who assigned his students to do empirical field research in a specific problem and weigh the various solutions, and whose students ultimately came to him with market solutions. That way, by encouraging independent discovery and by avoiding ideological preaching, free-market professors can avoid the wrath of the academic establishment with confidence, safe in the knowledge that we are, of course, right all the time about everything.

Ramble ramble.

Well this is enjoyable.

Wake Forest is beautiful, though isolated. Only took 9 hours to drive here, starting at 4:30 A.M…

The faculty at this seminar are Dan D’Amico, Mark Pennington of King’s College London, Bill Kline of Illinois, John Hasnas of Georgetown, and Mimi Gladstein of Texas-El Paso. Thanks to Dr. Gladstein, there is an element of fine arts, literature, and performance art rounding out the interdisciplinary focus.

So far, Dr. Kline has taught us about Hume’s concept of property as an ethic that emerges from constant conjunction. Very interesting, and so surprisingly for me, I think I am largely a Humean in my interpretation of the agreements that become our general common ethics and “rights.” Dr. Gladstein showed us One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and analysed the themes, more pronounced in the book, of social pressures—the Combine Big Chief sees, which was not mentioned at all in the movie—stifling individual agency through psychological manipulation. Dr. Pennington introduced teh n00bs to spontaneous order.

Perhaps more valuable than the lectures are the discussions and networking opportunities. IHS is notorious for setting faculty and students up like middle-schoolers set each other up in closets during parties—encouraging conversation and intellectual exchange through proximity. The Distinguished Doctors are housed in the same dorm building, evidently on the same superlong twin beds from my freshman year, and they eat in the same dining hall and go to the same socials. Thus, intellectual conversations are the dominant feature of these seminars, between students and faculty alike. As always, it is enjoyable to meet new young libertarians and catch up with the old.

There is a week of interesting events to come.