A correspondent asks me about talks I am giving on the east coast. I gave one today at the law school of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and am giving another tomorrow (April 17th) at the University of Baltimore law school, 1420 N. Charles St., Baltimore, Maryland. The talk is at noon, the subject is "What is Economics and What Does it Have to do With Law?" I do not know the room, nor how open the talk is.
After that I fly to Raleigh/Durham to participate in a conference at Duke on "Community and Emergent Order in Non-State Spaces." I am speaking Thursday afternoon at 3:45; I wouldn't assume the conference is open to the general public, but I don't know. My topic will be "Vinge, Heinlein, the Sagas, and Me: Stateless and Semi-Stateless Societies in Fiction and Semi-Fiction."
Then home.
28 comments:
Will you web recordings?
I second that!
BTW why isn't Eric Frank Russell also part of the title of your speech at my alma mater?
Information on the program at Duke:
http://bit.ly/12mNa0l
(redirects to duke.edu)
I expect I'll mention Russell, but he hasn't affected my thinking. And I don't think the system of "obs" that he describes works. I also plan to mention some other people, but the title was already rather long.
I intend to web the recording, assuming I don't forget to make it.
I wrote to Duke and asked, and the talk is open to the public.
'I expect I'll mention Russell, but he hasn't affected my thinking. '
Can nothing affect your 'thinking'? you worthless cunt- you can't read Bork, a guy who wrote clearly, without fucking up big time; you don't know what David Lewis did; you are way too stupid.
Is there any half way decent insight anywhere in the septic pile of shite of your writing?
Is there- cunt?
I used to be one of the shitheads who thought coz u got degrees and are from a distinguished family, you could not be utterly shit.
But, you are.
I wasted time on you- you cunt.
Fuck is wrong with you?
Answer this- http://socioproctology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/david-friedman-getting-it-wrong-on.html
windwheel-
I don't think tossing ad hominems at someone is a good way to get them to read and respond to your blog or take you seriously.
What about blocking that spamming troll, David? Although it is almost fascinating to see someone as out of their mind as him, it is getting a bit repetitive and he keeps spamming this with nonsense. He will probably give up if people keep ignoring him for long enough (which isn't really happening, because there are always new people who have not seen his spam before and react to it), but it would be easier to simply ban him (as long as blogger.com supports that option and unless he doesn't just change a nickname or an I.P.).
David didn't ban Mike Huben, so why would he ban Mike's sock puppet?
John:
That is unfair to Mike.
Tibor:
On the other hand, it does let me demonstrate that I don't censor comments--aside from removing spam.
I take the view that a blog is the property of the blog owner, and he's entitled to delete particular comments or block particular people from it at his own whim. Anyone affected has plenty of other space on the Web in which to express his opinion. However, of course the blog owner is also entitled to have a policy of not deleting anything, if he chooses.
David, Jonathan: OK, your call (David's) of course. I guess it is a good demonstration. Hopefully noone will react to that persons comments anymore and he will go away.
Thank you for posting the audio recording of your talk.
Do you know if Duke or anyone else recorded Cantor's session? Also, did you have the opportunity to attend his session, if so do you have any thoughts to share?
David: Could you please spell the name of the first sci-fi author (after Heinlein) you are mentioning in the speech? The one who deals with a stateless society attacked by the state, has one protection agency called "michigan police" and so on. I can't catch the name on the record properly. Thank you.
Tibor Machan: I haven't listened to David's speech yet, but I recognize your description. The author is Vernor Vinge (pronounced, I believe, "VIN-ghee") and the story is "The Ungoverned."
Now let's see if I can get past the Sentinel of the Illegible Captcha ...
Vernor Vinge is an excellent sf writer. He took some interest in anarcho-capitalism in the 1980s, but it doesn't seem to be one of his major interests, at least as expressed in his fiction. In most of his books, he tends to take more interest in other aspects of the future.
Stevo: Thanks a lot, but I am not Tibor Machan :) Just Mach. I'm about 50 years younger and not from Hungary :)
The "Vinge..." talk was very interesting and entertaining (at least from the standpoint of someone who wasn't there). I wonder however how often do you get such a hostile audience? And by "hostile" I do not mean "people who disagree with you", because given your political position that probably happens quite often, but people who basically refuse to listen...
I agree with the description of Ken MacLeod's work ... ambivalent about his own Trostsyism, enjoys flirting with anarcho-capitalism, and generally fascinated by ideologies.
For those of you who aren't interested in the fiction part of the discussion (though you should be), the Q&A at the end is well worth a listen. I try to avoid the us vs. them mentality, but I couldn't help but feel some glee while hearing DDF intellectually dominate the leftist academics who tried to argue with him about inequality and Cuba, respectively.
And it was revealing to me that the Cuba guy seemed entirely uninterested in what Cubans actually do. I think many social scientists are more interested in questionnaires, which can be manipulated in a variety of ways, than in looking at peoples' revealed preferences.
Wlodek:
Most of the time, my talks are given to people who are there because they want to hear what I have to say, so most of them are not hostile.
This one was part of a conference at Duke, sponsored, as best I can tell, by the English department and the Political Science department. It was pretty clear interacting with people during the conference that the English department was very left wing, and for the most part not in a very sophisticated fashion--closer to "everyone knows that capitalism is terrible."
So I found the people friendly enough, but perhaps less interested in considering the possibility that their views might be wrong than they ought to have been. I was particularly entertained at dinner talking to a graduate student about an alternative view of evolutionary biology, apparently popular with people he knew and (I am guessing) producing views more palatable to left wing opinion than Dawkins' conventional view, which he couldn't explain very well but assumed should be taken seriously.
At a considerable tangent, but in response to the comment on Vinge. He's a friend of mine, a libertarian, and one of the better idea people in modern sf. He is also the person who persuaded me to write _Salamander_ (I had described the idea to him) instead of the sequel to _Harald_ that I had started.
Which was, I think, the correct decision, although I might go back to the other book some day.
Thanks very much for Webbing the talk. I was especially interested to hear your mention of S. M. Stirling, a writer whose work I enjoy; if you have not read the Nantucket Island trilogy or In the Court of the Crimson Kings, his Burroughs tribute, I recommend them to you. The rest of the talk was hardly lacking in interest, but less unexpected.
On the matter of Ken MacLeod's solid gold statue of Ludwig von Mises, back during the economic calculation debates of the 1920s and 1930s, Oscar Lange wrote that "a statue of Professor Mises ought to occupy an honorable place in the great hall of the Ministry of Socialization or of the Central Planning Board of the socialist state." Lange did not go so far as to propose making it of gold, but I thought that was a witty touch of irony on MacLeod's part! I'm sure that MacLeod was well read enough to know of Lange's comment; he seems to have read essentially everything.
William:
I've read Crimson Kings, which was fun but not great. I haven't read the Natucket trilogy.
I did read, and greatly enjoyed, The Peshawar Lancers, which I suppose counts as a tribute to lots of people, including Kipling, Burroughs, and Fraser.
Thanks for the information on how the Mises statue came into the story.
David,
I certainly enjoyed The Peshawar Lancers, which was a neat job of worldbuilding. I can actually add another source to your list for it: Talbot Mundy, author of such Indian novels as Guns of the Gods and King of the Khyber Rifles (whose hero, Athelstan King, becomes involved with a woman named Yasmini while spying for the British Empire—sound familiar?). As my friend Jefferson Swycaffer told me when he gave me Guns of the Gods, Mundy isn't as good as Kipling, but he's entertaining and I can understand why Stirling paid tribute to him.
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