As if it weren’t exciting enough that tonight’s scheduled to bring another appearance by me on PJTV (making predictions about 2009, along with Will Wilkinson, which should be viewable anytime after 7pm Eastern or so), I notice an ad has been running for the Jean-Paul Gaultier perfume Ma Dame, and the fashion transformation it depicts [...]
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I’ll be traveling to North Carolina and Connecticut over the next several days, so I’ll resume blogging on New Year’s (next week!) — the first day of my “Month of Liberty (i.e., Property).”
I resolve to blog in a civil and open-minded fashion, as if for well-meaning and innocent newcomers. [...]
This month as been somewhat disappointing for me as a nerd, given that I’m inclined to skip three films aimed squarely at my demographic:
•Punisher: War Zone (I’ve been burned before with this character’s mindless machine-gunnery, and this sounds like the third, yes, third, failed attempt to make him interesting on screen)
•The Day the Earth Stood [...]
If some assert that feminism is a libertarian virtue, it’s only right that we counter by asking: Is manliness an even more libertarian virtue? Let’s consult this Esquire interview with libertarian former mayor of Carmel, CA, Clint Eastwood. His thoughts on “Generation Pussy” alone may be worth your time (and my thanks to consummate gentleman [...]
My friend Katie Surrence made a bunch of clever science-themed foods for the holidays, including “string theory beans” and “primordial soup,” to be consumed on a “Night of Hypothesis-Testing.” Some might think it fitting that she also rejects utilitarianism as involving insufficiently quantifiable claims — much the same reason for rejecting it given by [...]
St. Martin’s Press has crossed my mind a few times lately, though I worked there only briefly, in the early 90s:
•Fellow former St. Martin’s editorial assistant Alex Kuczynski has been criticized for her supposedly cavalier writing about hiring a surrogate mom.
•Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote in this month’s Reason about the St. Martin’s sci-fi imprint Tor being [...]
Back in college, my friend Chris and his (beautiful albeit leftist) friend Sasha both spotted a copy of a book by pro-censorship feminist Catharine MacKinnon lying around, and, spontaneously and simultaneously, he (being a libertarian) pointed at it and said “Devil!” just as Sasha said “Goddess!”
(If our Debates at Lolita Bar were that brief, no [...]
•So, feminists, should I like or dislike the recently-deceased Bettie Page (for whom my conservative girlfriend Helen had to write an obit)? I think this is one that may divide the Second Wave from Third Wave feminists. She’s a girlie-mag pin-up queen, for crying out loud — but the Third Wavers pride themselves [...]
As I’ve suggested before, I think one simple reason we don’t already have a movement called “masculinism” that renders men’s complaints about women as pseudo-moral, pseudo-political grievances in the way that feminism turns perennial complaints about men into an ersatz philosophy is simply that this would entail a great deal of whining, which under the [...]
Prince’s representatives claimed he was misquoted after the New Yorker said he described both anti-gay conservatives and pro-gay-marriage liberals as wrong — and many who see marriage as solely a legal institution rather than one perhaps defined by tradition and thus demanding some caution and deference were offended and disappointed by what he reportedly said.
But [...]
A commenter responding to yesterday’s entry accused me of cloaking populism in intellectual rhetoric — but did not bother to explain why this is manifestly a bad thing to do. I mean, it depends on what sort of populism it is and what sort of intellectual rhetoric, right?
I’m not merely pigheadedly demanding that the [...]
So-called Continental philosophy is almost invariably inimical to the negative-liberty tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, from which libertarianism arose (utility, rights, constitutions, markets, etc.). Those Euro sophisticates pride themselves on looking more skeptically at social context, but once people decide that countless free actions by their fellow citizens aren’t necessarily conducive to the patterns the [...]
•With the biopic Milk having been out for about a week now, it’s worth noting the interesting dichotomy between art that is thematically gay and art that is (arguably) aesthetically gay (see: Ugly Betty), which are not quite the same thing.
Witness, for instance, this earlier Gus Van Sant work, the video for Deee-Lite’s song “Runaway,” [...]
Sometimes, as my friend Dan Greenberg wisely said once, it seems as though the world only contains about thirty characters and you keep bumping into them — and familiar situations — in different combinations:
•I notice Kerry Howley quotes a comment left by Jacob Levy on my blog (defending feminism as un-fascistic) and headlines it “Reasons [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selections of the Month (December 2008)
I’ve been talking in part about women, libertarians, and heretics this month, so, just in time for the holidays, it seems right to begin and end the list of eight religion-related texts below with items by libertarian women interested in heresy — specifically, historian Christine Caldwell Ames and [...]