All right, one last blog entry touting Freedom Watch before I turn my attention to blogging about more personal matters — like musings about the fate of the world (and how it is decided) in my August “Month of Imperialism” blog entries. Henceforth, you can get your online Freedom Watch info, though, by clicking [...]
•Since the past two days’ entries mentioned time travel, the Victorian British, and imperialism, it might be a fitting time to note that I stumbled across this nineteen-minute sketch featuring Rowan Atkinson (among others) as a comedic version of Doctor Who. Not bad. (The Doctor’s British-eccentric combination of wanderlust, tolerance, and very-reluctant interventionism [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (July 2010): Victorian Norwich by Arthur Lester Lathrop
Until Helen gave me a copy, I had no idea anyone had written a book about the town I grew up in, Norwich, CT (there’s been more than one such book, apparently).
Thanks to Lathrop’s tome, which depicts the different-yet-very-familiar Norwich of the [...]
Jacob Levy notes J.E.H. Smith has attacked 80s music — or rather, has captured perfectly how a forty-year-old Gen Xer of a certain sort (e.g., me) feels about whether to stay hip or indulge in musical nostalgia…or both…or neither (I also really like the first comment below the article).
I will note that I am not [...]
Perhaps the most surprising moment on this weekend’s Freedom Watch (for which I write) is the moment when hulking professional wrestler Kane is asked what he thinks about liberty and he gives host Judge Andrew Napolitano an erudite citation of nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat. You can find clips from past shows here, and you [...]
I’m pleased to see that this clip of a pug dog who (ostensibly) sounds like he’s saying “Batman” (followed by ABC anchor-banter that reminds me oddly of some dates I’ve been on) has already gone viral…and been transformed (as my friend Paul Taylor points out) into this musically-enhanced version using the theme from the 1960s [...]
I see that tonight brings a performance at Le Poisson Rouge in the Village by Boyd Rice, punkish noise artist and ex of performance artist Lisa “Suckdog” Carver. Rice mainly interests me because he’s sort of a Social Darwinist anarchist with Church of Satan influences, whereas among my friends, only one person holds that philosophy, [...]
Bobby Steele is not only a past Lolita Bar debater (much as you can be if you volunteer to argue against imperialism for August 12), he’s also a punk-rocking veteran of the Misfits and the Undead — and a conservative — and he’ll be performing in the highly-capitalist venue of the Jamba Juice in between [...]
I see that a couple weeks ago I was evoked as an example of a libertarian with conservative cultural sympathies (due to my debate with Kerry Howley), in a Daily Caller column defending gay marriage. I don’t want to exaggerate my conservatism, since I also have my punk side (as the blog slogan suggests), but [...]
•I understand David Mamet’s play Race got some negative reviews, but I liked it — sort of a Twelve Angry Men with gruff racial arguments thrown in, with enough layers of un-p.c. expectations-thwarting and reverse-reverse-racism to keep things ambiguous. (And Eddie Izzard looks a bit like comic book industry legend Scott Nybakken, as a [...]
…or at least he now calls for libertarians to ally with moderates instead of, as he desired two years ago, liberals. What hasn’t changed is that he still hates those rotten no-good conservatives, even the Tea Party ones. I wonder if, in the end, he will have any friends at all.
Jonah Goldberg and Matt Kibbe [...]
Comic book writer Harvey Pekar passed away this week, but while he lived, he wrote the graphic novel biography of my friend Michael Malice, a one-man walking anarchist revolution (and former Cato Institute intern). Malice recalls the experience in this article. I wish this were a typical comic book death and thus likely to be [...]
Happy Bastille Day. While I don’t hold the French Revolution in much higher esteem than I do the Bolshevik Revolution, both (unsurprisingly) ending in mass murder, I do think this is an apt day for asking radical/revolutionary questions. One that keeps cropping up in conversations on this blog and elsewhere is what the foundation of [...]
Revolutions don’t always start for the reasons you think they should have, and they don’t always work out the way you expect. A libertarian acquaintance of mine, despite being sympathetic to freer immigration, notes that the conflict over immigration laws in Arizona could end up being the spark that leads to states making greater use [...]
Congrats to Spain. I’m reminded that a friend of mine was recently falsely labeled a fascist by a leftist, and his one concession to her charge was that he might have picked the opposite side from hers if forced to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
By contrast, he and I have a mutual acquaintance who [...]