Uncategorized Archives - Page 11 of 39 - The Libertarian Labyrinth

One’s-self/En-masse

September 9, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

“One’s-self I Sing,” by Walt Whitman ONE’S-SELF I sing—a simple, separate Person;Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse. Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—I say theForm complete is worthier far;The Female equally with the male I sing. Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine,The Modern Man I sing.

Time to free ALL the political prisoners

September 7, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

{Immoderate thoughts on the eve of my return to the corporate retail world. . .} Denver and the Twin Cities taught us very little we didn’t already know, I suspect, but the experiences, even for those of us who only experienced them vicariously, ought to have drawn in some big, fat exclamation points and underlines on what we already knew, but had imperfectly internalized. We can predict at this moment that the next round will be moreso, in almost every way. No matter who wins the elections, there is little chance that the climate of intolerance of dissent will change, […]

Missing pieces

August 18, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been working on a collection of short biographies of radical figures, sort of an introductory miscellany, and had been translating Elisée Reclus’ “John Brown” to include there. Gallica has a rough, but readable scan of what appears to be a pamphlet version of the text. Now that I’ve translated it, it also appears to be an incomplete version. Some text, probably at least a few lines, is pretty clearly missing. Brown’s capture, trial and death seem to have disappeared between one line and the next. This looks like an “original” error, rather than a recent scanning error. It’s still […]

August 6, 1945

August 6, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

A repost, but one appropriate for the day: Guinea-Pig Fleet: Hiroshima Tattoo

I need a technical assist

July 28, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I’ve been pushing ahead with plans to equip one of my wikis for a group transcription/translation of Proudhon’s collected works. The tools developed at Wikisource are in many ways pretty slick, and it looks like they will be adaptable to all the needs of the project. My only problem is that they use the djvu format, and I am living in an all-Macintosh house at the moment. If there’s anyone out there who has the capability to do some pdf-to-djvu conversion for me, I can do the rest of the work to get the OCR work done and the raw […]

What Is Property? Chapter 2, part 3 notes

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Just a bit more on Destutt-Tracy: on page 61-2, there is one of the clearest expressions of Proudhon’s argument that a significant amount of property theory rests on a semantic slide, and it comes in the context of one of Proudhon’s few direct encounters with the concept of self-ownership. Here’s Proudhon: “Shameful equivocation, not justified by the necessity for generalization! The word property has two meanings: 1. It designates the quality which makes a thing what it is; the attribute which is peculiar to it, and especially distinguishes it. We use it in this sense when we say the properties […]

The unfinished business of Liberty, III

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Just a note on the last post: the addition of the tools for translation will also mean the possibility of more efficient transcription of the pdf files of Liberty. If you can’t translate, but can read and type, there might be some of this unfinished business you could help finish.

The unfinished business of Liberty, II

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

Let’s do something big! A side thread, during a rather distracted week on the Proudhon seminar list, has involved the possibility of tackling the untranslated portions of Proudhon’s writings in a collaborative setting. I’ve bounced this notion off of a few friends and allies, without a lot of response, but having someone else suggest it reminds me how much I really want to get the job done. There are tools for Mediawiki that should make the two-step process of transcribing and then translating the works. The structure of a wiki ought to make it easy for the participants to also […]

What Is Property? Chapter 2, part 2 notes

July 24, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

I had some unexpected delays of a better sort yesterday, including two rather random encounters with one of my best friends from high school (in California, not Oregon, where I am now), who I haven’t seen in about 20 years. A familiar voice in a coffee shop turned out to be just who it sounded like. And then the voice again, from a parking lot I was walking by, hours later, on my way home from the bookstore. Good stuff. Anyway, we left off at page 54, at the start of section 2, on “Occupation, as the Title to Property.” […]

D. I. Y. tomfoolery

July 22, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

It’s a sign either 1) that I’m settling in and getting a little relaxed after the move, or 2) that I’m finally losing it. It’s no secret that baseball comes in somewhere not too far behind liberty on the scale of my obsessions: watching and listening to games accounts for much of the minimal downtime that my attention gets from things like French grammar, the fine points of Proudhon, the economics of infoshops, etc. I inherited the love of baseball and, specifically, of the Boston Red Sox, from my grandmother, who was an avid fan. I catch a couple of […]