DUALITY : GUILT WHETHER WRITING OR ‘WORKING’. When I was writing full time I fel

DUALITY : GUILT WHETHER WRITING OR ‘WORKING’.

When I was writing full time I felt guilty about not ‘working’. And now that I’m ‘working’ I feel guilty about not writing. I have to make time for it. :/

RESEARCH SOFTWARE ON THE MAC?

Well, honestly, I just save everything to a directory on my laptop. Dropbox copies it. And once in a while I organize it.

But it’s pretty easy really. In the case of libertarian political philosophy, the canonical works are pretty limited. And conservative philosophy even more so. One might argue that the entire conservative body of work is a demonstration of a failure of conservatives to undertand themselves. I understand that they’re relying on heroic, inspirational language that is effectively structured as a traditionalist or legendary religion. But they’re just indefensible against secular socialism because they don’t really understand their own belief system.

On top of that limited amount of canonical information, we’ve incorporated economic thought pretty thoroughly into our philosophical framework and pretty much figured out the problem of measurement. So, I don’t really have to address those issues. Our problems are institutional. It’s not that we haven’t accommodated economics.

Libertarians are still lagging because we haven’t solve the problem of ethics – rather, we haven’t articulated the full scope of ethics necessary to describe the moral framework of aristocratic egalitarianism used by Conservatives. And Rothbard’s little side-adventure into ghetto ethics has both provided the means to solve the problem of ethics, and at the same time, done it so badly that we haven’t been able to either gain the cooperation of the conservatives, or solve the problem of political systems in heterogeneous polities.

Hopefully I’ll fix that. 🙂

But all that said, the problem of writing libertarian philosophy isn’t so much one of academic research. The problem is reordering our thinking back toward aristocratic ethics, and away from the ghetto, while at the same time realizing that we have extended the scope of the market to include those who do not share such aristocratic ethics, and for whom those ethics pose a genetic hindrance that forever will keep them out of our quarter.

So my work isn’t so much one of citations, but of articulating what we have failed to articulate to date, about aristocratic egalitarianism on the one and, and the totality of human political requirements in a market society on the other.

TOOLS I USE ON THE MAC:

Scrivener

WordPress (I sketch a lot of my ideas online – my entire glossary is up there.)

Notepad/Wordpad

Skim

Papers

Dropbox and Evernote

I’m considering moving into DevonThink.

And Alfred for searching.

My biggest technology problem seems to be copying text in and out of Kindle, now that I’ve switch to buying on Kindle whenever possible. (Maybe someone has a bright idea on how to help me with this?)