Just to add on to what Media Girl said a bit:

“Permalinks” are human-readable. They’re the links you use to get to a post in your web browser, even if the post has fallen off the front page of the blog. (Hence “Perma[nent] link”.)

The “TrackBack” URI is an address for a machine-readable conversation where one blog tells another that it referenced a particular post. (If you try going to a “TrackBack” URI in your web browser, you’ll most likely get an error message in XML.) Since the TrackBack URI doesn’t convey any useful human-readable information, ideally blogging software should be able to embed this information in a page where humans won’t see it, and should be able to extract it automatically from pages that you are sending TrackBack pings to. But in this vale of tears that very often doesn’t happen, so most blogging software displays a TrackBack URI somewhere for manual cut-and-paste. Yet one more way, I guess, in which technological gizmos make our world a little more useful and a little more ugly.

HTH.

Joe Miller:

If you were told that you could have anything that you wanted without working for it, would you really insist that, no, you’d prefer to work for it?

Well, I don’t know; that depends on what the object of desire in question is, doesn’t it? If I could have cookies without working for it, sure, I’d like the free cookies. But it’s not clear that everything worth having in life is worth having without the correlate work. There are lots of places that will offer me a college degree without any work at all; but it’s precisely because they don’t require any work at all that I don’t think a college degree from those places is worth having. More broadly speaking, honors and fame are not worth having if you have not done the work to earn them. You might think they make your life easier, but so what? Who says ease is the only thing to go after in life?

I don’t want to live on the Big Rock Candy Mountain. I’d really insist that I don’t. And I’ll bet you wouldn’t either.

Micha:

I agree that there are no purely rational reasons to not be a prudent predator and lie, steal and cheat when you can get away with it. I don’t believe in cosmic karma.

You seem to be supposing that the only motivations which can count as “purely rational” are those that involve gaining natural goods or avoiding natural evils. I agree that it’s often possible to be a Friedmanian PP without losing any natural goods or gaining any natural evils—hell, just go into politics and you’ll be set for life. But why does it follow from that that there aren’t rational reasons to avoid it? Is not wanting to treat other people like crap irrational?

We are more complicated creaturs than some of the popular accounts of human actions and attitudes seem to take for granted. The fact that an explanation of somebody’s behavior is ennobling is not necessarily a good reason to think that it’s false.

All excellent recommendations. You might also add Mozilla Thunderbird, an e-mail client coming out of the same project as Firefox, as a replacement for Outlook Express. Partly because it is more secure, and partly just because it’s by far a better e-mail client—it features excellent spam filtering, good IMAP support, a better interface, etc. (It also, for what it’s worth, features a handy-dandy Atom/RSS newsreader, and happens to be the main way that I keep up with blogs these days…)

Well, what are you supposed to say instead of a sentence like “Where’s the Party at?” You could just drop the preposition and say “Where’s the Party?” but that doesn’t have the same meaning. You could try to fix it by saying “At where is the Party,” but, well, as Winston Churchill said, “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.”

Dobeln:

Plus, it’s pretty obvious Rall’s position on the issue is a ruse. Rall and his friends will cheer on any force that opposes the United States. Simple as that.

If they has to make up a halfway consistent position to cover their asses , they will do so.

Fine, but that’s not really to the point. Maybe Rall is playing games here and maybe he’s not, but either way the conclusion that he is “casting his lot” with the Taleban is radically undermotivated by the evidence which is presented in the post. If you want to make the claim that Rall casts his lot with the Taleban, or cheers on any forces which happen to oppose the US, you’ll need burlier evidence for that conclusion than an interview in which he declares the Taleban “the world’s worst regime” ca. December 2001. You can write off the statements in that interview as duplicitous, but then whatever other evidence that you have for considering them duplicitous seems like a more natural candidate to present as evidence for the conclusion that he sides with the Taleban than the interview linked here.

It’s also worth wondering what any of this has to do with anything of real interest. If Rall does happen to “cheer on any force that opposes the United States”, does that make his assessment of the evils of the Taleban and Northern Alliance therefore wrong? I thought that the truth or falsity of statements like that were established by an appeal to the facts of the matter, not by the team loyalty of the person advancing them.

“Mr. Rall, of course, casts his lot with that genocide’s perpatrators and beneficiaries.

“Apparently murderous hatred of Westerners, especially Americans, gives you carte blanche for murderous hatred of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and, yes, Zoroastrians.”

jeet, what are you talking about? If you’re referring to the Taleban, Rall describes them as “the world’s worst regime” ca. December 2001. He also thinks the Northern Alliance jihadi-warlords who now have their claws sunk into the country are just as bad, or worse, than the Taleban were. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not—Afghans who had to deal with all of these fuckers from 1989-present are mostly not very enthusiastic about any of them. But (1) how do Ismail Khan, Rabbani and company count any less as “that genocide’s perpatrators and beneficiaries” than the Taleban? And (2) how does ranking one bunch of people “#1 most evil motherfuckers in the world” and ranking another bunch of people “#2 most evil motherfuckers in the world” constitute casting your lot with #2?

Well, I guess these sandwiches have something to do with porn.

Specifically, they look really, really gross.

Just a quick tidbit about Bill Pryor—I don’t think it affects anything of substance in the post, but it’s worth noting. As the A.G. of Alabama he got Roy Moore’s back throughout the federal court proceedings over the Ten Commandments monument, but after the Federal Court handed down the decision that the monument had to be removed, Moore and Pryor had a pretty nasty split (Pryor thought the court ruled wrongly but Moore should comply with the ruling anyway; Moore of course decided to defy the court order). After the split, Pryor went on to lead the prosecution of Moore in Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary, which ended up in Roy Moore being thrown out of the state Supreme Court. There was enough bad blood between them over the whole affair that a lot of Moore’s supporters have actually joined the campaign to block Pryor’s nomination(s)—which has got to be one of the most impressive cases of politics making for strange bedfellows in recent history.

Let’s say you’ve got a group of people who are trying to get a company to change the way it does business. There are two different ways in which their efforts might qualify as “political”:

1. … they might be trying to coerce the company by bringing down the government to enforce their demands against the will of the company decision-makers (or by getting the company to accept those terms under threat of government action).

2. … they might be trying to encourage the company to voluntarily accept their demands by coordinating conscious efforts to change people’s decisions in the market so that they intentionally act in such a way as to give the company an incentive to change how it does business—e.g., strikes, boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, shareholder actions, etc.

Now, whether (1) is objectionable from the stand-point of Austro-libertarian principle or not depends on whether the resort to government force would be defensive or aggressive. There are cases where it has been defensive (the CIW, for one, has exposed and broken up some honest-to-God slavery rings in the Southeastern US in the course of its work over the past few years), but clearly the demand for Taco Bell to work with its contractors to secure higher pay for tomato-pickers isn’t one you could legitimately get the government to enforce. Fortunately, the CIW has never, as far as I know, followed any kind of strategy under heading (1). The Taco Bell Boycott, specifically, was certainly never a “political” campaign in that sense. (And you can’t run the standard “government-sponsored cartel” objections to unions against CIW, either. CIW doesn’t have any government recognition as a union and couldn’t get it if it wanted it.)

Whether (2) is objectionable from an Austro-libertarian standpoint is a lot more complex and I can’t see any plausible principled reason to say that “political” campaigns in sense (2) are always unjustified. It’s not enough to just point out, “Hey, group A is placing demands on firm B and engaging in market activities that hurt B’s bottom line until B complies with the demands” and close the books on group A’s campaign; people—and for that matter firms—do that all the time, sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. People boycott contributing to their alma mater to get foolish policies changed; firms and individuals refuse to deal with companies that deliver shoddy goods or engage in sharp dealing unless or until those companies show that they’ve changed; workers leave firms—sometimes en masse—if they aren’t treated right or aren’t paid enough. Whether these are good or bad ideas depends in part on whether the complaints that the people have are legitimate, and in part on whether the tactics do more harm than the good that can be reasonably expected from them at the end of the day.

You could, of course, try to make a case that the CIW’s specific demands are unfair and/or stupid, or that the strategy they adopted was more destructive than constructive, but what’s the argument for that conclusion?

There won’t be a national march but you might check with feminist and abortion rights groups for your state or community. At least some are doing anniversary events—I just got a card from MARAL (the Michigan state branch of NARAL) about a march and lobbying day they’re holding in the state capital as an anniversary commemoration. Folks in your neck of the woods may be doing similar. Or if they’re not, there’s a good month left for y’all to plan an event of your own!