Fisking is "the practice of savaging an argument and scattering the tattered remnants to the four corners of the internet (named after Robert Fisk of The Independent)" who was a victim. A verbal equivalent of the process was demonstrated last night by Christopher Monckton. Per...
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Quadrant magazine kicked off in 1956-57 as a pocket-sized quarterly. James McAuley edited the first 20 issues and these have now become collectors items. I am scanning those 20 issues and the task is half done but work will have to stop while I go fishing in WA, off Carnarvon....
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The single thing that could possiby lower emissions in the long term is apparently off the table at present. Assuming that it really matters to lower emissions. It is possible to be skeptical about that and still be in favour of cleaner energy sources. One of the opportunity c...
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This is a page of links to pdf files of press cuttings from the mid 1980s when the debate about economic reform started to get really vigorous. Some of these are slow to load, so be patient. This is the list of links. It is pretty scary stuff. Have we progressed? Alan Ashbolt,...
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Here it is folks , courtesy of Cafe Hayek.
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This is an EconTalk interview by Russ Roberts, with links to relevant readings. You can download to listen or you can read the dialogue, which is a bit hard because you have to work out who is talking (maybe not hard if you pay attention, but you can't tell at a glance). The b...
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Next week the Mont Pelerin Society has a General Meeting in Sydney (Australia). Speakers will address a range of topics under the general theme of The 21st Century Liberal Enlightenment. I appreciate that there is a high level of scepticism regarding the MPS on this site howev...
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Terence Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor at Buckingham University and he will be in Sydney next week for the Mont Pelerin Conference. In 1996 he published a book which has a few controversial ideas in it. I don't recall any talk about it at the time and it was not on my radar whe...
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Contemplating recent nominations for the Prestigious Critical Rationalist Scholar award. Terence Kealey , Barry Smith , the late Sir Donald Bradman and Ronald Dale Barassi . The criteria for the PCR Scholar are identical to the four that are used for the Rhodes Scholarship, co...
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Extracting some arguments from the critique of Marxism in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies . This is concerned with the Marx/Engels doctrine on the possible need for a violent revolution. Popper argued that the ambiguities of violence and of power-conquest...
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Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest . And the winner is...Toby Evans of Australia. Whoever he is, you can p...
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A late call on the passing of Sol Encel, a tireless writer and public intellectual, acknowledged as the father of Australian sociology. He died suddenly and peacefully at home, aged 84, still engaged in a range of writing and research projects. He came from Poland at the age o...
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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...
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This was the theme of a talk by Andrew Moore at the Blackheath History Forum yesterday. Blackheath is in the Blue Mountains out of Sydney and it has a lot of semi-retired academics and the like who support a thriving intellectual subculture of bookshops, galleries and action g...
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Popper is often perceived as an eccentric kind of positivist who adopted a slightly different take on the demarcation of science with the criterion of falsification in place of verification. People like Habermas and the late Richard Rorty regarded Popper as a positivist for al...
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The publication of Peter Coleman's collection of essays with some memories and reflections is a reminder of his remarkably productive career as a public intellectual. Those who do not share his politics should note that his first book in 1974 was a scathing critique of Austral...
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Jorg Guido Hulsmann, professor of economics at the University of Angers in France has written a magesterial biography of Ludwig von Mises , running over 1100 pages. This allows sufficient space to permit generous coverage of the historical and intellectual background with clos...
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Joseph Agassi Liberal Nationalism for Israel: Towards an Israeli National Identity . Gefen, Jerusalem, 1999. This book is a passionate call for a public debate in Israel and elsewhere to resolve some fundamental and crippling disabilities in Israeli politics. It first appeared...
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