There is no top 5 list for 2011

 Culture, Personal  16 Responses »
Jan 202012
 

I saw a bunch of movies this year and they all pretty much sucked. I can’t even think of five movies* that I’d consider putting into a list to call “top.” Sad times.

To take a break from my regular, yearly “top 5″ list, I’m just going to say this: there were only three movies** worth seeing this past year: Rise of the Planet of the Apes***, Drive****, and Hugo*****.

* I’m going to give a favorable nod to Super 8, because I enjoyed it. It just didn’t blow me away.

** Some movies can’t be on this list, because I didn’t see them (yet). But I recognize they have the potential to be on the list: The Tree of Life, Moneyball (though I’m skeptical), Warrior, and on a long shot, War Horse. I’m right to not include a certain Gary Oldman film, Tinker Tailor Snore…

*** I was very surprised that I liked this one as much as I did. But I really liked it.

**** Mom, don’t see this movie.

***** I suspect Chloë Grace Moretz will join the ranks of Emma Watson and Natalie Portman in a few years. And don’t call me a creeper, because you were all thinking it. I just had the guts to say it.

 Posted by Brandon Robison at 9:37pm

The reading queue

 Culture, Personal  No Responses »
Jan 202012
 

What should I read next?

I just finished Slaughterhouse-Five. I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t really enjoy it. Given its standing as one of the “great anti-war novels,” I had high hopes. Maybe I expected too much. Hipsters would probably say I just didn’t get it. That might be true. Meh. I’m just glad it was only 200 pages.

I’m usually going through a couple books at the same time. So, the other current read is The Myth of National Defense. I’ll probably be done with it next week. It’s also not really doing it for me. Maybe it’s too academic. I just feel like I’m reading and reading and reading and I keep getting that feeling I used to get in the Ph.D. program while reading journal articles — that the author is writing a whole bunch of stuff to just fill up space, and there’s so much tangential stuff flowing that I no longer remember the thesis of the article or the point he’s trying to make. And then I get bored. I think a much more concise, accessible “book” on the topic of privatized national defense is contained within Bob Murphy‘s Chaos Theory. But who knows. Maybe my opinion will become more positive about The Myth of National Defense by the time I finish it.

So, here’s what I’m eying to read next (in no particular order). Based on what you know about me, feel free to suggest other things you think I might enjoy, as the queue is in a constant flux. Otherwise, what sounds the most “fun” out of the following?

 Posted by Brandon Robison at 5:12pm

Government, Mafia, what’s the difference?

 Society  No Responses »
Jan 202012
 

While I was watching The Sopranos recently, I often wondered. Walter Block makes some good points in his article National Defense and the Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Clubs:

To argue that a tax-collecting government can legitimately protect its citizens against aggression is to contradict oneself, since such an entity starts off the entire process by doing the very opposite of protecting those under its control. The government, by its very essence, does two things to its citizens incompatible with this claim. First, it forces the citizenry to enroll in its “defense” activities, and second, it prohibits others who wish to offer protection to clients in “its” geographical area from making such contracts with them, in preference to the one it itself offers them, under duress. If true protection from violence includes the government itself, and there is no reason it should not, then it is this entity which is the prime rights violator. The state, here, is indistinguishable from the Mafia chieftain who tells his victim he will protect her from himself.

 Posted by Brandon Robison at 9:31am

New blog for a new year

 Personal  1 Response »
Jan 192012
 

Going to try to blog more regularly. Right now I’m imagining it won’t be much like the old blog. Mostly I’ll throw together shorter posts, with links to other sites or pictures or media or stuff like that. Overall, less reading for you, and less work for me to come up with lengthy things to say. If I were more hip, maybe I’d just make a tumblr blog.

 Posted by Brandon Robison at 8:32pm
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