The Wizards of Ozymandias

In the category of "Um, dude, why didn't I know about this before?"...

Reading through today's War On Guns entries and their commentary, almost by chance I ran across this link.

Wow. Wish I had said that!

Turns out this is Chapter 32 of an electronic book by an author named Butler Shaffer, published back in 2002. Today was a bit crazy, but I managed to bookmark the entry point and make it through the Introduction.

So far, so good. It will be interesting to see where this goes.


UPDATE 4/15: We have achieved candidacy for "the book I wish I had written", after just 5 of the 163 entries in the ToC. And I suspect the guy is just getting warmed up.

UPDATE 4/16: Okay, so far this (entry #7) is the best entry yet. Shaffer is nailing the worldview with only the briefest hints of impertinence. Interestingly, earlier in the day I had a conversation on a potential business opportunity which seemed to feature one of the manifestations Shaffer talks about here--that of the inherent adaptability of small, intelligent structures over monolithic command-and-control ones. Shaffer gives a couple of anthropological examples (which seemed on the money to me) but refrained from including evolutionary ones such as the ascendancy of mammals.

UPDATE 4/17: It was inevitable that Shaffer would eventually show at least a few chinks in the armor, but they are pretty minor nits to pick. Mostly it is a brief appearance of the impertinent, some minor preference item, and I cannot say that any of them has risen to the level of something that can be reasonably objected to. Almost as soon as it comes up it is gone, and he is right back to the demolition of sacred cows. He is certainly harsher on the American Founders than I am, but then I have never claimed to be a purist, either--it always seemed to me that the BoR made the Constitution just palatable enough, and workable for an imperfect world. He makes a pretty good point there, though, and it makes me realize that I have much yet to learn about just how free one actually could be. Curiously, it appears that he and I do not share the same preference on abortion, but he has given me the first glimpse I have yet seen of someone who disagrees with it on truly libertarian grounds. He in no way advocates the state to have any say in the matter, which is where we are in 100% agreement, but he has an interesting and respectable take on it that I had not really considered before. I am happy to say that he does a very good job of articulating the libertarian's positive view of human nature, that is so difficult to articulate and so easy to assume is just a platitude. And finally (I'm about 22 titles in now) I love the chaos-theory metaphors that he uses to ground many of his examples in. He shoots, he scores.

UPDATE 4/19: I am at entry 32 now...and if you want to understand the way I look at the world, go read this and you'll cover a huge amount of ground. Simply fantastic.