Is he still getting advice from people that he's off his rocker?
If the fact that I worked with him on The Libertarian Enterprise since the beginning (15 years), copyedited, proof-read three of his books (Neil, vampires don't like garlic, as you said in chapter 1, how many times is he going to revel in garlicky goodness?), etc, and he now considers me his enemy due to disagreeing with him about copyright "Intellectual Property", I think what he is doing is isolating himself to only people who already agree with him.
Wow...it's little short of a tragedy. I keep hoping he'll "come around" in whatever is his own way.
Is his attitude costing him money and/or opportunity?
Wanna bet he doesn't put the typos and references to garlicky goodness that I found back in _Sweeter Than Wine_? So much for "enemy".
I haven't noticed that ads for his "Phebus Krum" have been canceled from Free Talk Live either, so it seems that actual business trumps personal peeves.
In a way, that's a small victory...the idea that free commerce (to the extent that it is or can be) conquers all. I'm glad he didn't resort to anything more than petty verbal assaults in response.
I'm in the middle of reading his latest entry, and this caught my attention:
That's why I fervently support the notion of borders that are open to individuals who wish to escape tyranny and improve their lives and those of their families. It's also why I support the equal right of a free association of individuals called Arizona to resist invaders—spawned, in essence, by drug prohibition—with murderous habits and intentions.
(Emphasis mine)
It seems so-called "intellectual property" by virtue of solely being the first to convey an idea isn't his only "odd" notion of property. Maybe he means "invaders" on their
actual property, but I don't think it's what the people he apparently supports mean.
There's also this:
More lately, I have been called a "statist" and a "socialist" myself, because I was, and remain, willing to defend my individual rights against collectivists who have assaulted them—and then attempted to make a "philosophy" out of their pattern of criminal behavior.
No, he was called a statist for threatening to involve an attorney--a sworn "officer of the court"--I.E. abuser of state power. I'm unclear in what context he was called a socialist, but he jumped right into calling people "collectivists" for not
support supporting the state-sanctioned invention of "intellectual property" right off the bat. Furthermore, I haven't seen him utter a single word in defense of the assertion that it makes us "collectivists," or "communists" or the assertion that we're "enslaving" him by disavowing his ownership of the ideas he shared freely. No one forced him to write or to release personal control of his works and the ability to contract their disbursement.
Yet they quote Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the founder of socialism, famous for declaring "Property is theft", and sneer like any common parlor-pink at anyone who expects to be paid for his efforts.
I also missed that, but it's cleverly worded so he can backtrack on the harshness of the claim.
My view, and that of any working writer, is that what's mine is mine, without regard to how easy it may be to steal (which appears to be their principal "argument") or how difficult it may be to defend. If scavengers like these are free to expropriate the products of my intellect, then, employing different excuses, they can expropriate anything.
He collectivizes all writers here, and gives them his opinion. Then he uses circular reasoning which requires his shared ideas to be his property in order to define using them as theft. He further claims what he shared freely is "expropriated." Finally, he claims the same logic can be used to "expropriate anything." This would appear to be the mother of all "slippery slope" claims.
He goes on beyond that to claim that people trying to reason with him are telling him this ("theft") is the wave of the future, where I highly doubt that. I suspect it's his twisted misinterpretation of the argument that IP being unworkable is a sign of its principled flaws, and that history will show this to be true. "History," more often than not, tends to end or marginalize things like chattel slavery and the like, and it will eventually end the slavery of the mind, known as IP, which was invented by the state to enslave in the
first place.
Oh, I initially skipped over this bit, but since I commented on everything else....
Those who don't feel secure enough to stand on their own two feet, physically or mentally or morally (or who have dedicated themselves professionally to exploiting the unfortunates with that problem), and, as a consequence, are inclined to identify more with the group than with the individual, naturally hate and fear individualism. They have done everything they could, over those ten thousand years, to destroy it.
I've always been uncomfortable about this conflation of liberty and individualism. This Ayn Rand chest-pounding about the the Men of the Mind, ad nauseam, is really unattractive macho flash bullshit, and it has the additional "everyone else be damned" aspect to it. Sometimes we "need" (aka "can benefit from the services of") others. The reality is that in a state of liberty, we can all choose whether to work with others, and whom to work with in order to improve our human condition--quid pro quo.
All too often this "individualism" stuff seems to imply that people can and should live as hermits, rather than voluntarily choosing our interactions. It's great when we can "stand on our own two feet," but when we can't, we can offer our services to others, who can help us leverage theirs. Thanks to the invention of money, we don't have to do this on a barter basis.