Last weekend at Peter Jaworski’s Liberty Summer Seminar, a variety of guests spoke about the topic of property rights. The ‘keynote address’ was given by Dr. Michael Walker, founder of the Fraser Institute. In this presentation, Dr. Walker provides a few interesting stories to illustrate his points on property rights.
Jan Narveson at the LSS
This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending Peter Jaworksi’s sixth annual Liberty Summer Seminar hosted in Orono, ON. For me, it was my second time attending and first time speaking at the seminar. The mid summer campout is now something I look forward to as a collection of libertarians gather to hear seminar presentations on libertarian thought. This year’s focus was “property rights”. While I’ll give a more thorough summary of Jaworski’s event in a later post, for now I’ll post some of the videos that I recorded of the event. As I mentioned this year in my speech at the seminar, while about 60 people attended last year, our podcasting of the event drew 400 listeners the first day that the audio became available and the seminar presentations were eventually downloaded by thousands.
This year, we’ve gone one step further by recording video of the presentations.
The first video is that of Professor Jan Narveson discussing property rights from a philosophical perspective. The video is cut-off at the end by a technical glitch (batteries died), but most of Dr. Narveson’s talk is there for your enjoyment (you’ll also have to turn your speakers up — don’t worry we figured out the video thing for the rest of the presentations)
UPDATE: Audio is now fixed! I boosted the volume and re-uploaded.
Spin documentary
Years ago, I found an amateur documentary called “Spin”. The 600MB movie file took hours and hours to download over my modem connection at the time. The film focused on television network feeds during the 1992 US Presidential election. Producer Brian Springer captured the live via satellite network feeds (the ones the networks in between segments to set up) and recorded countless hours of them. He presents an interesting look into the emergence (at that time) of cable network news in news coverage, and the spin of it by both the network brass and by competing politicians.
I’ve found the documentary in full flash-streaming form at Google Video and I encourage everyone that’s interested in the interplay between politics and media to watch it.
The documentary is also interesting if we consider the context of blogging as the present emerging medium. The ubiquity of blogs and those that write them are certainly changing politics again and we still haven’t seen the full effect. Politicians who embrace blogging and use it intelligently are sure to attain better control over their messaging and “spin”.