BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 25 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

September 25, 2007

The purpose of civilization . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I make my living as a hard-headed, practical man, but I live in a very abstract world. Because of the Anglin children, I’ve been thinking about the idea of fatherlessness, a topic I’ve written about in the past:

I was doing that fatherstuff, to the extent I understand it, which amounts to teaching boys how to be men, and, in other circumstances, teaching girls how to relate to men. You can’t pick up a magazine without discovering what poor specimens of humanity men are. “Men make lousy women!” a woman’s magazine will reveal. “Husbands are not the best wives!” discloses a journal for married women. “Fathers are inadequate mothers!” a mother’s magazine proclaims. And the rejoinder to all those with a deathgrip on the obvious is: “Well, duh!”

A father is the provider, his most important job. If he neglects it in order to preen as an ersatz mommy, the children suffer. A father is the moral leader, obliged to take it on the chin again and again; that’s how children learn how to take it on the chin. A father is the defender, the one who confronts the burglar when mom and the kids are hiding under the bed. Fathers are everything we claim to admire when we use the word “manly” and everything we affect to despise when we use the word “male”, but, at bottom, fathers are not mothers. We need mothers to do what mothers do, and we need fathers to do what fathers do, and when children are denied one or the other, they suffer. You won’t read this in a women’s magazine, and you won’t read it in a men’s magazine unless it’s tattooed into a well-tanned navel. But it’s the truth.

But the main job of being a father is simply being around. I’m not congratulating myself for what I did with Xavier, because I knew it was temporary. He didn’t have a father all of a sudden, he just had a weak little prosthetic, and that only for a while. But I taught him what little I could of the manly art of manliness, what little Read more

September 24, 2007

Lani Anglin’s brother’s children lost their father yesterday. Here’s what you can do to help…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Lani Anglin lost a brother yesterday, and his children lost their father. April Groves has the details at Lani’s site.

We can count the beads later, but now is the time for practical action.

Aaron Anglin is survived by a wife and two very young daughters. The way I’m reading things, he died without life insurance, which puts those three ladies on a very hard road.

If you can spare something for them, put it in the form of negotiable funds — cash, cashier’s check or money order — and overnight it to:

      Aleisha Anglin
      c/o Lani Anglin
      2719 Costa Azul Cove
      Leander, TX
      78641

April is working on setting up a donation account with Bank of America, and I’ll amend this post when that account becomes available. In the meantime, Jay Thompson has set up a donation system using PayPal.

But: I will promise you that there are people who will want to be paid now, and this young family will have immediate and ongoing needs. There was a time in your life when fate could have hit you this hard. Now is your chance to redeem that good fortune.

More: At GeekEstate Blog, Michael Price is auctioning a tricked-out 30GB iPod, with the proceeds going to the Anglin family.

Benn Rosales reflects on these tragic events, finding grounds for hope despite everything.

Jay Thompson has a rundown of today’s activity on the RE.net, including links to many other posts. I am always very proud when I have the privilege of setting my shoulder beside his to get something done. Jay is honor made manifest, and I am honored to know him.

Here is trust fund information:

A trust fund has been set up for the children:
Guaranty Bank, Acct# 3805908914
Checks payable to James Johnson (grandfather)
ITF Eleanor & Mackenzie Anglin

And: if you have the ability to donate a big chunk of money, here is a discussion of how you might make a huge and enduring difference in the lives of these children.

Here are a couple of buttons, large and small, that you can use on your own weblog/web site. These incorporate Jay’s PayPal donation interface, so your readers can make donations online by credit card. Copy Read more

September 24, 2007

Prometheus abundant: Giving the gift of mind

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to fight a war on poverty? A war on terror? A war on the senseless waste of the sole source of capital, the human mind? Here’s your chance. For two weeks in November, you’ll be able to buy two XO laptops, the One-Laptop-Per-Child computer, with one coming to you and the other going to a hungry young mind overseas.

From the Boston Globe:

With orders for its rugged XO laptop falling short of its initial goal, the One Laptop Per Child project announced today that it would let consumers in the United States and Canada buy the cute computer for a limited time.

In an interview last week, Nicholas Negroponte, the former MIT Media Lab director and founder of the so-called $100 laptop initiative, conceded that he had not locked in the 3 million orders that he once said were necessary to trigger mass production.

The new “Give 1, Get 1” initiative could be the antidote, he said, by helping to spread the project.

For a limited two-week span in November, people will be able to buy two laptops for $399, one for the buyer and one for a child in a developing country.

My take: Donate both, perhaps with one going to a child in your own home town. Even better:

Starting today, people who simply want to donate a laptop to a child in a developing country for $200 can do so online at XOgiving.org.

I think there must be three billion candidates for this machine, so I can’t imagine how most of them will get one before they are no longer children. But the bounty of the harvest is planted one seed at a time.

Prometheus literally means “foresight.” Because of the gift of mind, the uniquely Hellenic gift, I live in a world of vast abundance. I used to joke that Americans should “count their microprocessors instead of sheep,” but, by now, I can’t get an accurate count of the microprocessors sitting on my desk. When I think about some young Prometheus growing up chained to the stultification of ignorance, indolence and superstition, I could not be more grateful for this chance to Read more

September 20, 2007

Herd dinosaurs? Not me, but what should we do instead?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Responding at some length to a comment from Charles Woodall:

> Changing the real estate business in the grassroots effort you suggest would be a slow process as well.

I know you’re not joking with me, but are you aware of how quickly the real estate industry is changing right now? None of this is happening through the NAR cartel.

> it would literally take thousands or ten of thousands of people to make it happen.

Shazam! Here we are. BloodhoundBlog is just a part of the changes taking place, but we talk to tens of thousands of unique souls every month.

> We already have a powerful trade organization in place, so getting a few hundred people involved would be easier, in my humble opinion.

You’ve already talked about how it was virtually impossible for you to make an obviously necessary change. The NAR exists to milk agents, consumers and the taxpayers, in that order. It will not even try to do anything else until it is much too late to make any difference.

> While your thoughts are noble, and I agree on several points, until leadership in REALTOR associations on the local and state level want to move into the 21st century, it just isn’t going to happen.

It’s not going to happen.

> Folks such as yourself getting involved will be required.

First, people like me will never get involved with the NAR. I personally am deeply philosophically opposed to what I consider to be the criminal objectives of the NAR, but even someone less philosophically fastidious is going to achieve far better results by improving his own mind, rather than wasting vast amounts of time trying to herd mental dinosaurs toward a future they despise and think they can avoid.

There are actually three issues that you are raising.

The first is that I — or someone like me — would be profited by participating in any sort of committee work, even if it didn’t involve lobbying the state to point its guns at innocent people. Assuming a committee can learn anything at all, it cannot learn any faster than its slowest member, and committees seem to me Read more

September 18, 2007

No committee will ever make the Cluetrain run on time

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Proposition 1: Groups, clubs, committees and professional associations would make better decisions if their smarter, more passionate members were to get involved.

Proposition 2: Central banking would work if only Alan Greenspan had a smarter brother.

Proposition 3: True Communism has never been tried.

I don’t consider these statements equivalent, but they are of the same species, the Wishful Thinking Fallacy.

Inasmuch as we are living through the nightmare of Proposition 2, one might think we could learn a lesson. We won’t, and every eye was on the Fed this afternoon.

Parents who wrote a fat check for a skinny college Freshman in August can expect the return on their investment in the form of Proposition 3 over Thanksgiving dinner.

From Proposition 1, though, there is not even the comic relief of a sardonic resignation. We want so desperately for it to be true that we will not even consider entertaining the obvious truth that all committees suck, and good committees suck the least when they adjourn early.

These three propositions are alike in another way, a way that illustrates why they are uniformly false, any devout wishing to the contrary: All three turn on a power devoid of consequences. They are fundamentally anti-Capitalist. Their errors are not correctable accidents, they are a necessary consequence of the caprice that is the opposite of Capitalism:

But in fact, in politics and economics, the opposite of capitalism is caprice. A government’s decisions are not awful because they are always corrupt — although they often are. They are awful because there is no reward for being right, no penalty for being wrong, and no one anywhere to take responsibility for anything either way.

Capitalism is not instantly rational — it is not always automatically right about what to do, where and in what quantity. But capitalism is ultimately rational. In due course, entrepreneurs will achieve something approaching optimal results. Why? Because they are rewarded for being right, penalized for being wrong, and they are proud to take responsibility for their endeavors.

Matthew Hardy left what I thought was a brilliant comment to my post on technological ineptitude at the Arizona Association of Realtors:

So the Read more

September 11, 2007

My 9/11 prayer . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me, this time last year:

Cathy and I watched The Path to 9/11 on television tonight. I had forgotten that we were in Metro New York for the Turn of the Millennium. My father lives in Connecticut, and we went there that year for New Year’s Day. The photo you see is my son crawling all over a bronze statue of a stock broker in Liberty Park, directly across from what was then the Merrill Lynch Building — on December 30, 1999.

I lived in Manhattan for ten years, from 1976 to 1986. For quite a few of those years, I worked just across from Liberty Park, in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway. At the other end of that little brick park was the southeast entrance to the World Trade Center complex.

I worked insane hours in those days, and, very often, when I got out of work, I would go sit at this tiny circular plaza plopped down between the Twin Towers. Not quite pre-dawn, still full dark, but completely deserted — and to be completely alone in New York City is an accomplishment. I would throw my head back and look up at the towers, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony running note-perfect through my head.

Everything I am describing was either destroyed or heavily damaged on September 11, 2001. Along with the lives of thousand of innocents. Along with the comfort and serenity of their families. Along with the peace of the entire world.

I don’t believe in any heaven except for this earth, this life — the heaven we make every day by pursuing the highest and best within us. The World Trade Center had its faults. I can detail every one. But it was a piece of the sublime, a proud testament to how high, how good our highest and best can be. I don’t believe in heaven, but when I think of what was done that day, I pray there is an everlasting torment for the men who did it…

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August 31, 2007

Mucho con gusto: Celebrating human independence in open defiance of Labor Day

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have more than too much work to do, including attending to all the controversy I’ve stirred up, but I pride myself on knowing when I need to stop, if only for a few hours. We’re kidless for the weekend, but we’re on the cusp of being infested by way too much family, so I’m going to grab for all the gusto I can, while I can.

Here’s Mark Knopfler, just blistering on what looks like a Paul Reed Smith FatStratClone (that is to say, a really kick-ass custom-made guitar):

For Teri Lussier’s daughter, Rian, here is an excruciating catharsis:

The examined life is having the courage to purge your own character of mediocrity, not punishing other people for having indulged their fears of greatness.

This is me, a memo from forever:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger — over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive — deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son and I were out riding our bikes and we rode to a CompUSA to see all the latest software. The store was packed. Middle managers poring over the PERT packages, programmers pawing through hefty manuals, yuppie couples testing eduware with their little yuppiekinder. Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence — and violence. And there in the CompUSA were the men and women of values. The people who know that to be more Read more

June 27, 2007

Seven Days of the Dog: The regal, indomitable arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in as a comment last night.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive and wanting to win, but, reading your posts the last few weeks, you ego is a little bit too big at times. Yes, you are a heck of a writer and you have one heck of a blog and you have assembled a heck of a team of contributors, but your ego is getting a bit cocky.

This is ad hominem, so it violates our comments policy, but I’m not averse to discussing the issue it raises in a general way.

Just not yet.

First, let’s address some general beefs I have with the world of real estate weblogging. You can regard this as an impromptu staff meeting of the RE.net, or, if you’d rather, as a Pompeii-like graffito.

Here’s one: I’m seeing more and more truncated feeds, and I am unthrilled about it. My entire purpose in using a feed reader is to aggregate everything I might want to see in one place. If I’m interested in what you have to say, I might click through to your site, but I don’t appreciate being forced to do so. I understand that you may be trying to boost your hard clicks, possibly to placate your advertisers, or you might be trying to frustrate sploggers. I don’t care. If you don’t capture my attention completely in the forty or fifty words you deign to show me, there is zero chance that I will click through to see if I might be missing something good. I can’t be that different from your target reader. You got ’em to subscribe. Now deliver the goods. Hoarding — for whatever reason — is the economics of the past.

(Near the subject, I had mentioned a long time ago (in a comment or somewhere) that I almost never do trackbacks. If for no other reason than that it offers automatic trackbacks and pingbacks, WordPress should be your CMS of choice for any weblogs you build (or migrate to) in the future.)

Here’s another beef: This came in as a comment to Real Estate Weblogging 101:

I think you Read more

June 6, 2007

The style of your soul: The fundamental virtue of conscientious real estate weblogging

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” –Victor Hugo

The Russell Shaw entry What’s wrong with Zip Realty?, written in February, was the most clicked-upon post on BloodhoundBlog on Tuesday. Debunking Zillow.com, which was written last July and which often comes in first, took second place.

I’m making note of this because there is a celebration of mental indolence going on just now, reflexively offered up as the rationale and justification for mental indolence. This by itself is meaningless: Erg for erg, laziness is the hardest job there is.

But it occurred to me that the RE.net has undertaken efforts, formal and informal, to instruct novices in the art of real estate weblogging — and laziness is very bad weblogging advice.

The job is what it is. It takes what it takes. If you don’t feel up to taking on the world, that’s fine. But don’t affect to pretend to believe that goofy pictures and bold subheads can take the place of rational discourse. It is actually possible to destroy a specious pose with one onomatopoeical word, but, most often, the work of the mind requires a greater effort.

This matters because you are not writing solely for the day and the visitors thereof. If there is any importance at all to the work that you do, it will be linked and searched. The post that gets only nine hard clicks today may someday get ninety clicks every day — if it deserves them.

What you do is your business, and most of weblogging is ephemeral — of moment for substantially less than a moment. We work the way we do here because we don’t affect to admire the half-assed. If you choose instead to indulge your worst appetites, arguing that that this is the path to popularity among people seeking to indulge their own worst appetites — rave on. It means less than nothing. The work of the mind in real estate will go on — in links, in searches, in perpetuity — without you.

But: If you actually care about improving your own mind Read more

May 29, 2007

Ask the Blogger: How much is eleven months in dog years?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This came in by email:

I find myself commenting on more and more of your blogs, because of my respect for some of your writers.

My concern is who are your readers?

How large is your audience?

Are we dealing with real estate professionals or the general public?

BloodhoundBlog is eleven months’ old today. We’re whipping up the batter for a first-birthday cake that — I assure you — Odysseus will be more than happy to eat.

Who are our readers?: Real estate professionals, by an overwhelming margin.

Weekdays are strong, weekends are weaker, but we average around 1,200 unique visitors a day. Those are click-through visitors, people who are actually landing on one or more of our pages. The overwhelming majority of them come from sites we know, mainly other real estate weblogs. A significant portion come from search engines, this because we tend to score very high on certain industry-related searches.

In addition, we have a very strong RSS subscriber base. How strong, precisely, I do not know, this because I don’t like routing traffic through third-party vendors. On top of that, we add new email-based subscriptions every day. For these latter, I see actual email addresses, so I know for sure we are appealing to real estate professionals.

There’s more I could say. For example, Google Analytics tells me that our readership is extremely “sticky”: Thousands of people have visited BloodhoundBlog hundreds of times. Since last August, when I installed Google Analytics, more than 42,000 individuals have visited us 9 or more times. Over 20,000 people have come here 51 or more times. Again, this ignores RSS subscribers. We are talking to a large, growing and very loyal audience.

Why does it work so well? I don’t suffer the curse of modesty, so I’ll tell the bald truth: We are as popular as we are because we deserve to be. We write wisely, wittily and well about things that matter to real estate professionals. We don’t divide our attentions trying to serve two divergent audiences, and we are so far-flung as to be completely location-independent. We are philosophically and temperamentally diverse, and yet we are able Read more

May 15, 2007

The Stockdale Paradox: “I never lost faith in the end of the story”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My friend Richard Nikoley dug this up, Admiral Jim Stockdale talking about his experience in a Vietnamese POW camp:

“I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

Asked: “Who didn’t make it out?”

“The optimists. They were the ones who said we’re going to be out by Christmas. And, Christmas would come and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, We’re going to be out by Easter. And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. Then they died of a broken heart.

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

They can’t say “Yes” if you don’t ask — but they sure can say “No” if you do. Learning to surmount the fear of the “No” is how to get to the “Yes.”

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May 11, 2007

Caesar’s Wife in the Agora: Why I am disconnecting from Blogger’s Connect

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Through the good offices of Jimmy Tomatoes, I found out today that I am cashing in on BloodhoundBlog. How? By means of my membership in the Amazon Affiliates program, which pumps something less than twenty cents a day into our coffers.

I’ve talked about this before, but clearly mere talk is not enough. On top of everything else I’ll be doing this weekend, I’m going to de-Affiliate every Amazon link. It’s absurd to eliminate five bucks a month of inflow — money that mostly just accumulates at Amazon.com — especially considering that our web hosting plan runs to $75 a month. But I don’t want there ever to be even the hint of a possibility of an implication that BloodhoundBlog is compromised by pecuniary considerations.

For that same general reason, I decided this afternoon to pull out of the Blogger’s Connect events at this year’s Inman Connect in San Francisco. I have had qualms about this since the moment I said I would do it:

(As a matter of disclosure, I have been offered a complimentary ticket and hotel room to Inman Connect this summer. I’m scheduled to speak, so I can argue to myself that this is an honorarium, but that feels like a rationalization. At the same time, I do feel that Caesar’s Wife should be free from even the hint of a suspicion. Lucky me, I don’t have to decide what to do yet.)

Brad Inman and his staff have been nothing but decent to me, but I am not comfortable with the idea that there might even be a scintilla of doubt in someone’s mind about my independence, personally, or about the independence of BloodhoundBlog.

This is real life inside my skin: When Inman Connect rolled around in January, I took a little poke at it. No big deal, except I had just started posting as a guest blogger at the Inman Blog, a position I have since resigned. Some sleazoid insisted that I wouldn’t say the same thing in Inman’s salon. And that would have been, true, too — until he said it. Instead, I wrote an extended evisceration of all Read more

May 10, 2007

Cri de coeur meets The Long Tail: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet to be released, finally, on DVD

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

How long is The Long Tail? Long enough, even, for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, ten long years after its theatrical release. I despair for the state of staged drama, and not just in the chip-on-its-shoulder burgs, but this, in Horace’s phrasing, is “a monument more lasting than bronze.”

The news: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is to be released on DVD, at last.

We’ve been on the waiting list at Amazon.com for years, and I’d like to hope that this is a vindication of the waiting list idea, a social tug-of-war to stretch The Long Tail.

I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The Cameron you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet‘s theatrical release.

 
Hamlet past his bedtime

I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting — or buying.

My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.

Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked Read more

May 10, 2007

A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We saw a performance piece called “Love, Janis” last week. It wouldn’t do to call it a play. It was more of a fictionalized chronicle of Pearl cavorting with her inner child while blasting through her greatest hits at top volume. The music was beyond excellent, and the interstitial crap was no worse than Ray or Walk The Line or The Doors — no act of evil or self-destruction is ever your fault if your records chart well. Creepy and dopey (no pun intended), maudlin and mopey, but ultimately nothing. If they had cut all that and doubled up on the music, it would have been a knock-out tribute show.

Here’s the beef: Was this raucous rock ‘n’ roll encomium performed at an Indian casino, alternating with the Tina Turner and Michael Jackson impersonators? No, alas. Was it the 8 and 10 o’clock headliner act at an off-Strip locals resort in Las Vegas? Guess again. No, “Love, Janis” is part of this season’s “drama” from The Arizona Theatre Company, one of eight “plays” to be presented this season to audiences of rich white people, whose seats will be graciously subsidized by poor black and brown people.

This is “theauhtuh, dahling,” an allegedly high-brow undertaking undertaken in that high-brow “performance centre” downtown — itself graciously subsidized by people who only make it downtown when they are dispossessed by fate and taxes. And although I am speaking of Phoenix, particularly, everything I’m saying goes for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America. “We can’t be a true city without theauhtuh, dahling,” even if that “theauhtuh, dahling” turns out to be a complete joke.

What’s the real point of this ugly charade? Wealth is waste, but how can one justify the indulgence of a thousand-dollar gown if there is no “theauhtuh, dahling?” No symphony? No opera? No ballet? None of these boondoggles is profitable, and that by itself is an excellent argument for doing away with them. Mozart can’t make money, but neither can “pops” music conducted by TV’s Doc Severinsen. Cage fighting turns a buck, as do rodeo and tractor pulls, but how can one wear a designer Read more

March 31, 2007

Want to make sure you can defend yourself from internet bad guys? Aim for the body, not the head . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is Tim O’Reilly on the Kathy Sierra persecution:

There’s an attitude among many bloggers that deleting inflammatory comments is censorship. I think that needs to change. I’m not suggesting that every blog will want to delete such comments, but I am suggesting that blogs that do want to keep the level of dialog at a higher level not be censured for doing so.

I’m not crazy about some kind of quasi-official clean comments pledge, presumably accompanied by a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. The more webloggers look like Babbitts, the less I like them.

However: Policing comments in your own weblog is not censorship.

With the bogus legal standard, “Shouting fire in a crowded theater,” Oliver Wendell Holmes did incredible violence to two fundamental American liberties — the right of free speech and the right to private property.

You have every right to free speech at your own expense on your own property or on public property. Holmes invented his specious standard to outlaw activities that should have been — and since have been — upheld as constitutionally protected speech. Not surprisingly, the perverse standard he proposed is used ubiquitously by thoughtless people to justify all manner of suppression of private property rights.

The owner of a theater has every right to shout, “Fire!” on his own property. He has every right to host a “Shout Fire!” party on his own property. If someone is injured in consequence, he’s subject to lawsuit — but none of this has anything to do with free speech. It would make no difference if the exhortation had been, “Excelsior!”

But: You do not have the right to free speech at someone else’s expense or on someone else’s property. The issue in that circumstance is not the speaker’s right to self-expression but the property owner’s right to condition his hospitality on the behavior of his guests. You do not have the right to shout, “Fire!” in the theater because you are a guest of the owner, not because your right to free speech is being suppressed.

In other words, if someone is acting like a jackass in your living room — or in Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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