Thou Shalt Not Crucify Labor On This Cross of Paper Money
"Labor must take the initiative and demand that Congress put an immediate end to the mindless destruction of capital."
I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
A former military interrogator who served in Iraq details the damage torture and abuse does to the U.S. antiterrorism efforts: "How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."
The Agonist Analysis of the Recession
"The business and political worlds are equally responsible for foisting a tremendous hoax on the public, which asserts that we can toss away well paying industrial and managerial positions, replace them with lower-paying ones in the service sector, and still have a vibrant economy. This hoax was protracted by artificially holding up consumer demand, which allowed millions of people to keep up the appearance of middle-class success."
Reaching Out to the Left
Anthony Gregory discusses ways in which libertarians can appeal to leftists to make common cause against the state. "Many people are on the political Left, and such people tend to be interested in activism and ideas and are especially valuable to the cause of liberty when they finally come around and embrace the consistent libertarian program. Ignoring them is not an option, and belittling them is not a luxury we can afford."
Memories may be stored on your DNA
"The cool idea here is that the brain could be borrowing a form of cellular memory from developmental biology to use for what we think of as memory."
How do you define progress?
"Tim [Lee] has a very particular measure that he uses to measure progress, and it includes more automation, more use of computers, more development of capital intensive industries. But that's not the only direction that you can measure progress, and in fact Tim's measures seem to evidence a fixation on the tools rather than the results."
(Late) Happy Thanksgiving
So yeah, not much activity here lately. I've experienced a pretty awful bout of blogger's block. It just has felt to me lately that I don't have much to say - at least not enough to write a whole blog post. And it's not just blogging: even in conversations and tweets I've been inarticulate and disengaged. There is a subconscious cycle of inspiration, I believe, and one of the things I like about blogging is that the platform is there for me when I need it. Were blogging ever to become some sort of duty it would quickly lose its appeal.
All the same, the blog is something that I recognize is more than just my personal project. So while I apologize to my handful of regular readers that I've been absent, I find it really liberating that I can tune in and drop out from the ongoing conversation at my leisure. I'm convinced that in order to contribute to this ongoing conversation I need to be more careful about how I allocate my attention on the web.
That means, for instance, not getting bogged down in unproductive / excessively emotional online conversations. I'm not swearing off Yahoo! Groups and forums, but I think I need to better regulate how my attention is spent online. If a debate on a forum is important enough to pursue with the kind of doggedness I sometimes do, it's important enough to at least warrant a post on my blog. And often, doing so really crystalizes my argument - or makes plain its sloppiness.
Quote of the Day
The Post tells us how the people who designed the bank bailout were committed to the free market. Interestingly, the key decisions that they made gave the banks much better terms than they could have received from the free market.
Baker's Conservative Nanny State is required reading as well.
I'm still not convinced, so suck it
More than anybody else, Robert Anton Wilson's life and attitude represent the essence of what attracts me to libertarianism. His example inspires me to engage in a libertarianism that is curious, comfortable with an imperfect world, and interested in understanding and appreciating man-as-he-is rather than molding him into a New Libertarian Man. I especially admire the way he combined sober thinking with a gigantic sense of light-heartedness and humor. Only a man with his humility and playfulness could give fringe topics like ritual magic and psychopharmacology the energy and attention they were due without sounding like he was selling something. He exemplified a libertarianism, to sum it up, that viewed the human condition as a frontier to be explored, not a prison to be escaped.
Sometimes I think those who identify as left libertarian are advancing this spirit; other times, the movement seems to be careening into the swamps of Ideology, working on its own (perhaps looser) straitjacket for mankind. To the latter group, I join ol' Bob in extending a giant middle finger (though the particular people I'm talking about appear to not have heard of blogs and think Yahoo!Groups is the wave of the future, so I'm probably not flicking you off, gentle reader). I refuse to let certain "ideologically consistent" types browbeat me into living by their Rule Book, and I deny their authority to bestow or withhold the title of "libertarian". Or as Bob wrote:
...there is an opinion abroad in the land that libertarianism does mean a mindless, heartless and mechanical system of medieval dogma. I don't know how this impression came about, although it probably has something to do with Randroids and other robot Ideologists who occasionally infest libertarian groups. Frankly, I have always loathed being associated with such types and devoutly wish libertarianism could be sharply distinguished from Idolatry and fetishism of all sorts. If liberty does not mean that we can all be more free, not less free, then I need to find a better word than "liberty" to describe my aspirations; and if we are to be governed by a Natural Law Rule Book of extramundane authority, we can scarcely claim to have advanced beyond the dark ages and might as well make our submission to the Pope again. (He's funnier than Ayn Rand, anyway.)
Quote of the Day
Every manager in a current corporation knows that they have been doing this (fudging their business's value) on a systematic basis since the 80's and that the value is purely based on a consensus, which in fact created a pyramid scheme. This is in my view the reason of the crisis of confidence, since they know deep down that their own value is bogus, how can they trust anyone else's?
Congratulations to Keith Preston
Richmond's own Keith Preston is the winner of the U.K.-based Libertarian Alliance's Chris R. Tame Memorial Prize Essay Contest. The theme of the competition was, "Can a Libertarian Society be Described as ‘Tesco minus the State'?", reflecting the general debate in libertarian circles on the exact nature of the free market we so doggedly advocate. Keith's essay nails it:
An economy organized on the basis of worker-owned and operated industries, peoples' banks, mutuals, consumer cooperatives, anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, individual and family enterprises, small farms and crafts workers associations engaged in local production for local use, voluntary charitable institutions, land trusts, or voluntary collectives, communes and kibbutzim may seem farfetched to some, but no more so and probably less so than a modern industrial, high-tech economy where the merchant class is the ruling class and the working class is a frequently affluent middle class would have seemed to residents of the feudal societies of pre-modern times. If the expansion of the market economy, specialization, the division of labor, industrialization and technological advancements can bring about the achievements of modern societies in eradicating disease, starvation, infant mortality and early death, one can only wonder what a genuine free enterprise system might achieve, and would have already achieved were it not for the scourge of statism and the corresponding plutocracy.
Washington needs a surge in America
As I wrote in an essay a few months ago, the best way to view the imperial nature of the U.S. government is to view it as an empire controlled by the city-state of Washington instead of as a broadly American phenomenon. Indeed, the territorial U.S. differs from Iraq and Afghanistan only in the sense that our occupation is a less volatile one. This allows the resemblance of "civil society" that supports and approves of the occupation, and rules out the need for the frightening displays of force that other people around the world endure at the hands of U.S. armed forces. Generally speaking, we chalk this relative lack of open violence up to our status as a "free people".
However, as we plunge deeper into financial crisis, that may change. Soldiers fresh from counterinsurgency operations in Iraq are deploying for missions within the U.S.. With the unrest likely upon full-blown collapse of the currency and the economy, Bush retains the prerogative to declare martial law and institute what is, in effect, military dictatorship. Essentially, the imperial managers of Earth in D.C. are deciding whether or not we need a surge - not in Iraq, but right here in the territorial United States.
Part of the process of taking back our freedom entails a sober analysis of our present political situation. There is no real difference between a free society under a government and a military occupation - each exists merely as different zones on a sliding scale of repression, which government dials up or down based on "conditions on the ground". Until we understand that we live in occupied territory, we will always be able to say "well, we got it better than Iraq" without realizing that the same dynamics are at play, at home and abroad.
Quote of the day
There's been a lot of quotable lines since I last blogged (sorry so seldom), but here's a great one that bears reminding as we go through this national doubting of our fundamentals:
I think it was Michael Kinsley, 25 years ago, who said of course Republicans in power are going to lead to deficits. A budget in balance or surplus represents government collecting taxes from rich people to fund its functions. A vudget in deficit represents government paying rich people interest (on bonds) to fund its functions.
Carefully uniting the political and the spiritual
My essay on the political implications of the Law of One is now up. Note that it may at times make zero sense if you aren't familiar with the Law of One material, but I plan on writing up a primer on the subject due to popular interest. This essay is based on a talk I gave at this year's L/L Research Homecoming, and it is in many ways the culmination of the project I set out on in starting this blog.
