Wikipedia Fun Fact
Almost every Linux distribution contains the program "ddate", which displays the Discordian date.
It's true - I tried it and just found out that "Today is Pungenday, the 40th day of Discord in YOLD 3174."
Institutions vs. the Authentic Collective
Being as fascinated as I am with the abstract concept of the institution, I am finding Butler Shaffer's Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival to be not just perceptive and engaging, but a positively eerie (and more articulate) statement of the beliefs at which I have arrived. And not just the political observations and conclusions: I find the theory of institutional dynamics that Shaffer lays out transitioning quite often between psychology and outright metaphysics. Perhaps this is because I see the institution as a good example of the kind of false collectivism that has ground the individual down into nothing more than a unit of replaceable labor and brand demand.
A great excerpt on how institutions falsely co-opt collectivism:
Because we have derived so much benefit from our associating with one another, most of us have no doubt expected that bringing people together into institutional collectives will foster greater social unity. But this has not been the case. Our expectations have failed to materialize because we have failed to distinguish between those spontaneous, unstructured organizations in which people come together for their mutual interests, and the structured institutional systems that mobilize people, inducing them - through intimidative or coercive means - to sacrifice their individual interests in favor of the alleged collective good. But on close examination, what is purported to be the collective good ends up being on the narrow good of the institution itself. One of the consequences of our being pushed together by institutional pressures has been an increased social isolation, a pulling away from one another. Perhaps Newton's third law of motion offers some explanation for the paradox of a society disintegrating as a result of its organization.
What I see him implying, and what I believe myself, is that there is an authentic collectivism - but it can only arise from the full expression of individuals; it cannot be a sublimation of individuals' qualities. This is why the shortcut of coercion is such a disruptive means to the collective end - it is not only crippling the collective entity being created, but it's also bringing into the entity countervailing forces that don't just disappear from lack of expression.
Because they are ours
I think that Obama's recent statements about poor people clinging to guns and God are being blown out of proportion. Certainly there's a sense in which oppressed people of any sort tend to fall back on tradition; firearms and religion are our traditions. But it's not that I think Obama is, on the whole, correct; it's just that he isn't out of line with the elite opinion of his class: the politicians. It's unfair to criticize him for speaking an opinion all his adversaries hold.
But it's not unfair to criticize him for having a contemptible, elite opinion that looks down on popular sovereignty, and John Médaille does an excellent job. Though I'm not Catholic or a member of any organized religion, I think those paths to God are certainly valid - they're not themselves good or bad (they are, however, human institutions which must be approached with the same discretion and self-knowledge that any important activity requires). And even if they weren't, I'd still defend the freedom of people to follow them.
But he absolutely nails the gun issue:
As for guns, we cling to them for another reason, a reason that his little to do with the arguments about the second amendment, arguments which few of us really understand, least of all myself. No, we cling to them precisely because the know-it-alls tell us not to. We live in an age when "experts" give us no end of good advice on subjects that are none of their business, and when each new day brings new headlines about what we should or should not be doing. Be it cholesterol or sex, God or guns, children or politics, there are endless experts to tell us what we are doing wrong. These professional naggers really have our best interests at heart, and the more so the more removed they are from us.
Virginia Anarchist Federation meeting tomorrow
As many of you know, I've been trying to find ways to interface with the larger activist community in Richmond. I do have plans to relaunch, with a different flavor, something akin to the Left Libertarian Alliance I started last year. But I was always disappointed that I seemed to attract far too few people who weren't libertarians. I know they're out there, but I'll be damned if I can ever get a foothold.
Well, this week I found out about the Virginia Anarchist Federation. They're holding a meeting in Richmond tomorrow which I will be attending. Here's the flyer. The location is the William Byrd Community House, 224 South Cherry Street, and the whole shebang starts at noon. I'm looking forward to speaking and working together with people who come to anarchism from a different direction.
Sorry for such late notice, but I just found out the location and time a few minutes ago.
Why invoke martial law?
![](https://d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20080415/capt.01619a17805a42088b34a2b8126a59c6.polygamist_retreat_dn204.jpg?x=400&y=300&sig=rX5DljLPiBQCSH7kQ8DQCA--" />Martial law just gets us into a whole constitutional debate that none of us want to have. Far easier to simply give your law enforcement personnel military vehicles, military outfits, military weapons, and a military mandate. After all, if they scare, rough up, or hurt the population a bit, <a href="https://blog.6thdensity.net/?p=928">it)
. You can have the benefits of an occupation force with none of the pesky insurgent resistance.The only price is our way of life. Oh, I know that's what we've spent the last century and a half fighting wars and sacrificing countless lives to protect. But, really, wouldn't you rather your own government occupy you militarily than some other government? I think the choice is clear.
The photo is from the raid on the Texas polygamist sect. Hat tip to Radley Balko.
Quote of the Day
This is from an old favorite of mine, Weapon of Choice:
Did y'all get your taxes done? Congratulations to liberals for unwillingly funding an illegal war and to conservatives for unwillingly funding bleeding heart social programs. We all win!
Good to see you're keepin' on keepin' on, R.
New Kids on the Blog
Since I've been hanging out on essembly, a political social networking site, I've benefited from discussions with many bright members. So I was delighted to see that two of the sharpest libertarian socialists on there have started blogs: Slient Radical and Belinsky on Politics. I hope they find blogging to be conducive to their explorations of anarchism, but I'm very sure that the rest of us will benefit greatly from their insights.
Vector graphic mayhem
I've always preferred open source image editing application GIMP over Photoshop. Not sure why, but I think it has something to do with Adobe trying to do too much for me. GIMP just works for me, and I've used it to do lots of design, such as much of the graphics on this blog (as you can see, I still have a lot to learn).
A few years ago when I was designing the 6th Density logo, I had the hardest time creating and manipulating geometric shapes. I eventually had to just eyeball it and hope that it would work out. Painstaking pixel editing and trial and error ended up paying off, but the logo I came up with was really stuck at one scale. I couldn't really shrink or expand it too much without pixellating it to all hell.
I had heard about vector graphics (.svg files), an image format that saves shapes, paths, and other more geometric data about images in an XML file rather than a map of pixels, but I didn't have Adobe Illustrator and didn't know where to begin anyway. However, as I'm about to launch my business and I want to use all that imagery, I decided it was time to either hire out the design work or figure it out.
Naomi Wolf on America's Slide into Fascism
A very well presented summary of the ways in which the U.S. government is taking the steps other totalitarian governments have throughout history.
What is happening right now is a corporate state conspiracy, pure and simple. Whatever that means to you, be prepared to respond to it when it crosses whatever threshold of human dignity you've decided upon.
Kindly remove your hat before crossing the threshold of institutional society's inner sanctum
Creed, the eternally creepy old guy in NBC's The Office, divulges to the camera in one episdoe that he has been involved in many cults in the past - both as a leader and a follower. "You make more money as a leader, but you have more fun as a follower." Part of the humor in his offhand observation lies in treating the mysterious roles of cult leader and follower as a hat one can put on or take off at will, devoid of any real purpose of responsibility. Yet when other people do essentially the same thing - especially those occupying positions of power in our institutional society - they can sometimes persuade us that they're not really wearing the hat.
Consider for example the recent remarks of General Motors' Vice President, Bob Lutz, confiding to reporters his true feelings on global warming and hybrid vehicles. The specific remarks denigrating global warming and hybrid vehicles indicated to many that Lutz is out of touch with the current market, especially given GM's long running inability to compete with foreign manufacturers who prioritize fuel economy, innovation, and environmental impact. In response to the outcry, Lutz acted as if his first amendment rights were under attack:
An offhand comment I made recently about the concept of global warming seems to have a lot of people heated, and it's spreading through the Internet like ragweed. But I think that the people making a big deal out of it are missing the real point. My beliefs are mine and I have a right to them, just as you have a right to yours. But among my strongest beliefs is that my job is to do what makes the most business sense for GM.
Never mind what I said, or the context in which I said it. My thoughts on what has or hasn't been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors. My opinions on the subject - like anyone's - are immaterial. Really. The point is not why and how did we get where we are, it's what are we going to do to get where we're going.
Three unorganized thoughts on organization
Well, at the beginning of this week I decided to make the long overdue move to Leopard. It's been a good opportunity to clean up some accumulated cruft, but I'm being stymied by problems getting MySQL to work. This is not how the Apple experience is supposed to play out! Having lost several days now I'm getting desperate, and I'm slowly but surely mucking up the hard drive cleanliness I had purchased so dearly. I will resolve it today, one way or another.
Also, I suppose now is as good a time as any to officially announce that I am now committed to fulltime freelance software development. I've been very fortunate to find contracts through respectable people in the Rails community to get me started. One of my primary goals right now in life is to find a way to be a fully self-directed individual, and I've certainly learned that employment is no guarantee of, well, much of anything. If I'm going to be on my own, I might as well acknowledge it and pocket the full returns on my work.
I'd also like the business to be an experiment in some ideas about organization. Freelancing is, in some ways, akin to the human scale economics that this country was founded upon. I'd like to make it part of my object to advocate for self-employment in the IT sector, facilitating an ecosystem of independent economic actors in my community. Anarchism is about realizing the infinity of possibilities for human organization and coordination, in my view, and it is my heart's deepest desire to realize in the material and social worlds what I've spent too much time contemplating in the online and inner worlds.
Quote of the Day
Today, it's about jury nullification. Via Radley Balko I found this post guest blogged by a Texas prosecutor who claims jury nullification is manifestly illegal. Specifically, he argues that David Simon, Ed Burns, and the other creators of The Wire were committing aggrevated perjury by suggesting others should nullify drug laws when serving on juries. You can read the prosecutor's argument to see if it's valid, but I thought this comment by Mark Draughn, on which he expands at his blog, was completely on point:
I understand that, when acting as a juror, I have a role to perform, and that it's important to do it well and with integrity. But I also believe in my heart that many things that happen as part of the war on drugs are, to keep this simple, evil-evil like witch burnings and slavery and Kristallnacht.
Some of these evil things are done by prosecutors. If they don't want me to nullify, they shouldn't ask me to take part in their foul deeds. I need to be able to sleep at night.
Draughn nails the libertarian position on this matter by exposing how the state requires our consent in order to do things we would never find moral or just as individuals.
forum.leftlibertarian.org is up!
I'm sure that if you're into left libertarianism, you probably already know that the forum at leftlibertarian.org is up. But if you're not into it and curious, check it out! The point is to start to organize and more widely represent the online conversation surrounding this approach to libertarianism.
I'm actually really excited about having gotten bbpress, the forum based on WordPress, integrated with the aggregator. I'm still trying to get bbsync to automatically start threads for posts syndicated on the leftlibertarian.org site. I'd like, eventually, to get things going the other way, too: to have the community post articles in the forum that get syndicated by the aggregator. The end goal is to have a site that manages a common content pool with several ways for viewing and interacting with it. I'm working on custom software to realize this goal, but the bbpress/WordPress integration tools are quite compelling.
