Ron Paul was on Bill Maher, and so was Ben Affleck. Although I don't think he's that shallow, this monologue really kicked ass:
...you know what's funny about this fucking giveaway? The Democrats live in fear of basically, you know, being called cowards. Of looking soft on military. Of looking like pussies, basically. We're afraid that somebody's going to call us a pussy. That someone's going to criticize us. And these people got elected basically on opposing the war. They got sent to Washington to oppose the war. They went there to make a vote on opposing the war. And then, when they got sent back the bill to, you know, and they were told, "Look, you know, the President's not going to, you know, you have to put these, uh, you know, timelines in there, you know, you're either going to vote for or against this measure that says, you have to, if you want this money, you have to give us timelines to get out of Iraq. Are you going to be for this or against it?"
They were afraid that if they basically sent it back to the President and said, "No, we need the timelines," and they left, for Memorial Day vacation, that when they left, the President would criticize them when they went on vacation for not supporting the troops. In other words…While they were on vacation, they were afraid of being criticized. So rather, out of a fear of being criticized, they sacrificed their core political beliefs. And they wonder why people call them fucking weak.
Also featured was the best bumper sticker slogan ever, for which I whipped up a quick pic:
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UPDATE (2:30 PM): I got hacked. After DreamHost said they'd fixed it. They just can't be honest about anything. Thanks douchebags.
Since I joined with Dreamhost, it's been one thing after another. They have tons of downtime problems, they bring this blog down on a far more frequent basis than it should be (usually by fucking around with PHP behind the scenes without letting me know ahead of time), and they blow it all off.
Now their incompetence has resulted in a major security breach. Here's the email I got:
Hello -
This email is regarding a potential security concern related to your 'xxxxxxxxxxxx' FTP account.
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From anarchistnews.org, it looks like there's an anarchist radio program project starting:
This is a call-out to anarchists interested in sharing our living history, ideas, debates and vision. If you are experienced with audio/radio/production/editing, great. But you're needed even if you have no experience, but go to events and care about making sure the anarchist movement's efforts are preserved and represented accurately for people globally. This effort requires tech-folk, cultural creatives, people willing to produce, and people with a passion for anarchist history and movements.
The goal of this endeavor is to launch in June/July a half-hour weekly (to-be-named) program to educate and build understanding of the diverse voices and tendencies within anarchist struggles globally. There are experienced radio producers, as well as new participants, involved, and everyone is invited. Ideally, there will be publicly posted teaching materials, so everyone without audio knowledge can learn too.
Questions? Ideas? Critiques? Those who are interested, please get in touch: mindgrime at gmail period com.
I've been thinking of doing a left libertarian podcast for a while, so this would be good exposure for me. I'd love to see other market anarchists and left libertarians offer help as well!
To all those whose address I wasn't able to remember, we're having a party and cookout at our place on Saturday, June 9 from 4:00 PM till whenever. If you'd like to come, please let me know via email.
First, off, this is damn funny:
Also of interest is this joint interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It's nice to hear them talk frankly about the industry without trying to inspire us with their world-changing, "imagineered" stuff (wish I could find a YouTube clip of the original Mr. Show skit that featured the "imagineer" guy, but no luck (thanks, Adem). Instead, I'll (also) link to this, which is one of the funniest concepts ever on Mr. Show. I laughed for days.).
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This time it's from Eric Husman:
The Left may not favor the police state, but they are for a police state. The Right is just the opposite: While they claim to be against a powerful, central government, they keep building the powerful, central government.
Of course, he's entirely correct about the establishment Left and the Right. And keep in mind that the generality or specificity of their authoritarianism changes in direct proportion to who's in power - in other words, the Right was all up in arms about militant law enforcement in the not too distant past. The establishment is defined by its pettiness, superficiality, lack of reflection, and most of all its sheer hypocrisy.
Author's note: In 2011 I reworked this essay, and the revised version can be found here.
On the LeftLibertarian2 Yahoo! group, we've been experiencing some disagreements about the likely consequences of an anarchist society. There are so many aspects of our current culture, economy, infrastructure, etc. that have been distorted by privilege. Civil society has become so confused with the institution of the State that it's hard to extricate one from the other. That's why distinguishing the competing visions of different anarchists usually comes down to predictions of what the likely ends of anarchy are, not the broad means.
A long running debate among the anarchists, especially between individualist and more communist type, centers around the justice of wealth disparities. Certainly the existence of the State serves to enrich particular interests at the expense of others, but in anarchy would the rich dominate society - just as they do with the State? Even if we could immediately switch off the institutions that forcibly manipulate society, there is danger that the legacy of privilege and accumulated wealth could persist for some time, distorting markets and continuing the frustrate the balance of power between individuals.
Individualist anarchists have had a variety of responses to the problems of historical property and wealth distribution. Even anarcho-capitalists who see large scale social coordination as the natural direction of society have different views, such as Hans Hermann Hoppe's theory of a natural elite and Murray Rothbard's support of syndicalist takeover of State-supported corporations. On the other side of the coin, left-leaning individualists also entertain a variety of approaches: from the agorist trust of entrepreneurship as a leveling force to mutualists such as Benjamin Tucker and Kevin Carson speculating about the possible need for short term State sponsored redistribution and reform.
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And now, the post about Memorial Day that isn't so serious. I spent it in my hometown, King George County, Virginia, with Tasha at Oak Crest Vineyards. We tasted and bought wine, of course, since bordeauxs are my favorite and their aspiration. Tasha was among several artists there, not only selling pottery and jewelry but also demonstrating throwing technique to guests. We also got to visit with my entire family as well as our friend Bill and his family.
I focused on reading the copy of American Gun Culture Report that I'd just received, which I found funny, entertaining, insightful, and refreshing. So excited was I about the magazine that I started writing an article to submit. It felt good to get my opinions about firearms - as well as the intersection with radical politics - into a form that I felt was integrated and balanced.
We were able to get back to Richmond for Memorial Day itself, which I spent catching up on email and feed reading as well as a bit of blogging. I also mowed the lawn and enjoyed a cookout with Kristal, my sister-in-law, her boyfriend John, and our friend Sara.
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Today is the day when Americans typically express gratitude for the sacrifices of soldiers. However, it's just as valid to remember them as victims of State-sponsored violence. Millions of people have been killed by their fellow man, not because the two individuals disagreed, but because some other individual, pompous enough to play chess with others' lives, ordered it. The State's wars have ended lives, ruined entire families, and obliterated whole communities - not just soldiers, but innocent civilian men, women, and children. We should be thankful for this - for the pettiness of state politics, for the gullibility of human beings, for the foreign soldiers our men killed?
Here at Social Memory Complex we remember all victims of state violence, regardless of nationality or professed ideological flavor. None of them deserved to die this way. Until the State is finally overcome, we must keep their memory alive as that which was lost to preserve a power and privilege too monsterous to contemplate much more often than once a year.
Let the picture remind us that the wars we memorialize result in more than gravestones, American flags, and cookouts.
Compare this:
with this:
Am I correct in assuming that all of the mind/body/spirit complexes that exist below levels of mid-sixth-density have a Higher Self at the level of mid-sixth-density? Is this correct?
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I'm through waiting for Scott Adams to figure out how to blog. Somebody needs to tell him his cute little exercises in faux-logic are much less funny without a dog wearing glasses and a guy with a "necktie erection". I mean, this is just a pathetic waste of bandwidth:
If all the experts tell you to go right, and you decide to go left, you're probably stupid. But if you get lucky, and discover a pot of gold along the stupid path, people will call you a leader. You'll still be stupid, but fewer people will feel the need to point that out.
What a humorous observation! He's the Jerry Seinfeld of the blogosphere! He's so predictably irreverent - but topical!
Whatever - it's not even funny, because he uses this gag in every blog post with much less variety than the comic form allows. I find a person who can only conceive of the world in terms of experts and dumb people (which is not an unfair generalization of his blog) probably belongs in the latter category, even if he is trying to make fun-fun. Dilbert is usually a great comic, but Adams if fucking annoying.
This Scott Bieser cartoon really says it all:
Hat tip to the diligent Brad Spangler.
In case you didn't catch the title's pop culture reference, watch this. Funnily enough, today's Dilbert is on the same topic. Amazing how the social memory complex works sometimes.
Via TLF comes this great quote at Coding Horror:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
Heh, yeah, that definitely takes me back to my days working for the military industrial complex.
I have to hand it to Right Thinking Girl: she has tenacity. For some time now she has offered numerous defenses of Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and the legitimacy of Enron's business. Usually these have been wrapped up in metaphysical value judgments rather than a factual analysis of this complex situation. I have criticized her for this on many occasions, with my best points being made here. Now she has released an six part analysis of the recent documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room (her posts come in the following segments: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6).
These sprawling posts lose their appeal about 5 minutes into reading them. For somebody who mercilessly criticizes a movie's artistic value and style, she intersperses every two sentences or so with a totally unnecessarily, distracting, and uninformative screenshot from the movie. She nitpicks stylistic choices of the filmmakers (I didn't necessarily like the tone of the film, either, but why not deal with the substance?) and peppers snarky commentary everywhere. She doesn't seem to understand that, if she thinks the film is biased, the effective retort is to introduce facts, not up the ante on attitude. But, of course, if she were that honest, I'd probably still be hanging out at her blog.
The problem with critiquing RTG's treatment of the documentary is that it is so piecemeal, isolating and questioning each minute in the film, that it's hard to get a general sense of either what the documentary meant to argue or what her rebuttal is. Moreover, because she's confining her commentary to only the film, there's no way to understand the larger debate about Enron and corporate practices. Everything is reduced to how opinionated and biased the documentary is, but the reader of her analysis gets no better or more even-handed sense of Enron's reality. I'm not a huge fan of the film, so I think it's pretty ridiculous to treat it as the end-all-be-all anti-Enron thesis - ridiculous and disingenuous.
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