On Thursday, the Supreme Court struck down several key restrictions on corporate campaign contributions. While many lament the expected influx of yet more corporate cash into an already compliant political system, does anybody really think McCain-Feingold had accomplished much of an improvement? These regulations only affect those who cannot afford the lawyers, accountants, and other professionals who spend their careers finding ways to circumvent the spirit of the laws.
There are two key elements to the court's conclusion: the constitutional prohibition of free speech restrictions and the status of the corporation as a person. Libertarians should not complain about the court's conclusions with respect to the first element. The government must abstain from interfering with any person's political contributions, monetary or polemical.
In the past the court has seen fit to abridge first amendment rights in cases where the government has a compelling interest. Campaign finance laws have usually rested on this basis, relying on the court's acknowledgement of the need for balancing a variety of interests. In throwing out McCain-Feingold, the Supreme Court can be seen as effectively reining in these deviations from the letter of the law. A strictly defined freedom of speech should certainly be defended.
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I've used git on many other people's computers and they never have the shortcuts that make git nimble for me to use. Until just now, I had know idea how those aliases were set. From a cursory reading of the docs, I gathered that you can edit your aliases directly with git config --global -e. For example:
[merge]
tool = opendiff
[core]
excludesfile = /Users/jeremyweiland/.gitignore
editor = mate -w
[alias]
st = status
ci = commit
co = checkout
br = branch
lg = log --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset' --abbrev-commit --date=relative
[color]
pager = true
ui = auto
Apparently Richmond City Council wants to pay for the privilege of having my neighborhood hurt. Please come to the City Council meeting at 6:00 pm tonight to stop the council from using Federal stimulus dollars to pay taxes on a private developer's riverfront condo complex. It's such a good investment, the developer doesn't even want to risk all of his own money!
More at springhillrva.org.
There are many reasons to oppose this scheme. Governments like city council have too often used taxpayer-financed carrots to entice developers into making precisely the bad decisions that led to an oversupply and crash in the real estate market. If the project fails, will these City Council members be around to reimburse the taxpayers for either the stimulus money or the project tax revenue we lost by financing this? No, they'll be several years out of office by then, in all likelihood. Let's not insult citizen intelligence with pledges of accountability, now.
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As many of you know, Tasha and I bought a house last year in Richmond. We found ourselves in the Springhill neighborhood, a little known historic area that started out a hundred years ago as a place for the families of Manchester industrial workers. The neighborhood is small and often overlooked, which is curious considering that, aside from being across the river, it's in the middle of the city. I can walk to the bottom or VCU, and the James River Park System and Belle Isle are blocks away.
Richmond is well known for being a hub for neighborhood blogs, so I've been sitting on the springhillrva.org domain for a while intending to launch a blog. Now that I'm getting my personal IT in order, I thought it was time to tidy the site up and make the announcement. Hopefully I can get my neighbors to help out maintaining it, and hopefully they'll find it useful to do so.
Hope everybody had a great New Years Eve! Tasha and I celebrated at an awesome performance by Brothers Past. The second set consisted of all the songs from their forthcoming album, most of which are brand spanking new. So that was exciting. We also had a great experience at the gorgeous Morris House Hotel, and we hope to stay longer the next time we're there.
Just wanted to throw some news items out there. As you may have noticed, commenting is now available via Disqus. I plan on importing the old posts and comments over the next month. Let me know if you experience any problems.
As for leftlibertarian.org, that project has proceeded splendidly. I'm now pretty sure that I've caught up with all the old, non-defunct feeds it was aggregating from before. Let me know if I've missed you. I will not be importing legacy content from the old site, since, well, it exists elsewhere. I will be continuing to tweak the site, with particular emphasis on truncating posts more cleanly and consistently. I also need to generate a list of all the blogs I aggregate; shouldn't be too difficult.
Hope everybody has a wonderful new year! Tasha and I will be heading to the Brothers Past NYE show in Philadelphia. This will be my first BP show in a while, so I'm looking forward to it! Just hope the weather cooperates.
Happy New Year!
leftlibertarian.org is back! I've moved the site off WordPress, which was giving me too many problems. The site should be simple enough - there's no commenting, and the core functionality has nothing to do with creating content, only publishing it. So I started thinking about why I was going out and gathering / parsing feeds when Google Reader does it perfectly well, and has an API I can access.
The new site has a Google Reader account associated with it (leftlibertarian.org). Instead of going out to a list of feeds, downloading them, databasing posts, and generating web pages on requests, I just grab a JSON encoded version of my reading list as if my site were a Google Reader user and generate pages off of that! Super fast, super lightweight, super easy (once I figured out how I wanted to go about it).
The cool thing about this is that the API makes available just about all of the Google Reader features, including starring, comments, sharing, etc. The Google Reader web application is really just a front end for a rather powerful backend. Over the long run, I'd like to leverage these features to make the site more socially driven and dynamic but without needing a database or anything but a basic web server, cron, and ruby.
The site is very much beta right now. I'm using a HTML parsing library to truncate posts, so if you see anomalies there or have any other comments, let me know. admin atsign left libertarian period org
If acts_as_enumerated classes are borking when you run your tests, here's a nasty workaround I did that just might work for you:
class MembershipStatus < ActiveRecord::Base
if RAILS_ENV == 'test'
def self.[](label)
case label
when :pending
MembershipStatus.new(:id => 1)
when :accepted
MembershipStatus.new(:id => 2)
when :denied
MembershipStatus.new(:id => 3)
when :invited
MembershipStatus.new(:id => 4)
end
end
else
acts_as_enumerated
end
end
Everybody and their mother has invoked the old Mussolini quote (regardless of its accuracy) about renaming fascism to "corporatism". It always surprises me how many different political conclusions this point is used to augment. For some, it means private business is bad because it takes advantage of a vulnerable democratic political process. For others, it means firms are enlisted into the agendas of big bad politicians, restraining the so-called "free market" competition that benefits us all.
When considering each competing interpretation, it's most interesting and instructive to note which institution plays the victim and which the oppressor. After all, the quote is often used by people who assume the legitimacy of both big business and big government. The quibble lies solely with the relative power of one party relative to the other.
To my mind, the victim/oppressor dichotomy is positively self-reinforcing. In this case, the ontological dynamics serve to restrict what might be a broader conversation about not just the powers that be, but the powers we might have alternatively. Even radicals reinforce these established concepts: capitalists must have an articulable definition of the corporation and of the government to be able to ensure the victory of one over the other. Same for radical communists. If they didn't have set definitions of each institution, how would they understand the conditions of success towards which they strive?
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It's been a long, long time. I went to Amsterdam. I reconnected with my host family, with whom I'd had no contact for 13 years. I revolutionized my productivity strategy. I delved into new areas of ruby. And more, I'm sure, which is hard to remember because I didn't freaking write it down.
Why have I been gone so long? The biggest reason is spiritual; much of the infighting among the Alliance left me feeling like I had been working with self-critical neo-maoists who were more interested in purifying the party than critically thinking about freeing the actually existing people. Disengaging from the ideology was essential to rediscovering those ideas for which I'm willing to fight.
A huge, giant part of it was technical problems related to WordPress which I've still not figured out. It took $38/month in virtual hardware to run my sites. Much of this was related to leftlibertarian.org (still down). In an attempt to pare down the resources I required to run what I thought were, in the end, rather simple operations, I moved to nginx to escape Apache's well known memory issues. This ended up being more complicated than I expected, the result being I'm still down.
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As the transhumanists go nuts, I merely look forward to understanding better how fundamental the brain is to consciousness.
I've written a few drafts of this basic essay over the past two months or so, but never published any of them because I was still trying to remain open to having my mind changed. In following the dialogue surrounding this brouhaha, my hesitancy to write something of my own has allowed me to get sidetracked into some harsh debates about other topics, such as moral universalism. Realizing that I left much unsaid about my thoughts on the original matter, I went through and found something I wrote that says it best. It also represents what I thought a month ago, but I stand behind all of it (though I might be less polite now).
I suppose it's high time I compose a coherent, integrated statement on the conversation surrounding Keith Preston's recent essay, Is Extremism in Defense of Sodomy No Vice?. The delay in consolidating my thoughts into an "official" response has been fortunate; I stood a good chance of succumbing to my own certainty on quite a few occasions there. Many participants in this dialogue probably discount the debt I owe them, for I am taking some fundamental lessons away from this episode.
My motivation through all this has not been to defend words, but rather to protect those fragile threads which moor egalitarianism and anti-privilege to this troubled planet. The nascent spirit surrounding pan-secessionism reminds me of the Free State Project. And anytime libertarians escape the familiar, comfortable world of cerebral debate to materially advance our condition and our consciousness, I am optimistic. Not for the ideology, towards which Robert Anton Wilson displayed the only proper attitude; rather, for the people who presently suffer while we argue how many psychological pathologies of authority can dance on the head of a heteropatriarchy. As exactingly consistent and logical as they may be, libertarian writing and debate constitute the epiphenomena of resistance, not the thing itself. The latter exists outside the safety of self-validating opinions and clear sociological ontologies; it is dangerous precisely *because* it is of consequence.
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There is evidence that the turmoil surrounding the election in Iran is part of a neoconservative legacy regime change operation.
