From Kevin Carson’s review of Michael Shermer’s The Mind of the Market:

The average person sees Wal-Mart, Microsoft, downsizings, oil company profits, offshoring, and all the other unsavory phenomena of the corporate global economy defended in “free market” language, and his response is “if that’s the free market, then the free market be damned.” It’s essentially the same reaction as Huckleberry Finn’s. Huck lacked the conceptual apparatus to make an effective critique of the legitimizing ideology of slavery, or to debunk the Widow Douglas’s “property rights” in Jim. He took the slave system’s ideological self-justification at face value–and then said “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” The average American, likewise, looks at the inequalities and injustices of our corporatist economic system, made possible by massive state intervention on behalf of organized capital, and sees it defended as the “free market.” And his response is the same: “If this is the free market, I’ll go to hell.”

[Police brutality] isn’t irrelevant. It is the boiled-down essence of what is relevant in politics.

In a free society, people would not stand for police shamefully waiting around on the road for somebody to come along and break the law.

Based on these flags, would this not be the fitting flag for mutualists, given their sort of middle ground between the market anarchists (who do yellow) and the syndicalists / socialists (who do red)?

Meh, it was mostly just a chance to play around with Inkscape. As always, your thoughts are welcome. I’m big on the plain ol’ black, myself.

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.”

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.

…

The real reason we cling to guns is that they are ours. And even more, they were our fathers. Ownership of guns is something that distinguished the New World from the Old. In the decadent aristocracies of Europe, guns were largely for the landowners, and “poaching” was punishable by flogging or worse. In the New World, every frontiersman had a gun, and it was an essential part of feeding his family and declaring his liberty. We no longer need to feed our families by hunting, but we still need to assert our liberty, and especially our liberty from the army of experts who claim to know what is best for us.

I hope he’ll forgive the selective quote; the whole post is enlightened, but this was just such a great statement on an issue I hold dear. As for whether or not we’re “bitter”, come on: it’s not just the white rural poor.

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.

(more…)

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.

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, it’s a small price to pay for officer safety. 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.

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.

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.

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.

(more…)

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.

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. (more…)