Editor's Pick-of-the-Update
[Playboy Magazine article – mildly NSFW; let’s just say all the especially interesting bits are covered]. “Many of the people making decisions [in Washington, D.C.] have been in and out of the same set of revolving doors connecting government, conservative think tanks, lobbying firms, law firms and the defense industry. So strong is the bond between lobbyists, defense contractors and the Pentagon that it is known in Washington as ‘the iron triangle.’ And this triangle inevitably gets what it wants.” Also available in .pdf.
Tool of the Update
Urban Dictionary: “1. tool: One who lacks the mental capacity to know he is being used....”
“Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters... the people we are trying to save.... You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” – “Morpheus,” The Matrix
A bonehead letter-to-the-editor from one Carol Solnom: “The article "Police ramping up to get tougher on guns" (Jan. 7) is too little too late. I hate guns. In today's society there is no need for the average citizen to own or carry a gun… Tighter gun control? I'll go so far as to say ban guns. That's the only way.” (Via The War on Guns.) Uh-huh. And I hate naïve tools. The reason most people like me need to carry guns is to protect ourselves from “police” and from the politicians that people like Ms. Solnom elect to office. (That’s not even to say anything about the criminals who don’t listen to gun laws.)
Unfiled
General category for links of interest to anarchists, individualists, and so forth. Anything that doesn’t fit in a “special” category gets filed here.
A list of the “most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.”
It’s illegal. “In purely objective [sic] terms, beverage alcohol is a recreational hard drug: mind-numbing, easy to misuse and intimately connected with aggression, carelessness, and despair. When a drugged individual is involved in a violent crime or an accident, the drug is most often alcohol…. A similar scenario exists among pharmaceutical drugs, with substantial risks accompanying their benefits.” Article also available at MAP.
“For all the talk about the threat of "Little Brother" this year (youtubers and bloggers ready to distribute celebrity and citizen malfeasance within minutes), Big Brother still got some life in him yet. Here are some of his finest moments from the last year.” Via Hellbound Alleee.
Per Bylund with an excellent statement of what some might call “anarchism without adjectives:” “This means I am no champion of a certain system or structure – all I know is that without [State] rule, people will make choices and people will act.…But exactly how they choose to act I cannot really say. Actually, it isn’t my business as long as they don’t use force to take that which is mine or restrain me in any way.”
“How, then, should the world ‘remember’ Pinochet? One of his opponents (who is known for his wry sense of humor) has suggested that a national cuspidor be created, where all Chileans who will never see justice can join together and spit on the dead dictator’s memory. Memorials are commemorations – how does one memorialize a man who for so many brought terror, death, and the destruction of democracy? We say there should be no memorial to Pinochet at all, ever.”
“New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that former President Gerald R. Ford's pardon of former President Richard M. Nixon ‘is now universally celebrated.’ However, Brooks ignored his own newspaper's December 28 editorial, which noted that the Times editorial page had criticized the pardon at the time...”
Stefan Molyneux with yet another tour de force: “People like to argue that the government should control the use of guns. Why? Because there are bad people who would use those guns to hurt us. The logical rule invoked? Well, we need a gang with more guns (the government) to protect us from gangs with fewer guns (criminals).”
It might be just me, but Mises.org has been a bit weak on good, original columns and essays lately. This article by Tim Swanson is a refreshing breath of air: “Could you imagine the economic impact on the domestic airline industry if there was a 1-in-50 chance of your plane crashing? In all reality, it would not exist beyond the research and hobbyist industries.” If you want to see the extent to which the Sheeple will defend this sacred cow with nothing more than straw-men and emotional, nationalistic knee-jerks, see the comments on the Digg page.
Great post by Thomas Knapp.
James Leroy Wilson of Independent Country: “What I proposed above is only different in degree from what many people advocate now. And the justifications - certain services are human rights, individualism is selfish, freedom isn't absolute, individual actions have social consequences, etc. - are very common.”
I had thought all those monuments to dead state thugs in Washington, D.C. were bad enough... but this really takes the cake.
Via Wolfesblog via LRC blog: “TIJUANA, Mexico — Disarmed municipal police patrolled alongside armed state police Friday, a sight that brought some comfort to many in this border city where municipal police are often equated with corruption and a plague of drug-fueled violence.”
At the Osterley Times: “His legacy will be the Iraq war and it is a war that he has lost in spectacular fashion. We expect too much if we expect him to admit this. So he would rather risk the lives of more US troops rather than admit his defeat and go down in history as the worst American President ever.”
thehim writes: “Somehow, I was able to subconsciously urge Matt Rosenberg to write a post about how dangerous marijuana is because it would be so incredibly misinformed that I could just write the response in my sleep. But seriously, I had no part in this. Matt decided all by himself to take a break from writing about how terrified he is of brown people in order to demonstrate how little he knows about pot.” What an utterly delicious post.
Walter Williams: “Not many complimentary things are said about politicians. When a problem arises, people say, ‘Government ought to do something.’ They seem to have forgotten politicians run the government. Many think things can be changed by electing different politicians. But I ask: Given the incentives politicians face, why should we expect one politician to differ significantly from another? We should focus less on personalities and more on rules.”
That's Outrageous!
Remember when everybody used to say “that’s outrageous” so often that the word got to the point of meaning nothing? I’m bringing it back: The “best of” ridiculous, appalling, outlandish, and otherwise outrageous behavior and running-off-at-the-mouth by states, statists, media shills and hucksters, and members of those large unionized gangs we call “police departments.” Don’t you love living in the land of the free?
”On Friday the Tufts historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto was arrested by Atlanta police as he crossed the middle of the street between the Hilton and Hyatt hotels. After being thrown on the ground and handcuffed, the former Oxford don was formally arrested, his hands cuffed behind his back.” Such immoral miscreants, these pressed and dressed academics. Way to show these jaywalkers who’s boss! See also the HNN exclusive.
Score one for the drug warriors: “In the past two decades, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has spent at least $175 million in direct spending and grants to the states to eradicate feral hemp plants, popularly known as "ditch weed." The plants, the hardy descendants of hemp plants grown by farmers at the federal government's request during World War II, do not contain enough THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, to get people high.” This is your “war on drugs,” America.
And one for the shrinks: “Huard had entered the Allan Memorial Institute in 1957 after suffering postpartum depression after the birth of her second child. Her newborn had become ill and Huard was having trouble sleeping. But instead of helping her, the institute's director, Ewen Cameron, used her as a guinea pig to carry out experimental brainwashing techniques...”
Speechlessness-Inducing Story of the Update
Some things just leave me speechless; usually I can at least come up with a sarcastic, irreverent, or vaguely pithy parenthetical cheap-shot. Sometimes I just can’t.
Also at Classically Liberal: “It is hard to believe this story. I have long argued that cops are out of control and the schools are run by morons. This story contains both elements. A 12-year-old special education student was arrested by police for wetting her pants.”
Classics & "New Classics"
Pieces you should be reading, even if some of them are a bit aged. "New classics" too.
"Joining the traditional rationalizations for state coercion — 'God’s will,' 'the consent of the governed,' and 'social justice' — comes a fourth: 'coercion as treatment.' Unlike theocracy, democracy , and socialism, however, pharmacracy has met little opposition." Non-gated .pdf here. See also: Thomas Szasz interviewed by Jacob Sullum.
The Onion doing more of what it does best: “WASHINGTON, DC—With national stupid-shit consumption at an all-time high and federal shit projections indicating sharply rising levels of stupidity over the next decade and a half, a small but vocal group of lobbyists has revived an old debate on Capitol Hill, calling for strict, federally mandated limits on incredibly stupid shit.”
Back to the Roots
Classics from the history of anarchism. Criteria: the writer must be dead.
Subtitled “How Far They Agree, and Wherein They Differ.” An indispensable classic from the acidic pen of American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, including perhaps the best explanation of Marxism I’ve seen to date.
Muckraking the Corporate State
One or more pieces, either fresh or aged, "muckraking" the machinations of the alliance between politicians and their favorites in the "private" sector.
Classic from Pete Guither: “The actual story shows a much different picture. Those who voted on the legal fate of this plant never had the facts, but were dependent on information supplied by those who had a specific agenda to deceive lawmakers. You'll see below that the very first federal vote to prohibit marijuana was based entirely on a documented lie on the floor of the Senate.”
Kevin Carson: “Via Joel Schlosberg, by private email. The NYT recently published an op-ed in honor of the 100th anniversary of publication of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Quoth Schlosberg: "as you might expect, it describes the 'official' interpretation to a T." Indeed... The only problem with the official version is that it's just about a 180-degree reversal of the truth in every detail.” Much more after the link.
Off-Topic
Even serious anarchist types need diversions from time to time...
"More than half of all writing advice you receive over your lifetime will be incorrect, incomplete, or howlingly wrong. You will encounter advice driven by neuroses, bitterness, failure, ego, and arrogance. In books and in writing workshops, you will have instructors who mistake their own path to success as the only path to success. Yet others will try to impose upon you their own writing style, their own list of valid subject matter and approaches." (Via VCTB.)
Satire: “The Lesbian Delusion doesn’t argue that lesbians don’t exist, but that they are actually worshipped by men more extensively than God, based on complete myths and wishful thinking that can not stand up to scientific thinking. ‘Most significantly,’ Professor Dawkins explained, ‘the male species has constructed this fantasy of the typical lesbian as an Angelina Jolie lookalike, who really only does it with women to turn on and attract men.’”
“’Skin has been studied to absolute death by dermatologists,’ Jablonski said jokingly during a recent visit to New York City. ‘They know it inside and out from the point of view of diseases that afflict it. What we wanted to learn was how human skin came to be as it is and what that meant for humanity.’”
Maybe you really do learn something every day: “The point is that we want to count one for each family of derived words like snow, snowy, snowing, snowlike, snowstorm, etc.; if you don't do that, then Eskimoan languages not only have millions of words for snow, they have millions of words for fish, millions of words for coffee, millions of words for absolutely anything, which makes the whole discussion irrelevant to anything about snow.” See also: polysynthetic language.
So wrong.
So cool. For instance, here’s illustrations from Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. And as a kicker it’s all been released into the public domain.
So evil: “What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques.” More of Lovecraft’s stuff is at Wikisource.
