Monthly Shaarli
December, 2012
The one where Orson Scott Card calls for the overthrow of any government which licenses same-sex marriage.
“… as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative.” Aaron Swartz will always be a hero of mine for that time he almost freed five million articles from JSTOR.
Bitcoin is not about making rapid global transactions with little or no fee. Bitcoin is about preventing monetary tyranny. That is its raison d’être.
Some interesting thoughts on lifespan and population size.
I spent three months hiking the northern half of the Appalachian Trail in 2011, covering 1,200 miles from Harper’s Ferry, WV, to the end of the trail on Mt. Katahdin in Maine. I returned in 2012 to hike the southern half (~1,000 miles). I hiked the entire distance in two pairs of Crocs-brand shoes. This page includes the trail reports I periodically made via email, an annotated interactive map, and other info.
Haha. Oh, rich people, you so rich.
An easy to read introduction to the theory of firms. Of course firms do not need to be ‘hierarchical organizations that are internally directed by command and control.’ They could be cooperatively owned and operated by the workers.
The game of Monopoly has its origins in a game meant to demonstrate the principles of Georgism.
“Veblen put forth a basic distinction between the productiveness of ‘industry’ run by skilled engineers, which manufactures real goods of utility, and the parasitism of ‘business,’ which exists only to make profits for a leisure class which engages in ‘conspicuous consumption’. The only economic contribution by the leisure class is ‘economic waste’, activities that contribute negatively to productivity. By implication, Veblen saw the US economy as being made inefficient and corrupt by men of ‘business’ who deviously put themselves in an indispensable position in society.”
The best essay I’ve read on the purpose of breaking windows as a form of propaganda of the deed: “when an activist tamely busts some window they’re obviously not trying to win by depriving the state of glass surfaces. This too is outreach of a form. But you are not the target audience … That’s why politicians and police consistently go apeshit over things like measly storefront windows. Their control is dependent in no small part on being seen in control. Certain boundaries to what’s considered feasible must be secured at all cost lest they begin to loose the illusion of invulnerability that dissuades the subjugated from rising up. No one in power gets hysterical when a common thief, for example, breaks a window because thieves are perceived as part of the same ecosystem of exploitation in which cops and CEOs position themselves as the apex predators. Political vandalism is potent in part precisely because it risks much for no personal gain. It announces a violation of the established rules"
Some photos and a first-hand account of being arrested at the 888 Turk squat in San Francisco yesterday.
This is a protest I went to back in November. State troopers under Governor Hickenlooper and Denver police under Mayor Hancock had just arrested dozens of people at the Occupy Denver camps and confiscated food and supplies from the kitchen, and then they were made the “guests of honor” at a Denver homeless shelter’s Thanksgiving dinner. It was pathetic.
Cops really hate tents; but they also don’t care much for books.
I disagree with her: protest chants almost never feel meaningful.
An interview with Justin Lee, the director of The Gay Christian Network. Some good questions and answers.
After I posted three links to a video of a Dateline episode featuring a small Arizona religious group, two of the three hosts received DMCA take-down notices from the group’s lawyer and took down the video. So I pulled out my stenotype keyboard and made this quick transcript of the 40-minute program. Corrections welcome.
User-submitted links to information on various religious groups.
Fred Clark on why some church people like to believe silly things.
Asthon Kutcher on SOPA
Mikhail Bakunin on social contract theory.
“That sound you don’t hear — the absence of outrage over marriage rights, and gay spokespeople for middle-American companies — is the sound of social change.”
Nice short introduction to neomedievalism. The rest of this weblog is fun to read, too.
The DA recently added a charge of trespassing and one of interfering with a law officer to my case (and offered me a deferred judgment, which I refused).
James Grimmelmann’s fascinating condensed history of Sealand, a micro-nation on a platform in the North Sea, and the attempt to run a data center there.
Wow. A speech given by Don Mitchell to students at Syracuse University learning how to rule the world: “I find the construction of the American Empire to be utterly reprehensible. I find our diplomatic and military hypocrisy not only on the world stage but at home too to be abhorrent. I find our - that is my and your state’s - role in the world, a role defined by the raw exercise of power, a startling ignorance of what other peoples are like and what they want, to be a sheer exercise not only in arrogance, but in violent bloody-mindedness. I find our reliance on force, on arms, on the technology of death, coupled with our disregard for others' lives - the thousands of Afghani civilians directly killed by our bombs as they missed Mohammed Omar and Osama bin Laden; the at least ten thousands Iraqis so far killed; the fifty to hundred thousand killed in Dresden; the more than a hundred thousand incinerated or condemned to a cancerous death in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the two million Vietna
Kevin Carson gives the standard left-libertarian view of the state as an economic siphon to make possible a parasitic rentier class.
My “I Was Arrested at Occupy Denver” essay is included as page 6 of this publication.
A satire of the entertainment industry’s rent-seeking, set in the first century near the Sea of Galilee.
Laura Jane Grace gives the backstory to Against Me!'s song “I Was a Teenage Anarchist”
“Music has changed in a generation — the bands, the industry. Oh, and me”
Reportedly, the FBI search warrant was for black clothing, paint, sticks, computers and cell phones, and ‘anarchist materials or literature.’ According to an FBI Domestic Terrorism guide published by greenisthenewred.com, “anarchists are criminals seeking an ideology to justify their actions,” and are “not dedicated to a particular issue.” Common meeting places are “college campuses, underground clubs, coffee houses/ internet cafes.” The implication is that owning “anarchist” literature is enough to indicate to the FBI that one is a criminal – even if that person happens to be a student studying political thought. Or maybe particularly if you are a student – the FBI document states that anarchists are “educated persons of various backgrounds, often students.”
“The historical impact of The Ego and Its Own is not easy to assess. However, Stirner’s book can plausibly be claimed to have had an immediate and destructive impact on contemporary left-Hegelianism, to have played a significant role in the intellectual development of Karl Marx (1818–1883), and to have influenced the tradition of individualist anarchism.”
My fellow teetotaler gives a righteous rant on the Obama administration’s hypocritical drug policies: “it’s not a god damned joke! People who smoke marijuana must be set free. It is insane to lock people up.”
A nice post by the Rustbelt Radical sampling some of the music that has come out of the Occupy movement.
This is an interesting instance of a curated Wikipedia spin-off project. It consists of Wikipedia articles re-written with a value-biased policy (to promote “happiness, prosperity, and world peace”) by a much more closed group of editors. I read the article on Tolstoy, which is adapted from a 2005 Wikipedia article, and thought it was well edited (and conveniently shorter than the current WP version).
George Donnelly’s account of being attacked and framed by US Marshals while filming his friends passing out jury nullification pamphlets outside a federal courthouse. This is the kind of thing that will make you hate cops.
Three members of Pussy Riot are serving two year prison sentences for creating this video.
“The best currently available public aggregate data on drone strikes are provided by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), an independent journalist organization. TBIJ reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children.[3] TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind.”
See also Kevin Gosztola’s summary: http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/09/25/life-for-pakistanis-in-us-drone-war-detailed-in-new-report/
[May 25, 2017]: The livingunderdrones.org domain is currently not resolving. But the Standford project page and the wayback machine cache are available:
‘The key move in Judge Jacobs’ opinion is concluding that sexual orientation is a “quasi-suspect” class justifying intermediate scrutiny. This requires the federal government to show that its policy is substantially related to an important governmental interest.’
About Aaron Swartz’s run-in with JSTOR and MIT
The state of mobile privacy and encryption
The Seattle airport has a downstairs area away from restaurants with benches, tables, and [a few] outlets.
“More than a decade ago, Daniel Suelo closed his bank account and moved into a desert cave. Here’s how he eats, sleeps, and evades the law.” Some day I will buy an acre of desert and live kind of like this guy — only with more computers.
The city of Clearwater, FL, is set to criminalize homelessness. They’re looking at both a daytime ban on sitting and a nighttime ban on sleeping.
He describes the movement by five main values: Distributed network architectures, transnationality, economic democracy, hacker ethics, and devolutionism (returning all products back to the commons). Sounds about right.
Looks like a good introduction to Georgism
Free trade is not free, money is debt, and people do not prefer to be wage labourers.
Kevin Carson weighs in on the controversy over the legitimacy of violence in protests: "The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves ‘the state’ have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves ‘the Ku Klux Klan’ or ‘al Qaeda.’"
Zakk Flash responds to Chris Hedges' criticisms of the black bloc tactic.
Although the charges and disputed facts in his case are different than mine, this is encouraging!
Pancho was arrested while meditating at Occupy Oakland and nearly deported. As far as I know after his release he has not been deported to date. See also his interview on Democracy Now! (http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/18/occupy_oakland_protester_pancho_ramos_stierle)
This is disturbing. Some in the OWS movement think the focus should be on corporate influence over politics (instead of police misconduct). But here Graeber reports the NYPD being violent, targeting women, and doing it for the sake of the banks. They’re not separate issues.
I responded to a questionnaire from the citizen journalist who wrote this article, and am quoted in it along with two other activists who were arrested at Occupy-related events (one from the West Coast and one from Australia). I think I came off sounding like I was trying to be insightful without actually being very insightful (someone remind me never to talk to a reporter in real life!), but at least she used my ‘cops hate tents’ quote to close the article. (I don’t know what the ‘police brutality’ bit in the title has to do with anything; I don’t think any of us were brutalized or witnessed brutality.)
This anti-religious fashion police stuff is stupid authoritarianism dressed up as enlightened thinking.
“Candy canes occupy an awkward place in the candy taxonomy.” I don’t quite understand the urge to invent history in an attempt at authenticating an idea. Whether it’s Joseph Smith and his Native American wars, so many gurus and their past lives (usually as famous historical figures), or “a candymaker in Indiana.” It doesn’t help.
When atheists sound like fundamentalist Christians.
A fairly concise introduction to Christian anarchism by one of the most active academics researching the topic.
Expanding on Tucker’s four monopolies of the state
Count me in the left-wing market anarchist school.
Don Mitchell coined the phrase ‘annihilation of property by law’ to describe the legal exclusion of the public (including the homeless) from ‘public’ spaces. Last year’s Occupy evictions show the violence cities are willing to inflict to so annihilate their public spaces.
Even Pat Robertson sees the problem.
A short essay on the criminalization of homelessness, with a focus on the inherent dignity of persons.
Glenn Greenwald’s introduction: “At some point in the future, I believe history will be quite clear about who the actual criminals are in this case: not Mehanna, but rather the architects of the policies he felt compelled to battle and the entities that have conspired to consign him to a cage for two decades”
Detroit high school suspends 100 students for walk-out protest. Those kids respond by starting a Free School while they’re suspended.
"I’m astounded that adults argue this so-called philosophy." There’s also a part 2 where you can learn about the silly notion of "libertarian/socialism": http://www.opednews.com/articles/Delusional-Anarchists-Part-by-Joe-Giambrone-120513-310.html
Paul Graham on property. His idea of property as that which “works” is slowly getting back to Max Stirner’s common-sense definition: “Whoever knows how to take, to defend, the thing, to him belongs property.”
Mormonism in Boston during the 70s and 80s
Transcript of the Mormon South Park episode.
I’m pleased to discover that this is a thing.
Larry Norman’s ‘666’ was the NPR song of the day June 5, 2008
A non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. We provide recordings, sheet music, and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Put simply, our mission is to set music free.
Denver’s Police Chief Robert White and Councilman Brooks praised the Church of Scientology at the opening of the church’s new Denver headquarters.
A brief history of homebrew transhumanism, from computer hacking to grinding.
“Run, philosophers, run (everyone else, too!) with whatever part of the anti-plutocracy message you find most urgent or salient; find whatever allies you can; make noise or pursue quiet changes as suits you and the means at hand.”
“Franciscan poverty does not mean that the monk must make every effort to avoid owning any particular thing, but rather that the monk completely abdicates any right to claim ownership. They don’t just lack all possessions, they lack the very ability to "possess."”
“The basic tenet of Simulationism — its 'Central Dogma' — is that the entire universe is nothing more than a simulation that’s been constructed by a highly intelligent being who resides in a place called Noumenal Reality”
"President Obama’s inability to simply state whether he’s for or against gay marriage is unacceptable," Obama said during a spirited 30-minute address in which he sharply criticized the president for failing time and again to articulate his beliefs.
“Without a concept of mutual aid, solidarity, and common struggle against an oppressive system, libertarianism is no more than a way to whitewash privilege and sweep injustice under the rug of 'free choice'. It’s not enough to defend a hollow freedom, because people need more than that. We can help each other achieve more than just freely choosing the best in a set of options the powerful and wealthy provide us.”
An English interview with some members of Pussy Riot, an anti-Putin, feminist-punk, Russian performance group. In Feburary several [alleged] members were arrested after the group performed a "punk prayer" in a Russian Orthodox church. Three members were convicted of "hooliganism" for the act and sentenced to two years imprisonment.
“And your old buddy Ronald Reagan! Now there’s a lesson in liberty for you. On one side of People’s Park there is the State of California with its right of eminent domain. It took the land. I would say it stole the land. How, I wonder, do you describe the right of eminent domain? On the other side are people who have an exotic notion about ownership. They don’t think it should be exercised at the point of a gun or a bayonet. They worked that land. They homesteaded it. They owned it in a sense far deeper than any government proclamation. Think of it that way: a scrap of government paper on one side; real people on the other, and your old friend Ronald Reagan, so help us, now supporting that scrap of paper against the people, with as much bloodcurdling diligence as any man you ever fought in the political arena. Senator, are you really sure you want to be a deputy sheriff for state power? That’s just what you are on the other side of the fence at the People’s Park!”
The Oatmeal explains why people who want to buy content pirate it instead.
Nice quote of Jefferson on patents
I can see no point in this except to disrupt the activist groups who use the service.
A friend organized a project to crochet hats for the homeless (or other cold people) this winter. She gave us a simple hat pattern to learn, and these notes are my attempt to make sense of it and explain to other beginning crocheters
Don’t you just hate it when homeless people are always existing somewhere?
Wendy McElroy on Georgism
Part II: http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/06/21/the-single-tax-a-refutation/comment-page-1/
What we need more of is cooperatives.
While I obviously disagree that economic rent is ever a good thing, this is a well presented introduction to rent-seeking. I also liked the same author’s (Dr. Ross) article presenting the classical-liberal view of the state (http://www.friesian.com/freestat.htm). There seem to be many interesting articles on this website.
Mike Leung and David Ellerman’s page about wage slavery and worker cooperatives.
They don’t denounce what the state does, they just object to who’s doing it. This is why the people most victimized by the state display the least interest in libertarianism. Those on the receiving end of coercion don’t quibble over their coercers’ credentials. If you can’t pay or don’t want to, you don’t much care if your deprivation is called larceny or taxation or restitution or rent. If you like to control your own time, you distinguish employment from enslavement only in degree and duration.
I was there. I wrote about it! (http://americancynic.net/log/2012/5/6/my_may_day_2012.html)
A cute story made up of photographs of little plastic people. I like how the ducks are wearing the red square… and how the anarchist saves the day :)
Good article about Montreal’s Anarchopanda. It turns out he’s a philosophy professor.
A good rundown of several of the new and proposed anti-camping laws aimed at the homeless and the Occupy movement.
Give us this day our daily bread Ⓐnd forgive us our trespasses
I’m the thumbnail image for this article!
A photo, quote, and brief bio of 20 people arrested at OWS. My favorite quote: “I think that everyone should be arrested at least once.”
Vermin Supreme is a candidate for the President of the United States of America. Free ponies for all.
On Karl Hess’s move to the Left.
By Andy Alexis-Baker of JesusRadicals.com. This paper is relevant to Christians beyond Anabaptists, and to people beyond Christians.
This site aggregates some good religious content.
Mormon channel: http://www.patheos.com/Mormon.html
Atheist channel: http://www.patheos.com/Atheist.html
Nate Phelps, who left the Westboro Baptist Church when he was 18, answers redditors' questions
One of the Pussy Riot defenders, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said at the trial yesterday, “We are freer than those who are prosecuting us. We can say everything we want, and they have their mouths shut and are puppets.” Every Christian in the world should be cheering her on.
A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court has issued an opinion affirming that California’s Proposition 8 is unconstitutional! From the majority (2-1) opinion: "The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry."
If nothing else, the Occupy protests have helped bring attention to laws aimed at criminalizing homelessness and the authoritarian restriction of public spaces.
No Border camp sticker from a 2009 Lesbos camp.
There was a No Borders camp at the US-Mexico border for five days in 2007! I wish I had been there. Though they did get beat up pretty bad by the US Border Patrol on the last day. Check out the videos. There is also a series of three videos on YouTube summarizing the entire event:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccePCNfEsQ0
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNJxYgEduSs
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9wGm6VA208&feature;=youtu.be
This is the issue by which I became associated with Occupy Denver in the first place.
Of everything Howard Zinn has written, this is my favorite.
Once again, good on the NLG. Note the protesters in San Diego charged with felony conspiracy for interrupting a political speech.
“The reason I’m wrong isn’t because gay people shouldn’t join the Army. It’s because no-one should join the Army.”
Anarchy is the radical notion that other people are not your property.
A glimpse at sleeping on Denver’s 16th Street Mall in face of the urban camping ban being discussed.
Chomsky’s assessment of Obama’s presidency: "In many ways, it’s a little worse than what I expected, but I didn’t expect anything."
Quebec criminalized protest in wake of the Montreal student strikes. This is how the people of Montreal responded.
I went to a few protests/marches last fall associated with Occupy Denver. It seems like it’s always the guy with the megaphone who least represents everybody else present.
An article arguing that “Democratic socialism is the very essence of Mormon theology and scripture.” See also my list of Mormon anarchism links: http://americancynic.net/log/2011/4/18/mormon_anarchism_/_some_links.html
Rap song with great lyrics: “No one is illegal / We’re all people / We’re all equal / No borders / No fences / No nations / No prisons / No deportations”
Some comments on the FLDS theocracy in Colorado City in light of speculation that church members tortured a kitten.
My first experience being arrested and some comments on the liberal/radical divide within the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Interesting thoughts on the unintended consequences of vegetarianism: killing animals to eat them versus killing animals to eat vegetables.
“We have said that marriage is instituted for the sanctification of love: it is a pact of chastity, charity and justice, by which the spouses declare themselves publicly to be freed, both of them by one another, from the tribulations of the flesh and the cares of gallantry. Consequently, it is sacred to all and inviolable. That is why, apart from some stipulations of interest also require publicity, the family and the city appear in the ceremony: the engagement of the couple, made in view of Justice, carries farther than their persons; their conjugal conscience becomes part of the social conscience, and, as the marriage insures their dignity, it is for the society that proclaims it a glory and a progress.”
These guys think they’re so funny. “Here’s an exchange of letters between Russell and his namesake, Lord Russell of Liverpool, which took place in February 1959.”
“I’d go Rothbard one further. Why is the criterion for de facto government status the amount of profits directly subsidized from state revenue? What about corporations that function within a web of state regulatory protections, and artificial property rights like Bill Gates’ ‘intellectual property,’ without which they couldn’t operate in black ink for a single day. Anyone who’s read much of my work for any length of time knows that I consider the entire Fortune 500 a pretty good proxy for such de facto branches of the state. As I already argued in an earlier post, the largest corporations are so intertwined with the state that the very distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ becomes meaningless.”
¡Yo Soy 132!
Also: http://americancynic.net/log/2012/6/4/north_america_is_stirring.html
A good interview with Kristian Williams about abolishing the police and stuff.
Illustrating the difference between direct- and indirect-action.
Police behaving poorly at political protests.
"Fortunately, it won’t work. If you think the music industry has a hard time combating file-sharing, just wait till the old-line manufacturing companies try to prevent hundreds of thousands of hardware hackers in neighborhood garage factories from replicating 'pirated' industrial designs on CAD files from The Pirate Bay.
"This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by the rentier classes, the lords of scarcity who’ve lived off our sweat for five thousand years, to stave off their inevitable demise."
Jill Stein pulled a Ralph Nader.
“Mormonism is not so simple as a quirky version of American conservatism, and both Mormons themselves and their fellow Americans would do well to notice.”