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Posts filed under Effluvia and Ephemera

Technicalities

Well, I feel kind of dumb.

But, first the good news.

I’ve recently added a new feature to the comments form on this blog. If you have an OpenID identity — and everyone who has a blog through WordPress.com or LiveJournal, or an account with AOL Instant Messenger, already has an OpenID identity — you can now use that to sign your comments on posts at radgeek.com (meanwhile getting a leg up on the comment spam filters).

OpenID is a free and decentralized system for using a single sign-in to vouch for your identity (or, if you prefer, your regular pseudonym) across many different websites. Because it is decentralized, you don’t ever have to turn any sign-in credentials over to this website, and your ID also remains good as long as your homepage exists — unlike single sign-in systems based on centralized providers like Microsoft or Six Apart, it doesn’t get compromised or killed if any one company goes under. It’s a neat project, and very useful for simple ID tasks like signing comments. So I figured I would do my part by enabling the use of OpenID on blog comments here. I downloaded the Alternate OpenID for WordPress plugin to handle the basics, and then set about hacking it to cover the details of how I wanted it to work.

So, the good news is that OpenID sign-ins are, as far as I can tell, up and running and ready for you to use. To use the feature, fill the appropriate URI into the URI field and then mash the button next to your URI to sign in using OpenID. Thus, for example:

After you mash the button, you’ll be shuttled over to your OpenID provider, where they will ask you to sign in, or whatever it is that they do to verify your identity. When you’re done doing that, you should be shuttled back to radgeek.com where you’ll now be recognized by your OpenID address. The OpenID plugin will try to create an intelligent user name to display based on the information you provide it, but if you don’t like the user name it supplies you with, you can click on the user name and edit your name (or any other part of your local record) to your heart’s content. Once you’re satisfied, you can return to the page and post your reply under your OpenID signature. Hooray!

Now, all that said and done, here’s the bad news. While I was tweaking the OpenID plugin, I managed to introduce some changes which, without my knowledge, borked the normal operation of the comments form here. Meaning that if you submitted a comment any time in the last several days, and it hasn’t appeared on the page yet, it’s not because it’s waiting in the moderation queue; it’s because (argh) WordPress lost it, due to said borking. In particular, if you tried to comment on:

… and your comment hasn’t appeared yet on the site, then it’s because I never got your comment. If you can say again what you had to say then, I’d be very glad to hear it; if not, I understand, and I really apologize for the trouble for this bout of blockheadedness on my part.

I wish that I had a more auspicious occasion for unveiling the new feature on the blog.

Working Within The System comix

In Friday’s Boondocks re-run, Huey Freeman learns a valuable lesson that certain fearless railroading rEVOLutionaries should have figured out a long time ago.

Huey: Huey Freeman, fearless revolutionary, prepares for his next mission of liberation!

Huey: Disguised as a mild-mannered census enumerator, Huey heads off to acquire sensitive information on the enemy.

Huey: Later, that information will be used to strike the final great blow to the evil system of….

Huey: Oh, forget it. There’s no way for a revolutionary to justify a government job.

Caesar: But it was a fine attempt ….

Happy Dead Prez Day.

Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism

Update 2010-03-02: The full text of Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism is now available online. Huzzah!

Here’s what I got in the mail Monday afternoon. It took a week longer to reach me than it did to reach Roderick; I don’t know whether that’s one of the perks of being an editor rather than a mere contributor like me, or simply because I’m way out west and he’s in Alabama.

A hardbound copy of Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country? Edited by Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan. Published by Ashgate Press (pictured here).

Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism

The purpose of this essay is political revolution. And I don’t mean a revolution in libertarian political theory, or a revolutionary new political strategy, or the kind of revolution that consists in electing a cadre of new and better politicians to the existing seats of power. When I say a revolution, I mean the real thing: I hope that this essay will contribute to the overthrow of the United States government, and indeed all governments everywhere in the world. You might think that the argument of an academic essay is a pretty slender reed to lean on; but then, every revolution has to start somewhere, and in any case what I have in mind may be somewhat different from what you imagine. For now, it will be enough to say that I intend to give you some reasons to become an individualist anarchist,1 and undermine some of the arguments for preferring minimalist government to anarchy. In the process, I will argue that the form of anarchism I defend is best understood from what Chris Sciabarra has described as a dialectical orientation in social theory,2 as part of a larger effort to understand and to challenge interlocking, mutually reinforcing systems of oppression, of which statism is an integral part—but only one part among others. Not only is libertarianism part of a radical politics of human liberation, it is in fact the natural companion of revolutionary Leftism and radical feminism.

My argument will take a whole theory of justice—libertarian rights theory3—more or less for granted: that is, some version of the non-aggression principle and the conception of negative rights that it entails. Also that a particular method for moral inquiry—ethical individualism—is the correct method, and that common claims of collective obligations or collective entitlements are therefore unfounded. Although I will discuss some of the intuitive grounds for these views, I don’t intend to give a comprehensive justification for them, and those who object to the views may just as easily to object to the grounds I offer for them. If you have a fundamentally different conception of rights, or of ethical relations, this essay will probably not convince you to become an anarchist. On the other hand, it may help explain how principled commitment to a libertarian theory of rights—including a robust defense of private property rights—is compatible with struggles for equality, mutual aid, and social justice. It may also help show that libertarian individualism does not depend on an atomized picture of human social life, does not require indifference to oppression or exploitation other than government coercion, and invites neither nostalgia for big business nor conservatism towards social change. Thus, while my argument may not directly convince those who are not already libertarians of some sort, it may help to remove some of the obstacles that stop well-meaning Leftists from accepting libertarian principles. In any case, it should show non-libertarians that they need another line of argument: libertarianism has no necessary connection with the vulgar political economy or bourgeois liberalism that their criticism targets.

The threefold structure of my argument draws from the three demands made by the original revolutionary Left in France: Liberty, Equality, and Solidarity.4 I will argue that, rightly understood, these demands are more intertwined than many contemporary libertarians realize: each contributes an essential element to a radical challenge to any form of coercive authority. Taken together, they undermine the legitimacy of any form of government authority, including the limited government imagined by minarchists. Minarchism eventually requires abandoning your commitment to liberty; but the dilemma is obscured when minarchists fracture the revolutionary triad, and seek liberty abstracted from equality and solidarity, the intertwined values that give the demand for freedom its life, its meaning, and its radicalism. Liberty, understood in light of equality and solidarity, is a revolutionary doctrine demanding anarchy, with no room for authoritarian mysticism and no excuse for arbitrary dominion, no matter how limited or benign. . . .

1. For the purposes of this essay, I will mostly be using the term anarchism as shorthand for individualist anarchism; since the defense of anarchism I will offer rests on individualist principles, it will not provide a cogent basis for communist, primitivist, or other non-individualist forms of anarchism. And I will use the term individualist anarchism in a broad sense, to describe any position that (1) denies the legitimacy of any form of (monopoly) government authority, (2) on individualist ethical grounds. As I will use it, the term picks out a family of similar *doctrines*, not a particular self-description or historical tradition. Thus it includes, but is not limited to, the specific nineteenth and early twentieth-century socialist movement known as individualist anarchism, whose members included Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, and Voltairine de Cleyre. It also includes the views of twentieth and twenty-first-century anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman; contemporary self-described individualist anarchists and mutualists such as Wendy McElroy, Joe Peacott, and Kevin Carson; and of others, such as Gustave de Molinari, Lysander Spooner, or Robert LeFevre, who rejected the State on individualist grounds but declined (for whatever reasons) to refer to themselves as anarchists. Many self-described socialist anarchists deny that anarcho-capitalism should be counted as a form of anarchism at all, or associated with individualist anarchism in particular; many self-described anarcho-capitalists deny that socialist anarchism should be counted as a form of genuine individualism, or genuine anarchism. With all due respect to my comrades on the Left and on the Right, I will use the term in an ecumenical sense, for reasons of style, and also because the relationship between anarchism, capitalism, and socialism is one of the substantive issues to be discussed in the course of this essay. !!!@@e2;2020;a9;

2. See Chris Matthew Sciabarra (2000), Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism. See also Sciabarra 1995a and 1995b. !!!@@e2;2020;a9;

3. Libertarianism as discussed in this essay is a theory of political justice, not as a position on the Nolan Chart. Small government types who speak kindly of economic freedom or civil liberties may or may not qualify as libertarians for the purpose of my discussion. Those who treat liberty as one political good that must be balanced against other goods such as social stability, economic prosperity, democratic rule, or socioeconomic equality, and should sometimes be sacrificed for their sake, are unlikely to count. Since they are not committed to the ideal of liberty as a principled constraint on *all* political power, they are no more likely to be directly convinced by my arguments than progressives, traditionalists, communists, etc. !!!@@e2;2020;a9;

4. Of course, the male Left of the day actually demanded fraternité, brotherhood. I’ll speak of solidarity instead of brotherhood for the obvious anti-sexist reasons, and also for its association with the history of the labor movement. There are few causes in America that most twentieth-century libertarians were less sympathetic to than organized labor, but I have chosen to speak of the value of solidarity, in spite of all that, for the same reasons that Ayn Rand chose to speak of the virtue of selfishness: in order to prove a point. The common criticisms of organized labor from the twentieth-century libertarian movement, and the relationship between liberty and organized labor, are one of the topics I will discuss below.!!!@@e2;2020;a9;

— Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism in Roderick T. Long and Tibor Machan (eds.), Anarchism/Minarchism: Is a Government Part of a Free Country. Ashgate Press, ISBN 978-0-7546-6066-8. 155–157.

The good news, for those whose interest is piqued and who would like to read the whole thing, is that the book is now available for pre-ordering and will be shipped somewhere around the end of the month. The bad news is that it’s about $80.00 for the hardcover edition, which is, for the time being, the only edition there is. (If you’re interested in reading the essay but are unlikely to have the bread to buy the book anytime soon, contact me privately.) In any case, for those who do get a chance to read the essay, I’d be glad to hear what you think, or any questions you may have, in the comments section at this post.

I mention this in the essay, but I’d like to repeat it here while I have the chance: the debts I accumulated in the process of writing this essay, and the earlier work on which it drew, are too numerous to give an accounting of them all, but I would especially like to thank my companion Laura and my teacher Roderick. The essay would have been much the poorer, or simply nonexistent, without their patience, inspiration, collaboration, encouragement, and detailed and very helpful comments

Here’s to The Greatest American ever!

(Via Austro-Athenian Empire 2008-01-29.)

Come on, guys. You’re making this too easy. Seriously.

Here’s an amateur Ron Paul ad recently released on YouTube.

Here’s to The Greatest American ever!

Long live our great leader Chairman Ron!

The Spitting Image, Captain of the Hosts Edition

What is it that unnerves me so much about the media’s duly-appointed Presumptive Republican Front-Runner, Senator John McCain? Is it the rampaging militarism? The austerely fascist aesthetic of his campaign materials? The newsmedia’s idiotic enthusiasm for any politician who can, in some sense or another, be packaged as a straight talker, without consideration for what the content of the straight talk might be? (So he says, with some conviction, that we ought to bomb the world. Great.)

Well, yes, yes, and yes, but there’s something that runs deeper, too. Just something about him, a certain I-know-not-what about the way he holds himself, and the way he talks, and the way he rallies his troops, that I can’t quite put words to. Where have I seen this before? Oh, wait…

Here's a photo of John McCain. And here's a photo of Gothmog, Captain of Morgul, from the Return of the King, looking eerily similar.

Yeah, that’s it.

McCain: The age of Man is over. The age of the Orc has begun!
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