Rad Geek People's Daily

official state media for a secessionist republic of one

Posts filed under Philosophy

Rad Geek Speaks: “Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State?” at the Alabama Philosophical Society, Friday, October 3

This week — specifically, FRIDAY, October 3 — I will be speaking at the Alabama Philosophical Society’s annual conference in Orange Beach, Alabama. The talk will be a presentation of a short paper, Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State? (If you’ve been reading here for a while, it will be similar, but not identical to, something you’ve already read here.) Here’s the abstract:

I defend a strong incompatibility claim that anything which could count as a state is conceptually incompatible with any possible consent of the governed. Not only do states necessarily operate without the unanimous consent of all the governed, but in fact, as territorial monopolies on the use of force, states preclude any subject from consenting – even those who want it, and actively try to give consent to government. If government authority is legitimate, it must derive from an account of legitimate command and subordination; any principled requirement for consent and political equality entails anarchism.

WHAT: Can Anyone Ever Consent to the State? paper and Q&A with Charles Johnson.

WHEN: Friday, October 2, 1:00pm-1:40pm.

WHERE: Alabama Philosophical Society annual conference, Hilton Beachfront Garden Inn, 23092 Perdido Beach Blvd, Orange Beach, AL. (The talk will be in the Island Bay II room, for what that’s worth.)

If you happen to be at the beach already, you might also be interested to know that Roderick Long is also giving a paper in the same room at 3:30:

Left-Libertarianism, Class Conflict, and Historical Theories of Distributive Justice

Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)

A frequent objection to the "historical" (in Nozick's sense) approach to distributive justice is that it serves to legitimate existing massive inequalities of wealth. I argue that, on the contrary, the historical approach, thanks to its fit with the libertarian theory of class conflict, represents a far more effective tool for challenging these inequalities than do relatively end-oriented approaches such as utilitarianism and Rawlsianism.

Hope to see you at the beach!

Rad Geek Speaks: “Ask An Anarchist!” TOMORROW, at the Vegas Anarchist Cafe. Las Vegas, Nevada, 3 September 2009, 6:00pm

ALLies,

In honor of the first anniversary of the weekly Vegas Anarchist Cafe, and in connection with the opening of a new school year on UNLV’s campus, Southern Nevada ALL has helped organize a line-up of special programming for the A-Cafe’s Free Speech Soapbox Series.

This week — specifically, TOMORROW, Thursday, 3 September 2009 — Anarchist Cafe will feature the second event, during the first hour of the meeting, from 6:00–7:00pm. I will be hosting a freewheeling Q&A session, called Ask An Anarchist!, which will give A-Cafers, guests, and random looky-loos the chance to fire away with any question they may have about Anarchy, Anarchism, or Anarchists. As our advertising handbill puts it:

Are you curious to learn more about Anarchy, Anarchism, or Anarchists? Have you got questions about Anarchist ideas, the history of Anarchism, how Anarchism has affected mainstream culture, Anarchist solutions to contemporary social problems, or how Anarchists believe that a free society would work without government? Want to know whether the picture of Anarchism that you’ve gotten from the mainstream culture is accurate or based on misconceptions? Want to try and stump an Anarchist? Bring all your burning questions this Thursday, and our speaker will do his best to answer any question you care to ask. Come on in and fire away!

This event is for anyone curious about the ideas of philosophical Anarchism, or interested in conversation. All are welcome to attend.

The Soapbox event will run from 6:00–7:00pm. An informal meet-up and discussion will follow from 7:00–8:00pm. If you're in the Vegas area (or even if you're not), it'd be great to see you there. If you know anyone around abouts who might be interested in a talk about Anarchism, then please do forward the announcement on to them.

  • WHAT: Ask An Anarchist! Q&A with Vegas ALLy Charles Johnson.

  • WHERE: Weekly Anarchist Cafe at the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Running Rebel Plaza (4550 S. Maryland Pkwy, right across the street from UNLV), Las Vegas, Nevada

  • WHEN: This Thursday, 3 September 2009, 6:00pm – 7:00pm. The regular A-Cafe informal meet-up and discussion will continue after the talk, from about 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

  • WHO: Anyone curious about the ideas of Anarchism, or interested in conversation.

Hope to see y’ALL there!

See also:

Rad Geek Speaks: a talk on Anarchism and its ideas TOMORROW, at the Las Vegas Anarchist Cafe. Las Vegas, 27 August 2009, 6:00pm

ALLies,

In honor of thefirst anniversary of the weekly Vegas Anarchist Cafe, and in connection with the opening of a new school year on UNLV’s campus, Southern Nevada ALL has helped to organize a line-up of special programming the A-Cafe’s Free Speech Soapbox Series, to offer some opportunities for kick-starting some engaging conversations about Anarchy, about the ideas of Anarchism in theory and practice, and about how Anarchist ideals of free association, mutual aid, DIY social change, decentralized resistance, and direct action can apply to our struggles, passions, and dreams for our own community here in Vegas.

I’m happy to announce that for the first event, which will be held at this week’s A-Cafe on Thursday 27 August 2009, I will be giving a special talk, **What Is Anarchism? to discuss the ideals of Anarchism in theory and practice, the meaning and reasons for Anarchism’s opposition to the state, the benefits of a society without rulers or domination, and correcting common misconceptions and replying to common objections about Anarchism, Anarchists, and Anarchy. For anyone curious about the ideas of philosophical Anarchism, or interested in the conversation.

  • WHAT: Talk by Vegas ALLy CHARLES JOHNSON on WHAT IS ANARCHISM?

  • WHERE: Weekly Anarchist Cafe @ the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Running Rebel Plaza (4550 S. Maryland Pkwy, right across the street from UNLV)

  • WHEN: This Thursday, 27 August 2009 6:00pm – 7:00pm. The regular A-Cafe informal meet-up and discussion will continue after the talk, from about 7:00pm to 8:00pm.

  • WHO: Anyone curious about, or interested in conversation about, the ideas of Anarchism.

If you're in the Vegas area (or even if you're not), come on out for what I hope to be an engaging back-and-forth, and a good kick-start to the conversation about Anarchist ideals in our community. It’d be great to see you there. If you know any friends, family, coworkers, or anyone else around abouts who might be curious or interested in conversation about Anarchism — whether they are themselves (A)s or not — then please do forward the announcement on to them

As always, the Anarchist Cafe will begin on Thursday at 6:00 PM. The talk will begin shortly after 6:00 and run for about 45 minutes, with time set aside afterwards for Q&A and conversation. After the formal Q&A has ended, we’ll continue with our usual informal chat until the end of the A-Cafe at 8:00pm.

This week’s presentation is part of the Free Speech Soapbox Series at Las Vegas Anarchist Cafe — a series of presentations, speeches, programming, and free speech 4open mics for the first hour of the weekly A-Cafe (6:00–7:00pm). Future Soapbox events are already being scheduled; if you’re in Vegas, or will be passing through, and are interested in giving a talk yourself — or know someone you’d be interested in hearing talk — about an issue you care about, a project you’re working on, a local group you support, or a how-to for a skill you’d like to share with fellow Anarchists — this is your time and we all have something to say or do that can help out our ALLies. Contact us for more details or to sign up.

Hope to see y’ALL there!

See also:

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)

(Via William Gillis 2009-08-15.)

There is a common notion that the problem with technology, or with a certain technological view of the world, is that it obliterates immediate relationship with the world, and the appreciation of the here and now for its own sake. That instead it constrains us to view the world as a whole, and everything in it, instrumentally, according to our own demands and interests, not as something wonderful in itself but simply as a sort of standing-reserve which is understood, appreciated, and valued only in relation to human uses, and perhaps human tastes.

Bollocks.

The wonderful thing about technology is that it allows me not only to wonder at the hummingbird out my window this morning (which is — no doubt about it — a wondrous thing), but also at traveling through the glimmering light of 10,000 distinguishable galaxies in the very infancy of the Universe, 13,000,000,000 years ago. So vastly remote that there is no possible angle, and no possible reason to care. Other than the fact that it is there, shining behind a tiny bit of the black that our unaided eyes could only take to be utterly empty. And yet, with only the right tools to gaze at it, is revealed to be shining with the light of a quadrillion stars.

Awesome.

Wednesday Lazy Linking

  • … but the streets belong to the people! Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-10): The People’s Stop Sign. In which people in an Ottawa neighborhood take nonviolent direct action to slow down the traffic flying down their neighborhood streets — by putting up their own stop signs at a key intersection. The city government, of course, is now busy with a Criminal Investigation of the public’s heinous contribution to public safety.

  • Abolitionism is the radical notion that other people are not your property. Darian Worden (2009-06-09): The New Abolitionists The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850's have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

  • Mr. Obama, Speak For Yourself. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2009-09-09): Speaking of the State

  • A campaign of isolated incidents. Ellen Goodman, Houston Chronicle (2009-06-08): Sorry, but the doctor’s killer did not act alone

  • Let’s screw all the little guys. Just to be fair. (Or, pay me to advertise my product on your station.) Jesse Walker, Reason (2009-06-09): The Man Can’t Tax Our Music: The music industry wants to impose an onerous new fee on broadcasters.

  • Some dare call it torture. Just not the cops. Or the judges. Wendy McElroy, WendyMcElroy.com (2009-06-08): N.Y. Judge Rules that Police Can Taser Torture in order to coerce compliance with any arbitrary court order. I think that Wendy is right to call pain compliance for what it is — torture (as I have called it here before) — and that it is important to insist on this point as much as possible whenever the topic comes up.

  • On criminalizing compassion. Macon D., stuff white people do (2009-06-05), on the conviction of Walt Staton for knowingly littering water jugs in a wildlife refuge, in order to keep undocumented immigrants from dying in the desert.

  • Freed markets vs. deforesters. Keith Goetzman, Utne Reader Environment (2009-06-04): Do You Know Where Your Shoes Have Been?, on the leather industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Utne does a good job of pointing out (by quoting Grist’s Tom Philpott) that the problem is deeply rooted in multi-statist neoliberalism: because of the way in which the Brazilian government and the World Bank act together to subsidize the cattle barons and ‘roid up Brazilian cattle ranching, the report is really about the perils of using state policy to prop up global, corporate-dominated trade.

  • Well, Thank God. (Cont’d.) Thanks to the Lord Justice, we now know that Pringles are, in fact, officially potato chips, not mere savory snacks, in spite of the fact that only about 40% of a Pringles crisp is actually potato flour. Language Log takes this case to demonstrate the quasi-Wittgensteinian point that, fundamentalist legal philosophy to one side, there’s actually no such thing as a self-applying law. (Quoting Adam Cohen’s New York Times Op-Ed, Conservatives like to insist that their judges are strict constructionists, giving the Constitution and statutes their precise meaning and no more [linguists groan here], while judges like [Sonia] Sotermayor are activists. But there is no magic way to interpret terms like free speech or due process — or potato chip.) I think the main moral of the story has to do with the absurdity of a political system in which whether or not you can keep $160,000,000 of your own damn money rides on whether or not you can prove to a judge that your savory snack hasn’t got the requisite potatoness to count as a potato crisp for the purposes of law and justice.

  • Small riots will get small attention, no riots get no attention, make a big riot, and it will be handled immediately. Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal (2009-05-30): In China, a New Breed of Dissidents. The story makes it seem as though the most remarkable thing about the emerging dissident movement is that they are safe enough for the State to tolerate them, rather than launching all out assaults as they did against the Tienanmen dissidents in 1989. Actually, I think that that misses the point entirely; and that the most interesting thing is that they have adopted such flexible and adaptive networking, both tactically and strategically, and that they now so often rise up from the very social classes that the Chinese Communist Party claims to speak for (not just easily-demonized students and intelligentsia, but ordinary farmers, factory workers, and retirees) — that the regime isn’t tolerating them; it just no longer knows what to do with them.

  • Counter-Cooking and Mutual Meals. Julia Levitt, Worldchanging: Bright Green (2009-06-03): Community Kitchens (Via Kevin Carson’s Shared Items.) If I may recommend, if you’re going to work on any kind of community cooking like this, particularly if you’re interested in it partly for reasons of resiliency and building community alternatives, you should do what you can to make sure that it is strongly connected with the local grey-market solidarity economy, through close cooperation with your local Food Not Bombs (as both a source and a destination for food) and other local alternatives to the state-subsidized corporate-consumer model for food distribution.

  • Looking Forward. Shawn Wilbur, In the Libertarian Labyrinth (009-06-06): Clement M. Hammond on Police Insurance. An excerpt on policing in a freed society, from individualist anarchist Clement M. Hammond’s futurist utopian novel, Then and Now which originally appeared in serialized form in Tucker’s Liberty in 1884 and 1885. (Thus predating Bellamy’s dreary Nationalist potboiler by 4 years.) Hammond’s novel is now available in print through Shawn’s Corvus Distribution. The good news is that, while Bellamy’s date of 2000 has already mercifully passed us by without any such society emerging, we still have almost 80 years to get it together in time for Hammond’s future.

  • Here at Reason we never pass up a chance to have some fun at the expense of Pete Seeger. Jesse Walker, Hit & Run (2009-06-09): They Wanna Hear Some American Music. On brilliant fakery, the invention of Country and Western music, the cult of authenticity, and the manufacture of Americana. For the long, full treatment see Barry Mazor, No Depression (2009-02-23): Americana, by any other name…

  • Anarchy on the Big Screen. Colin Firth and Kevin Spacey have signed on for a big-screen film adaptation of Homage to Catalonia. The film is supposed to enter production during the first half of 2010.

Technological civilization is awesome. (Cont’d.)

Communications

Anticopyright. All pages written 1996–2024 by Rad Geek. Feel free to reprint if you like it. This machine kills intellectual monopolists.