Shameless Self-promotion Sunday
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
Happy Anna Howard Shaw Day! (And happy birthday to my sister, Ms. L.E.J.!)
What better day than February 14th for Shamelessness? This week has been a week for catching up on old commitments and making new connections. You probably know by now about my letter to the Secretary of State of South Carolina; you may not know that I was briefly interviewed about the letter by Ernie Hancock on Declare Your Independence. Anyway, to turn back to local affairs, a crew of us from Food Not Bombs Las Vegas rolled out on Tuesday to help feed 200 FWs on the picket line at NV Energy corporate headquarters. I made it out for a somewhat productive FNB business meeting Saturday, and I’m heading out to Baker Park this morning for our weekly free picnic. On Thursday at Anarchist Cafe and then yesterday, we made our first steps towards organizing a local CopWatch network in Las Vegas. We’re beginning weekly meetings this Saturday; if you’re curious, contact me or follow us on Twitter for updates as they come out. Meanwhile, I’m still in the midst of preparations for the trip out to the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair.
Et tu? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.
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Here’s something I’ve been debating with myself for awhile:
Is it tactically shrewder to practice non-cooperation, resistance and other forms of activism out in the open? Or is it smarter to think of this as a kind of “French resistance” situation where we’re under occupation and need to sort of sneak around a little more?
Another way to think about it is: Is this government gang made up of honest people with good intentions who only need some reform? Or is it a criminal conspiracy with designs – conscious or not – of taking over our lives, liberties and property?
This may be an artificial dichotomy but I think the answer(s) will be useful. Thanks.
Just started an anarchy meetup in DC. So if any of you are in the area…
http://www.meetup.com/DC-Anarchists/
http://polycentricorder.blogspot.com/2010/02/explaining-anti-authoritarianisms.html
My interpretation of your “thickness” concerns as having tension with Rothbard’s system itself.
Wow, that host is really obnoxious.
Hey, it’s been a while since I contributed some shameless self-promotion. I’ve got quite a backlog of material on my blog though – you all should just go browse around. Here are a few that might be of special interest to my fellow anarchists:
Thoughts on Power
Why I’m Opposed to Military Anthropology
Intermediaries and Mediators
Enjoy! PS – @BroadSnark, I’ll see if I can go to the meetup – I’m in College Park.
George, I think the government is staffed by both sorts of people, but I think there are others, too, and they may be the most dangerous. Among them are people who really believe that they’re doing good, but that raison d’etat justifies whatever disregard for ordinary people’s rights they may exhibit. There are also people with relatively decent humane values who nonetheless fail to see the injustice of the state and who may regard their own work on its behalf as vital and entirely warranted. These people, even if they’re good, are too deeply invested in the statist quo to be immediately susceptible to anything like reform. They can’t see any alterantive to the way the state does business: they believe that Leviathan is necessary to keep order, they don’t see voluntary cooperation as viable alternative to state coercion, they believe that state power is legitimate, and they believe at a deep level that disrespect for the state’s laws means both disrespect for them personally and that those laws are all that stand between us and lives that are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (I suspect that Myers-Briggs SJs are disproportionately represented in this group, but I may be quite wrong about this; SJ’s reading this page can correct me.)
Bottom line: these basically decent people may treat you like the enemy even though they’re not part of any evil conspiracy. I think there’s no point in challenging them openly unless you think you’ve got even odds of emerging unscathed, and those odds don’t seem likely to obtain in most cases today.
Thanks Gary.
I wasn’t referring to conspiracy in the sense of theories but in the legal sense of conspiring I suppose.
I didn’t mean to put any weight on “conspiracy.” My point was just that people may be in some sense good but nonetheless quite impervious to reasonable arguments about the state’s illegitimacy, and that it may not be useful to confront them directly.
Oh, many thanks! On this particular Shameless Self-promotion Sunday, I promoted myself to my next year of age, and, with the aid of my trusty assistant and the use of his parents’ kitchen, made cakes in celebration thereof. It was most excellent.