official state media for a secessionist republic of one
Domestic Abuse. Daily Brickbats (2010-03-24):
In Canada, Yaowei Wu says Vancouver police dragged him from his home and beat him without provocation. The police were investigating a domestic abuse report but had gone to the wrong address. Police originally claimed he resisted arrest but later said that wasn’t true.
You got served and protected. (Cont’d.)
!!!@@e2;20ac;2dc;No Dashes or Spaces' Hall of Shame. Daring Fireball (2010-03-24):
Calling out sites that force you to enter, say, credit card numbers, in a precise format, even though removing things like spaces and dashes is programmatically trivial. (Via Sarah Harrison.) ★
There is no reason ever to force your user to remove spaces or dashes from a credit card number or a phone number. Not being able to s/[^0-9]+// is sheer barbarism.
As you may know, I gave a talk on March 20th at the Free State Project’s 2010 Liberty Forum in Nashua, New Hampshire:
The Revolution Will Be Made Of People: Anarchy, Direct Action, and Free-Market Social Justice
Freedom is not a conservative idea. It is not a prop for corporate power and the political-economic statist quo. Libertarianism is, in fact, a revolutionary doctrine, which would undermine and overthrow every form of state coercion and authoritarian control. If we want liberty in our lifetimes, the realities of our politics need to live up to the promise our principles — we should be radicals, not reformists; anarchists, not smaller-governmentalists; defenders of real freed markets and private property, not apologists for corporate capitalism, halfway privatization or existing concentrations of wealth. Libertarianism should be a people's movement and a liberation movement, and we should take our cues not from what's politically polite, but from what works for a revolutionary people-power movement. Here's how.
With many thanks to Antonio from blog of bile, here is a recording of the talk and the Q&A session that followed. (Split into 10 minute segments, as per YouTube constraints.) A couple of quick notes before we begin:
Props where props are due. I intended to mention this in the talk, but barrelled through without remembering to. The story that I told at the beginning, about the Spokane Free Speech Fight of 1909-1910 is a story that I first heard through the late, great Utah Phillips, and he got it from FW Herb Edwards, who was there in Spokane working in logging at the time. I told the story just about the way Utah told it (and he says he was telling it just about the way he heard it from Herb Edwards, minus the Norwegian accent). If you want to hear Utah’s version of it, it’s Track 5, Direct Action
, on Fellow Workers, the second album he put out in collaboration with Ani DiFranco.
Time constraints forced me to skip over a substantial portion towards the end of the talk, which was largely concerned with methods. If I had it to do over again, I would have spent less time on opening matters and the case against minarchism, and spent more time (as I originally hoped to) talking about why libertarians should not waste time or energy on voting, parties, paper constitutions, nationalist politics, or conservative mythology about Founding Fathers
or the stupid slave empire so often passed off as a Republic; and would also have talked about how partisan politics punishes radicalism and rewards compromise (hence, effectively, locking us into the statist quo), whereas direct action politics rewards principle, radicalism, and political courage. Ah well; next time, next time.
Now, on with the show:
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 1 of 9.
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 2 of 9.
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 3
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 4
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 5
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 6
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 7 — Q&A
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 8 — Q&A
The Revolution Will Be Made of People (2010-03-20), Part 9 — Q&A
More left-libertarian material from the Liberty Forum coming soon as I collect it. Expect to hear a bit more from me, and to see and hear from Darian Worden and other ALLies and agorists gathering in the Shire.
Happy Tyrannicide Day (observed)!
Today, March 15th, commemorates the assassination of two notorious tyrants. On the Ides of March in 2010 CE, we mark the 2,053rd anniversary — give or take the relevant calendar adjustments — of the striking down of Gaius Julius Caesar — the military dictator who rose to power by butchering his way through Gaul, by boasting of enslaving millions of war captives, by setting fire to Alexandria, and, through years of conquest, perfidy and proscription, battering and breaking through every restraint that Roman politics and civil society had placed in the way of unilateral military and executive power — until he finally had himself proclaimed dictator perpetuus, the King of Rome in everything but name. On March 15th, 44 BCE, a group of republican conspirators, naming themselves the Liberators — rose up and ended his reign of terror by stabbing Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate. By the coincidence of fate, only two days before, on March 13th, is also the anniversary (129th this year, give or take the relevant calendar adjustments) of the assassination of Czar Alexander II Nikolaevitch, the self-styled Caesar and Autocrat of All the Russias. A group of anarchist conspirators, acting in self-defense against the ongoing repression and violence of the autocratic state, put an end to the Czar’s reign by throwing grenades underneath his carriage on March 13th, 1881 CE, in an act of propaganda by the deed. In honor of the coinciding events, the Ministry of Culture in this secessionist republic of one, together with fellow republics and federations of the free world, is happy to proclaim the 15th of March Tyrannicide Day (observed), a commemoration of the death of two tyrants at the hands of people rising up in the conviction of their own equal freedom to defend themselves from violence and oppression, even the violence and oppression exercised by men in the name of the State and its fraudulent claims to authority. It’s a two-for-one historical holiday, kind of like President’s Day, except cooler: instead of another dull theo-nationalist hymn on the miraculous births of two of the canonized saints of the United States federal government, Tyrannicide Day gives us one day in which we can commemorate the deaths of two tyrants at the hands of their equals — men and women who defied the tyrants' arbitrary claims to an unchecked authority that they had neither the wisdom, the virtue, nor the right to exercise. Men and women who saw themselves as exercising their equal right of self-defense, by striking down the would-be tyrants just like they would be entitled to strike down any other two-bit thug who tried to kill them, enslave them, or shake them down.
It is worth remembering in these days that the State has always tried to pass off attacks against its own commanding and military forces (Czars, Kings, soldiers in the field, etc.) as acts of terrorism.
That is, in fact, what almost every so-called act of terrorism
attributed to 19th century anarchists happened to be: direct attacks on the commanders of the State's repressive forces. The linguistic bait-and-switch is a way of trying to get moral sympathy on the cheap, in which the combat deaths of trained fighters and commanders are fraudulently passed off, by a professionalized armed faction sanctimoniously playing the victim, as if they were just so many innocent bystanders killed out of the blue. Tyrannicide Day is a day to expose this for the cynical lie that it is.
There are in fact lots of good reasons to rule out tyrannicide as a political tactic — after all, these two famous cases each ended a tyrant but not the tyrannical regime; Alexander II was replaced by the even more brutal Alexander III, and Julius Caesar was replaced by his former running-dogs, one of whom would emerge from the abattoir that followed as Augustus Caesar, to begin the long Imperial nightmare in earnest. But it’s important to recognize that these are strategic failures, not moral ones; what should be celebrated on the Ides of March is not the tyrannicide as a strategy, but rather tyrannicide as a moral fact. Putting a diadem on your head and wrapping yourself in the blood-dyed robes of the State confers neither the virtue, the knowledge, nor the right to rule over anyone, anywhere, for even one second, any more than you had naked and alone. Tyranny is nothing more and nothing less than organized crime executed with a pompous sense of entitlement and a specious justification; the right to self-defense applies every bit as much against the person of some self-proclaimed sovereign
as it does against any other two-bit punk who might attack you on the street.
Every victory for human liberation in history — whether against the crowned heads of Europe, the cannibal-empires of modern Fascism and Bolshevism, or the age-old self-perpetuating oligarchies of race and sex — has had these moral insights at its core: the moral right to deal with the princes and potentates of the world as nothing more and nothing less than fellow human beings, to address them as such, to challenge them as such, and — if necessary — to resist them as such.
How did you celebrate Tyrannicide Day? (Personally, I got back into town from San Francisco, got down to sorting my books from the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair, and gave my wife a Tyrannicide Day gift that I picked up for her while I was out — a copy of the The Tragic Procession: Alexander Berkman and Russian Prisoner Aid, just barely cooled from the presses from the Kate Sharpley Library.) And you? Done anything online or off for this festive season? Give a shout-out in the comments.
Thus always to tyrants. And many happy returns!
Beware the State. Celebrate the Ides of March!
terrorism
archive – contact – sexy exciting merchandise – search – about– !!!@@e2;2020;90; previousMarch 8th, 2010nextMarch 8th, 2010: Guys, remember Adventure Time? IF NOT THEN CLICK THAT LINK FOR AN AMAZING VIDEO. Anyway it turns out Cartoon Network has made a whole series out of it! There’s a trailer here. I…(Linked Wednesday 2010-03-10.)
Here we go again. Almost immediately after a former mental patient named John Bedell opened fire outside the Pentagon last week, the usual suspects rushed to suggest he was "inflamed by far-right conspiracy theories," had views that "eerily reflect fringe right-wing rhetoric," and was driven by "the same open hatred…(Linked Wednesday 2010-03-10.)