I’m going to be interviewed on Chicago’s Little Alex in Wonderland radio show this coming Thursday at 4:00 Central; we’ll probably be talking about agorism. (I was interviewed last week on James Hines’ New Orleans Saint and Fools radio show, but it doesn’t seem to be online yet; the topic was the use of logical fallacies in political discourse.)
Tag Archives | Democracy
Anarchobama!
Speaking in Ghana, President Obama recently called for the abolition of the American form of government:
No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves, or if police can be bought off by drug traffickers.
No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top, or the head of the Port Authority is corrupt. No person wants to live in a society where the rule of law gives way to the rule of brutality and bribery.
That is not democracy, that is tyranny, even if occasionally you sprinkle an election in there, and now is the time for that style of governance to end.
Oh, wait. Sorry, I’ve just been informed that the president intended his remarks to apply solely to Africa ….
The Caucus Race
An LP Anarchist Caucus has just formed.
I’m not a big fan of the “five key points” – taken literally, there’s a couple of them that I actually disagree with, and taken humorously, they’re just not especially funny. But hey, I’ll join. See also Tom’s comments.
I’m still waiting for someone to take Brad up on his suggestion of a Libertarian Socialist Caucus ….
Region Three Is Number One!
In my new role as LPA Regional Rep for Region 3 (the Selma-Montgomery-Auburn tier), I’ve created a webpage and Yahoo group; check them out.
Update and Various Animadversions
The LPA convention was held last weekend. The “business as usual” faction put up an opposition slate at the last minute and won the field; since the rebel slate’s supporters had assumed (despite our warnings!) that we would be running unopposed, most of them didn’t show up to vote. (The entrenched establishment is largely located in Birmingham, where the convention was held; our supporters were mostly located elsewhere in the state.) We did get one member of our slate, Matthew Givens, elected (his opponent having failed to show up), plus I was chosen as the Regional Representative for the Selma-Montgomery-Auburn tier. Well, you win some, you lose some.
This was my first visit to Birmingham in years, so it was nice to see the art museum again. Though I have to grump about some dubious labeling in the Asian Art section; for example, bodhisattvas are not “Buddhist deities” (unless St. Francis is a Catholic deity). I initially thought the translation of lingam as “pillar” was another such error (or more likely censorship), but apparently there’s controversy as to whether lingam actually means “phallus” after all.
In other news, Olbermann’s at it again. Either last night or the night before, I saw him lambasting Joe the Plumber for saying that America’s founders had rejected socialism and communism. The concepts of socialism and communism, Olbermann explained, weren’t formulated until about 50 years after the American founding, so the founders couldn’t have rejected them. Now Joe the Plumber deserves lambasting for a good many things, but this isn’t one of them. The founders were well aware of the debate between Plato and Aristotle on the subject of communism, and took Aristotle’s side; see the Jefferson-Adams correspondence, for example.
I also saw an odd headline: “Sanford Mistress Breaks Silence, Says Nothing.” Did she belch?
In Triumph Through Persepolis
Sheldon makes some good points about the u.s. and Iran here. It would be interesting to know how much involvement the u.s. already has in what’s going on there. The Iranian government says that foreign influences are involved – but you’d expect it to say that. The relevant foreign influences deny that they’re involved, but you’d expect them to say that too. The u.s. government certainly has an incentive to intervene covertly – though they’re also so incompetent and clueless that they actually might not have.
That Twitter delayed its downtime until nighttime in Iran in order to avoid interfering with coordination among the protesters is great, but the fact that the u.s. govt. asked them for the delay makes me wonder what else the u.s. govt. is doing? That the u.s. govt. could simply have created this situation out of whole cloth as the Iranian govt. would have us believe is ludicrous; but to what extent did the u.s. actually promote this situation and to what extent are they simply trying to exploit an independently arising situation?
The protests also seem to be coinciding with a power struggle within the Iranian leadership. (I mean the actual leadership, not the presidency.) So the same question can be posed there: to what extent did dissident factions within the ruling council actually promote this situation and to what extent are they simply trying to exploit an independently arising situation?