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Tag Archives | Left-Libertarian

Libertariański Feminizm!

By on November 30, 2009 35

I just received in the mail, kindly sent to me by Włodzimierz Gogłoza, a Polish libertarian magazine called MindFuck (pronounced, I assume, “Minndfootsk”) that includes translations into Polish of the libertarian feminist piece I wrote with Charles, Libertarian Feminism: Can This Marriage Be Saved?, as well as my blog post Against Anarchist Apartheid.

Polish flag with anarchy symbol

The magazine’s other articles, likewise all in Polish, are as follows (insofar as I’ve guessed/deciphered correctly); I’ve linked to the English versions: David Andrade’s What Is Anarchy?; Voltairine de Cleyre and Rachelle Yarros’s The Individualist and the Communist; Wendy McElroy’s American Anarchism; Murray Rothbard’s Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty and The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine; Bryan Caplan’s Anarcho-Statists of Spain; and three pieces I couldn’t find English versions of: an unsigned editorial on horror movies (I think), another on religious parodies (I think), and a piece by Gogłoza himself on Spencerian anarchist Wordsworth Donisthorpe.

There were also interviews with our own Kevin Carson, with Fred Woodworth of The Match!, with Tom Hazelmyer of Amphetamine Reptile, with “feminist pornographer” Erika Lust, and with anarchist musician Daniel Carter; the latter interview is the only one I believe I’ve identified an English version of, here.

So it’s safe to say that this is the sort of periodical I would read, if I could read Polish.

The Trick of Singularity

By on November 28, 2009 26

terrestrial barbecue

As a global-warming agnostic – not having had the time or the inclination to study the issue closely enough to feel competent to address it – I have no particular comment or opinion on the recent leaked-email flap, so I won’t endorse this piece (CHT Ken MacLeod), but it’s certainly worth a read.

JLS  Symposium on Atlas Shrugged  Finally Available

By on November 27, 2009 16
Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand

The last issue of Journal of Libertarian Studies – last as in most recent (it remains to be seen whether it’s the last absolutely, as there might be at least one more issue) – was devoted inter alia to a symposium on the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged, with new contributions by Barbara Branden, Geoff Plauché, and Jennifer Baker, and two previously unpublished pieces by Murray Rothbard – one an amazingly revealing fan letter to Rand, and one a defense of Rand’s aesthetic theory. (The rest of the issue is interesting too, including a dandy piece by Bob Higgs on anarchism. For further details, see the summaries here and here.)

I’m particularly proud of that issue – but until recently, it wasn’t available online yet. Now it is. Gaudete igitur.

It looks to me as though hard copies of that issue (21.4) are available for sale also, but I haven’t tested whether that’s true.

O is for Visitor

By on November 25, 2009 3

V: Humankind's Last Stand

Great line from Jesse Walker:

IDEA FOR A MINISERIES: Extraterrestrials come to Earth promising hope and change. Gradually their sinister plot is revealed: They will take over the planet and run it pretty much the same way it was being run before.

Who Said It?

By on November 22, 2009 4

Magritte - Lovers

Can you guess the source of this passage?

– Do your people always quarrel thus?

– Always.

– Why?

– I do not know. They take their mates for life and are permitted but one and though both men and women have a choice in the selection of their mates they never seem to be satisfied with one another and are always quarreling, usually because neither one nor the other is faithful. Do the men and women quarrel thus in the land from which you come?

– No. They do not. If they did they would be thrown out of the tribe.

– But suppose that they find that they do not like one another?

– Then they do not live together. They separate and if they care to they find other mates.

– That is wicked. We would kill any of our people who did such a thing.

– At least we are all a very happy people, which is more than you can say for yourselves, and, after all, happiness, it seems to me, is everything.

– Perhaps you are right.

The answer.

Icky Sticky Anarchy

By on November 22, 2009 11

I came from a real tough neighborhood.
I put my hand in some cement and felt another hand.

– Rodney Dangerfield

the bricks of society

According to Simon Read, in Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Anarchism, But Were Afraid to Ask: “The English anarchist Colin Ward calls anarchism the cement that holds the bricks of society.”

That’s a great line, paradoxical-sounding but true (though I usually quote it as “Anarchy is the glue that holds society together”). It’s a more succinct, and more radical, version of Paine’s “Great part of that order …” passage. (See also Emerson’s “hooks and eyes” line.) But where, exactly, does Colin Ward say it – if he does?

After looking through some Ward books I own and doing some internet searches (as well as searches through Ward’s books via Amazon’s “look/search inside” feature), I can’t find any place where he says this – though I did find a passage assigning the social-cement role to human solidarity, and another assigning it to music-making.

Can any of my readers recognise/confirm/disconfirm this quote?

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