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Plumbing the Depths

By on May 5, 2009 23

Sam “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher famously said the following two stupid things:

People don’t understand the dictionary – it’s called queer. ‘Queer’ means strange and unusual. It’s not like a slur, like you would call a white person a honky or something like that.

I’ve had some friends that are actually homosexual. And, I mean, they know where I stand, and they know that I wouldn’t have them anywhere near my children.

It’s my impression – after an admittedly unscientific survey conducted with but a cursitory eye – that the tv media have been more exercised over the first quotation, and the blogosphere more exercised over the second. Since the second quotation is even more idiotic and dickish than the first, this doesn’t speak well for the tv media.

NAACP <3 Ron Paul

By on May 5, 2009 21

Speaking of Maddow, she just had a quite friendly interview with Ron Paul. (Something Olbermann has yet to do AFAIK, I might add.) And then in an interview afterward with NAACP President Ben Jealous, the latter opined that “Ron Paul had it right” about the importance of adhering to the Constitution.

OK, this isn’t ALL-style reunification (especially since, y’know), but it’s worth a grin.

IMP in The American Conservative

By on May 5, 2009 9

Isabel PatersonStephen Cox teaches conservatives about Isabel Paterson.

(Though it’s a gentle introduction; Cox spares them the Paterson who attacked the corporate elite, condemned the U.S. for perverting science to “fry Japanese babies in atomic radiation,” and told Ayn Rand that garden-variety collectivist ideas came from liberals and really godawful collectivist ideas from conservatives.)

More Crap from the “Libertarian” Party

By on May 4, 2009 57

The Barristas, apparatchiks, dilutionists, and statist creeps who currently control the Libertarian Party are now demanding that immigrants to the U.S. be treated as “guilty” of being infected until proven innocent. (Conical hat tip to Soviet Onion.) No word on why they don’t favour similar controls on travel between states, or hey, counties.

Liberty betrayedThis is just the latest in a long train of abuses and usurpations.

I’ve been involved intermittently with the LP for the past couple of decades, and there have always been serious problems with it. But in the last few years things have gotten much, much worse.

One of two things needs to happen, dammit. Either the Libertarian Party needs to be retaken by actual libertarians, and all these bozos purged – or else the Party needs to be fought tooth and nail as an enemy of libertarianism.

Groups like the Grassroots Libertarian Caucus and the LP Radical Caucus are working (in somewhat different ways) at the first option, as are some of the better LP candidates and potential candidates (e.g. Mary Ruwart, Tom Knapp, Steve Kubby). The Agorists and Voluntaryists have long advocated the second option. I feel the pull of both, but in any case one or the other needs to be done. Letting the current leadership keep dragging the libertarian banner through the mud without concerted opposition is not an option.

Dialectical Anarchism: Mind the Gap

By on May 3, 2009 86

Murray BookchinThe late Murray Bookchin famously claimed that the gap between “social anarchism” and “lifestyle anarchism” was unbridgeable. Over at IAS, John Clark has an excellent essay challenging Bookchin’s thesis. Particularly noteworthy is the following passage:

The idea that there is an “unbridgeable chasm” between two viewpoints that share certain common presuppositions and goals, and whose practices are in some ways interrelated, is a bit suspect from the outset. It is particularly problematic when proposed by a thinker like Bookchin, who claims to hold a dialectical perspective. Whereas nondialectical thought merely opposes one reality to another in an abstract manner, or else places them inertly beside one another, a dialectical analysis examines the ways in which various realities presuppose one another, constitute one another, challenge the identity of one another, and push one another to the limits of their development. Accordingly, one important quality of such an analysis is that it helps those with divergent viewpoints see the ways in which their positions are not mutually exclusive but can instead be mutually realized in a further development of each.

I find this quotation useful in thinking not just about the specific opposition that Bookchin put forward but likewise about a number of other divides in our movement. When social anarchists tell us that anarcho-capitalists aren’t really anarchists, or when right-libertarians tell us that mutualists aren’t really libertarians, it might be worth replying with this quotation or something like it.

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