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Tag Archives | Molinari/C4SS

I Got 99 Problems But a Glitch Ain’t One

By on June 9, 2016 1

So the aforementioned website glitch is solved, and Praxeology.net (along with the Molinari and ALL pages) is back up.

As Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) requested, I downloaded my files through FileZilla and scanned them for malware, but detected none; and their tech “support” line (after hours on hold listening to their horrible music loop) couldn’t tell me which files were infected.

Devils in Hell

However, since the most likely website vulnerability is WordPress files, and I haven’t used WordPress on that site since Brandon rescued my blog from Yahoo (may they also be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) back in 2008, I just deleted all the WordPress files, and that did the trick. Website’s back!

At the same time that I’ve been having this website problem, I’ve also been having another, unrelated problem, this one with the Alabama Philosophical Society website, AlPhilSoc.org. Here again the culprit is Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity). Y’see, Yahoo (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) recently transferred all its websites to its newly extruded appendage Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity), also apparently known as Luminate (likewise damned). So I had to create a new account with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) for AlPhilSoc.org.

Now when I first created AlPhilSoc.org (or GeoCities.com/AlPhilSoc, as it was then) back in 2000, for some reason I gave an address at cyberspace.org as my contact email. That was a very old email account of mine – in fact it was the first email account I ever had, from 1994. In any case, I soon changed my contact email to my current address, and I had no reason to think cyberspace.org was still associated with my account. All the AlPhilSoc announcements came to my current address, and when I looked in my account info online, the only email contact listed was my current address.

But when I went to update the AlPhilSoc account with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity), for some reason their system was convinced that the one and only contact email for me was the one at cyberspace.org, and that was the only address they would send their verification notice to – even though Yahoo (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) still listed the right address in the part of my AlPhilSoc account still hosted with them. Since I no longer had access to my cyberspace.org account – it had long ago been deleted – this meant that there was no way to access the AlPhilSoc site to update it. The tech “support” line for Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) told me there was nothing they could do.

Happily, I found a solution. Although my cyberspace.org account was gone, luckily no one had created a new account with the same username. So I created a new cyberspace.org account (not easily – cyberspace.org doesn’t support webmail, so I had to wrestle with SSL and IMAP and PuTTY, which I know from nuthin), chose my old username, and prompted Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity) to send their verification email once more to the cyberspace.org address. This time I could answer and respond to it, and so I have access to AlPhilSoc.org once more. I’ve just updated it with info about the next APS meeting; see my next post.

Apparently I’m not the only one that has been having these problems with Aabaco (may they be damned to the lowest circle of hell for all eternity); see, e.g., here and here.

Glitch in the Matrix

By on June 7, 2016 1

My Praxeology.net website is down, along with the Molinari and ALL sites hosted therein. My service provider (the horrendous Aabaco, which is currently spinning off from the almost-as-horrendous Yahoo) shut it down because they say there’s malware on the site (though they can’t or won’t tell me which files are the problem). They’ll put the site back up as soon as I find and remove the malware. So far I haven’t been able to find any malware. Watch this space.

If You Love Freedom, Thank an Anarchist

By on May 30, 2016 0

[cross-posted at BHL]

It’s often said – particularly on holidays like Veterans Day and Memorial Day – that Americans owe their freedom (such as it is) to u.s. military veterans.

ifulove-blogpic

This claim has always puzzled me. In what war in living memory was the freedom of Americans at stake? Without u.s. military action, were Japanese or German troops – let alone Italian, Vietnamese, Korean, Panamanian, Afghani, or Iraqi ones – really going to be marching though Times Square? If anything, given the notorious ratchet effect whereby wars tend to produce permanent increases in government power, it seems more probable that u.s. military action has contributed to a diminution of our freedom.

Yet Americans do enjoy a greater degree of liberty, however inadequate, than citizens of many other countries around the world. To whom do we owe that fact?

Many people wear shirts that say, “If you love freedom, thank a veteran.” I wear a shirt that says “If you love freedom, thank an anarchist.”

So what have anarchists (and other fractious dissidents) done for the cause of freedom? In answer, I quote from two recent articles:

Anarchists have never taken power. We have resisted authoritarianism and oppression in every arena. From calling out Marxism long before its draconian aspirations became public record, to fighting and dying to resist Fascism, fighting Franco until he couldn’t afford to join Hitler and Mussolini and leading the resistance against the Nazis across Europe. We’ve fought the robber barons, the czars, the oligarchs, and the soviet bureaucrats.

And we’ve been extraordinarily popular in different regions at different points in history, although we have not yet had sufficient critical mass to completely transform the world. In every instance where anarchism surged to localized popularity with a few million adherents, as in Spain but also Ukraine and Manchuria, every surrounding power immediately put their wars on hold to collaborate in snuffing out the examples we provided of a better world, of better ways of interacting and settling disputes with one another, that do not turn to control but build a tolerable consensus for all parties when agreement is needed.

We’ve been at the forefront not just of technology like cryptocurrencies and the tor project, but we’ve also been at the forefront of struggles against patriarchy, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc., etc. Since long before there were popular coalitions like “feminism.” We smuggled guns to slaves and ran abolitionist journals. We’ve coursed through the veins of our existing society, pioneering myriad social technologies like credit unions and cooperatives. We’ve consistently served as the radical edge of the world’s conscience, and played a critical role in expanding what is possible while developing and field testing new insights and tools.

Anarchism – as many commentators have noted – has served as the laboratory of the left, of social justice and resistance movements around the world. Even where we remain marginal, the tools we invent eventually become mainstream.

— William Gillis, “Transhumanism Implies Anarchism”

 

 

[The] claim that our rights are something “given to” us, handed down from above by the government and its soldiers, is a pernicious, authoritarian, damned lie.

Who has given us our rights? Nobody. We have taken them. Every right we have, we have because we fought for it from below. We have these rights because we resisted violations of them, because we fought those who violated them – sometimes fighting “the Soldier” – and compelled the state to recognize them. And the state recognizes them because it’s afraid that if it violates them we’ll damn well fight it – and its soldiers – again.

Rights have never been granted by authority. They have always been asserted against authority, and won from it. We don’t have our rights because the government and its soldiers are nice – but because we’re not. It’s not the Soldier – it’s the dissidents, the hell-raisers, the dirty flag-burning hippies, the folks with bad attitudes towards authority in general, who have given us our rights throughout history, by fighting for them.

— Kevin A. Carson, “No, It’s Not ‘The Soldier’”

 

 

Molinari Review 1.1: What Lies Within?

By on May 21, 2016 1

[cross-posted at C4SS and BHL]

The Molinari Institute (the parent organization of the Center for a Stateless Society) is proud to announce the publication of the first issue of our new interdisciplinary, open-access, libertarian academic journal, the Molinari Review, edited by yours truly, and dedicated to publishing scholarship, sympathetic or critical, in and on the libertarian tradition, very broadly understood. (See our original call for papers.)

You can order a copy here:

Print Kindle
Amazon US Amazon US
Amazon UK Amazon UK
CreateSpace Store

It should also be available, now or shortly, on other regional versions of Amazon. And later on it’ll be available from our website as a free PDF download (because copyright restrictions are evil).

mr1-1-coverphaze

So what’s in it?

In “The Right to Privacy Is Tocquevillean, Not Lockean: Why It Matters” Julio Rodman argues that traditional libertarian concerns with non-aggression, property rights, and negative liberty fail to capture the nature of our concern with privacy. Drawing on insights from Tocqueville and Foucault, Rodman suggests that privacy is primarily a matter, not of freedom from interference, but of freedom from observation, particularly accusatory observation.

In “Libertarianism and Privilege,” Billy Christmas charges that right-wing libertarians underestimate the extent and significance of harmful relations of privilege in society (including, but not limited to, class and gender privilege) because they misapply their own principles in focusing on proximate coercion to the exclusion of more indirect forms of coercion; but, he argues, broadening the lens of libertarian inquiry reveals that libertarian principles are more powerful tools for the analysis of privilege than privilege theorists generally suppose.

In “Capitalism, Free Enterprise, and Progress: Partners or Adversaries?,” Darian Nayfeld Worden interrogates traditional narratives of the Industrial Revolution. Distinguishing between capitalism (understood as a separation between labour and ownership/management) and free enterprise, Nayfeld Worden maintains that the rise of capitalism historically was in large part the result of a suppression of free enterprise, and that thanks to state intervention, the working-class benefited far less from industrialisation and technological innovation than they might otherwise have done.

In “Turning the Tables: The Pathologies and Unrealized Promise of Libertarianism,” Gus diZerega contends that libertarians misunderstand and misapply their own key concepts, leading them to embrace an atomistic vision of society, and to overvalue the market while undervaluing empathy and democracy. (Look for a reply or two in our next issue.)

Finally, Nathan Goodman reviews Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire, an anthology edited by C. B. Daring, J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano. Goodman praises the book for its illumination of many aspects of the intersection between anarchist tradition and the LGBTQ community, with particular emphasis on the tension between LGBTQ activists who seek to dismantle oppressive institutions and those who merely seek inclusion within them; but in the area of economics, he finds its authors to be too quick to dismiss the free market or to equate it with the prevailing regime of corporatist privilege.

Want to order a copy? See the ordering information above.

Want to contribute an article to an upcoming issue? Head to the journal’s webpage.

Want to support this project financially? Make a donation to the Molinari Institute General Fund.

New Molinari/C4SS Books

By on April 10, 2016 0

[cross-posted at BHL]

Two of my Molinari/C4SS comrades have new books out.

desktop-revolution

One is Kevin Carson’s The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks. The blurb says:

Defenders of the modern state often claim that it’s needed to protect us – from terrorists, invaders, bullies, and rapacious corporations. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, famously argued that the state was a source of “countervailing power” that kept other social institutions in check. But what if those “countervailing” institution – corporations, government agencies and domesticated labor unions – in practice collude more than they “countervail” each other? And what if network communications technology and digital platforms now enable us to take on all those dinosaur hierarchies as equals – and more than equals? In The Desktop Regulatory State, Kevin Carson shows how the power of self-regulation, which people engaged in social cooperation have always possessed, has been amplified and intensified by changes in consciousness – as people have become aware of their own power and of their ability to care for themselves without the state – and in technology – especially information technology. Drawing as usual on a wide array of insights from diverse disciplines, Carson paints an inspiring, challenging, and optimistic portrait of a humane future without the state, and points provocatively toward the steps we need to take in order to achieve it.

The other is Sheldon Richman’s America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. The blurb says:

This book challenges the assumption that the Constitution was a landmark in the struggle for liberty. Instead, Sheldon Richman argues, it was the product of a counter-revolution, a setback for the radicalism represented by America’s break with the British empire. Drawing on careful, credible historical scholarship and contemporary political analysis, Richman suggests that this counter-revolution was the work of conservatives who sought a nation of “power, consequence, and grandeur.” America’s Counter-Revolution makes a persuasive case that the Constitution was a victory not for liberty but for the agendas and interests of a militaristic, aristocratic, privilege-seeking ruling class.

Wisdom from the right-libertarian corgi

Wisdom from the right-libertarian corgi

Another of my Molinari/C4SS comrades, Nick Ford, has a forthcoming anthology on anti-work anarchism, titled Instead of a Book, By a Man Too Lazy to Write One; check out the description.

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