Archive for the ‘Democracy’ Category
Maybe free speech is less popular than I thought
Friday, February 3rd, 2012I had a bizarre experience yesterday: I encountered two people who were wrong on the internet who asserted that words can harm people and so their (mis)use should be punishable by law. I don't mean using libel or slander to harm someone's reputation, which should not be considered crimes anyway. ...
How long will the SOPA protests be successful?
Sunday, January 29th, 2012In my more cynical moods, I think that Westerners' complacency in political and economic matters and their comfort levels with life in general will make their recent victories against internet censorship mere footnotes to the history of State encroachment into our online lives. In other words, lawmakers, lobbyists, and other ...
Links for an ending week
Friday, January 20th, 2012President Obama deserves praise for opposing the SOPA/PIPA bills in the House and Senate, respectively, but, of course, in true Republocrat fashion, deserves further criticism for qualifying that with, "That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors ...
Quote of the day
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians' stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers'? I answered the question in that ...
Stop the Stop Online Piracy Act!
Saturday, November 12th, 2011The latest attempt from the parasites in Washington to limit the freedom of the internet and all of the benefits that stem from it is called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Its more official, full name is Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation ...
Guaranteed student debt guarantees the need for student debt
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011The ongoing Occupy movement has produced myriad versions of the "we are the 99%" lament, complaining that 99% of us have been taken advantage of and outright wronged by the richest 1% of individuals who control the financial sector and the governments of our society. I've found myself surprisingly sympathetic ...
Bin Laden reaction roundup
Sunday, May 8th, 2011I have been much more interested in the various and sundry reactions, mainly from Americans, to Osama bin Laden's killing than to the news itself. The whole situation ought to inspire quite a bit of mixed feelings from any libertarian, and even from any sensible, sympathetic human being. Notwithstanding the ...
End-of-the-month links
Saturday, April 30th, 2011Amazon.com's cancellation of its plans to open a South Carolina distribution center and high-tailing it out of town because the state legislature voted against giving the company a tax exemption are interesting from a libertarian perspective for a couple reasons. First, from a principled anti-tax standpoint, this is one of ...
Jim Breuer on democracy
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010I really liked actor-comedian Jim Breuer's perspective on politics and democracy on the Regular Guys Show on Friday, October 22, 2010. He was an in-studio guest, and he stuck around for the last news segment of the morning. When the news guy brought up the local elections and the fact ...
That refusal-to-put-out-house-fire story
Thursday, October 7th, 2010Only this morning did I hear about the South Fulton, TN, fire department responding to a house fire but then declining to put the fire out because the homeowners had not paid the annual $75 protection fee. I thought about using this story to explore some issues of statism and ...
The left believe lies and propagate misconceptions, too
Thursday, August 26th, 2010I was not impressed by this blag post by Timothy Egan, even though several of my friends were (according to Facebook). I mean, all of his points were good and worth making, but the immense hypocrisy of the blag post and liberal Democrats in general makes me skeptical that any ...
Victims
Saturday, August 14th, 2010In Atlanta last Wednesday and Thursday, 30,000 people crowded the streets on foot and in their cars to hand in their applications for a voucher for free Section 8 housing to the East Point Housing Authority. More than a thousand people [as I mentioned, it was actually 30,000 in the ...
Fish in a barrel 7
Monday, May 24th, 2010I've been a little depressed about how little time I have/make for blagging and reading about politics and economics this year, but it's because I'm working a lot, exercising five or six times a week, and watching things obsessively on DVD, like Star Trek and Futurama and True Blood. I ...
Misguided Tea Partiers, misguided Tea Party haters
Monday, April 26th, 2010You know, I actually think it's a shame the Tea Party gatherings receive nothing but ridicule and not discussion or engagement from the liberal Democrats. Really, what's more of a shame is that they deserve a lot of the ridicule, from libertarians and libertarian-ish people, because the movement has become ...
Comedian Larry Miller on politicians
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010Larry Miller, of Ten Things I Hate About You and general stand-up comedy fame, was interviewed on the Regular Guys show, the Atlanta morning radio show that I used to listen to in college and still listen to online regularly. Among other things, they got to talking about government and ...
My jury duty experience
Sunday, March 21st, 2010I'd like to relate my limited experience as a potential juror and use this as a starting point for some thoughts about our criminal justice system. It might be a little anti-climactic, but it might also be worth the read. I'll leave out a lot of specifics because it is ...
Stupid census commercial
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Have you heard that radio commercial encouraging people to participate in and cooperate with the census because it allows local, state, and federal governments to allocate money for schools and determine how many teachers a town needs and so forth? The narrator says there are four science teachers in this ...
Internet uprising overturns Australian censorship law
Friday, February 5th, 2010I don't think this news story got enough attention: from Ars Technica I read that an internet uprising led to the overturning of a very Orwellian censorship law in Australia. The law, which had taken effect just weeks prior, banned anonymous political commenting online. Can you imagine the twisted set ...
Campaign finance reform is pretty simple
Monday, January 25th, 2010Many of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court's ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was ...
Fish in a barrel 6
Thursday, December 17th, 2009For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter ...
Obama-bashing quote of the day
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009In reality, the quote of the day is Chris Floyd's entire post about Tony Blair's warmongering glorification of the Iraq War and Obama's warmongering glorification of any war the Imperial Federal Government embarks on—in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, no less! But since I know you all read Chris Floyd's ...
Quote of the day
Friday, October 16th, 2009Charles Johnson, October 14, 2009: If you want a recipe for real disgust with the prevailing political establishment, and a real opening for radical critique, one of the things that has to happen is that dissidents need to begin to see that even the longed-for best-case scenario can’t possibly deliver what ...
An “up-or-down vote on health care”?!
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Sadly, we have yet another example of liberal short-sightedness and overall inability to understand the key part of an issue: this petition that the political action committee Progressive Change Campaign Committee is going to submit to Harry Reid. It reads, "Any Democratic senators who support a Republican attempt to block ...
Misconceptions about libertarianism and Statism
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009I find that correcting misconceptions about libertarianism amounts more to correcting misconceptions about the State than anything else. Statists don't understand libertarianism because they don't understand their own philosophy. Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By "moral egalitarianism" I mean everyone is ...
Ted Kennedy, good riddance
Saturday, August 29th, 2009The more gracious sensibilities inside me prevent me from ranting and raving about what a terrible scourge on humanity Edward Kennedy was, but he really was a terrible senator. I detest the common notion that we should focus only on the recently deceased's good qualities or only say kind things ...
This just in: Americans are stupid
Friday, June 19th, 2009No, this isn't just stupid. It's stupid and evil and inhumane. As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren't proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the ...
Quote of the day
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009Roderick Long, on the recent anti-tax tea parties: Whichever party is out of power always begins to emphasise its libertarian-sounding side in order to divert anti-government sentiment toward support of that party rather than toward genuine radical opposition to the entire establishment. By the same token, the party that’s in power employs ...
Obamaism is Statism
Friday, April 10th, 2009Out of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary ...
Blagnet.net’s quiz of the day
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009Who said the following? It must be understood that toil alone makes for accomplishment and advancement, and righteous possession is the reward of toil, and its incentive. There is no progress except in the stimulus of competition. When competition—natural, fair, impelling competition—is suppressed, whether by law, compact or conspiracy, we halt the ...
Taxes shouldn’t pay for stem cell research
Saturday, March 7th, 2009To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical. —Thomas Jefferson Because they shouldn't pay for anything. Associated Press reports: Eight years of frustration are close to an end for scientists seeking ways to use embryonic stem cells to combat illness and ...
Quote and links of the day
Saturday, January 31st, 2009On the off-chance that you haven't read them, I thoroughly enjoyed this critique of Noam Chomsky and other communist idiots and the ensuing discussion of it at Austro-Athenian Empire. Roderick Long's involvement makes just about everything into a stimulating discussion, if it wasn't already. The quote of the day was provided ...
Sarah Palin: same old neoconservatism cost them election
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008From an article at Politico.com, reporting on an interview that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News, we learn that Sarah Palin blames her and McCain's defeat on the fact that their campaign represented the "status quo" and that the people wanted change—anything different from the Bush regime—and the McCain/Palin ticket ...
Rooting for Barack Obama
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008All of my friends and colleagues, being scientific researchers who are funded by the State (National Institutes of Health, mainly), want Obama to win so badly they can taste it. They preach about doing your civic duty of voting every chance they get, and they talk and email about how ...
Michigan ballot proposals
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008I broke down and went to my polling location this morning to vote for one ballot proposal and vote against four of them, and write in "NOBODY" for president, Senate, House of Representatives, state legislature positions, mayor, etc. The ballot proposal I voted Yes on was to legalize medical marijuana ...
Many, many quotes of the day!
Monday, November 3rd, 2008I probably visit Vox Popoli, Vox Day's blag, about once or twice a month, and when I can avoid or ignore the egomaniacal self-promotion and non-Christian-bashing, I am rarely disappointed. There were a couple gems in his recent posts: There's no shortage of evidence that most people are idiots. This is ...
Arthur Silber on our choice of war criminals
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008I imagine many of my friends and colleagues are watching the debate between two hideous megalomaniacs, two shameless scumbags, two proud war criminals, as I write this. I don't imagine they would ever read anything as honest or powerful as Arthur Silber writes on a regular basis. I liked this ...
The bailout is even worse than we know
Saturday, September 27th, 2008I liked two rants that I found via this Chris Floyd post. The first is by Arthur Silber, whom Floyd is fond of quoting, and with good reason: ...the consequences we are now seeing are irrevocable and unavoidable. The bad debts must be accounted for and written off. A problem of ...
Mob-rule is the answer
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Yeah, 'cause that worked real great in ancient Athens.
The Republocrats are ALL against us
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008Brad at WendyMcElroy.com is right on the money: If the bailout accomplishes nothing else, it may expose the charade of the "two-party" system to a few more eyes. The Democrats' excuse for supporting so much atrocious Bush legislation (Patriot Act, use of force, Military Commissions Act, warrantless wiretapping, etc.) has traditionally been ...
Thoughts on libertarianism and voting
Sunday, September 14th, 2008The anarchist argument against voting in democratic elections is that participating in the immoral system of determining right and wrong that is democracy (mob-rule) gives your tacit consent to the outcome of such elections; by voting, you demonstrate that you agree that mob-rule is a valid and just way of ...
Voting
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008My University's paper today had an opinions article in which the author announces his distaste for both of the political parties candidates. However, he still shows us his faith in Democracy - otherwise known as Mob Rule - when he states: I am a firm believer that by not voting, a ...
Vote with your feet, not your mind
Thursday, September 4th, 2008In an astonishing departure from the norm, James Ostrowski blagged about something unrelated to Buffalo, NY, his father's career in Buffalo, NY, or his own amazing prescience in making political predictions. He's frustrated that the Democrats look as though they're about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory once ...
Cypriot cynical wisdom
Thursday, August 28th, 2008My college friend who is from the Turkish side of Cyprus currently has a Facebook status that reads: "is bewildered by the amount of hot air generated at political party conventions in the US. He bets you could run a steel mill with it for a year!" Amen. I just ...
What libertarianism isn’t 2
Thursday, July 24th, 2008In summary: It isn't democracy, with good reason. In my last post I quoted an anti-libertarian commenter on some Statist blag who thought that libertarians wanted to do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted whenever they wanted, and that no law or police force should stop them. I'll remind you ...
Libertarian Party nomination
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008Link-and-run time: I agree with pretty much every word of this post by Roderick Long, who, despite his agorist commitments, endorses anarcho-capitalist Mary Ruwart for the LP nomination.
Google’s Quote of the Day
Thursday, May 15th, 2008For those of you that have a personalized google page, I certainly hope y'all noticed the quote of the day. Sitting beside my news bar - which is filled with news about Bush's vision for the middle east, and the Edwards endorsement of Obama - lays a quote by Lord Acton, ...
Can anarchism save Somalia?
Sunday, April 27th, 2008"Good government" is a paradox. Any people so decent as to be capable of implementing it would be better off without it, and any people so rotten as to need it would be incapable of implementing it. —unknown Somalia's condition, its history, and the attempts by the U.N. and U.S. to impose ...
Democracy disgraced
Friday, April 25th, 2008After the debate in Philadelphia between Obama and Hillary, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson were widely and harshly criticized for the way they ran the debate; specifically, the questions they spent the first 45 minutes on. Viewers, writers, and Obama's camp complained that voters did not hear anything ...