Archive for the ‘Statolatry’ Category
David Henderson: in defense of Avatar
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010If you haven't seen Avatar yet, you should; the plot might be incredibly predictable and, actually, almost identical to that of Poul Anderson's novella Call Me Joe or Robert F. Young's novella To Fell a Tree, but what you get out of it is the best visual, graphical, cinematic experience ...
Get it straight: the military does not protect our lives or our freedoms
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009War is the health of the State.—Randolph Bourne Today is Veterans' Day, formerly called Armistice Day. But, our exalted warmongering Statolatrist congressmen and senators and presidents couldn't have a holiday that celebrated the end of a colossal State endeavor, so in 1954 they renamed it Veterans' Day. The attention paid to ...
Obama: More government school is the answer!
Sunday, September 27th, 2009Perhaps you've heard that the Savior of America and his Secretary of Education are proposing rules (edicts backed with explicit threats of murder) that would add hours to the school day and days to the school year. This is so typical of the simple-minded Statism that pervades Washington that I'm ...
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 ...
Fish in a barrel
Friday, June 19th, 2009Here are a few issues or news stories that I've come across recently that I could offer easy and obvious solutions or objections to, or that libertarianism has already provided an easy and obvious answer to: Philip Morris supports new FDA regulations on cigarettes. Why, when they've opposed previous interventions in ...
Toy guns aren’t weapons
Saturday, May 16th, 2009I have difficulty believing anyone actually supports zero-tolerance policies and extreme political correctness anymore—anyone, that is, except government bureaucrats. By "extreme" I mean atrocities such as this, which any sensible person would be outraged at: NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. -- The latest case of zero-tolerance at the public schools has a 10-year-old ...
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 ...
We need more competition, not consolidation, in food-inspection agencies
Thursday, February 26th, 2009My experience and my reading has convinced me that more freedom (less government) in a given industry or sector of the economy leads to more, cheaper, and better goods and services. Libertarians take this as a given. Despite the Statist objection to the possibility of competition between rival companies/agencies/organizations in ...
Quote of the day
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009From Chris Floyd: What would happen if we simply treated all of these greasy pole climbers as ordinary human beings—"poor, bare, forked animals" like the rest of us—instead of turning them into fantasy figures imbued with embodiment and magic and goodness? The only extraordinary thing about them—their craving for dominion over ...
I pledge…
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009...to be of service to Barack Obama... ...to be a servant to our president and all mankind. That is some scary and disgusting shit. Hat tip to one of Radley Balko's commenters for a working link to a video of this celebrity pukefest: MySpace Celebrity and Katalyst present The Presidential Pledge
Obama’s nationalism and socialism
Wednesday, January 21st, 2009Partly because I like quotations so much and partly because I haven't perused many blags recently, my favorite blag post of the last several days was this one by Michael Rozeff. He compares the unifying, nationalistic theme of Obama's four-year presidential campaign to the ideas and slogans of the Nazis. ...
Freedom-hating “nudger” appointed to regulatory post
Thursday, January 8th, 2009Skip Oliva writes about the appointment of Harvard law school professor Cass R. Sunstein as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This is one of the most important "regulatory" (murder/slavery-mongering) bureaucracies in the federal government. There isn't much I could add to Oliva's post. Except to link ...
Scarcity is not shortage
Thursday, December 11th, 2008The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. —Thomas Sowell I might only be an amateur student of economics, and a lazy one at that (I have totally ...
Sheldon Richman on Black Tuesday
Saturday, November 8th, 2008I wish I had seen Sheldon Richman's thoughts about America's election of a black man to its highest and most vaunted position before I wrote my last post, because I think his take on it (and Wil Wilkinson's, whom he quotes) matches mine more closely than does Lew's, which, if ...
It can’t get any worse
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008I heard an Obama supporter say this today (paraphrasing because I couldn't quite hear everything, from across the room): "When we elected Dubya eight years ago, we thought he would be halfway decent, and he turned out to be terrible. ... Although, at this point in time, everybody's saying, 'It ...
Well, that didn’t last long
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Last night I wrote about the sick and depressed feeling that my unintentional, half-subconscious rooting for Barack Obama gave me; this feeling was very strong all day yesterday, from my trip to the polls to my viewing of Comedy Central's election coverage, because I found myself actually rooting for Obama ...
Quote of the day
Friday, October 24th, 2008"Whenever there is a problem due to 'too much freedom', the solution is to restrict freedom, and not to blame the individual that committed the crime. Whenever there is a problem due to a corrupt system, then the individuals are blamed and never the corrupt system." —FSK, Kangaroo Court Fnord.
Agents of the State are better than everyone else
Monday, September 15th, 2008An LRC reader writes in disgust to Lew Rockwell: Please don't use my name because, as you know, i am a news reporter for [a certain TV station], and it could get me in trouble. I am outraged at what I have seen about the horrific train wreck that killed about 20 ...
The-e-e-e-e-e-e Yankees suck!
Friday, August 29th, 2008The patriotic correctness bellowing blowhard bully brigade is in full force at Yankee Stadium, where no one is allowed to move or talk very much, much less go to the bathroom, during "God Bless America" in the 7th-inning stretch. Bradford Campeau-Laurion violated that ludicrous rule, unknowingly, and suffered the consequences, ...
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 ...
David Theroux on Olympic nationalist-Statism
Wednesday, August 20th, 2008Naturally, a professional writer says many of the same things I said better than I did.
Debbie Downer, Olympics version
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008I know I'm being a total Debbie Downer about the Olympics, but I had two thoughts to write about them. Basically, they are variations on the observation that the Olympics tend to glorify and elevate the State to a great extent. This could be due to the preeminent pathos of ...
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 ...
Artificial intelligence is dangerous in State, not private, hands
Monday, July 7th, 2008I was reading about the Three Laws of Robotics at Wikipedia, and for anyone who hasn't read any Isaac Asimov, I highly encourage you to start with I, Robot and go all the way through Foundation and Earth. That's 12 books altogether: five robot novels and seven Foundation novels, which ...
America! Fuck yeah!
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008The Onion's AV Club has a funny list of the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America songs. Of course, the most hilariously hyperbolic pro-America song of all time is "America! (Fuck Yeah!)" from the movie Team America: World Police, but, then, it was trying to be hyperbolic. I love the list of ...
Brave Statists on Mises.org
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008As wrong as they are, I am quite impressed with several of the non-libertarians—and in fact outright socialists—who frequent the Mises blag discussion threads and offer their input as to why a Mises columnist or blagger was way off and why government is actually not so bad, and is necessary, ...
Inside the Statolatrist mind
Saturday, June 21st, 2008In New Scientist magazine, Owen Flanagan reviews the book The Political Mind by George Lakoff. Flanagan provides a surprising and refreshing non-Statolatrist perspective on science and politics in this review, but that might be typical in New Scientist—it certainly isn't in primary scientific journals. Flanagan is especially skeptical of this ...
Juror conscription is not a civic duty
Friday, May 23rd, 2008I wonder if anyone but myself, who is pretty thoroughly obsessed with quotations from famous figures throughout history, enjoys our random quote generator that Kel put at the top of our page. (He didn't write the code, he just put it up there; the plugin is by Dustin Barnes.) I ...
Coercion, not persuasion or enterprise, is the answer
Saturday, May 10th, 2008for environmentalists, claims Ann Pettifor on the BBC website. Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that "there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice". And yet... and yet... there ...
Defeating their own arguments
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I'm surprised I haven't blagged about any of the posts on one of my new favorite libertarian sites, Rad Geek People's Daily, Charles Johnson's blag. He wrote a long and entertaining post about three rural-Minnesota 8th-graders who were suspended for sitting during the Pledge of Allegiance. My favorite part of ...
Girl suspended for not pledging to the flag
Saturday, April 26th, 2008I give fascist neocon warmonger and all-around State lover Neal Boortz a hard time on this website, but he introduced me to (what he referred to as) libertarianism, and it led to my adoption of pure libertarianism, so I should give him a little more recognition. He has several solid ...