In What Counts as Political?, this week’s Center for a Stateless Society commentary, I examine how the label “apolitical” could be applied to Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

The assumption is that things are only political if they explicitly involve a political office or ballot measure. This view ignores what lies below the surface: The political climate from which campaigns spring or which they try to appease or co-opt.

The New Yorker has published an article on the influence of the Koch bros. Jesse Walker responded at Reason. I found both at Roderick Long’s blog, where they are discussed here and here.

Radley Balko brings a useful counterpoint when he says “I’d like to thank the Koch brothers for six years of funding my right-wing, corporatist work on police abuse and criminal justice reform.” Cato also hosted Roderick Long’s Corporations Versus the Market article. There is more to the story than the pursuit of corporate profits.

Of course, Samuel Konkin, who invented the word Kochtopus, talked about this thirty years ago in New Libertarian Manifesto and elsewhere.

The story reminds me of politicians who conflate their personal interests (exercising power) with the common interest.

And it is pronounced “Coke-topus.” “Cock-topus” is the lovable mutant who pulls the strings at Thinking Liberty. His henchman is a bear from Canada rumored to be an ultra-rich marijuana tycoon.

Yeah, the summer’s almost over, and I’ve finished my August work for Center for a Stateless Society. In September I’ll be scaling back my work with the Center so I can better focus on graduate school. My monthly commitment is now 4 regular news commentaries and 2 irregular commentaries that can hopefully be offered as exclusives to various publications. The leveraging of voluntary organization to benefit all individuals involved continues!

Speaking of individuals, my August feature (the last regular c4ss.org feature I’ll be doing for a while), Social Individualism and Solidarity explores these concepts as foundations of a free society.

My first commentary of the week, And Real Criminals Go Unpunished is on the charges Ahlam Mohsen faces for throwing a pie into the face of a senator, and how ruling elites get away with murder. Mohsen has been released on bail since the article was published, but is still facing charges and investigation.

I wanted to emphasize a positive example of liberty moving forward or non-authoritarian organization in my second commentary of the week, so in Breaking the Information Monopoly I took a look at how the current information landscape is both breaking up established power and also provides an inkling of a free society in action.

And yes, there is a fundraiser. If you like what we’ve been doing to get more radical libertarian voices heard and more ideas examined, why not throw in some funds to help us focus on the important work we’re doing?

Ross Kenyon: “Why (good) libertarians and socialists/progressives aren’t really at odds with each other.”

I’ve got a new page on my site for presentations I’ve done.

darianworden.com/archives/presentations.html

There you can find the final version of my notes for the practical anarchy talk I did at the Drexel Student Liberty Front Summer Retreat. They don’t entirely correspond to what I said. Some qualifiers and additional sentences were added here and there. Also I started the talk by walking to the podium and saying “I’m Darian Worden, and I’m here to talk about anarchy!” I then asked how many people in the room considered themselves anarchists. The vast majority of the audience (which totaled 15-20 people) raised their hands. I had written it for a mixed minarchist-anarchist free market libertarian crowd. But even the seasoned anarchist should be able to at least pull some talking points and ideas out of there.

The notes were posted at Center for a Stateless Society.

There was video taken, but it might not have recorded fully. I’ll probably record an mp3 of the talk at home – it’s only about 30 minutes anyway and I won’t be agitated from being caught in traffic for an hour.

I’ve got new commentaries online at Center for a Stateless Society.

In Video Provides Look Into Policing, I analyze a Liberty on Tour video documenting aggressive police behavior.

If cops will not hold other cops accountable for bad behavior, that will encourage more bad behavior by police. If external pressure is exerted on police forces through videotaping and public commentary, that might compel positive actions.

In Steven Slater and Narratives of Conflict, I take a look at how New York Times coverage characterized Slater’s actions, and offer an alternate explanation.

With constant submission to petty power trips, occupations that could be adventurous, instructive, or otherwise interesting ways to make a living become processes that reduce the worker to an automaton. Causing a scene and grabbing a drink on your way out the emergency chute might just be a rational way to deal with that kind of nonsense.

Check out the full articles at c4ss.org.

Viking Zombies seem to have magical powers in this Ensiferum video.

This is a line of thought I’ve been considering lately. Maybe I’ll adopt it some day. I figured I’d post it here for discussion and note-keeping purposes. I’m probably not the first person to think of it but I don’t recall seeing it elsewhere.

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Whatever Western culture was, it destroyed itself in the First World War.

The revolutionary aspirations of the 1960s were the result of widespread attempts to break free from the philosophical nihilism that prevailed from 1914 to the mid-sixties. These aspirations were largely co-opted by Marxist-Leninist authoritarians and professional liberals into support for a more stable kind of domination, but still had lasting beneficial effects.

This implies that saying you fight for “Western Civilization” is a nicer way of saying you support Western domination over global civilization.

Shortcomings with this thesis:

1) It’s very simple, so it is inherently limited to providing one model for thinking about one brief period of history.

2) How do anti-colonial, particularly post-WWII era, struggles fit in?

3) Should massive anarchist and anti-authoritarian movements within Western nations during the era 1914-1964 (eg, Insurrectionary Ukraine, Revolutionary Spain) be seen as attempts to create a new world that were not as widespread/noticeable/broad-based as those of the 1960s?

4) Naturally a counter-culture was growing below the dominant ideas during this time – that is what emerged in the 1960s to challenge the dominant culture.

But noticeable advances in applying classical liberal ideas, which seems to be the defining positive factor of 19th Century Western culture, did occur during the 1914-1964 era. Regardless of what one thinks of voting as a measure of freedom, women’s suffrage does represent a measure of greater social equality than before. Efforts towards racial desegregation gained ground during this era. And the defeat of the European Axis powers unquestionably resulted in greater liberty for millions, despite the unnecessary deaths, strategic bombing murder, and the ceding of Eastern Europe to Stalinist rule.

5) Let’s not pretend that racism, sexism, and religious discrimination are “solved” problems in the West, or let Westerners off the hook for supporting murderous politicians. But nations considered “Western” in general seem to be environments where more tolerant and open cultures predominate than in nations considered “non-Western.”

65 years ago today, the United States government dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, condemning to death and agony thousands of individuals who were not responsible to the war. I can’t think of a culture that dropped two atomic bombs on civilians primarily to demonstrate national power as something worth preserving. The golden days are ahead of us.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” – attributed to Edward Grey

My weekly commentaries are up at Center for a Stateless Society.

In True Economic Liberty: Not a Conservative Idea, I use a Students For Liberty post as a springboard to discussing the idea that conservatives support “economic liberty.”

Unfortunately McCobin’s article, like many free-market libertarian works, does not look deeply enough into the assumption that conservatives support economic liberty. Are conservatives in general really in favor of a free economy?

PA School Encourages Sexual Assault is based on a story so ridiculous, I had to keep reading it over again because it was so hard to believe that I got the right idea from it.

After a Pennsylvania high school student told administrators that another student had raped her, the school principal’s response was to use her as “bait” to catch students he suspected were having consensual sex on campus. The alleged perpetrator was not pursued and is now accused of raping the same student later that night.

Yes, you read that right. Not only was a serious crime not investigated, but the alleged victim was forced to take part in a sting operation to catch non-criminals. And then she was raped again.

How could something like this happen?