Dale Everett, author of Anarchy in Your Head webcomics, has a post on his blog that underscores the importance of liberty.
Our will is what defines us as living. It’s what makes us critically different from dead inanimate objects, e.g. a rock has no will of it’s own. To the extent that you take away or restrict a person’s will and expression of self, you’re killing that person.
I came across a fun article about the Yugo today.
the Yugo Cabrio convertible was introduced with many GVX features as standard equipment. This would be a hipster’s wet dream to own a Yugo convertible and drive it ironically around.
There was a time when both Megadeth and Metallica were cool.
This is Megadeth performing Hook in Mouth.
“You say you’ve got the answers well who asked you anyway?”
I respect neither the office of the president, nor anybody who occupies it. There has not been one good president, a precedent established by George Washington when he attacked the Whiskey Rebellion. Jefferson and Jackson would have been okay if they weren’t racists who expanded executive power.
The office of the president of the United States now stands as an affront to the liberty of people all around the world. It is the office that directs the murderous and thieving policies of imperialism that threaten the lives of countless individuals while telling the world that liberty means the freedom to do the bidding of tyrants. The cult of personality that presidents build is an integral part of this system of oppression, and must be countered. So let’s piss on the images of a couple of presidents who are especially idolized today.
Abraham Lincoln said, “I will say then, I am not nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not, nor have I ever been in favor of making voters of the negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people…there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
It should be obvious to anybody who looks at the history without star-spangled glasses that Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation as a military measure to undercut support for the Confederacy. Lysander Spooner, a militant abolitionist, said that “There never was and there never will be, a more gross, self-evident, and inexcusable violation of the principle that government should rest on the consent of the governed, than was the late war, as carried on by the North.”
So perhaps Lincoln would have been a good president if he wasn’t the archetypical treacherous tyrant.
For more on Lincoln and some other tyrants, see L. Neil Smith’s Empire of Lies.
Barack Obama is supposed to embody change, but all he really embodies is a more sophisticated, non-white face on the imperial presidency. He talks of closing Guantanamo, but has already come out in favor of preserving extraordinary rendition. He already has the blood of children on his hands as president, not that he wasn’t responsible for the continued war as a senator. His administration supports forcing people into national service where service is defined by the leaders of the nation. Not to mention all the other rights-violations that he shows no intention of stopping.
All this should have been obvious to anyone who watched Obama as a senator and presidential campaigner. Real, positive, lasting change cannot come through rulers or legislation. Real change starts in you. So what are you going to do about the world? Disobey, hopefully.
New Jersey Alliance of the Libertarian Left recently began a flyering campaign against Immigration and Customs Enforcement detentions. Our campaign focuses on the use of Middlesex County jail facilities to house those kidnapped by ICE.
Why focus on Middlesex? Plenty of reasons. Our operations are centered in Middlesex County, there are people here who ought to be socially and economically isolated for benefiting from oppression, we hope that Middlesex officials will be personally offended by our words, and we hope that there will be people who read our flyers and decide to help out the detainees and possibly stop Middlesex County from housing ICE captives. We are not proscribing any course of action for people to take; we are raising awareness of the evil of government at all levels and some possible solutions. We leave decisions concerning action up to the conscience of individuals.
The flyer can be downloaded as a .pdf. As the New Jersey Alliance of the Libertarian Left website pronounces, we hope to create a political climate in which abduction and detention of peaceable individuals for non-crimes is unfeasible.
I’d like to call attention to an excellent zine, The Best of BAD Press, published by Invisible Molotov. It’s a compilation of writings from the Boston Anarchist Drinking Brigade, which are every bit as excellent as the name would suggest.
It advances a more mutualist concept of property rights than an Austro-lopithecus like me favors, but its criticism of multiculturalism and of “anarchists” who favor state action are spot-on. I’ll have to check out more of the BAD Brigade’s work.
Here’s a recording of Iron Maiden doing an electric version of Journeyman.
As I’ve said before, when people rely on themselves and their friends for protection, there will be less use for the protection racket known as the state. The dissemination of weapons and combat information is one way to peaceably bring about this change.
In that spirit I present an interesting link, The Box O’ Truth. It started with testing what happens to different things when they are hit with different projectiles, and expanded to include other neat firearms stuff.
Amount of time I waited in line at the post office today: approximately 30 minutes
Number of surveillance cameras I noticed while waiting: ten
Number of postal employees present: two
Stamped on my package: “Media Mail Subject to Inspection”
If only there was a counter-economic American Letter Mail Company.
Here’s a Metal Monday Viking onslaught, courtesy of Amon Amarth.
Note that I’m a tech-positive anarcho-barbarian. If I could have a fusion-powered, GPS-navigated longship made of the most advanced materials, and terrorize the oppressors on the coasts while blasting metal, that would be pretty sweet. That doesn’t actually play into my strategy though.
