No, we need to build community. That means relationships. We need, each of us, to find ourselves, our respective individual truths. We need to share that with the world in a human way. An emotional way. One person at a time. And we need to be present when our fellow community members do the same. Every day of every year for the rest of our lives.
My dad spent a considerable sum of money every month to send me to a Catholic grade school in Northeast Philadelphia in the 1980s. It was a decent working class institution. Our first subject in the morning was Religion. It went downhill from there. Discipline was emphasized. Actually, it was shoved down our throats. To tell you the truth, I was so bored that I, the eventual valedictorian when I graduated eighth grade, became a troublemaker. Wow, did I make trouble.
There’s a lot of screaming and hair-pulling going on about the Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox right now. It’s really dumb. And I’ll tell you why.
When do we launch the armed resistance? That is the question bouncing around the libertarian/anarchist social media scene and blogosphere over the last few days. At what point do we stop risking arrest, stop pamphleting, stop speaking out, blogging, YouTubing and all that other stuff in favor of picking up arms and dropping cops and IRS agents by the dozens?
This past week the Free State Project (FSP) made the news again and, as usual, not in the best way. The FSP board of trustees voted to expel a member – blogger and activist Christopher Cantwell – from the organization for violating the policy against promoting violence.
How would war work in a stateless society? Would it happen at all? John and I talked about that and much more in our 20th episode. Give it a listen!
Mike Shanklin, an old liberty friend who runs Voluntary Virtues invited me to do an interview yesterday. Check out the video above. We talked about my evolution from a conservative to an objectivist and then voluntaryist. We talked about my business Shield Mutual, the agora’s first defense agency. We discussed Gandhian nonviolence, the self-ownership principle and some of my recent videos.
Under what conditions in our oft-promoted libertarian stateless society, will a person’s freedom be taken away? How will people be punished for committing crimes – real crimes, not victimless crimes – against people or property? Will there be pre-trial confinement and bail? House arrest? Will there be prisons? Just how different from the current state injustice system will the stateless libertarian dispute resolution system be? Listen to this week’s episode to find out!
I screwed up. I dropped the ball. I start so many projects over here in my office overlooking a bamboo forest that I don’t actually finish them all. I have learned to filter myself before trying to put every seemingly good idea I get into practice. Because sometimes, those ideas suck. And sometimes, I just don’t have the time, patience, manpower, assistance or money to do them justice. Here are some recent projects where I just totally failed to deliver.
Absentee ownership is taken for granted in today’s society and indeed by most anarcho-capitalists. Whatever you can legitimately obtain and keep is kosher, according to proponents of absentee ownership, be that a tiny self-sufficient homestead or a global corporate empire spanning multiple industries with tens of thousands of employees. But without state protection in the form of limited corporate liability, subsidies and the inefficient state monopoly court system, I don’t think absentee ownership on any kind of large and expansive scale can be practically sustained.