New Word Order
Control of Language, Control of Thought
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. – Hermann GöeringGilbert, G.M. Nuremberg Diary. York: Da Capo…
Veiled Paradigms
Conspiracy is as natural as breathing. And since the struggles for advantage nearly always have a rhetorical strain, we believe that the systematic contemplation of them forces itself on the student of rhetoric. Indeed, of all the motives in Machiavelli, is not the most usable for us his attempt to transcend the disorders of his…
Politics as Pro-Wrestling
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.Mencken, H.L. A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956, p. 29 The winner of the last contest, a very powerful man, walks down the ramp to the deafening sound…
Democrazy: Democratic Fascism?
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for…
Nietzschean Libertarianism
Ernest Jones, a biographer of the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, said of Nietzsche that he “had more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was ever likely to live”. I find it difficult to categorize Nietzsche sometimes because he was so decidedly anti-system and went out of his way…
Language & Liberty
Anomaly, Tea-O-Conned, and New Word Order warn against top-down, authoritarian attempts to détourn dissenters back into the fold. The good news is that despite some efforts to the contrary, there really is no “New Word Order” dictating meaning from the top down to us plebes. Now if only we can let our fellow humans know this!…
Thomas Paine Was A Red: A Primer on Libertarian Welfare
Libertarians sure are a contentious group; they love to quarrel. Did you know that Murray Rothbard wrote a one-act play satirizing Ayn Rand called “Mozart Was A Red”? Did you know that Robert Anton Wilson wrote an entire book satirizing Murray Rothbard’s natural rights approach entitled, “Natural Law: Or Don’t Put a Rubber On Your…
Nobody Expects the American Inquisition
Having been a long-time libertarian, the over-arching moral directive of my adult life has been the idea of voluntarism, i.e., that all forms of human interaction should be consensual. This emphasis on the primacy of consent in all social avenues often leads libertarians to hold positions that seem counter-intuitive to the uninitiated. Maybe my point…
Social X
The attention of most libertarians seems to be easily directed at economic or political topics, but really there are a number of topics in other fields that warrant our concern as well. I wanted to bring up what I call “Social X”, i.e., social experiments. Understanding the implications of these experiments can become a form…
Optimistic Anarchism: Avoiding Enforcement Zones
I want to share a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, one that hopefully resonates. This concept is something I call Personal Anarchy (PA) which is NOT anarcho-capitalism. I do not consider “anarcho-capitalism” tenable for many reasons. One main reason is that the concept “property” is doomed to being eternally ill-defined.…
Defining Liberty
Alex Wissner-Gross, Harvard Ph.D. in physics, has developed an equation that may explain intelligence itself, which some libertarians may find very flattering: Intelligence is a physical process that seeks to “maximize future freedom of action and to avoid constraints in its own future.” Reading this really got me thinking about how libertarianism would be best…
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