May 2012
6 posts
The No Texting While Walking Law is a Threat to... →
Let me attempt to approach this from a different angle for a short while before I bring up the tone again. Replace the phone with a book; replace the phone with a toy; replace the phone with a map; replace the phone with a disorganized wallet; what is the difference?
If I or you are distracted by something other than a phone, it presents the exact same situation when crossing a street. The...
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Occupy bb7 conversations
Transcripts of a few conversations that took place in Occupy bb7 between the 6th and 13th of May 2012.
E: I consider myself elf. I use elf Pavlik, that’s the full official name I use.
T: The elf part, what does that refer to?
E: Elves come from the forest, also a bit of the Christmas elves without any Christmas ideology, other than that, joyful spirits wanting to make people...
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Power Fears Freed Markets
Sara modelling my placard for the 12M demonstration in Berlin.
A handful of people asked me about it. I outlined some of the ways that the most despised corporations are beneficiaries of state-granted privilege. I talked about the reasons that the species of state intervention that gets called ‘regulation’ can be expected to create very irregular distributions of power and wealth. I...
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A place in a queue: property?
Jeffery Tucker:
Important issues: Do you “own” your place in line? What if someone pays the person in front of you to cut in, thereby pushing you back one step? Are you owed some portion of the revenue? But then should the payment taker have to ask permission from everyone behind him before making the transaction?
Robert Toten’s reply resonates the strongest for me....
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April 2012
7 posts
~*~* Evil Moustache-Twirling Capitalist *~*~:... →
logicallypositive:
Free will thus becomes negated by not by external limitations of the potential pool of options, but on a particular causal sequence that coerces (not coercion in the libertarian sense, but coercion in the “there is physically no other option” sense) the agent into choosing something. For example, when you go to the docotr and they hit your knee with that tiny hammer thing,...
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Harry Binswanger on Edgar the Exploiter
Harry Binswanger, commenting on the Edgar the Exploiter animation writes:
I came across a libertarian youtube video purporting to show what’s wrong with the minimum wage. It’s not only entirely economic, rather than moral, it consciously seeks to appeal to the hatred of businessmen.
It’s entitled “Edgar the Exploiter.” The theme is: make the businessman as...
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Edgar the Entrepreneur →
Great article from Daniel Sanchez that picks up from where Edgar the Exploiter leaves off.
Every state intervention into the market is an abrogation of consumers’ sovereignty. It impairs the satisfaction of consumers by hampering the efforts of entrepreneurs to adjust the intricate structure of production so as to better serve them.
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Crowd-funding liberty. More tips.
I’m in the middle of my second crowdfunding campaign. Its purpose is to fund the production of the third animated film in the George Ought to Help series; Give Me Your Ball.
This is a sort of a note-to-self, but if you’re thinking of crowd-funding a pro-liberty project that resembles this series at all, perhaps the following recommendations will be useful for you too.
Forge...
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March 2012
8 posts
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Anti-Government Extremist: What it Feels Like to... →
http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/FeelsLike.htm
Political analysts frequently consider what it means to be a libertarian. In fact, in 1997, Charles Murray published a short book entitled “What It Means to Be a Libertarian” that does an excellent job of presenting the core principles of libertarian political philosophy. But almost no one ever discusses what it feels like to be a...
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Beyond Democracy
I added a new reward to the campaign. The great little book Beyond Democracy.
You can read it through in just a few hours. Very accessible and extremely densely packed with solid argumentation. A fantastic ‘hand-out’ for the questioning democrat in your life.
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Gracefully ending online conversations that start...
Note to self. Next time you feel like you’ve had enough of an online conversation, instead of what you feel like saying, say this instead for a better outcome (and resist the temptation to respond to the reply):
My apologies that I haven’t been able to make my position clearer. I don’t feel like pursuing this further and I think that both our times could be spent in better...
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Give me your ball! Critique this script
Hi all, if you have the time and inclination please take a look at this script for a forthcoming animation and given me your thoughts/criticism/suggestions.
Give me your ball!
(working title)
[Albin is shown carrying a ball]
Albin is on his way to school. The local bully is blocking the path.
The bully says
“Give me your ball, or I’ll beat you up!”
Albin is being threatened...
February 2012
3 posts
anarchei asked: I'm curious. Do you run the Redshift Media account on Vimeo, and if so, will you be uploading the "George Ought To Help" video there at all?
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On the non-existence of Human Needs
Everyone I know exposes themselves to an increased risk of death in order to satisfy other preferences they hold: Travelling by car, smoking, drinking alcohol, crossing the street, biking, going swimming, giving birth, eating food that hasn’t been pre-liquified to minimise the chance of choking, the list goes on.
Apparently most people do not place infinite value on extending their own...
January 2012
3 posts
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The weak case for laissez-faire
Markets are complex systems. Threats of force against peaceful people, to get them to do X or to refrain from doing X, have an ambiguous net effect on overall well-being (these interventions will have unintended consequences). But the threats themselves have a negative effect on well-being. Insofar as our goal is to maximise well-being, we are not justified in making threats of force against...
December 2011
9 posts
logicallypositive:
I think lefties have a legitimate point when they talk about consumerism… It’s annoying and devoid of any sort of genuine meaning
Agreed. Closely linked is the problem of firms ‘manufacturing desire’. Bullets to bite though. The alternatives are much worse.
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I use the word voluntary a lot. This is what i mean: If a given purposeful behaviour would _not_ have obtained if a threat of force being maintained by another person or persons, against the agent, were removed, then the purposeful behaviour was not voluntary. All other purposeful behaviour is voluntary.
A person may decide to run indoors in bad weather to avoid getting wet. This is a voluntary...
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Capitalism Is the Enemy of Democracy?
http://www.truth-out.org/capitalism-enemy-democracy/1323789051
The title of the article is almost right. Democracy is the enemy of capitalism, and capitalism is the friend of the poor.
The most significant accomplishment for Occupy Wall Street (OWS) to date is that the Occupiers have managed to poke a hole in the legitimacy of neoliberal capitalism and its central claim that unregulated...
State interventions in markets, however minor, cause unintended consequences. The interventionists see the consequences and conclude that more intervention is needed to fix them. The unintended consequences ripple outwards, becoming increasingly severe, politicians scramble to implement new interventions to fix them. That’s how continuing belief in the appropriateness of violent intervention...
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Diaspora invites
There’s some decent ancap-ansoc dialogue/arguing going on on the diaspora alpha (it’s like google+, but open source). But I’d like some more knowledgeable propertarians on there. Who would like an invite?
Oh: Diaspora posts can be synced to auto-publish on tumblr and facebook, which is handy.
Drop your email address in my ask box if you’d like to join.
Define power
logicallypositive:
everyone uses this term, but what do you mean by it?
Capacity to effect absolute influence in the world. How this absolute influence is to be measured is a tricky one.
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Monster roars: what's all that about?
A gigantic monster appears. It strikes a pose and roars at the film’s hero. Why would a large predator behave that way towards small prey? This skyrim ad is as good an example as any : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1AenlOEXao
Getting the hang of https://joindiaspora.com (the open source, less evil, facebook/google+ alternative). Looks uncannily similar to google+, seems to work fine so far. (testing: this diaspora post should show up on facebook and tumblr automatically)
November 2011
7 posts
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Vigilance against creeping 'Human needs' →
Caitlyn - I watch the episodes of My Super Sweet 16 where they show how much is spent on each facet of these parties. With every price that pops up on some lavish, useless thing, I say to myself what basic, practical life necessity that money could pay for (my bachelor’s degree, a wedding, a down payment on a house, etc.). Then my heart just breaks. Right into a million pieces.
There are no...
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The shaky foundation of exploitation theory
One-sheet printable PDF here: http://ge.tt/9zPHW4A
Suggestion: Print a bunch of copies and head towards your local Occupy protest, politely hand copies to the people listening to the Marxists.
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Collective brain: improvements? suggestions?
I’ve been seeing a displeasing amount of Marxism on youtube footage of the US occupy protests. I wanted to put together a one-sheet handout which would function as both an introduction to the foundational problems of Marxist exploitation theory, and a taste of Austrian economics.
Here’s the text of my attempt below. Any suggestions for improvements welcome (I will link a PDF version...
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Interview with LibertariaNation.org
Here’s the English version of an interview I did for LibertariaNation.org
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Tell me a little bit about you: where were you born, where do you live, what is your occupation etc.
I was born in Huddersfield, that’s a town in the north of England, in the late 70s. I currently live in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. I do freelance digital media work. Currently most of my income comes...
October 2011
9 posts
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Libertarianism: Replies to Jon Stewart
My responses to the questions that Jon Stewart asks judge Napolitano here.
1 Is government the antithesis of liberty?
I prefer not to talk about liberty if possible since it means lots of different things to different people. But to the extent that liberty means freedom from coercion, yes the state is inherently hostile to liberty.
2 One of the things that enhances freedoms are roads....
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The state: Necessarily willing and able to kill...
Just watched the footage of Scott Olsen seemingly shot in the head at close-range with a tear gas canister, by police in Oakland. It’s enraging, but shouldn’t be surprising.
The continued existence of the state in any form (monarchy, dictatorship, representative democracy) depends entirely on the willingness and ability of its agents to attack and ultimately to kill peaceful people....
Smash the Evil 1%! →
The “occupy” protest movement is thriving off the claim that the 99 percent are being exploited by the 1 percent, and there is truth in what they say. But they have the identities of the groups wrong. They imagine that it is the 1 percent of highest wealth holders who are the problem. …
But there is another 1 percent out there, those who do live parasitically off the population and exploit the...
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Occupy Amsterdam. A 'new form of democracy'?
Earlier today I visited the ‘Occupy Amsterdam’ camp at Beursplein Amsterdam.
I wanted to get a sense of what kinds of ideas were prevailing in the Dutch branches of the occupy movement, and if appropriate, suggest resources for research for any open-minded protesters who weren’t yet familiar with austro-libertarian analyses of the current situation.
I joined a conversation...
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'Markets not Capitalism'
This looks like an interesting book, looking forward to reading it. Like the cover too. Deliberately disowning the word capitalism though, I don’t think that’s smart. Perhaps the content will change my mind about that. From the comments section at mises.org someone said:
Language is dynamic (as you all may know from reading Shakespeare), just like the market. “Capitalism” is a lost...
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“Thank goodness Jobs didn’t believe ideas could really be owned when he visited...”
– Sheldon Richman
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Steve Jobs compared to the banksters
Jobs, and his firm Apple, relied in large part on state coercion—the initiation of force via IP law—for its success. He presided over a company that makes amazing products, but his actions—filing patents—have prevented and continue to prevent other products from coming into existence.
For me Jobs and the banksters that OWS protesters decry have very similar moral...