(Source: antistate, via anarcho-fabio)
"Thinking is man's only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think—not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment—on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict “It is.” Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. But existence exists; reality is not to be wiped out, it will merely wipe out the wiper."
XXX • I feel so left out for not getting ask box hate on here!
Socratic Apology: Philosophy, Hardcore & Coffee
XXX • I feel so left out for not getting ask box hate on here!
Socratic Apology: Philosophy, Hardcore & Coffee
Proletarian dictatorship sounds more like a dictatorship over the proletarian to me.
dillonbeard asked: Hey, where did you get your Ceremony burn this flag shirt?
They played in Oklahoma City (which I live near) the other day.
The best present I have ever received from my parents (Taken with instagram)
This is forreal one of the best tribute albums I’ve ever heard.
(via deathwishinc)
“Why put yourself into a position to go over there and be forced by a circumstance not of your choosing to take the life of another human being who’s a total stranger? Because they’re not some evil caricature like you’ve seen in films, they’re people. They have mothers, they have fathers, they have sisters, they have brothers, they have children. There’s people who love them just like there’s people who love you. Those people grieve when they lose them, just like people grieve when they lose you. That’s maybe not as dramatic and exciting and clear-cut and easy to understand as the simple binary world of good and evil that you get pained for you but that’s not the way the real world is. And in the real world, you have to live with the consequences of your decisions for the rest of your life.”
Got this the other day. Glad they started reprinting this shirt.
(Source: davidnardcore, via creesquevives)
“The idea that a well-designed spectacle reduces people to automata is not merely an ‘explanation’ of Nazi horrors and the otherwise apparently unaccountable phenomenon of Hitler; it is a restatement of Hitler’s position and a trace of the twentieth-century cult of propaganda. One function of it is to place all the responsibility for a whole society mobilized into a killing machine on the shoulders of one man: people who see the ‘cathedral of light’ are from that moment no longer responsible for the murders they perpetrate. The function of the Führer is to guide us, to inspire us, and to take the blame for everything, precisely to relieve us of responsibility, the fantastic appeal of all political leadership. The power of the arts to transform the world and ourselves —- a modernist trope seen in as varied a group of thinkers as Heidegger, John Dewey, and Nelson Goodman —- is also a basically political idea: a dark fantasy, or a social-democratic ideal, but also a cooperative resolution to blame the art for the slaughter, or for that matter to credit it for the social welfare. In other words, ‘the power of aesthetics’ is itself a kind of totalitarian fantasy: what is required for the Holocaust, or for the transformation of the class system, is just effective art/propaganda; it’s not a matter of real people wanting to kill or achieve justice. … Art is central to politics, and propaganda sometimes works to some extent, but the idea that it hypnotizes or breaks the will of millions of people is itself a mere totalitarian fantasy. Greeting Hitler ecstatically and doing what he said were things that actual people did for actual reasons, not mere effects of mesmeric superpowers.”
— Crispin Sartwell (Political Aesthetics)
“Admittedly, some regimes have been explicitly anti-aesthetic: examples would include all the Marxist dictatorships. Marx himself treated the arts as epiphenomenal: a mere twisted reflection of an underlying economic reality. However, this posture itself has myriad aesthetic entailments. Communist architecture has often been pointedly ugly, as a way to emphasize its sheer utility. Well, this is an actual aesthetic approach that remakes whole environments and has been massively influential. The great American housing projects of the early sixties, now belatedly being imploded all over the country, participate in this sort of leftist anti-aesthetic aesthetic, a pointed ugliness that beautifully reflects the bureaucracies that produced it. That is, there is no getting rid of aesthetics, even in a case where it is consciously rejected: rejection of beauty as a bourgeois plot, for example, is itself a design style expressing the essence of the regime. And while the texts may lie, the building or cityscape or industrial wasteland cannot lie, or at least cannot merely lie. It is real: the actual intervention of the actual regime in the actual world.”
— Crispin Sartwell (Art and Politics)
aurochz asked: Might of been asked before, sorry. Who is your favorite left-libertarian? Also, who do you think is the smartest advocate of a political philosophy you fundamentally disagree with?
Hasn’t!
Roderick Long, definitely. Ironically, partially for some of the reasons you listed as problems you have with him (the eudaimonism element). However, there are plenty of other reasons that I favor him, as well. I’m not a mutualist, but a left-Rothbardian, and he’s probably the best example of one. Not only that, he remains fully radical as both a libertarian and as a leftist, including on social issues. Charles W. Johnson might be my second favorite for all of the same reasons, though he seems to be a mutualist rather than a left-Rothbardian. They actually wrote a really interesting paper together on libertarian feminism:
http://charleswjohnson.name/essays/libertarian-feminism/
Another one of my favorites from Long is his “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Class.” It’s very long, so it’s uploaded in two parts:
http://praxeology.net/libclass-theory-part-1.pdf
http://www.praxeology.net/libclass-theory-part-2.pdf
(A note on the word choice in that paper: it’s pretty old —- I think from the early 90s —- and at the time Long still used the term “capitalism” in the way that most ancaps do. He’s since rejected this and promoted the “free market anti-capitalist” position.)
As for the second question, hmm. My first reaction was Kevin Carson, although mutualism doesn’t seem that far off from my own views to say that I “fundamentally disagree with” it. Since I’m posting links, here’s probably my two favorite things that I’ve read from Carson:
http://www.mutualist.org/id4.html (“The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand”)
and
http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/C4SS-Labor.pdf (“Labor Struggle: A Free Market Model”)
If we’re including the dead in this discussion, I’m going to be fairly cliche and say Aristotle and Marx. If we’re not going to include the dead, I’m not sure. Part of me wants to say Chomsky for his work in linguistics as well as his analysis of foreign policy, but I feel like the question implies specifically that political philosophy specifically would be the area in which I’m judging them. While I think Chomsky is generally brilliant there as well, he also has some very perplexingly not-so-brilliant moments (and while these typically correspond with the reasons I disagree with him, I don’t mean that they’re perplexingly not-so-brilliant statements simply because I disagree with them). For instance, his response to Roderick Long’s question when he did his Reddit AMA:
There’s a number of odd things about this video. First of all, it seems to be an anarchist telling another anarchist to grow up and stop being an anarchist, or at least stop being an anarchist in the short-run. Secondly, he notes “you can’t just abolish the State because you’d need worker co-operatives, etc”—-the obvious implication here would seem to be that the correct strategy should then be to set up those non-State alternatives to State institutions (i.e., a dual power strategy). Furthermore, he fails to address what Long’s actual point was: that strengthening the State inevitably means strengthening corporate power as well. He himself has perfect analysis of how this goes on, and then fails to incorporate that analysis into his larger analysis. As I’ve said before, Chomsky has always felt like the perfect mirror image of Milton Friedman —- both in all of the positive connotations that comparison brings, and all of the negative connotations that comparison brings.
So who I’d actually choose in regards to the second question if it was narrowed down to living people and mutualists didn’t count, I’m not totally sure off the top of my head. It’d likely be a feminist or someone else with a very good grasp on sociology and identifying very real social problems that ended up supporting State solutions to those problems.
