I really, really think the Ames/Levine position is a deliberate psyops plan to make this weird doublethink among liberals where opposing corporate involvement in the economy/property/government by Democrats and Republicans is somehow being FOR corporate involvement in the economy/property/government.

Or some shit like that. I have no idea what they are actually arguing but I am disturbed by the way they are trying (perhaps unsuccessfully though there IS an audience for this stuff) to create a knee jerk 'purist' corporate liberalism out of pure paranoia and contrarianism.

I am bothered by them much more than the usual Salon or Alternet screed about 'Ayn Rand libertarians' etc.

Mark Ames has nightmares of being frozen in carbonite gold and dropped into a pit in Galt's Gulch. We should have sympathy for his debilitating phobia.

Alex Strekal doesn't seem to like you guys very much.

Bitcoin as it stands is not going to save us from the rest of the economy that drags us all along with it. It is bound to the economy whether its proponents like it or not.

Lincoln might just be the Secular God of American Capitalism. He gets defended more often than Christ himself.

"Despite progressive’s claim to command a substantive critique of social and systemic power, they will celebrate governmental structures of plutocracy. They see plutocracy as an externally constituted force that can combat diffused power hierarchies while failing to be a part of them. As if it were a “neutral” force, a blank executive slate upon which a rational justice can be inscribed and effectively commanded by the intended rationality of the prescribed justice itself. Exposing the modern progressive’s ignorance of the structures of oppression is another opportunity."

Tell 'em!

I am conflicted about this case as well. I have no sympathy or care for the vulgar anti-immigrant bile from the crowd that has lionized Bundy, and that certain libertarians shamelessly pander to. Bundy and the conservatives and libertarians that cheer for his 'property rights' are also looking like idiots in their rhetoric, as liberals have clearly refuted his claims on legal and constitutional grounds (though those grounds are arbitrary and inconsistent considering federal concepts of 'public property').

The 'private property' 'rugged individualist' Galt's Gulch bullshit is entirely besides the point of this case's significance. Most partisan yammering on this is pretty ugly as well. Both Bundy's defenders and detractors are embracing the most vulgar forms of authoritarianism. On the conservative/libertarian side, there is the fearmongering and militiaman grandstanding (I'm not sure I want to live in a society that arms every fenced in puddle with shotguns), as well as paranoia and lip service to 'revolutionary' violence (really just an ahistorical desire to see their propertarian privileges rescued by a Constitution that will never save them).

On the liberal 'progressive' Obamaforce side there is bloodthirsty nuttiness by center-right liberal bootlickers gleeful to see another Waco, and decrying America's gun culture while simultaneously and absurdly praising the barbaric 'expertise' of our hyper militarized police and government agents, smugly content with the belief that those drones overseas are serving the people. Scorpions in a bottle, ugh!

What this case shows is what this article describes well; the claims to land made by rugged invidualists like Bundy and the claims to land made by the government in the name of the 'people' are the same thing: ugly, egotistical greed and a willingness to enforce it with a culture of entitlement and violence.

With conservatives it's always 'for'. Always has been.

he's living in the marvelous world of the magic Freepers, probably.

I got a far different impression from reading the summaries of these movies... that the "Purge" isn't really freedom, or anarchy, but a cynical method of population control by the totalitarian state to weed out dissenters and keep the status quo ongoing. That is, it's an indictment of totalitarianism and the 'planned chaos' and systemic terrorism it creates.