en-us https://www.intensedebate.com/users/5191062 Comments by sunny_outlook http://c4ss.org/content/30223#IDComment863398769 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. Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:51:22 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/30223#IDComment863398769 http://c4ss.org/content/30206#IDComment863013345 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. Sat, 9 Aug 2014 18:56:32 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/30206#IDComment863013345 http://c4ss.org/content/28323#IDComment852422786 Alex Strekal doesn't seem to like you guys very much. Wed, 9 Jul 2014 16:54:32 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/28323#IDComment852422786 http://c4ss.org/content/28111#IDComment850103959 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. Fri, 4 Jul 2014 00:05:11 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/28111#IDComment850103959 http://c4ss.org/content/28910#IDComment850102803 Lincoln might just be the Secular God of American Capitalism. He gets defended more often than Christ himself. Fri, 4 Jul 2014 00:00:48 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/28910#IDComment850102803 http://c4ss.org/content/26426#IDComment818959911 "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! Fri, 18 Apr 2014 07:40:58 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/26426#IDComment818959911 http://c4ss.org/content/26443#IDComment818954924 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. Fri, 18 Apr 2014 07:23:59 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/26443#IDComment818954924 http://c4ss.org/content/9802#IDComment798236462 With conservatives it's always 'for'. Always has been. Tue, 25 Feb 2014 07:18:51 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/9802#IDComment798236462 http://c4ss.org/content/18085#IDComment798234800 he's living in the marvelous world of the magic Freepers, probably. Tue, 25 Feb 2014 07:11:10 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/18085#IDComment798234800 http://c4ss.org/content/24622#IDComment797545134 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. Sun, 23 Feb 2014 09:02:39 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/24622#IDComment797545134 http://c4ss.org/content/24812#IDComment797540938 I'm going to cross post a comment I made on n8chz's blog, with a few edits made, as I believe there are good points being made that need to be heard by left-libertarians and c4ss and would benefit the discourse greatly: Libertarians, once synonymous with anarchists, are (supposedly) not beholden in theory to any institution for its own sake. Yet there is a tendency even among those who endorse the 'freed market' to favor equilibrium first, and equality second. I'll quote n8chz here: "The market process is a process that produces equilibrium, not equality. If equilibrium is a survivable state, then agorism should be enough. I won’t commit to the idea that agorism is enough without testing the market equilibrium it creates for survivability." Many current arguements for the 'freed market' would lead to favor the ‘equilibrium’ spoken of here, the equilibrium so beloved by most libertarians, and one that leads to market fundamentalism and backdoor neoliberalism in practice. As the market is a process which is not shy of creating many institutions, either through the cash nexus or otherwise, I am intrigued by the theory that n8chz refers to as 'polymacroeconomy'; that is, let the individual choose which economy to take part in. If I understand it right this would make the free market only one economy of many. I like to think of social anarchists as favoring sovereignty among economies (or, put more simply, having no single economy be sovereign), an interesting alternative to market anarchists favoring of sovereignty among communities (having no single community in the economy be sovereign). What I mean by that is that I understand most market anarchists to endorse one macroeconomy, the so-called ‘freed market’, and favoring free interaction among polities and collectivities inside that macroeconomy. In other words, the market anarchists want society to be able to set up their own grid apart from the Dominant Grid enforced by the State and capitalism. In contrast, the social anarchists want to do away with all Grids entirely, or at least a society where Grids can be shut on and off or swapped in as fluid a way as possible. I believe such a setup strongly requires a widespread nexus of communal property and a stable occupy/use infrastructure as a regulatory check on the possible rise of private economic power dynamics. But still, this is only theory. This I’m afraid may lead to a fundamental disagreement among both market and social anarchists at first, but I believe it can be overcome, but only through the exploration and establishment of social anarchist economic activity as described above, sovereignty not only among economies, but between economies, and between individuals. How that comes about would on the surface resemble the agorism described by many libertarians, but I believe the answer lies within the continued spread of antiestablishment communal property and a decentralized planned economy where the ends is not simply ‘voluntarism’ for economic actors, but something akin to a ‘vanguard with peer-review’. Sun, 23 Feb 2014 08:41:04 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/24812#IDComment797540938 http://c4ss.org/content/22306#IDComment797215528 Read the wikipedia definition of "Vanguardism" for a textbook case of the weasel-word bullshit sophistry many Leninists and their authoritarian schmoes try to pull. "oh, the vanguard is a natural organic voluntary emerging order"... ffff, sounds like the words of some anarcho-capitalists! Just replace 'vanguard' with 'entrepeneur', and you have the exact same lipstick-on-a-pig facade that is the apologetic for a ruling class. Anarchists reject all ruling classes. (I agree that this does not condemn or refute all social anarchist theories of planned economies. I do not conflate 'planned economy' with a State command economy, as libertarians are wont to do. The only vanguard I'd like to see is one with peer-review. That is, not a vanguard at all, but a society where the individual chooses which economy they wish to participate in, not one with mere adherence to institutions and economic contracts that allegedly allow the most freedom.) Sat, 22 Feb 2014 06:51:01 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/22306#IDComment797215528 http://c4ss.org/content/24639#IDComment796910859 "Hard right-wingers are easier to take. They love the awful things government does because they’re awful people. They know government is about uniformed thugs pushing people around and murdering them, and they revel in it, because they view the world through a Hobbesian, red-in-tooth-and-claw prism. " What a beautiful paragraph. Conservatives are 1984, and liberals are Brave New World. Also, I think liberals are better capitalists than both conservatives and libertarians (to all you Austrian Economists who may be reading this, no, that's not a good thing) . I've never seen any ideology sell the idea of capitalism (and the State which is intertwined with it) as the end result of civilization better than they do. Fri, 21 Feb 2014 08:05:15 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/24639#IDComment796910859 http://c4ss.org/content/23326#IDComment779945616 Our future dystopia will be a lot closer to Terry Gilliam's Brazil than something like 1984. Still brutal, but instead of ruthless 'efficiency', it will be a sprawling corporate nightmare of planned chaos where nothing works for the powerless. Mon, 6 Jan 2014 03:28:24 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/23326#IDComment779945616 http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/10/24/former-us-official-for-every-yemen-terrorist-us-drones-kill-40-60-new-enemies-are-created/#IDComment760871602 Terrorism is just another business for them. Mon, 2 Dec 2013 22:00:12 +0000 http://antiwar.com/blog/2013/10/24/former-us-official-for-every-yemen-terrorist-us-drones-kill-40-60-new-enemies-are-created/#IDComment760871602 http://c4ss.org/content/22682#IDComment758281670 Because as you said, they 'value production more'. Employers would likely just hire people to manage the robots, ironically paying them even less to do so in the long run in terms of scale as they rack up windfall profits. And with a minimum wage along with this new technology, they'd simply create a yet smaller captive employee pool, a 'specialized' class of robot repairmen, leaving even more unemployed and barred from the market as employers adjust their budgets to gain as much profit as possible and to cede as few of these profits to other humans as possible. Worst of both worlds, really, and the minimum wage doesn't address the fundamental problem here. Look, if the state decided we should all be paid $100 per hour I would celebrate as it sounds good in theory, but I wouldn't believe it would be sustainable for very long. But tactically I'd love the state to rack up the minimum wage as high as possible, accelerating the dysfunctional nature of capitalism for all to see. Thu, 28 Nov 2013 08:28:12 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/22682#IDComment758281670 http://c4ss.org/content/21681#IDComment748711893 Vampire Spider, then. Or Cthulhu. Tue, 12 Nov 2013 08:37:48 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/21681#IDComment748711893 http://c4ss.org/content/22306#IDComment744395835 yeah, for every sentence that made me go 'wtf' there was another that I loved. Mon, 4 Nov 2013 05:59:16 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/22306#IDComment744395835 http://c4ss.org/content/9805#IDComment741951707 Go home Mr. Gibson, you're drunk. Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:48:50 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/9805#IDComment741951707 http://c4ss.org/content/22195#IDComment741950178 1960s - era (pre-crank) Rothbard goes into this quite a bit. Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:44:19 +0000 http://c4ss.org/content/22195#IDComment741950178