The Center for a Stateless Society, like many marketist groups, hosts a web-based Find Your Philosophy Quiz. As is par for the course with these quizzes, I can’t find my philosophy in the quiz, precisely because the questions are worded in a way that excludes my philosophy.

I would think at best they are missing an opportunity by not asking the respondents which (business or government) partner they perceive as more powerful.

In my view, if I accept someone’s positional authority, it’s because I’ve run out of options that don’t involve authority. I refer to this process as resignation, not consent. This highlights profound and widespread controversy as to the definition of consent. If the C4SS were seriously interested in exploring the range of public opinion along several ‘axes,’ one of the more important and interesting ones would be the spectrum of understanding of what constitutes consent, or alternatively, views on what factors determine the scene of consent.

Here’s a news flash. Some of us see managerial and executive level decisions as a net-negative. I pride myself on my lack of managerial background, just as I and other pride themselves on lacking a ‘civil service’ background. You can see this attitude even in pop culture. Those old enough to remember the TV show ER perhaps recall the kinds of resistance nurse characters and even doctor characters made against ‘promotions’ to managerial roles. Whether or not the stories are realistic, the fact that they are part of our popular culture says something about our national psyche.

Throwing in ‘organizing their work lives’ with ‘mak[ing] managerial…decisions,’ is of course an example of package dealing.

If they deleted the if clause from the statement, I would have ‘strongly agreed,’ without reservations. As stated, I have to decide whether an ‘agree’ answer will be interpreted as support for the idea of worker takeovers or as support for the idea that all unfair advantage (or privilege) has its origin in the public sector. A rhetorical question.

More package dealing. Self-employment is seen as less preferable than employment-employment by many, for reasons I find perfectly understandable. Many are backed into self-employment by circumstance, and the self-employed on paper (1099 instead of W2) are de-facto temps, counted as business founders as yet another way of cooking the employment and business startup statistics. See for example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/fridays-job-numbers-and-w_b_598520.html.

Cooperative economics is something I value in its own right, not only because it is an alternative to working for a boss, but more centrally because it is an alternative to competitive economics.

Partnerships are something I understand to be (by definition) an ownership arrangement, and therefore not a departure in any sense from capitalism, even actually-existing capitalism. Anderson Consulting was an example of a partnership.

No consistent answer available to someone who believes in squatting but doesn’t believe in land titles.

They’re effectively asking whether I favor censorship, or favor freedom of the press being for those who own one. Another loaded question.

As a matter of principle, the word ‘and’ should be avoided in questionnaires of this type.

True. They also of course use the built-in advantages inherent in wealth itself.

Sweatshop labor is a by-product of economic desperation and little else. Yet I hesitated to answer ‘disagree’ as I feared I would be interpreted as viewing such work as ‘voluntary.’

Plain English Glossary

Often we generate more heat than light because we are reading from different dictionaries. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in the so-called marketplace of political ideas. Take the word liberal. In terms of what Rush Limbaugh means by liberal, I’m a flaming liberal, while in the sense of what the Economist (magazine) means by liberal, I’m a flaming antiliberal. Then there is the related term ‘libertarian,’ which somehow during the 20^th century (in America, at least) morphed from being (among other things) an anticapitalist movement to being (among not many other things) a laissez-faire capitalist movement. Libertarians in the American sense (henceforth called litas in this blogentry) cherish markets and liberty, while they disparage egalitarianism and collectivism. My own attitudes are largely the opposite, in spite of very real common ground. My purpose here is to provide a small list of words that are especially prone to multiple connotations, and explain my understanding of what they mean, along with my understanding of the litas’ understanding of what they mean. I generally prefer to use words in whatever way is most consistent with what the words mean in everyday, non-jargony English.

market

The pencil-and-paper science called economics conceives of a ‘market’ as a category of product or service, and that portion of the population who either buy or sell that product or service. This ‘market’ can be described in terms of a supply curve and a demand curve. It’s really all quite abstract. To me, and to many if not most, ‘market’ is a verb, as in: “In the new economy, you have to market yourself.” Market is also, of course, a noun: “I have to go to the market and replenish my supply of cat food.” The verb usage of market has the most bearing on my social/political/economic worldview. In my experience, the more ‘market oriented’ the political climate gets, the harder I have to [expletive deleted] sell, sell, sell myself to get a job offer on the table. I definitely associate market-oriented policy with economic precarity, if not hardship. Maybe that just means I’m a loser, but that’s how I feel.

equality

The snarkiest voices among the litas and other rightists frame equality as something that comes in precisely two distinct forms, which they call equality of opportunity and equality or results. The former is possible, if not inherent, in the frictionless plane that is the unfettered market, while the latter is theoretically impossible, and as a stated goal is a symptom of the psychological disorder called sense of entitlement. They love to ridicule it with Diana Moon Glampers jokes or by implying that it implies people being identical. I recognize a third sense of the word equality, characterized by the very widely understood notion of an equal footing. I understand this type of equality to be somewhat broader than the narrow sense of equality of opportunity that seems to imply a society free of de jure privilege. It requires the (to me) more ambitious goal of a society free of de facto advantage. This is in no way equivalent to equality of results.

What does it mean to be on an equal footing with another party? I think most people know intuitively what it means. It means nobody has your head over a barrel. It doesn’t mean getting everything on your terms, but it does mean you have enough clout, game, or whatever, to negotiate a compromise in which the other party doesn’t, either. Expressions like ‘market leverage,’ varying degrees of ‘duress,’ ‘boilerplate contracts,’ ‘getting taken advantage of,’ and ‘monopoly’ are very common figures of speech, even though the litas perform much derivation to demonstrate their theoretical impossibility. Everyone understands what they mean, and that understanding comes from very routine personal experience. Certainly it’s possible for the conventional wisdom to be wrong, but I find it to be a more ready guide than theoremsies derived from assumptions such as a universe in which the only economic goods that exist are eggs and root beer.

freedom

Litas love liberty (the ‘l’ in litas stands for libertarian, after all) and they love the word liberty. I love liberty. What self-respecting person doesn’t? It turns out that in recent years I have been more and more reluctant to self-identify with liberty. The liberty equals negative liberty meme has been pounded so relentlessly, at least on the Internet, that I’ve been conditioned to think of liberty as a basically right-of-center concept. People on my side can and should, of course, remind me not to let our adversaries steal our issues and hijack the language in other ways. I agree, but there is some practical value in ceding the field in spite of my better judgement. Navigate down any blogroll infused with blognames like liberty this, liberty that, CamelCaseLiberty, whatever, and you’ll find a rogues gallery of the usual suspects; Birchers and other conspiracists, litas, agoraphiles and other FMF’s, as well as a bumper crop of Republicans. Including the word ‘liberty’ in my blog name would simply create the wrong impression, and would put me in company I don’t want to be associated with. So, for better or for worse, the colloquial meaning of ‘liberty’ has successfully been massaged to rightist specifications. This sort of poisoning of a word is not uncommon. The 20^th century variety of communism fetishized the word people so much with their people’s republics and people’s liberation armies, that almost reflexively, seeing a sign that said something like ‘People’s Pharmacy,’ my first thought would be, ‘I wonder if it’s run by communists.’ Likewise with the word family and Bible-based Christians.

What about ‘freedom?’ To the litas, freedom means nobody is holding a gun to your head. It’s become quite a cliché. I think of freedom as ‘play,’ in the mechanical sense, that is, some part is free to move along more than one axis. Analogous is the mathematical idea of degrees of freedom. In this spirit, freedom of action is far more precious than freedom of expression. Freedom of conscience is more precious than freedom of belief. In Plain English, economic freedom is synonymous with the phrase ‘set for life.’ To the litas, of course, economic freedom means freedom to fail. At least that freedom is universal. I’ve been trying to popularize the idea that economic freedom means freedom from economics.

capitalist

In Plain English, capitalists are people who are in business for themselves. It’s a functional, not an ideological, term. Practicing capitalists, in general, don’t mind having the government as a customer.

collective

The ultimate dirty word among the litas, it’s not really part of everyday English. Perhaps its most widely recognized usage is collective bargaining. ‘Individual bargaining,’ or negotiating one’s own wages (and of course terms of employment) without representation, is asymmetric. The other side has legal representation, as the job application and other signable documents are professionally-drafted boilerplate. It is also important to note that the other side (the employer) is in almost all cases a collective entity.

Much is being made of the fact that Rand Paul’s position on civil rights laws prioritizes property rights over civil rights. This is a well-known feature of the Libertarian Party platform, and the American variant on libertarianism in general. That this was drawn out of Dr. Paul by a blogger rather than a journalist comes as no surprise. With the main$tream media, zero exposure for third party movements is obviously an editorial policy. More troubling is that even the progressive media are discussing the public accommodations aspects of Dr. Paul’s troubling priorities, rather than the much higher stakes issue of employment non-discrimination. The consumer marketplace is considerably easier to negotiate than the job market, the customer always being right, and all.

David Brin writes of what he calls the ‘diamond-shaped society;’ shape in this case being the shape of the socio-economic structure of society. This is proposed as an alternative to the ‘pyramid-shaped society,’ which is very small at the top and very large at the bottom:

Ever since human beings discovered metals and agriculture, nearly all complex civilizations shared a common structure, a hierarchy of privilege reminiscent of a pyramid, with a super-empowered few on top, directing the labors of obedient masses below. Across 4,000 years and nearly every continent, aristocracies (and the clerics who preached on their behalf) colluded to ensure that the ruling oligarchy would stay on top.

The ‘diamond’ configuration is wide in the middle and small at both top and bottom. This represents a society dominated by its middle class:

The so-called “American Dream” represents a radical departure from this near-universal theme. Our ideal of a middle-class society is best pictured as a flattened diamond… with a few people getting rich by providing honest goods and services, but the vast majority living not far below this elite in comfort, education, and even political clout. In such a society, a respected millionaire will have earned his or her wealth personally—by helping engender competitive services, solutions and products—rather than just inheriting it.

Below the middle class, numbers are supposed to narrow again. (Hence the diamond shape.) If we must cynically accept that “the poor will always be with us,” then they should be few—sporadic unfortunates who have fallen temporarily, due to bad luck or perhaps bad habits. Either way, society ought to be able to lend a hand so they can rise up again. Or if not them, certainly their children.

I have a number of problems with this:

• I’m not willing to cynically accept that the poor we will always have with us. My political economy agenda is to prove Jesus wrong on that particular prophecy.
• While poverty may be more avoidable in the diamond configuration than in the pyramid; it is a more humiliating experience in the former. Combined with America’s cultural tendency toward ‘kick-em-when-they’re-down,’ this could be a positively hellish experience.
• When poor people are a tiny voting bloc, the interests of poor people are especially poorly represented.
• I’ve been rebelling against middle class social norms for most of my life. Likewise, I reject the popular notion that the middle class is uniquely qualified to implement democracy and other forms of accountability.

These objections raise the question: What social geometry is palatable to me? The mandate to abolish poverty necessitates a form that is not in contact with the ground. The socialist (yeah, guilty as charged) ideal of a 0.5 Gini coefficient is exemplified by a zero-thickness or planar object, such as a horizontal sheet of paper. So, the ideal social geometry is a sheet of paper hovering above the ground. Perhaps a small amount of equality can be traded for some efficiency by folding the sheet into a paper airplane. Unfortunately, every glider must run aground sooner or later. It’s a point I must concede for the sake of realism, in spite of my distaste for the hacks and snarks at the American Petroleum Institute and similar astroturfs who delight in such dismalities. In the spirit of the dismal science, we now attempt to negotiate a tradeoff between the fact that we insist on a poverty-free-society, and the Iron Law to the effect that energy-consumption-driven technologies (such as the steam engine) are an apparent prerequisite for the development of a mass middle class; a ‘middle mass.’ For the sake of sustainability, efficiency should be heavily emphasized over power in this tradeoff; hence the ultralight society.

More mixing board shenanigans at Clear Channel’s WDTW AM

Said station is billed as “Detroit’s progressive talk,” which is fair enough, given that it is the local outlet for some fraction of Air America Radio’s feed, about half even carried live, as well as Thom Hartmann live, Ed Schultz on 3-hour delay, and even, giving truth to the “Detroit” part of “Detroit’s progressive talk,” the locally-produced Fighting for Justice. The latter is paid-for content; technically an infomercial. This week (Nov. 1) at the appointed 10:00 AM time, right after the hourly (gag) CNN Radio News brake, we hear about a minute or so of Fox Sports Radio content, some chitter-chatter about football, it seems. Pre-emption of progressive talk programming by sports programming is par for the course on WDTW. Over the years this has been for live game coverage, as with the basketball team formerly known as the Detroit Shock, in past seasons the EMU football team, Oakland University men’s basketball, currently U. of Toledo football, etc. These pre-emptions have always been handled in the crudest devisable manner; unannounced, often breaking in mid-sentence, and very often preceded by studio weirdities such as two concurrent streams in a 50-50 mix, minutes at a time of “dead air” (illegal under FCC rules, unless that too has been deregulated), muzak® or the generic equivalent replacing either commercial breaks or news breaks, and other forms of signal degradation one can only assume are meant to piss off the core “progressive talk” audience, or at least serve as a reminder that the progressive talk community is dependent on the imperious Clear Channel as distribution channel in many if not most markets. Lately, in addition to live sports coverage, there has been an increasing amount of sports talk, such as the NASCAR talk show that pre-empts the second hour of the Ron Reagan Show on Tuesdays, and a talk show boosting U. of T. football overwriting the first hour of the same program Monday nights. Last Thursday, they broke in with about a five minute snippet of the UT booster show over Reagan’s show. Perhaps the sloppy audio editing is due to incompetence rather than contempt. It requires less suspension of disbelief, though, to imagine that a typical WDTW listener (who by now is of course conditioned to expect this sort of treatment), when hearing a sports pre-emption at the beginning of “regularly scheduled programming” to simply tune out on the assumption that the whole show has been bumped. This would make sense as a strategy of de-promotion of a radio program. Ed Schultz, for one, points out the difference between a local affiliate that promotes progressive content and one that simply puts it on the air for interested listeners to “discover.” On the other hand, Clear Channel certainly uses WDTW to promote its “sister station,” of course a sports-talk station, WDFN, “The Fan.” This is fair game when done through the usual channels of commercial breaks, but 2-3 weeks ago, on the occasion of the premiere of yet another do-it-yourselfer or “honeydew” themed show over on WDTW, a half hour of that show was broadcast in a 50-50 audio mix with the first half hour of Free Thought Radio. My point here is, the not-so-subtle unprofessionalism in engineering at WDTW points in not-at-all-subtle editorial directions.

Ed Schultz and others have of course pointed out that broadcasting is a business, and that a talk show is best operated on a for-profit basis. I have no argument with that, as economic independence is a pre-requisite for editorial independence. It is necessary to point out, however, that editorial independence is likely as not the currency in which economic independence is paid for. There has been much discussion concerning what changes in FCC policy would best facilitate editorial diversity and independence. The equal-time provision of the long-defunct Fairness Doctrine comes up often, but with little support even among progressives given its bureaucratic division of airtime between both sides of the aisle, and the implicit assumption that there are exactly two sides to every issue. Challenging the oligopolistic nature of the media market via anti-trust laws is another idea that gets much airtime, but with little to no editorial contrast between the five or so major players in Big Media, what reason is there to believe that 10, 15 or 20 medium-large corporations would collectively be less dumbed-down, controversy-shy, or deferential to power? The relationship between a medium-small talk show operation or other content provider, and a medium-large radio network or holding company, would still be basically asymmetrical. The former would still need the latter more than the latter the former, and I think our audio traffic would still get shat upon in the various ways outlined above. For this reason I have more optimism about Thom Hartmann’s strategy of distributing his show to nonprofit (including Pacifica!) stations, and Free Speech TV. The distribution of progressive content, like its creation, must become a bottom-up process. The change in broadcast rules that is really necessary is the lowering of the entry barriers to broadcast station ownership, especially for low-power stations. Even given a politically-unlikely (as in politically unfeasible) return of some spectrum to low-power broadcasters, it appears media other than Internet are a lost cause for non-commercial or controversial content. The advertising-driven business model of traditional media is simply too aggressive to allow for independent journalism, let alone critiques of the primacy of business in society. The Internet is probably the last hope for grass-roots communication. I am less optimistic about the Internet’s potential for true grass-roots communications than I was when I first encountered it in the early 1990’s–a much more “innocent” period in its development. Nevertheless, the entry cost of being “published” in some meaningful sense (at least until one manages to attract a substantial audience) is still effectively zero, even for someone not milking their site for ad revenues, and even server-side netizenship (self-hosting) is within reach of a typical upper middle class household, or even a thrifty lower middle class individual. So, I think net equity is a far more important issue than any of the issues surrounding incumbent (or traditional) media. The digital divide is also very real, and is something which must be addressed.

Quotations with links

“I found out I would rather be a brat and take whatever I got than lose my identity. I learned that you could be screaming and begging and curled up in a corner, and still in your head be thinking about your next move. I learned that there was a part of you, if you could keep it for yourself, that would not listen to fear. I learned that if you got angry enough, nothing mattered anymore.”–chaotic idealism

“It is far easier for employers and hucksters to ally with ISPs than it is for the little people to maintain the needed gossip flow. ISPs are employers and hucksters too.”–Altoid

“The need for human labor is minuscule now, and most jobs are created merely to keep as many people off the streets as possible–not because their labor is needed, but so they can be credit-worthy consumers. Given our global material abundance and overcapacity, what we need now more than anything are consumers, not laborers, but we lack the imagination and will to create a system which accepts and deals fairly with this fact.”–Jim Dator

“Imagine yourself having grown up using your fingerprint as proof of who you are, and giving it to every corporation that asks for it. What kind of person would you grow up into? Probably just a person who thinks that biometric scanning and the use of personal information by corporations is just the way things are. Let’s turn it around… you have grown up in this world. You grew up in a world where various forms of institutions control your birth, education, work, leisure and death. Can you think of a single activity in your life that is not mediated by a corporation or institution?”–jason

“What would happen if we stopped compromising, stopped playing their game altogether and concentrated all our efforts on creating channels of our own for spreading ideas in new ways? “–CrimethInc

“One of my classmates said something the other day in regard to the march in Cincinnati entitiled ‘Way of the Cross, Way of Justice’ that I have been thinking about ever since. In effect her comment was ‘Why march against poverty, who isn’t against poverty?’ But the first thing I said was ‘if you need people to work for a dollar an hour so that you can sell your goods it is in your interest to have a destitute population from which to draw a work force.’ Thus there may not be open advocation of poverty but support for a pure free market is really a hidden argument for social Darwinistic ideas that poverty is a necessary element of economic growth.”–David Kowalski

“Have we gone from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous thrift, without going through humility and frugality along the way?”–Martin Laplante

“This rhetoric of liberation has led many a talented and idealistic young person to believe that coding, especially for free, is a political statement. In the guise of an anti-establishment, scrappy, can-do underdog attitude, [Lawrence Lessig], [Kevin Kelly] and their colleagues have created an environment in which well-intentioned people really believe that the commercialization of friendship by Facebook is a democratizing force, that it’s progressive for technology entrepreneurs to make billions from the work of artists who get nothing, and that posting book reviews on Amazon and movie reviews on Amazon-owned IMDB is contributing to a public good. In which otherwise intelligent people believe that Google and Twitter are somehow morally different from Microsoft and Wal-Mart because their employees are younger and because they use phrases like ‘radical transparency’ without living up to them.”–Tom S.

“A guest speaker in one of my classes many years ago made the observation that banks are for businesses and credit unions are for people.”–boehmian rhapsody

“People that want leadership positions shouldn’t have them.”–The Meek

“I’m leaving the Democratic party if we don’t get the public option. And if things keep getting worse I’ll just quit voting altogether. Don’t think for a second I’m the only one feeling this way, either. There’s no point in fighting for people whose only promise is that you’ll be less screwed under them than the Repugs.”–djtyg

“Physical reality is coercive: there is only so much of any physical thing to go around. Complaining that one or another economic philosophy is ‘coercive’ is pointless.”–The Raven

“In fact, the G8 leaders used current economic concerns to fail to agree on long-term [carbon reduction] goals. Faced with a choice of ‘your money or your life,’ our leaders have some pretty skewed priorities.”–DJ

“Fuck off and die if you’ve got a problem with me being angry at oppression and oppressors!”–drakyn

“What fascinates me is the extent to which we have allowed the new media to eliminate the freedoms that we had, in the time of videotape, audio cassettes and early computer disks. True, copyright piracy is (generally) bad. But the bloody inconvenience and blithering incomprehensibility of simply using a modern DVD player to watch a film that you already own – let alone record an episode of NOVA – it is why I keep three VCRs in the house, still.”–David Brin

“My experience with Alcoholics Anonymous has been that a lot of the people in the meetings smoke. If 12-Step is such a wonderful program and can keep you from drinking why don’t these people us the same program to stop smoking?”–admin

“Moooving on … I was hanging out in the university library the other day and found some cool stuff on teamwork. Now personally I am opposed to teamwork, because it involves other people and cannot be performed individually. However, I am in the MBA program, and teamwork is all the rage.”–Christine

“The Revolutionary act is the orchestration of the disappearance of power. Power, like truth, is the empty place you must know how never to occupy, but that you must know how to produce so that others will be swallowed up in it; a strategy of intelligent subversion would also be to avoid aiming directly at power, but rather to force it into occupying the obscene position (power that insists on occupying this place, power that incarnates power, obscene and impure, and sooner or later collapses admist blood and ridicule) – force it into the position of absolute obviousness. For it is there that, mistaking itself for real, it falls into the imaginary – its there that it no longer exists to violate its own secret.”–bioæsthetic

“That top 1% should be very afraid of those with nothing left to lose. Howard Hughes was probably smart rather than crazy.”–Suzon

“And personally, I despise sales or any kind. Some people like it, some people don’t. I despise it. If I had to do any sales work of any kind, I would be on welfare. YOu don’t take a fish, put him on a bicycle and expect him to be thrilled.”–Uppity Woman

Quotations with links

“In a worldwide capitalist system, different nations contend against each other to furnish the most congenial environment for investors. This intends that low tax is coerced, and consequently low province spending. This successively intends that public goods will be underestimated, and because welfare programs are so expensive they would besides should be confined in ambit, and so inequality gets worse. As capitalism goes more globalised, and wealthiness can be transferred even more promptly at lower cost, this outcome is getting stronger and stronger, so that antecedently successful assorted economies are now fighting excessively, and are being squeezed to react to the demands of capital and trim tax and outlay.”–audrafrancopr

“Speaking of econs, mdm khoo today said that she received scripts stating that babies are merit goods because, like education, the government thinks that it is not enough and encourages people to have more babies. And she proceeded to say that this means that all of us are merit goods then. The way she said it was damn funny. Haha!”–Luo Zhi Qin

“I don’t believe in libertarians. To describe that group of eccentric right-wingers and misanthropic ranters as ‘libertarians’ is to aid them in their undeserved appropriation of a word that does not belong to them and does not describe the intellectual history of their so-called movement.”–Adrian Bleifuss Prados

“On a global level, many…workers have barely been ‘freed’ from the land by the first steps of primitive accumulation before finding themselves ‘freed’ again by the diminishing opportunities for wage slavery in the official economy of capitalism. “–C. Alexander

“The upshot is that connectivity is privilege. Not a privilege that should be abolished or rolled back, but one that should nevertheless be constantly recognized, addressed and struggled with in our daily lives. Disequilibria in connectivity leads to compounded relative inequality and implicit power dynamics, but because connectivity is what animates altruism (which provides absolute advances for all) the egalitarian solution in any context is always to expand connectivity for all.”–William Gillis

“I fear that the irony-free security-culture that has been fostered since 9/11 is far more dangerous to America’s survival as a free society than any terrorists-with-bombs could ever be.”–Trish

“…[F]reedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others, and not augmented by the expedient of being provided ever more items on the menu from which to make a selection.”–Dale Carrico

“One thing about the ‘rugged individual’ paradigm is that it’s bred & fed by a preoccupation with competition. Our culture is Way over the top in this particular proclivity- small towns, big towns, the countryside- it doesn’t matter. Competition is great- but when ‘it’s the ONLY thing’ (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi), without grounding, without balance, we’re in trouble- because curiosity will be channeled into ‘self-serving-ness’ (or what Mr. Raban referred to as ‘narcissism’). We lose by devaluing, dismissing, or even deriding Cooperation- in a number of ways and venues. However, ultimately it’s Cooperation that builds communities; and Competition that fills prisons (when combined with the eternal pitch of ‘Having = Being’ aka ‘go shopping- & everything will be alright)… ^..^”–Herbert Browne

“And, the last time I visited my local stationery store (to buy the supplies I needed to feed my own shameful paper habit), I discovered that the cost of recycled paper was actually 10-30% more than standard paper! I steadfastly bought the more expensive recycled pack, and when I got home, I made sure to hug my favourite trees, telling them what I went through on their behalf (they were not very sympathetic).”–Theo Bromine

Quotations with links

“Competition among individuals and even individual cultures, in order to empower a broader base to a unified multicultural society, goes too far when dominance over the other individual or individual cultures degrades and demeans our very existence.”–Ed

“A Website that can’t be viewed with Lynx is a Web site not worth visiting.”–Jurily

“I do so love the fact that I have the right to buy the Uncola from the same company that makes Cola! It makes me feel so different and such a non-conformist! Lord, what freedom of choice we enjoy in this land of liberty!”–Dennis Loo

“I once investigated for this blog if any of those factories where Mr. Rogers once showed kids how things were made were still in business. The results were just too depressing to share.”–jdg

“Introversion is simply a culturally disliked way of life; and mental illness shouldn’t be defined by culture.”–chaotic idealism

“We’ve already voluntarily given up huge amounts of privacy, and the sky hasn’t fallen in. What is needed is for parties other than ordinary citizens to lose more of their privacy.”–Nicholas Wilt

“in other words, anarchists are not just trying to equal the playing field, we’re trying to change … the maimed character structures of people. living in this fucked up world for so long, we’re miserable on the inside, so we do things to hurt each other. this is one major reason anarchists have specifically sought out all forms of authority and hierarchy, (like racism, sexism, or homophobia) not just the big 3 (state, capital, religion)”–xveganx

“Of course, mandatory [drug] testing means that everyone is a suspect, and everyone must submit. Aren’t these the same right-wingers who are complaining loudly that Obama’s supposed ‘socialism’ is all about taking away our rights and enslaving us in a totalitarian state?”–David Neiwert

“Iceland didn’t break capitalism. Capitalism broke Iceland.”–Lindsay Beyerstein

“Hyper-individualism – the adjunct of neoliberal corporatism that isolates us from one another as market agents to the benefit of global capitalism – accidentally led us into thinking that ‘aloneness’ was a virtue. We’ve psychologically detached ourselves from one another and fiscally and physically eviscerated the public realm.”–Mike Soron

“This tension is the strongest, the most unbearable, there where professional practice already bears within itself the possibility and the demand for this categorical break, but is at the same time constrained to make a practice located beyond relations of value pass through the needle’s eye of valorisation; where, in other words, we are forced to ‘promote’ ourselves, that is to commoditize and sell ourselves to live, even though our activity brings us to oppose the constraints of self-promotion experienced as a mutilation.”–André Gorz