Monday Lazy Linking   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Monday, February 08)

• Anarchists in Space. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-07). Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)
• Comment on Anarchists in Space by Roderick. Roderick, Comments for Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-02-08). Back in 1980, when Broach came out, perhaps Kolko’s Triumph of Conservatism or Railroads and Regulation, and then follow it up with stuff from Left & Right and the early years of Libertarian Forum. If it were nowadays, Kevin Carson’s books would obviously be essential. The crucial point is this:... (Linked Monday 2010-02-08.)

ALL out for the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Monday, February 08)

News Flash: We “No Longer Control Our Government”   Kevin Carson at Center for a Stateless Society (Monday, February 08)

You mean we once did?  I must have missed it when I blinked.

Keith Olbermann recently spent several consecutive shows in hysterics over the Supreme Court’s  People United decision, announcing in the most dramatic tones that “…we no longer control our government.”

What, exactly, does he mean by “no longer?”

Consider:  the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which Cory Doctorow describes as “a brutal, unprecedented copyright treaty being negotiated behind closed doors,” has been in the news recently.  Oddly enough, that treaty was drafted with the help of Mr. Faith and Hope’s trade representatives, before the Citizens United decision, as I recall.

The WIPO treaty and Uruguay Round TRIPS accord were ratified by pre-Citizens United Congresses.  So was the DMCA.

As a matter of fact, pretty much the whole of U.S. trade policy is drafted behind closed doors by industry representatives and WTO technocrats, and Congress ratifies the resulting treaties without even reading them.

"Won't Get Fooled Again'   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Monday, February 08)

Anarchists in Space   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Sunday, February 07)

Anarchists in Space   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (Sunday, February 07)

The Dispossessed, by Ursula LeGuin   Francois Tremblay at Check Your Premises (Sunday, February 07)

Notes From All Over   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Sunday, February 07)

Morphology   Eric H at GrimReader (Sunday, February 07)

Shameless Self-promotion Sunday   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Sunday, February 07)

Happy Sunday, y’all. Ready for some Shamelessness?

This week has been a week of getting back into activism after time away — time for the holidays, time for conferences, and time to just chill out and try to get some solitary work done for a while. But this week I made it out to UCIR and to Vegas Anarchist Cafe for the first time in 2010; and today I’m back for Food Not Bombs. After that — onward to some work (printing, folding, announcing, etcetera) in preparation for an ALL table at this year’s Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair. Also, there’s a new Market Anarchy zine in preparation.

¿Y tú? What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

Things Fall Together   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Sunday, February 07)

Interesting article on Chinua Achebe’s Africna trilogy. (CHT Walter Grinder.)

System Fails!   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Saturday, February 06)

Just another good apple.

Hidden Cameras – Ban Marriage   Francois Tremblay at Check Your Premises (Saturday, February 06)

Our Communist Future   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Saturday, February 06)

A nice write-up of post-IP business models.

How the Falun Gong’s anti-censorship software helped the Iranian protestors   Michel Bauwens at P2P Foundation (Saturday, February 06)

Excerpts from an interesting story in the New Republic, by Eli Lake:

“To most metropolitan Americans, the Falun Gong are the yellow-shirt-wearing adherents of a Chinese religious sect who hand out flyers on street corners. Those flyers describe the group’s struggle against the Chinese government, which has banned the Falun Gong and subjected its members to organ-harvesting, electroshock therapy, and gulags. But, as the Chinese have escalated their efforts to stamp out the Falun Gong, the group has grown ever savvier in outwitting its oppressors. And it was the protestors in Iran who benefited from this savvy.

As the streets of Tehran erupted in the days following Mir Hossein Mousavi’s bizarrely lopsided defeat, the regime’s repressive apparatus kicked into full gear. Among its top priorities: shutting down access to the Internet. But, at this critical moment in the Islamic Republic’s history, some of the government’s Internet filters failed. Indeed, the most utopian proponents of the Internet’s liberating powers seemed vindicated–as social-networking sites organized mass demonstrations and YouTube videos documented the brutal truncheons of the basij and the making of martyrs.

The APEEan Way Leads to Caesar’s Palace   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Saturday, February 06)

The schedule is up for this coming April’s Las Vegas APEE conference at which Gary Chartier, Steve Horwitz, Charles Johnson, Sheldon Richman, and I will be holding forth at our panel on Free-Market Anti-Capitalism (whatever that is).

No, Copyright Has Never Been About Protecting Labor   at Techdirt (Saturday, February 06)

No! False! The purpose of intellectual property law has very little to do with Matt Yglesias being able to enjoy a wide variety of new music. The purpose of intellectual property law is to protect the intellectual property created by artists so they are rewarded for their efforts. The purpose of intellectual property law is to punish people who steal that which isn't theirs.

At C4SS: Statism ≠ Socialism; Pro-Market ≠ Pro-Business   Kevin Carson at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism (Saturday, February 06)

USTR Insists Gov't Isn't Keeping ACTA Secret   Mike Masnick at Techdirt (Friday, February 05)

Intellectual property protection is critical to jobs and exports that depend on innovation and creativity. Trade in counterfeit and pirated products undermines those jobs and exports, exposes consumers to dangerous knock-offs from toothpaste to car parts, and helps fund organised crime.

The Dressing Down of Rahm Emanuel   Alex R. Knight III at Center for a Stateless Society (Friday, February 05)

It seems Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is taking a bit of a dressing down of late, due to the following, according to Stephanie Condon at CBS News:

“White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel today will meet at the White House with a handful of advocates for people with intellectual disabilities, following an incident in which he called a group of liberals ‘retarded.’

“Emanuel came under fire from former GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, whose son has Down Syndrome, and groups like the Special Olympics after it was reported that he told liberal activists in a private meeting that they were ‘F-ing retarded.’”

There are a lot of things that make me wonder about this incident. First off, it doesn’t seem implausible that Emanuel would insult a bunch of true liberals the way he did – even though my first thought is that he’s merely describing himself. However, I guarantee that not one of the Democrat politicos Emanuel was yelling at qualifies as a “liberal.” After all, people who are truly liberal don’t engage in the Government Creed at all – which is essentially Pay and Obey…or Die. Neither Demopublicans nor Republocrats deviate from this arrogant and dangerous credo one bit (with a partial exception extended to Ron Paul). Secondly, however, in a certain sense, Emanuel is correct (though he also seems to hypocritically exclude himself): One’s intellect is “retarded” if one cannot renunciate coercive violence in the name of accomplishing one’s economic and social goals. And of course, all political government is first and foremost grounded upon a cult of sheer violence. Everything government does amounts to coercive force, and ultimately, the threat of death if resistance to such initiation of aggression is met with concomitant force. No one who advocates what governments do and how they do it can ever claim to occupy any moral high ground whatsoever. It is exclusively comprised of thieves, liars, and killers and those who enable such.