Arthur Silber: “The only way you can speak the truth on any subject of importance in this country today is BY BREAKING THE RULES. That is what Andrew Meyer did in Florida. He broke the goddamned rules and was charged with resisting arrest and disturbing the peace — for asking the most urgent question of our time, the question that almost no one will ask.”
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From time to time I get contacted by a contributor to check into why their posts suddenly cease showing up at leftlibertarian.org. It seems to happen to certain contributors more than others but is otherwise pretty random. I now believe it has to do with invalid characters in the feeds.
leftlibertarian.org requires an RSS or Atom feed consisting of well-formed, valid XML. To check your feed, enter the URL at feedvalidator.org. If your feeds are not valid, there’s going to be little I can do for you, but let me know so we can try and figure out a solution. Usually removing the wierd character that inadvertently appeared in the text solves the problem, and you can use feedvalidator.org to diagnose it yourself! So check there before you check with me.
In other news, I updated to FeedWordPress V0.99. Many thanks to Charles Johnson for a great piece of software!
Pumpkin carving is a popular part of of the season. Come October, pumpkins can be found everywhere in the country from doorsteps to dinner tables. One of the market gardens located near Lumsden, Saskatchewan always has several hundred on hand at the end of the selling season which I've been told carries on right to the end of this month. The carving of "jack o'lanterns" is supposed to have originated with an Irishman by the name of Stingy Jack. I'll have to accept this on face value. According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a
piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years. Eventually Jack shuffles off this mortal coil. As the legend goes, St. Peter would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern." In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack's lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack o'lanterns. Although Halloween is associated with the Celts the celebration has spread to various parts of the western world including England where the event in it's North American variant has "sort of" dovetailed into the more traditional "bonfire" festivals at the beginning of November.
Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,Pumpkin carving is a popular part of of the season. Come October, pumpkins can be found everywhere in the country from doorsteps to dinner tables. One of the market gardens located near Lumsden, Saskatchewan always has several hundred on hand at the end of the selling season which I've been told carries on right to the end of this month. The carving of "jack o'lanterns" is supposed to have originated with an Irishman by the name of Stingy Jack. I'll have to accept this on face value. According to the story, Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him. True to his name, Stingy Jack didn't want to pay for his drink, so he convinced the Devil to turn himself into a coin that Jack could use to buy their drinks. Once the Devil did so, Jack decided to keep the money and put it into his pocket next to a silver cross, which prevented the Devil from changing back into his original form. Jack eventually freed the Devil, under the condition that he would not bother Jack for one year and that, should Jack die, he would not claim his soul. The next year, Jack again tricked the Devil into climbing into a tree to pick a piece of fruit. While he was up in the tree, Jack carved a sign of the cross into the tree's bark so that the Devil could not come down until the Devil promised Jack not to bother him for ten more years. Eventually Jack shuffles off this mortal coil. As the legend goes, St. Peter would not allow such an unsavory figure into heaven. The Devil, upset by the trick Jack had played on him and keeping his word not to claim his soul, would not allow Jack into hell. He sent Jack off into the dark night with only a burning coal to light his way. Jack put the coal into a carved-out turnip and has been roaming the Earth with ever since. The Irish began to refer to this ghostly figure as "Jack of the Lantern," and then, simply "Jack O'Lantern." In Ireland and Scotland, people began to make their own versions of Jack's lanterns by carving scary faces into turnips or potatoes and placing them into windows or near doors to frighten away Stingy Jack and other wandering evil spirits. In England, large beets are used. Immigrants from these countries brought the tradition with them when they came to the United States. They soon found that pumpkins, a fruit native to America, make perfect jack o'lanterns. Although Halloween is associated with the Celts the celebration has spread to various parts of the western world including England where the event in it's North American variant has "sort of" dovetailed into the more traditional "bonfire" festivals at the beginning of November.Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,“The past several decades have witnessed an incredible resurgence of interest in anarchism in philosophy, political science, anthropology, sociology, and countless other academic disciplines. To this end, we are attempting to create a new anthology of scholarly essays on anarchism and anarchist studies…”
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People will be able to look up BREAKFAST and see
that I did not advocate eating babies for breakfast.
– Ayn Rand
If I were running the Ayn Rand Institute – admittedly an unlikely turn of events – I’d make all of Rand’s writings available online. (So far the only major Rand work available online got there by mistake, because Peikoff & Co. apparently forgot to renew the U.S. copyright on Anthem.) So why hasn’t ARI taken this obvious step? Do they really value copyright revenue more than the chance to promote Rand’s ideas? If so, they’re still probably miscalculating: I suspect putting Rand’s works online would stimulate more book sales than it would stifle. (The Mises Institute, for example, puts loads of stuff online and yet the paper versions sell like hotcakes.)
But I suspect ARI’s decision not to put the writings online has been driven less by mercenary considerations than by some sort of notion that it’s immoral, a violation of the Trader Principle, to hand out benefits without receiving anything in return. If so, it’s a misunderstanding of the Trader Principle; unless the folks running ARI regard themselves (or Rand, insofar as they take themselves to be her agents) as having no personal interest in promoting Rand’s ideas (in which case, what’s the point of ARI?), they presumably would receive a “selfish” benefit by putting them online, and thus could do so with a clear egoist conscience.
Whatever the reason, ARI’s refusal to disseminate Rand’s writings in the most effective manner seems nearly as self-defeating as Andrew Galambos’s refusal to disseminate his writings in any form. (I’m reminded of the Shakers, a sect which died out because its tenets forbade reproduction.)
But a small chink has appeared in the armour of ARI’s anti-web policy: the Ayn Rand Lexicon has been placed online. (Conical hat tip to Karen DeCoster.) Admittedly this is a comparatively unimportant text; it’s just a collection of quotations from Rand (and sometimes her acolytes as well) on various subjects, arranged alphabetically by topic (apparently the editors were under the misapprehension that alphabetical order of topics is sufficient to make a book a “lexicon”). But it’s a start.
“Libertarianism is clearly the most, perhaps the only truly radical movement in America,” wrote the great Karl Hess almost 40 years ago [The Libertarian Forum, June 16, 1969]. “It grasps the problems of society by the roots. It is not reformist in any sense. It is revolutionary in every sense.”
Unfortunately, outside of Samuel Edward Konkin III’s New Libertarian Manifesto (1980), very little appropriate literature on revolutionary strategy is available to radical Left Libertarians who’ve grown beyond the basic “why to” to the inevitable “how to” stage. Most guides to revolution focus on seizing power, not diminishing it. And most are written from an explicitly communist point of view. Even left-collectivist organizer Saul Alinsky recognized this in 1971:
“The Have-Nots of the world, swept up in their present upheavals and desperately seeking revolutionary writings, can find such literature only from the communists, both red and yellow. Here they can read about tactics, maneuvers, strategy and principles of action in the making of revolutions. Since in this literature all ideas are imbedded in the language of communism, revolution appears synonymous with communism. … We have permitted a suicidal situation to unfold wherein revolution and communism have become one.”
To set right the situation, Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals, “a revolutionary handbook not cast in a communist or capitalist mold, but as a manual for the Have-Nots of the world regardless of the color of their skins or their politics.” There is no doubt when reading Alinsky that he was willing to lean on government when he believed it necessary. He was by no means an anarchist. But Rules for Radicals remains, after 36 years, the closest thing we have to what might be called a “generic” tract on revolutionary “how to.” And for that reason, I intend to reflect here on some of its contents over the next few days.
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