[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

Reminder: the Molinari Society will be holding its fourth annual Symposium this week in Baltimore, in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (Dec. 27-30). Here’s the schedule, with links to the papers (which, as you’ll see, are both Spooner-intensive):

GVIII-4. Saturday, 29 December 2007, 11:15 a.m.-1:15 p.m.
Molinari Society symposium: “Anarchy: It’s Not Just a Good Idea, It’s the Law”
Falkland (Fourth Floor), Baltimore Marriott Waterfront, 700 Aliceanna Street

Session 1, 11:15-12:15:
chair: Jennifer McKitrick (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)
speaker: Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
title: “A Place for Positive Law: A Contribution to Anarchist Legal Theory”
commentator: John Hasnas (Georgetown University)

Session 2, 12:15-1:15:
chair: Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College)
speaker: Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
title: “Inside and Outside Spooner’s Natural Law Jurisprudence”
commentator: Geoffrey Allan Plauché (Louisiana State University)

Also check out the schedules (happily not conflicting) of the AAPSS and ARS. 

So if you plan to be in the Baltimore area, come on by! (Last year they switched us to a different room at the last minute, so if you come to the appointed location and don’t see us, look around for a sign – we’ll be sure to have one up if it’s needed.)

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

For he, like a man or a star, lives in a universe
shut in by walls of the things he knows. – RWL

A late Christmas gift for you: three hauntingly beautiful and politically subversive early 20th-century tales – all searing indictments of the brutality of the state – have been posted in the Molinari Online Library: Voltairine de Cleyre’s fiction-disguised-as-memoir “The Chain Gang” (1907), Gertrude Nafe’s mordant fable “The Law and the Man Who Laughed” (1913), and Rose Wilder Lane’s journalism-disguised-as-fiction “A Bit of Gray in a Blue Sky” (1919). (This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that the Nafe and Lane pieces have been available online.)

De Cleyre and Lane were of course leading writers of the libertarian anarchist tradition (representing that tradition’s “socialist” and “capitalist” strands respectively, if it matters). I haven’t been able to learn much about Gertrude Nafe, except that she was an associate of Emma Goldman’s, that she was active in John Reed’s Communist Labor Party, that her short stories were well-regarded by the mainstream, and that she was dismissed from her post as a Denver schoolteacher for refusing to take an oath to “promote by precept and example obedience to laws and constituted authorities.” Specifically, I don’t know whether she was an anarchist; but “The Law and the Man Who Laughed” is certainly anarchist in spirit.

Despite its obvious antiracist intent, “The Chain Gang” is marred by some unconscious racism (beneath all her beautiful metaphors, de Cleyre is in effect characterising blacks – or black convicts, anyway – as congenitally ignorant but naturally musical, comparing them to idiots savants), but its haunting beauty survives this flaw.

“A Bit of Gray in a Blue Sky” isn’t explicitly an antiwar story, but it’s hard not to read it as one, or to see an analogy between the fate of Lane’s carrier pigeon and the fate of human beings dragged from their ordinary lives into the jaws of a war machine they know and care nothing about. (Incidentally, see the true story behind Lane’s account. Sadly, by the time “A Bit of Gray” was published, the pigeon had already died of its wounds.)

“Except, oh sweet Jesus yes, for the terrorist watch list, that little red flag o’ fascism, another warning light on the nation’s jumbled dashboard, blinking frantically to let us know that something is indeed deeply wrong with our unstable, overheated engine.

But wait, maybe it’s not all that dire after all. Maybe we are merely looking at this all wrong.

After all, Rule No. 1 in the Eternal Karmic Guidebook says that like attracts like, violence begets violence, dark creates only more dark. Hence, the minute you set up a nasty government system designed to screen for hate and fear and violence, well, the more hate and fear and violence the system will find, and the more that must be created for it to find, and the larger the system will get. And on it goes.

But here is the good news: This truism also works in reverse. Or rather, inverse.

Which is to say, I am here to suggest an alternative. I am here to offer up a new plan, a devious little scheme that will run directly counter to the vile U.S. database of death.

I am here to suggest that we can override this insidious system and create a database of our own, one so goddamn radiant and slippery and omnipotent it shall overshadow the TSC’s list and hack into its operating system and stab at its violent little heart and, to put it gently, shut that f-er down.

We shall invent a new algorithm. We shall begin a new list using a complex formula made of simple truisms of delight and honest pain and unquenchable love. We shall call it the Bliss Watch List.

I am only ¼ joking. Our screening process will be rigorous and incontrovertible and true. The BWL will contain only the names of people widely suspected of being savvy, titillating, open-hearted, deeply lovable, sexed-up geniuses of divine intent and hot self-exploration and ravenous intellectual curiosity.

It will contain the names of anyone who is suspected of daring to understand that life is not, in fact, a clenched and harrowing slog, but an actual ongoing, incessant, stunning manifestation of the divine, even when it’s dirty and violent and obnoxious and horribly dressed and seems to contain only a bleak never-ending rundown of doom and decay and Dick Cheney. It’s just that kind of list.”

- Mark Morford

The interesting thing is that he actually bought the domain name. See for yourself here.

Merry Christmas / Kwanzaa / Dies Natalis Solis Invicti to everyone out there in the Empire!

In honour of the season, I link to this old editorial of mine on the libertarian case against Ebenezer Scrooge.

Finally, in the words of John Lennon, channeling Étienne de la Boétie: “Happy Christmas – war is over – if you want it.”

" I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little [blog] to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Faithful friend and servant, C.D.

December 1843 "

(Christmas 2005)
Money and greed dominate the Christmas season. This is especially true in the west. In the U.S alone the amount spent on Christmas gifts continues to rise. In 1994, $55 billion was spent on Christmas. Just 11 years later, it is estimated that $160 to $200 billion will be spent on presents this Christmas season. That’s more than two-thirds of the U.S. defense budget. And you thought those guys were bad.


" ... Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression."
A Christmas Carol


" Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society -- in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence -- that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word society. "

"Why Socialism", Albert Einstein, 1949

Right now, the URL wspp.info points to a collection of posts on this blog related to the World’s Smallest Political Platform. Pretty soon, though, it will point to a site I’m building to more actively promote the WSPP. Content so far:

- Link to a signable petition asking the Libertarian Party to adopt the WSPP as its platform.

- Link to a Yahoo! Group for discussion of the WSPP.

- Some buttons for linking.

Check it out. If you’re a better button designer, etc., than I am, I’d welcome some assistance in making those things prettier.

Earlier this year, I moved leftlibertarian.org from shared hosting to a virtual private server. Not only did I move it to a server I’d have to play a more active role in maintaining, I moved it to a server that I’d have to provision from scratch. Over the last 8 months I’ve learned a lot about running my own server. This is good, but in the process of learning, I’ve made a mess of my server. It’s very disorganized, with custom compilations of software are broken (did you notice when the header turned from red to blue? I messed up the PHP compillation and never fixed it) and a lot of cruft that could stand to be removed.

Now, I’ve bought a new slice that I’ve been able to set up using all the lessons I’ve learned. I plan on moving all my sites over to this new server and incorporate some changes into the way they’re set up to make all the sites easier to maintain. Consequently, you may experience some downtime over the holiday season while I accomplish this. I plan to have everything ready to go by the beginning of 2008.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

City drivers in Barcelona are in a bad mood this season and the Grinch had better watch himself. It seems these folks have to work six days per week instead of the usual five everywhere else (something which seems a bit strange for western Europe). Apparently there was some damage to the buses while stations were spray painted with solidarity slogans.

Bus drivers in Barcelona have called a strike for 21-24 December and 2-4 January, demanding a second day of leave per week. Currently, bus drivers have to work six days a week. Workers with the anarcho-syndicalist union, Confederacion General de Treball (CGT) agreed to go on strike to press their demands against the owner, (Metropolitan Transport Barcelona) TMB, allowing only minimum services needed to connect neighborhoods without other transportation options. (The CGT contact below seems to be down.)

CGT Barcelona
CNT Barcelona
Indymedia Barcelona

Happy holidays, y’all. I hope that yours are full of light, and warmth, and fellowship.

(Photoshopping thanks to lowercase liberty 2005-12-25.)

This is supposed to be the season of jollity although in Saskatchewan I think this will take more than a little imagination since the Grant Devine clones are now safety bunkered down at Wascana Lake. Actually Shag is thinking about taking bets on the survival odds of the Saskatchewan Party government. The people of this province have seen a result like this twice before in our recent history. Although it is hard to feel much sympathy for the social democrats especially in their current form as "borne again" Liberals, the recently elected Sask Party government is just the old Devine Tories by another name. No wonder easterners think we're illiterates. During the 2000 federal election a woman in an Ontario city (I think it was Hamilton) was being interviewed for an "in the street" assessment of the upcoming vote. She stated her dislike for then Prime Minister Jean Chrieten but tempered her comment with the belief that although she could not stand the PM she would have to hold her nose and vote for him in order to, " keep out those cowboys from Calgary " ie. Stephen Harper and the new federal Conservative party.

On a lighter (but related) note here's another parody of that famous song sung by Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of the city of Titipu, with a chorus of men "I've Got a Little List"... the original lyrics are printed out within the video attached to the "Tis the Season" posting. You can also find links to parodies here from other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The Mikado takeoff is followed by a fairly new and "correct" variant ( oh no!) of "When I was a Lad" from H.M.S. Pinafore.

I wanted to add this part earlier but will do it now on the first day of the new year. Some modern audiences see an element of (are you ready?) "racism and sexism" in the Mikado because the way the phantasmagorical Japanese town of Titipu was portrayed. But people weren't as thinned skinned back then.

'Japanese Prince Komatsu Akihito, who saw an 1886 production in London, took no offence. When Prince Fushimi Sadanaru made a state visit in 1907, the British government banned performances of The Mikado from London for six weeks, fearing that the play might offend him — a manoeuvre that backfired when the prince complained that he had hoped to see The Mikado during his stay. A Japanese journalist covering the prince's stay attended a proscribed performance and confessed himself "deeply and pleasingly disappointed." Expecting "real insults" to his country, he had found only "bright music and much fun." '

G.K. Chesterton had this to say:
" Gilbert pursued and persecuted the evils of modern England till they had literally not a leg to stand on, exactly as Swift did.... I doubt if there is a single joke in the whole play that fits the Japanese. But all the jokes in the play fit the English."

So IF you're getting tired of the usual fare on television and radio at this time of the year almost anything by G. and S. would be worth listening to or watching. Normally I don't do advertising spiels on Shagya Blog but the classical label Naxos has re-recorded some earlier versions of these operettas (with varying results according to some comments on Amazon) and they also do good work in helping to introduce new listeners to classical and other forms of complex orchestral music. They're now the largest classical record label in the United States.


followed by: