leftlibertarian.org

Jake Freeman Smith has added his views on the question we pose to all of you: What is left libertarianism?

Left-libertarianism is a growing tendency amongst certain people identifying as libertarian who challenge many of the prevailing views and attitudes held by most libertarians, particularly those stemming from the unfortunate 20th century alliance with political rightists. Knee-jerk anti-leftism, apologia for current distributions of wealth, support for big business interests, and a generally atomistic orientation regarding human relations are examples of positions being challenged, if not outright rejected, by left-libertarian thinking.

Many, if not most, left-libertarians envision a more decentralized human scale economy and a more egalitarian organization of society taking shape upon the removal of the myriad forms of state privilege promoting centralization, exploitation, and the unsustainable, cancerous forms of growth resulting from artificial economies of scale.

Many, if not most, left libertarians additionally recognize many forms of aggression and harm originating either outside of a purely state-based context or from forms of state privledge distorting relations between people and other forms of life. The role of patriarchal attitudes and behavior in society serves as an example of the former, whereas ecological exploitation and destruction represents the latter tendency.

If you have something to contribute to this site’s introductory essay, feel free to send it to us and we’ll link to it and include an excerpt.

The ALL logo that Roderick Long designed is awesome. Unfortunately, it’s a file that’s not very flexible - if you try to expand it too much, it pixellates heavily. So I’ve created two vector graphics (read more about Standard Vector Graphics here). Let me know if you improve upon them; many of the measurements were eyeballed because I’m still a noob, but you can print this on a 100 foot banner and it won’t lose any detail.

Standalone Version	“Circle-A” Version

A couple of updates on the issues we’ve been experiencing on this site:

1. I’ve been having problems with the feed for the Picket Line for some time. I’m trying one last thing before I am forced to stop syndicating the blog entirely. It’s not the mission of an aggregator to shed good content, but right now I don’t have time to hunt bugs on this site, unfortunately.

2. You’ll notice that some new posts coming in don’t have bodies. This is another problem I’m stumped on, and I don’t have time to diagnose it. It started after I updated to WordPress 2.5, and that upgrade coincided with some problems with the rss.php file that showed up in other places (such as the link exchange sidebar) which I worked around. So I’m thinking this might be a WP libraries issue.

   If you want to see this issue resolved quickly, the best thing you can do is donate to Charles Johnson. He is the author of the excellent software that runs this site. It’s because of his skills and engineering that leftlibertarian.org can usually churn away without maintenance for four to six months at a time. Some money flowing his way might help him help us. leftlibertarian.org does not accept donations, but I heartily urge you to channel all your good will his way.

3. The forum is not doing well; there’s a problem with mailing (some) people. Mail problems are typically difficult to get to the bottom of, and once again, I don’t have time to do that. So, for now, the forum will have to site on the back burner.

I run leftlibertarian.org as a labor of love, but I don’t always have the labor to throw at it. Usually it doesn’t require it, but right now it’s just a little too much for me to get to. I appreciate your support, and please continue to offer it while we work through these issues in a less timely fashion than I’d otherwise like. Thanks.

Some of you may have noticed some hiccups in the way this site has been loading lately. The upgrade to WordPress 2.5 coupled with the launch of the forum probably was a bit too ambitious, and it muddled the debugging of some of the problems. Most of these issues have been addressed, although we still seem to have problems with sucking in the full posts from certain feeds. Hopefully we can fix that soon.

Also, the forum should now be fully functional. All previous forum data, including user accounts, were blown away, but it should be good to go now. The only thing is that the integration I’d like to see between the forum and the blog will probably not be as imminent as I’d hoped.

I’m pleased to announce that the long delayed leftlibertarian.org forum has finally been set up! If you already have an account on here, it should translate to the forum. If you don’t have an account, it’s simple to create one. Please let me know what you think!

Today I removed some feeds for either not being topical or being dormant:

• Independent Country
• After:All
• Upaya: Skillful Means to Liberation

If you have any recommendations for new contributor blogs, let me know!

I’d like to welcome our newest contributor at leftlibertarian.org: Matthias Jenny, who recently started a new blog, From the Radio Tower. On his blog you can choose from a German language or English language version. Thanks for throwing in with us, Matt.

If you know of any blogs that belong here, or you write one yourself, contact me. You can see more information on become a contributor here.

leftlibertarian.org is now available with a mobile interface. Try it out - just navigate to leftlibertarian.org on your PDA, cell phone, or other mobile device.

Also, be aware that I’ll be trying out some new WordPress plugins over the next week or so. I’d like to get some diggability up in here.

The move from one slice to another is complete. Please provide me with feedback about load times and any other issues.

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!