Tag Anarchism

Entries 5 Total

The world needs more dicks like this

Sep 14, ’10 9:25 PM

Paul Karl Lukacs:

Why were you in China?” asked the pass­port con­trol officer, a woman with the appear­ance and dis­pos­i­tion of a prison matron.

“None of your busi­ness,” I said.

Her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“I’m not going to be inter­rog­ated as a pre-condition of re-entering my own coun­try,” I said.

This did not go over well.

Some great stuff in his fol­low up too:

Many of the com­menters took issue with my rude tone toward the CBP officers. This cri­ti­cism is pro­foundly misguided.

To the author­it­arian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: sub­mis­sion or defi­ance, and any­thing less than total sub­mis­sion is defiance.

(via Jonathan Wight)

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

Freedom and equality joined at the hip

May 21, ’09 9:01 PM

Cos­tas Douz­i­nas on free­dom and equal­ity:

Let me start with a social­ist axiom … : free­dom can­not flour­ish without equal­ity and equal­ity does not exist without freedom.

While logic­ally and philo­soph­ic­ally insep­ar­able, equal­ity and liberty have fol­lowed dif­fer­ent and even opposed tra­ject­or­ies. For lib­er­al­ism, free­dom in its neg­at­ive and pos­it­ive forms is primary. Neg­at­ive free­dom is cap­tured in Hobbes’s state­ment that liberty is the absence of “external imped­i­ments”. The pos­it­ive “free­dom to”, on the other hand, was clas­sic­ally defined by Isaiah Ber­lin: “I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind … to be the instru­ment of my own, not of other men’s acts of will.”

Or as I once put on a t-shirt:

Anarch­ism, the name given to a struggle for a soci­ety char­ac­ter­ised by the abil­ity of each actor to have a say in out­comes pro­por­tion­ate to the degree they are affected by them.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)

An Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

May 22, ’08 10:38 PM

Rebels Against Tyranny, an inter­view with Howard Zinn on Anarch­ism, by Ziga Vodovnik.

Comments (0)

It’s a risky business voting

Sep 16, ’05 3:40 AM

It’s a risky busi­ness, vot­ing. The prob­lem is you’re just encour­aging them.

Continue Reading… Comments (2)

May Day

May 1, ’05 5:16 PM

For those of you who don’t know May Day is a cel­eb­ra­tion of the social and eco­nomic achieve­ments of the west­ern labour movement.

Continue Reading… Comments (0)