Quote of the Day: What Logical Principles are for

A quote explaining the main error right-libertarians and “anarcho”-capitalists make.

Quoth Sidney Hook (Quoted in turn by Corey Robin)

The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests that she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can test only consistency. They cannot establish truth….

This is something that needs to be drilled in the minds of all right-libertarians who insist that they can describe reality without requiring any empiricism at all. From the “A is A” Randroids to the “Human Action” Misoids.

"I work at the Red & Black. Ask me Anything."

A worker from the collective of the Red&Black answers your questions in reddit.

No, no. Not me. But given the recent brouhaha with the Red & Black cafe expelling (oh horror of horrors) a cop, I thought it might interest you to ask some questions to a person working there. You can ask in the thread in /r/Anarchism and you should also check the crosspost in /r/IAmA where some interesting replies and questions have been asked by the general populace.

Regardless of what impression you might have got from the outraged middle class christian suburbanites, not everyone is against the R&B and arranging a huge boycott. In fact, most of the people where quite supportive of their actions.

Quote of the Day: Difference of the two capitalist systems

Either as a welll-treated slave or as a worked-to-death animal, your options are not very good under currently existing capitalism.

Kevin Carson spot on as usual

The main difference between the social democratic or New Deal corporate liberal model, and the Reagan-Thatcher model, is that the faction of organized capital that controls the former is like a humane farmer who thinks he’ll get more work out of his animals in the long run from taking good care of them; the faction that controls the latter is like Jones in Animal Farm, thinking it’s more profitable to work them to death and replace them.

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Quote of the Day: Consumables and Property

Propertarians always like to compare issues about ownership of land to issues about ownership of consumables. This is flawed.

Quoth Voltairine, my favourite redditor, in reply to a propertarian:

My eating an apple prevents someone else from eating that same apple, or entraps them in their “ghetto” as you call it.

A one time consumable good is not the same as an indefinitely productive property. Every major thinker in anarchist history that I can think of has always considered the consumable goods to be important, but ultimately small potatoes in comparison with what is truly critical. This is the reason behind the possession/property distinction that most anarchists find critical going all the way back to Proudhon, while so-called “anarcho”-capitalists seem to think it is a clever plot to make them look like jerks. Indefinite private dominion over all productive resources, enforced upon the unwilling, is hardly legitimated by your need to eat apples.

This is the kind of issue skirting in fact that subconsciously annoy me when arguing with AnCaps and the like. Usually I can’t put my finger on it but Voltairine immediately calls it out.

Quote of the Day: USA bullying

Noam Chomsky explains why the USA can always be seen bullying small nations around.

Quoth Noam Choamsy (as seen in this post)

Why was the U.S. so intent on destroying northern Laos, so poor that peasants hardly even knew they were in Laos? Or Indochina? Or Guatemala? Or Maurice Bishop in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world? The reasons are about the same, and are explained in the internal record. These are ‘viruses’ that might ‘infect others’ with the dangerous idea of pursuing similar paths to independent development. The smaller and weaker they are, the more dangerous they tend to be. If they can do it, why can’t we? Does the Godfather allow a small storekeeper to get away with not paying protection money?

Read the whole article too. It’s very RRRRAAAAGE inducing and it nicely exemplifies how imperialism, even violent, army-backed imperialism is only the reality even to this day and age.

Quote of the day: Soviet Train

What would USSR look like if it was a train?

Quoth Thehellezell

Russia is like a malfunctioning train, and Stalin tried to make it move by putting a gun to the engineer’s head. It moved fast for a while, but then sputtered. Khrushchev noticed something was wrong, attempted to alert the other passengers, but was booted off of the train for being a nuisance. The train slowed to a crawl, then stopped. A man named Brezhnev stood up and addressed the passengers: “Pay no mind to the outside scenery! The train will arrive to our destination soon!”

Brilliant metaphor but the rest of the comment is really worth reading. The whole thread is pretty good as well, diving into the familiar argument of “Communism failed because USSR failed.”

Quote of the Day: Eco-Terrorists

The ones truly pointing the problems about environmental problems were first called crazy and later terrorist.

Quoth Peter Gederloos (@ Counterpunch. h/t Nihilo Zero)

The few people who were talking about pollution, ecological collapse, and related issues thirty years ago—generally radical ecologists, anarchists, and indigenous communities—were ignored or dismissed as crazy. Nowadays, they have no time to say “I told you so,” because members of those three groups are investigated as terrorists and locked up in prison.

Truly a great piece connecting the dots between the environmental problems and the systematic failures of Capitalism. Gogogo.

Quote of the Day: Surgery Metaphor

A metaphor of how Marxists misrepresent anarchism and democracy

Joeldavis from reddit provided this excellent quote while demolishing a tired Marxist-Leninist anti-anarchist post.

Because workers do not exploit any class below them, as these barriers are gradually overcome workers’ states will tend to “wither away”

And yet it didn’t. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Lenin was alright. Now let’s take this scenario as an illustration of the concept: “A surgeon is attempting to perform a heart transplant. In keeping with his beliefs, he shuns the use of antibiotics. The operation more-or-less succeeds, but the patient eventually becomes septic and dies.”

Using the logic of the Bolshevik argument, the doctor would be right to argue that his rejection of antibiotics didn’t kill the patient, since it was clearly a bacterial infection that killed him, not a lack of antibiotics. Anarchists would say “But if you had given the patient the medicine, they would have at least probably survived the operation.” to which the Bolshevik replies is “No, you’re just antidemocratic.”

Quote of the day: Words and Meaning

A quote about the use of words

Quoth Chuang-Tzu (c. 200 B.C.E) ((As seen in the book On Being Certain))

The fish traps exist because of the fish. Once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning. Once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten the words so I can talk with him?

This is related to my article on the use of Mathematics and language