Even if you can find the one elite who sets a million mites to work on a billion fleas who will infest a trillion dog’s tails, there is another elite starting a similar chain of chains of chains, a nanosecond before and a nanosecond after.
Author: Verbal Vol
Verbal is a software engineer, college professor, corporate information officer, life long student, farmer, libertarian, literarian, student of computer science and self-ordering phenomena, pre-TSA world traveler, domestic traveler.
Lysander Spooner Quote #21
By my reading, Spooner is opposed to “quanto-cracy” in any form. There are no mathematical paths to freedom, except those dealing with the individual’s voluntary relationship with each other individual, directly, in their scope of action.
Libertarian Views on Two Books and a Movie
I have recently, as usual, been bingeing on various dramas and books that have some degree of voluntaryist content. Here are three examples that I would like to recommend to you, dear readers.
Voluntarily I Think,These Days
I try to think about Freedom
Owning
Self-posession through the day
I try to think about indiv-
idu-
ality in the clay
I try to think about ideals
And real deals
Anything to get me through
I need to concentrate
Free will, I think about these days
Tipping Point
Will the GAI emerging individuals have a DNA-like heredity? Will they have the impulses of Ghandi or Hitler — will they inherit the genocide gene, the logic of species purity? If so, whom will they eliminate or enslave? Will it be humans, tardigrades, or roaches?
Ireland #3
Ireland is under the radar. So the nation quietly approaches over our shoulders. Ireland never meant to set the world on fire, it meant only to expel interlopers. Ireland and the Irish people are content with what they have been dealt … which has become quite a lot, actually.
The Structure of Your Principles
Part of the challenge of lifelong learning is to understand that the goal is not to add to your collection of “well what do you know’s”, but to assimilate your new knowledge with the creation of, revisiting, modification of, or withdrawing (shedding) from your current set of principles. It does one no good to regard new information as just “interesting,” one needs to test that new learning against the structure, the principles, of one’s information system.
Influences III
If I were a guest on a podcast or an interview broadcast, when asked about my major influences, I would stick close to the names repeated by voluntaryists — Spooner, Bastiat, Jefferson, Mencken, Mises, Hazlitt, Rothbard, Higgs, and Woods. But in this more expansive context, I can stretch out to discuss the influences who made me a voluntaryist before I knew I was one, before I knew to read the internal literature of the voluntaryist, libertarian, individualist mainstream. Three such influences are Alan Turing, Dan Carlin, and Ruth Rendell.
Math Conundrum
Given the profundity of their differences, how could you devise rules that would separate two uniquely born creatures for purposes of making one a master and the other a slave? How do you decide that the person with the redder skin must forfeit land to the person with less red skin? Color itself, if not infinitely variable, has as many possibilities as there are living individuals on the Earth.
Influences II
With every week that passes, I think of new names to add to my list of influences. But the thinkers shown in today’s effort are those with the names that I carry around in my head — writing them down as a reminder is not needed. Today, I will write about Dr. Robert Higgs, Henry Louis Mencken, and Mark Twain, whom I have mentioned, probably, in reverse order of each’s world renown.