There is infinite information in the universe. Any time you select a tiny slice of info and focus on it, you are creating a story that is different from reality itself. News is a specific view of reality. It’s always wrong.
Category: Blogs
The official Everything-Voluntary.com blog.
Stop Blaming Russia, China for US Disarmament Failures
On June 22 and 23, Russian and American diplomats met in Vienna to discuss New START, a nuclear arms reduction treaty which expires next year. The treaty provides for an optional five-year extension. Alternatively, the parties could negotiate a new agreement as has happened several times in the past. A third possibility involves one or both parties playing silly games like insisting that China be brought into the negotiations despite Beijing’s complete lack of interest in participating. Which is exactly what happened.
Respecting Liberty Will Still Work
Liberty, which is freedom tempered with responsibility, could solve all these problems to the extent they can be solved. Exercise your freedom to do whatever you want as long as it doesn’t violate the equal and identical rights of any other person. There’s no better way to live among others.
Immigration vs. Social Desirability Bias
No matter how awful their country is, people love to proclaim their undying devotion to folk and land. Why then have hundreds of millions of people left their countries of birth? Because the migrants don’t literally believe this flowery talk. Though almost everyone voices these sentiments, actions speak louder than words.
Take Care of Your Tools
“Capital goods” are the materials that create wealth. And when what you have to work with are your machetes and your shovels and your chainsaws, those are your capital goods. If you can take care of those, maybe you will take care of the bigger capital goods (with more potential for wealth creation).
Politics Fears (or Hates) Reality
Reality seems to offend the noisiest people these days. It’s not just that they don’t like it, they want to deny it even exists. And they demand you go along with them. Especially when it contradicts their political agenda. To this way of hallucinating, science isn’t real to them because it has too much “western, white male” influence. It doesn’t lead where they want to go. Nor (the belief goes) can you expect others to behave ethically when that’s not a path that their culture created.
COVID-19: Freedom Means That We Can Do Stupid Things, Not That We Have To
Yes, as freedom returns, some people will throw caution entirely to the winds. They should be free to act like idiots, right up to the point they actually — not prospectively, not hypothetically, ACTUALLY — cause harm to non-consenting others. They should also be free to refrain from acting like idiots.
Antagonism and Action
One of the most useful methods I’ve found to get closer to actionable truth is by creating (non-hostile) antagonism.
Democrats & Jim Crow: A Century of Racist History the Democratic Party Prefers You’d Forget
In the last Presidential election, Donald Trump was lauded for his performance among black voters – he scored 4 percent of female black voters and a whopping 13 percent of black male voters, the highest since Richard Nixon. This isn’t shocking. Black voters have voted en masse for the Democratic Party since the mid-60s and the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the social welfare programs of the Great Society. This solidified black voters behind the Democratic Party, but they had been moving there since the New Deal.
On Bootstraps
Libertarians are often strawmanned as uncaring assholes who think that all that is necessary for anyone, even the most unfortunate among us, need to do to succeed in life is to pull themselves up by their own “bootstraps”.