Authoritarian empires need enemies, need conflict, need violence, in order to have an excuse to exist. The purpose of “government” militaries is not to defeat enemies, but to create them.
Tag: class
Where Everyone Does Whatever They Want
Once you understand that everyone already does “whatever he wants to do,” then the question becomes, does the presence of a ruling class make people want to do more good stuff, or want to do more bad stuff, than they would want to do otherwise?
What is Fascism?
As an economic system, fascism is socialism with a capitalist veneer. The word derives from fasces, the Roman symbol of collectivism and power: a tied bundle of rods with a protruding ax. In its day (the 1920s and 1930s), fascism was seen as the happy medium between boom-and-bust-prone liberal capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, wasteful competition, and profit-oriented egoism, and revolutionary Marxism, with its violent and socially divisive persecution of the bourgeoisie. Fascism substituted the particularity of nationalism and racialism—“blood and soil”—for the internationalism of both classical liberalism and Marxism.
Makework Expands To Fill Time
Why are school lessons so bad? Perhaps we overlook the most crucial of reasons, discovered by Parkinson: work expands to fill time. Compulsory attendance laws mandate that children attend to something for ever-increasing parts of their lives, under the direction of professional educators, at ever-increasing cost.
Kids Learn Naturally: Why Compulsory Schooling is Unneccessary and Even Harmful, A Case Study
Life is learning. Language has a definite purpose for us, and utility. In short, learning the language our mommy and daddy use to communicate has meaning. We need to get that milk! We need our blessed diaper changed! This language stuff gets shit done! Without meaning, “education” is a breathtakingly inane and pathetic waste of an individual’s time.
Why Free Immigration Is the Moderate, Common-Sense Position
Far from being utopian, saying “Immigration is a human right” is just the moderate, common-sense position that when natives and foreigners voluntarily interact, strangers are morally obliged to leave them alone unless the overall consequences are clearly awful. Even if the stranger happens to be the government – and the government happens to be popular.
Social Norms, Moral Judgments, and Irrational Parenting
Our current norm of extreme protection of children has become, unfortunately, not just a social norm, but a moral norm. If you don’t watch your child (or have some other responsible guard watching) every minute, you are, in the eyes of many people, doing something immoral. How can we change this crippling social norm and get back to common sense?
In Praise of Immigrants
Three new technologies of the last 20 years made America’s economy great again: the iPhone, Google search, and horizontal drilling and fracturing. All came from first-generation immigrants.
The Myth of Religious Violence: A Review of William Cavanaugh’s Book
William Cavanaugh’s “The Myth of Religious Violence” sets out to deflate the titular myth, that religion is a uniquely violent social force, both throughout history and across cultures. In doing so, he manages to critique the modern secular liberal concept of religion as a definable sociological category, and gestures towards a more holistic mode of analyzing the origins of violence in society.
A Critique of Stefan Molyneux’s Discussion with Stephan Kinsella on Schooling
One of my strategies in sniffing out unequal or one sided relationships is to always shift the players around. Lets say a politician asked the question “How do you manage the behavior of the people?” Your response would likely be something like “Who are you? I am not your subject to be managed!” Of course you are probably thinking, well this is the difference between a young child who lacks experience and mental capabilities and an adult. I would somewhat agree, but also have strong disagreement. There is a little bit more subtlety at work.