If you value civility and peace, and desire to avoid costly and violent conflict with other people, you would do well to respect and apply due process in situations that require it. Since I value and desire these things, I am committed to respecting due process in every way that I can. Unfortunately though, not many else are.
Tag: conflict
Compulsory Schooling Is Incompatible with Freedom
If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
Let’s Get Back to Having Peace Officers, and Away from Law Enforcers
Believe it or not, I want to respect cops. Sticking to these 5 roles, they’d deserve our love, respect, and admiration. They’d rightfully be considered heros. But unfortunately, 90% of what cops do today is utterly without merit.
Hurricane Harvey: About That Wall…
It may be weeks before the storms end, the waters recede, and basic utilities are restored. But this, too, shall pass — and then begins the rebuilding. Who’s going to do that rebuilding?
Words Poorly Used #99 — Anarchism
Anarchy is. Whether you believe in it or not is immaterial. Anarchy is. Whether you act to gain it or not is immaterial.
Breaking up is Hard to do. Or is it?
“A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war,” writes Jesse Walker in the Los Angeles Times. Pundits left and right wax ominous over the prospect of a permanent break in American society along partisan Republican/Democratic lines, citing outbreaks of street fighting a la Berkeley and Charlottesville.
How To Live In a Nuclear-Armed World
It’s our own small inhumanities that create our great inhumanities. It’s our small humanities that can save the world. If it’s too late, it’s too late. But I much prefer to play my music as the ship sinks than to let myself be ruled by fear.
Putting Principle above Party, People, and the Past
When I put principle first, I’m better able to judge the compatibility of parties, people, and the past with what I believe in. And when my understanding of those things change, it’s easier to move on. I’m also less likely to be fooled and subsequently betrayed.
Political Action Exacerbates the Problem of Hate
Politics is your neighbor and his like-minded friends rallying together to lobby for government to shift their policies in their favor. If your neighbor and his friends hate intrusive government, those policy shifts may be a good thing for those who value peace and prosperity. But if your neighbor and his friends hate people wealthier than them, or people with a different skin color, those policy shifts are sure to bring about an exacerbated level of conflict, and thus a reduction in prosperity.
How Mass Schooling Perpetuates Inequality
For kids like Matt, schooling can bring out the worst behaviors. Like a trapped tiger–angry and afraid–they rebel. Unable to conform properly to mass schooling’s mores, they get a label: troubled, slow learner, poor, at-risk. They will carry these scarlet letters with them throughout their 15,000 hours of mandatory mass schooling, emerging not with real skills and limitless opportunity, but further entrenched in their born disadvantage.