I’m sure you heard the retort, “If you don’t vote, you have not right to complain!” It’s especially common to hear after election days. Of course it’s complete and utter bullshit. I read somewhere today this parody of it, “If you don’t vote for an oppressor, you have no right to complain about your oppression!” I…
Tag: democracy
Democracy Is War by Other Means
Democracy is war by other means. Superficially, it is waged with ballots instead of bullets. At the end of the day, those ballots become bullets. Elections load real guns and aim them at real people. If you disobey the commandments handed down by elected officials, beefy men with shaved heads and Ray-Ban sunglasses will come to take you away. If you resist them, hot lead will fly. Elections are scrambles for control over the service weapons that propel those rounds. In such contests, every faction is trying to point the gun barrels at someone else.
Short Manifesto Against Democracy
Written by Rob Alvord. My quick manifesto against democracy before voting day: Some people have Verizon, some have T Mobile. Some have Progressive, some have Allstate. I love that we are able to choose these preferences without having to cause disputes amongst ourselves as human beings. Tomorrow, a majority of people are going to decide…
We Have Almost Destroyed Childhood
To me it boils down to this: A lack of unsupervised free time is a mental and physical HEALTH CRISIS — and also a potential democratic crisis. If kids never learn that they are safe when they’re unsupervised, they will always expect and even demand supervision. With that, they’re abdicating their own role in shaping their lives and society, and trusting authority to tell them what to do, how to act, what to believe.
Democracy in Practice
Words Poorly Used #62 — High Definition
In this age of “High Definition,” it is extremely ironic that people engage in voting, “democracy,” and politics, because there is no well-defined product. And even if there is a lumpy, stinking, shadowy by-product such as corruption, what means is there for an individual to withhold consent for this process? To paraphrase Sheldon Richman, if…
Linguistics #1: Dictionaries, Spooner, Recency
Send him mail. “Finding the Challenges” is an original column appearing every other Wednesday at Everything-Voluntary.com, by 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. Archived columns can be found here. FTC-only RSS feed available here. Although each…
An Open Letter to Anarcho-Socialists
Socialism is an economic system based on the collectivist ownership (e.g., co-ops, worker-management, the people as a whole, etc.) of the means of production (i.e., capital). Anarcho-socialism (a.k.a., social anarchism) is likewise, except ownership is voluntary, without a state. Different schools of thought make up this ansoc philosophy; such as anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-communism, anarcho-syndicalism, mutualism, libertarian…
Words Poorly Used #60 — Settled
To a voluntaryist, “settled” means voluntarily agreed upon among individuals. In the running arguments of today, in the vernacular of statists, it means a formal or informal recognition among statists, that an institutional goal is greater than voluntary agreements among individuals. Example, “settled science.” We too frequently hear that there is a consensus among scientists…
Re: On Anarchy II
After sharing my post on anarchy over at reddit, Anen-o-me wrote this enlightening reply (links are mine): “Removing the lie” with an argument only works for the reflective thinkers of the population, which is a fairly small slice. Notably, the INTJ(P) personality type, the mental system builders who are bothered by logical inconsistencies and also willing…