An interview with Faisal Saeed Al Mutar.
Tag: protest
The “Democratic Centralism” of COVID
ed with the author’s permission.
Welfare for the Wealthier? What Else is New?
The main function of the state is to redistribute wealth from the productive class to the political class. That’s inherently an upward redistribution, and the “middle class” is half-fish, half-fowl: Partly productive class, partly a hodgepodge of political constituencies well-positioned to grab a share of the grift as bribes for their continuing support.
2020: I’m So Sick of Superlatives
Lately it seems everything has to be described in a superlative manner. Natural disaster. War. Police violence. Political craziness. You name it, we just can’t seem to accept that it’s part of a continuum. Everything absolutely, positively must be the mostest or the worstest of its kind, ever.
Carl Watner, Rest in Peace (1948-2020)
Carl Watner, founding member of The Voluntaryist academic journal/newsletter (along with Wendy McElroy and George H. Smith, in 1982) passed away yesterday after a long fight with cancer.
COVID-19 Lockdowns: Liberty and Science
The Chinese Coronavirus (COVID-19) hit American shores — officially, anyway, there is significant evidence that it arrived earlier — in late January 2020. The American public was then told that a two-week shutdown of the economy would “flatten the curve,” relieving the pressure on hospital intensive care units and saving lives in the long run. The average American, including conservatives,…
COVID-19: The Way the Music Died?
“Why,” Candice Holdsworth asks at British web site spiked, “aren’t more artists standing up to lockdown?” “The lockdown has completely decimated the live-performance industry,” she writes. “And yet we hear very little from leading people in theatre, music and the arts criticising the lockdown and what it is doing to their industry.”
Life-Years Lost: The Quantity and The Quality
A few weeks ago, the NYT reported that “The Coronavirus Has Claimed 2.5 Million Years of Potential Life.” If you read the original study, you’ll discover one crucial caveat: The authors’s calculations assume that COVID victims would have had the standard life expectancy for Americans of their age. They freely admit that this is unrealistic and inflates their estimate.
ARK3 Returns, Trauma and Rage, PTSD, & Violent Parenting (1h3m) – Episode 428
Episode 428 welcomes back Alex R. Knight III to chat with Skyler on the following topics: finally making the connection between his former alcoholism and trauma he experienced in childhood and adolescence; accepting failure as okay, and not as shameful; post-traumatic stress disorder experienced by both of them; family disfunction and divorce; the roots of authoritarianism in violent (physically and psychologically/emotionally) parenting; laws against spanking; the effects of prolonged brain exposure to stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline; stress in infancy, such as “cry-it-out”; evolutionary reasons why kids protest bedtime; Skyler’s family bedroom; and more.
Shepard’s Journey, Former Cop, Voluntaryism, & Spreading Liberty (59m) – Episode 426
Episode 426 welcomes Shepard the Voluntaryist to the podcast to chat with Skyler on the following topics: knowing Carl Watner intimately and his work at Voluntaryist.com; Watner introducing both Skyler and Shepard to Stoicism; his discovery of Ron Paul, and then Murray Rothbard, Walter Block, Larken Rose, et al; his 10 year career as a police officer, 2 of which were as a prison guard; capitalism versus corporatism; growing up with the Mennonites, but later becoming an atheist; Marc Stevens’ method of challenging state jurisdiction; the wisdom in avoiding the cops; why the BLM protests over the some had the wrong grievance about injustice; a story of a prison inmate getting beat up for flushing a toilet, and how asking about why this happened to a fellow prison guard got him ostracized; why spreading the ideas of liberty, planting seeds, is a very slow process; fun strategies to repel cops; and more.