Whatever you want, dude, but in the “transitive property” quote from me, you may notice that I’m objecting to the guilt-by-association argument, not endorsing it. So your parody of a slippery slope argument (as if I were endorsing that kind of reasoning, rather than objecting to it) seems like an odd response.

Bay Area National Anarchist,

Speaking as one irrelevant subculturalist to another, I’ll mention that I have a litmus test of my own. When someone starts talking about “irrelevant intellectuals” as if it were a bad thing to be one, I know that there is probably something wrong both with their ideas about both relevance and intellect.

Aster’s attack on decentralization comes perilously close (perhaps even over the line) to full-blown statism and “revolution from above”. The “implementation of a specific social system” which is a “rational set of values and institutions which are incompatible with traditional organic society”: is there anything in this with which a Leninist or Jacobin would disagree?

Even worse, she goes on to praise the “Roman, British, and American Empires.” Not wholesale, of course, but still . . . The “easy flow of goods, people, and ideas” that often accompanies empire may yield some good results but it is not really so easy, but rather has been, in Marx’s phrase “written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Multiculturalism in late Rome, for instance, was the pragmatic result of the pursuit of ever-expanding conquest and exploitation. Kind of makes it hard to praise their cosmopolitanism when you see what it was built on. The ancient Greeks made far greater and more original contributions to culture while being, by comparison, insular and stubbornly provincial.

Now, I happen to agree that the goal is individual liberty and (more) rational values. (And peace- shall we not forget that war is the health of the state?) I am also sure (who would deny it?) that local communities can be tyrannical. Theoretically we can imagine a world-state with a bill of rights straight out of Rothbard’s “Ethics of Liberty” fully protecting personal property and the right to do pretty much anything that is peaceful. But I am sure that decentralization, and not centralization, is the better path. We know this because the latter has already been tried. Indeed, much of the war and all of the brutality of totalitarian regimes are a result of it. And much of our “existing social systems” are the result of this as well. State power has crowded out social power, and communities are in decline. Some individual liberty has resulted, but purchased at great cost. With it has come the “atomism” and “one-dimensionality” that leftist critics have always charged against the capitalist system. In fighting “traditional organic society” (which I am somewhat reluctant to defend myself, as a socially liberal atheist libertarian), Aster would seem to be giving aid to contemporary society in its rush toward the Brave New World Order. The denizens of Huxley’s infamous novel enjoy all the individual autonomy Aster seems to desire, but to what end?

Instead, let a thousand, nay a million, communities and societies bloom with no more outside interference than citizens will allow.

What I think weird about this National Anarchist stuff is how to define the world’s diverse people…

Considering that the national-anarchist society will be organized in a way that does not trespass the non agression principle, how do I define Palestinian, Irish or whatever?

Born in a geographical area? Does not solve the problem, someone can move away as a child and not be “Palestinian” or “Irish”…

Someone who likes the “culture”? Well, how do I define the “national culture”? It is incompatible with territorial borders, I can like Irish culture as well Mexican culture while I’m in the Brazilian geographical area…

The idea is embedded in a crude collectivism… And I don’t know how do we define the border between someone who just likes doing what his grandparents did some decades ago in a certain geographical area and a racist…

I wish we could be as positive as BANA but it seems our local Socialist Alternative are far beyond an epileptic attack whenever they see us approach them for a discussion.

Three of us approached a stall today to talk about the current asylum seeker business going on in Australia – as usual, we nearly began an intelligent conversation with a couple of them and within half a minute one of their “higher-ups” came over and ordered “radio silence” around the National-Anarchists. When one of theirs tried to continue a conversation with us, another pulled them away for some “schooling on National-Anarchism” as they put it themselves, no joke, I wonder how far away the gulag was!

We tried to talk to a couple of them for a little bit longer, only for them to push us away and yell louder to the hundreds of pedestrians walking passed, totally ignoring them. It seems that they truly feel that regardless of their total lack of revolution in the past thirty years, if only they can ignore those pesky National-Anarchists for long enough, their ship can sink with some sort of honour.

LOL, I lost my chair reading that! I’m happy to report that we’re making progress in this front in California but as you mention the subculture wars of equally irrelevant intellectuals is stark raving mad.