“Marcuse Is Dead…And We Have Killed Him.” -Quagmire, ATS Reader

Spontaneous Order

AlternativeRight.Com Is Now Live!

Community Organizing and National-Anarchism presentation by Andrew Yeoman

Tribal Anarchism Video Series Parts One, Two, Three, Four

United Anarchism Vs United Nationism

Fall of the New World Order

The Tyranny of “Tolerance”

“Isn’t it ironic that the government can criminally charge citizens with ‘conspiracy’ (an agreement or a partnership, not an action), but when a citizen even mentions that there is ample evidence (provided by the government’s own documents) that the government can and does conspire to commit and does commit various felonies, they are mocked, vilified, and labeled as kooks?

When the government came for militia, I remained silent; I was not militia.
When they locked up the religious conservatives, I remained silent; I was an atheist.
When they came for the bloggers, I remained silent; I was not a blogger.
When they came for the Muslims, I remained silent; I was not Muslim. When the came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

-Eli Cryderman

“There’s no difference between cops and outlaws.” -Kim Fowley

“The future of radical politics is coalition among groups advocating positions the system simply cannot integrate – & therefore cannot co-opt.”

-Jeremy Weiland

“Having received some of my childhood education in the USSR, I am now even more convinced that North American public schools + academia + MSM are infinitely more damaging as well as evil in their perceived benign ideology. Worse yet, in the latter case, the inside / outside paradigm simply does not exist.”

-Nina Kouprianova

“The worst that can happen under monarchy is rule by a single imbecile, but democracy often means the rule by an assembly of three or four hundred imbeciles.”

-Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus

The Tea Partiers: Revolutionary Phoniness by Paul Gottfried

Oklahoma Further Criminalizes Freedom of Association by William Norman Grigg

The Tea Party and Big Spending on War by Charles Pena

What Does the Arizona Immigration Law Really Say? by Pat Buchanan

South of the Border by Justin Raimondo

Reduce Immigration: End the War on Drugs by Anthony Gregory and Eric Garris

Immigration Law in Mexico by J. Michael Waller

Thinking Clearly About Immigration by James Leroy Wilson

Secession and Immigration: Who Should Be in Charge? by Russell Longcore

Modern Civilization: This Sucker Is Going Down by James Howard Kunstler

Papering the War Against Iran by Philip Giraldi

To the Tea Party: War and Liberty Are Not Fellow Travelers by Ivan Eland

Killer Cocktail: PTSD and Your Local Police by Kelley B. Vlahos

It’s Goldman World, We Just Live In It by Richard Spencer

Iraqi Secret Prisons: Taking a Cue from the United States by Thomas Eddlem

The Obama Administration and Indefinite Detention by Glenn Greenwald

On Collateral Murder and Stephen Colbert by David Henderson

War Propaganda from Afghanistan by Glenn Greenwald

Pat Tillman Film a Haunting Blindside by Bill Dwyre

Death Squads in Afghanistan by Francis Shor

The Military Occupation of Our Minds by Tom Hayden

The U.S. Threat to Latin America by Grace Livingstone

The Anti-Salt Gestapo by Walter Williams

Oppose Imperialism with Every Fiber of Your Being by Tom Woods

The Firepit Secession Movement by Michael Stetz

E.T., Stay Home by Fay Schlesinger

Soft Totalitarianism Attacks Amish Raw Milk by Mike Riggs

Imperial Crime and Complicity by Tim Case

I Am a Traitor, Communist, Nazi, and a Racist by James Bovard

No, Obama Is Not a Socialist by Ron Paul

The New Secessionists by Chris Hedges

Marijuana Freedom in the American West by Paul Armentano

Arizona Revolts by Ewen MacAskill

Christians Upset They Can’t Pray at Criminal Murder Syndicate by Laurence Vance

The Republican Party and Planned Parenthood by Laurence Vance

The Trial of Tonya Craft by Bill Anderson

Don’t Film a Cop Pointing a Gun at You by Karen De Coster

Gabriel Villareal: PIG Stalker

Anarcho-Leftoid Says Freedom Has Nothing to do with Voluntary Association and Private Property

Michael Medved’s Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity by Kevin Carson

Whose Country Is This? by Pat Buchanan

Chinese Acting Like 19th Century Americans: Americans Acting Like Utopian Ideologues by Pat Buchanan

In Defense of Freedom of Speech by Dennis Steele

The Prospects for Real Financial Reform Remain Remote by Andrew Cockburn

Marijuana Boom and Bust by Alexander Cockburn

How Washington Hooked Mexico on the Drug War by John Ross

Censoring the Decrease in Global Temperatures

A Dash of Tyranny by Stephanie Murphy

Can Ron Paul “Pull a Goldwater”? by David Paul Kuhn

The Battle of Britain by Justin Raimondo

Crippling, Crushing, and Suffocating Iran by Robert Dreyfuss

Obama, Nuclear Weapons, and the Future of the Planet by Helen Caldicott

Can You Disappear in the British Surveillance State? by Jean Paul Flintoff

“The Italians were called wops, the Jews were called hymies, I was of course a greaseball, and every Hispanic was a spic. Well, we all got along famously! It was rough, but it was fine.”

-Taki Theodoracopulos

“The “clash of civilizations” is, in a very literal sense, a clash of God and Mammon. The Islamic revolutionaries are driven by a fanatical devotion to their god and the promises they believe he has made to them if only they take up arms on his behalf. The nations of the West are driven by an almost as fanatical devotion to Mammon, that is, to wealth, luxury, power, pleasure and privilege. Further, the culture of the West combines this unabashedly materialist ethos with rejection of strength and discipline in favor of a maternalistic emphasis on health, safety, “sensitivity”, “self-esteem”, “potential”, “personal growth”, “getting in touch with one’s inner child”, “feelings” and other concepts common to pop culture psychobabble. Of course, the socio-cultural ramifications of this is to create a society of weaklings, mediocrities and crybabies.”

-Keith Preston

“Life is war and conflict, struggle and strife, from conception till death…Never shall the lion lie down peacefully with the lamb…”

“Why are those who espouse Univeral Love, Tolerance, and ‘Human Brotherhood,’ usually the most screwed up people you’ve ever met, socially and emotionally? Not to mention some of the nastiest and most self-centered narcissists around?”

-Chris Donnellan

“What You Believe is Not as Important as What You Do.”

-Andrew Yeoman

Audio Broadcasts

Alternative Right Radio

Antiwar Radio

Pentagon Wages War Against Enlisted Joshua Kors interviewed by Scott Horton

Ain’t Democracy Grand: The Iraqi Stalemate Jason Ditz interviewed by Scott Horton

States Revolt Against Federal Hegemony Michael Boldin interviewed by Lew Rockwell

The Corruption of Empire Mark Ames interviewed by Scott Horton

A Conversation About Race Craig Bodeker interviewed by Richard Spencer

A Nation of Sheep, Ruled by Wolves, Owned by Pigs

The Revolution Within Anarchism

Forty Years in the Wilderness?

Liberty and Populism: Building An Effective Resistance Movement for North America

Organizing the Urban Lumpenproletariat

National Anarchy and the American Idea

Don’t Talk to the Police

“The king is most wounded by ridicule.” -Thomas Hobbes

I have a new piece on secession at AltRight. Check it out.

So says an informal poll from the Code Pink ladies.

This is about what I would have expected. But there’s some light:

The 15 people who wanted to dismantle the web of foreign military bases included Josh Little, a college student from Alexandria, Virginia. Josh said that his grandfather helped overthrow Hitler, but that was 60 years ago and it was high time for us to leave Germany. “I’d say the same for Japan, Korea and all of Europe. They can take care of themselves.”

One of the most sophisticated people I talked to all day was 22-year-old college student Andrew Barth from College Park, Maryland. “The hawks represent the old guard — so do both the Republican and the Democratic parties. With a few exceptions, they all love war and empire. But a small-government movement worth its salt can’t just be anti-Washington, it has to be anti-empire. If not, I’m outta here.”

It sounds like the younger generation of right-wing radicals needs a new home. Here we are.

Good piece on AltRight today from Richard Spencer.

I posted this response, which is in the same vein as some of my other recent comments here:

“…there have certainly been “red scares” in the past, and “Islamic extremists” are on the loose, but the state’s enemies du jour are caricatures of traditionalist Middle Americans. “

I think much of this can be explained by the fact that as traditional forms of out-group hostility (the usual laundry list of isms, archies, and phobias) have become more and more socially unacceptable and politically taboo, the state has had to find new targets in its perpetual quest for self-expansion. The most easy targets are those groups who are unpopular with educated, affluent liberals and the cultural and intellectual elite: religious fundamentalists, “racists,” bizarre cults, gun nuts, poor whites, Southerners, rednecks, supposed “anti-Semites,” on down the line, perhaps intertwined with more conventional outgroups who never made it onto the Left’s Pantheon of the Oppressed: drug users, prostitutes, poor blacks (as opposed to the Obama carbon-copies that liberals prefer). Essentially, these kinds of groups comprise what amounts to “the new niggers” in the eyes of the liberal establishment.

Hat tip to TGGP for digging up this old blog post from David Friedman.

What I have often found the most bewildering about many anarchists is their rather naive presumption that the specific institutions they claim preference for will necessarily produce the results they want.

Most anarchists of the Left claim to prefer some kind of “direct democracy” of the New England town meeting variety. But when the town meetings of New England had real force the results were that of a Calvinist theocracy-not exactly a manifestation of the left-anarchist ideal.

Anarcho-capitalists favor institutions that are completely privatized: private police, private courts, private law, private prisons. Otherwise known as feudalism. One can just imagine systems of private police and private law pitting pro-lifers against abortionists, Muslims against Christians, blacks against whites, “Aryans” against Jews, feminazis against misogynists, and so forth.

It was after studying anarchist theory for a number of years and coming to understand the weaknesses of these approaches that I came to fully embrace the pan-separatist or anarcho-pluralist outlook. Ultimately, the only way to achieve peace between forces with irreconcilable differences is through territorial and institutional separation. Otherwise, a strong arm state is needed to prevent society at large from degenerating into warring factions. Of course, some anarchists argue that the solution is to maintain a cultural foundation that is conducive to one’s preferred form of “anarchy.” For instance, left-anarchists will insist that the way to avoid having direct democracy degenerate into theocracy is the development of a culture that rejects “hierarchy,” which is more or less a euphemism for the usual laundry list of Isms and Phobias. But the flaw in this approach is its universalism. Otherness is inevitable, as the intra-left-anarchist race war that transpired between Anarchist People of Color and Crimethinc a while back illustrates. Here we had the edifying spectacle of blindly fanatical anti-racist, anarchist, people of color engaged in open combat (fortunately non-lethal, so far) with blindly fanatical anti-racist, anarchist, people of non-color (un-color?). Can we assume that following the anarcho-leftoid revolution the various ethnic factions will start attacking each other with their respective “Smash Racism” signs?

This essay has been posted here before, but a slightly edited version is now available on AlternativeRight.

“Marcuse Is Dead…And We Have Killed Him.” -Quagmire, ATS Reader

Spontaneous Order-NEW VIDEO!

AlternativeRight.Com Is Now Live!

Community Organizing and National-Anarchism presentation by Andrew Yeoman

Tribal Anarchism Video Series Parts One, Two, Three, Four

United Anarchism Vs United Nationism

Fall of the New World Order

The Tyranny of “Tolerance”

“Isn’t it ironic that the government can criminally charge citizens with ‘conspiracy’ (an agreement or a partnership, not an action), but when a citizen even mentions that there is ample evidence (provided by the government’s own documents) that the government can and does conspire to commit and does commit various felonies, they are mocked, vilified, and labeled as kooks?

When the government came for militia, I remained silent; I was not militia.
When they locked up the religious conservatives, I remained silent; I was an atheist.
When they came for the bloggers, I remained silent; I was not a blogger.
When they came for the Muslims, I remained silent; I was not Muslim. When the came for me, there was no one left to speak out.”

                                                                                                 -Eli Cryderman

If This Be Sedition, Make the Most of It by Kevin Carson

A Coming Berlin Wall Moment by James Leroy Wilson

R.I.P. Malcolm McLaren by Dave Itzkoff

Iraq War Vet: “We Were Told to Just Shoot People” by Dahr Jamail

“From a civil libertarian point of view, we’re in a much worse place than we were during the Bush administration…” 

Mass Murder As Routine by Justin Raimondo

Iraq Slaughter Not an Aberration by Glenn Greenwald

Terrorism Is Not an “Existential Threat“ by Gene Healy

Let’s Get Our Own Foreign Policy House in Order Before Criticizing Others by Ivan Eland

Everything the State Says Is a Lie by Jacob Huebert

Anarcho-Distributism by Daniel McCarthy

It’s Time to Part Company by Walter Williams

The New Intolerance by Pat Buchanan

They Were Just Following Orders by Laurence Vance

The Government Is One Giant Cult by Phil Maymin

The Art of Not Being Ruled by Drake Bennett

Killing the Spirit of Learning by Gary North

The Manufactured Menace from Michigan by William Norman Grigg

The Republican Party: A Criminal Organization by Butler Shaffer

The Roots of Totalitarian Humanism? by Murray Rothbard

Congress Is a Criminal Syndicate by Gerald Celente

The Coming Dictatorship by Robert Ringer

The Cover-Ups That Exploded by Alexander Cockburn

The Losing Battle Against National Self-Determination by Mark Weisbrot

Richard Holbrooke: A Bulldozer Stuck in the Mud by Kelley B. Vlahos

Back to Kyrgyzstan by Justin Raimondo

How Brainy Is Obama? by Alan Bock

Nuking the Mullahs by Philip Giraldi

“Two, Three, Many Afghanistans” by Michael T. Klare

Blowback: The Lessons of the Moscow Bombings for America by Doug Bandow

The Ivy League Hates Nullification by Tom Woods

Helping Us to Death by William Norman Grigg

A Really Dangerous Militia by Laurie Roth

Winter of Our Discontent Is Over-Now What? by Maury2K

Tea Party Keeps Missing the Point by Maury2K

The Three Horsemen of the Global Depression by John Robb

Primary Loyalties  by John Robb

Mexico’s Mercado of Violence Heats Up by John Robb

Really Sorry by Andrew Bacevich

Democracy Delusion by Peter Hitchens

Justin Raimondo on the Beltway Libertarian Attack by Lew Rockwell

Immigration and the SPLC by Carol Swain (Part 2 here)

The Church of Morris Dees by Ken Silverstein

Who Killed the Miners? Profits Over Safety? by Jeff Biggers

The Hutaree Militia Raid by Chuck Baldwin

Vermont Secessionist Candidate Arrested at Gubernatorial Debate

I Discriminate Against Ex-Soldiers by Karl Winn

Confessions of an Al-Jazeera Fan by Stuart Bramhall

Obama’s Totalitarian National Biometric ID by Alex Newman

Bootleggers and Baptists in California by Matthew Yglesias

The Case of the Topless Teenager by Julie Hilden

Hot Chicks Who Rock by Kim Nicolini

Portland School Issue Hug Ban by Karen DeCoster

The Pot Calling the Kettle Racist by David Kramer

Prosecutorial Misconduct and the Trial of Tonya Craft by Bill Anderson

Costs Too High to Send 600 Lb. Man to Jail for Stealing Junk Food 

Works Sucks! by Francois Tremblay

Florida Students Protest PIG Shooting of Graduate Student from Infoshop.Org

The Global Economic Crisis: Riots, Rebellion, and Revolution by Andrew Gavin Marshall

Strategic Perspective on Taliban Warfare by Ehsan Mehmood Khan

Subverting Freedom by James Bovard

Fallujah’s Sick Babies by William Blum

Welcome to Obama’s War by Dave Lindorff

Why I Am a Muslim by Charles R. Larson

American Indians Enslaved by the Federal Government by David Kramer

Markets Versus Free Markets by Anna Morgenstern

Our Beautiful Laundrettes by Thomas Knapp

Reformist Political Action as a Diversion, Part Three by Kevin Carson

Collateral Pentagon by Pete Escobar

Imperial Troubles in Afghanistan and Iraq by Jacob Hornberger

Palestinian Aspirations Are Clear, But What Does Israel Want? by Gideon Levy

Human Rights Hypocrisies by Saul Landau

Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political by Michael O’Meara

Canada Grants White South African Refugee Status by Carly Laird

The End of Mexico? by Zenpundit

Mexico Drug Gangs Turn Weapons on Army by Tracy Wilkinson

The Utah War 

“The Italians were called wops, the Jews were called hymies, I was of course a greaseball, and every Hispanic was a spic. Well, we all got along famously! It was rough, but it was fine.”

                                                                                  -Taki Theodoracopulos

“The “clash of civilizations” is, in a very literal sense, a clash of God and Mammon. The Islamic revolutionaries are driven by a fanatical devotion to their god and the promises they believe he has made to them if only they take up arms on his behalf. The nations of the West are driven by an almost as fanatical devotion to Mammon, that is, to wealth, luxury, power, pleasure and privilege. Further, the culture of the West combines this unabashedly materialist ethos with rejection of strength and discipline in favor of a maternalistic emphasis on health, safety, “sensitivity”, “self-esteem”, “potential”, “personal growth”, “getting in touch with one’s inner child”, “feelings” and other concepts common to pop culture psychobabble. Of course, the socio-cultural ramifications of this is to create a society of weaklings, mediocrities and crybabies.”

                                                                                                             -Keith Preston

Sweat Loaf by The Butthole Surfers

I Saw an X-Ray Girl Passing Gas by The Butthole Surfers

Creep In the Cellar by The Butthole Surfers

God Damn the Sun by The Swans

Always Near You/Nowhere to Hide by Gene Simmons

Great White Buffalo  by Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes

Strong Enough to Be Gentle by Black Oak Arkansas

“Life is war and conflict, struggle and strife, from conception till death…Never shall the lion lie down peacefully with the lamb…”

“Why are those who espouse Univeral Love, Tolerance, and ‘Human Brotherhood,’ usually the most screwed up people you’ve ever met, socially and emotionally? Not to mention some of the nastiest and most self-centered narcissists around?”

                                                                                                          -Chris Donnellan

“What You Believe is Not as Important as What You Do.”

                                                                                                          -Andrew Yeoman

Audio Broadcasts

Occupation Causes Suicide Terrorism Robert Pape interviewed by Scott Horton

Identity Politics in the U.S., Part Two Kevin MacDonald interviewed by Tom Sunic

The Moscow Metro Bombings Matthew Raphael Johnson interviewed by Mark Glenn

A Nation of Sheep, Ruled by Wolves, Owned by Pigs

The Revolution Within Anarchism

Forty Years in the Wilderness?

Liberty and Populism: Building An Effective Resistance Movement for North America

Organizing the Urban Lumpenproletariat

National Anarchy and the American Idea

Don’t Talk to the Police

“The king is most wounded by ridicule.” -Thomas Hobbes

Free Sex With Coupon

This interview with Doug Casey isn’t a bad elementary level introduction to anarchism as a political philosophy. Some highlights and minor quibbles:

If people aren’t open-minded enough to even consider an alternative view, they’re their own worst problem, not my ideas. In point of fact, anarchism is the gentlest of all political systems. It contemplates no institutionalized coercion. It’s the watercourse way, where everything is allowed to rise or fall naturally to its own level.

I have a problem with referring to anarchism as “gentle”. That may be true in the sense that anarchism (properly understood) does not advocate oppressing anyone, except aspiring tyrants, buy the label of “gentle” has pacifistic implications which are not necessarily a part of anarchism. As Pareto said, he who becomes a sheep will be devoured by the wolves. If indeed the Zomia region of Asia is a functioning quasi-anarchy, no doubt its success at self-preservation comes in part from the warrior spirit of people such as the Hmong.

An anarchic system is necessarily one of free-market capitalism. Any services that are needed and wanted by people – like the police or the courts – would be provided by entrepreneurs, who’d do it for a profit.

What Casey means by “free market capitalism” is simply a system of voluntary associations, private property, and voluntary exchange of goods, services, and labor. But’s its a propagandistic mistake to call this “capitalism”. The term “capitalism” is automatically identified in most people’s minds with Big Business, Wall Street, and sweat shops, just like “socialism” is identified with the welfare state or Marxism. Sorry, but all of those terms are taken. “Mutualism” is a much better term as it has yet to be identified with other things many people consider to be undesirable. Also, plenty of history’s most successful anarchies or quasi-anarchies, such as the Icelandic Commonwealth or Celtic Ireland, existed for centuries before “capitalism” as we understand it came into being.

Also, I’m not so sure “for profit” police and courts are the best way to go. Why not volunteer militias, civilian posses, and expanded neighborhood watch programs? Turning protection services into businesses is what invites opportunism. Why not courts comprised of volunteer arbiters, professional jurors who work on a part-time basis, individuals from the community selected for their superior qualities? Why not professional judges selected by “monasteries of scholars” organized on the basis of the old Chinese civil service system? The problem with the judiciary today is that judges are either elected politicians or professional bureaucrats appointed by politicians. We anarchists know that, with rare exceptions, politicians and bureaucrats are worthless. So institutions in an anarchic system need to take every precaution to make sure the state does not creep back in through the back door.

Look, I’d be happy enough if the state – which is an instrument of pure coercion, even after you tart it up with the trappings of democracy, a constitution, and what-not – were limited to protecting you from coercion and absolutely nothing more. That would imply a police force to protect you from coercion within its bailiwick. A court system to allow you to adjudicate disputes without resorting to force. And some type of military to protect you from outside predators.

Unfortunately, the government today does everything but these functions – and when it does deign to protect, it does so very poorly. The police are increasingly ineffective at protecting you; they seem to specialize in enforcing arbitrary laws. The courts? They apply arbitrary laws, and you need to be wealthy to use them – although you’re likely to be impoverished by the time you get out of them. And the military hardly defends the country anymore – it’s all over the world creating enemies, generally, of the most backward foreigners.

In a free-market anarchy, the police would likely be subsidiaries of insurance companies, and courts would have to compete with each other based on the speed, fairness, and low cost of their decisions.

Scratch that idea, Doug. As one who has actually been in the insurance business, I can assure everyone that insurance companies don’t give a flying fuck about “speed, fairness, and low costs”. This issue is the main disagreement I have with Hans-Hermann Hoppe, who has more or less argued for “insurance feudalism.”

In any event, there’s no conflict whatsoever between anarchy and the rule of law, since there are private forms of law and governance. That’s what Common Law is all about.

Yes, common law, merchant law, admirality law, Roman private law, canon law, many other examples.

But I never said a truly free, anarchic society would be a utopia; it would simply be a society that emphasizes personal responsibility and doesn’t have any organized institutions of coercion. Perfect harmony is not an option for imperfect human beings. Social order, however, is possible without the state.

What holds society together is not a bunch of strict laws and a brutal police force – it’s basically peer pressure, moral suasion, and social opprobrium. Look at a restaurant. The bills get paid not because anybody is afraid of the police, but for the three reasons I just mentioned.

To be honest, I’d probably pay a lot less bills if there were no police.

If you have people who’ve been brought up to believe that the only limits on what you can or should do is the force exerted by the authorities, it’s no surprise that when the greater power disappears, they reach out to take whatever they want, by force.

That’s clearly the case in Somalia, but it’s also true of the people stranded in New Orleans, who were primarily those with no money to flee – in other words, the inhabitants of government housing projects. It’s not politically correct to point this out, but those people had, on average, a distinctly different culture from that of the average American.

Actually, ex-police states are the most dangerous places – like Russia in the early ’90s, the Congo in the early ’60s, or Haiti today, because they have a culture of repression that’s like a pressure cooker. When the lid comes off, it’s a mess.

Absolutely! This observation also indicates that America will be a very, very messy place when the shit finally hits the fan.

As Pareto’s Law indicates, there’s inevitably a bad element in most places. 80% of folks are truly decent, and 20% are perhaps problematical. And 20% of that 20% are bad apples. You have to have a culture that keeps them hiding under rocks, rather than rising to the top – as they wind up doing quite often in government.

The reaction of a person to the idea of a truly free society is an excellent moral litmus test. The more negative the reaction, the more likely you’re dealing with a sociopath.

I don’t really buy this. It sounds like an anarcho-libertarian version of Adorno’s “authoritarian personality” theory. Also, I’ve encountered plenty of obvious sociopaths in anarchist circles.

It wouldn’t matter any more if a group of people calling themselves Congress went through some rituals that involved a leader putting some ink on some paper and said a violation of your rights was now “legal” than if a witch-doctor told a tribe’s warriors that it was okay to take slaves and sacrifice them to the gods. Laws are just a “civilized” man’s taboos.

Here’s the rub; imagine that the Quebecois decided unanimously that they really didn’t want to be part of Canada anymore but wanted to be an independent, French-speaking country. So they peacefully vote and take their marbles to play their own game. In doing so, they don’t violate anyone’s rights, so there is no moral way the government of Canada can stop them. They could use force, but that would violate the rights of the Quebecois, who would not be hurting anyone. And if the Quebecois could do this, so could Disneyworld, or your neighborhood – or you individually.

There’s no moral way to prevent peaceful secession – but if a state doesn’t prevent secession, it soon disintegrates. People always want to do things differently, and they would if the threat of force from the state didn’t stop them. Brute force – although gussied up with myth, propaganda, and red, white, and blue bunting – is what holds the state together. That force is ugly and corrupting.

Democracy is no solution – it’s just 51% bossing the other 49% around. For God’s sake, Hitler was democratically elected. Democracy is just mob rule dressed up in a coat and tie.

All sensible political philosophers since Plato have agreed with this.

The Mormon Church, for example, exerts a very significant amount of regulation of the private behavior of its members. I’m not a Mormon, of course, but I’ve lived in predominantly Mormon communities, and I have to say they tended to be cleaner, nicer, safer, etc. I’d say the Mormon religion exerts more control over its adherents than any state’s laws have ever exerted over citizens – but those regulated like it. They believe they benefit from it, and most important of all, they are physically free to leave any time they want.

Not so for the state. This is why I’ve said in the past that the state is not a necessary evil but merely necessarily evil.

The Amish and Mennonites provide other examples, although religious communities are entirely too uptight to suit my taste. And UL is a good one too, because people worry that businesses would all turn rapacious if the state weren’t there to regulate them. But electronics producers are not required to get UL seals on their products. They go to the extra expense of meeting UL standards because they know they’ll make more money if their products have the UL seal of approval on them.

Best Western hotels are the same way. Best Western doesn’t own the hotels; it’s largely a private regulatory agency that inspects hotels and gives those that make the grade the right to put a Best Western sign out front, which is worth a lot to a small mom-and-pop joint.

These are essential points. Contrary to what our “leftoid-libertarian” and “anarcho-leftoid” enemies may say, anarchism is neither a free-for-all nor simply an orgy of political correctness.

I’m of the opinion we’d already be living with the technology of Star Trek if it wasn’t for the state slowing things down.

That’s a bit of a reach.

Not a bad interview, all in all.

The Asian highlands of Zomia.